* * *
With the ambulance dealt with, and her patient safely seen off to A&E, Gulnaz sits and takes Alex’s trembling hand, trying everything in her power to pacify him with assurances that the injuries are not life-threatening, that Daniel will make a full recovery. Of course she can have no idea of his real distress; she’d never believe him if he told her, but simply having her company does, to his surprise, help him feel a little calmer. It’s less the words she uses, more the gentle sound of her voice that slowly quietens the screams. And by dissecting every detail of her face he’s able to assemble an image of composure over the one that has seared into his mind – of a face thrust upwards with teeth clenched, muscles in spasm. He focuses on the way she winds a strand of hair around three fingers as she speaks and how, each time she catches herself slouching, she pushes herself upright with her hands at the small of her back. Those other hands, outstretched; the other back, naked and hunched, are gradually pushed from his mind.
Herself still in shock, no doubt, Poor Gulnaz looks exhausted and dishevelled. Her eye makeup has smudged across one cheek; her skin is shiny with perspiration; her hair refuses to lie flat. And yet, the more Alex studies her the more perfect she seems. There’s a familiarity, a rightness to her face that seems disproportionate to the amount of time he’s known her, an intimacy that feels hard earned, as though they’ve already let go their defences and spent time building trust. Like two people who have previously walked, talked, laughed and cried together, shared food together, touched, kissed, even made love.
So easy to dismiss, to say that attachment to a carer is understandable, to point out that patients are forever falling for their nurses. But Alex is convinced that something else is happening here. For her part, Gulnaz remains the strict professional. Only her eyes give a hint of an inner struggle with her loyalties. And who could blame her if she were having second thoughts about Daniel? However loving their relationship at the outset, Daniel’s behaviour towards her now is in freefall. Is she too besotted to object? Or just too scared to speak out? Fact or fiction, Alex’s visions of a woman dodging objects as she fights her way blindly through a kitchen still refuses to relent.
When at last she’s convinced herself he’s okay, she leaves him with the television and busies herself in the kitchen. But Daytime TV holds no interest for Alex. He’s far keener to stand watching as she begins mopping up the spilled water, rounding up the potatoes and sorting out the roast. She is busily adapting the coffee table from his room to form an improvised cage over Daniel’s bed when the doorbell rings. From the moment she disappears to meet the waiting taxi, Gulnaz’s priorities are quite understandably with her patient, bringing him through to the sitting room, helping him to undress and climb into bed. Alex maintains a guilty watch from a distance. He knows the burning will plague his brother for days. He knows that tonight Daniel will lie awake under that cage and sting and itch for hours, so that even sleep cannot spare him. The pain will drill on into his dreams, inventing a hundred new ways to continue its torment.
Meanwhile Scoff, oblivious to his master’s misfortune, wastes no time in clambering up onto Daniel’s bed and burrowing through the blankets to colonise the tent. Daniel shrieks out for fear of those claws. Gulnaz drags the cat out and shoos him away, leaving Scoff to wander disgruntled through to the kitchen, push his nose into his bowl, take one look back at the room from which he’s been banished, and pad ahead of Alex through to the bedroom. Alex’s discarded pullover offers token solace; Scoff makes two complete circuits, pummels it and curls up into a ball.
The company is gratefully received. Alex wants Scoff closer; an intuition perhaps about what is to come. Before she leaves for the night, Gulnaz looks in on the room and cleverly reads his mind, picking Scoff off the floor and laying him at his side. Scoff stretches, yawns and begins head-butting the turn of the covers to open up a channel through to the warmth beneath. There’s a comfort in feeling the cat’s shallow breathing rhythmic against his chest, lulling him slowly off to sleep.
The same patch of mattress is still warm and bowl-shaped when Alex wakes, but Scoff is gone. The brush past of fur still itches his cheek. As he raises himself up and gazes around, a head bobs up from the foot of the bed, the pink mouth falling open, showing off his one lonely canine. But something plainly isn’t right. Scoff begins to meow. Not his usual gruff, discordant call, but a train of timid, infantine, almost pleading little cries. He makes an effort to stand, only for his hind legs to give way and throw him off balance. Alex levers himself round in the bed. With equal determination, Scoff tries again to get up and meet him halfway. But again the legs fail. This time he topples sideways and to Alex’s dismay starts to pee.
All the time something is screaming through Alex’s mind. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Scoff isn’t meant to die here, not like this.
Scoff has dropped to his stomach now, chin on the bedspread, front paws splayed to the sides, his hind quarters forming an M as his back sinks between the two wasted femurs; tiny, tiny snatched breaths that hardly disturb the fur, too fast to be counted. Just when it seems he will never stand again, he springs back to life, all four legs kicking out at the bedclothes and somehow bringing him to his feet. This, the voice in Alex’s head tells him, has to be where Scoff takes himself off to his basket for his final, very private few moments. He watches, waits and prays. Has a brainstorm in Scoff’s head put an enemy in among the folds of the bedding? His neck cranes forward, his big green eyes grow wider, like two glass marbles, the blacks showing huge and oval. Then he is gagging, retching, shaking violently and emptying himself from the rear, finally collapsing into the blankets, a spent force. The eyes glaze over with pupils still dilated, a spittled tongue draping itself over the single tooth between parted black lips.
Alex stares in stunned horror. This is the death he’s seen coming from the moment he first laid eyes on Scoff, but violently and horribly rewritten. He’d also foreseen Daniel’s reaction. Now that too needs revising. In his current fragile state, finding Scoff like this won’t just break Daniel’s heart, it will totally unravel him.
But maybe everything can be cleaned up. Maybe Scoff can be laid in his basket and things put back the way they were meant to be. The glassy eyes stare out at Alex, cynically awaiting a decision. Alex eases himself from the bed, careful not to soil the bedclothes further by disturbing the body. He heads for the chair; it’ll give him somewhere to put the items he needs. In the kitchen, he uses his teeth to pull an old cloth from the towel rail. Out in the bathroom he drops the cloth into the toilet pan and fishes it back out with the rubber cap of one crutch. With the same rubber cap he then harpoons a spare toilet roll and brings it to his lap. In the bedroom again, by bringing the chair alongside the bed, it is just possible to reach Scoff’s tail, lifting his back end as he drags to avoid further staining of the bedspread, then taking the limp corpse onto his knees. He dabs, wipes and rubs as best he can. And he closes the gaping eyes and mouth and rearranges the skewed limbs – re-sculpting the body to match his mental picture.
Back in the kitchen, he immediately meets with a problem: laying Scoff properly to rest will mean getting down on the floor. Getting himself out of the chair will require both hands. Scoff lies curled up in his lap. The only option seems to be to drop him over the side – like a piece of rubbish into a bin; like a soiled garment into a washtub. So far, Alex has managed to keep a check on his emotions, but the thought of doing that is almost too much. Swallowing the sound rising in his throat, he carefully positions his chair, looks away and lets go.
By sheer good fortune Scoff lands more or less correctly. Down on his knees, a slight repositioning of the head and tail, a little plumping up of the blanket, and really there is nothing more Alex can do. All his efforts are now needed for the mess in his room. Tissues and cloth at the ready, he grimly sets off to finish the job. For the first time he spots a second stain on the sheets where Scoff had been sleeping beside him. The poor creature must have be
en woken by his own incontinence and struggled to get away, only to make it as far as the foot of the bed. Having cleaned up where possible, Alex tosses the soiled rags and tissues under the bed. He breathes out. There is no longer reason to withhold his emotions. Not only is this death a tragedy; it is a catalyst, an escape valve for all the bewilderment he’s been locking up since his whole nightmare began. The pain is breaking through, like a drill about to strike oil; when it comes the outpouring will be unstoppable. He’s on the verge of howling the house down when something cuts him short.
“Oh Jesus, Alex, have you puked up, or something?”
Daniel stands at the doorway with arms folded. At first the words don’t register, until, looking down, Alex clocks the stained sheets and blankets and sees in a flash what is coming – but witnessed again through Daniel’s eyes: himself sat there on the bed, being screamed at to talk, being yanked forward and all but head-butted in the face. Feeling Daniel’s self-restraint kick in, just enough to pull him back from the brink; letting go, falling to his knees and crawling away, no better on his feet than Alex himself, heading straight for Scoff’s basket.
And it all happens exactly that way. Not immediately; Gulnaz’s arrival and, thank God, her blazing row with Daniel and her narrow escape from the mug he hurls after her are not foreseen. But from there, every detail. Step by ugly step. Until everything at last becomes quiet and Alex is returned once more to his own head. Through the doorway he sees Daniel down on the floor, cradling Scoff’s lifeless body. He hobbles over, gazes down in pity and musters his one ineffectual word of condolence.