When the wound was cleaned up, I could see a bruise forming around it. His nose and right cheek were puffy, too, though the skin was even paler than usual. The ice seemed to lessen the pain. After a few minutes, we walked down to the taxi-hire firm. I told him we’d have to go to the hospital. “Can’t I just go home?” he said.
“If you don’t get that cut stitched up, it won’t heal properly.” He nodded slowly. We waited in silence, Jason holding a ball of clotted tissues like a rose stiff with color. I bit my lip to stay awake. Eventually a taxi came.
The casualty department at the General Hospital was brightly lit and reassuringly blank. Several rows of plastic chairs marked out the waiting area. In front of Jason was a rather gaunt-looking man of thirty or so, who was explaining loudly to the nurse that he’d swallowed a penny and was now unable to shit. It had been three days, he said. “I don’t know why I swallowed it. It was just something I had to do.” The nurse, with well-concealed impatience, suggested he try a curry. “Nothing works,” he said. The look of hopelessness in his face betrayed him. I could pencil in his background easily enough: he lived alone, was unemployed, an incipient schizophrenic or perhaps an outpatient at Highcroft. But no amount of psychiatric help could change the fact that he had no friends and no way of gaining affection from another human being. When the nurse dismissed him, he took a seat behind us and waited to be seen again.
After Jason had talked to the nurse, we went and sat in another waiting area, with red upholstered seats and a number of silent people, all with minor injuries. I thought about the antipeople. They seemed to be everywhere in this hospital, waiting just out of sight. Perhaps they hung around the little curtained rooms where patients were left alone. One thought kept recurring to me, something Alan had said once. The opposite of love is indifference.
Eventually, Jason’s name was called and he followed a nurse out through the swing doors. I waited, still drunk but sober in whatever part of me reacted to what was happening. Half an hour later he came back, with fourteen stitches in his forehead. It was past four o’clock. Jason lived in Kidderminster with his parents; he’d had to move back there after losing his job. I took him back to my flat, where he slept like a child. In the morning, I woke up and lay there for a while, looking at him. If anything visited him in the night, I didn’t see. He woke up around midday and left soon afterward, thanking me repeatedly for my help. But somehow, I still felt responsible. Fourteen stitches are not enough.
WELSH PEPPER
by D. F. Lewis
I was on a solitary walking holiday, the way I always liked it, with my rucksack, large colored umbrella and personal headset.
For many years, I had been coming to this part of North Wales, enjoying the rugged scenery and challenging treks, far from most tourist enclaves. I slept rougher than many would countenance, my only shelter being the umbrella which I would stake to the ground with string guyed from every pinion to keep it steady in most winds thereabouts, but sadly not preventing the driving rain from slanting in upon my sleeping bag.
Good job I always slept “like a log,” as my mother used to say.
She never liked the idea of me coming away on these ventures, for fear of me catching the death of cold or falling down some (god)forsaken ravine.
As she had been dead now for a year or two, I no longer felt guilty at making her fret. One thing I do remember is her telling me never to beat about the bush, even when telling a story.
I was listening to my favorite Beatles album, as the path took me into an unfamiliar valley. I had decided earlier in the day, after a particularly dreadful night of really soaking rain, that I would turn almost full circle on myself and head toward a hostel that I had once before visited on a previous hike, where I would be able to dry out for a day or so. This inevitably meant putting up with the back-to-back discos and irritating bonhomie of the young set but, too bad, when the devil needs, the devil must. The girls there would make a nice change of view, in any case…
I admit that I am one of those men who believe any shortcomings are the fault of factors other than themselves. On coming across this valley, I automatically assumed that geography was to blame, rather than myself, for the valley should never have been there at all. I was quite familiar with the waterfalls a mile or so back which should have led to some nuclear silos in view of the hostel’s back bedroom windows. But the turnings instead had taken me to a deep cleft between mountainous slopes which, if I did not know better, were tantamount to twin Snowdons. A mighty frothing river surged between wooded slopes…
I had not heard the crash of the waters for my headset was an expensive one, more or less acoustically leak-proof and, in any event, it was a specially noisy bit at the opening of the Sergeant Pepper album.
Sitting down to remove a large stone from my boot, which I had been enduring for some while, I suddenly felt as if I were being watched.
A young girl, certainly not more than half my age, was crouched upon a nearby rock and, since she was wearing a gray dress, I was not surprised at missing her presence until now, merging with the rock as she did.
“Excuse me! What’s the name of this area?” I asked.
She opened her mouth to speak, but before I had the chance to remove my earphones, she had finished.
“Sorry,” I said, “that’s my fault. Can you please repeat what you said?”
“The name of this valley is forgotten.”
Her voice was silky, with a lilt peculiarly Welsh at the same time as being un-Welsh.
“Show me on the map, please.” My mother had always taught me to be polite. I picked up the boot and hopped over to her rock.
I cursed myself for being a prize chump, for I had lost the map earlier; I did not think it mattered since I was so familiar with this territory, or so I thought in my usual pig-headed fashion.
The girl, seen up close, was decidedly attractive. Her face was very young, but the curves of her body gave a clue to her real age.
She pointed to my personal stereo. “Can I try it on?”
I adjusted the telescopic arch of the headset and positioned it carefully over her cropped brown hair. I felt a warm tingle in my hands as I fitted the cans upon her small ears. Listening to the faint distant tinkle, I could still just about follow the familiar music myself. Her face had filled with delight at the first surge of stereophonic sound.
I smiled as I looked down the river. Uncanny, even without the headphones: I was still unable to hear it flowing, as if it were behind glass. Broken shards of the sun shone off its careering waters.
Turning back to the girl, I had a sudden impulse to place my arm around her shoulders. Much as a father might… but I was not her father nor was she my daughter.
She had in fact begun to lean upon me, nodding her head gently to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” and quietly singing along.
Her gray dress was partially buttoned down the front, exposing small swelling patches of flesh. Could she really be from the hostel, as I had automatically assumed?
I looked back at the rucksack where I had left it, beginning to steam in the growing heat of the morning sun. The umbrella, leaning against it, was opening gradually on its own accord, like a fast-motion flower. No, I looked again—it was my fancy playing tricks or the umbrella’s springloading was working loose, after being dropped.
She abruptly jumped down from the rock, pulling me with her by the hand.
“Follow me, I want to show this to my family,” she said, pointing to the throbbing cassette player which she held tightly against her breasts.