Читать книгу Staying Alive - Matt Beaumont - Страница 15

friday 21 november / 2.03 a.m.

I arrive at Saint Matthew’s only eight hours early for my appointment.

But I’m not here to see Doctor Morrissey.

This is Aamp;E.

I walked, of course.

All the way from N1 to E11.

My wallet and my tube pass were in my jacket.

It was a slow, freezing walk, every step jarring fresh pain into my fingers. Despite the agony I didn’t want to come to the hospital. No, I wanted to crawl home to bed in the hope that half a night’s sleep would somehow set things right. Bed is where I’d be now if halfway across Hackney Marshes I hadn’t realised that my front door keys had been in—where else?—my jacket.

I read in the Standard that this is Britain’s busiest casualty department. Apparently it boasts the longest waiting times and the most assaults on staff, and the doctors here know nearly as much about tweezering bullets from crack-crazed gangstas as the guys on ER. Seems I’ve caught the place on a quiet night though—not a single lurching drunk with a pint glass embedded in his head at a jaunty angle. Even so, I’m told that I’ll have to wait at least an hour.

I sit down on a chilly perforated steel bench and watch a girl drop some coins into a vending machine. She waits a moment before pulling out a Styrofoam cup of steaming liquid. She cradles it in her hands and walks it to the bench facing mine. I watch the vapour rise from the cup and—even though it’s almost certainly whatever the NHS passes off as coffee, and by definition undrinkable—I want it.

I’ve never felt so cold in my life. The ambient temperature in Aamp;E would be comfortable enough in normal circumstances, but my body is so iced up that I’d need to sit in an industrial bread-oven to have any hope of bringing warmth to my bones. Right now a cup of whatever passes for coffee represents my only chance of raising my temperature. I stare at the girl. She’s vaguely familiar. But she has long purple hair and the grime-encrusted look of homelessness. All my acquaintances have addresses and hair colour that passes as natural—even when it isn’t. But she does look familiar. I dismiss it—probably gave her a quid once outside the station. She takes a tentative sip from her cup. Her caution isn’t surprising—she has a ring through her bottom lip, which must make drinking hot beverages an ongoing hazard. I’ve always wondered about body piercing. Doesn’t it compromise everyday activities? Things like eating, peeing, sex, breast-feeding, navel de-fluffing and walking unhindered through airport metal detectors. Or, for that matter, getting work. All those rivets would surely hinder her prospects of a job in…say…account management at…for example…Blower Mann/DBA. She peers back at me through the gaps in the lank curtain of fringe, and…Is that a sneer? She must be reading my mind. And if she’s thinking, God, not long past thirty and already he’s thinking like his mother, well, I wouldn’t blame her.

She takes another sip of her steaming coffee-style beverage.

I so want some of that.

Hang on. Not everything was in my jacket. Haven’t I got some money in my trousers? I shake my legs gently and experience a wonderful sensation. Chinking change. I stand up and reach my left arm across my body in an attempt to feed my hand into my right pocket. Left hand to right pocket is a manoeuvre that I suspect even a bendy Mongolian contortionist would have to think about—a knackered and stiff-with-cold me doesn’t have a prayer. I look at my bloody right hand and wonder if it’s up to it. I have no choice but to try so I gingerly feed it in. I’ve got no further than an inch when I feel a jolt of pain as my little finger catches the lip of the pocket. I try to strangle the Aagh!, but I’m too late. The admissions clerk doesn’t look up from his computer, but the girl does and she calls out, ‘You OK?’ I nod my head, but I guess I don’t look too happy because she adds, ‘Wanna hand?’ I shake my head and look down at my pocket—there must be a way of getting in there.

This is like a rubbish ‘based on a true story’ TV movie; Luke Perry and the bloke who used to be Pa Walton as rescue workers standing at a cave entrance, post-landslide.

Luke: There must be a way of getting in there.

Pa Walton: We gotta find it, son. If we don’t rescue the change from Murray’s pocket there’s no tellin’ how long the guy will hold out.

Luke: I got it! You can get the chopper to drop me on his waistband and I can abseil down from a belt loop.

Pa Walton: That’s pure crazy. No one’s ever made a climb like that…and lived.

‘Whatever it is, you ain’t gonna get it with that hand.’

I look up. It isn’t Luke or Pa Walton. The studded girl is in front of me.

‘It doesn’t matter—it’s only some change,’ I mumble.

‘Let me,’ she says and she thrusts her hand where no girl has been since…I was going to say Megan, but, actually, Doctor Morrissey was fumbling around my groin only eight days ago. Her hand, though, wasn’t decorated with weeping scabs and a tattoo of what looks like a cod.

Moments later it re-emerges from my pocket clutching nine or ten one pound coins, a fifty-pence piece, two tens and assorted coppers. ‘If you were gonna get a coffee with this, don’t bother,’ she says. ‘It tastes like a rat pissed it out.’

‘As long as it’s hot I don’t care too much.’

I reach out for the money.

‘It’s OK, I’ll get it. Milk? Sugar?’

2.56 a.m.

She’s eighteen. She has ambitions. She wants to be a tattooist. Or a psychiatric nurse. Or an environmental terrorist. Or a model. Or a contestant on Big Brother. Or a bus driver. Or—truly fanciful, this one—a long-haul flight attendant (‘ Chicken or Beef? Nah, don’t bother, mate—they both taste like a rat shat it out.’) But she’s between jobs at the moment. She loves dogs but not cats, ecstasy but not acid and The Matrix though not the sequels. And she stinks. BO, KFC, Bamp;H, Woodpecker and—ever so faintly—piss all jostle for my nose’s attention. She smells because she hasn’t had a bath or, I suspect, a change of clothes for some time. This is because she lives in a squat in a condemned tower block on the Cathall estate in Leytonstone.

I study her as she talks—and she hasn’t stopped for over half an hour. A thin film of dirt lies over the skin on her face, and her pores are clogged with enough black grease to lubricate the drive shaft on a sixteen-wheeler. Her teeth are chipped and stained the colour of the ‘before’ set of dentures in a Denclens ad. She has a cold sore on her top lip—roughly the shape of Cuba, though obviously not as big. She’s wearing the world’s baggiest jeans so I can’t tell, but I’ll bet she hasn’t waxed lately. I wonder what she’d look like if she scrubbed up, but not for long—she’s way past scrubbing up.

‘What are you doing here?’ I say, getting a word in edgeways at last. I’ve been curious because she has no discernible signs of injury or illness. Perhaps she’s come about the cold sore—but at nearly three in the morning?

‘It’s the only place round here you can get a coffee this late,’ she explains. ‘And it’s quiet—tonight it is, anyway. These three Dutch guys moved into the squat and they play trance all night.’

‘I hate trance,’ I murmur sympathetically.

‘Trance is the bollocks, man—but the arseholes’ve only got one CD.’

Like you can tell one from another, I don’t say on account of the fact that it would be exactly what my mum would say.

She doesn’t need to ask why I’m here—though, curiously, she hasn’t expressed any interest in why my hand resembles a clumsily butchered chicken quarter that I’ve found in a dustbin and stuffed up my sleeve for a rag-week-type jape.

A voice calls out, ‘Mr Colin?’ I look up to see a tired-looking doctor scanning the reception. I rise from the bench, but before I follow him I turn to the girl. ‘Thanks for getting me the coffee…And for the company.’

‘No problem. Take care of yourself, yeah?’ she replies with apparent sincerity.

‘Thanks—you too. What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Fish.’

That would explain the cod.

‘ Fish…That’s really…Er…I’m Murray.’ And then, because I haven’t been able to shake the feeling, ‘You look familiar, you know.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Unless you’re the twat from Tesco who keeps moving us on from their ATMs.’

‘No, that wouldn’t be me…Bye, then.’

‘Yeah…See you ’round, man.’

I almost ask for my change—the coffee was only 50p—but I stop myself. My life is at a fairly low ebb, but I still think she needs the money more than I do.

Maybe she’ll use it to buy soap.

But I doubt it.

7.21 a.m.

It seems like an hour since I last checked the time, but it was only two mintues ago. I’ve been sitting on the wall outside my flat for just over forty-five minutes. I walked here from Saint Matthew’s. After the doctor had finished I looked for Fish—I was going to ask her for a pound for the bus fare—but she’d left. Now my body is even colder than it was when I arrived at the hospital, which I didn’t think would have been possible. There is an upside, though—my right hand is so numb that I can’t feel any pain for the first time since I punched the car. A bandage covers the four stitches in my knuckles. My ring and little fingers are strapped and splinted. Seems I was wrong about my body’s lack of criminal bones. I have at least two, both of them fractured.

My peripheral vision catches something and I quickly look round to see movement through the window of the groundfloor flat.

At last.

I shake my legs to check that they’re still capable of movement before slipping off the wall, climbing the steps and ringing the bell to flat A. I see a hand part two slats in the venetian blind of the bay window, and my neighbour’s eyes peer at me through the gap. I hope they belong to Paula and not to her slightly scary girlfriend, whose name I can never remember. After a moment the intercom gives a farty buzz and I lean my shoulder into the door. Inside, a yawning, crusty-eyed Paula is standing in her doorway. She’s wearing a long, baggy T-shirt printed with a picture of, surprisingly, Sigourney Weaver (skin-head Alien 3 model). Surprising because Paula goes to great lengths to avoid the shaved head and swagger of stereotypical dyke-ness—obviously all the effort goes out of the window when she goes to bed.

‘Bloody hell, Murray, what happened to you?’ she asks.

I guess I don’t look my best, then.

‘Oh, nothing much. I fell…outside the office. Spent all night in casualty—it was like Piccadilly Circus,’ I say. I didn’t want to lie, but there was no way I was going to tell her the truth. ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I left my jacket at work and my keys were in it. Can I nick my spare set back?’

‘Yeah, of course.’ She disappears into her flat.

Aminute later she’s back with a key ring.

‘Are you really OK?’ she asks.

‘Yes, really. Thanks for these,’ I say, jangling the key ring.

‘Murray,’ she says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something?’

Here we go. You want to know how I’ve been coping since Megan dropped me for a barrister with a highly developed social conscience, TV charisma…

‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—’

…a million-pound house close to several cabinet ministers…

‘—I’d hate you to be upset—’

…and an impregnable (to idiots, at least) Bentley.

‘—but would you mind having your TV on a bit quieter? We could hear everything the other night and Apollonia—’

Apollonia! How could I forget?

‘—is a really light sleeper.’

Fine—so you really couldn’t give a damn that I’m a miserable, lovelorn wreck—one, by the way, coping manfully with a potentially cancerous tumour—and that my one and only comfort is to watch repeats of Seinfeld on Paramount with the volume right up to drown out my sobs as I cry at all the bits that Megan used to laugh at hysterically. Well, fuck you too.

‘Yeah, sorry, Paula, I’ll keep it down.’

7.34 a.m.

As my (very, very hot) bath runs I go to my wardrobe to choose some clothes. I pull out a mid-grey suit—one of several mid-grey suits I possess. I hold it up and wonder if it’s suitable attire for the kind of appointment I’ve got in less than three hours. It looks a little formal for a cancer verdict. It’s more the other kind of verdict—you know: ‘And how do you find the defendant?’ It will have to do, though. I’ve got a meeting in Croydon this afternoon. I shouldn’t think I’d get past Schenker security in anything other than mid-grey. At the height of post-9/11 fever they had a walk-through metal detector in their foyer, but now they’ve replaced it with a spectrometer.

Needless to say, Niall Haye loves it there—Croydon is his spiritual home. He needs only the flimsiest excuse to board a train for the Schenker Bunker. This afternoon’s is a slimmer-than-slim excuse for a meeting—we’re presenting draft thirty-two of the script, which is all of three words different to thirty-one—but I’m duty-bound to attend.

I lay the suit on my bed and go to the front room—I need to call Barclaycard, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Morgan Stanley and Goldfish to tell them I’ve lost my cards. (To which they’ll doubtless reply, Good—it’ll save us the bother of calling on you to seize them and then casually beat the shit out of you as a warning to other piss-takers.) I sit on the sofa and as I reach for the phone I see the red light on the answering machine blinking at me. I press play.

‘You have—one—new message—’ the familiar synthesised voice announces, ‘left—yesterday at—eleven—thirty—seven—p.m.’

Beep!

‘Murray, it’s me,’ says another familiar though less robotic voice. ‘I was really hoping you’d be home, because it’d mean that what I just saw was an hallucination…Obviously not. I think we’d better talk…Oh, and by the way, don’t you think it’s about time you took my voice off the answering machine?’

Funny that. For weeks I’ve been desperate for Megan to call.

Now that she finally has my heart…s

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