Approaching Zero (17 page)

“Name please?” she asked and immediately shared a look with Suri, recognising that they were two of a kind in the smiling stakes—the sky could fall and they would be smiling at the pretty colours. Her mauve blouse was covered in pin badged with motivational slogans designed to tell patients that what they were going through would pass quicker if they were able to relax and smile—laughter, as it was, being the best medicine.

Kathy answered all of the questions that this young receptionist asked, explaining that she only got out of hospital the day before, was now in a fair amount of pain, and decided that it would be wise to get herself checked out. She was getting into the spirit of the lie, contorting her features into all kinds of pained shapes, when she felt a familiar rising inside of her. Its cause was also all too familiar—rotten meat, congealed puke, festering dairy, all of it lingering in the air and trailing a path up her nostrils and settling on her tongue. Before she could turn around to see the source of the smell or reach into her bag for the vapour rub, she was bent over, splashing vomit onto the disinfected floor of the waiting room. She stayed in that position, her stomach aching from the depth of the retching, while the staff sprang into action around her.

“I need a chair over here,” the receptionist called behind her and suddenly two porters ushered Kathy off her feet, into a wheelchair, before wheeling her away from Suri.

“I’m fine, really,” Kathy protested, but she looked anything but fine. Her face had cleared of any discernible colour except for the orange vomit on her chin and she was struggling to catch her breath. Consequently, no one was listening to her. “Just wait here, Suri,” she then said, accepting her fate and as she was wheeled away she could hear the commotion in reception and knew that she was missing the moment they had both been waiting for.

“There’s a fire in my cock!” a high-pitched voice exploded behind her. “Help me! Put it out! It’s burning!”

Kathy could still hear his cries and the receptionist’s attempts to appease him as she was wheeled into a cubicle. She tried to peek through the curtains, but as the porters left they were replaced by a nurse who snapped them shut and ordered Kathy onto the bed.

“I really don’t need to be here,” Kathy protested once again.

“Let me be the judge of that,” the nurse told her, sternly but with a friendly undertone. He was the first male nurse that Kathy had seen in her recent experience of hospitals and he moved around her efficiently, checking her eyes, ears, pulse, blood pressure, before feeling around her injured face and watching for the reaction. He was extremely handsome, but her internal compatibility assessment drive, which she was surprised to see working even at a time like this, dismissed him on the grounds of his age. She may have been old enough to be his mother, which wasn’t a thought that she found pleasing.

“Really, I’m fine,” Kathy told him.

“Well, let’s just stay here until they get your puke up off the floor out there, eh?” The tone he now took made her feel as if he could be her parent rather than the other way round and she liked him less and less all the time.

“Your daughter can come in after we get a doctor to look you over.”

Now she really didn’t like him, but she let him go about his business freely while she listened out for more from their suspect. On the plus side, she knew that he would have to spend time at the hospital even if they did see his as a serious problem. Everyone had to wait at some point in their hospital experience. It was just the way it was. There would be no hurry for her to get back on her feet again, which suited her, as she felt completely hollow after purging the evil from her stomach out in the reception. She also knew that she had Suri’s eyes out in the waiting room. She knew the seriousness of all this; she wouldn’t let the man slip through their net.

“I want to get a drip set up,” the young nurse told her and before she could open her mouth to protest again, he said, “No argument,” and was helping her out of her T-shirt.

“But I can’t be here all day.”

“An hour tops,” he told her and slipped a robe over her head bearing the words ‘Hospital Property’ over and over again, before slipping a needle into her arm and leaving her to it.

“Goddammit!” she huffed and couldn’t even fold her arms to cement the protest because of the fat needle in her arm. Suri didn’t have a mobile phone so she couldn’t get a message to her. In fact, looking around her, she saw that she didn’t have a mobile phone either. Suri must have had her bag; at least she hoped she did. She thought about ripping the drip out of her arm—her T-shirt was just on the chair beside her—but she must have puked up every last morsel of goodness from inside of her and she really did feel weak and shaky. She closed her eyes for a moment and was soothed by what she found there. Far from silent, the space she found at least relieved her brain from the drab view of the curtain and equipment around her. It also relieved what pain was left in her face. She stayed in the serenity of her own darkness until the screams in the cubicle next to her brought her raging back to reality.

“Make it stop, you bastards! It’s on fire!”

It was him. Kathy sat up suddenly. She didn’t need to strain to hear him, but she felt herself leaning closer to the curtains anyway despite the stench. She would have been sick again, but there really was nothing left and she was more prepared than she had been earlier too.

“Let’s get this off shall we, Mr. Denver?”

Kathy wasn’t sure if he was being attended by the same nurse, but he had the similar tone of compassionate efficiency.

“Be the fuck careful!” the patient snapped at him and then let out a piercing scream that made Kathy pull away from the curtain. There was then silence from the cubicle followed by ‘Urrgh’s from at least two new voices. Suri really had done a number on his nether regions.

“How long has it been like that, Mr. Denver?”

“Fuck, does it matter?” Denver’s voice was now breaking into tears. “Just sort it.”

Silence again and a few wincing noises from the patient and expressions of disbelief from the nurses and then, “I’m going to get someone else to have a closer look at this.”

After the curtain had swished back and forth and the only sounds to be heard were whimpers, Kathy knew that the man was on his own again. She slid off the bed and made a space in the curtain that would be small enough for the man not to notice her distant glance. She was immediately hit by an encore of the reeking that her senses had just started to manage. She heaved, but was able to contain anything further. She closed her eyes tightly to compose herself and then peeked again. The man was maybe late twenties, early thirties, and had a grubby quality to him, which was all the more prominent in contrast to the clean white robe he had been forced to wear. He had the look of a man who could spend his life washing and would still have dirt under his nails and greasy hair. Her view may have been influenced by what she knew about the nature of the man, but all she could see was filth. Unfortunately, all she could hear from the man were thoughts about his penis—the look and colour of it, the fear that it would never get better and on top of all that, the pain that he just couldn’t escape. She stayed with his thoughts as long as she could bear them, but there was no sign of Joshy there or of any other kind of perversion; his current predicament was dominating him.

“It’s fuckin’ burnin’” he screamed again and Kathy jumped back from the curtain, afraid that he had seen her, although he was far too preoccupied to notice anything around him. “Get me some ice, ya bastards!”

Kathy dared herself to peek again, but at that moment the curtain opened in Denver’s cubicle and a group of white coats surrounded him, saying things like, “This really is most unusual,” and “No, I can’t say I’ve seen anything like this in my career.”

Kathy paced her cubicle, stretching the drip flex as far as it would go, weighing up her options, listening and planning her next move. The discussions in the adjacent cubicle continued for some time and finally concluded when a cheerful voice said, “Well first we’ll get you something for the pain, old chap—something to sooth the old chap, old chap—”a few groans of suppressed laughter—“and then we’ll run a few tests and see if we can’t work out what’s got you in this mess.”

And then the swishing of curtains again. Kathy guessed that the pain relief would come quickly and then would come her chance. She pulled at the cannula in her arm; it wouldn’t budge and the pain bit into her so she took a closer look and managed to ease the needle out. The pain was still intense but it ended with the last of the sharp point out of her body. She wiped away the blood that the manoeuvre had left behind and then pulled off the robe and held it to her arm for a few minutes. The flow was easily stemmed and she quickly changed into her T-shirt. There was no danger of the medical staff coming in to stop her, she had seen what they were dealing with in the waiting room and she would be very near the bottom of their list of priorities.

“Right, let’s get you sorted,” she heard another voice tell the dirty man next door and then more screams followed as something was applied to his genital area, whether it was cream, ice, or an injection she really couldn’t care less. If they knew what this man was like they wouldn’t be so keen to end his suffering. “Let’s see how you get on with that,” the voice chirped, and then that curtain swish again. Now was her chance.

Kathy made herself as tall and confident-looking as she could and slipped into the kind of smile that she had seen on the faces of all the medical staff in the hospital. For this to work, it was all about confidence. Life itself was all about confidence, in fact, this was one of the first important lessons she had learnt as a psychologist and now it would be put to the test.

She left her cubicle via the foot of the bed and entered Denver’s with the same confidence swish of all doctors and nurses alike. “Afternoon,” she told him cheerfully, now able to see the additional details that fit his profile so aptly—the acne, the bad teeth, the haircut that he had obviously done himself.

“Fuck’s this?” he said. It was obvious that he was no longer in as much pain, but it did nothing to improve his patience.

“Just need to update your info,” Kathy told him merrily and before he had the chance to answer, she snatched the clipboard from the end of the bed and was out of the cubicle. Safely back in her own cubicle, she read the information there—Miles Denver, such a strange name for a man from the Midlands, as if his mother had had a fling with a honky-tonk cowboy—And an address! She’d done it! She had his address.

Kathy tossed the clipboard on the bed and darted out. She then had second thoughts. She really didn’t want the clipboard traced back to her so she took it with her and when she arrived back in reception, she slipped it onto the desk when the receptionist was looking the other way. She was full of energy now, bursting to get to the car, hit the road, and get to Josh as quickly as she possibly could, but she couldn’t see Suri. Had she gone without her?

She scanned every inch of the waiting room, which was still bursting with the noise of the afflicted and the smell of antiseptic and eventually saw Suri seated between two old women; she had taken one of the lady’s hands onto her lap and her eyes were fixed closed in concentration. The second woman looked to her friend or sister the whole time as if watching for signs of change in her condition. Suri then slowly opened her eyes as if waking from a deep sleep and the smile awakened with her. Kathy sighed deeply at the sight of her and marched over.

“I’ve got his address, Suri. We need to go.”

Suri slowly turned to face Kathy, her eyes glazed and puffy. She didn’t say anything for a moment as if she didn’t recognise Kathy at all. And then something switched in her focus and the reality of the present dawned on her; she was in the hospital, Kathy had been wheeled away, the man had been taken too, and now here was Kathy ready to take on the world. But Suri didn’t seem to share Kathy’s excitement.

“Should we call your policeman? It might be of danger, Kathy,” she said, lowering her eyebrows seriously.

“Nonsense! The pervert’s in there with his willy in a sling!”

The two old ladies didn’t even try to disguise their huffing and puffing revulsion at this interruption.

“But–”

“We haven’t got time for this. Say your goodbyes and I’ll meet you in the carpark,” Kathy said before turning and marching away, across the waiting room and out of the automatic doors, without looking back. The urge to crack this, to rescue Joshy and put an end to this whole sorry mess had taken over her and when reached the carpark and got in the Mini, she debated going without Suri—she wasn’t going to be much use to her in this part anyway. The only thing that stopped her was the realisation that she still had her handbag. She would have to wait for her.

“Come on!” she urged with the engine running, her fingers tapping a heavy beat on the steering wheel. “Come on!”

Five minutes later, the door opened beside her and Suri slipped into the car.

“Next time I say we need to go, we need to go! Do you understand?” Kathy snapped, manoeuvring out of the carpark before Suri had even pulled her seatbelt on. “Do you have my bag?”

“It is here,” Suri answered sheepishly. “I am sorry, Kathy.”

“Never mind that. Just hold on. We’re not losing another one.”

Chapter 17

Kathy skid the car around the bend into Miles’s road, slowing only to view the numbers of the flats that she found there.

“Eighteen to twenty-four; twenty-five to thirty-one. There,” she said, but drove past and pulled the car onto a kerb in the next street. She was out of the car almost before turning the engine off. “You’ll be safe here,” she told Suri then grabbed the phone out of her bag and slid it into her pocket. “I’ll be in and out,” she said and charged off towards the block of flats. If she had looked more closely she would have seen that Suri’s face was pleading with her not to go, but she felt too helpless to put it into words. All she could do was watch as Kathy disappeared around the corner.