Death Comes for the Fat Man

7

On Saturday morning two nurses were straining their backs cleaning and rearranging Dalziel.

“Much more of this and they’ll be finding a bed for me,” complained one of them, a little blonde with the face and figure of a well-fed angel. “How long before they switch this bugger off?”

Her friend, used to excursions into the macabre as an escape route from the everyday horrors of their job, replied, “Could be they’re keeping him going till they find someone in need of a big heart. With his weight, he must have a huge one.”

“Not just his heart,” said the first nurse, looking down. “Wonder if I could get that transplanted onto my Steve? Mind you, with his weak knees, he’d probably fall over every time he stood up!”

Dalziel, could he have heard the exchange, might have enjoyed a good laugh. Unfortunately, he isn’t having an out-of-body experience today. In fact, he is very much in body, awareness reduced to a pinprick of dim light in a black box at the bottom of the deepest shaft of an abandoned mine. There is nothing in this awareness that could be called memory, not even of the most generalized kind-rain in the grass, light on the land, sun on the sea-no sense of anywhere else, not even really a sense of here and now, just the thinnest membrane of differentiation between pinprick and darkness.

And the only choice remaining is when to let the pressure of the dark pop the membrane and go out, go out, beyond all doubt…

The blond nurse said, “Right, that’s Fatty done. No, hang on. Best put the music back on else his girlfriend will be looking for someone’s arse to kick.”

Cap Marvell’s mini-disc frequently got switched off, sometimes because a cleaner wanted the power point, sometimes because a consultant didn’t like competition with the sound of his own voice, sometimes because a member of staff simply found Swinging with the Big Bands even pianissimo set his teeth on edge, but mainly because very few people believed it served any function other than to bolster delusional hope.

But delusion was not a term anyone cared to use in the face of Cap Marvell’s very real anger, so now the strains of “In the Mood” played by the Dorsey Brothers’ Orchestra stole forth once more, crept into the Fat Man’s ear and sent its brassy brightness spiraling down into the darkness.

A couple of seconds later a momentary respondent syncopation of the hitherto regular notes of the heart monitor might have interested the nurses but by now they were out of the door and on their way to their next angelic assignment.