His father came to the foot of the stairs, looking at him through the banisters, as if they were bars on a cell. ‘Your
The bedroom door to his sister’s room was open, the bed inside made, but dented, as if she’d thrown herself on it. In the bathroom there was a trickle of water still running to the plughole, and a single bloody fingerprint on the edge of the bath.
He felt his father at his shoulder.
‘I felt her, drowning…’ said Bryan.
He could smell his father now. Cheap talc, and the cream he put in his hair. Bryan looked at his father and saw that he’d cut himself shaving.
‘She walked out twenty minutes ago. She’s fine.’ Their eyes met. ‘We argued, that’s all – about the baby. That’s all you felt, Bry – she’s upset. Now leave it. Please.’
His father leant forward, pulled some toilet paper from the holder, and wiped the bloody print from the ceramic white edge of the bath.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
Eighteen years later to the day
When the lights went out Darren Wylde was at Junction 47. It was the last thing he saw – the big stencil-painted numbers – before the shadows rushed out of the corners. He stood still, the dark pressing in, making his skin crawl, as though he were hiding in a wardrobe full of fur coats. He looked at his luminous watch for comfort: 8.16 p.m. Down here, under the hospital, the lights often failed, but the back-up generator would be online in seconds. He started counting slowly and he’d got to forty-seven before the emergency lighting flickered on: which was spooky, because there it was – the big number on the walclass="underline" 47. Spooky. The weak emergency lighting didn’t really help; stillborn, barely struggling free of the neon tubes, creepier than the dark.
It was a T-junction; and so he could see three ways. Left towards the incinerator. Right? He thought that might be the corridor to the hospital organ bank. And back, over his shoulder, was the zigzag route to the lift shafts which led up to the main wards, A&E, and outpatients. But down here no one moved within sight. He caught only the echo of one of the little electric tugs, hauling laundry, a specific sound against the background
This was Level One: a catacomb; a maze, in which a map was useless. There were small signs at crossroads, and some of the T-junctions, but you needed to know your way. He’d done Theseus and the Minotaur at school, and he knew that the Greek word for the ball of twine that the prince used to find his way out was the origin of the modern word clue. A smile lit up his face, because he loved that, the way the past was part of his life today.
Every corridor on Level One was the same: the walls bare concrete, services in dusty pipes running overhead, humming like a ship’s insides. That’s what it was like, he thought, Jonah and the Whale, and he was down amongst the intestines, the lurid coloured pipes, like he’d been swallowed whole.
Turning left, he walked quickly towards the incinerator, trying to forget what he carried; trying to forget why he was down here at all, when he could have walked through the hospital, down the long bright corridor with the children’s mural, the yellow bag swinging in his hand. But the theatre manager on surgery had spelt it out: Level One, and get it signed for. He felt the weight in the yellow plastic bag. His stomach gently flipped the full English he’d crammed down in the staff canteen for tea: runny eggs, sunny-side down, oozing out onto the greasy plate. Gulping, he tried to suck in some cool air; but it was fetid, unmoving, hot. Outside, above his head now, the hospital tarmac would be cooling in the dusk. Here, the heat went on, defying the sunset.
Darren hitched up his jeans with one hand and walked faster. It wasn’t a bad job as summer jobs went. Usually,
But sometimes they sent him on foot. The yellow bag would be too big, an odd shape, and they didn’t want any breakages in the chute system because then they’d have to have it deep-cleaned. Or the yellow bag would have that little sign on it: the three-cornered trefoil, the radiation symbol. Or the chemotherapy warning label. So those bags he’d have to take down to Level One himself. And at weekends, when they pushed through the private patients, there’d be hardly any tugs working, so they’d send him on foot then as well, because the last thing they wanted was a backlog, not in this heat.
He felt the heft of the yellow bag and tried to swing it, but the laugh he’d planned caught in his throat.
At last. Junction 57. A door, a radiation sign, a danger sign, and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
He took the steps two at a time and burst through a pair of swing doors marked INCINERATOR ROOM.
It was like crossing the threshold into a kind of hell. The sudden brutal heat, the shearing scream of the furnace; but most of all the air – heavy with the fine white ash, and the heated fumes, making everything buckle like a mirage.
Darren tried to take a breath and gagged on the grit in
Above him, unseen, Darren knew there were several more floors of the incinerator building, smaller than this room, but rising up to house the various stages of the furnace, the cooling ducts, the filters, until at last, 200 feet over the hospital itself, the incinerator chimney trickled a cloud into what he imagined to be an otherwise cloudless evening sky.
The polluted air made his skin creep, as if he’d walked into a spider’s web. Below him, around him, the furnace rumbled, as if he were part of the machine. And the heat was like a duvet, crowding out the last breath of cool air, sucking out his energy.
Emergency lights here too, running on the hospital generator, which had kept the furnace working – but, oddly, while the conveyor belt was running, it was empty of yellow bags, and unsupervised.
‘Bry!’ he shouted. The ash got into his mouth right away, and he had to lick his lips, tasting the carbon.
Bryan Judd – Bry – had always been here on the late day shift, two until nine, watching the conveyor belt shuffle the piles of yellow bags towards the furnace doors, his pudgy fingers running over the dials on the control panel, sorting the bags, working alone. Darren didn’t know why he liked him, especially as he always seemed annoyed that his solitude had been interrupted. Perhaps it was the music that created a bond, because Bry always had an iPod round his neck, like Darren. And, despite the age gap, they liked the same stuff: New Country, some Cash. And he knew what he liked because Bry was always singing, tunefully, hitting the notes dead on.
But there was no Bry.
One of the plant engineers appeared from behind one of the control panels wiping his hands with a cloth, a blue overall open to his waist, the hair on his chest grey, streaked with sweat. He shrugged. ‘What’s up?’ he shouted, holding his mask out with one hand. Everyone shouted in the furnace room. ‘The belt’s empty – where’s Bry?’ he asked.
Darren knew the man; his name was Potts. Like all the engineers his damp, warm face was plastered with the white ash-like dust, a face devoid of eyebrows, wrinkles, or stubble. The face of a clown. Across his skin sweat had eroded a few channels, as if his skull was about to fall apart.
‘I’ve got this,’ said Darren, holding up the bag.
They heard footsteps on the open-lattice metal ladder,
‘Nothing’s going in,’ said Bourne. ‘Better find Bry – he’ll cop it otherwise.’
Potts shrugged. ‘Probably having a fag outside – I’ll get him.’