The Dead Hour (27 page)

“Katie, you’re going to die if you keep taking that stuff.”

He was right and she knew it. She had felt her heart weaken up at the cottage, the rhythm of it change at times, straining like the Mini’s engine to keep going.

“Bernie, I’m not an idiot. I’m going to get help, but this isn’t the time.”

Bernie rubbed his face roughly with a hand. “Katie? Look at me.” But she couldn’t so he raised his voice. “Look at me, Katie. Fucking look at me. You won’t live to get help. They’ll kill you for taking that bag of coke.”

Kate could hear singing in her left ear. It was the low murmur of the dead man. He was faint, barely perceptible, singing a hymn, she thought, some old Protestant dirge about sins and sinners.

“Katie. Can you hear me?”

She didn’t know if Bernie was talking to her or the dead man, so she waited.

“Katie?” Bernie, it was definitely Bernie, his mouth was moving. “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you, darling.”

“They’ll kill you like they killed Vhari.”

“No they won’t. I’ve got a plan.” She was beginning to shiver.

Bernie leaned forward and cupped her chin roughly. “Listen to me.” He held her face and made her look at him. His eyes were wild with fright. “Listen.” Kate lifted her chin to get away but he held on, digging his fingers in. “Listen.” Seeing it was hopeless she sat still and looked at him. “Katie, you’re a feckless tit. Your plans are stupid. You couldn’t think your way out of a newsagents’. You’ve got to go to the police.”

She laughed in his face, a genuine, sensible, spontaneous laugh and Bernie loosened his grip and smiled back. She was like herself again and Bernie felt a wash of relief, as if he was meeting an old friend in a hostile crowd.

“But I am planning to go to the police,” she said.

Bernie watched her, reading her face, and he believed her. “God, Kate, fucking hell, I’m so glad. If you lay low and go to the police and just don’t mention the coke, everything’ll be fine. Tell them you went missing and about Vhari and even if they press you, don’t mention drugs of any kind. Promise?”

She pouted, and looked up at him. “Bernie, dearie, I need my pillow to lay low.”

Bernie frowned, annoyed again that she had brought it up. “You’ve no idea how serious this is. Mark Thillingly killed himself the other night because of this.”

“Fat Mark?”

“He’s not fat, Kate. He’s dead.”

“For God’s sake, I’m not responsible for every death in Scotland.” She wanted the pillow. She needed the pillow. The thought of living through the next ten minutes without knowing whether she could get it back scratched at her brain. “Can I have it back?”

Bernie looked at her sadly, noting that she hadn’t asked about Mark or even why he killed himself. “Katie.”

“Give it to me right now or I’ll cut myself.”

“Tell me your plan.”

The dead man giggled in her ear and she hesitated. “Knox. Knox.” She stared into the distance as she repeated the name like a prayer keeping her safe. “Knox’s the out. Paul would do anything to protect him. If I get Knox to talk to him he’ll definitely leave me alone.”

Bernie leaned in and prompted her softly. “But who is Knox?”

“Give me my pillow and I’ll tell you.” She smiled coquettishly, as she used to, but her flattened nose made the look grotesque.

“You’re a fucking nutjob. And you look like a tramp.”

“Piss off.”

He stood up and began to tidy, picking up the biscuits plate, sweeping crumbs from the table onto it. Kate loathed him suddenly. She knew then that she would do anything, literally, the worst she could think of to hurt him and make him give it back. “I’ll phone my parents.”

He looked down at her, the color bleeding from his cheeks until his face was gray.

“I’ll phone them and tell them your home address and where you work. They’ll come and see you.”

The muscles on his face tightened. He looked a little sick, like he had when he was a boy and felt trapped, which was most of the time when he was at home. He looked at his watch. “Phone your parents if you like. I haven’t got a telephone and I’ll be out when you get back. If they see the mess you’ve made of yourself you’ll be in a sanatorium by teatime.”

“I could call them tomorrow,” she said, twisting the knife. “They will come, you know.”

Bernie let the crumbs slide off the plate into the carpet and dropped his hand to his side. “I don’t fucking care, Katie.” But he did care if they came. She could see he was trembling.

“All you have to do is give me the pillow.”

“I’ve thrown it away.”

“You weaselly little prick.” She stood up and slapped him hard across the face, making him drop the plate. He slapped her back, and felt her flaccid nose brush his palm. She toppled over, landing on the settee, holding her nose. He had made her bleed.

Kate sat up, holding her face, streams of scarlet bubbling through her fingers. She looked at him and carefully tipped to the side, letting her nose bleed itself out all over his settee. She took her hand away and smiled at her bloody palm. “If Paul finds me without the pillow he’ll kill me. My blood’s all over your sofa: the police’ll come here and find it and think you killed me. So now you’ve got to give it to me.”

He hesitated; she could see it.

“Bernie.” She sat up, holding a hand under her nose. “Bernie, I want my pillow so I can get it together and sort this out. Please? I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. If I don’t sort out my own mess we’ll both end up dead. You know that, don’t you?”

Bernie looked at her on the sofa. “You’re going to take it all and kill yourself.”

“Look at me, Bernie. I’ve got a plan. I’m as tough as nuts. If the world ended tomorrow I’d be the sole survivor. I’d be looting for handbags and jewelry. Tough as nuts.” She laughed at her own turn of phrase, holding a hand over her nose to catch the last dribble of blood.

Bernie watched her, smiling sadly, loving her and wishing everything was different, that they had stayed friends and looked after each other instead of bolting from home in opposite directions as soon as they could.

As Kate laughed up at him she heard a breathy huff in her ear: the dead man was laughing as well, deep inside her inner ear.

Paddy was terrified to be back in the courtyard of the Royal Hospital. The car park was crammed with cars and a couple of vans; every space was taken apart from the space where Billy had been parked the night before. It was left empty, a black scorch left from the fire. She tried not to look at it but saw it in the corner of her eye, the soot on the buildings nearby. The car had been taken away but had left its mark on the bubbled tarmac and the great wetness on the building and ground where it had been drenched by the fire brigade.

Paddy shuddered. She had a creepy sense that most of the soot on the building must have come from Billy’s body, from his skin as it burned. A throb started in her throat. She wanted to sit down on the step of the hospital and cover her face and cry. All she could see were his feet, twitching, his heels banging off the car park floor and the white coats gathered around him.

She looked up at the building. A hundred heart-wrenching tragedies must happen in here every day of the week, twice at weekends, and the thought brought her comfort somehow, that she was just a part of a great wave of fright and sadness. Everyone else was being brave about it. She’d be letting the side down if she wasn’t too.

The doorway was busy with staff and visitors coming in and out of the building. Deliveries were being brought in for the dispensing machines in the lobby, cans of juice and boxes of crisps. Paddy stopped in the busy crowd and looked up to the signs on the wall to find the right department. It was isolated at the very far corner of the immense building.

As she walked along the corridors, following the signs, she passed the oncology ward and remembered when her friend Dr. Pete had been in here, when he looked at her with a steady fearless eye and told her he was dying. She missed him. She missed Terry Patterson. When she thought about it, she missed every fucking person she’d ever known and wished it was some time other than now. She wished she was on day shift. She wished her father had a job and her mother was over the menopause and last night hadn’t happened and she hadn’t shagged George fucking Burns. She wished Mary Ann wasn’t a religious maniac and Sean was still her boyfriend. She wished she was thin.

She tripped along the corridor, head down, so distracted that she almost walked straight past the entrance to 7H. It was easy to miss. Only a small sign sticking out of the wall highlighted the fact that the door was there. She turned, caught her breath, knowing Billy would be a harrowing sight, and opened the door.

She found herself in a short lobby, painted a calming pale lilac that made her feel faintly panicky. A kind, matronly woman smiled up at her from behind a desk, asking if she could help. Paddy gave Billy’s name and watched the nurse’s face for a reaction, revulsion or something, she didn’t quite know. The woman smiled and looked at a chart on her table,

“Are you family, pet?”

“No, I’m … I was with him.” Paddy thumbed out to where she imagined the car park was.

The nurse looked at her, reading her face. “What we don’t want is visitors who are going to get very upset,” she said in a careful voice. “I don’t want anyone to upset the patients. Do you feel able to do that? To stay calm?”

Paddy nodded, though she wasn’t sure it was true. “Are his family with him?”

The nurse nodded. “I’m sure they’ll be glad you came.” She stood up and opened the door for Paddy, pointing her down a shabbily constructed corridor of white emulsioned cubicle walls. Paddy had been in other wards in the hospital, she knew that only the burns ward had these walls and doors. Presumably they needed them to keep visitors from staring at the boiled and blistered men in the beds.

She crept along to the door the nurse had indicated, hearing the beep of the machines and the rustle of crisp sheets against moist skin. A strong medicinal stench came from the walls, mint over disinfectant.

She knocked gently on the door, half-hoping no one would answer. A smoker’s voice called to come in. Paddy turned the handle and pushed the door open.

A high, metal-framed single bed sat in the middle of a room. A tiny sink was against the back wall alongside a locker with a plastic jug of orange squash and a glass.

Billy was sitting bolt upright in the bed, flanked on one side by a standing woman and on the other by a young man in a plastic chair reading a tabloid newspaper. Billy looked astonished and mortified at the same time: his eyelashes and eyebrows had been seared off and his skin scorched into a permanent flustered blush. He was dressed in a blue paper nightie, his hands wrapped up into massive white bandage mittens like oversized Q-tips. He seemed small and then she realized: his hair was gone.

In all the time she knew him, Billy had sported the same shoulder-length wavy perm. She knew it was a perm because she watched it carefully from the backseat, night after night, the small hint of a straight root here or there and then the sudden two-week flush of distinct flatness just before he went to the hairdressers’ and had it redone. The hairdo was five years out of date when she first saw it four years ago, but she had developed a grudging respect for Billy’s persistence. It was a brave man who’d risk baldness out of loyalty to the age of disco. Sean and her brothers were terrified of losing their hair.

But Billy was going to have to find a new look: the perm had melted. Over his left ear—away, she imagined, from the source of the fire—a bush of hair remained as it was before, but the rest of his head was bald, furnished in small tufts or pink fleshy patches.

Relieved and surprised, Paddy barked an unkind, shrill laugh and pointed at him. The wife and son stared at her blankly.

“Bloody hell, Billy.” She sidled into the room. “I thought you were really hurt.”

Half-amused, Billy held his giant bandaged hands up to her. “This is pretty bad.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I thought it would be much worse.”

The wife was staring at her aggressively. She was stout, tanklike, her hands clasped together over an onerous chest and belly. The son was built like his mother, although young and footballer-fit; he looked as if he’d run to fat given a chance. He glanced at his mother, taking her cue about the stranger giggling at his burned father.

“I might never have the use of my hands again,” said Billy. “I might never be able to drive again. And it’s bloody sore.”

It was wrong of her but she was so relieved to see him looking like himself that she laughed again.

The wife widened her eyes, retracted her lips, and stepped up to meet her. “Who in the eff are you—” Her voice was the gravel growl of a heavy smoker and even as she stepped across the room to her Paddy smelled a whiff of smoke.

Billy called her off with a small, firm, “Agnes.”

His son huffed behind his hand. Billy asked them to go down to the canteen for a cup of tea and leave him alone with Paddy for ten minutes.

They gathered their things together, the wife giving Paddy a filthy look and banging shoulders with her on the way out. “She’s had a scare,” he explained when the door clicked shut behind her. “She reacts like that when she’s frightened.”

“You been married a long time, Billy?”

“Since we were seventeen.”

He was a long way from that now. Paddy took the seat next to him, still warm from his son, and realized that Billy was pretty old. In his late forties at least. They only ever met in the dark and she was generally staring at the back of his head, but she had imagined him younger.

They looked at each other and smiled. Paddy patted the bed in a symbolic contact. “Is this you from the front, then, Billy?”

Billy pointed his big white mittens at his face. “Is it bad?”

“You just look embarrassed.”

“They won’t let you see yourself. That’s scary.”

She looked around for a mirror but there wasn’t one, so she felt in her bag and pulled out a powder compact, opening it and handing it to him. Billy peered in at himself, turning the mirror to different angles. “Red, eh?”