‘Look, that’s it,’ I said, petulantly. ‘I’m not going to say one more word to you until I’ve seen a doctor. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. I know as much about Woolf as I know about you, which is nothing, and I think there’s every chance that my neck is broken.’ No answer. ‘I demand to see a doctor,’ I repeated, trying to sound as much like a British tourist in a French customs shed as I could.
‘No, Tom. I don’t think we want to waste a doctor’s time.’ His voice was even, but I could tell that he was excited. The leather crunched, and the door opened. ‘Stay with him. Every minute. You have to use the bathroom, you call me.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘What do you mean waste time? I’m injured. I’m in pain, for Christ’s sake.’
The shoes turned towards me.
‘That may be, Tom. That may very well be. But who the hell washes up paper plates?’
There weren’t many good things to be said or felt about my situation. Not many at all. But the rule is that after any engagement, won or lost, you replay it in your mind to see how much you can learn. So that’s what I did, while Richie slumped against the wall by the door.
First, Groomed knew a lot and he’d known it quickly. So he had manpower, or good communications, or both. Second, he didn’t say ‘you call Igor or one of the other boys’. He said ‘you call me’. Which probably meant there was only Groomed and Richie in the space shuttle.
Third, and at that moment the most important, I was the only one who knew for certain that my neck wasn’t broken.
Eight
For a soldier I listed, to grow great in fame,
And be shot at for sixpence a day.
CHARLES DIBDIN
Some time passed. It might have been a lot of time, and probably was, but after the bike crash I’d started being a bit suspicious about time and how it behaved. Patted my pockets after every meeting, that kind of thing.
There was no way of measuring anything in this room. The light was artificial, on constantly. And the noise-level didn’t do anything at all. Hearing some milk-bottles rattling in a crate, or somebody yelling‘Evening Standard,five o’clockedition only just arrived’ would have helped a bit. But you can’t have everything.
The only chronometering device I had about my person was my bladder, which told me that roughly four hours had elapsed since the restaurant. Which didn’t tally with the aftershave reckoning from Groomed. But then again, these cheap modern bladders can be hellishly unreliable.
Richie had left the room only once, to fetch a chair. While he was gone I tried to break free, knot the sheet together, and abseil to the ground, but only made it as far as scratching my thigh before he came back. Once he’d got himself comfortable he didn’t make another sound, which made me think that he’d probably brought something to read as well. But there was no noise of any pages turning, so he was either a very slow reader or just happy to sit and stare at the wall. Or me.
‘I need to go to the lavatory,’ I croaked. No answer.
‘I said I need…’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
This was good. This made me feel much better about what I was going to have to do to Richie.
‘Look, you have to…’
‘You hear what I said? Shut the fuck up. You gotta piss, piss where you are.’
‘Richie…’
‘Who the fuck told you to call me Richie?’
‘What should I call you?’ I closed my eyes.
‘Don’t call me anything. Don’t call. Stay there and piss. Understand?’ _
‘I don’t want to piss.’
I could almost hear his brain grinding away. ‘What?’
‘I need to crap, Richie. Old British tradition. Now if you want to sit in the same room while I crap, that’s up to you. I just thought it would be fair to warn you.’
Richie thought about this for a while, and I was sure I could hear his nose wrinkling. The chair scraped, and the rubber shoes made their way towards me.
‘You don’t go to the toilet, and you don’t crap yourself.’ The face came into view, tight as ever. ‘Hear me? You stay where you are, you shut the fuck up…’
‘You haven’t got children, have you, Richie?’
He frowned, which looked like a gigantic effort on his face. Eyebrows, muscles, tendons, everything called into action for this single, faintly stupid, expression.
‘What?’
‘I don’t actually have any myself, to tell the truth, but I have god-children. And you can’t just tell them not to. It doesn’t work.’
The frown deepened.
‘The fuck are you talking about?’
‘I mean, I’ve tried it. You’ve got children in the car, and one of them wants to crap, and you tell them to hold on, put a cork in it, wait until we reach somewhere, but it doesn’t work. When the body has to crap, it has to crap.’
The frown eased slightly, which was nice, because I was starting to feel tired just looking at it. He bent down towards me, bringing his nose in line with mine.
‘Listen to me, you piece of shit…’
That was as far as he got, because on the word ‘shit’ I brought my right knee up as hard as I could and caught him on the cheek. He froze for a second, part surprise, part concussion, and I lifted my left leg and hooked it round the back of his neck. As I dragged him down on to the bed, he managed to get his left hand out in front of him to try and keep himself up. But he had no idea how strong legs are. Legs are very strong indeed.
Much stronger than throats.
He lasted pretty well, I have to admit. He tried the usual stuff, grabbing at my groin, thrashing his foot towards my face, but to do that kind of thing effectively you need air, and I just wasn’tinthe mood to let him have it in any useful quantities. His resistance curved upwards through angry, to wild, to terrified, peaked and then drifted all the way down to unconscious. I held him for a good five minutes after his last kick, because if I’d been him I would have tried playing dead as soon as I realised the game was up.
But Richie definitely wasn’t playing dead.
My hands had been tied with straps, which took a while. The only tools available weremyteeth, and by the time I’d finished I felt like I’d eaten a couple of Portakabins. I also got some solid confirmation of the injury to my chin, because the first time it brushed against a buckle, I thought I was going to go through the ceiling. Instead, I looked down and saw a mess of blood on the leather strap, some dark and old, some red and very new.
When it was over I fell back, panting with the effort, and tried rubbing some life back into my wrists. Then I sat up again and gently swung my feet over the edge of the bed and on to the floor.
It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement. I gripped the side of the bed and screwed my eyes shut until the roar had eased to a babble, then took another inventory. Whatever I’d hit first, I’d hit with my right side. The knee, thigh and hip were screaming at me, and their screams were all the keener for the recent contact with Richie’s head. My ribs felt as though they’d been taken out and put back in the wrong order, and my neck, though definitely not broken, was hardly movable. And then there were the testicles.