Strangers (17 page)

It happened, he thought wearily. It happened and Annie and I were there, that’s all. Annie and I and the others. The two of us were lucky. We’re still alive. Annie, are you still there?

But he had no sense of luck, yet. He felt numb, and he simply remembered the two of them lying side by side in the darkness, without being able to think any further. The officers had thanked him, folded up their notepads and creaked away again.

Steve’s next visitor was Bob Jefferies.

At the beginning, in the accident unit with the pain fogging everything, they had asked Steve for the name of his next of kin.

Cass? he had thought. No, not Cass.

‘Or just someone we can contact to let them know where you are,’ they had reassured him. In the end he gave them Bob Jefferies’ name, more because Bob was his business partner than because he was a closer friend than any of a dozen others.

And now Bob came down the wards towards him, bulky in his expensive overcoat, carrying one of Steve’s Italian suitcases. He stopped at the end of the bed and looked at the dome of blankets propped over Steve’s leg, at the dressings covering his hands and chest, and then at his face.

‘Jesus, Steve,’ he said at last. ‘Was the prospect of the staff Christmas party as bad as all that?’

Steve let his head rest against his pillows and, with a part of himself, he laughed. But the laughter jarred his bones, and it died quickly.

Bob looked at his grey face. ‘Is it bad?’ he asked.

Steve said, ‘No. Painful, but no lasting damage.’ The orthopaedic surgeon who had come in to see him earlier had told him that the compound fracture of his femur had been pinned. In time, new bone formation would begin, and he should be able to move quite normally. ‘I won’t be able to walk on the leg for a bit. Months, perhaps.’

Bob hoisted the suitcase on to the end of the bed. ‘Mmm. What about getting it over?’

Steve didn’t risk laughter this time.

‘I didn’t ask about that.’

‘No kidding?’

They were uncomfortable together, Steve thought, because Bob’s awkward urge to extend unobtrusive sympathy and his own determination not to need it had shaken their arm’s-length, flippant intimacy out of true.

Bob busied himself with unpacking the suitcase. Steve saw that he had brought in his bathrobe, pyjamas, sponge-bag. It was odd to see Bob handling them.

‘Sorry to land you with this,’ Steve said.

‘Wish there was more I could do.’ Bob wasn’t looking at him now. ‘I couldn’t find your electric razor.’

‘Not much of a next-of-kin, are you? Don’t you know I wet-shave?’

‘You apply that frayed bunch of animal hair that’s crouching in your bathroom cupboard to your
chin?
Well, don’t worry. I’m sure you can get one of these lovely girls to shave you.’

Suddenly Steve wanted to close his eyes. The effort of trying to be the person that Bob knew was too tiring, and there was nothing else he knew how to reveal to him.

Bob saw the weariness, and rapidly unpacked the last things. There were books, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label.

‘Can I have some of that?’ Steve asked. Bob emptied the water out of the glass on his bedside table and poured two inches of whisky into it. Steve drank some and the familiar, worldly taste of it seemed to link him back to Bob again.

‘That’s better. Thanks.’

Bob stood back a little, holding the empty suitcase.

‘They wouldn’t let anyone in except me, and they’re only allowing me ten minutes. But they all send their love. Everyone, you know.’

Steve knew. He meant all the people they worked with, colleagues, the business. He could imagine how the news would have travelled.

‘And Marian, of course. If there’s anything we can do, Steve …’

Marian was Bob’s wife. Steve nodded.

‘Thanks. Thanks very much.’

‘D’you want me to get in touch with anyone? Anyone in particular?’

Steve thought for a numb moment. ‘Well, Cass, I suppose. And Vicky Shaw. Numbers are in the book on my desk, Jenny’ll find them. Tell them I’m all right.’

‘Yeah. Okay. Look, can’t we fix you up with a private room, at least? Somewhere with a TV and a phone?’

Steve looked round at the ward with its half-drawn curtains. He hadn’t spoken to any of the occupants of the other beds, but he liked the feeling of their company. And the glory of the flowers massed in the middle of the room had come to matter as much as anything.

‘I’m fine here. Bob, I was supposed to meet Aaron Jacobs yesterday about the fruit-juice commercials …’

‘Don’t worry about the damned business, Steve. Don’t worry about anything.’

Bob was a kind man, Steve realized. They had worked together for years, spent countless hours and eaten numerous meals together, but the thought had never occurred to him before. He saw him now, fussing with his coat as he got ready to leave, wanting to do something helpful or say something comforting.

‘There is one thing you could do,’ Steve said. Bob turned at once, pleased and relieved.

‘There was a girl. Her name’s Annie. We were down there together, all that time. We talked to one another. We could just touch hands. It would have been … terrible, without her.’

‘Yes. There was a bit about it in the news. Not very much.’

‘She’s here, somewhere. They brought her in before me. I’ve asked, but they won’t tell me anything much. Will you find out how she is? How she really is?’

‘Leave it to me.’

Bob would do as he asked, Steve was sure of that. He only had to wait, now, until he came back with the news of her.

They said goodbye then, and Bob went away and left him to himself again.

Annie was very ill.

After the emergency operation she had developed pneumonia. The surgeons had taken the ventilator tube out of her mouth and cut a hole for it directly into her windpipe. The machine breathed smoothly for her, and they pumped antibiotics into her veins to counter the lung infection. Her kidneys had failed completely, but the dialysis machine at her bedside did their work. For another day she lay inert, knowing nothing. Then, as if her body had no strength left even to start the struggle to heal itself, Annie began to bleed. She bled from her operation wound, from her cuts and grazes, and from the holes where the tubes and drips punctured her skin.

Martin sat by her bedside watching her face. He couldn’t even hold her hand because the lightest touch brought up big purple bruises under her skin. Her face was so dark with bruising that she looked as if she had been beaten over and over again. He sat and waited, almost in despair.

The doctor in charge of the intensive care unit had told him that Annie’s blood had lost all its ability to clot and stop her wounds from oozing. From their battery of tubes and plastic packs they were filling her with all the things that her own blood couldn’t produce. Martin watched the packs emptying themselves into her bruised body. Even her hair seemed to have lost its colour, spreading in grey strands against the flat pillow. Her lips were colourless, and leaden circles like big dark coins hid her eyes.

Steve waited too. Bob’s determined enquiries had led him to Annie’s surgeon, and the surgeon had come down himself to talk to Steve.

‘How is she?’ Steve asked.

The other man had looked at him speculatively, as if he was trying to gauge how much he should be told.

‘I held her hand for six hours,’ Steve said. ‘I want to know what’s happening to her.’

‘She has pneumonia and kidney failure. She is also suffering from disseminated intravascular clotting. That is in addition to the usual post-operative effects and her other, more minor injuries.’

‘Will she live?’ Steve watched the doctor’s face. But he didn’t see any flicker of concealment, and after a moment the man told him, ‘I think her chances are about fifty-fifty. The next two or three days will tell.’

‘Thank you,’ Steve said.

Two days went by.

The third was Christmas Eve, and the hospital hummed with the sad, determined gaiety of all hospitals at Christmas time. The staff nurse on Steve’s ward wore a tinsel circlet over her cap, paper streamers were pinned from corner to corner, and Steve could see a big Christmas tree in the day room that linked the ward to the women’s ward across the corridor.

The double row of beds with their flowered curtains and the narrow view through the doors at the end had become perfectly familiar. It struck Steve that he already knew the other occupants as well as he knew Bob Jefferies or any of his other friends outside the walls of the ward.

On the day of the bombing the eight-bedded ward and its women’s counterpart had been cleared to receive the victims. They had been brought in one by one, and they had found that their experience was a stronger bond than years of acquaintanceship. By unspoken agreement, they almost never mentioned the bombing itself. But there was a wry, grumbling kind of determination to overcome its effects that linked the newspaper seller, whose pitch outside the store had been covered with falling rubble and glass, the teenage store messenger, the five other Christmas shoppers, and Steve himself. In the handful of days that they had been enclosed in the ward, Steve had unwittingly become a kind of hero. It was only partly because he was the most seriously hurt, and because he had been trapped for so long. The real reason was the tide of presents that flowed into the ward for him. Flowers and cards and gifts arrived for all of them, every day. It was Christmas. The world felt guilty sympathy for them, and the loaded table in the middle of the ward clearly showed it.

But Steve’s tributes, from advertising colleague and friends and clients, were set apart by their lavishness. There were complete sides of smoked salmon, champagne and whisky by the case, boxes of chocolate truffles and fruit and flower displays that came in great hooped wicker baskets. Steve had been embarrassed at first by the procession of presents, and he had wanted none of the luxuries except flowers to look at. He gave the rest away, to the other men and the nurses, and then he saw the delighted interest that greeted each new delivery, and he began to enjoy them too.

On Christmas Eve, from Bob Jefferies and some friends in the film industry, a television set and a video recorder arrived. With the machines was a box containing tapes of two dozen of the newest feature films, some not yet even released.

The young messenger-boy shuffled over to Steve’s bed and gaped into the box. ‘I haven’t seen
one
of these before.’

‘You’ve got plenty of time to see them now, Mitchie.’

That was the accepted level of reference to what had happened to them all. They shied away from anything more. Steve thought of Annie lying somewhere upstairs, and wondered what they would say to one another if she was here, instead of this assortment of strangers precipitated into companionship.

At six o’clock one of the nurses inexpertly opened one of Steve’s bottles of champagne. The cork popped and bounced over the polished linoleum floor and the silvery froth foamed into hospital glasses. The nurses handed the glasses round and the old newsvendor next to Steve sipped at his and smacked his lips.

‘Well,’ he pronounced. ‘I’ve known worse Christmases.’ He looked appreciatively at the staff nurse with the tinsel wound around her cap. ‘But I wish I was your age again, Stevie.’

To be called Stevie, and the way that the old man spoke, reminded Steve of Nan. The thought of her, with the determined paper streamers over his head and the winking fairy lights and his image of the old man’s Christmases, filled him with sadness.

I wish I was your age again
.

For what? Steve thought.

He hadn’t cried since he was a little boy, but there were tears in his eyes now. He wanted to get up and walk out of the room, defending himself with solitude as he had always done. But his broken leg and the pain under the blanket cage pinned him down. He felt his own weakness, and the way it exposed him to the need for other people to be tactful. Steve put his champagne glass down on the locker and turned his wet face into the pillows.

The others saw, and looked away again. Steve knew that they were raising the pitch of champagne jollity amongst themselves to shield him, and he felt the strangeness of what was happening more sharply even than the pain.

He lay and waited for the tears to stop forcing themselves out of his eyes, and thought about Annie. He knew Annie now better than he knew anyone else in the world, and he was afraid that she would die.

You mustn’t die, he whispered, as though they were buried again and she could hear him in the dark. You won’t die, will you?

The coldness of his fear for her dried up the weak tears.

Deliberately he turned his head back to face the other beds and reached out for his beaker of champagne.

Later, the hospital medical students came to tour the wards with their portable Christmas pantomime. They put on an extra lively show for the bomb victims. Steve lay and watched the clowning with a smile stretched over his face.

It was later still, when the overhead lights had been dimmed and he could hear the nurses rustling and giggling at the end of the ward, when Steve opened his eyes again and saw a man standing beside his bed.

He had a square, pleasant face with lines of tiredness pulling at his eyes and cheeks. He was tall and stooped a little, and he was looking down from his height at Steve lying in bed, as if he wasn’t sure whether to tiptoe away again.

‘It’s all right,’ Steve said distinctly. ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

The man’s hand rubbed over his face.

‘The sister said I could come in and see you for a minute.’

Steve reached up and clicked on the lamp over his bed. The circle of light enveloped them within the curtained space.

‘I’m Annie’s husband,’ the man said.

She’s dead. You’ve come to tell me that she’s dead
.

Steve tried to haul himself upright against his pillows so that he could meet squarely what Martin had come to say.

‘How is she?’ he asked flatly. And then he saw that the lines in her husband’s face were drawn by exhausted relief, and not by defeat at all.