The Kiss (20 page)

I
know Fatima is mad, but I never thought she’d be idiotic enough to buy whatever Studs was selling.

The ambulance speeds through the town, sirens going. I am thrown back and forth, sometimes crashing into Jem and sometimes into the oxygen canister taped to the metal wall behind us. I look at Fatima’s dark hair spread on the ambulance pillow and the mask strapped to her face. She is taped to the gurney, her spider-web lashes closed and her chest moving erratically. Monitors bleep.

‘What did she take?’ I ask the paramedic fiddling with the drip feed in Fatima’s arm.

‘We won’t know until she wakes up and tells us.’

This is every kind of nightmare rolled into one.

‘Studs was at the Gaslight,’ I spit at Jem.

He runs his hands through his hair. ‘He wouldn’t deal anything dangerous.’

‘You think?’ I rest my head against the oxygen canister. ‘It must be nice to have so much faith in your friends.’

‘Delilah,’ he begins. ‘I—’

I hold up my hand. ‘
So
not the time.’

We listen to the keening wail of the siren over our heads. There is a little telescopic window set in the back doors of the ambulance, and I gaze out at a shrunken world of headlamps and streetlights and reflective cats’ eyes.

Five minutes later and we are squealing into the special parking bay outside the Royal Surrey’s Accident and Emergency department. The paramedics leap out and yank Fatima on to the tarmac.

Jem and I are allowed to follow her inside, but then we lose her. We are ordered to sit like dogs and wait. People slump in the red plastic chairs around us, with bandaged fingers, or bloody heads, or cradling wailing children. The smell of disinfectant is eyewatering.

‘
New Scientist
?’ Jem suggests, dangling a tattered magazine at me.

‘Not really in the mood for reading,’ I say. ‘Funnily enough.’

He puts the magazine back, reclines on the chair next to me and crosses his long legs. It is comforting having him there. I wish it wasn’t, but you take what you can get.

‘I worked it out about Studs and my money,’ I say. I don’t care any more. ‘And your bruise.’ I flap my fingers around my face to illustrate.

He looks wary. ‘You worked out what, exactly?’

‘You fought about it. Cut Studs’ lip. I don’t know how it all connects – something to do with the cashpoint I used at the Gaslight maybe.’ Studs was there, the first time I saw Jem. The night everything began. ‘It was a lot of money that I couldn’t afford to lose, and I never said thanks. So . . . thanks.’

‘I didn’t put your money back,’ he says. ‘The bank did.’

‘It’s still what you fought about. Isn’t it?’

‘Studs has always worked the shallows,’ Jem says after a short pause. ‘But he met some guys recently who pushed him out too deep. He needed me to reel him in again.’

‘And the fishing rod gave you the bruise.’

He gives me a look.

‘You started the whole fishing metaphor thing,’ I say, blushing slightly. ‘Why is it up to you to babysit him?’

I am getting echoes of another conversation he and I once had, about a mother duck and her duckling. How times have changed.

‘You know why,’ he says, closing me down.

We stare for a bit at a poster about handwashing hygiene taped to the opposite wall.

‘I know what you did too,’ he says eventually. ‘Saving the show, changing the theme. Ella told me. You saved my mother’s neck. The bar, the business. That makes us even, I think.’

‘I told Ella not to say anything,’ I say, embarrassed suddenly now my plan has been revealed in all its
pathetic glory.

‘She told me on Thursday. She was bored of waiting for me to figure it out for myself.’

Does he know I did it for him? Do I want him to know? He’s looking at me so intently that I have to stand up and walk to the desk.

‘Talk to me,’ I say to the receptionist on the counter. ‘I’m being bothered by the guy in the red T-shirt.’

The receptionist has a head of tight curls and a face like a dormouse. She stares at me in wary surprise, making me wonder how often people talk to her about things not related to critical injuries. Her badge tells me to call her Shelagh, should I feel the need for first-name terms.

‘I was jealous, OK?’ Jem says, following me. ‘Of that idiot in the car making you laugh. It clouded my judgment. I know you were never going to rob the bar.’

‘Oh, but I was.’ I fiddle with the RSPCA charity box chained to the reception desk. It seems you can’t even trust people with life-threatening injuries not to nick stuff. ‘The one-way ticket to Rio was booked and everything.’

‘Why are you still fighting me, Delilah? Can’t we—’

His phone starts ringing.

The receptionist comes to life. ‘All phones should be switched off in the hospital,’ she barks, her tight curls vibrating even more than Jem’s phone.

‘I’ll take it outside.’ He fixes me with burning eyes. ‘Don’t go away. We are going to talk about this.’

He heads through the hospital doors and stands in a streetlight with the receiver to his ear. It’s probably Val.
Or Miss Long Legs UK.

I don’t want to talk!
I mentally scream after his back.

More sirens, another ambulance. A kid on a trolley, lots of blood, a woman whose skin looks as clammy as a toad’s. I stand to one side with my arms tightly folded into my sides, wishing I could block out the horrible noise the woman is making as the boy is checked in. Finding a few coins in my pocket, I drop them in the charity box because it has a cute dog on the front and I am in need of distraction.

The receptionist looks up at the sound, her dormouse face suddenly animated. ‘I’m an animal lover too,’ she says. ‘Dogs, cats, budgies.’

‘I’ve got a fish,’ I say, feeling the need to somehow prove my animal-loving worth.

Apparently Marie Curie gets me into the club. All of a sudden, the receptionist grows chatty.

‘Hit and run,’ she says, nodding at the boy’s trolley being rushed down the hospital corridor. ‘Always nasty.’

I glance out of the doors. I wish Jem would come back. Then again, he probably doesn’t need reminding of what happens in hit and runs.

The receptionist is still talking. ‘A lovely Staffie was knocked down with his owner five, six years ago. Couple of joyriders up the Watts. Scarpered, of course. Police never got them, the little criminals.’

Jem and Studs hit a man with a dog.

‘Barney survived,’ she adds, registering my expression. ‘I can see that you’re wondering.’

I’m suddenly wondering a lot of things. I am also looking very hard at the receptionist with the kind of pinpoint focus normally reserved for microscopes. Now, I feel, might be the moment for first-name terms.

‘Was Barney the dog or the owner, Shelagh?’

Shelagh looks slightly amazed by the question. ‘The dog,’ she says.

It’s a coincidence, of course. Joyriders must hit dogs all the time. I have visions of the Watts Estate filled with flying four-legged bodies. But still, I have to ask the question.

‘Do a lot of dogs get caught up in hit and runs around here?’

‘No, thank goodness! It’s the only case I’ve known in fifteen years on this desk.’

I need to keep this conversation going because suddenly I have to know how it ends. ‘Dogs have better senses than humans,’ I say.

‘They do,’ Shelagh agrees warmly.

‘Shame about the guy,’ I prompt.

‘What guy?’

I really hope I get a receptionist like this the day I get knocked over by speeding teenagers. So interested in the human element of a tragedy. ‘The guy with the DOG,’ I say.

‘Oh, a broken leg won’t kill you,’ Shelagh says. She frowns again. ‘Unless you’re a racehorse.’

She returns to her paperwork, completely unaware that she’s just made a seismic shift in my world. The only case in fifteen years? Both man and dog survived? This is
colossal
. This . . .

I sit down to stare at the handwashing poster again. More sirens. Another ambulance. Moaning, crying, puking.

‘Apparently it’s all kicking off back at the Gaslight,’ says Jem, returning. ‘They clawed the show back from the brink, but it’s touch and go they’ll make it to the end. Val has Oz and Kev on the bar as back-up, but she really needs one of us back for the interval or the whole place will implode.’ He looks at me properly. ‘You look like someone just hit you round the head with a mallet. Are you OK? Has Fatima—’

A bemused-looking doctor with a wispy beard approaches us. ‘You came in with Fatima Ammour? She’s awake and chatting up my gastroenterologist. You can see her if you like.’

It’s like resurrection day around here, I think a little hysterically. Now Fatima isn’t dead I can kill her myself, at my leisure. As we follow the doctor up the corridor, my hand creeps up Jem’s arm and grips him tightly at the elbow.

‘Are you sure he died?’ I blurt.

His face tightens. ‘What?’

‘The guy Studs hit.’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘You saw him lying there? Him and his dog?’

‘Why are we talking about this now?’

‘Did you see him?’ I insist.

‘We left,’ he says shortly. ‘I got the details from Studs later. What—’

‘The receptionist remembered the dog,’ I say. ‘They didn’t die, Jem. Neither of them died. You didn’t
kill anyone.’

Fatima is sitting up.

‘My stomach feel like an elephant is jumping on me,’ she croaks crossly, trying to smooth the hospital gown over her belly. Her voice sounds rough.

‘They pumped you out,’ I say. ‘Does it hurt?’

Fatima flops her head back on the pillow. ‘I cannot even fart, it hurt so much. Imagine this. English drugs don’t agree so much with me as French drugs. When I see that skinny weasel man again I will kill him.’

Jem is standing by the window, staring out into the night. He hasn’t said much since the man-and-dog bombshell. Nothing at all, in fact.

‘When did you meet Studs anyway?’ I ask, squeezing Fatima’s hand to reassure myself that she really is talking
to me.

‘He offer me something outside Ella’s place but I don’t want it. Then he is at the Gaslight tonight. I want to relax, enjoy the party, you know?’

‘But you were
working
,’ I say.

Fatima looks surprised. ‘Why does this matter?’ She nods at Jem a little woozily. ‘You see his tall girlfriend yet? Do I miss the fight?’

I shush her, alarmed.

‘Whose girlfriend?’ Jem says, turning round.

‘Tall. With the curves like a violin.’

Fatima motions with her hands. She is still pretty out of it. Jem looks at me like
I’m
the one who owes
him
an explanation.

‘Cats never stay in bags, Jem,’ I say, deciding to have it out right here and now. ‘I mean, why would they? They’re cats. You can’t even keep potatoes in bags. They go green and sprout. Imagine the state of a blinking
cat
.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You tell me,’ I challenge.

‘I can’t tell you what day of the week it is right now. My head is spinning like a wheel
.
I can’t take any more surprises.’

‘Fatima saw her in the kitchen at the Gaslight,’ I say. I wish I could sound more triumphant about this. ‘Talk your way out of
that
.’

Jem raises his hands. ‘I’ve said sorry for not believing you about the swipe machine. You just dropped the nuclear news that I have never killed anyone and now you’re talking about potatoes and cats. Have we slid into another dimension? Fatima, I’m really glad you’re OK, but right now I have to leave before my imminent alien abduction. I’m going back to help Val at the bar.’

He leaves, hands in pockets, head down and shoulders up.

As the door closes I burst into tears. Emotional intelligence is so
exhausting
. I long to be fourteen again, getting with Ali Frampton while simultaneously eyeing James Collins at the fruities.

‘You have him very bad,’ Fatima observes as I weep all over the hospital blanket.

‘I’ve only been in love twice,’ I choke. Bogies are going everywhere. ‘And both times they’ve had girlfriends and lied about it. What are the chances?’

Fatima strokes my hair.

‘It’s because I annoyed Aphrodite,’ I gulp. ‘I tried to interfere in her plan for the universe. And now it’s all pinged back and walloped me in the face. I don’t think the gods like it when you interfere.’

She makes a tutting noise. ‘This is Laurent, yes?’

‘What’s Laurent?’ I wail.

‘Aphrodite.’ Fatima looks at me indulgently. ‘I have the kiss of Aphrodite, mwah mwah. You kiss him in Argole and you catch fire in your pants and you think this is the power of Aphrodite because he tell it to you. He tell it to all the girls. He tell it to me one time, even. But the truth is more simple. French boys kiss like movie stars.’ She looks a little smug.

Oh. Right.

Yes.

What?

‘I never really believed him,’ I mumble. My face feels scarlet. ‘Not really. Not a hundred per cent. I’m a
scientist
. I mean, it’s a great line and everything, but . . . Tab believed it but I didn’t. Kind of didn’t. I’m a total pillock.’