The room is an antiseptic-white, marble-smooth, featureless cube. Only a bed and a life support machine and the interconnecting circuitry pierce its blank surfaces. The machine flickers and pulses on behalf of the eyelids and heart that lie frozen beside it. Under its white shroud, the body might have been laid out for despatch, were it not for the life signs registering via the wires onscreen. Even the face is covered. Behind the small windows in the swing doors Daniel watches and waits. A second figure steps into view: a nurse in blue-white, her legs naked beneath the short tunic. She walks over to the bed and turns back the sheet from the man’s face, stoops and kisses his forehead. A transfusion of red passes from her lips into his. The eyes slowly open and blink. As recognition dawns, the skin around the man’s mouth cracks into a faint smile. The woman’s response is slowly to unbutton herself. Something moves beneath the sheet over his stomach, a creature there rising to make a tent of the linen. The man begins to moan softly. Her slim fingers tease his neck and slide the sheet down his chest, beyond his waist and over his erection. Nimbly she mounts the bed and climbs aboard, her back to the patient, her face towards Daniel, the open uniform exposing her fully. As her hips rise and fall, her eyes meet with Daniel’s through the glass and fix him a lascivious stare. He feels the swing doors give against his hands and becomes swallowed up by the room’s intense whiteness. He stands within reach of her now, at the foot of the bed, unsure whether he is about to embrace or to strike her. He can smell their lovemaking. Both she and her lover are approaching climax – faster and faster she pounds his groin. The man lies motionless, but his moaning deepens into a resonant bellow. As he orgasms, and as Gulnaz shudders over that twitching muscle, a howl of bestial pain rocks the ward. Her piston actions grind to a halt. Black liquid courses through the tubing from the patient’s arms and nose into the machine. Deep crimson patches spot the sheet and spread quickly in widening pools beneath his entire body. And the whole time the room reverberates to the shrill alarm bell of a life-support system monitoring the eruption of a man’s organs. It rings and rings and it rings. But nobody attends.
Eventually the phone does stop ringing, though Scoff’s caterwauling continues, and Daniel can finally pull his head from beneath the pillow. He might have made it to the kitchen in time, but he already knows who the caller will have been. The bedside clock, despite new batteries, has failed to go off, and he’s due back at work today. The dream is a fading memory now, its contents slipping through his fingers too fast to grasp. Something about hospitals? It had to be, to leave him feeling so knotted up inside.
His guts have other reasons to grumble. What was Threadbare’s favourite quip? You drink when the bottom’s fallen out of your world, only for the world to fall out of your bottom. If it were only that. After what he put away last night he’ll be lucky the whole universe doesn’t come crashing down on his head. Warily he lowers his feet to the floor, ready to abort, braced for Armageddon. But throwing up last night has saved him from the worst. Yes, it’s just the guts. But by God it’s urgent.
Scene by toe-curling scene, the whole sorry tale of the previous night unravels as he sits there, elbows on thighs, sweat gathering on temples. He can astonish even himself at times. That all-consuming obsession to have her, the devastation of her rejection, the dispassion he feels right now – all in under twenty-four hours. It’s not healthy. He’s only grateful that nobody else witnessed it. Another shooting pain cuts off his thoughts, and then he’s done. He is on his way back from the toilet when the phone rings again. As predicted, the call is from Greenalls. To be more precise, it’s from Jerry, his line manager.
Ah, what would he do without Jerry? Invariably it’s Jerry who rings if he hasn’t shown up by nine fifteen. The arrangement: Daniel gets to keep his job (just) and Jerry gets to enjoy a free lunch. Several times Daniel has come perilously close to the sack, not for his opportunism – he’s too careful for that – but for his poor time keeping, constant hangovers and more than once for turning up drunk. But so far he’s been lucky. Each time he’s fallen into really deep water, someone further up the ladder has countermanded the ultimate sanction. And Daniel has a pretty good idea who that someone is: the company’s senior partner and founder no less, the man whose name, on account of its neatly horticultural ring, has become the popular diminutive of Greenall and Blakeley – Mr Martin J Greenall.
This hunch hangs on the simple fact that Martin Greenall and Daniel’s uncle Martin are one and the same. Not quite true to say that Greenall had done ‘fuck all’ to help him and his mother. Pretty useless in the face of his sister’s terminal illness he may have been, but Greenall had also promised that her son would have a job to go to after she was gone, at a time when employment prospects for a twenty-one year old with barely a GCSE to his name were slender at best. No doubt the promise was as much to Daniel’s father as it was to her; some pact they had made with each other at sea. But it could also have been his uncle’s way of saying sorry for the fact that of the two of them, only he had come home.
Jerry of course, like everyone else at Greenalls, is quite unaware of the blood ties between lowly service assistant Daniel George and Managing Director Martin Greenall. Daniel has no desire to be seen as the stooge of senior management. Having delivered his mild reprimand, Jerry has now moved on to an enthusiastic account of the pool team’s practice session. Great prospects now for the tournament quarter finals on Saturday. Shame Daniel couldn’t have stayed to take part. And no, the earlier call hadn’t been from Jerry after all.
It was probably those damned window salesmen again.