“I’m looking for my granddad-”
She smiled. “I know who you’re looking for. And you’re too late. He’s gone.”
“What do you mean, he’s gone? Up until an hour ago, he was in the kind of coma you lot said he’d never come out of.”
“He discharged himself,” the nurse said blithely, as though comatose septuagenarians had leapt from their beds and bolted for the exit on most days of her working life. “He said he had things to do. But he left you a note. Over there. By the bed.”
I strode over to the wretched National Health Service cot in which the old bastard had been so long entombed and saw that the nurse was right. There was a message scrawled for me, written on a page ripped from a notepad.
Dear Henry,
Go home.
It was signed in his usual scrawl. Below that, a postscript.
I am serious. Go home.
Nothing else. Just that. And to think I was hoping for answers.
The nurse was speaking again. “You mustn’t worry about him. He’s with friends. I saw them from this window.”
“Friends? What friends?”
“Two men in fancy dress. “They were dressed as-”
I cut her short. “I know what they were dressed as.”
The woman laughed. There was an undercurrent of naughtiness to it, as though she’d just been unexpectedly tickled somewhere intimate. “You know what’s coming, don’t you?”
“What?”
Another discomfitingly sensual laugh. “The city is ripe and Leviathan is coming to take it as his own.”
“What did you say?”
The door was flung open and someone clattered in behind us. The nurse swiveled away and returned her attention to the gathering dark.
The new arrival shouted my name and I barely had time to hear the strutting clack of her heels and catch the familiar odor of her perfume before she was upon me and I was enfolded in her fleshy arms.
“Oh, Henry…”
“Hello, Mum,” I said.
She was covered in snow. A thick swathe of the stuff was clinging to her clothes, and although traces of it were still discernible on her hair and eyebrows, the rest must long ago have sunk into her skin.
“He’s a shit, Henry. I was the latest in a very long line. I was a notch on his bedpost.” She broke off, having finally realized what had happened. “Where is he? Where’s the old bastard?”
“He’s gone. It would seem he’s defied medical science and made a dash for it.”
Mom sounded dazed and bewildered. “That can’t be right, can it? That’s not possible.”
By the window, the nurse turned her head toward us, slowly, as though heavily drugged. “Leviathan is coming.” A look of zealotry burnished her face. “Such a glorious day.”
For an instant, Mum just stared at her, then she gasped as though she were short of breath, lumbered forward and crashed into a chair, sending it skidding across the floor.
“Mum? Are you OK?”
All at once, she seemed terrifyingly old. “I’m OK,” She murmured. “Don’t know what came over me. Just a little turn.”
“I think we should leave.”
“So many of them, Henry. All those women. And not just women, either. It’s the only thing he’d talk about. I couldn’t stand it. I-”
“Let’s go, Mum. I don’t think it’s safe here anymore.”
“Not safe?” My mother looked afraid. “Why ever isn’t it safe?? Is Gordy here? Is that it?”
“Come back to the flat. I don’t think you should be on your own.”
“Then, without warning, my mother was smiling again, a dopey, blissed-out kind of grin. “Have you seen the weather, Henry? Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”
I grunted in reply, took her by the arm and steered her firmly toward the door.
“Leviathan is coming,” Mum said. “Leviathan is coming to earth.”
“At the sound of these words I felt rancid and sick but I did my best not to show it. “Let’s get out of here,” I said briskly. “Let’s take you home.”
As we walked from the room, I heard the nurse begin to laugh. An instant later, the old man in the bed joined in. Mum and I left the Machen Ward backed by the stereo laughter of people whose sanity was steaming into the distance and wasn’t even bothering to look back.
We scurried through the hospital as fast as we could. The beds had emptied out and the patients — even the worst of them, even the most long-term and permanently horizontal — were on their feet, milling in flocks, trailing tubes and splints and bandages. I learnt later that a doctor had returned from a lengthy outdoor cigarette break to open every single window in every single ward, encouraging the black snow to enter in and billow hungrily over all those consigned to the care of St. Chad’s.
The staff were endeavoring to keep them in line, doing their best to put everything back in its proper place, but the ill, the old and the dying were having none of it and persisted in wriggling free. The scariest thing was that it was becoming hard to tell the professionals from their charges, the keepers from the beasts.
As we pushed our way past, it felt like I was one of the first to have any idea what was happening, the first to understand the gravity of the situation, like the man who runs to the top deck of the Titanic the moment the lower levels begin to flood only to find the band bickering amongst themselves about what to play next.
When we reached the exit, Mum didn’t want to come. She seemed to want to stay with the patients, and I had to use some considerable force to rip her out of the door, into the dark and the snow. Behind us, the situation grew worse. I didn’t turn back but I heard scuffling and brawling and wild laughter — the forest-fire spread of insanity.
The roads were packed, almost completely gridlocked as the population struggled to escape the city. There were horns, raised voices and shaken fists, quarrels and arguments lip-read from behind glass — anger feigned to hide the fizzing surge of panic. For a while, we walked, me half-dragging my mother, as she seemed to luxuriate in the snowfall and shuffled only very reluctantly onward until, miraculously, I saw a taxi drive by, its light still switched on. Warily, the driver stopped for us, but it was only when I brandished a wad of notes that he seemed to even entertain the idea of letting us inside. I gave him everything I had and told him to take us to the flat in Tooting Bec. Mum was still bleating and muttering darkly but I strapped her in and told her, politely and with a lot of love, to shut up and behave herself.
We had just escaped from Camberwell Green when my mobile phone shuddered in my pocket, as though in sympathy with the distress which surrounded us.
The line whirred and crackled, like the soundtrack to an old newsreel, and it took me a minute to recognize the voice.
“Henry? It’s me.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Jasper. Though I think you ought to know now. My name… my real name… It’s Richard Price.”
I thought for a moment. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“No. I just thought… I thought you ought to know my real name.”
“Thanks.” I really couldn’t think of what else to say. “How are you?”
“Fading fast.”
I asked him, not without a certain measure of impatience, what on earth he was talking about.
“I’m in a hotel room,” he said. “Somewhere expensive. Somewhere clean. So very important, I think, to die somewhere clean.”
“What are you doing there? Can’t you lot help? This stuff — this snow — it’s doing something to people.”
Jasper chuckled indulgently, like a mother to her little boy who won’t stop jabbering about his first day at school. “I’ve swallowed some pills, Henry. Swallowed a lot of pills.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because I touched her.”
“Touched who?”
“Only once. I want to make that absolutely clear. I only touched her once. But I had to. You understand? What man wouldn’t?”