Go Not Gently (26 page)

I pushed myself again, tried to establish a rhythm, the air in my windpipe burning with each gasp.
Please don’t let him die, please, don’t let him die.
I could taste my lungs. Past, the tall tree on the left. Cows to the right, huge Friesians, like cartoons, black and white against the lush grass. Another gate. Please don’t let him die.

Then I saw the man and his dog.

There’s always a man and a dog, isn’t there? While the rest of us luxuriate in the final hour in bed the dog walkers are up and out, rain or shine, discovering the dark deeds the night has spawned. Stumbling over shallow graves, corpses.

He was a small man, middle-aged, glasses and a neat moustache. He wore a waterproof jacket and a woolly hat. He looked shocked when he first saw me, then concerned as we drew closer. You couldn’t blame him. Clad in a T-shirt, smashed-up face, spattered red. The dog was small, brown, nondescript, friendly enough. It tried to lick the blood off my leg.

‘Get an ambulance,’ I said to the man, ‘and the police.’

‘Has there been an accident? Are you all right?’ He pushed the dog away from me gently with his foot. ‘Get down, Shep.’

Shep! I felt a giggle inflate in my belly. ‘Yes, please hurry. Tell them there’s a man with head injuries, up at Malden’s, you know where…’

He nodded. ‘Come on, Shep.’ He began to run, really run, the dog at his heels. I turned back for Malden’s.

Above me I heard the roar of a plane ascending from the airport. The sky was too cloudy to see it but I could hear it climbing. Full of passengers bound for sunny holidays. Up for hours already, they’d have been. Stomachs sour with lack of sleep and food at funny times, wondering whether to risk the curdled eggs and the strange sausages on the in-flight meal.

I leant over the road and retched. Thin, foamy bile.

Don’t let him die.

Agnes was still beside him, pressing my sweatshirt to his head. He was still breathing, just. I sat beside her, told her help was on its way. I closed my eyes and waited.

            A second ambulance was summoned by the first. Goulden was given immediate emergency treatment before being moved. The police took initial statements from us. The bare bones of the story that had brought us here, leaving us shocked and bloodied. We were wrapped in blankets and led blinking into the bright daylight to the ambulance.

At the casualty department people came and went checking pulse and temperature. They let me ring home. Ray answered, relief catching at his voice. I told him where I was and that I’d be home as soon as they’d checked me out. I didn’t tell him what had happened. I wasn’t sure. Had I killed a man? Brain-damaged him?

I couldn’t get warm. They took my clothes and left me a paper gown which was open at the back and one cellular blanket. I asked for more blankets. They never came. There weren’t even any rolls of paper sheeting I could make use of. We were waiting again, for an X-ray, for a doctor, for a diagnosis, for ever. Shock dulled my comprehension but I didn’t dare sleep.

At last someone offered us tea. Oh, yes, yes! When it arrived, pale grey in Styrofoam cups, I nearly wept with disappointment. It didn’t even seem to help my raging thirst. More police came. They spoke to Agnes and me together.

They managed to note down the main points of our story and our conspiracy theory without too many incredulous looks. I asked about Goulden. He’d been taken to another hospital; there were no intensive care beds free at this one. They didn’t know how he was.

The doctor checked us over, pronounced our X-rays clear and agreed we could be discharged. They cleaned us up first. They decorated my nose with seri-strips, which looked stupid, and strapped up my wrist. Agnes had badly bruised legs from the kicking she’d received. They dressed them for her. We were both given some painkillers to take with us, a poorly photocopied leaflet on hypothermia, shock and concussion and what to look out for, and our choice of old clothes from the Hospital Friends Box. I was going to ask about my own clothes until I realised with a rush of fear that they might constitute evidence of my assault on Goulden. Did they need evidence when I’d told them all about it?

It was well after lunchtime when we were escorted to Agnes’ in a police car. I insisted that someone go in with Agnes and check the house out.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.

‘Your phone’s cut off,’ I said. ‘Your door was open half the night, anyone could have been in.’

‘It’s best we check it out, madam,’ said the driver, and he and his partner got out.

‘I’ll ring BT,’ I said, ‘order a repair.’

‘No,’ she objected.

‘It’s no trouble.’

‘Sal, I’m perfectly capable of going next door to use my neighbour’s phone to do that. I don’t need looking after,’ she admonished me.

‘Sorry.’ I made a note of the neighbour’s number in case I needed to contact Agnes and the police did the same when they returned and pronounced the house secure. She watched us go from the doorstep. I turned to keep her in view as long as possible. I had an urge to run back and stay with her. Agnes and I, we’d been somewhere terrible together; no one else could ever really know what it had been like. And we’d survived. I took a deep breath and sat back in my seat.

Digger was inordinately pleased to see me. Made me feel guilty as hell seeing I have so little regard for the animal. Still, unrequited love doesn’t seem to faze him.

Ray paled when he saw me and he fussed round me until I gave him something to do. ‘Ray, please, I want a pot of tea, strong. And porridge, loads, with golden syrup.’

‘I know how you take your tea,’ he retorted.

He’d contacted the police when I’d failed to return. The police had found my car but had not got any further in their efforts to find me.

Sheila arrived back from lectures as I was eating the first mouthful. ‘Oh, you poor thing. Is it broken?’

‘No, just bruised.’

‘You’ve got black eyes.’

‘No,’ said Ray, ‘more like purple. Prettier than last time.’ He put down my tea, pulled out a chair.

‘Has this happened before?’ Sheila was aghast.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ said Ray.

‘That was a gun,’ I said, ‘this was a fist.’

‘You were hurt,’ he raised his voice, ‘you were hurt then and you’re hurt now.’

‘I know. Don’t shout at me. I don’t like being hurt, I don’t try to get hurt. It frightens me too.’

For a beat or two the unspoken argument hung in the air. We’d been through it before. Ray would never like the risks the job brought with it and would never understand why I persisted in it. But I loved my work. In spite of the bad breaks and the dull days there was nothing else I could imagine being halfway happy doing.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it.’

‘What?’ I swallowed a mouthful of tea, then another. Bliss.

‘From start to finish. I’ve been up all night worried sick, talking to police, trying to convince them I wasn’t being neurotic, covering for you with the kids, imagining you floating down the Mersey or crumpled into a wheelie bin somewhere. The very least I expect is a blow-by-blow account of what’s been going on.’

He got it. Sheila too. And the telling of it helped relieve me of some of the awful tension that had my shoulders up near my ear holes and my guts like macramé. They were suitably appalled at the central image of people being given diseased brain matter as a means of pushing forward the search for a cure for Alzheimer’s. I finished with an account of our planned attack on Goulden.

‘I ran out and found a man walking his dog. He called an ambulance. I still don’t know how Goulden is. They took him to intensive care in Chester.’

Sheila swallowed and Ray was quiet, lost for words. I couldn’t deal with their shock as well as my own.

I pushed back my chair and got up. ‘I must have a bath.’

I pushed Blu-Tack into the overflow and filled the bath, dripped in some geranium and rose oils. I found one of my old Marvin Gaye tapes and put it on. My face was a mess, nose still swollen and mottled, lips cracked, eyes bleary and bruised. The ridiculous lattice of seri-strips contrasted vividly with the bruised plum background.

Marvin sang about injustice and love and loss. The bathroom filled with steam, which condensed on the mirror and the walls and dribbled down the tiles.

Drops leaked down my face too but they were salty and of my own making.

I had barely half an hour before the children would be home. I craved sleep but wanted to see Maddie first, reassure her all was well. I’d already agreed with Ray and Sheila that as far as the kids were concerned we should say I’d been hit by a baddie and the police were going to put him in jail.

‘Are they?’ Sheila had asked. ‘If he’s all right?’

‘Bloody hope so. I don’t know what the charges will be, aggravated assault, conspiracy, abduction, maybe even manslaughter as far as the deaths of some of those patients go. They can take their pick.’

I wrapped my big old coat round me and sat outside in the garden while I waited. There was a watery sun reflecting softly off the drops on the leaves and grass. Everything was damp and a bit grey round the edges but there were a few signs of the summer to come: shiny curled shoots on the clematis round the back door, buds and bright new leaves on the aubretia. I felt melancholy. The violence had made its mark inside as well as on the surface. I felt weepy and burdened down. Recognised once again the huge gap between the world I wanted and the one I was living in. I’d failed Agnes and Lily. There was little consolation in the knowledge that I’d been able to stop Goulden killing us.

I needn’t have worried about Maddie. Once she’d established that I wasn’t dying and had enjoyed a good tour of my injuries she lost interest. I enquired about school. It was boring.

‘What’s boring?’

‘All of it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing.’ She was growing impatient.

I could remember the same inquisition from my own mother, though at a later age. I’d always fobbed her off with the details of the school dinner menu, not an option if you took packed lunches as Maddie did. I could never comprehend why she had any interest in what I did in those long tedious lessons. Why then, if I could remember what it was like, did I persist in asking Maddie the same questions?

‘You must have done something.’

‘Fish,’ she said enigmatically. And that was the end of the matter.

The phone rang. It was one of the police officers to tell me that Goulden was out of the woods and the prognosis was good. They’d found ropes, drugs and weights in his car, plenty to substantiate our belief that he intended to murder us. His wife would be helping them with their enquiries, as would her brother. They were looking for Matthew Simcock. I thanked him profusely for letting me know. I’d worked on cases before where getting any such information was like drawing teeth. There was no obligation to tell victims what was happening to villains. I asked him to make sure Agnes knew too.

The relief made me dizzy. I’d been frightened silly that Goulden would die, that I’d have a man’s life on my conscience. I sat on the bottom stair. I felt a flare of anger then. Searing hot, in my guts, up my spine, pricking my eyes. Rage at what Goulden had done to me, to Agnes, to Lily. A blaze of fury that I hadn’t dared to allow whilst his life hung in the balance. It felt good, burning up some of the guilt and the self-blame. Slowly it ebbed away. I was too drained to sustain it. Ray found me gazing into the middle distance.

‘Go to bed,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I will.’ I said good night to the children. Hugged them both tight.

‘You’re going to bed before me!’ Maddie was delighted.

‘I know. I’m so tired. If I don’t get some sleep I’m going to fall over.’

‘You’re not,’ she scoffed. ‘I know! I can put you to bed.’

I allowed her to burble round me while I got myself undressed and into bed. I took some more paracetamol and wriggled under the duvet. ‘Night-night.’ I leant out of the side to kiss her on the head. ‘I love you, Maddie.’

‘Mummy?’

‘What?’

‘My nose is a bit sore too, on the inside. You can’t see it on mine.’

‘Well, there’s not a lot you can do about that, Maddie.’

‘A plaster might help.’

‘Not on the inside.’

‘No, outside.’

‘Fine.’ All I wanted to do was sleep. ‘They’re in the kitchen. Tell Ray I said you could have one. Night-night.’

‘And cream.’

‘Yep.’

‘I might need two plasters, you know.’ 

Irritation rose like bile, but I tried to keep it from my voice.  ‘Fine.’ You can use the whole bloody box as long as you let me sleep.

I awoke aching and disoriented at midnight. My throat was parched, my head thumped with pain, my nose was blocked. I didn’t dare blow it. I crept downstairs and made tea and toast with lashings of honey. Sat in my old armchair in the kitchen to eat it. Digger padded over and laid his head on my foot. Nice gesture, spoilt a bit by the drool. I gently pushed him away.