A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (55 page)

Her hair was silvery-grey. A nurse’s watch hung from her apron; she wore black tights and black sensible shoes, had skinny legs, and old hands, folded neatly in front of her.

 

When we didn’t answer, she repeated, “Well, come, come now, I haven’t got all day.”

 

“Swift,” I stuttered. “My name’s Swift.”

 

“Well, Mr Swift, can I help you?”

 

“I’m looking for the hospital.”

 

“As you can judge for yourself,” she said, voice not changing, expression not wavering, arms not moving, eyes looking down at me across the length of her nose even though she had to be half a foot shorter than I was, “this is a hospital.”

 

“Yes. Sorry, yes. I can see.”

 

“If you can see, why did you ask?”

 

“I… need help.”

 

“That is why most people come to a hospital. What exactly appears to be the problem?”

 

I rolled up a coat sleeve to reveal one of the blood-bandages. Her lips thinned. She made a little
ummm
noise, tutted, then barked, “Very well, come this way, chop chop.” Turning on one heel, she set off down the corridor. I struggled to keep up, striding as fast as I could without breaking into a run. “I suppose you have tried the regular services; there is a waiting list, yes?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“And? Please don’t waste my time with the usual inadequate excuses, Mr Swift. ‘I just happened to be playing with the bones of the dead’ or ‘It just so fell out that I accidentally summoned the spirit of a thousand shards of falling glass’ or other feeble tales. I really don’t care how the injury was inflicted, I simply need the full information to make a good diagnosis.”

 

She turned into a room as mouldy and dark as the others; but unlike them, it was possessed of a large wooden cupboard with another padlock across its doors, and a dentist’s chair set in the middle, with a bright lamp lit up above it. Although the lamp had no electrical lead, it grew brighter as the nurse approached it. She waved me to the chair, and as I sat down she added another “Well?! What happened?”

 

“Honestly – I was attacked by the living shadow of a sorcerer, a creature of darkness and hunger that longs to drink my blood and which I managed to defeat by the use of a wish-spell and a lot of burning light. It dug its nails into my arms; and now they won’t stop bleeding.”

 

“Interesting,” she said in a voice of a woman who couldn’t care less. She reached into her apron and pulled out a pair of glasses that she rested at the end of her nose, and a pair of very sharp-looking scissors. “But nothing special. I don’t suppose you killed this living essence of darkness?”

 

“I doubt it.”

 

“Wouldn’t that have been the most sensible reaction?” she said, peering at me over the tops of her glasses straight down the sharp tip of her nose as I lay on the chair.

 

“It’s a shadow,” I replied. “It dies when the man that casts it dies.”

 

“How terribly tedious,” she intoned. “You know, sometimes, I don’t know why I bother – they all come back here eventually.”

 

She started snipping neatly at the bandages around my arms, and when they came away, tutted at the bloody half-moon indents in my skin. “Yes, well…”

 

“I… do not know what it is I should offer you for your help,” I said as we turned our head away and half-closed our eyes against the sight of our own blood.

 

“Offer me?” A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. “Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports.”

 

“How does that make Britain great?”

 

“Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!”

 

I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my own blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing.

 

“The second,” she went on, “is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptations, the
Today
programme and
Doctor Who
, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!”

 

“Oh,” I said, feeling that something was expected. “Oh” was enough.

 

“And lastly, we have the NHS!”

 

“This is an NHS service?” I asked incredulously.

 

“I didn’t say that; I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still.” I lay still and tried not to flinch as her fingers probed the tender flesh on both my arms. She tutted again.

 

On a whim I asked, “What about the Beatles?”

 

“What about them?”

 

“Do they make Britain great?”

 

“Don’t play silly buggers in my hospital, thank you.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

After a while she said, “Did you collect some buddleia?”

 

“Yes. Was that OK?”

 

“There’s plenty around, why should I care?”

 

“But… you asked.”

 

“A nurse is supposed to put the patient at ease during unpleasant procedures, in order to facilitate a calm and quick medical process.”

 

“You haven’t done anything too unpleasant…” I began, then hesitated.

 

“The word you caught your tongue up on was ‘yet’,” she said with a small-toothed grin. “I’m glad you thought it through before making a rash utterance.”

 

“This is a reassuring medical procedure?”

 

“You survived – badly – being attacked by a living shadow, essence of darkness,” she said. “A little honesty isn’t going to hurt. Not as much as the medicine.”

 

“Do you enjoy what you do?”

 

“It’s a living.”

 

“How?”

 

She pulled a key out of her pocket and undid the heavy padlock on the cupboard. Inside, the shelves were in shadow. “You’re scared of doctors,” she said briskly to the clinking of jars. “You’re frightened by medicine. It’s fine. You’ve also had a couple of splintered ribs, a twisted ankle, a lot of bruising and been clinically dead sometime in the last two years. So I can understand your point of view.”

 

“How do you know all that?”

 

“I read your palm, do you really want to know?” she retorted in an uninterested voice. Turning, she revealed a large glass kitchen jar containing some sort of dark, sludgy goo. “Crushed rat’s skull, desalinated Thames water, ground dried moss scraped from the base of a leaking pipe in Kings Cross station, a pinch of mortar dust and a vestige of unleaded petrol drawn from the top of a puddle of torrential August rain; ground together, microwaved for ten minutes and filtered with the light from a photographer’s lamp for three days and three nights – sound all right to you?”

 

“For what?”

 

She tutted again at my impertinence. “Mr – Swift, wasn’t it? Mr Swift, did you bother to consider some of the medical implications of being injured by a creature of pure darkness
before
you rashly engaged it in mortal combat? I doubt it. Young people never do. You all think you’re immortal. Lie still.” She popped the top off with the hiss-snap of escaping pressure, and from one of her pockets, which I was beginning to suspect were not nearly big enough for all the things that she seemed to fit in them with perfect ease, pulled out a small wooden spatula. She scooped a large dollop of the slippery, shining dark gunk from the jar, took a grip of my right wrist, pulling my arm straight with a hand like an iron clamp, and started smearing the stuff across my wounds with the casual air of a grandmother icing a birthday cake.

 

The effect was like eating hot Vietnamese curry: for the first few strokes of the spatula, there was no sensation beyond that of thick soap bubbles moving on the skin, or of sticky flour being washed off the fingertips. Only when the mind had been fooled into thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad did the burning hit. It started as a dull itch, quickly rising to an intense, fiery pulse that went right down to the bone and shot up past the elbow joint and into the shoulder blade; my fingers burnt and my neck cramped. We jerked at the shock of it, but her grip was unrelenting, and her face showed no sign of humour as she muttered, “Don’t be a baby.”

 

“It hurts!” we whimpered, mostly for the relief of having breath in our mouth and sound in our ears; any sort of sense to distract us.

 

“And it’ll be over soon,” she said. “If it was really that bad I’d have thought about giving you an anaesthetic; but you know how it is with budget cutbacks these days.” On our skin the dark substance started to mix with our blood, in brownish-black whorls the colour of treacle. “You’ll get a little dizziness,” she added, “but please try and control any latent sorcerous urges you might have to incinerate my hospital. Despite its infinite patience, the NHS isn’t that understanding, and we have to serve everyone equally.”

 

We squeezed our eyes shut and bit our lip until we could taste blood. It wasn’t dizziness; not quite. It was… more of a loosening of thoughts, a disintegration of the straight, neat lines of thoughts-with words, of structured reasonings and human sounds, splitting down, as our mind inflated like a hot-air balloon, into its component parts, like the dream-state just before sleeping or wakening when it seems perfectly logical for the goldfish not to like to peel its own potatoes on the bus. I thought of my thoughts, those conscious processes and pains, as thoughts-with-words, as understandings and rationales within the constraints of language; but in that state, our thoughts were nothing of the sort, they were…

 

hello hello? yeah hi i’m looking for jeff yeah jeff the guy with the no I can’t hang up will you just listen he’s

 

mum died on thursday. yeah next week its

 

three poppadoms no three. three. well if they said that

 

look move the thing to tuesday, i’ve gotta go and

 

help me! he’s in the house and he’s coming for me and oh god oh god if you

 

yeah miss you too

 

hello?

 

        
hello?

 

                
HELLO?

 

We opened our eyes. We grabbed the nurse’s arm as she reached across with another dollop of gunge, and hissed, “When did you last make a phone call?”

 

“Mr Swift, is this entirely…”

 

“Your name was Jean but then your father died. He was a doctor. You cried down the phone and said help me, help me, please, but she was in Paris, she couldn’t come in time, there weren’t any tickets, it was Christmas she said baby, it’ll be OK, it’ll be OK, and you found the costume and you knew about magic you knew what made it tick, you told your friend on the phone that you were going to make it work and he said, what are you doing, what do you think you’re talking about and you said goodbye. Sorry I have to leave you goodbye. I’ll always think of you and then you hung up. You haven’t picked up a phone since. You fell silent, you don’t want to know, nothing that isn’t in front of you, no one that isn’t there, no voices, no distance, no responsibilities, just this, just goodbye Alex, I’ll sometimes think of you, but don’t think of me, goodbye.”

 

Jean pulled her wrist carefully free of our fingers and met our eyes without flinching. “Fascinating,” she murmured at last. “You know, you really should have informed me that you were sharing your consciousness with the stranded memory of the telephone wires, it qualifies as relevant medical history.” Her voice was level, her hand was shaking.

 

“We know you,” we whispered.

 

“Do you?”

 

“We know what you said.”

 

“How?”

 

“It’s…”

 

somewhere in flying thoughts

 

                               
blue memories of what we are of

 

hello!

 

              
you there?

 

                              
anyone there?

 

hello?

 

              
gotta go, darling, gotta go now

 

                             
don’t hang up

 

              
bye

 

good night, sweet dreams!

 

              
hello? i’m looking for this number it’s for this guy

 

                                
hello?

 

“We are the thoughts you left behind,” we murmured. “We-are… the feelings in your voice, even if he didn’t hear. We are…”

 

“Responding interestingly to what should really just be dizziness,” she said briskly. “Does your blood usually turn blue and wriggle like maggots in the presence of oxygen?”

 

We glanced at the trickling blue sparks crawling across our skin where the medicine had met our blood, and I felt suddenly sick, the world a spinning vague thing seen through a heat haze, tinnitus in my ears and my head aching, no longer a hot-air balloon but stuffed with lead, dragging me down with the sound of

 

         
hello!

 

                  
anyone there?

 

                           
never had a chance to say…

 

                                    
look i know this shouldn’t be done by phone but i want

 

you to know that

 

         
looking for someone is there operator?

 

                  
hello? Hello? HELLO?

 

“Help me!” I blurted through gritted teeth. “Please, help me!”

 

“Well now, that all depends on the problem,” said the nurse in a voice of infinite patience.

 

“I can’t remember! I can’t remember what… what I was before! I can’t remember being me!”

 

“You’d be wanting a shrink more than a nurse,” she explained, and she had got her composure back, in an instant switched back into professional, businesslike mode. “I can give you a referral.” Then, quieter, sharp little words to be spoken and forgotten again, “You still want the bleeding to stop?”

 

“Don’t know, don’t know…”