Mr Toppit (6 page)

“You know, I’m really worried about this, Alma.”

“Walter Reinheimer is bringing them himself. You remember him?”

Laurie closed her eyes. Alma barked, “What did you say? I can’t hear you. It sounded like you said, ‘Zingzingzing.’ ”

“Alma, it’s as far away as the moon here. It’s a bad line.” Laurie was gazing out of the window. She felt as if she
was
on the moon. “You mustn’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Go on with this story.”

“Laurie—he assaulted me!”

“I think technically it’s not an assault. He didn’t touch you.”

“Physical isn’t the only kind of assault.”

“Tell them you’re not sure, tell them maybe you’re mistaken.”

“I’ve already told them what happened.”

“They’ll understand, Alma. Everyone at Spring Crest has Alzheimer’s. They won’t know the difference.”

“He was Mexican. I can tell you that for nothing. No question.”

“Well, there’s a surprise.”

“He got his diddly out—he got his
thing
out. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I hear what you’re saying, Alma.”

“Well, I never know with you, Miss Laurie Clow.”

Sometimes Laurie thought Alma had been better when she was drinking. At least then the days and nights had had a more predictable arc to them. Now she was sober you just never knew. The first two attempts to dry her out had been a disaster—Laurie didn’t even want to think about what had gone down at the second place, the one outside Tularosa—but on the third go, at the clinic Marge had found near Tucson, mysteriously it had worked. Laurie had driven down to pick Alma up and on the journey back Alma had never referred to the place or what had happened to her there, but she had not had a drink since. Now she was no easier to handle; she was simply difficult in a different way. Maybe twelve steps just weren’t enough for her.

“Your friend Marge came to see me yesterday, asked where you were. She’s packing a lot of weight.”

“What did she say?”

“Told her you were in England, told her you’d gone to the wedding. To be a bridesmaid to that Princess Lady Di.” Alma hooted with laughter.

Laurie didn’t want to talk about Marge. “You’ll get into a lot of trouble, Alma, if you go on with this assault story. Especially if Officer Reinheimer’s coming over.”

“Not as much trouble as that wetback’s going to be in when they get him.”

Laurie felt her face redden with anger. She banged her fist on the wall and screamed,
“Alma! This is insane! Don’t go on with it!
Walter Reinheimer knows you. He was one of the officers who came over that night you dialed 9-1-1 and told the police I was trying to poison you. Remember? You remember that?”

There was a pause. When Alma spoke, she seemed to have dredged up some long-forgotten dignity and was quite calm. “As you know, Laurie, I was a drinker then. Now I’m a recovering alcoholic.” She pronounced it like two words—“alco holic.” “My guess is he’ll respect that.”

“Alma …” But the line had gone dead. Alma had hung up on her. Laurie ran to the bathroom, got down on her hands and knees and threw up a torrent of molten brown chocolate into the stained lavatory bowl.

Late the next morning, Laurie was still lying in bed. She felt as if she was on a boat that had no sail, drifting in the breeze. She thought of trying to change her flight and going straight home. If she sat around in her hotel room, she might just as well sit
around back there, but the thought of a few more days on a different continent from Alma and Mrs. Detweiler and Officer Reinheimer decided her.

She got out of bed. She had been there such a long time that her legs felt shaky and she had to hold on to the bedside table. Finally she began to get dressed. The one bit of planning she had done was to buy a whole lot of new clothes to cope with the cold English weather. Now, with the sun blazing in from outside, the best she could do was a pair of black sweatpants and the loose black shift that Marge called her wigwam dress. Round her middle she had a belt with a pouch for her money, passport, and credit cards. She picked up her KCIF bag and had one last glance in the mirror. She looked like a black blimp.

Outside her room in the dark corridor, the man who had given her the room key when she had arrived the day before was on his hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and a bucket, trying to get a large brown stain off the threadbare carpet. She smiled at him as she passed, and then, just before she reached the stairs, she turned back to him. “Can you help me?” she said. She was still thinking about the wallpaper. She put her palm against the corridor wall and ran it up and down. “I know this is a weird thing to ask,” she said, “but does it have a special name, this stuff you have on the walls? You know, the lumpy paper?” The nail she had torn on it last night was still throbbing.

He didn’t seem to think this was an odd question. “It’s Greek,” he said, in a pleasant voice. “Is Greek word.” He was foreign. Maybe
he
was Greek. Then he said a word that had a beautiful sound to it, unlike any other word she had ever heard, but he said it quickly, so quickly, in fact, that by the time Laurie said, “Thank you, thank you so much,” it had gone
out of her head. She thought it was Anag-something but she was too embarrassed to ask him to repeat it, and as she walked down the stairs it receded further and further away. She tried to get it back by holding on to other words it had sounded like—anabolic, anaphylactic, analytical—before letting them drift away, like helium balloons, when she got outside into the bright sunlight.

On the street in front of the hotel, an ice cream van was surrounded by a crowd of kids. There was an overflowing litter bin next to it and a nasty, rotting smell lingered in the heat around it. Laurie was about to buy an ice cream when two of the boys looked at her and nudged each other. They blew out their cheeks to make their faces fat before erupting into giggles. Laurie felt herself flush. She turned away from the van and walked down the street as purposefully as she could. She decided to head for Hyde Park, which even she had heard of. It seemed like the kind of thing a proper traveler might do in London. “Heard so much about Hyde Park, first place I went soon as I got there,” she could imagine herself saying to someone. She would ignore the fact that she had already been in London for thirty hours, twenty-nine of which she had spent in bed.

Laurie walked around the park for some time until she found herself by the side of a big highway coming up to a roundabout, which had a huge arch-like monument in the middle with a statue of galloping horses and a woman on the top. As she squinted up at it the traffic roared past her. She felt she had come to the edge of the ocean. People were going down a flight of concrete stairs and she followed behind them. It was like entering a labyrinth. Under an eerie white light, tunnels spun off in all directions from a central well and people, their faces
unnaturally pale, crisscrossed in front of her with a blank air of purpose.

Once out of the tunnel she walked along a wide street past grand old buildings and expensive shops. The sun shone hot on her face, and gradually she found she was enjoying herself. Recognizing some of the things she passed, like Piccadilly Circus, she felt herself becoming a traveler of some experience, not just a large, middle-aged stranger, wearing the wrong clothes for the time of year, wandering aimlessly through a foreign city.

She turned into a narrower street filled with cars. The traffic had stopped and must have been there for some time because people were honking their horns and a few had got out of their cars and were trying to see what the holdup was. About twenty yards ahead, on the other side of a crossroads, a big truck with a concrete mixer on the back had stopped in the middle of the street. Silhouetted against the sun, two men were getting out of its cab. The three other narrow streets that met at the crossroads were blocked with cars. There was something curious about the way everyone was standing so still. She could hear people talking, but the words were indistinct and echoey. They all looked like aliens, as if maybe they were the same pale people she had seen in the underground tunnel, meeting here to wait for their spaceship to land. Then she saw something odd: by one of the corners of the crossroads a bundle was lying on the ground a little way off the sidewalk. Laurie moved through the line of people standing in front of the cars and saw that the bundle was not a bundle at all, but a man.

She began to run, but someone grabbed her and tried to pull her back, squeezing her arm so tightly that she let out a gasp of pain. She turned and pushed the person so hard that they
stumbled backwards, and then she was free. She ran across the road to where the man lay. The sun was glaring into her eyes now, and when she squatted, lowering her head, she felt as if she had gone blind. The top half of the man’s body was on its side and his cheek was pressed onto the road. The lower half was at a curious angle, as if it was part of a different body carelessly attached to his by someone who had lost the instructions. His trousers were gray flannel, but they were stained black and shiny with oil. His breathing was shallow and his eyes were open. She moved closer to him, sat on the edge of the pavement and touched him. The tip of her finger grazed his skin and she found herself tracing the bones of his hand. His eyes flickered, but his field of vision was limited by the position of his head on the road. She moved so he could see her face.

“Are you okay?” she asked shakily.

He moved his mouth, then stopped. After a moment he tried again, and said, in a surprisingly clear voice, “I’m so uncomfortable. Will they let me get up?”

She wondered who he meant by “they.” Then she saw that the people standing in front of the cars were advancing towards her. She thought that maybe the man was frightened of them. She put up the hand that wasn’t touching his to stop them. “I work in a hospital,” she shouted. They were staring at her blankly. “I’m a nurse!” It sounded better than saying she was a hospital disc jockey. She looked back at the man and folded his hand into hers.

“Oh, I wouldn’t move. I think you’ve broken your leg,” but as she was saying it, she knew he had done much more than that. She knew that his trousers were stained not with oil but with blood, so thick and dark and shiny that she could see the reflection of the sun and smell the sickly sweetness it gave off.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“I’m Laurie,” and then she repeated it, “Laurie.”

Behind the man, someone broke through the line of people. He was young, no more than twenty and he was stumbling as if he had been injured, too. He stopped just in front of Laurie. He was gasping for breath and let out a great sob. “I didn’t see him! He just walked out in front of me!” He bent down to the man lying in the road.

Laurie’s free hand clenched itself into a fist and she was halfway off the ground.
“Don’t touch him! Don’t you come near him!”
she screamed. Another man came running forward and put his arm round the boy, who put his head against the man’s shoulder. Laurie was on her feet now. She shouted at the two men, “Have you called 9-1-1?
Have you?”
There was incomprehension on their faces.

Behind her, she heard a little cough and a small voice said, “You mean 9-9-9?” Laurie wheeled round and saw a short woman with gray hair. The expression on Laurie’s face was clearly terrifying, because the woman stuttered, “I think—I think someone called. There’s an ambulance coming.”

“When?
When?”
Laurie yelled, right in her face.

The woman flinched and whispered, “A few minutes ago. They called a few minutes ago.”

Laurie wanted to hit her. “
No!
When is the ambulance coming?” Then, in the distance, she heard sirens and the screeching of brakes, and everyone turned round. Down the street, about a hundred yards away, she could see the flashing blue light of a police car.

She turned back to the man on the road. He hadn’t moved, but he was looking at her. “Keep back,” she shouted at the woman, who had given no indication that she had any desire to
move forward. Then she shouted it again, at everyone who was staring at her as if she was a mad person. She went back, sat on the pavement and hunched over the man. She wished she could erect a tent round them so that nobody could see them. She held his hand again, and with the other she absently brushed some grime from his thick white hair.

“Are you hurting?” she asked him.

“It’s a bad break,” he said.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” she said, then realized what he meant. “Oh, your leg, oh, no, no, it isn’t. They’ll be able to fix you up just fine, don’t you worry.”

She moved her hand from his hair to his forehead. It was cold and damp with sweat. “You’re going to be fine,” she said, then covered his cheek with her hand. What she wanted to do was move closer to him and put his head on her lap, but she knew not to move him.

“My name is Arthur Hayman,” he said.

She could feel him trembling. “Are you cold?” she asked.

“I’m … I don’t know,” he said, and then he continued to talk, but his voice became so quiet she could hardly hear him and she wasn’t able anymore to exclude the noise that was increasing around her, the sirens, the banging car doors, the horns honking, the footsteps running, the people talking. She looked up in frustration, wanting everything to go quiet like it had been a minute ago.

Two men broke through the line of people, police or ambulance men, she wasn’t sure which, and then there was pandemonium as more men came through, forcing the people watching to move aside. Someone was shouting into a walkie-talkie and she heard a squawking response to whatever was being said, and then she was pushed aside as two men got down on either side of
Arthur. One took his wrist and felt his pulse. The other put an oxygen mask over his face. “Don’t hurt him,” Laurie said. “Please.”

Another man squatted in front of her and tried gently to move her further away from Arthur. She tried to stay where she was but he moved her more forcefully and she toppled sideways, almost into his lap, and her hand was detached from Arthur’s cheek. Her throat let out a little guttural cry, and she could see Arthur gazing at her with a quizzical expression in his eyes, his face almost hidden by the oxygen mask. They were now surrounded by people, some squatting and some standing. From nowhere, it seemed, something like a coat stand had appeared with an upturned bottle, clear liquid inside, attached to it. A man with white overalls was bending down, trying to attach a tube to Arthur’s neck and there was blood all over him. Behind her she heard a voice say, “Femoral artery severed,” followed by something about trauma.