Whirligig (6 page)

‘I told you I was boring about it. As you can tell, I'm on a bit of a mission.' She looked down at the smears of egg yolk on her plate. ‘Peregrine's useless, and we really need a person who knows what they're doing. Someone to… provide a bit of leadership. And the crucial meeting is next week, so it won't take much of your time. Won't you please think about it?'

Claypole fixed on Coky's shy smile. It was not that of a rapist. At least, not that of a contrite one. Furthermore, he concluded, despite feeling overwhelmingly tired and fantastically sweaty, it was now clear that she was not talking about sex.

‘I… Yeah,' he said, and blinked away the sweat.

She sighed and leaned back in her chair. ‘Sorry, let's change the subject… How is your mother? I remember her as a very kind lady.'

Claypole hesitated. He shaped his mouth to reply. Immediately, nothing happened. He rehearsed the line he had meant to say in his head, just to be sure that it was not his emotions concerning his mother that were somehow blocking the synapses, and he shaped to speak again. Nothing.

At this point, Coky started to look concerned. There had, Claypole had to admit, been sufficient silence to cause concern to the average punter, let alone someone like Coky who might be expected to be more than averagely concerned about Claypole's welfare. Especially if they had just slept together, about which he was no clearer.

Claypole was just wondering if his body was once again conspiring to pretend to be asleep when something did happen. While still trying to say something and being inexplicably unable to, he began to feel a burning sensation in his forehead, as if a lit match had been flicked into his shapeless forelock. He moved his hand to his head instantly. At least, that's what he tried to do. But when his brain asked his hand to move, it refused. He asked his hand again to move, in any direction it chose this time, just to see if it still worked at all. It refused again and merely began to tremble. So he forgot about the hand and simply asked his lungs and voicebox to emit an exclamation. Any exclamation would do. ‘Ouch', perhaps. Or ‘argh'. Even a grunt would have been fine. But no sound came from his mouth at all, and Claypole began to panic as it dawned on him that something was seriously wrong.

His panic was undetectable except in his eyes, which were now wildly straining, desperate to be understood. The rest of his face and body could not do anything to show the world – and particularly Coky – that he needed help, instantly. Coky jumped out of her chair and came around the table to Claypole. He would have responded to this, but nothing in his body was working. The burning sensation in his head redoubled.

As Coky put her hand on his arm in concern and said something that he could not make out, Claypole began to slump sideways and off the chair. She moved instinctively to catch him, but had only limited success. His sheer bulk would probably have been too much for her to bear, even though she was a reasonably fit woman, without the added difficulty that there were, owing to his peculiar shape, no normal structures to hold on to. Claypole was not only heavy but spherical, and his thin arms and legs had turned completely to jelly. It would have been like trying to catch, with no warning given, an oversized beachball filled with water and with the tentacles of a dead octopus protruding from it. The two of them collapsed together in a deathly clinch, dragging the tablecloth with them. The plates, glasses and cutlery crashed and danced crazily all around them as they splayed on the pavement outside the café.

The last thing Claypole remembered before everything went black was Coky's face – near enough for him to smell her sweet coffee breath. His numb and burning head was next to her soft features. He beheld himself as a melting monster, and she as a picture of innocent, infinite worry. And his last thought – such a gentle one in the light of his parlous state – was that he still didn't know whether this unusual and pleasant woman was his friend or his lover.

When a crop is so thin,

There's nothing to do but to set the teeth

And plough it in.

‘A Failure', Cecil Day-Lewis

C
oky had never been able to understand why so many people said ‘I don't like hospitals' as if it were a revelation. Something to be marked and understood. Of course you don't
like
hospitals, she thought. Nasty things happen to you there. Maybe you had your gall bladder removed in a hospital, or you gave birth to a ten-pounder, or maybe you had to take a man there because he had a stroke while eating breakfast with you and you haven't seen him since they took him away in an ambulance. Liking hospitals doesn't come into it. You don't
like
a sewer, but you can appreciate what sort of a mess you'd be in if they did not exist.

At the reception desk of the fifth floor of St Paul's Hospital was a young and heavily made-up welterweight, who responded to Coky's businesslike ‘hullo' with an expression that managed to be simultaneously blank and hostile, indicating that she was terribly,
terribly busy. It seemed to Coky that the woman clearly had nothing more urgent to accomplish than the eating of many sugary buns.

‘Murble help you?' said the receptionist, not looking up from a half-demolished pink doughnut. Coky patiently explained to the top of the woman's head that she would like to visit Mr Claypole.

The woman tapped away at her computer, her long purple nails gingerly scratching the keyboard. She looked at the screen, puzzled.

‘Is he dead?' the receptionist asked.

‘Could…?' Coky gulped and covered her mouth with her hand. ‘I…' She choked on her words.

‘Says here,' the receptionist began, her fingers performing some more arachnid scuttling on the keyboard.

‘Oh God,' exclaimed Coky, staring at the floor and blinking. ‘He was…'

But that was as much eulogy as she could manage for the late Gordon Claypole. Who had he been to her? A childhood acquaintance with whom she had spent a few hours twenty-five years later. Even that had been a strange evening, during which he had got so drunk that he needed putting to bed and monitoring periodically throughout the night for continued signs of life. They had been, she thought glumly, friendly, but not yet friends. Her goal in going to see him had been to persuade him to be the spokesman for the wind farm. He wasn't perhaps the ideal candidate, being something in children's television, but she had asked every other person of her and her uncle Peregrine's acquaintance who might be in the least bit suitable, and every one of them had turned her down. In any case, she told herself, if you were successful in one sort of business,
presumably you could be successful in another. But now that Claypole was dead she would have to do the job herself, and she doubted her own abilities. None of this entitled her to any grief, she realised, only dread for her own prospects. And yet, she had liked Gordon Claypole. He was an odd fish, but he had a worldliness that she utterly lacked. He was a drunk, yes. But she was hardly on strong ground to censure an addict. And now she would never meet him again. She looked up sadly. The receptionist was gawping at her.

‘Yeah, Mr Cartwright is in the mortuary. Ground floor.'

‘Clay-pole,' said Coky slowly, transmitting relief and irritation in carefully equal measure. This was lost on her audience.

‘Gordon S. Claypole?' asked the receptionist. Coky nodded slowly.

As she made her way to the ward in which Claypole was recovering, she found herself wondering what Claypole's middle initial might stand for. Had his parents continued with the Scottish theme? Thus, maybe Stuart or Sandy? But perhaps they had gone cute (Summer?), or whacky (Sasquatch?).

Since being admitted to St Paul's two days previously, Claypole's mood had veered between petulant and weepy, with little in between. Breezy or sympathetic nurses, bothersome wandering crazies and his doctor, the humourless Dr De Witt, had been his only human contact. It was no surprise for him to remain unvisited. But he was surprised to find Coky's face on his mind whenever he was not feeling sorry for himself. Perhaps,
he thought, this was because she had been present when he had so nearly departed from the world. But it was possible that he was just grateful to her, and not just because she had paid the bill for breakfast. Dr De Witt had explained – several times – how vastly Coky's quick thinking had increased Claypole's chances of a complete recovery. Coky had identified that he was having some sort of stroke, obtained some aspirin from the first-aid box in the kitchen of the restaurant, crunched it up in a glass with some water and swilled it into his bubbling, panicking mouth. The vaso-dilatory effect thus ensured that his weak and punished heart could pump more oxygen to his brain, limiting the damage.

The Transient Ischemic Attack Claypole had suffered was dramatic, and unusual for a man of his years, but De Witt was cautiously pleased with progress. He told Claypole that if he could just improve the quality and reduce the quantity of his diet, get some exercise, drink plenty of water and much less alcohol, cut out stressful work and take his pills, his heart might not require surgery for another thirty years. (If I could manage to live like that, Claypole had thought ruefully, I wouldn't have had a stroke in the first place, you patronising Dutch hermaphrodite.)

In any case, it was not directly from the stroke that Claypole looked so dramatically bad. The problem was that he had, when he was on his way to the ambulance, regained consciousness and suffered a panic attack. In what were, as far as he was concerned at the time, his dying moments, he had thrashed and kicked, resisting all help from the paramedics, requiring them to restrain and finally to sedate him. As a result, Claypole had barked his shin, split his nostril, bitten his tongue,
given himself a black eye, cracked a knuckle and a rib, trapped his little finger and given himself a blood-blister, banged his funny bone and – most dramatically – smashed his two front teeth out on the ambulance door and cut his lip badly in the process. A mass of other small cuts, bruises and scrapes decorated his person. De Witt had commented on the extraordinarily varied range of minor injuries his patient had sustained. ‘For you, Mr Claypole,' De Witt had said in front of what seemed like fifty student doctors, ‘I would prescribe a twice-daily course of salad, and a box of sticking plasters.' The doctor had then chuckled in the same mirthless way that northern Europeans reserve for laughing at their tasteless films. Claypole had nodded slowly, his piggy eyes darkly flashing.

Miserable and beached on his hospital bed, a mass of contusions, he could only be glad that Coky was not here to see him.

‘Hello, soldier!'

And here she was, grinning at him with all those teeth and her gorgeously unarranged hair. For Claypole it was like having a torch shone in his face in the middle of the night. Coky's expression told him that the smile he had attempted was not well transmitted by his bloodied, mutant, toothless face.

‘Oh, cripes,' she said, and failed to suppress a giggle.

Claypole said nothing, and raised his unbandaged left hand in greeting. She grabbed it as she half sat half perched on the bed. But the hand Claypole had offered was neither fingers down for a wrong-handed handshake, nor fingers up for a more intimate grasp. They grappled awkwardly for a moment.

‘Oops,' said Coky. Claypole looked as if he was
thinking, and the moment hung in the air for a second. His mouth moved impotently.

‘Oh, sorry,' she said quickly, ‘I didn't realise you couldn't speak.'

She patted his hand. Claypole blinked, and then nodded slowly.

‘Poor you,' she said.

Coky had expected – assumed – that Claypole would be able to talk at least a little, and silently cursed the doctor for failing to tell her on the phone that he could not. She would have prepared herself better if she had known.

‘When do they…? Do you know when you might recover your, um, speech? If…' She swallowed.

Claypole, his expression hovering nowhere in particular, shrugged.

‘I expect you've had lots of visitors.'

Claypole shook his head, but then nodded vigorously.

‘Oh.' Coky was confused. ‘My fault. Are you able to wink or something so we can have a conversation? Like that bloke who wrote a book while he was in a persistent vegetative state. Something about butterflies. You know, wrote it with his eyebrows or something. Amazing, really. Must have taken terrific pluck… No pun intended… Eyebrows? Pluck?'

Claypole turned one thumb upwards.

‘Oh right. Yeah. Well, OK then. Do you want to write something down?' Coky leapt up and opened the drawer of Claypole's bedside table. As she did so, she did a lot of ‘what-have-we-got-here-then'ing and ‘hope-you-don't-mind-me-rummaging-about'ing. She found a pencil and a newspaper.

‘Look, we could even do the crossword.' She placed
the pencil in Claypole's limp and clammy hand.