Sugarcoated (14 page)

You’d have to go back to the Old Testament or
that
scene in
Singin’ in the Rain
to find a wetter night for any soul to be trudging in squelching soles through the streets of Glasgow.

Not that there was even a spit when I set out for the Western Infirmary, which explains why I’d no brolly. (Actually I never have a brolly, me.)

The heavens waited till I was a good half way into my journey before they let rip. Clod’s Law, eh? And you know that kind of boingy gymnastic rain that buckets so hard it bounces off the pavements soaking you from the bottom up and the top down at the same time? That’s what I was up against. I’m not exaggerating, I was so sodden I felt like I’d peed myself. And wet boy-shorts are not the pleasantest of sensations when you’re going to meet a fella. Possibly his mum, too. Of course it didn’t help that I’d left the
house in a denim (the most rain-unfriendly fabric known to man) jacket and
those filthy streetsweeper jeans
a
s
Mum called the trousers that, in fifteen minutes of walking, had blotted up so much puddle-water they were glued to the tops of my thighs like sloppy cold papier mâché.

‘Where are all the taxis?’ I grumbled, ton-weight legs lurching me along the deserted main road. ‘And what am I doing out here anyway? It’s the middle of the night.’ For the umpteenth time I used my mobile to call a black cab.

‘I’m sorry. Your call is in a queue.’ The same warm and dry and cheery operator I kept on reaching chimed like it didn’t matter that a girl was
drowning
out here. In the background plinky-plonked the same muzac loop of
Here Comes the Sun
. Was that meant to be a joke? Did the cab company play
Let It Snow
in a heatwave?

I couldn’t believe my luck: the one and only night I needed to get
anywhere
fast there was barely a car on the road.

Definitely Clod’s Law,
I sighed, stopping on a corner and squeezing half a gallon of rain from the ends of my
hair. For a moment I considered turning back home. Being smart for a change. Phoning the hospital to say I’d pop in first thing in the morning. After all, if Dave Griffen was coming out of his coma he must be less critical now. Delaying my visit a few hours wouldn’t matter to him, would it? It might be even for the best, since the sight of a big wet doughball like me appearing at Dave’s bedside with her clothes clinging in all the wrong places and her nose running was hardly going to be therapeutic for him, was it?

Yeah, better to come tomorrow on the bus all nice and dry
…

I was
so
close to aborting my errand-of-mercy. Only I spotted approaching headlights. And wouldn’t you know – Clod’s sodding Law again – it was
actually
a taxi. No FOR CLOD on its little orange light, alas and alack. No. Just three blootered geezers in the back roaring their heads off at me as the taxi shot past. Sprayed me from head to toe with gutter muck.

‘Lovely,’ I burbled, attempting to dry my dripping face with my hand. Of course this just made me even wetter. Too wet to turn back. And too late anyway.
Ahead of me, I’d spotted the blurry twinkle of floors in the hospital. Somewhere in those wards stacked on wards was Dave Griffen. Fighting for his life.

But asking for
me.

Wow!

The notion of that, I must confess: Dave Griffen
specially asked for me
!
is what kept me sloshing the remaining few blocks with ramrods tap dancing on the top of my head, water streaming down my face. I know this sounds mad, and it’s embarrassing to admit it. Shallow too. But I actually felt there was something movie-esque about the whole situation: Here I was. The girl in the rom-com. Hurrying, alone through deserted city streets. Plain but strong, I was. Possibly Jennifer Aniston drabbed down or padded up like Renée Zelweger in
Bridget Jones
to play the character of Clod Quinn. An Oscar shoe-in for any female movie star gorgeous enough in real life to go Ugly Betty for a few months. Bulked-up Jen/Ren-as-Clod can hardly see where she’s going for all that famous hair (dyed Clod-gingery and back-combed to attain that rain-frizzed look) in her eyes. She stumbles through the
wet, half sobbing to herself now when she reaches the hospital. She’s banging on locked doors, ‘You gotta open up!’ trying different entrances, determined to find a way in somehow …

Because nothing can stop her. Claudia Quinn’s on a mission to revive a friend her heart’s telling her could be so much more
…
Can she reach Dave Griffen in time …?

Sick this made me sound, I know, but in the throes of hurling my weight against a hospital door that was clearly marked NO ENTRY, I was actually delivering a schmaltzy film-trailer voiceover, muttering under my breath in an American accent. Nearly gave the cleaner dabbing away on the other side a heart attack.

‘I need Intensive Care,’ I bellowed at him when he spun round to see who was doing all the door-thumping.

‘Me’n’all now, thanks very much, hen,’ the cleaner was clutching his chest while he peered out at me. ‘Way in’s round the corner.’

Although there was a locked fire-exit between us, he reeled back when he’d looked me up and down.

‘But you’ll no’ get intae a ward the night.’

Backing away he jerked his mop at me. ‘Visiting’s seven till eight. Come back tomorrow.’

I’d a doubly helpful exchange with the bloke manning the only open door I could find.

‘Looking for Intensive Care –’ I made to barge past him, but he blocked my path, legs apart, arms folded. I’d stake my big toe on him being ex-army.

‘Where you going, pal?’ his greasy brown caterpillar of a moustache rippled when he spoke.

‘Intensive Care.’

‘That wouldn’t be your decision. It’d be mine. Unless you’re medically qualified. And the walking wounded always start off in Casualty. That would be here. See that desk. Give your details. Sit. Wait your turn.’

This fella – clearly acting out his Casualty bouncer job as a Glaswegian version of some heavy from Reservoir Dog
s
– strutted me towards a queue in reception. His fingers clamped round the tip of my elbow. Squeezed. Not in a chummy way. In front of me, two stoners with busted noses and bloodied shirts were growling insults through a screen, while the female clerk safe on the opposite side totally blanked them. She
just tapped away at a keyboard and smiling to herself like she was being serenaded by Julio Iglesias. Next in the queue a lassie with rubber legs and fairy wings was puking into her tutu. No way was I going near her.

‘Look.’ One of Uncle Mike’s sneaky wrestling jerks freed my arm. I backed away from the Casualty bouncer, checking all round me for direction signs to the wards. ‘I’m not sick. Just had a phone call to go to Intensive Care.’

‘Zat right. Not sick? But you blow in here shouting the place down?’ The doorbloke’s tash gave a sarky twitch. ‘We’ll let the doctors establish your medical fitness, shall we?’ he said, the softness in his voice not quite matching the meanness with which he seized my wrist when I dodged past him into a corridor through swing doors marked Wards.

‘Backup. Backup.’ He followed me, snarling into a walkie-talkie, his request a completely unnecessary waste of hospital resources in my opinion. Single-handedly he made a grand job of pinning me to a wall. Then racking my arm up my back till I yelped at him to stop.

‘Don’t even think about it on my watch, Wonder-woman,’ Casualty bouncer’s chewing-gummy breath was a hot whisper on my wet cheek, ‘unless,’ he was laughing, his caterpillar catching my wet hair in a way that turned my guts, ‘you really do fancy a night in Intensive Care with a feeding tube up your nose. Interested?’ He leaned his full weight against me. Pushed into my back with his pelvis to make his point. ‘Huh?’ When he wrenched my wrist all my strength was transfused with pain.

I know this fella was only doing his job, but to say I wasn’t happy about the way he restrained me was an understatement. And I knew I was being pretty stroppy but I liked the way he was talking into my ear even less. It was intimate and cruel at once, and worst of all – this is what made me shudder. This is what made me
mad
– it was kinda sleazy: here was a stranger thinking his uniform granted him power and licence to grind himself against me.

Think again, slime-ball.

You wouldn’t imagine there’d be any silver linings in growing up to be a girl with size nine feet, but take
it from me. See, when you stamp down hard with one of those big plates, it hurts like …

‘Fuuuuuuu-’

Instantly Casualty bouncer let me go to grab his stomped foot in both hands. While he was dancing the Rumplestiltskin, I used the rear butt-thrust that I’d thought was responsible for opening Stefan’s garage to whumph doorbloke to the ground.

Before he was back on his feet, I’d belted through the nearest set of double doors. Up a flight of stairs I stumbled, three at a time.

Six floors later and my heartbeat was thudding out of my ears, though not quite loud enough to drown the furious echo of Casualty bouncer’s promises about what I’d be getting when he’d his hands round my neck.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was scared. Metaphorically speaking this bampot chasing me had me up against a wall. He was in his rights to do so too. And I only had one option:

Keep on climbing, Clod. Find Sister Smith. Sort everything out
…

Rubber-legged, totally whacked, I burst through the doors of Intensive Care with so much force that they walloped the walls they were hanging from like fire-crackers exploding. Then ricocheted back. Whammed into my face.

When I took my hands away from my pulped nose and saw the evil eye I was getting from the nurse who’d responded to my entrance, I decided Casualty bouncer was a mere pussy cat.

‘Can you read?’

He might have had the build of a malnourished whippet and the hissiest of whispers, but this guy in a white tunic was no Sugar Plum Fairy.

‘NO ENTRY to my ward.’ He flourished the back of his hand against the warning signs in the ward doorway. Made the same gesture at the SILENCE posters flanking the walls. And it
was
his ward. He’d the badge on his tunic flashed in my face to prove it:

HEAD OF ICU: MARTIN SMART.

‘Sister Smith. I’ve to ask for Sister Smith. She phoned,’ I gasped, blood from my nose streaming into my mouth.

‘Ssssh,’ Nurse Smart’s index finger was pressed so firmly to his lips that their flesh paled. ‘You’re not shouting across to your pals in a nightclub now, sweetheart,’ Martin Smart half-shooed, half-backed me from the ward entrance just as Casualty bouncer’s latest threat echoed up from the stairwell below.

‘See when I get my hands on you –’

‘Sensational. A security ding-dong’s
just
what vulnerable patients on life-support need at one o’clock in the morning,’ Martin Smart’s tone was caustic enough to strip paint. ‘But it’s not happening here.’ As he spoke, Martin Smart was flipping down a bolt on the ward door, closing the other door on me, flapping me backwards.

‘Don’t you even think about crashing my ward looking for trouble. Or turning physical on me. Just get explaining yourself. Before I wheech you down the service lift to meet the big hospital cop who stops lollies like you stopping me from doing my job.’

Now I was really scared.

‘Please. I’m not looking for trouble. But I was phoned to come here. Urgently. By a nurse. From here.
Honest,’ I clasped my hands before the flinty eyes of Martin Smart. ‘Sister Smith called from Intensive Care. Said Dave Griffin was asking for me. Now that guy out there’s gonna kill me –’

‘Right. Zip the lip two secs now.’ Martin Smart, who listened hand on hip to my burbling, suddenly whisked me back through the door of his ICU and bolted it with a fraction of time to spare before Casualty bouncer set about pummelling it instead of me.

The tongue-lashing he took from Martin Smart for that!

‘You
dare
stress my patients. There’s folk hanging on to life by a thread in here. I’m getting right on to your supervisor –’

I pressed myself against a wall behind the ward door, listening to Martin Smart’s whisper grate strips off Casualty bouncer through the crack in his ward doors. I tried to pinch my nosebleed away while all this was going on. Tried not to sob, but when I finally heard the bouncer’s footsteps receding down the stairwell, I dissolved. Slid down to the floor, a streak of rain and tears and blood.

‘Now this better be good, because I’ve put hospital security on the line for you, but you look like you’re telling me the truth, and I hate bullies.’

Still whispering, but not quite so harshly, Martin Smart beckoned me to my feet. Led me into a wash-room. I waited while he scrubbed his hands with antiseptic soap, then nodded for me to do the same.

‘You said a Sister Smith phoned?’ he pressed paper towels to my nose, pursing at me in the mirror. ‘Not from this hospital.’ He shook his head. ‘What’s your name, princess?’

‘Dodia.’ I met Martin Smart’s eyes above the sink. Could tell by the way he was frowning that, at least, thank goodness, he definitely believed my reason for being here.

‘A Dizder Smid pode be,’ I added. Not particularly helpfully.

‘Two secs, Dodie,’ Martin Smart said, guiding my hand to my nose. ‘Keep pressing. Head up.’

I thought he might have gone to find ice but he came back empty-handed. There was an elderly female nurse with him.

‘Right. Nurse Young here’s worked thirty years on this ward. Doesn’t know your Sister Smith.’

‘Sorry,’ Sister Young shrugged at me. ‘And I’ve just checked the rosters in case there’s an agency nurse started but –’

‘Don’t know what this is about, Dodie. Something fishy. No Sister Smith in the Southern General either. We’ve just phoned –’

Martin Smart paused to ease the paper towel from my nose. He wetted fresh ones to wipe round my cheeks and mouth and eyes. Then he manoeuvred me to a chair and sat me gently on it. Tilted his chin to squint down like he didn’t know what to make of anything I’d told him so far.

‘We transferred David Griffen there this morning. Showed signs of waking up, didn’t he, Gloria?’