Last Orders

Vince

So I walk into the hospital with the money in my inside pocket. Eight hundred in fifties, rest in twenties, rubber band, brown paper envelope. I think, There can't be many people who turn up at this place like they're hitting a casino. And I hope he understands it wasn't easy. He ought to know a thing or two about cash-flow, him of all people. He might think that kind of dosh is just pocket money to me, because I wear a four-hundred-quid suit, because I flog jalopies for readies on the spot, but he ought to know about margins, now specially. Sometimes cash flows and sometimes it don't. Right now it's hardly trickling.

So Hussein better.

And when am I getting it back? You can't deny a dying man a favour, any crazy thing he asks, but that don't mean. You can't take it with you when you go, but he will, he will.

I think, I might as well be taking this money to chuck it off the edge of a cliff.

But then I come out the lift and walk down the corridor, with the usual traffic of trolleys and wheelchairs, and there's that smell again that's getting so familiar you can smell it when it aint there. I'm standing in the showroom and I can smell it. I'm breathing in cars but I can smell it. Like the smell of the swab they give you after a jab, only scaled up, and beneath it the smell of something stale and thin and used up, like the smell of old tired papery skin. I suppose it's the smell of— I think of all the patients in this hospital, heads in beds, I wonder what the tot-up is, I wonder what today's takings are. And I think, I've done what he asked, I've only done what he asked, and if I don't ever touch this money again, still it's cleared my conscience, aint nothing on my conscience.

So I stride down that corridor with my head held high, like I'm back on the square at the depot and the sergeant's called me out. Deetail! And I look at all those poor crumpled-up bastards and old girls in their wheelchairs, thinking, I bet you aint got a thousand pounds to give away, have you? But it's only money, aint it? Only paper.

I walk in, and there he is with his tubes and his pumps and his meters and his belly all swolled up like he's pregnant. I can see he aint looking so good. I mean, given he's buggered in the first place. Today he's having a worse day than yesterday. Every day's a notch in only one direction. But I can tell what the first thing on his mind is, so I don't play no tricks, I don't tease. I pull out the envelope, giving a quick squint around, like the place is full of spies and thieves, and hand it to him, looking at him, thinking, I aint ever going to see this money never again.

I say, "There you are, Jack, as per promise. You don't have to count it.'

Though I bet he does, soon as I'm gone. He just takes a quick peek inside the envelope, feeling the thickness, stroking it with his thumb, then he looks at me, up and down like he's taking in the whole of me, like he's that sergeant inspecting my turn-out, and says, 'You're a good boy, Vince.'