Dying to Write (34 page)

I was screaming.

If I screamed much longer, my voice would give out. But if I sang, I could keep that up for an hour or more. And I might give myself courage to start picking the lumps from the heap that had trapped me.

‘Voi che sapete'. ‘Three little maids from school'. ‘Summertime'.

And then I heard another voice.

‘God Save the Queen'.

A woman's voice. Kate's. I had found Kate.

I ought to sit tight and wait for them to come – Hugh, Chris and the rest. They'd be out there, looking for me. Hugh knew where I'd gone. Roughly. Chris would come with a posse of men and women trained in all sorts of rescue work.

But I wanted to get out and I wanted to find Kate. Now.

I knelt and reached and lifted and pushed back. A rhythm, I needed a rhythm. A long time ago, at school, a teacher more inspired than most taught us George Orwell, ‘Down the Mine', all about these men who worked in confined conditions heaving coal. She'd made us all kneel under our desks and pass piles of dictionaries back, back, back, until our knees and backs and arms screamed. About five minutes. Then we'd giggled and dusted ourselves off and gone back to our desks and never quite forgotten about miners.

The pile was smaller, but the beam from the torch was dimmer. I shoved it between my knees so I couldn't possibly lose it, switched it off, and worked in the dark. Occasionally I would stop and sing again. ‘The Ash Grove', ‘Londonderry Air', ‘Greensleeves'.

‘Rule Britannia' and ‘I vow to thee, my country' came back. Much more clearly. I was winning. And then it occurred to me that scrabbling sounds were coming from the far side of the roof-fall. Someone was helping.

I don't know what order the thoughts came in. That whoever it was was not trying to call to me. That Toad had been playing Bach uncommonly well. That it was not Toad and his viola but a professional musician playing a cello. A recording. That I had nowhere to run to. That as long as I had my torch, I had a weapon – I shoved it up my left sleeve. That, overriding everything else, I was very frightened indeed.

The last of the coal was nearly cleared. A very bright light dazzled me. I couldn't see who was speaking. I didn't need to. Trust Toad to have acquired a torch as viciously powerful as his ghettoblaster.

I dragged the kagoul-pouch zip completely closed, and prayed Sidney'd have enough air. I wanted to deal with Toad without the complication of rats.

But it was he who was dealing with me. Shazia hadn't mentioned any knives going missing from the kitchen. But Toad had one. And I didn't doubt he'd use it.

He grabbed my hair and inched me forwards. Forwards until I could stand upright. And then he threw me off balance, and caught me by the arm as I lurched. I ought to thank God it was the arm not holding the torch, but all I could do was scream as he wrenched it behind my back. Then he jerked it again. The message was clear: shut up or he'd dislocate it. I shut up. I would concentrate on keeping my balance. I could see reasonably clearly where I was going in the light from Toad's torch. From the angle it fell, he must have fastened it somehow or other to his waist. Now we slithered down the other tunnel, our feet sometimes covered by black water. The smell became rank: foul lavatories and menstrual blood. We were brought up against thick stakes of wood – old pit-props, perhaps. They'd been hammered in vertically to form a crude cage. The floor was solid wood – it looked like the bottom of an old railway wagon, but Toad didn't give me time to look properly. He'd found a metal-barred gate from somewhere, hingeing it crudely with chains and fastening it with another, padlocked chain. A cage.

And in the cage was Kate, naked except for a disposable nappy and a sheen of coal dust.

At least there were now two of us.

Two of us together – we must be able to deal with him. Two of us.

He'd have to let go of me to unlock the padlock. Maybe I could bolt then. But that would mean leaving Kate. I hesitated. He held the knife to my neck. Then he passed the key.

‘Open it.'

I fumbled and dropped the key. He sliced my ear. I could feel the blood warm on my neck.

‘Pick it up and don't drop it again.'

I did as I was told.

He thrust me inside the cage. The water was to my knees.

‘Two for the price of one,' he said.

‘Garth,' I said, trying to sound cool and reasonable, ‘could you tell me what's going on? I came in out of the rain and got trapped and –'

He hit me hard across the mouth.

Kate stood up. I dared not hope she'd seen the bulge in my left sleeve. But she was going to distract him.

Her chest was heaving. ‘Asthma,' she gasped. ‘A spray.'

‘You know what you have to do,' he said, pointing to the bottom of the cage, swirling with water. He lifted his left foot. And she knelt in the foul water to kiss it.

I hit him very hard. He sagged forward, but then started gently twitching.

I grabbed Kate's hand and pulled her up and towards me. I pushed the key into her hand.

The gate swung open, desperately slowly. Water was now to our thighs. And the floor was tilting.

At least she was out. But the gate was pushing me back towards Toad, and he was already staggering to his feet.

And then I heard voices, and I knew I could swing on the gate, like a monkey if I had to, and wait for them to help me. But nothing would help Toad. He was no longer twitching, but threshing in huge convulsions, literally foaming at the mouth. And by the second he was going deeper into unconsciousness and closer to death by drowning.

Getting me out hadn't been as easy as I'd thought. Eventually I had to let go, wait for the gate to swing, and literally swim out. Chris was there to pull me up.

I was afraid for a moment that I'd drowned Sidney. He was very quiet inside that pouch. But maybe the fabric had kept enough air in.

I pulled off the kagoul and helped pull it over Kate. And I made them wait while I gave her my jeans. I could cope with a blanket. She deserved more dignity.

Chris and Ian would have carried her. But she found the strength to stagger out, a comic, grotesque parody of a woman, and when she saw Matt she broke into a tottering run. Neither said anything. You couldn't tell what streaked the coal dust on her face, tears or rain. Matt tried to pat her face clean with his handkerchief. He said something and pointed to the movement in the kagoul.

And then we heard them laugh.

‘God knows how Casualty will cope with a rat,' said Chris, watching the ambulance drive away along the ash-covered track.

‘Send a squad car with his cage,' I said briefly. ‘And, while they're at it, some clothes for me.'

I was very cold, now I came to think about it, and I would have to succumb any moment now to Chris's insistence that I have my ear stitched. But I couldn't have gone in the ambulance with Kate and Matt. It wouldn't have been fair. They had Sidney to play gooseberry in any case.

Hugh was still white. When I emerged he hadn't hugged me as I'd expected: he'd grabbed my shoulders and shaken me until I an Dale had stopped him.

‘No heroics, you said,' he was shouting. ‘No bloody heroics! My God! And look at you!' He turned from me, not to weep but to vomit in the gorse.

Ian silently hitched up my blanket and led me away. Without asking, he fastened my seat belt for me. And then he passed me a mint.

I don't think we spoke all the way to the General. I didn't really want to anyway. My mouth was throbbing viciously and my nose insisted on streaming. Eventually Ian passed me a box of tissues. I left black fingerprints on the packet and on every tissue I touched. I reached for the mirror on the sun visor. The face I saw might have been Kate's. I wondered if the National Health would run to showers.

As we approached the city centre, Ian slowed and pointed. Down side streets we could see the fire service still at work, and bulldozers were clearing wrecked cars. The rain hadn't come early enough for some.

As he parked in an ‘Ambulance Only' space, I said, ‘I'm not staying in, you know.'

‘Of course you're not. You're going back to Eyre House for lunch. I promised Shazia. And Chris. He'll want to talk to you.'

‘Yet another statement?'

Ian grunted, and came round to my side to help me out. A wheelchair appeared. I rejected it. Ian sniffed and offered his arm. As we started our dignified progress, a police car screamed into view, slowing sharply as the driver recognised Ian, no doubt. The driver parked with care and scurried after us, a rat cage in one hand and a polythene carrier in the other.

‘For the lady,' he said, thrusting the cage at me.

‘Wrong lady,' I said, taking the carrier instead.

The National Health ran to a student nurse with sponges and warm, soapy water. I asked him to leave me to it for a couple of minutes, and managed to dunk my hair too. I longed suddenly for the privacy of my bathroom at home. It would be good to be back, to lie and soak. Perhaps a little Haydn on the radio. Maybe a drop of single malt. And then the nurse came back with the casualty officer, a young woman with designs on my ear. A difficult place to stitch, she admitted at last. We settled on a butterfly dressing. More Melolin for the worst of the abrasions: I looked at the messes that constituted my knees and wondered why they'd not hurt when I was crawling on them. She tutted over the puncture marks Sidney had left, but at least I was spared another tetanus shot. I signed myself out this time, but asked to see Kate before I left.

‘Two minutes,' said the student nurse, leading the way.

There is nowhere to knock on a curtain, of course. Ian and I looked at each other quizzically, coughed in unison, and he waited for me to put my head round the curtain.

They'd been cleaning her up, too: her hair had been tied back, and her face was no longer bizarre with coal dust. But there were dark circles under her eyes, and her face, once plumply middle-aged, was gaunt, with cruel lines around the mouth. She wore a hospital-issue gown, and was obviously about to be admitted – there was a name tag on her wrist. Matt was holding her right hand against his cheek. He seemed completely oblivious of us, and of the streams of tears that ran down his cheeks, plunging into the forest of his beard. As we watched, she drifted into sleep.

Sidney might have been observing with interest since his future was no doubt involved, but someone had bought him a Kit-Kat and he was more concerned with that.

‘I was wondering if you could use a lift,' said Ian.

‘I'm staying here,' said Matt. ‘Say goodbye to everyone for me, OK?'

I nodded.

‘I'll be in touch, Sophie – I take it Hugh has your address.'

I could feel Ian stiffen. I'd have asked him for a page from his notebook but I'd an idea they were sacrosanct, and I didn't want to make an issue of it.

‘What about yours?' I asked.

He suddenly noticed his tears, and rubbed his face with a fistful of NHS tissues. ‘Wherever Kate is, for a bit. And then I've got to sort out – everything.'

‘If you need a base in Brum, I've got a spare room,' I said. And bent to kiss him.

He laid Kate's hand down on her chest for a moment. Then he got up to meet me, and held me. Eventually the nurse came back, and we patted each other's backs affectionately – time to let go.

I turned to Ian and propelled him from the cubicle as fast as I could. For I knew what the nurse was going to say: ‘And what about the rat? Can't your friend look after him?'

Ian heard too. And we did the nearest I could manage to a scamper.

I was running out of clothes, of course, and my tracksuit was hardly the festive garb demanded by our last lunch together. I was suddenly hungry, and wondered what Shazia might have managed to produce, given all the comings and goings. Whatever it was, she wasn't wearing an apron when she pushed into reception to hug me.

I excused myself for a couple of minutes to see what make-up might do to the ravages of my face. Someone had shifted all my clothes on to the desk so they could make the bed. But they hadn't packed. I shoved the lot willy-nilly into my case. I couldn't even lift it.

The officers outside thought it was a great joke. One grabbed the case with one finger. The other grabbed me and carried me to reception. End of term for them too. I'd better get into the swing of things.

What I did not expect to see, when I picked my way into the lounge, was a bottle of champagne, and Gimson pouring it. He saw me and bowing with only the minimum of irony, presented me with a glass. At the sight of my ear he tutted professionally and then said, quite quietly, so no one else could hear: ‘The bruises will heal fast enough. But you may be encumbered with unpleasant memories for some little time. Travel might help – a peak in Darien, perhaps.'

I nodded and smiled. We would never like each other but we could at least observe the proprieties.

I toasted him vaguely, and looked about me. No Chris, but he'd be busy tidying up ends. No Hugh. No Tabitha. My God, I couldn't be about to discover jealousy.

Laughter from the corridor: yes, I could. But as soon as he came into the room he looked for me. When our eyes met, he abandoned Tabitha and stood over me proprietorially until Shazia urged us into the dining room.

Christmas had come early, courtesy of Fortnum and Mason. It was fortune for someone's bank balance that there had been so few of us to cater for. Mr Woodhouse demurred that game pie was too rich for him; Jean urged him to take a little more caviare, and the sci-fi freak picked negligently at olives. But the rest of us weighed in. Gimson passed plates with enthusiasm. Mr Woodhouse cleared his throat as if to make a speech. I didn't want a speech to listen to: there were still far too many goodies left.

‘I'm sure we would all like to thank –' he began.

Hugh popped a canapé into my mouth and held his fingers to be licked.