Take the Next Road on your Left (13)

“Who’s been a silly boy then?”
I was struggling to breach that mazy state between dreams and the nightmare of reality and the last thing I needed to hear was another fucking lecture delivered by another fucking authoritarian, and worse, one with bad breath.
I knew I was lying down, but the time and place concerned me little; I actually felt comfortable and it was a pleasure to regain that familiar sensation.
“Why don’t you just keep me sedated, at least until its all over?” I pleaded.
“I think you’d be safer if we could” the nurse replied. She was maternal, malevolent and meaty. I tried to get up from wherever I was but was as quickly thrust back into a prone position.
“You need to go?” she asked.
“Yes; back to my hotel…and then out of this bloody town”
“Oh…sorry” she smiled “I meant go to the loo”
Then I remembered. I raised my head as far as I could, as Matilda the Hun maintained the downward pressure on my chest, and whimpered as my eyes located the two white bundles attached to the end of my legs.
The curtains had been drawn around the bed but I knew I wasn’t in a ward. Beyond the drapes I could hear a drunken argument was in session; a man and a woman, both pissed by the sound of it. I must be in the A & E. Next stop the graveyard. Hit her mate I thought. Get one back for me.
“How about a conundrum?” I said.
“Pardon?” She laughed as if she were humouring an idiot who’d been lobotomised.
“What do Satellite Navigational Systems, CID officers and bedpans add up to?”
“Ooh, that’s a bit too cerebral for me, that is”
“Well the bloody answer isn’t too far away” I informed her, pointing toward my two ineffectual limbs adorned in elastic bandage.
“Well I still don’t understand, nevertheless my dear you’re not going anywhere tonight”
“Tonight; what time is it?”
“It’s two in the morning”
“I’ve been unconscious for the best part of five hours?”
“Not quite. You came round about ten minutes after you were concussed. The doctor gave you something to ease the pain and you fell asleep. I expect you were exhausted”
The doctor; who? For all I knew it could have been the time lord himself.
“Just rest”
“Here?”
“We’ve no beds but its midweek so you should be okay in here tonight. If it had been Friday or Saturday we’d have had to prop you between two chairs” she said laughing again.
“I bet you were bored until I came in”
“There’s always paperwork you know”
“And the usual” I gestured toward the escalating racket beyond.
“Sid and Nancy? They’re regulars. In a minute or two he’ll slump into a chair and go to sleep. She’ll shout at him for a short while and then stagger home. Sid will wake up about five and follow her home too”
“How the f…how on earth am I going to sleep now?”
“I’ll find you a magazine, a book maybe?”
“What’s your name?”
“Bridey”
“So Bridey that’s how you combat the inconvenience of insomnia?”
“Me? You don’t need any books to read or sleeping pills or anything else…” she winked “…to knock me out. This shift is tiring enough”
I bet her old man’s relieved at that. I could see him now: a tiny wiry man, lying awake in his bed as she climbs in next to him, the weight of her sending him spinning down against her huge back. I could feel him sweating until he heard that the secure world of slumber once more.
“I suppose I could try” Anything was better than staring at my beleaguered feet accompanied by the Sid and Nancy soundtrack.
“I’ll check the staff room; there’s some paperbacks lying around” She pulled back the drape and slipped out that stocky frame rather more delicately than I believed possible. Find a classic please, I thought, something dense, that’ll definitely work.
I lowered my feather-light eyelids. My head was like a Grand Prix of thought. It’s funny that the moment you close your eyes to sleep, regardless of how riddled your body is with fatigue, you immediately know whether or not the exercise is fruitful or futile. I began the day a successful, contented biped and doubted whether I’d begin another the same way.
I could imagine Hardman arriving home last night seething, grabbing a bottle of Scotch and ruminating over his next move. Mobile, I could have snuffed out any threat with a week’s new sales. I actually considered a strategy of travelling the wards, engaging the staff and patients alike in amiable conversation, probing for opportunities. I knew from my background that most nurses were heavily underinsured. Employed people who spent long periods either in hospital or in enforced convalescence rarely were covered against loss of earnings. Imagine leaving here in a wheelchair with an armful of sales. Imagine rolling into Hardman’s office with better figures from one night than most of the other mugs would get in 31. He’d be as helpless as a priest without a prayer book. Christ why stop there? Why ditch the chair once I’d got my feet back? I could barely comprehend the power I’d have planted in that two-wheeled wagon in the corner of a lounge staring with doleful eyes at the target’s wife.
“Well that’s better”
I started at the interruption. Bridey was back.
“What is?”
“You’ve finally got a smile on your face”
“I was in a better place”
Bridey sniffed. “You’re not…”
“Don’t worry nurse it was only the drug of wishful thinking”
“Well we all…”
I curtailed her rambling and dipped a toe in. “Your husband Bridey, does he work shifts like you?”
“For sure, I do the nights and he the days; been the same for thirty years. It suits us. Like one of them wresting tag teams”
“Good job?”
She paused and looked at me; her demeanour had hardened slightly
“Now Charlie just you relax. This is the only thing I could find” She handed me an Autocar magazine.
I persevered because that’s what I do, how I eat. “Pay the bills”
“Keeps the wolf from the door” she countered with her own cliché and straightened my bed sheets.
“In good health?” I slipped it in as imperceptible as possible.
She paused again “I don’t want any” she insisted
I was astonished at her perceptiveness but tried to blag it. "Bridey I can’t even walk; what could I offer you”
“I know what you do for a living Mr Lucrii; your friends warned me. They’ve told everyone”
That pair of CID cunts. I’d found the road to profit amongst the crazy corners and cul-de-sacs of the day and they’d thrown out a stinger. Then a huge vision of Hardman howling with derision bludgeoned its way into my contemplations obliterating my blueprint for safety.
But why shouldn’t he? Ruthlessness was an integral element in our world and if I’d adopt as much compassion if I were him. As for the two dickheads from Dock Green, their intellectual capacity was probably conditioned by the sort of scum they had to mix with. They were not to blame – but I knew who was; that silly bitch upstairs.
She ran into my car and I ended up at the police station. I took her to the toilet and twisted one ankle and then twisted the other on a pool of her bloody piss. A few hours ago I was actually attracted to her. I’d looked into those jade eyes of hers and the weight went out of my knees, a sensation unknown to me and one I was still at odds with. But she was trouble. That superseded everything.
I lived a simple existence. I desired the best and I knew how to achieve that. I lived in the best area in town and I was a member of several exclusive clubs. Years ago as a child living with my parents I experienced the misery of having shitty neighbours and a house that lay on the route back from the local Pub. As an 8 year old I witnessed in terror my first fight in the early hours of a Saturday morning but only because of the noise coming from the bastards next door. Their stereo speakers must’ve been cemented to the shared wall and the bass throbbed like a giant aorta. Occasionally the thump would cease but this offered little respite as its absence only disclosed the screaming of mother and daughter which ran concurrently with the music.
I saw a glint of silver and someone drop and I ran back to bed petrified of the idea of growing up and having to navigate my way through a world where scenes from a bad New York movie can happen next to the front gate I would have to pass through, Monday morning, on my way to school.
That was their fault – my parents. I suppose I couldn’t hold anything against them for trying but they were bloody useless at everything. My Dad never held a job for more than two years; learning difficulties she said, don’t blame him. He knew where the “offy” was though. She cleaned floors for less than minimum because they paid her cash. It boosted the household income as its undeclared nature didn’t affect the amount she claimed for family allowance. She thought that the occasional steak and chips would serve as recompense for the wretchedness of life on the estate.
They were dead now. Devoted to each other despite the squalor he died three weeks after she. They both passed away quickly, a relief for me. It was the only thing they ever did successfully.
I escaped, but not through school; that was never going to work. My artistry arrived spontaneously in the playground one afternoon facing Gordon the Golem. The school bully, he specialised in grabbing kids, girls too, by the face and squeezing them savagely, extorting with pain the usual bounty – sweets or money. Actually his parents were fabulously wealthy but sent him to comprehensive because his old man had gone there, still supported Labour and considered state education the making of him. But I didn’t need evidence to conclude that Gordon only took what the kids gave him to add legitimacy to his assaults; he enjoyed it for its own sake because every kid he squished in the face was only a proxy for his reviled father.
I knew that humour was wasted on him and many a clever and witty individual lay twatted on the concrete because Gordon’s sense of humour was as ethereal as Shangri-La.
It was 12:55 on a Wednesday afternoon (I was about 11) when he twirled me around by the shoulder with his index finger. It took only a moment yet half way through the spin I knew whose ugly visage I’d be confronting. And he was really ugly. He looked like a Bacon self-portrait without the colour, and he was twice my size. I often wondered if Saruman had found his inspiration for the Urak-Hai in our little school.
He fastened that huge hand on both my cheeks and I could feel his digits manipulating my flesh like he was moulding Plasticine. “Give” he ordered.
Where I got the balls from I’d don’t know but I gestured for him to return me to the earth and to my amazement he obeyed which seemed to stun the onlookers as much as it shocked me. “So?” he asked with a hint of intrigue I thought beyond his horizontal personality.
“How much you got?” I said
“Don’t” he growled, which I translated as a sign that he had nothing rather than another threat.
“Want to make some?”
“Maybe” Even at this angelic stage of my career I knew I had the prick hooked. What’s more his monosyllabic vocabulary was the perfect training for the clientele of the future.
“Let’s go” I beckoned.
The Golem was motionless as if he’d stepped in liquid nitrogen and was waiting for one of the little kids to shatter him with one swift and delicious boot of retribution.
I was expecting whatever brain cell in his head that hadn’t had the day off to give the Neanderthal a nudge toward re-establishing his authority but instead he continued with the one word sentences as if the notion of stringing two words together was as complicated as, well, string theory. “Us”
“I’m not hitting on you am I?” I joked, forgetting the hideous consequences of tickling Goliath’s ribs, and my teeth automatically clenched like the shutter on a camera. Then a huge smile broke somewhere along the crest of his mouth and my anus stopped twitching.
“Good?” he asked with the inquisitiveness of a toddler who’d taken his first steps and couldn’t wait to go to all those dark and secret places he could only gaze at sitting on his bum in the middle of the kitchen.
“Oh I think you’ll be very pleased”
“Good” This time it wasn’t a question.
And so I took Gordon to the school canteen and showed him the clever little fiddle I did with my free school meal tickets. I’d heard about a similar ruse that went on in a local betting shop. A punter would wait until the last minute before a dog race and then throw two tens on the counter and bet £20 on whichever trap took his fancy. Only it wasn’t a two ten pound notes it was one. The punter would tear the note in half and screw both parts into a ball. The assistant, trying to place the bet before the off, would scoop both halves into the till. It was not a long term strategy. Needless to say the punter would be a one-off visitor. I doubted if they ever won as people that desperate were reduced to such measures through a career of studying animals that invariably lost races.
My variation was brilliant. The dinner lady on the till had a compulsive disorder concerning any kind of mess. She would tut- tut if a spot of gravy landed any where near her spotless machine and would fidget like chimpanzee with piles until the blemish was purified. I knew she counted the meal tickets and tallied them at the end but she couldn’t abide a wad of jam strewn or chewed rectangular pieces of paper in her till. It was enough she had to put a grubby penny inside. She threw them all in a waste paper basket (lined with a lavender tissue) and tallied them on a note pad sitting beside her.
I received five tickets every Monday and garnered two meals a day using this con. I then branched out and took other kids tickets from them on the basis that they’d still get a meal. I’d rip up the ticket and fill out both halves with blotting paper which gave them some authenticity. One half fed the child who donated the tickets the other half bought a dinner for someone who paid for his lunch normally. I’d offer to get him a meal at a discount. Everyone ate and I made money.
It took Gordon’s IQ a couple of laps around his cerebral cortex to grasp the essential elements of the scheme. I helped him out to begin with, as I would have grooming a new salesman for the company, but he was far better at persuading kids to part with their free tickets than I ever could be simply due to the overwhelming malevolence that masqueraded as irises in his gaze.
“Thanks” he grinned sticking rigidly to his verbal dynamism.
I never managed to corner the market; there were always kids who saw the immorality of what I was doing, but their dodgy ethics creaked and caved in faced with the Golem’s physicality. Within a week he had taken over my little wheeze but I hardly cared; I had bargained on it.
I guessed what would happen but I had two motives for educating Gordon in the ways of the entrepreneur. Firstly it saved me a beating which I promised myself I would never let happen as long as blood swam in my veins. Secondly, like the bookie scam, it had to come to an end. Eventually some accountant would find a little too many chips and beans on the loss side of the ledger sheet. Gordon took the fall like the great huge patsy he was and was promptly expelled because in the end the smart survive, the stupid get shit on.
Yet I wasn’t stupid but I’d had enough crap for a lifetime in one day because of one woman who couldn’t utter a word of apology if she could. The nurse returned with a wheelchair for me. I hoped she would leave it and go; there was little kudos in discussion with her. She didn’t, but kept it business like.
She demonstrated the chair’s operation as if I’d just left the theatre after a lobotomy. When I protested against her patronising me she chided: “It’s for insurance purposes, you know, in case you do anything silly. I thought you’d have known that or don’t you sell that kind of policy?”
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek and she beamed at me in triumph.
“Now would you like me to help you into it?”
“No thanks I’ll do it myself”
“Oh no, you can’t; a member of staff must assist you it’s for insurance…”
“Purposes…yes”
The curtain was drawn now but it was early morning and most of the looney tunes had gone home; patched up ready to be broken again next weekend. I nodded assent and she hauled me across the bed with those huge biceps and forearms down into the wheelchair with professional ease.
“You’ll have to wait for a bed. You’ll have to provide us with the name of a relative or a friend; someone who can pick you up”
“You’re sending me home like this?”
“You’ve got cushions at home I guess? These beds are needed for more than a couple of twisted ankles”
“I have private insurance. As soon as I get to a phone they can come and pick me up”
“No friends then; I thought not” she said and then Bridey disappeared.
She could have pointed out the telephone. I ripped my wallet from my trouser pocket and fished out my BUPA details. At the very least they could get me a private ward in here but perhaps no, they might put me next to Adeona. I wheeled out into the A & E seating area and spotted the phone over to the left next to a window. The sun was creeping up over the car park, just beginning to force a bit of light into the shadows, those creepy little leftovers from night time.
I began to dial but got an engaged tone.
“Who the fuck…” I screamed but the empty corridors were like a loud hailer and I was suddenly conscious that I had become another A & E idiot. I glanced out the window and couldn’t believe my eyes. Although it was still murky I could swear that was the same smart 4 x 4 in the car park. What’s more a nurse was leaning in and talking to the driver. Maybe she was late going home – what can I say?
She seemed to nod as the driver passed her something and then strode away, not toward the main entrance but around the rear. She was slim and the complete antithesis of Bridey. Her arms were slender, her hair cut short and neatly trimmed to the neck and she had virtually no shape, like a pencil.