The Cold Calling

IX

He woke up in a dark panic. Or didn’t. Didn’t wake up …

… woke down.

Dreams bunched and knotted behind his shuttered eyes, and he couldn’t open them. Couldn’t move, couldn’t scream. I’m paralysed.

A whizzing, a flittering, snipping tearing.

As he awoke again, into the cold.

Lying on his back, the sky above him alive with dark wings. Tried to hurl himself away, muscles wouldn’t respond. Locked. Everything inside him got behind a scream, but his throat wouldn’t process it. No lubrication. All congealed inside, all the liquids in him had clotted and dried when the blood stopped flowing.

Like a corpse. Like a corpse. Muscles rotted through. Torn. Shredded bits of him pecked away, ripped away, chewed away, blown away … and no eyes to see any of it. Couldn’t open his eyes because there weren’t any eyes. You couldn’t open bone.

Whimpering. He heard whimpering, and it was his own. Whimpering and the clatter of a morning trolley. A morning was happening somewhere out there, but he wasn’t part of it. He was out of it. He was two days dead.

He turned his head on the sweat-damp pillow and opened his eyes. Third awakening. Always three; never trust the first two.

God help me.

‘Tea, Mr Maiden. Bobby?’

‘Andy?’

He was fogged, muffled.

‘No, it’s Sister Andy’s day off. I’ll leave it on the side here. Then you can have another sleep, if you like, before breakfast.’

He sat up in panic.

The words another sleep terrified him.

No Sister Andy.

Who’d saved his life.

The African doctor, Jonathan, had told him. How they were all ready to give up and she’d stood there holding his head, demanding they keep going with the defibrillator. Jonathan describing it all so gleefully that Maiden was sure he could remember them coming in like the Drug Squad on a dawn raid.

All this down to Sister Andy. Left to me, man, Jonathan had said, with a frightening shrug, they’d be putting you in the ground today.

Recalling the words now with a sense of deep horror, he could clearly see himself from above, still and bluish, eyes closed against the earth coming down on him in spadefuls, the first particles of grit drumming on his screened eyeballs. Closing his mouth against it … but suddenly his eyes were opening into a brutal, hurting hail of soil and stones.

He could still taste the soil in the back of his throat; he drank all the tea and then two glasses of water from the carafe.

Lay back, breathing heavily, remembering what Andy had said about the patients who returned. The soft warmth and the gardens, the angelic voices, fountains. Well, yeah, you read all that stuff, saw people talking about it on TV, faces uplifted to the lights. All very comforting.

And all crap. It ended with the grave. That was the truth. Burial. In the earth. And death wielding the spade. You saw the face of death through fibres and roots and decaying matter and worms.

Still tasting it.

And, oh God, he needed to talk to Andy. You heard it said that saving someone’s life created a bond, a mutual responsibility. Something was reaching out to this grim-faced Glaswegian nurse as if she was his long-lost mother. No, that wasn’t exactly it. Close, though. Close.

Where was she? Jonathan might know but he wasn’t here either. There was a different doctor in the unit, the tight-mouthed, officious kind, patrolling the beds like a rogue traffic warden, peering into the side ward and rasping over his clipboard, as though the guy lying there was deaf, mute and backward.

‘Nurse, explain to me, would you … why is this patient still here?’

Nobody could explain it, and so, after breakfast, they pulled Bobby Maiden out of the sometimes-comforting chaos of Casualty and dumped him in Lower Severn Ward.

If the side ward in A and E was limbo, Lower Severn was authentic hell: continuous daytime TV — colours cranked up to lurid-plus — playing to two rows of probably nice enough guys with drips and tubes, one bloke pre-op and nervy, one post-op and demob-happy, one who read the Sporting Life and kept trying to persuade the nurses to place his bets, one who sat on the side of his bed and farted like a moped.

All these guys, Maiden saw them in cold, rubbery shades of grey, their faces squashed into stocking masks, a layer of dense depression banked over the beds like industrial smoke. Sunshine streamed through long windows, but the whole place was full of February, and there might never be a March.

According to the book, according to Andy, he should be feeling real joy, able to spread some comfort. Sitting up in bed and glowing with this kind of smug benevolence. Having died, he ought to have been reborn. His spirit pulled out of his body and washed clean.

It felt soiled.

Soiled. Literally. All he experienced was a very tainted kind of relief every time he awoke. A temporary relief, because one day he’d have to die again, and death was a sour grave. There was an old man in a corner bed they kept pulling the curtains round — the Sporting Life reader shaking his head, saying, ‘Can’t be long now.’ And Maiden wanting to leap out of bed and scream at the old man, For Christ’s sake, hold on to every last, fucking second …

The rest of life was going to be tainted by the acrid taste of the grave.

Meanwhile, Riggs was coming.

Boss’ll be in to see you.

Vaguely remembering, from when he first came round, someone leaning over the pillow with sanitized, spearmint breath.

Just give us a name. Somebody we can pull. A name, Bobby.

Don’t remember anything. Remember going home, latish. Nothing after that. Sorry, Mike. Sorry.

Mike. Mike Beattie.

Maiden instinctively lying to Beattie — Riggs’s man. Of course he remembered. Even in and out of consciousness, he remembered about black-eyed Suzanne and the pictures and the offer. And Parker and Riggs and the filigree of corruption stitched so tightly into the fabric of the town that undoing it would leave the fabric itself in shreds.

Parker and Riggs. Or was it, in fact, Riggs and Parker? Had Riggs simply sat back and thought about it and decided reliable old Tony was, on balance, the best man to handle drugs and other essential service industries in Elham? Was Riggs, in some way, the contractor?

Whatever, Maiden seemed to have been offered a ticket for the gravy train on a climb aboard or be found dead on the tracks basis.

Dead. Been there. Been into the big tunnel, come out the other side. Crawled out, sick and scared. What happens now, back down the slime-trails of downtown Elham?

After a while, Maiden let the whole mess — Lower Severn Ward, Suzanne, Parker, Riggs and the certainty of the grave — seep sluggishly out of his mind like dirty water down a drain, and went into his black, swampy sleep.

Awakening unable to move again. Convinced at first that he was on a trolley in the mortuary, his consciousness like a bird caged in his corpse and it would only be free when the electric saw took off his cranium.

Death again. He could only ever dream about aspects of death. Dead people, dead sheep. Violence. Brutality.

He actually sobbed with relief when the grey world babbled in.

‘So you’re a snooker man, Tom?’ the TV said, some daytime quiz programme. ‘And how many kids? Blimey, Sharon, he must keep his cue well chalked …’

Maiden jerked in the bed, wrapped the hard hospital pillow around his head.

‘So you’re awake, lad.’ The voice coming down like an oak truncheon.

Maiden opened and closed and opened his eyes.

‘Papers said you was in a bad way. Don’t look that bad to me. Bloody sight better than I did, by God, the night I had Harry Skinner and his lads cornered in the old paint warehouse at Wilmslow. Heh. Tell you this much. They di’n’t look so pretty neither, when I’d finished wi’ ‘em.’

‘Hello, Dad,’ Maiden said.

‘Two trains it took, getting here. Had to change at Shrewsbury.’

Norman Plod, boots gleaming, fusewire hair Brylcreemed flat, stood in the centre of the ward, glaring up and down the lines of beds as if he was scouring a pub for under-age drinkers.

‘Bugger of a place, Shrewsbury,’ said the Sporting Life bloke.

‘Had to get hisself transferred down here to get away from me,’ Norman Plod said, dead accurate for once. ‘Not fit to be let out, this lad. Heh. Can’t be trusted to cross the bloody road without getting hisself flattened.’

As usual, it had taken Norman Plod less than a minute to collect an audience. Presence, he used to say. You have to have presence. Halfway to respect.

‘Bet you didn’t get his number either, did yer?’

‘No, Dad,’ Maiden said wearily. ‘Busy dying. You know how it is.’

‘Bloody detective, this,’ Norman Plod told the ward. ‘Bloody detective.’

He could have been a detective, could Norman. CID had been on their knees to him. But the public didn’t have the same respect for detectives, slinking, nosing and drinking on duty. The public liked a policeman to look like a policeman. To have presence.

Maiden noted the absence of grapes, sweets, bottles of Lucozade. Not even a newspaper. His old man never saw the point of little gifts for the sick. Their duty to get well, back to work, stop the drip, drip, drip of taxpayers’ money into their arms.

‘Nice of you to come all this way, Dad.’

‘I’m retired, lad. Garden’s winding down for winter. Nowt else on the go. They got any leads, your clever colleagues? Poor bloody do, you ask me. Got to be a motor somewhere wi’ a busted front end. Listen …’

Norman leaned in, just the way he’d always done, as if he was about to confide the Secret of Life.

‘I don’t know the background, don’t know what villains you’ve put away lately, who’s got a grudge. An’ I don’t want to. I’m retired. All I’m sayin’, word to the wise …’ Tapping his veiny nose. ‘Just don’t, whatever you do, don’t let this one bloody well go. Don’t ever write it off. Make sure the bugger gets nailed to the bloody wall. Eh? Know what I’m sayin’?’

Maiden said, before he could stop himself, ‘You’re thinking about Mum.’

‘I’m thinkin’ nowt!’ Norman lurched back as if his only son had struck him. Amazing to see the old hostility in his eyes, the look that said, You never got the car number then either, did you, lad? Even though Bobby had been not yet three years old when he toddled off the kerb in his pyjamas, seven in the morning, pushing Bonzo, the dog on wheels.

He stared at his dad. Had Norman ever cried?

He’d told Maiden once, and once only, what must have happened that day while he was on the early shift and the road at the end of the garden was no more than a country lane — not much traffic, but no excuse for the paper lad or the milkman (although neither would put his hand up to it) to leave the gate open, so that the child could get out.

The inquest had decided the mother must have rushed into the road and pushed the kid out of the way. And the vehicle hit her instead, ran over her. Whoever it was never stopped. No other drivers in the area, until the farmer on his tractor who found the woman dead, the child sitting silent and white-faced in the road beside her, hugging a white dog on wheels.

His hands clenched under the bedclothes. Everything seemed interconnected. Two explosive moments in time, two hit-and-run incidents over thirty years apart, two deaths. Runs in the family, getting knocked down. As though the same impetus that took away his mother on the outskirts of a scrappy village in Cheshire had carried on through time until another Maiden had crossed its path in Old Church Street.

He saw, blurred by sudden tears, the struggling colours of Norman Maiden pulsing through the stocking mask of February. Felt momentarily closer to the concrete-faced old cop than he could ever recall.

There’d been no pictures of his mum in the house; Norman got rid of them all. Nan, who looked after him until she died, would bring out a precious photo album when he was older. Maiden’s mother had thin, brown hair around a pale, sweet face. Small and slender as a waif. Tiny bones, crushed under the wheels of … a van, it was speculated. She was ten years younger than Maiden was now.

They’d never caught the driver, which left only one person for Norman Plod to hang the blame on. Finally conveying, with his usual iron-bar subtlety, that joining the police was the least the lad could do for his mother. Too many other drivers out there ready to kill and speed away. Get ‘em nailed.

The guilt factor. Bobby praying, at the age of eighteen, for something to get him out of this. Solitary kid, no good at team games. Down on his knees, Please God, I don’t want to be a copper. Don’t want to be like him …

Always the feeling that the old man also had some secret guilt. Something he had to make up to her but there was no chance now because the bloody kid ran out into the lane and got her killed.

‘Dad, listen …’ If any old mysteries were to be solved, if anything was going to be said, any healing process begun, it would have to be now.

‘No, you listen, lad …’

The peace process was probably doomed, but it never got started anyway, because that was when Riggs walked in.