Sleep walking

The door buzzer went and jerked me out of sleep. I’d a book about Stalin on my lap and I picked it up and put it on the arm of the couch face down to keep my page. Pins and needles bent my right leg when I stood up, I’d been resting it on the table. The buzzer went again, a loud prolonged wail.

‘Fuck off,’ I said, under my breath.

When I picked up the intercom phone in the hall I was more diplomatic. ‘Whit is it?’

‘Police,’ was the reply.

My brain shuffled thoughts like a magician shuffling cards to the bottom of the pack. Wondering what offence I’d committed. I didn’t even drink much anymore and the only thing I could think of was my car jumping a red light. Even that seemed farfetched, as I was slow on the turn.  

I pressed the buzzer to let them into the close and stood at the door. They shuffled up the stairs with police hats covering their hair, and what we used to call walkie-talkies, but now mobile phones pinned to the stab-vests on their chest. They both wore coverall face masks and goggles. By their diminutive size and swing of their hips I took them to be women cops.

They stood on the edge of my landing staring at me as if I’d committed an offence because I wasn’t wearing a facemask. But since I was standing in my own house, I thought it was unlikely they could arrest me. I played the gallant. ‘You want to come in?’ I asked. ‘And I could make you lads a wee cup of tea?’

Neither of them took the bait. The smaller of the two shifted her feet. ‘Are you Jack Hayes,’ she asked in a pleasant voice.

I could almost have fancied her. Took her as a package, sight unseen.  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Guilty as charged.’

The other cop had the kind of voice that you know that she likes to be in charge and order folk about. I didn’t need to see her face. She was a no-no, she reminded me too much of my first wife.

‘Is your father also called Jack Hayes and is currently residing at Scotsware Nursing Home?’

‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Unless he’s nipped oot to the disco.’

‘Well,’ the hardnosed cop said. ‘We’re here to tell you that he’s dead.’

‘Whit happened?’

I took a step out into the close. The hardnosed cop whipped one of those sprays from the lapels on her jacket and pointed the nozzle in my direction.

‘Back inside,’ she said.

I took a step backwards, my hand feeling for the handle on the door. ‘Can you know tell me whit happened?’ My voice had that pleading tone I didn’t recognise.

‘Contact the authorities,’ the smaller of the cops said.

‘But you are the authorities.’  

They didn’t hang about. Leather soles of their feet hitting the stone steps and echoing off the walls as they ran down the stairs.

I spent most of that night on the phone and most of the next day, getting put on hold, listening to piped music, being automatically cut off and being told to ring back if it was an emergency.

When I finally did get through to speak to somebody, I was in tears, but she was very nice. But dying was no longer an emergency, she informed me. Especially with somebody so old. There was nothing I could do, but stay put. She could not issue me with a pass to go and see his body. They were doing everything they could.

‘I understand,’ I told her, before I got cut off.

Rain whipped against the living-room window and it was getting dark. I went into the lobby and pulled on a dark nylon jacket and looped a Celtic scarf around my neck and covered my nose and mouth. A blue baseball cap completed my outfit.

The wheels on my mountain bike were flat, I hadn’t be on it in years, but when I pumped them up they were solid enough. The back light was still working, but dimly. The front light needed new batteries, but I figured it was safer going blind. That way in my dark clothing I’d be more likely to go unseen. I supposed the cops could arrest me, but I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.

Being outside in the open air on a bike was like a shot in the arm. I felt about twelve as I pedalled furiously along the canal. By the time I’d reached half way up the hill at Duntocher Road, I’d added another year, and with every turn of the pedal I aged ten years. Breath in my ribcage was a mixture of pain and more pain. By the time I’d skirted around the park I was using the bike as a walking aid, leaning against it as I got my breath and wheezed it up the hill.   

Scotsware Nursing Home was at the top of a long steep hill, the kind you never notice when you’re driving up it. It was picturesque with fir trees and bushes and a long curving driveway from a different era when landowners built houses that would last. My dad had called it a fancy prison. I knew what he meant, but he’d dementia and there was nowhere else he could go. Nowhere else I could go, but I still felt guilty about it.

I left my bike behind the trunk of a tree overgrown with ivy, near the front gate. I didn’t need to do much sneaking. The Nursing Home was usually lit up like a spaceship from the inside, the big Victorian windows on the ground floor illuminating pink stone-chip paths overgrown with weeds. I thought it was closed; it was only that I got closer to the grand entrance halls that I noticed there were lights on, but deep inside the building. Some instinct made me take a sideways step,  crouch in the shelter of a dilapidated shed as police car looped up the hill, headlights full beam, as it escorted a convoy of furniture lorries.

The police car drove around the back of the building, but the tarred road was too narrow for the lorries. Engines roared as they edged forward as close to the wall and near the entrance as the skill of the driver allowed. The convoy dropped their tailgates, almost touching, lorry to lorry, in a fan-shaped curve. I was surprised men had been travelling in the compartments. They stepped out the back of the vehicles wearing baggy white paper suits, masks and googles, the kind of uniform we were used to seeing on the twenty-four-hour news briefings.

All the lights in the long Victorian windows flicked on. Two cops stood tall at the entrance, rifles casually slung in the crook of their arm as they watched the men unload their cargo. The cold began to creep up my legs and I shivered as I listened to muffled groans from the stretchers. Pairs of frightened eyes stared out from the blankets covered in cling film. Geriatrics, heads bowed, being shuttled with machine-like precision inside the building.