Ibrahim & Reenie (5 page)

‘By the time the old dear stopped screaming and the funny boy went back to sleep it must have been three o'clock, and then they wake you up at half six to take your blood pressure and stick all those instruments in your ear and what have you. Half six! And let me tell you, I'm not one of those people who can get back to sleep. Once I'm up, I'm up. So they wake you up at half six, and then they don't get round to serving tea and toast till nine. Well, by then I was
starving
. I
hate
hospitals. Can't
stand
them.'

He smiled and took a sip of his coffee. There had been times when he hated the hospital, days when he longed to see something from beyond its car park. Some of the upper wards had views over the city's suburbs, but they were so distant as to be rendered abstract, little more than rooftops and trees.

The hospital was vast, practically a town in its own right, or so he came to think of it. There was a concourse with shops – the usual selection of newsagents and florists – and a self-service café. There was a central quadrangle where patients and visitors could go to smoke, or just to get out of the sterile, bleached air of the wards.

Once he was more mobile, more confident using a wheelchair, Ibrahim spent hours touring the hospital, searching for undiscovered corridors, places he hadn't yet seen, and it was while wheeling himself around the corridors that he saw, on a television suspended in one corner of the day room, the image of a red London bus blasted in half, the street around it littered with debris. He entered the room and asked the only other person there – a burly rugby type with his leg in plaster – to turn up the volume.

‘…a scene of carnage at Tavistock Square, where it would appear there has been an explosion on board a bus. The top deck of the bus, as you can see, severely damaged…'

The rugby type looked at Ibrahim with a brief sideways glance – brief but held long enough for Ibrahim to notice – and that one look said enough.

This was your lot
.

And on TV there were people with faces covered in blood and there were bodies lying in gutters and people weeping and what Ibrahim saw wasn't a statement or a victory but chaos and blood and smoke and nothingness.

It meant nothing.

He hated the hospital most of all when things were demanded of him; when he was sent for x-rays or told to stay in his ward and wait for the latest in a string of junior doctors to come and assess him. These things were stark reminders that he was damaged. His body had been damaged. It no longer worked as it should. His legs were all but useless, his left arm still feeble. He found it difficult to eat anything with a consistency tougher than soup. His eyesight was still poor, making all the newspapers and magazines brought by visitors little more than colourful waste paper.

And to begin with, once he was well enough, there had been many visitors. His family came from London and Birmingham to see him, sometimes checking into hotels to stay the night and visit again the next day. His Cardiff friends, most of them students, travelled up en masse, and brought odd gifts picked up in second-hand shops and flea markets. Early on, they'd sit around the bed cracking jokes, sharing gossip.

It was during one such visit that he learned they were clearing out his room, in the house he had shared with four others. The academic year was nearing its end; the landlord had new tenants ready to move in over the summer. Ibrahim might have reacted to this angrily, were it not for the painkillers and sedatives that kept him placid most afternoons. Besides, as he had to remind himself, and keep reminding himself, he was lucky. The friends sitting around his bed, telling him these things, were talking to the only friend of theirs to survive the crash.

Eventually the gaps between visits from all but one person became longer. In justifying it, both to Ibrahim and themselves, his family reminded him of the distance and the cost. Neither petrol nor train fares were cheap, they said. You'll understand, won't you, if we don't make it up this weekend, they said. Maybe next weekend? Then the semester was over, and many of his friends went back to their hometowns, and their words came to him as text messages.

Soon enough he stopped hating the hospital in any real sense. He might tell others he hated being there, but all the raw anger had trickled out of him. He even came to find some comfort in the hospital's patterns and routines, in its inherent safety. Nothing terrible could happen to him there. He was surrounded, day and night, by staff whose job it was to keep him safe.

When, after six months of treatment, his doctor announced he was well enough to leave, Ibrahim felt a kind of panic, an anxiousness, a sensation only heightened by his leaving, and one that stayed with him, constantly ringing, like an emotional tinnitus.

The world outside the hospital was, he realised, dangerous; made up of random sequences of events that had no meaning. There was cause and effect, yes, but the spidergram was so vast, so intricate, it made him nauseous to consider it for any length of time. Meeting Reenie, for instance, and learning her father's name. Looking at her from across their small campsite, he wondered if she could be a product of his imagination, if he could be dreaming. But when he dreamt, invariably those dreams were filled with meaningless violence and an acute, unending sense of loss.

While passing through Newport, they had stopped at a supermarket to pick up supplies – bread and cheese, bottles of water, cartons of UHT milk; bananas, apples and clementines – and Reenie made them both a supper of sandwiches, which Ibrahim gobbled down in seconds, leaving a litter of breadcrumbs in his beard and a splatter of ketchup on his t-shirt.

What neither of them noticed, as they washed their plastic plates and cutlery in water, was the small black car orbiting the interchange; a car that had followed them, intermittently, since Newport, and now left the road and came to a halt a short distance from where they'd set up camp. A young woman got out of the car, gingerly crossing the four lanes of traffic and trudging her way across the island of grass beneath the motorway.

‘Who's this?' asked Reenie.

He squinted at the young woman and shrugged, and the young woman waved at them and smiled.

‘Hi,' she said, short of breath. ‘My name's Kirsty. I'm a researcher for the BBC. Do you have a moment?'

5

It was too early to go home. There was a point in the night when, once he was out through the door, Gary knew he wouldn't go back until breakfast.

He'd mastered the art of getting out of bed without waking Emma; learned to take his uniform to the bathroom and get changed there, never once letting a single noise or the slightest bit of light from the landing disturb her. He knew which floorboards creaked, and he avoided them. If, before leaving, he made coffee, he would close the kitchen door to stop the noise of the kettle from travelling up the stairs. He could open, close and lock their front door almost without making a sound.

It took months, maybe years, for him to get used to this – waking in the middle of the night after only a few hours' sleep. It no longer rattled him as it used to, when he began working nights. Back then the sudden noise of his pager caused his body to react as if in shock, as if all his senses were under attack. If the night was warm, he woke up feeling clammy. If it was cold, the room felt like a fridge. The darkness played tricks on him; the bedroom ceiling full of swirling colours and patterns until his eyes adjusted to the dark. The silence of the sleeping world left him feeling alone though Emma still slept beside him. All this happened at once, so that the experience of waking at two or three o'clock in the morning was a near-harrowing, disorientating one, but eventually this passed and now, when work called, he could be out of the room in a minute and out of the house in ten.

The summer months were quieter. People didn't use their boilers so often in summer. Showers, baths, washing the dishes, that was about it. The winter months were much busier. Then he could expect three or four call-outs a night. Maybe more. Another pensioner or young mum who could smell gas. Another family with no hot water or heating. Flats and houses like iceboxes. People in dressing gowns and nighties, arms folded, faces all wrinkled up and sleepy, waiting for him to ‘work his magic'.

The summer months weren't so bad, but the nights felt more broken up. A night with no sleep at all was somehow better, less disruptive, than a night chopped in half by a single call-out, and the later that call-out came the less likely he was to go home before breakfast. Emma was a light sleeper. He was amazed she could sleep through the sound of his pager, but she did. Perhaps she was used to it now and knew how to block out its noise, to
unhear
it. It was the irregular sounds that woke her – sirens and car alarms – and, after a certain time, once awake she could never get back to sleep.

At first she had tried sleeping tablets, but these left her sluggish and groggy in the mornings, so Gary decided that if he was ever called out after three he wouldn't go back until she was up and awake, and this often left him stranded in the night with nowhere to go. The call-out might take minutes; an imagined scent of gas, a dead thermocouple replaced before the dressing-gowned customer had a chance to offer him tea. He'd go back to his van, tiredness weighing down every limb, and stare anxiously at the clock, praying for another call before dawn.

That morning his pager had woken him a little before 4am. He reached the customer half an hour later, and was out of there again by five.

For a while he drove and listened to the radio. Gary preferred stations where they talked, having failed to find a music station that didn't, sooner or later, piss him off. One DJ played rock, the next played love ballads. Never any consistency. At least with the stations where people talked he might learn something, or they'd talk about something he found interesting. Sometimes he'd answer back, agreeing loudly with those he agreed with, swearing at those he didn't.

Right now there was only news. Bombs exploding and protestors getting shot somewhere foreign. The economy up the spout. Some politician talking bollocks, as usual. Outside it was getting light, but Gary imagined the presenters on the radio sitting in their dark, windowless studio, a room where it could have been any time of day or night, and he felt sorry for them. He actually felt sorry for them.

He drove back towards the city on near-deserted roads, and veering around the interchange at the Coldra saw a small orange tent pitched on the grass at its centre. He wondered, briefly, who would camp in a place like that, but those thoughts drifted effortlessly to a vision of bacon and fried eggs and beans and sausages and fried bread and
both
sauces.

In the city he went a café he knew would be open. On weekends the place was invariably full of nightclub bouncers and bleary-eyed kids at the tail-end of their nights on the town, but on a Wednesday morning it was mostly drivers – cab drivers, lorry drivers, maintenance men. A greasy spoon place with red plastic gingham on the tables and, for some reason, pictures of sports cars on its walls; the kitchen a racket of clanging pots and pans and the hiss of meat and eggs frying on the hotplate, a catering boiler firing hot jets of water into mugs and stainless steel teapots with a steamy whoosh.

After ordering his breakfast at the counter, Gary sat at a table near the window, where somebody had left behind their newspaper, and he read – or rather
scanned
– it while he waited.

Everyone he knew was asleep. Dreaming, not dreaming. Snoring, not snoring. With someone, alone. Sleeping. And nobody, not even Emma, knew where he was. Most of the people he and Emma knew had regular jobs, Monday to Friday, nine till five. They woke at respectable hours and enjoyed peaceful, unbroken nights of sleep. Their weekends were sacred, their time precious. Whenever there were parties, at Christmas or on birthdays, these friends made a point of sympathising with Gary. Always the first to leave, hardly ever drinking.

‘That must be
horrible
,' they'd say, as if they understood, but they didn't.

The achievements and successes of his friends and family were a sore point, but those were thoughts he kept to himself, knowing how bitter it would make him sound. When he congratulated his mates on their promotions, it had that veneer of sincerity, and sometimes it was genuine – he wasn't yet bitter enough to wish for their failure – but behind it lay a shadow of regret.

Gary ate his breakfast quickly, pausing just once to watch as an old man in a heavy, camel-coloured duffel coat shuffled along the street outside, bending down to pick half-smoked cigarette butts from the gutter.

Disgusting. What was the world coming to? He saw these things more often now, but were they always there, or had something changed? Driving around the city in the early mornings, everything looked shabbier, more worn. Paint peeling. Windows boarded up. Graffiti everywhere. Broken glass everywhere. Dog shit everywhere. Things were beginning to slide, as if no one cared about anything any more. He was the only person in the café to notice the old man picking soggy cigarette ends from the gutter. When did people stop seeing these things?

The city was waking up, the traffic getting heavier. Soon it would be time for him to go home, which was just as well, because he wanted nothing more than to leave this place and forget about the old man and his damp, second-hand cigarettes. And his timing was important. Emma hated being woken in the night, but more than that she hated waking in an empty house.