‘Used to go in for camping when I was younger. My wife and I, that is. Couldn’t get her into a tent nowadays. Don’t mean she wouldn’t fit, although there’d not be much room for anyone else, I have to say. It’s just …’
He takes off his cap, smooths down his hair, replaces the cap.
‘… just that women seem to get older younger than we do, if you see what I mean. Lose their instinct for adventure. No spirit. On holiday, are you? Know the area well?’
‘Yes.’
He sniffs. ‘Call ourselves birdwatchers. Just an excuse really. To get away from the wives, get some fresh air, have a few pints in peace. Ah, well. ‘
He breathes deeply and closes his eyes. Sitting on his pack with his knees together, his hands clasped around them. And at that moment, the sun finds a hole in the mist and lays a white beam up to his feet.
Yes.
Feel it. Feel it rise through the soles of the feet, up the backs of the braced legs into the spine, out to the shoulders, rippling down the arms, the wrists, the gloved hands behind the back, gripping the stone.
‘So what do you do,’ the Green Man asks mildly, ‘when you’re not birdwatching?’
The eyes tip open. ‘You’ll laugh. I run a small chain of ladies’ hairdressers in Wolverhampton. ‘
And the Green Man does laugh, with the sheer joy of the revelation, the fitting of the last segment of a perfect circle.
He sees a first flicker of uncertainty in the birdwatcher’s colourless eyes as the little man attempts to rise, before the stone crunches his nose, like a red pepper. His eyes flicker rapidly through an amazing range of emotions: outrage, disbelief, terror … and, finally, pleading. He opens his mouth and the Green Man stops his scream with the stone, and the birdwatcher gags on blood and smashed teeth. Soon there is a quite terrific amount of blood, mixed with vomit, and it forms a warm delta between the exposed roots of the tallest pine.
IX
He woke up in a dark panic. Or didn’t. Didn’t wake up …
… woke down.
Dreams bunched and knotted behind his shuttered eyes, and he couldn’t open them. Couldn’t move, couldn’t scream. I’m paralysed.
A whizzing, a flittering, snipping tearing.
As he awoke again, into the cold.
Lying on his back, the sky above him alive with dark wings. Tried to hurl himself away, muscles wouldn’t respond. Locked. Everything inside him got behind a scream, but his throat wouldn’t process it. No lubrication. All congealed inside, all the liquids in him had clotted and dried when the blood stopped flowing.
Like a corpse. Like a corpse. Muscles rotted through. Torn. Shredded bits of him pecked away, ripped away, chewed away, blown away … and no eyes to see any of it. Couldn’t open his eyes because there weren’t any eyes. You couldn’t open bone.
Whimpering. He heard whimpering, and it was his own. Whimpering and the clatter of a morning trolley. A morning was happening somewhere out there, but he wasn’t part of it. He was out of it. He was two days dead.
He turned his head on the sweat-damp pillow and opened his eyes. Third awakening. Always three; never trust the first two.
God help me.
‘Tea, Mr Maiden. Bobby?’
‘Andy?’
He was fogged, muffled.
‘No, it’s Sister Andy’s day off. I’ll leave it on the side here. Then you can have another sleep, if you like, before breakfast.’
He sat up in panic.
The words another sleep terrified him.
No Sister Andy.
Who’d saved his life.
The African doctor, Jonathan, had told him. How they were all ready to give up and she’d stood there holding his head, demanding they keep going with the defibrillator. Jonathan describing it all so gleefully that Maiden was sure he could remember them coming in like the Drug Squad on a dawn raid.
All this down to Sister Andy. Left to me, man, Jonathan had said, with a frightening shrug, they’d be putting you in the ground today.
Recalling the words now with a sense of deep horror, he could clearly see himself from above, still and bluish, eyes closed against the earth coming down on him in spadefuls, the first particles of grit drumming on his screened eyeballs. Closing his mouth against it … but suddenly his eyes were opening into a brutal, hurting hail of soil and stones.
He could still taste the soil in the back of his throat; he drank all the tea and then two glasses of water from the carafe.
Lay back, breathing heavily, remembering what Andy had said about the patients who returned. The soft warmth and the gardens, the angelic voices, fountains. Well, yeah, you read all that stuff, saw people talking about it on TV, faces uplifted to the lights. All very comforting.
And all crap. It ended with the grave. That was the truth. Burial. In the earth. And death wielding the spade. You saw the face of death through fibres and roots and decaying matter and worms.
Still tasting it.
And, oh God, he needed to talk to Andy. You heard it said that saving someone’s life created a bond, a mutual responsibility. Something was reaching out to this grim-faced Glaswegian nurse as if she was his long-lost mother. No, that wasn’t exactly it. Close, though. Close.
Where was she? Jonathan might know but he wasn’t here either. There was a different doctor in the unit, the tight-mouthed, officious kind, patrolling the beds like a rogue traffic warden, peering into the side ward and rasping over his clipboard, as though the guy lying there was deaf, mute and backward.
‘Nurse, explain to me, would you … why is this patient still here?’
Nobody could explain it, and so, after breakfast, they pulled Bobby Maiden out of the sometimes-comforting chaos of Casualty and dumped him in Lower Severn Ward.
If the side ward in A and E was limbo, Lower Severn was authentic helclass="underline" continuous daytime TV — colours cranked up to lurid-plus — playing to two rows of probably nice enough guys with drips and tubes, one bloke pre-op and nervy, one post-op and demob-happy, one who read the Sporting Life and kept trying to persuade the nurses to place his bets, one who sat on the side of his bed and farted like a moped.
All these guys, Maiden saw them in cold, rubbery shades of grey, their faces squashed into stocking masks, a layer of dense depression banked over the beds like industrial smoke. Sunshine streamed through long windows, but the whole place was full of February, and there might never be a March.
According to the book, according to Andy, he should be feeling real joy, able to spread some comfort. Sitting up in bed and glowing with this kind of smug benevolence. Having died, he ought to have been reborn. His spirit pulled out of his body and washed clean.
It felt soiled.
Soiled. Literally. All he experienced was a very tainted kind of relief every time he awoke. A temporary relief, because one day he’d have to die again, and death was a sour grave. There was an old man in a corner bed they kept pulling the curtains round — the Sporting Life reader shaking his head, saying, ‘Can’t be long now.’ And Maiden wanting to leap out of bed and scream at the old man, For Christ’s sake, hold on to every last, fucking second …
The rest of life was going to be tainted by the acrid taste of the grave.
Meanwhile, Riggs was coming.
Boss’ll be in to see you.
Vaguely remembering, from when he first came round, someone leaning over the pillow with sanitized, spearmint breath.