Corpsing (3 page)

Available in three finishes (matt black, blue or stainless), the .40 ESP will take all the punishment you can throw at it.

Our engineers and scientists have immersed the .40 ESP for extended periods in salt water, have fired it at temperatures of -44°F (-42°C) and 153°F (67°C) and have subjected it to NATO Mil-Spec mud and rain tests.

The result?

As this catalogue goes to press, the .40 ESP has test-fired over 37,000 Smith & Wesson rounds without malfunction: no failures to feed, no stovepipes, no jams whatsoever!

The specially designed Smooth-barrelling System (patent pending) reduces wear and tear, to enhance and prolong the .40 ESP’s service life.

In the .40 ESP, we at Gruber & Litvak have created a mid-size defensive pistol with all the stopping power that the discerning shooter will ever require.

As well as setting new standards for the future, our scientists have also learnt from the successes of the past. The .40 ESP therefore operates with a modified Browning-type action – as based upon the classic and much-loved Government Model 1911.

In addition to which, the .40 ESP – thanks to our Recoil Disenhancement System (RDS™) – produces far less felt recoil and muzzle flip than equivalent pistols.

Finally, the .40 ESP is a remarkably
safe
pistol. It has an ergomically efficient mixture of five separate safeties – some passive, some active.

Gruber & Litvak have a world-wide reputation for creating quality firearms, a reputation that the launch of the .40 ESP can only serve to enhance.

The .40 ESP is yet another step on our long road ‘towards the perfect pistol’.

For six weeks I was less a human being, more a terribly unproductive drain upon the National Grid. I owe my life to the men and women of Southern Electric. Six weeks. Their power breathed for me, regulated my pulse, kept me warm, fed me, made quietly eloquent beeps on my behalf, and monitored almost every aspect of my physical and mental existence.

This was the dream-illness: the one you’re not around for.

The best analogy I’ve managed to come up with is this: Being in a coma is like being a perfectly functioning, top-of-the-range television transported to a completely uninhabited moon. With no TV signals to receive, my mind was the clearest cleanest static. In static, just as in flames, you soon start to imagine patterns – and to see pictures. These pictures are the much-debated topic of coma-dreams. My chief terror was the wolf, who appeared in my mind periodically – though I had no real sense of time. The wolf would eat my legs. Other people in my Internet coma-recovery group claimed also to have encountered the wolf – but only after I had mentioned him first.

When I came round I was inexplicably bruised all over, particularly on my upper arms. My foreskin appeared to have been pierced by a sharp object, possibly a scalpel.

My legs were slightly wasted away, making walking an issue of rehabilitation and encouragement.

The only period in my entire adult life that I’ve had a full set of fingernails was the first few hours after I came out of my coma.

My room in the ITU was dim. Anglepoise lamps rained their light down on to desks. LCDs glowed green and red.

Mother was there at my bedside – as she had been for most of the previous month and a half. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was her smiling face.

My first thought was
I need to have a piss;
my second,
There is someone out there who it is now my obligation to kill.

Yes, even the word
obligation
was there in my mind.

They removed my respirator a few hours afterwards. I indulged myself with a marathon choking and gasping session.

There was a great deal of mother-love.

Still, I started biting my fingernails before I started talking. (As soon as I realized it really
was
my mother who was there.)

‘Granny sends her love,’ she said.

This was a lie: Granny had Parkinson’s and couldn’t remember whether she took sugar in her tea, let alone the existence of some abstract grandson. (She took two.)

Doctors and nurses came and went.

I began to recover.

Waking was often a trauma, and it was best I did it alone. I attacked people – that’s how it seemed to them. Really, I was trying to fight them off – them and their whole physicality.

I was terrified of bunches of flowers. They made me cower. Yet I felt compelled to count all the grapes in any bunch I received, in order to control them.

People were too much: giant beings with pancake-sized pores, football-bulging zits and spearlike nostril hairs. Doctors leaning in to my face with penlights always made me scream.

‘This won’t hurt.’

It already does.

If I could, I would have tried to encourage the nurses to wear even more make-up, to be as artificial as they could possibly be. My ultimate wish was for them to become medical geisha.

It felt as if I had popped up into the world like an
écorché
– a flayed man, peeled of all protection, experiencing breeze as hurricane, cough as cataclysm, smell as orgasm (if nice) or disembowelment (if nasty), touch as torture. I didn’t want to be so beyond-human. I wanted the muffled dullness of my old-self. The hippies thought that the doors of perception could be cleansed with one sort of acid. But when it happened to me, it felt more like the other sort. Hydrochloric. An acid bath. Everything outside dissolving until the inner is exposed to forces it was never meant to face.

There is too much world.

That was the only sentence I could come up with.

There is too much world.

(Remember the playground joke: What goes plink-plink fizz? Two babies dropped in an acid bath.)

I refused to be prodigal of my perceptions. I closed my eyes and listened to the ticking of the floor, the walls.

I got a reputation for being mildly eccentric.

Why couldn’t they credit me with surviving? That’s all I wanted. My badge and go home.

It was music that lassooed me and pulled me back in towards humanity. Hospital Radio – like a downer, slowing the world up and shooting it through a filter of hazy rippling golden nostalgia. I would sit there with the disability-grey headphones in my ears, blissing out. Hospital Radio is audio heroin. I heard rumours that some of the porters took bootleg tapes along with them when they went to visit their dealers – swapping a stack of C90s and some legal storeroom drugs (Valium, methadone, Mogadon) for a 10 per cent discount on their few twists of coke. Hospital Radio – it brought me close to a sad ecstasy. This was music for another generation, a generation of which I was temporarily a member. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Doris Day – these people knew about pain and suffering, they understood the need for mollification and nullity. These were the Saints in the Church
of Our Lady of Nice’n’Easy. Bless them, bless each and every one of them.

My recovery was progressing well.

Then, all at once, they started telling me the news – the good news and the bad news.

‘Umm, listen…’

He pulled up a chair and sat down at my bedside. (This meant news.) He spoke quietly and quickly. (This meant the news was not good.) And he used my first name. (This meant Lily was dead.) He spoke for a while in a comforting tone. (This meant Lily had died very slowly, in an agony so extreme that it took her beyond being Lily, being female, almost beyond being human.)

I counted the square tiles in the ceiling.

When I started listening again, the doctor was talking about my legs. Apparently I was going to have to do physiotherapy.

‘How long did she take to die?’ I asked.

The doctor looked at me, realizing a lot of things all at once. He knew he shouldn’t lose his temper with me, so he went back to the beginning.

‘We estimate the time of her death to be approximately twenty minutes after the shooting.’

‘In the ambulance?’

‘We didn’t try moving her – she died in the restaurant.’

‘Were you there?’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Have you ever been there?’

‘Um, no.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t recommend it as a dining experience.’

He obviously didn’t feel this was a gag he had any right to laugh at.

‘After she died, she was brought here – to UCH. Then she was buried. It was a nice funeral, I hear.’

‘Did you ever see her?’

‘No. I didn’t. By the time she got here it was a matter for the pathologist.’

‘Mmm,’ I said, ‘brain matter.’

‘Perhaps we should discuss this later.’

‘Do you know if she said anything? If she said anything about me?’

‘To be honest, the injuries she sustained were so severe –’

‘You mean her head?’

‘Principally.’

I smiled, I believe for the first time.

‘I like that –
principally.’

He went on.

‘The areas of her brain that dealt with speech were still physically intact. However, the shock must have been so great that I doubt she would have been capable of using them.’

‘Is that your professional opinion?’

‘It is.’

‘How long have you been a doctor?’

‘Twelve years.’

‘It would probably be a good idea to take you seriously, then.’

‘I’ll leave that up to you.’

‘You know, it’s funny. I’m sure I heard her saying
bastard-bastard-bastard
as I was dying.’

‘Given that you were in a room full of people who’d just seen a hitman shoot you, I’d say it’s quite likely one of them was calling
him
a bastard. You probably heard that.’

‘Lily was my girlfriend for two years. I know her voice.’

‘Well, maybe you weren’t in quite the best state –’

‘I did die, didn’t I?’

‘For about half a minute, yes. In the operating theatre.’

‘Tell me about the guy who shot us.’

‘I think I’d better leave that to the police.’

Eventually, I found out that the hitman was now in jail. The way he had been caught, putting it together from what I’d read in the newspapers (my mother kept all the cuttings) and from what the police let slip, was actually quite stupid.

Apparently, he’d arranged for some kid to stand outside Le Corbusier holding his bike while he went inside to do the job. This, he’d thought, would save him valuable getaway time afterwards. No need to unlock the bike, just take it from the kid who he’d paid to hold it. Of course, the boy wasn’t to know what was about to happen inside the restaurant. It seemed a sensible plan. However, this particular boy thought that the money the hitman was paying him wasn’t enough – so he decided to nick the bike instead. Unfortunately, his feet didn’t really reach the pedals. So when the hitman emerged, fresh from his crime, he found the boy and the bike gone. But when he looked fifty yards along the road, he saw the boy wobbling up to, then crashing into, the side of a black cab. The hitman sprinted down the street, becoming more conspicuous with every step. The police would have no shortage of witnesses to his mad run. He started shouting. More witnesses. The cab-driver got out of his vehicle to see if the bike had done any damage to his paintwork. The bike – a Cannondale Super-V Raven 4000 – was worth a couple of months of most people’s wages: including the cab-driver’s. This was the simple reason for the hitman’s pursuit. When the police later asked him
whatever he was thinking of, running away from the commission of a serious crime and straight into a confrontation that would draw the attention of half the street, the hitman replied: ‘My bike is a Cannondale Super-V Raven 4000. You don’t just let some kid steal one of those. The kid was going to die, especially if it was damaged.’ ‘But you’d just shot someone,’ the police said. ‘To be honest,’ the bike-crazed hitman replied, ‘I forgot all about that the moment I saw my bike was gone.’ The damage to the black cab was minor but unmissable: the pedal had removed paint, leaving behind a silver-grey slash on the left rear wheel-arch, the handlebars had skidded along the side of the door. The bike itself was unharmed. The kid, though, was in the way of getting himself killed – if not by the hitman then by the cab-driver. By this time, traffic was building up behind the incident. Horns were being honk-HONKED. Heads were snaking out of driver’s-side windows. Expletives were escalating. As soon as the boy saw the hitman running towards him, he dropped the bike and took off. Again the handlebars slammed into the paintwork.

‘It’s mine,’ shouted the hitman as he arrived, hardly out of breath. ‘The bike is mine.’

He tore it from the cab-driver’s hands.

‘That little cunt was stealing it,’ the hitman said.

‘Well, someone’s going to have to pay for this.’

The cabbie’s thick finger touched the grey gash.

‘Yeah,’ said the hitman, mounting up. ‘You will.’

Two of the drivers trapped in the cars behind had got out to give the cabbie some up-close-and-personal grief.

‘Come back!’ shouted the cab-driver.

The hitman was riding rapidly along the pavement, the bike rocking from side to side between his legs.

The cabbie swore, and didn’t bother chasing him.

‘Alright! Alright!’ he said to the two irate drivers.

It was then that they heard the sirens, shortly followed by the gunfire.

The hitman was now in Wandsworth Prison.

I imagined him in his grey cell: doing squats and press-ups to keep those pecs and calves toned up, reading bike magazines and fantasizing about gear ratios, waking up from a nightmare about not having killed me – of having failed to do his job well enough.