“I could call them tomorrow,” she said, twisting the knife. “They will come, you know.”
Bernie let the crumbs slide off the plate into the carpet and dropped his hand to his side. “I don’t fucking care, Katie.” But he did care if they came. She could see he was trembling.
“All you have to do is give me the pillow.”
“I’ve thrown it away.”
“You weaselly little prick.” She stood up and slapped him hard across the face, making him drop the plate. He slapped her back, and felt her flaccid nose brush his palm. She toppled over, landing on the settee, holding her nose. He had made her bleed.
Kate sat up, holding her face, streams of scarlet bubbling through her fingers. She looked at him and carefully tipped to the side, letting her nose bleed itself out all over his settee. She took her hand away and smiled at her bloody palm. “If Paul finds me without the pillow he’ll kill me. My blood’s all over your sofa: the police’ll come here and find it and think you killed me. So now you’ve got to give it to me.”
He hesitated; she could see it.
“Bernie.” She sat up, holding a hand under her nose. “Bernie, I want my pillow so I can get it together and sort this out. Please? I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. If I don’t sort out my own mess we’ll both end up dead. You know that, don’t you?”
Bernie looked at her on the sofa. “You’re going to take it all and kill yourself.”
“Look at me, Bernie. I’ve got a plan. I’m as tough as nuts. If the world ended tomorrow I’d be the sole survivor. I’d be looting for handbags and jewelry. Tough as nuts.” She laughed at her own turn of phrase, holding a hand over her nose to catch the last dribble of blood.
Bernie watched her, smiling sadly, loving her and wishing everything was different, that they had stayed friends and looked after each other instead of bolting from home in opposite directions as soon as they could.
As Kate laughed up at him she heard a breathy huff in her ear: the dead man was laughing as well, deep inside her inner ear.
II
Paddy was terrified to be back in the courtyard of the Royal Hospital. The car park was crammed with cars and a couple of vans; every space was taken apart from the space where Billy had been parked the night before. It was left empty, a black scorch left from the fire. She tried not to look at it but saw it in the corner of her eye, the soot on the buildings nearby. The car had been taken away but had left its mark on the bubbled tarmac and the great wetness on the building and ground where it had been drenched by the fire brigade.
Paddy shuddered. She had a creepy sense that most of the soot on the building must have come from Billy’s body, from his skin as it burned. A throb started in her throat. She wanted to sit down on the step of the hospital and cover her face and cry. All she could see were his feet, twitching, his heels banging off the car park floor and the white coats gathered around him.
She looked up at the building. A hundred heart-wrenching tragedies must happen in here every day of the week, twice at weekends, and the thought brought her comfort somehow, that she was just a part of a great wave of fright and sadness. Everyone else was being brave about it. She’d be letting the side down if she wasn’t too.
The doorway was busy with staff and visitors coming in and out of the building. Deliveries were being brought in for the dispensing machines in the lobby, cans of juice and boxes of crisps. Paddy stopped in the busy crowd and looked up to the signs on the wall to find the right department. It was isolated at the very far corner of the immense building.
As she walked along the corridors, following the signs, she passed the oncology ward and remembered when her friend Dr. Pete had been in here, when he looked at her with a steady fearless eye and told her he was dying. She missed him. She missed Terry Patterson. When she thought about it, she missed every fucking person she’d ever known and wished it was some time other than now. She wished she was on day shift. She wished her father had a job and her mother was over the menopause and last night hadn’t happened and she hadn’t shagged George fucking Burns. She wished Mary Ann wasn’t a religious maniac and Sean was still her boyfriend. She wished she was thin.
She tripped along the corridor, head down, so distracted that she almost walked straight past the entrance to 7H. It was easy to miss. Only a small sign sticking out of the wall highlighted the fact that the door was there. She turned, caught her breath, knowing Billy would be a harrowing sight, and opened the door.
She found herself in a short lobby, painted a calming pale lilac that made her feel faintly panicky. A kind, matronly woman smiled up at her from behind a desk, asking if she could help. Paddy gave Billy’s name and watched the nurse’s face for a reaction, revulsion or something, she didn’t quite know. The woman smiled and looked at a chart on her table,
“Are you family, pet?”
“No, I’m… I was with him.” Paddy thumbed out to where she imagined the car park was.
The nurse looked at her, reading her face. “What we don’t want is visitors who are going to get very upset,” she said in a careful voice. “I don’t want anyone to upset the patients. Do you feel able to do that? To stay calm?”
Paddy nodded, though she wasn’t sure it was true. “Are his family with him?”
The nurse nodded. “I’m sure they’ll be glad you came.” She stood up and opened the door for Paddy, pointing her down a shabbily constructed corridor of white emulsioned cubicle walls. Paddy had been in other wards in the hospital, she knew that only the burns ward had these walls and doors. Presumably they needed them to keep visitors from staring at the boiled and blistered men in the beds.
She crept along to the door the nurse had indicated, hearing the beep of the machines and the rustle of crisp sheets against moist skin. A strong medicinal stench came from the walls, mint over disinfectant.
She knocked gently on the door, half-hoping no one would answer. A smoker’s voice called to come in. Paddy turned the handle and pushed the door open.
A high, metal-framed single bed sat in the middle of a room. A tiny sink was against the back wall alongside a locker with a plastic jug of orange squash and a glass.
Billy was sitting bolt upright in the bed, flanked on one side by a standing woman and on the other by a young man in a plastic chair reading a tabloid newspaper. Billy looked astonished and mortified at the same time: his eyelashes and eyebrows had been seared off and his skin scorched into a permanent flustered blush. He was dressed in a blue paper nightie, his hands wrapped up into massive white bandage mittens like oversized Q-tips. He seemed small and then she realized: his hair was gone.
In all the time she knew him, Billy had sported the same shoulder-length wavy perm. She knew it was a perm because she watched it carefully from the backseat, night after night, the small hint of a straight root here or there and then the sudden two-week flush of distinct flatness just before he went to the hairdressers’ and had it redone. The hairdo was five years out of date when she first saw it four years ago, but she had developed a grudging respect for Billy’s persistence. It was a brave man who’d risk baldness out of loyalty to the age of disco. Sean and her brothers were terrified of losing their hair.
But Billy was going to have to find a new look: the perm had melted. Over his left ear-away, she imagined, from the source of the fire-a bush of hair remained as it was before, but the rest of his head was bald, furnished in small tufts or pink fleshy patches.
Relieved and surprised, Paddy barked an unkind, shrill laugh and pointed at him. The wife and son stared at her blankly.