To Die For (14 page)

The police. How long had I been there? My mind was rambling. How long would they take to respond? Not long.

I opened my eyes. I’d passed out again. I saw the girl staring at me. She didn’t move.

I opened my eyes again. She was gone. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I was nearing the end. I didn’t seem to mind. You lived. You died. That was how it went.

I got the car started again and crunched the gears, tried to get reverse. The car stalled and jumped and lurched back, smashing into the car behind. I’d had it. I knew it. I was finished. All over.

I fell back in the seat.

I must’ve passed out again because the next thing I knew she was standing beside the car, shoving my arm. I looked at her for a moment, trying to place her. She was holding something towards me. It was a key. A car key. She pointed along the road to a black Saab. I looked at the car like an idiot. It took me an age to notice the ‘Auto’ label on the back. I pulled all my strength together in one final effort. I grabbed my bag and coat from the passenger seat, snatched the key from the girl and staggered to the Saab. I flipped the button on the key ring; the alarm blipped off. I opened the door and fell into the driver’s seat. I turned the ignition. As the car hummed with life, I heard the passenger door slam shut.

‘What are you doing?’

The engine thrummed, filling the silence between us with a kind of tension, a question unasked, unanswered. She looked at me and in her eyes was a look that I couldn’t read. It wasn’t fear or defiance or suspicion, though it seemed to carry all those things, like they were gathered together inside her, and held there by some kind of need.

But the blood was still seeping from my wound and I could feel the dizzying emptiness getting near again.

‘Can’t drive,’ I said.

‘I can drive,’ she said.

‘Then drive.’

Browne was drunk when he answered the door. He took one look at me and sobered up.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘In there.’

He pointed to the back of the house. I made it through the hallway and slumped into the seat at the kitchen table. I tried to peel off my jacket. I had no strength. The girl tried to help me, carefully pulling away the blood-soaked cloth. Browne opened a cupboard, grabbed some kind of surgical scissors and sliced through the jacket. Then he cut away my shirt.

‘Jesus, man,’ he said. ‘What have you done?’

I grabbed him, pulled him near.

‘Fix me,’ I said. ‘No medicine. I need to keep – fix me...’

When I came to, I was still in the kitchen, still in the seat. Browne, his hands and shirt bloody, was standing back looking at me. He was holding a scalpel. The table was covered in blood-soaked cotton wool, gauze.

‘I’ve done what I can for now,’ Browne said, his Scots accent less harsh now that he was more sober. ‘I’ve cleaned it and stitched it. You’re suffering from hypovolaemic shock and I suspect the bullet broke your scapula. It went through you, you know. I’ve given you a penicillin-based antibiotic. I remembered that you weren’t allergic to penicillin. That’s right, isn’t it? I managed to transfuse some blood. In short, you need to get to a hospital.’

‘No...’ I managed to say, ‘hospital.’

‘I thought not. Well, it’s your choice.’

‘My blood type – ’

‘Christ, I know what type you are: O. Same as me.’

I tried to move my arm but the pain cut through me. I was faint still, and weak. I was alive inside a carcass.

‘Your arm’s going to be useless for a while,’ Browne said, wiping his hands on a wet cloth. ‘I’ll bind it up tightly. Hopefully, you won’t die of shock or loss of blood or brain damage. Hopefully, your shoulder isn’t splintered too much to heal and there aren’t fragments of bullet still inside you. Hopefully.’

‘Yeah.’

He flung the cloth into the sink and reached behind him for a glass which he filled with Scotch. He took a couple of swigs. He looked at me for a moment. I was too weak to do anything except sit there. I thought if I tried to move I’d realize I was dead.

‘So, you going to tell me what all this is about?’ he said.

‘Trouble.’

‘So I gathered. Who’s the girl?’

‘Where is she?’

‘In the other room. Who is she, Joe?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Who shot you?’

‘She did.’

Browne sighed and puffed his cheeks. ‘Okay, Joe. Better I don’t know. What’s her name?’

I blacked out again. When I managed to open my eyes, I was lying on my back on a mattress. My arm was bandaged and bound to my side. The room was dark, but there was thin daylight behind the curtains, which meant I’d been out for a few hours at least. I could hear a voice speaking quietly in another room. Browne was talking to someone, but I couldn’t hear a reply. Was he on the phone? Was he selling me out? I tried to sit up. I didn’t make it.

I came to as Browne had just about finished rebandaging my arm. Watery morning light crept around the curtains and paled the living room. Browne fell into the chair opposite my mattress and looked at me through narrowed, red-rimmed eyes.

‘Awake, are you? You’ll have to stay here for a while. Until you’re strong enough to walk. We tried to get you upstairs into bed, but you’re too bloody big.’

‘What – ?’ I said.

My mouth was dry. Browne nodded, held a hand up to silence me, and left the room. He came back with a glass of water, helped me sit up, and lifted the glass to my lips. I drank some of it and fell back again.

‘Still getting the headaches?’ Browne said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you seen anyone about them?’

‘No.’

‘I told you a million bloody times, Joe, you’ve probably got scarring on your brain. You need to see someone.’

‘Can they do anything?’

‘I’m not a neurologist, I don’t know what they can do these days.’

‘Can they fix it?’

‘You mean can they repair the damage? No.’

‘Then what’s the point?’

‘They can help alleviate the symptoms. The headaches.’

‘I can live with headaches. I don’t want questions about gunshot wounds.’

He watched me for a moment, then, sitting back in his chair, reached down to the half-bottle of Scotch on the floor beside him and poured a couple of glasses. He offered one to me. I shook my head.

‘Take it.’

I reached out with my good arm and took the drink.

‘Alcohol is probably the worst thing to give you right now,’ he said. ‘But I hate drinking alone.’

He poured his drink down his throat. When he saw that I was going to spill mine, he reached over and took it.

‘This is the finest cheap Scotch money can buy,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t waste it.’

I passed out again, thinking that there was something I was going to say.

Images drifted through my mind, nightmarish and clammy and cold, all of them clogging together. It was something I couldn’t escape, something I couldn’t even see how to escape. I was back in the ring and my brain had been bashed to pulp and I was trying to stand and being choked by confusion, caught in a web.

I’d open my eyes and see Brenda sitting next to me, her hand on mine. I think I touched her face and it felt real. And then I’d remember. My eyes would close, my eyelids weighted down, and I’d go back into the darkness and fear, and I’d be on Mount Longdon, the wet cold making me shake uncontrollably, the boy lying on the ground, grinning at me. And then I’d look up and see the girl sitting high up on a stool, holding my hand, looking into me. And then I’d go again. It went on like that, for hours – or years, it seemed. And I wouldn’t know the difference between waking and sleeping but always I’d see her there, beside me, and I kept wondering if she was real.

A bright light woke me. I blinked.

‘It’s alive,’ Browne said.

He swayed as he came into the room, balancing a tray of food. He looked like a circus act. On the tray was a plate of something that looked a bit like fried eggs, beans and bacon. There was a small plate of doughy slices of bread and a mug of tea. I tried to sit up. My head felt light, my thoughts were dull and tied up with themselves. My arm throbbed, but there was little pain, and it was a long way off. I fell back.

‘That’ll be the morphine,’ Browne said. ‘It should be wearing off a bit by now.’

‘I told you not to give me anything,’ I tried to say.

‘Yeah. You told me. Now sit up and eat.’

He put the tray aside while he helped me up, padding my back with cushions. He put the tray down on my lap.

‘Not hungry.’

‘Eat anyway.’

‘Where’s the girl?’

‘Upstairs. Asleep. It’s eight-thirty p.m. You came here last night. You’d lost a lot of blood. I thought you might have severed the subclavian artery, but it’s all right. I don’t think I could’ve fixed you up if that had been the case. It was the exit wound, mostly. You must’ve had a high heart rate, pumped out a lot of the red stuff.’

‘The girl.’

‘I told you, she’s asleep. She stayed awake, right here by your side, until I gave her a tablet and put her to bed. You’ve had a blow to the head recently.’

Had I? I remembered the men in my flat, but that was weeks ago, wasn’t it? It was years ago.

‘Baseball bat,’ I said.

‘There’s swelling there, hell of a lump. I think you were suffering delayed concussion, probably exacerbated by the blood loss. You should’ve told me.’

There was something I had to say. I was trying to remember what it was. Why was I asking about the girl? I didn’t care about the girl. I remembered what it was I needed to say.

‘Heard you talking,’ I said.

‘Imagine that. Me talking. Whatever will I think of next.’

‘Who to?’

‘Don’t trust me, Joe? Suppose I was talking to the police? What’re you going to do about it? Now eat.’

I didn’t feel like eating. I looked at the food instead.

‘Don’t tell me what this is about,’ Browne said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

He was right about that. It was better he didn’t know. Hadn’t we agreed that already?

‘She wouldn’t tell me anything,’ Browne was saying. ‘About what happened, I mean.’

He was going the long way around not wanting to know.

‘I heard something interesting on the radio, though. Something about a suspected drug deal gone wrong, in Dalston. Three men dead and police searching for a man seen leaving the premises in the early morning. Man was described as big and ugly and very bloody stupid. You, I take it.’

My throat was suddenly dry. I drank some of the tea. It was strong and sweet. It was the best drink I’d ever had. I drank it all and dropped the mug on the floor.

Browne was quiet for a while, biting on his thumbnail, which, I knew, meant he was getting ready to say something significant. He’d done it every time he’d told me that it was time to quit boxing, that I was too old, that I risked permanent brain damage, or whatever.

I waited for him to speak. It was easier to let him take his time, otherwise he’d get crotchety and lose track of what he was trying to say, and then I’d have to wait for him to start all over again. I tried to eat the food, using a fork in my right hand. Browne had given me a knife too. He’d forgotten that I couldn’t use both hands.

‘Her parents, you know,’ he said finally. ‘Dead. Well, mother dead. Father...’

He threw his hands up as if to say ‘gone in the wind’.

It took me a few seconds to work out who he was talking about. When I realized, I said, ‘So?’

‘So? It’s a bad thing to lose your parents.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. It is. It is a very sad thing.’ He pushed this thought around his head for a second or two, then he said, ‘You shouldn’t have involved her in this.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘She’s so bloody young.’

He wasn’t really talking to me. After another moment, he said, ‘Are your parents alive?’

I shrugged with one shoulder.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘Where’d you think they are now?’

‘Dead, or around somewhere.’

‘That’s sad,’ he said softly.

I didn’t say anything to that. It didn’t seem sad to me. It didn’t seem anything to me. Your family were there when you were born. That’s all. They fed you until you were old enough to feed yourself, and then you left.

‘You’re drunk again,’ I said.

‘Wrong. I’m drunk still. And so what? Who else you going to get to heal your wounds? You want someone sober, go to Harley Street.’

‘Where’s this going?’

‘Huh?

‘The girl.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Going nowhere, I suppose. Just thought you might like to know about Kid.’

‘What?’

‘Kid. The girl. That’s her name.’

‘Her name?’

‘Yeah. Kindness. Some name, huh? Kindness. Apparently what they call children out there. In Nigeria. Or was it Ghana? Christian thing. Some name. Beautiful name.’

He left the room, nodding vaguely to himself and trying to walk straight.

He’d aged more than six years in the six years since I’d last seen him. His grey hair had thinned and was now wispy and straggly, clinging to his head in a desperate last stand. His hands had become gnarled. A red strawberry nose and broken blood vessels showed the years of heavy drinking. Mostly, though, what seemed to have aged him was defeat. He’d given up hope and with it he’d lost the spark. The papery skin and drawn face were the look of a man waiting out his time, an advertisement for wasted life. A long way from the success he’d once had.

I ate some food and made an effort to stay conscious. It was hard work. After a couple of hours, I felt reasonable. My arm was beginning to throb, but at least my head was clearer. I was beginning to think.

By the time Browne came in again, I had some idea of what I was going to do. Firstly, I was going to speak to the girl.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Okay.’

He stood and watched me for a moment. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.

‘My bag, where is it?’

He went off to get it. When he came back, I said, ‘There’s money in there. Take some.’

When he looked at me he seemed disappointed or something. He threw the bag to the floor. He was doing his noble act, refusing my money. I let it drop.