The December dusk had turned to darkness when Clive finally got into Spurling’s. He made his way past the counter with its sweets and cigarettes, past the newspapers and magazines, to the stationery department at the far end of the shop, where, from the racks of disposable pens, he selected a rollerball and tested it on the squiggle-covered pad provided.
The pen would do. He decided to buy it and moved off towards the greetings cards, where he set about choosing a birthday card for his brother. He found some of the cards insulting or vulgar or even obscene; Julian would find them yet more offensive, for he conducted himself with scant concession to modernity. Clive was content to use a rollerball, while his elder brother wrote only with a pencil or fountain pen, still called the radio the ‘wireless’ and wore such things as sports jackets, overcoats, brogues, and a watch that needed winding. Not that Clive himself was much more au courant: the influence of their parents had been, and still was, too strong.
Still browsing the birthday cards, he came upon those intended for a brother. Most were impossibly sentimental. Even so he was tempted to send one meant for a boy obsessed with football, fishing, train-spotting or cricket. But that joke, too, alas, Julian might not appreciate.
In the end he chose a blank card with a view of Venice by Canaletto. He would write the greeting himself, no doubt with his new rollerball.
This was the penultimate Saturday before Christmas so he had to queue at the cash desk. Eventually, however, adding these purchases to his shopping bag, he was able to emerge into the air.
The High Street made an attractive scene, what with the illuminated stars and angels strung across it, in diagonal rows, by the Chamber of Commerce and perhaps also the Rotarians, or the Round Table, or the Lions, or whoever they were. Clive knew almost nothing about such matters and rarely so much as glanced at the front page of the freesheet that was his only source of news about these goings-on. But Christmas was coming and this afternoon he was feeling more than usually benevolent towards the inhabitants of his little home town.
As usual during shopping hours, parked vehicles lined the kerb on the far side of the High Street. Clive had left his car in the council car park, reachable by an alleyway between two shops.
At the moment the traffic was being held up by the pedestrian-actuated lights further down towards the War Memorial, so with appropriate circumspection he was able to cross, threading his way between two queueing cars to gain the empty half of the road.
Having passed between a big, mud-spattered hilux parked on his left and a silver Mercedes estate car, he gained the pavement and was about to proceed when for some reason he felt an urge to look back.
The traffic lights had turned green. Concealed from that direction by the hilux, a boy of about ten, in jeans and a dark hoodie with the hood down, wearing white earbuds, had entered the gap Clive had just negotiated and was showing no sign of caution. Either he had not realised that the lights had changed or he was misjudging the speed of an oncoming Range Rover – because he was keeping straight on, into the road.
It made no sense to shout a warning. Nor did Clive think much about that. Purely from instinct he dashed out to scoop the boy back, but then he saw that there was no time for them both to change direction and retreat, because the Range Rover was still accelerating, and so, with a wild lunge, made clumsy by his bag, Clive shoved him forward and out of harm’s way.
The driver of a Transit van coming from the left, towards the lights, must have seen what was happening: by braking hard he had managed to stop short of the place where the boy, arms outstretched, was falling headlong to the tarmac. The car behind the van could not stop soon enough and piled into it with a crump.
These things Clive saw and heard in the last moment before the Range Rover hit him.
The impact threw him into the air. The trajectory he described seemed to last an age, without pain, offering a crazy view of the High Street, its festive shop-windows, its stars and angels. He just had time to say to himself ‘I am being killed’ before he collided with the merciless solidity of the roadstone and knew nothing more.
・・・
He was extricating himself from a dream involving the disassembly of a piece of furniture – a wardrobe perhaps, or an armchair; he couldn’t be sure. It was finished in dark oak and comprised in part a number of inexplicable spindle-shaped objects holding it together. He had been taking it to pieces because, vaguely, a house-move was either in progress or mooted. Verity had been behind him, silently, somehow, egging him on.
The dream faded, its texture and details dissolving, leaving him with nothing more than a sense of obscure and morbid nonsense involving his former girlfriend, such dreams being frequent with him of late. It was supplanted by the realisation that he was in bed, a hospital bed, and in pain, more or less all over, but chiefly in his midriff and, most particularly, in his right thigh.
Besides all that he felt queasy, light-headed, just as he had felt on that wretched ferry to Jersey – again with Verity – when the rain had intensified and with it the swell. She had sat beside him, in the window seat, digesting her breakfast of bacon and egg and sausage while his had rebelled inside him. With rain sheeting down the glass he had stumbled to his feet. The vast cabin, full of holidaymakers and unnaturally subfusc on that June mid-morning, had seemed to present him with endless obstacles on his way to the lavatories, which were themselves crowded with vomiting passengers. That too had been a nightmare. His will had failed at the last moment: he had wanted to get into a cubicle, but none had been vacant and he’d had to make do with a basin in full view of everyone else.
Clive was seasick now, all right, but he seemed not to be undulating and his stomach felt empty.
Then he recalled what had happened opposite Spurling’s.
Light from the corridor revealed that he had been placed in a ward of six beds, his bed being the second, clockwise, from the door. To his left rose two tall windows, now covered with pale blinds. Sundry small noises – congested breathing, faint wheezing and low, intermittent and almost inaudible groans – were issuing from his fellow patients. Judging from these noises most if not all of them were elderly men.
His right leg had been encased in splints and suspended from a gallows-like frame. The different parts of his body hurt him differently. The dull, deep, heavy aching in his thigh provided a basso continuo for sharper pains from his ribs, though these too seemed muffled, robbed of their highest frequencies, as it were, which suggested that he had been given, or was still being given, painkillers: beside the bed stood a drip attached to his right forearm. He was unpleasantly sure that he had been fitted with a catheter.
Clive’s dismay deepened. Not only had he landed in the clutches of the Nosocomial Horror Show but the nausea and various other sensations told him that he had been anaesthetised and operated on. What were his chances of avoiding sepsis? Or even of walking again? He was gripped by fear for the future. Would he even be able to return to his flat, still less look after himself?
He felt parched. There may have been a jug of water on the bedside cabinet he could just discern to his right but it hurt him too much to turn his head further in that direction, though not in the other. With his painful left hand – bruised and abraded where it had hit the road – he groped about in the bedclothes for whatever they provided to summon help, but found nothing.
His fellow patients seemed to be unconscious. No one yet knew he had come round. For a time, then, he could be alone with his thoughts.
In a single reckless moment it was possible that he had ruined his life. Given half a second to consider the consequences he would not have behaved like that. That boy was old enough to have known better. If he had been run over instead, it would of course have been a tragedy. Given his size he would probably have been killed. Cruel, regrettable, and so on, but such things happened all the time.
Clive saw again the oncoming LED headlamps, the looming radiator grille and bumper, the massive, uncompromising, box-shaped body – in some dull colour, grey, most likely – and wondered what had been the aftermath. At least one bystander would have called for an ambulance. An appalled but fascinated circle would have gathered round his sprawling form. If anyone had had knowledge of first aid, the rubberneckers might have been told to stand back and await the arrival of the paramedics. The police would have been called too. The High Street and perhaps surrounding roads would have become gridlocked, this spreading, even, to the bypass, which begged the question of how an ambulance had got through. Nonetheless through it must have got, or he would not be here.
The driver, in distress or otherwise, might have pleaded, to anyone who would listen, his, or her, inability to avoid the collision.
And what of the boy? Had he been hurt too? Had his family been present?
The nausea was diminishing somewhat. Clive turned his mind to practical matters. In the short term at any rate he would be unable to return to his flat, which was on the second floor and accessible only by stairs. Assuming a long stay in hospital, he would have to ask Julian or Father to empty the fridge-freezer and switch it off, leave the central heating on its frost setting, shut off the water, and visit now and then to collect the mail and check that all was well.
An unanticipated inspection of his flat by a member of his family might prove embarrassing. He recalled the reply he had written to Verity, which he had never posted but kept in his bureau, together with the even more caustic letter to him that had ended their affair; she had refused to respond to his phone calls and emails or even the doorbell. Then there was his laptop, which held certain data he would prefer to keep private, nothing pornographic, but personal, such as his correspondence, especially with Verity, together with details of his financial affairs.
Julian, he knew, was too honourable to pry, but Father might be another matter. Access to passwords would be needed to deal with the utility providers and to respond to email. And what had happened to his phone? Had he broken it in his fall?
Then there was his car. One key had been in his pocket, while the other was at home, so it was unlikely that anyone could yet have retrieved it for him. Would he have to dispute the excess charge the council would already have levied? Might they even impound the car?
And what of his job? How long would he be off and would it even be open for him, if and when he recovered? What were the chances of someone – that reptile, Bewlay, for example – easing himself into Clive’s place?
Clive’s mood rose a fraction when he remembered that as part of his package he was entitled to private medical care and fell again when he remembered that, as one of the junior employees, he was covered only for minor procedures. There was small chance of his being moved to a private clinic.
The old men continued to groan and wheeze. He began to distinguish one set of noises from another and speculate as to the age and affliction of its source. At long intervals NHS bods passed to and fro along the corridor, but none entered the ward.
Clive now perceived that what he had done could be viewed as heroic rather than what it was, idiotic. Might it even make the local news? Not the freesheet, which was only published monthly, but one of the regional TV programmes.
Although Verity owned a television she watched the news only to scoff at it as a specimen of propaganda. She had firm opinions on such matters, as indeed on many others. For example, she had memorably defined voting as the adult equivalent of writing to Father Christmas. Such opinions were something he still missed almost as much as he was missing her body. Rather against his better judgement, he had been mulling over the idea of proposing to her when the end had come.
Clive had never been good with women. He didn’t understand them and his shyness had prevented him from asking out more than a handful. Besides Verity he had only ever slept with one girl, during his first year at the university, and that too had ended in recriminations. She had accused him of various crimes abhorred by the left, such as being an unreconstructed member of the patriarchy and interested only in getting between her legs: the latter charge, at least, being valid.
When Verity had come along she had taken him over and he was still not sure how that had happened or how she had regarded him; he had feared becoming henpecked and worse in later life. On the other hand, she was pretty, she had brains, and she had independence of mind. So independent was she, indeed, that she was working towards starting her own business.
Besides, she was a good social fit for him. Her family and his were compatible. His parents approved of her, without, he was certain, being aware of how uninhibited she could be under his duvet or hers, for she had her own flat as well.
The thought occurred to him that if she learned of the accident she might relent, just a little, and come to see him here.
For a long time he lay there fantasising about this. At last he admitted that she would not be coming, full stop, and fell into a troubled doze, only to be aroused, along with his companions, at six o’clock when a nurse entered the ward and turned on the lights.
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