Maurie was sitting on the bed beside a holdall bag. He was wearing a coat and hat, both of which seemed several sizes too big for him. Seeing him out of bed like this made Jack realize just how diminished he really was. And for a moment he was struck by the folly of what they were doing.
‘Who was that?’ Dave said, flicking his head towards the door.
But Maurie just shook his. ‘No one. Are we all set?’
Jack looked at the bank of monitors beside the bed. Where the previous night green and red lights had winked and bleeped, and a heart monitor had registered on a green phosphor screen, nothing was illuminated. The equipment looked dead. Wires and sensors lay strewn around it on the floor.
‘Won’t that have set off an alarm or something?’
‘It’s disconnected from the mains.’ Maurie sounded tetchy. ‘Just get me out of here.’
Jack said, ‘My grandson’ll be here to get you in just a minute. We’ll keep the nurse busy.’ He hesitated, taking in Maurie’s chalk-white complexion, and the deep, dark smudges beneath his eyes. ‘Are you okay?’
‘As okay as any dying man can be. Go!’
The duty nurse was talking to a middle-aged couple about the condition of their elderly mother, which suited Jack and Dave’s purposes very well. They stood, waiting to speak to her, masking her view towards the door of Maurie’s room, and Jack gestured to Ricky waiting out in the hall that he should make his move now. As Ricky pushed the wheelchair quickly across the floor of the ward, the nurse turned towards Jack.
‘How can I help you?’
Jack fished a pill box with a clear plastic lid from his coat pocket. It was divided into six compartments, each with its own coloured pills.
He said, ‘I know you’re not a doctor or anything. But since this is a heart ward, I thought I could ask you.’ He gave her his best smile. ‘These are the pills I’m on following my own little episode, and I’m off tomorrow on a wee trip. Only, I’ve lost my list of instructions telling me which to take when, and there’s no time to see my doctor before I go.’
‘Pretty colours, though, aren’t they?’ Dave said.
The nurse gave him an odd look.
‘You wouldnae know just how dangerous they are.’
The nurse frowned. ‘Dangerous?’
‘Aye, my old man was on these things after his heart attack, and they might have kept his ticker goin’, but they destroyed his kidneys.’
‘Polypharmacy,’ Jack said. ‘That’s what you’ve got to be careful of, isn’t that right?’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to speak to your doctor about your prescription, Mr...’
‘Aye, I thought you’d say that.’ Jack put on his best worried look now. ‘I mean, I think I remember the order I’m supposed to take them in, when and how many. But I wouldn’t swear to it. I thought you might know. There’s just no time to ask the doc, you see.’
He felt Dave dunting him, and glanced over his shoulder to see Ricky wheeling Maurie out of the ward.
‘Anyway, thanks for your help, nurse. You can always come to my funeral.’
Her eyes opened wide, and he grinned.
‘Just kidding.’ And he turned to follow Dave out into the hall.
Ricky had a good twenty yards’ start on them and wasn’t hanging about. They almost had to run to catch him up.
But as they did, Maurie started shouting, ‘Stop! Stop!’ and a panicked Ricky pulled up sharply.
Dave reached them first, then Jack, both of them breathless.
‘What the hell is it?’ Jack gasped.
‘I need to go,’ Maurie said
Jack looked up to see the men’s toilet sign above the door to their right. He cursed under his breath. ‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No, it can’t. Just help me out of the chair. I can do this on my own.’
The three of them helped Maurie to his feet and stood fretting in the corridor by the wheelchair as the toilet door swung shut behind him. Visitors and nurses, and the occasional doctor, drifted by as they waited. And waited.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Dave whispered eventually through clenched teeth. ‘What’s he doing in there?’
Jack sighed. ‘I’ll go and find out.’
He discovered Maurie on his knees in a cubicle, his arms around the bowl of the toilet as if he were embracing it, retching and vomiting between huge gulps of air.
‘For God’s sake, man, what’s wrong with you?’
Maurie gasped, ‘I’ll be alright in a minute.’ And he threw up again. When he’d caught his breath, he said, ‘It’s the chemo.’
‘I thought you were stopping it.’
‘I just have.’ This time he dry-retched. ‘I think that’s all for the moment. Help me up.’
Jack helped him to his feet and fumbled in a pocket to retrieve a hanky to wipe the saliva and sick from his old friend’s lips and chin. ‘It’s not too late to give this up, Maurie. We can still take you back.’
Maurie turned sad brown eyes on him, so large now in his shrunken face, and Jack saw the determination that still burned in them. ‘Not a chance!’
Back out in the hall, Maurie slumped almost semi-conscious into the wheelchair, and they set off again towards the lifts, anxious to be out of there just as quickly as they could. But as the lift doors closed behind them, they heard a nurse’s shrill cry from the far end of the corridor.
‘Mr Cohen! For God’s sake, where’s Mr Cohen?’
It seemed to take the lift an eternity to descend to the ground floor, and the palpable silence in it was thick enough to slice. Not one of them dared to meet the others’ eyes. When, finally, the doors slid open it was only to reveal the acres of lobby that had to be crossed before they could escape into the night, and a uniformed security man standing by the doorway.
Jack tried to swallow as his tongue stuck to the roof of a very dry mouth. ‘Don’t rush it,’ he said under his breath. ‘Just take your time.’
But Ricky was off as if the flag had just been raised on pole position at a Grand Prix. Jack and Dave struggled to keep up with him.
They were halfway across the hall when a wall-mounted phone beside the security guard rang, and he lifted the receiver. He listened for a moment, then his eyes raked the lobby as he spoke, settling on Ricky and the wheelchair before he hung up. Jack saw a tiny trickle of sweat run down Ricky’s neck from behind his ear.
The guard glanced at his watch, then raised a hand to stop them. ‘Excuse me, doctor,’ he said.
For a moment Jack thought Ricky was going to faint, but from somewhere he managed a mumbled, ‘Yes?’
‘You got the time on you? My watch seems to have given up the ghost.’
Ricky’s relief almost robbed him of the ability to stand up, and he very nearly staggered as he let go of one handle of the wheelchair to look at his watch. ‘Quarter to eight,’ he said.
‘Thanks, doc.’ The security man held the door open for them. ‘Better wrap up warm, it’s bloody cold out there.’
By the time they got to the top of the hill they were all wishing they had been able to find a parking space at the bottom of it. It took all three of them to get Maurie up the steep incline, past the Langside Library and the shops below the tenement flats that climbed the rest of the way to the roundabout.
When they reached the car, Ricky said, ‘I can’t let go. There are no brakes on this thing.’
Jack tutted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the genius, son. Turn it sideways.’
‘Oh. Aye.’ Ricky seemed chastened.