Wearing Purple

Chapter 29

I expected him to be waiting for me at the performers’ door when I emerged in my civvies; slacks, my black suede bomber jacket and a Behemoth tee-shirt which I had scrounged from the merchandise people.

But he wasn’t. She was there instead: Primavera Phillips, with dark blood staining her jeans all the way up to the knees, and smeared on the long sleeves of her denim shirt. She looked tired, not far short of exhausted, but she was beautiful nonetheless, with her tangled, sun-bleached blonde hair flicking against her shoulders, something I had never seen before.

‘Hi.’ She spoke softly, almost tentatively, as I approached.

‘Hi, yourself. Come here.’ We closed the gap between us in a moment and hugged. As I pressed her to me, the tension within her exploded into tears.

Her face was buried in my tee-shirt, which bore the image of Jerry Gradi. For a moment the symbolism of it made me fearful. ‘Prim, he isn’t. . Is he?’

‘No,’ she mumbled into my chest. ‘I spoke to the doctor who admitted him, after he’d been X-rayed and sent up to surgery. He’s going to be okay, they reckon.’

Relief flooded me, finding its way out in laughter. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘since you saved his life earlier, don’t bloody drown him now.’

She looked at The Behemoth’s face on my shirt for the first time, and grinned.

‘You’re a heroine, my dear,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to make sure, damn sure, that the GWA recognises what you did tonight.’

‘What? Are you going to get me free admission for life to all your shows? Thanks, but I’ll settle for a steak from you, although I don’t doubt it’ll be on expenses.’

‘It’s a deal; Everett can afford it. But hold on, I’ve got to meet him here. We were going to see Jerry.’

‘Everett’s your large friend, yes? Looks a bit like a tree, goes by the name of Daze?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve seen him already. I told him about Jerry, and also that there’s no point in anyone going to see him till tomorrow. Even after the surgery, they’ll keep him under for a few hours at least. He said to tell you he was going back to the hotel to catch up with Diane. Who’s she?’

‘His wife. You probably saw her; Catalan flag dress.’

‘Saw her?’ Prim exclaimed. ‘Everybody saw her; bloody near all of her! Some of the women around me in the crowd weren’t too keen on what she was doing to their flag, I should tell you.’

‘I’ll mention that, quietly, to the big man,’ I promised.

‘And who was the girl with the big tits? The one who gave me her silk shirt so quickly.’

‘That was Sally; the GWA Ladies’ Champ. She’s Jerry’s girlfriend.’

‘A lady wrestler! Really? I’ve never met one of those. I thought they were all bruiser types; big bull dykes and such.’

‘Nah, they’re athletes. Just like the girls on that television show back home.’

She stepped back, took her arms from round my waist, and looked up at me. ‘Oz, how the hell did you. .’ She stopped in mid-sentence. ‘No, save it for dinner. I don’t suppose you’ll want to use this in the restaurant, but you might want it back anyway.’ She reached into her hip pocket and handed me my Tesco loyalty card. ‘Trust you to give me that one.’

I took it from her. ‘Thanks. I’ll pass it on to my pal The Behemoth, as a souvenir.’

‘When you do, you can tell him he owes his girlfriend a new shirt. That one was a write-off.’

She pulled the tail of her own shirt from her jeans, used it to wipe the tear-streaks from her face, then shoved it back into her waistband. I took her by the hand and started towards the taxi rank at the front of the arena, where the last few spectators stood. ‘Come on, let’s grab a cab and go down-town.’

She pulled me back. ‘No; my coche’s down there, in the park.’

It took us less than three minutes to reach Prim’s car. It was a Seat Ibiza hatchback, in what looked, even under the car park lights, a sickly orange colour. She unlocked it with a remote device. I climbed into the passenger seat, but Prim slid into the back. I looked at her, waiting: not surprised, for I was beyond being surprised by anything she did.

So I didn’t bat an eyelid when she slid out of her jeans. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t go into a restaurant looking like this. There’s a pair of scissors in the glove box. Pass them over, will you please.’

I did as she told me: they were big, heavy dress-making scissors. Knowing her as well as I did, I guessed that she kept them there for security. She took them from me and as I watched, never thinking to avert my eyes from the sight of Prim in her knickers, she cut off the bloodstained trouser legs just above the knees. Next she unbuttoned her shirt, and slipped it off. I breathed an inward sigh of relief; she was wearing a bra. Invariably the sight of her without one had a certain effect on me. She trimmed the sleeves off the garment just above the elbows, then dressed quickly and jumped out of the car.

‘There,’ she said, modelling her new-look outfit on the tarmac. ‘A bit skimpy for this time of year, I’ll grant you, but at least we won’t be arrested.’ She opened the driver’s door and slid into her seat, beside me.

‘Like it?’ she asked, grasping the steering wheel.

‘It looks fine from inside, but were you blindfolded when you bought it? I mean, the colour, Prim. .’

She laughed: not her normal, easy laugh, but high-pitched, not unlike Susie Gantry’s distinctive giggle; as if for the first time in our lives she was unsure of herself with me. ‘I got a deal on it, didn’t I. Anyway, most of the time it’s so dirty that you can’t tell what colour it is.’ She turned the ignition key, and the engine thrummed into life. It certainly sounded okay. ‘I know a place where we can eat,’ she said. ‘I’ve been exploring Barcelona.’

‘What else have you been doing?’ I asked. ‘Improving your Spanish for one thing. I was impressed, back there.’

‘My job has a lot to do with that. I’m nursing again, in the big hospital in Girona.You know, the one you see just as you drive into the town from the north.’

‘Yes, I know it. How did you get in there? I thought they’d have recruited Spanish only; you know what they’re like.’

‘I had help,’ she said. ‘Ramon put in a word for me.’

‘Ramon?’

‘Ramon Fortunato. Remember the Guardia Civil captain we met?’ I nodded in the dark. ‘He’s not Guardia any more, he transferred to the Mossos Esquadra, the new Catalan national police force, and he’s based in Girona. He heard about a supervisor job that was going in the A amp; E department and he asked me if I’d be interested. I hadn’t thought about going back to nursing, but equally, I didn’t intend to sit on my arse working my way through our capital. So I thought, what the hell.’

‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘For big Jerry’s sake, it’s as well you’re up to speed on emergencies.’

‘That stuff back there?’ she exclaimed. ‘Pure meatball surgery: I learned that trick on chest wounds when I worked in Africa. Out there I used my Mastercard so often, then steam-sterilised it, so that the signature was obscured. I had to report it lost and get a replacement. That procedure would make great television, but I’d be sacked from any hospital in Europe for doing anything as unhygienic.’

‘Don’t worry, kid,’ I said softly. ‘I won’t report you.’

I stared at her profile as she drove us down from Montjuic and into the city, thinking of the last time I had seen her: when we had split that morning in St Marti d’ Empuries; the village where we had lived together for a while until I had an encounter with Jan which made me realise where I really belonged. And until Prim. . but that was still too painful a memory for me to dwell on for long.

I had left her there, with a last kiss for luck. One way and another we had amassed a fair bit of money in our short time together, but we had agreed that we would do nothing about dividing it for a year, to give Prim a chance to decide how and where she wanted to live her life.

So I had driven off into the autumn afternoon, knowing that I would have to see her again at some point, but never dreaming that it would be in such bizarre circumstances.

The place which she knew was a restaurant in a side street about half a kilometre from the Columbus Monument. She found a space in one of the city’s many underground car parks and led me to it. There were tables available, since it was still only around nine-forty-five, early on a Spanish Saturday night.

I let her order for us both: anchovies and escalivada, followed by two T-bone steaks, with two beers for starters and a bottle of Faustino III.

I watched her as she took her first mouthful of Estrella, and thought to myself that for all the tiredness which still showed on her face, and for all that she looked to have dropped a pound or two, I had never seen her looking lovelier.

‘What else has Ramon been doing for you, then?’ I asked her, casually.

She arched her eyebrows over the top of her glass. ‘Nothing in that respect, my dear,’ she said. ‘Not that it would be any of your bloody business. He’s a friend, that’s all. He and his wife live in Albons, and they eat in Meson del Conde every so often. I saw them there and we all sort of got to know each other.’

She looked down at the table-cloth. ‘There’s been no one else, Oz. Not so far. In the last year I’ve had the two most memorable relationships of my life, both of them all too brief, sadly. I’ve always been aware of the dangers of rebound flings, so I’ve made a point of declining all offers.’ She grinned. ‘There have been more than a few, by the way. Junior doctors the world over would shag themselves into oblivion, given half a chance.

‘So much for my non-sex-life, though. What about yours?’

I made a hole in my beer. ‘Did you get my letter?’ I asked her, as casually as I could.

‘The one where you told me that you and Jan were getting married?’ She nodded. ‘I got it. Thanks for not inviting me, by the way. That would have been pushing it.’ For the first time, I caught the faintest trace of bitterness in her voice.

‘We’re living in Glasgow,’ I went on, quickly. ‘Dad and Auntie Mary got hitched too, Ellie and the boys are fine, I’m back in business, Jan’s carrying on with hers, we’re both making plenty of money. . and Jan’s pregnant.’

She gasped slightly. ‘When you went back, Oz,’ she asked, after a moment, ‘she wasn’t, was she?’

‘No, no, no,’ I assured her. ‘I’d have told you that. We only just found out.’

‘The icing on the cake, eh.’ She tried to hide it, but I saw her chin tremble.

‘Prim, love, I’m sorry.’

She shook her head, and smiled, but her eyes were shining. ‘Don’t be, my dear. We talked it all out, remember. It wasn’t just you who made the decision. As for Jan, I was never convinced that you were over her, even if you believed it. Why d’you think I wouldn’t marry you when you asked me?’

‘You said you wanted more time to think about it.’

‘Yes, but what I meant was that I wanted you to have more time to think about it, so that both of us could be sure that it was me you really wanted. Brilliant tactician me, eh. Bloody backfired on me, didn’t it.’

‘But you didn’t want to marry me either! You told me.’

She finished her beer and signalled for two more. ‘Bollocks, my darling. Given the job that you do, I’m amazed that you always believe everything a woman says to you.’

She reached across the table and grabbed my hands. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say all this. I didn’t want to marry you if you were in love with someone else. That’s the truth. Let’s just be thankful it wasn’t me who got pregnant and leave it at that.

‘Quick, change the subject. Tell me, exactly how the pluperfect fuck did you get involved in this carry-on?’

‘I’m doing a bit of undercover work for Everett,’ I explained. ‘Someone’s been trying to sabotage his operation. What happened tonight is the culmination of a series of events. The big Daze fella hired me to help him find who was behind it.’

‘And have you?’ Prim asked.

‘We have now. The road foreman: an American called Sonny Leonard. We suspected him before tonight, and now he’s done a runner. The device that shot Jerry was hidden in the top pad in the corner of the ring. It was triggered by the impact of twenty-seven and a half stone of wrestler hitting it at high speed. It was Leonard’s job to fit those pads; we even watched him do it.’

‘I see. Are you sure he knew about the device?’

‘There was other evidence against him; also, like I said, he’s vanished.’

I finished my first beer, just as the second arrived. ‘But how about you? How the hell did you come to leap up into that ring tonight like Florence fuckin’ Nightingale?’

‘Simple. I was in the English lady’s bar in L’Escala last night, having a drink after work, the telly was on and all of a sudden, you were on it, speaking dodgy Catalan, and talking gibberish about this thing called the Global Wrestling Alliance. I have never fallen off a bar stool in my life before, but I was so surprised last night that I did just that.

‘At the close of the item, the presenter said that there were still tickets available, and gave a number to contact. So I called it. The rest, as one says in Auchterarder, is geography. ’ She paused.

‘I had quite a good seat too, overlooking the ring, When Jerry went down, I could tell from the way Everett reacted that it wasn’t right, even before he yelled for assistance. Then I saw the blood. I had to argue my way through security to get to the ring, but I made it in time.’

‘Thank heaven,’ I said, sincerely. We both sat silent for a while, contemplating the outcome that might have been.

‘Tell me,’ I asked her, eventually. ‘If there hadn’t been an emergency, would I ever have known you were there?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I hadn’t decided. You tell me. If I hadn’t seen you on Canal 33, would I ever have known you’d been here?’

‘I don’t know either. I’d been thinking of calling you.’ I took my mobile phone from my pocket, and in that instant it rang.

‘Probably Everett,’ I said. But it wasn’t.

‘Oz? Is that you?’ I didn’t recognise the voice on the other end; not even after he’d told me who it was.

‘Of course it is. Who’s that?’

‘It’s Mike here.’

I held the phone away from my ear for a second and stared at it, astonished. ‘Dylan? What the fuck are you calling me here for? Are you drunk or something?’

Prim stared at me across the table, as surprised as I was. The name, Dylan, meant plenty to her too.

‘No, Oz, I’m not drunk.’ The voice seemed to steady. ‘I have something to tell you. Where are you?’

‘In a restaurant.’

‘Are you in company?’

‘Yes. Now will you please tell me what this is about.’

‘Okay.’ His voice cracked again. ‘Oh Christ man, I’m sorry.’

To this day, I still don’t remember the moment he told me that Jan was dead; that my wife and my child were dead. What I do remember is the sensation of a blow within my head; the sudden overpowering dizziness, the phone slipping from my hand on to the table, Prim looking frightened as she reached to pick it up, and the cold beer splashing over me when my hand caught the glass and upset it, as I slipped from my chair to the floor.