transformation

Richard’s daughter Melanie opens the front door.
‘I found him on the bathroom floor,’ she says. ‘I’m worried he’s had a stroke.’
‘What does your father suffer with?’
‘Parkinson’s – that’s pretty much it.’
Ropes of thick greying hair hang down over the shoulders of her flowery waistcoat. She has a rubbed and faded look, like a boho teenager who took forty years to make it back from Woodstock.
She turns and walks ahead of us through her father’s perfectly ordered flat. The sunlight lays in through the windows, illuminating shelves of history and travel books neatly arranged in height order, ceramics, masks, wooden totems, and a selection of family photographs in simple gilt frames. We pass a South American figure meticulously lit in a recess – a strange sculpture, something like an ancient, terracotta astronaut, his eyes closed but his mouth sagging open, his crooked arms and feet transforming into snakes.
Melanie stops, gestures to the bathroom door, then moves off to the side and starts chewing a fingernail.
I knock.
‘Richard? It’s the ambulance.’
I manage to push the bathroom door open enough to put my head round.
Richard is lying on his left side with his legs drawn in, tangled up in a toilet surround and a high washing seat.
‘Are you in pain?’
He shakes his head.
‘Okay. Let me just – get – in and I’ll say hello properly. Blimey, it’s a squeeze.’
To cheat a couple more inches of clearance I unclip the radio from my belt and hand it back to Melanie, then begin threading myself in through the chaos. Finally I put myself in a position where I can start freeing him up. I put the toilet stand in the bath, right the chair and put it in the one square of available space left in the bathroom, then squat down to have a better look at the patient.
‘How did you end up on the floor like this?’
Richard is naked, his wrinkled skin dusted with a fine, white scurf. There is an unwholesome tackiness to the air, a cloying mixture of soap and sweat and the insipid, honey-sweet odour of the sick.
‘How long have you been on the floor?’
His answer is thin and indistinct.
‘Okay. Let’s get you out to the ambulance, Richard. I’ll just slide your legs in a bit – like this.’
I cheat enough room for Frank to squeeze in through the door. He passes me some oxygen, and after I’ve got that running, we consider our options.
As always, there’s a trade-off to be made. Richard is poorly. It doesn’t seem as if he has hurt himself in the fall, but his blood pressure is low, and it would be better to take him out as flat as possible. There’s no room to get a trolley into the house, let alone the bathroom. We could spend some time taking the door off, but even if we managed it quickly, and had the trolley waiting by the front door, we’d still struggle to keep Richard flat as we negotiated the narrow hallway.
‘If we stand him up, sit him on the high chair, you could get the carry chair in and we could run him out to the ambulance.’
‘Okay. Let’s do it.’
Between us we manage to stand him up. I hang on to Richard, one hand on his chest and the other on his belly. Frank manoeuvres the high chair into position behind him. When Frank goes back outside to bring in the carry chair, Richard stops breathing.
‘Richard? Richard!’
No pulse at his neck. He voids his bladder, the urine jumping and splashing around me.
I thump him in the middle of his chest and call out for Frank to bring the defibrillator in. I hear him say to Melanie: ‘Just a moment…’
The thump seems to have worked, though. His pulse returns, and he makes a reasonable effort at breathing. We attach the defib pads in case he goes again, then Frank fetches in the chair. We lower Richard into it, wrapping him up in a blanket and strapping his legs. I tip him right back, Frank opens the door as far as it will go and together we lift, bump and angle the chair out into the hall. Melanie is there, clutching my radio in one hand, the other to her mouth, her eyes wide and glittering.
‘I’m afraid Richard’s heart stopped working for a moment in there,’ I say. ‘Could you get together all his medications and whatnot and meet us in the ambulance?’
She nods, but says nothing.
‘If you could stand just a little off to the side – great. Thanks.’
We hurry him out through the hallway. I glance to my right, and in the blur of passing I could swear the terracotta figure was now more snake than man.

scandal

Emma is lying on the walkway in a tragic heap of distressed hair, cream taffeta and lace, gold heels and a silver clutch bag. There is a crowd of young clubbers around her, as if she had fallen to earth like a debutante from another time zone, scattering bystanders in a star shape. A boy kneels by her head offering encouragement, one stands and looks round with a mobile pressed to his ear, the rest josh and push and carry on, passing the time, keeping warm in the chill midnight air.
‘They’re here!’ says the boy on the phone as he sees us approach, and immediately presses it off. ‘Can we go now?’
‘What’s happened? Did she fall?’
‘No. She was turned away by the bouncers because she’s drunk, I think. She staggered over here and just kind of crumpled up. What’s the matter with her?’ But he adds quickly ‘She’s not with us,’ as if I might hold him up further by telling him.
‘Don’t know. But we’ll find out. If you need to get off now, thanks for your help.’
‘No worries. Hope it works out. Come on, Stephan.’
He wrenches his friend away from the girl and they rejoin the rest of the group. It moves off, shouting and jumping like some hyper-active, twenty-four limbed animal, happily entering the club pen and funnelled with the rest towards the bouncers and their doors of thumping white mist.

Emma has been crying so hard she looks as if she has been bobbing for apples. But despite her distress she senses a change in her immediate vicinity and lifts her head.
‘Please, please, please don’t let this get in the papers,’ she sobs. ‘It would ruin the family and I couldn’t do that to them, I just couldn’t. Please – it won’t get in the papers, will it? I’ve got money. I can pay you whatever it takes to get me out of this. My uncle is Sir Nonesuch. I’m his niece. My mother is Sir Nonesuch’s sister, I’m his niece and he’s my uncle. Sir Nonesuch. He’s an international celebrity. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? He’ll kill me if he finds out. Oh, God – don’t let this get in the papers.’
‘Emma – it won’t get in the papers. We just want to know if you’ve hurt yourself. Do you have any pain anywhere?’
‘If it got in the papers I’d be in so much trouble. This is so embarrassing. I’ve got to get out of here. Can you help me? I’ve got money. I can pay you whatever it takes. But I have to get out of here. Oh God – I’m in such trouble. My uncle’s Sir Nonesuch. I’m his niece.’
‘Yes – you said. Look, let’s get you up and in the warm. We can have a good chat there.’
‘You won’t let anyone see me, will you? You won’t let them call the papers. It’s just the kind of thing they love. It mustn’t get in the papers. My uncle is Sir Nonesuch. He’s an international celebrity. Please, please, please don’t let this get in the papers.’
‘I can’t see any head injury,’ says Frank. ‘But I can maybe hear one.’
We help her up, gather her stuff together and lead her past the cheering crowd.
‘You won’t let this get in the papers,’ she rambles. ‘My uncle’s Sir Nonesuch. He mustn’t find out. He’d kill me.’
‘Ssh, Emma.’
‘I don’t like to play the famous relative card, but hell – my uncle is Sir Nonesuch. You must have heard of him. Well - I’m his niece.’
‘Really.’
‘I can pay. I’ve got money. Look. I can pay you whatever it takes. But please, please, please keep this out of the papers.’

As we walk together up the ramp to the ambulance, the club drills on behind us with its heavy machinery of dance, deeper and deeper into the night, thump, thump, thump.

gloria

‘Watch your step.’ But the little halogen clip-light on the policeman’s shoulder shines right in my eyes and makes it even more difficult. I feel my way up towards his voice.
‘They could’ve made this a bit harder,’ says Frank, striding up from the vehicle with a torch, suddenly illuminating the difference between the gate, the shrubs, the trash, the scaffolding, and the weirdly syncopated concrete steps. ‘All we need now is a boulder rolling down from the top.’

Inside, the house is a ruthlessly lit box of laminate flooring and cigarette smoke. Two men are chatting in the front room, the first a jaded and roughened older version of the other – a cherry-cheeked kid of twenty with glycerine curls and the choleric lines of an overfed pet.
‘She’s in the kitchen,’ the father version says, pointing with his fag. ‘Good luck.’
‘Relative of yours?’
‘Wife.’
‘And she’s taken some pills...?’
‘She’s always taking pills.’
‘Do you know what exactly?’
‘Here, give him the pack.’
He taps his son on the shoulder; the boy dips down and bobs up again with an empty blister pack and a carrier bag of assorted boxes and bottles.
‘A half bottle of vodka to wash them down with,’ he says.

Gloria is in the kitchen clutching on to the sink with a couple more police officers right and left. If her husband and son have been eating well, Gloria can only have been watching. She is a clawed and freeze-dried stick of a woman, a wig of bouffant blonde hair on a prematurely aged frame.
‘Fuck off. Leave me alone,’ she screams. ‘I’ll bite you.’
She turns her head to the side, bobs down her head and draws her lips back from a set of crooked yellow teeth; strings of foamy spittle thread the gape of her mouth.
‘Come on now, Gloria,’ says the police officer on that side, easily deflecting her attempt by manipulating her arm and shoulder. ‘Don’t be like that. It’s silly.’
‘You cunt.’
‘We just want to help you, Gloria.’
‘You pig.’
She tips back her head and yells up at the ceiling in a sing-song voice. ‘All police are bastards. All police are bastards.’
‘Easy, Gloria. Easy. Look. The paramedics are here.’
He smiles at us as we come into the kitchen.
‘Hello Gloria,’ I say, coming round to face her. ‘My name’s Spence and we’ve got Frank here as well.’
‘You can fuck off, too,’ she says. ‘I’m not going. I just want to die here.’
‘I understand you’ve taken a few pills tonight.’
‘No. I haven’t done nothing.’
‘You really need to come with us to the hospital, Gloria.’
‘I’m not going. You can’t make me. I know my rights.’
‘We can’t very well leave you here, can we?’
She sags a little and the police officers hold her up.
‘Come on, Gloria. Let’s go out to the ambulance.’
‘No.’
‘We have to get her in,’ I tell the officers. ‘With everything she’s taken, the sooner the better.’
The police officers shake their heads.
‘Breach of the peace,’ they say, unhooking Gloria from the sink and guiding her out. It’s a strangely passive experience, like watching two police officers arresting a mop.
‘Can I at least get my shoes?’ she whimpers, her bare feet scarcely touching the floor.
‘Of course you can, Gloria,’ says the first officer. ‘Are they in the hall? You’ll need a nice, warm coat, too.’
The husband and son watch as we pass through the front room, the husband smoking, the son holding a remote control, tapping it impatiently, like a baton, up and down in the palm of his hand.

sabre

Shelley is lying in the hallway, groaning under a dirty brown blanket, her right arm crooked into a fleshy pillow and her head in the vee of it. Only her back-combed black hair shows over the top, like a fright wig tossed on a pile of earth after a day’s digging. She takes up most of the hallway, and Rae has to step over to get to the business end.
We’re caught in a crosswire of attention: her husband Dez, squatting like a hunter on the last step of the stairs, his massive, tattooed arms wrapped around his knees, leaning back against the wall; her three teenage children sitting in reverse age order on the top three steps, and behind a baby gate in the kitchen, two dogs – a husky with pale, psycho-alien eyes, and a mastiff, up on his haunches, violently still, like the activated bronze of a Greek monster. A low growl rumbles at the core of it.
‘Sabre. Chill. Sabre.’
The mastiff slaps a tongue around his muzzle, narrows his eyes.
‘So what’s happened?’ says Rae.
‘I got a call from the club and they said Shell had passed out, which is so not like her. I mean, she can really hold her drink. Like, really. When I got there she was all over the place. It took five of us to carry her out. That’s not right. Why would it take five of us?’
‘Cos I’m a fat cunt,’ she says from beneath the blanket. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘So what is the problem tonight, Shelley? Why have we been called?’ says Rae. The mastiff ignores her, intensifying his watch on me. He growls again, and shifts his weight hungrily from paw to massive paw.
‘It’s cos you’re a man,’ says Dez. ‘Sabre. Chill. Sabre.’
‘Come on Shelley,’ says Rae. ‘Let’s sit up and have a chat.’
‘I’ve never seen her like this before,’ says Dez. ‘Do you think her drink was spiked?’
‘Well she’d have to go to hospital to find that out. It’s unlikely, though. Come on, Shelley. Why don’t you sit up and talk to us? We just need to make sure you’re okay, then we’ll get out of your hair. Shelley?’
‘What?’
‘Come on. Open your eyes. I need to shine a light in them.’
‘Go away.’
‘She’s not right,’ says Dez.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘You can’t very well sleep here all night? Can you?’ adds Rae.
‘Why not?’
‘What about the children?’
‘I’m not moving.’
Rae straightens and looks up to the audience on the stairs.
‘Isn’t it past your bedtime?’ she says.
‘Why – what’s the time?’ says the first in line.
‘It’s three o’clock in the morning,’ I tell them. Sabre widens his eyes, outraged that I spoke. ‘It’s past my bedtime, I know that much.’
‘Is that all it is? Three o’clock?’ says the second in line.
‘I thought it was later,’ says the third. None of them moves. The only two who seem ready to sleep are Shelley, who pulls the blanket over her head, and the husky, who clicks off to its bed by the fridge. Sabre’s fury intensifies. His massive head drops an inch, and another, thunderous growl rumbles out a second later.
‘Sabre. Chill. Sabre.’
‘Would it help if I turned sideways or something?’ I say. The kids laugh.
‘No, mate. He’s a guard dog, a trained killer. If it weren’t for that gate you’d be ripped to pieces. And me here, of course,’ he adds. ‘It won’t do a thing without me saying.’ The dog sneers.
‘Anyway,’ says Rae, pulling a tiny corner of the blanket clear of Shelley’s face. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
‘Nothing. Leave me alone.’
‘Well. She’s made it pretty clear she doesn’t want our help,’ says Rae, standing up. ‘There’s not much we can do. She sounds pretty coherent, though. I doubt it’s anything more than the drink.’
‘She can really drink, though. That’s the thing.’
Rae shrugs.
‘We’ll be on our way.’
‘Can you see yourself out? I’m a bit stuck here,’ says Dez. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘No problem.’
I turn to open the door.
The growl that follows is like a tube train passing underneath.
‘Sabre. Chill. Sabre.’
He doesn’t.

a little salt water

Flat calm at dawn, and the sea runs out like mercury from the dark legs of the jetty to the vast pearlescent stretch of the horizon. Mid-way across the bay, a thick column of black smoke rises straight up about a hundred feet, then curves and gradually thins to the east. A small yacht is on fire at the root of it; you can just about make out the last licks of fire around a lump in the water. It’s a shock to see it – as if someone had taken a violent, oily rag to a seascape by Turner.

As we swing down towards the pontoon, a coastguard waves and points to where he wants us: a collection of emergency vehicles on the road end of the jetty, and a couple of teenagers sitting on a wooden parapet, shivering under blankets. A lifeboat man stands next to them, as bulked out with Ripstop competence as the boys are reduced and spindly beneath their blankets.
‘Okay. What we’ve got here – two lads who’ve been in the water max of ten minutes. No smoke inhalation, no swallowing of water, no drowning, shark attack, no mugging by crabs as far as we can make out. Just need to warm up a bit, probably, but we’ll let you be the judge. That one’s Scott, that one’s Billy.’
‘Other way r-r-r-ound,’ says Billy, chattering the words out of his mouth.
‘Anyways,’ says the Lifeboat man, ‘Over to you.’
He smiles and carries on writing out his form.
‘Okay. Billy.’
‘No, I’m Billy.’
‘Okay. Scott. Billy. Let’s get you on the ambulance, throw a few logs on the fire then we’ll get the story. Okay?’
‘We’re a bit wet, so you might want to put something on the chairs.’
‘No worries.’
We lead them onto the truck and pile them with more blankets.

The lifeboat man was right – all their observations are normal, no sign of anything untoward, except for mild hypothermia. Despite being dunked in the ocean, alcohol fumes hang over them both in a visible haze.
‘How much have you had to drink?’ I ask them.
‘Oh, loads. Anyway – it was his idea.’
‘Well it was my Dad’s boat, but he said he wanted to take it out.’
‘You said you knew what to do.’
‘I do know what to do.’
‘Obviously mate. Obviously. That’s why the boat blew up and I had to rescue you.’
‘F-f-f-uck off. You didn’t rescue me.’
‘I did!’ he shouts. ‘The boat was in flames! It was going down! So I dived into the sea.’
‘I couldn’t get my laces undone.’
‘Yeah – and you were crying like a bitch so I had to swim back and save you.’
‘I was not.’
‘I saved you, man! I saved you!’
Frank yawns and takes a seat opposite them on the trolley.
‘So it was your Dad’s boat?’ he says.
‘Yeah. God – what am I going to tell him? You won’t tell him, will you?’
‘I won’t say a word,’ says Frank. ‘But he’ll have to know sooner or later. Unless you can think of something really amazing. Which I doubt.’
‘Yeah – I know. He’s going to k-k-kill me. But just don’t tell him yet. I’ve got to get the story straight.’
‘Good luck.’
A violent shudder passes through Scott, shaking up from his white nubby toes, up through the layers of blanket, to rattle out of his body via his jaw. After it passes, he laughs out loud.
‘God! Look at us! We nearly drowned, man! We nearly burned up and drowned!’
Billy laughs too, their shivers accentuating their craziness, until they both almost vibrate out of the chairs, through the door and back out onto the jetty.
Eventually, Scott calms down and flaps his arms out right and left like a giant, sorry bird.
‘I lost my iPhone, man,’ he says, miserably. ‘It’s on the seabed now. That cost four hundred quid.’
‘You should’ve got yourself one of those wreck apps,’ says Frank.
‘Yeah,’ says Billy, sitting up and hugging himself. ‘Yeah. Maybe you’ll get some sex texts from a lobster.’
‘Shut up. Don’t forget – I saved your life. You owe me.’
‘F-f-f-fuck off.’
But he seems happy about it.
‘So – tell me again what happened?’ I ask them.
‘Billy said he wanted to be out on the sea for when the sun came up. So we took his old man’s boat. I put the sails up but they didn’t work, so we stuck the engine on. After a bit it started making a funny noise…’
‘… all this black smoke coming out.’
‘… we tipped loads of water over it.’
‘… and then it blew up.’
‘Yeah, and I stripped down to my boxers and legged it over the side. And I’d swum miles before I realised Baby Billy was still on board. I could see him screaming and crying.’
‘Fuck off was I.’
‘So I swam back and I saved his life! I dragged you from the jaws of death, my friend. And you can never, ever re-pay me.’
Meanwhile, Billy has pulled out his mobile phone and is shakily trying to take the back off.
‘Hey! Where d’ya get that?’
‘I had it with me the whole time, man. I s-s-stuffed it down my shorts.’
As he pulls off the back, a trickle of sea water runs over his hands. He taps it a couple of times on his knee, then nails-out the SIM card, holding it up for us all to see.
‘There!’ he says, turning it round and round in the light. ‘A little salt water never hurt no-one.’

a half too far

Gary is standing outside the pub, arguing with a woman, waving his stick in the air and almost being carried over backwards by the rucksack on his back. She sees the ambulance first and steps to one side to wave us over. He stands where she left him, planting his stick back down on the pavement and blinking owlishly in the harsh midday sun.
‘He’s soiled his-self’ she says as I climb out of the cab. ‘The taxis don’t want to know.’
‘Okay. Are you a relative?’
‘A relative?’ She tips her chin up and laughs like a crow. ‘A relative?’ But then the humour of it leaves her as suddenly as it came. ‘I’m a friend,’ she says. ‘If that.’
We walk over to Gary.
‘What’s happened?’ I ask him.
‘What’s happened? I’ve shit me-self, mate, that’s what’s happened. Look at me. What a state. I stink. It’s disgusting. What’s wrong with me?’
‘I don’t know, Gary. Have you vomited at all?’
‘Only the usual brackish whatsits every morning, like. But this – oh, it’s disgusting. The taxis took one look at me and drove off. That’s not very nice, is it?’
‘Let’s get you on the ambulance and see what’s what, shall we?’
‘Urgh,’ he says, walking like an old cowboy beside me, a dreadful dark stain spreading across the seat of his jeans and down each leg.
The Easter throng magically parts around us right and left.

Frank has placed a line of inco pads down the trolley; Gary manoeuvres himself delicately into position.
‘I’m not in trouble, am I?’ he says, hauling each leg up individually. ‘What are they going to do to me? I was only there yesterday.’
‘What for?’
‘What’s that?’
‘I say – what were you up at the hospital for yesterday? Incontinence?’
‘No, mate. I fell over and cut me face.’
Behind the filthy oval panes of his glasses I can see scuff marks and steri-strips around one of his eyes.
‘Was that drink related, too?’
‘I’m a diagnosed alcoholic. It’s all drink related, mate.’
‘How much have you had today?’
‘I just went in for a quick half and then this happened. They wouldn’t serve me any more and threw me out. I hope they don’t charge me for the chair.’
His friend leans in at the door to say goodbye.
‘See you later, Gary,’ she says, drawing her lips back and exposing a landfill of rotten teeth. ‘Look after him,’ she says, and slams the door shut.

***

At the hospital, the air in the department is bright and relaxed. There is a sparkle of freshness about the place, a dreamy vista of empty beds, cleaners wiping surfaces with a Tai-Chi level of focus, a domestic wheeling a trolley of coffee, tea and perfectly aligned biscuits – the only thing lacking is birdsong, and a line of cherry trees scattering white blossom as I walk down the corridor to the desk. The charge nurse is chatting pleasantly with her colleagues and a couple of young doctors; they all look up and smile as I approach.
‘What have you got for us?’ she says.
The further I get with my story, the darker their collective expression grows. I feel as if I have committed a terrible error of judgement, like a leper trying to interest them in a new sandwich round. There is a shocked pause after I finish my handover.
‘Side room one,’ says the charge nurse finally, screwing up her nose as she spins my board round to get the surname. I want to reassure her Gary didn’t touch the board.
‘Where did you say you found him?’ she says.
‘In a pub on the high street.’
‘God,’ says one of the young doctors. ‘Which one?’

We load Gary onto the bed in the side room. He puffs and blows, his slack red cheeks flapping in and out beside the dreadful aperture of his mouth.
‘I stink,’ he says. ‘What’re they going to do to me?’
‘I don’t know Gary. Make sure you’re okay.’
‘Look at me.’
‘I know. It’s just the way it is.’
‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘I think it’s probably drink related.’
‘But I only had a half a lager.’
‘Did you have anything this morning?’
‘Well I had the usual but that was it.’
‘What’s the usual?’
‘Thirteen cans. But you see – I’m a diagnosed alcoholic.’
‘Anyway, Gary. Here’s your stick. The doctor will be with you shortly.’

In fact, things are so quiet that the doctor goes into the room as we’re outside cleaning the trolley. The door to the examination room is propped open with a chair and I can overhear the consultation.
‘Good afternoon to you. I’m Doctor Enderby.’
‘Hello, Doc. I was only up here yesterday,’ says Gary, pleasantly.
‘Oh yes? And why was that?’
‘I fell over. I’m a diagnosed alcoholic.’
‘Okay. I see. Mm. And can you tell me what has happened to you today, please?’
‘Yes I can. I’ve shit me-self.’

We wheel our trolley out through the automatic doors into sunshine.

rocking horse manor

The electric gates swing open; I drive past the gate house and on to a private road that curves round and down through a meticulously groomed corridor of conifer and camellia to a D-shaped drive around a rocky waterfall; behind it rises the Altrincham’s residence. A boxy, red-bricked place, unweathered, pristine, it has an affected but strangely guileless look, as if a child had won the lottery and designed its ideal home with a crayon. A portico of Portland stone is stuck on to the front of the house; beneath it a pair of massive oak doors. A terrier barks and barks from somewhere deep inside the house, but otherwise the place is dark and quiet.
Just as Frank is about to flip the lion’s head knocker, there is the sound of rattling chains from the other side, a heavy bolt, and then one half of the door swings open. Mr Altrincham stands looking at us from inside – or rather, he seems to sense our presence, swaying slightly from side to side and sniffing the air.
‘Ambulance?’ says Frank after a moment. Mr Altrincham lets go of the door, turns and heads back inside, which we take as a signal to follow.

We find ourselves in a colossal atrium. A wide staircase sweeps upwards on the opposite side to a gallery of rooms. On our left is a glass fronted library; on the right, an oak panelled wall with a couple of corridors leading off. But essentially the feel is of a house built around a great cube of space, with a geometric glass canopy above, something like a museum, or maybe the lobby of a grand hotel. What pictures and objects there are have a lost air, as if they were used to a smaller place, and struggle to justify the emphasis their new surroundings have put on them: a couple of small, country-themed oil paintings; a bronze of a running child; an medieval oak chest, a tattered rocking horse.
‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’ says Mr Altrincham, beginning the long haul back up to the gallery. ‘When I had to go in a few months ago, they dropped me down the stairs.’
‘Don’t worry. We’re professionals,’ says Frank, giving me a look as I follow up behind him.
‘What sort of dog have you got?’ I ask him, but Mr Altrincham either cannot hear me or chooses not to.
‘She’s just about ready to go,’ he says.

He leads us up to the gallery and along to the main bedroom. It suddenly strikes me that the whole place is modelled on a medieval great hall. A thousand years ago this would have been the Lord and Lady’s retreat, the inner court set apart from the rabble below. But if the idea is the same, the fixtures and fittings have changed. Instead of tapestries there are professional family portraits; instead of a scattering of straw and lavender, acres of fitted beige carpets; instead of serfs, two ambulance men with a carry chair and a blanket.
‘Now you promise me you won’t drop her?’ says Mr Altrincham, fussing around with an overnight bag.
‘What on earth have you done with my dressing gown?’ says his wife from the edge of the four poster. ‘My flannels?’ She clutches the bedclothes to her, overwhelmed by the horror of the situation.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘Your husband can always bring the rest of it up later.’
She stares at me like someone being addressed by an owl in a nightmare.
‘My slippers!’ she gasps eventually.

From far off, the dog continues to bark.

occasional flight

Mr Collins has slid out of his chair onto the floor. He sits sweating helplessly on the rug, like a feverish white elephant in a fisherman’s jersey. The jersey has ridden up as he went down, revealing vast slopes of pale white flesh, four massy limbs on each corner, the legs bound in stained crepe bandages, toes poking out in bundles of cracked and dreadful meat, arms extending helplessly left and right, the left hand resting on a cushion, the right on an ornamental bird cage, where an ancient green budgerigar hops about on the seeded floor pecking affectionately at his finger.
‘The fire brigade shouldn’t be long,’ I tell him.
‘Righto.’
Mrs Nelson, next door neighbour, next of kin, helps us move what furniture we can to make some space, but really you’d need a small tractor. The flat is packed out with shelves of DVDs, cabinets of photos and ornaments, a sofa heaped up with magazines, books, manuals, and a coffee table banked up with transmitters and receivers, two high aerials extending up to the ceiling.
‘Bit of a radio ham?’ says Frank.
‘Oh yes,’ says Mr Collins. ‘You need something.’
It’s so hot in the flat I want to rip off my clothes and throw a ladle of water on the radiator.
‘I’ve just got to open a window,’ I say.
‘You’ll be lucky. It’s a stretch,’ says Mrs Nelson, perfectly adapted to the environment in a loose Japanese kimono.
There is a gigantic TV screen in front of the window bay; I can just about reach round it to flip the handle of the window, but can’t manage to push it open.
‘I’ll just use this to help,’ I say, leaning over an inch more to retrieve a walking stick from the alcove. As I swing it up I accidentally hook the net curtain line which only seems secured by a pin; it crashes down on my head.
‘Oops.’
‘Oh my good god,’ says Mr Collins. ‘Mr Bean.’
But when I use the stick to push open the window, the sudden rush of cool night air is worth all the fuss.
As I stand there bathing in the delicious draught, there is a hiss of truck brakes from down in the street.
‘Here they are.’

***

‘Jesus it’s warm in here,’ says a fireman. They’ve already stripped down to their blue t-shirts, but those are heavy trousers.
‘What’s the plan, gentlemen?’
After some discussion we decide to drag Mr Collins out into the hall on the rug; once there, we’ll have the space to lift him up and onto the trolley. The lead fireman inspects the rug.
‘It’s a good, tough weave,’ he says. ‘I think we may as well lift you with it as well.’
Suddenly the budgerigar squawks, a surprisingly loud sound for such a small animal. It’s a dreadful noise, something like a wire hanger being dragged down the funnel of an ocean liner.
‘What the hell was that?’ says a fire fighter, tentatively lifting a corner of the throw that covers the cage and peering inside.
‘A Mongolian feathered hamster,’ says Frank.
‘I was seriously mis-sold then. Thirty years ago,’ says Mr Collins. ‘Wasn’t I, Bertie?’
‘What’s the bell on the top for?’
‘That?’ says Frank. ‘Bertie gives it a tap whenever he draws blood.’
The fire fighter drops the throw.
‘Don’t listen to them,’ says Mr Collins. ‘Bertie’s a strict vegetarian. I let him out sometimes. I like to watch him fly about. Don’t I? Ye-es. Don’t I? ’
Mr Collins reaches out to the cage again, and we watch as the decrepit bird wipes its beak affectionately against his mitt-thick fingers. The moment passes, and we prepare to move.
‘Come on. Let’s get this rug on the road.’
Between us we manoeuvre the massive armchair out of the way, then grab hold of the rug. We look like some strange version of Twister: four firemen, two paramedics, adopting what positions they can to fit around each other in the restricted space, shifting Mr Collins backwards a foot at a time then re-positioning, calling out tolerances and obstacles, shouting out Stop or Come on, or Go, Yeah, Go, until we’ve made the distance and spill out into the cool vaulted heaven of the hallway.
‘Now then,’ says Frank, straightening up and easing his poor back. ‘If you’re sure you can’t remember the magic word to make this rug fly, Mr Collins – everyone grab a hold, bend your knees, and ...’

On three, he rises into the air.

king frog

Our destination seems to be stuck out in a grey area of the map, as if even the Satnav were so tripped out it closed its eyes, tossed the little chequered flag over its shoulder and let it fall where it may.
‘Ignore that,’ says Frank.
We follow his instinct, taking a backstreet tributary that curves round and down and then up again into an obscure block. The estate has that four in the morning ebb, the street lamps and the moon having long since sucked up what light there is and dealt it back as night sweats.
There is a squat, middle-aged woman waiting for us on the pavement. Her hair has been clumped up in bunches and tied off with scraps of coloured rag, the remainders of which she could have stitched together with spider silk and made into a dress.
‘She’s upstairs,’ she says, pointing too.
‘A relative of yours?’
‘No. A friend. We were having a party.’
We follow her through a doorway hidden amongst some bins and she leads us like an urban version of the white rabbit up a stairway like a tunnelled run, junked to the arches with discarded chairs, hi-fi components, the bone yard of a thousand thrift stores. The air gets thicker with herbal smoke as we near the heart of the place.
‘What’s she had tonight?’
‘Ketamine, LSD. Some cake.’
‘What was in the cake?’
‘Oh it’s pretty healthy. Nuts and seeds. There’s loads left.’
She pushes through a door at the top and brings us out into the top flat - surprisingly clear, as if all the clutter that had simply been vomited down the stairwell. The furthest door stands open to a dimly lit living room, and inside we can see eight or so people sitting around, five of them on the floor holding down the legs, arms and shoulders of a young, screaming woman.
‘What’s the patient’s name?’
‘Rosie.’
‘Has she had any alcohol?’
‘She doesn’t drink.’
I step through into the room.
‘Hello, there. Hello. It’s the ambulance,’ I say, trying to ameliorate the shock of the uniform that I can sense on the air.
But if I was a director I’d want to re-shoot my entrance. Can you try it again with more sincerity, less school master – I don’t know, just try.
But then if I was an actor I’d want to ask about the costume design. Along with the first woman – but apart from the guy holding down the left leg, who looks as straight and out of place as I do, like a trainee optometrist at a festival – everyone seems to have been dunked in the same dressing up box, a seventies pot pourri of spangly wigs, metallic hot pants, stripy stockings, robes, tails and faded Love t-shirts. Apart from the restrainers, there are two women sitting chatting on a put-you-up, and a man perched on the edge of an easy chair, overlooking the scene. His pointed goatee, twirly moustache and pince-nez sit like a comedy set on display above a starched white collar, stripy yellow and black blazer and pressed white trousers. The lobes of his ears are stretched into pendant rounds by two black plates, and tattooed flowers sneak over the edge of his collar. He is leaning forwards on his cane.
Rosie is lying between her five friends on the floor. She is dishevelled, sweated up. Every so often she tries to wrest herself free from their grip, screams and swears incoherently, then bashes her head back onto the throws and cushions they’ve placed behind her.
‘So tell me again what’s happened to Rosie?’
The optometrist looks up at me over his shoulder.
‘Can you take over holding her down?’ he says. ‘I’m exhausted.’
‘How long has she been like this?’
‘An hour.’
‘Well just carry on as you are for the moment. Let’s just see what needs to be done.’
‘What if we can’t do it anymore and we let go and she jumps out of the window and kills herself.’
‘Just stay with it for a while. I’m sure between all of you in the room you can swap about and make it easier.’
‘And you are?’ says the man with the cane.
‘My name’s Spence.’
‘Spence. No last name?’
I hesitate, and the man leans back with a smirk.
‘Oh I get it,’ he says. ‘I see. You’re just doing your job. What is your job by the way?’
‘I’m a technician with the ambulance service. And no – we don’t normally give our last names, but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s Kennedy.’
‘Oh. Kennedy. Well I’m Lord Scratch-it-up from Hearts Enough and this is my castle.’
He leans back in the chair and sighs.
‘OK. Right. So. Rosie’s been like this for an hour. What’s she taken?’
‘I told you,’ says the first woman over my shoulder. ‘Ketamine and LSD.’
‘At what time?’
‘Look. None of that matters. We’ve all had exactly the same and none of us are beating ourselves senseless on the floor.’
‘But with respect, these things affect people differently. Plus we don’t know exact quantities. It varies.’
‘Are you going to help her?’ says another girl. ‘Do something.’
‘Does anybody know her past medical history?’
‘Her what?’
‘Her past medical history. If she suffers with anything.’
‘I think she had some investigations for something or other a while ago, but I’m not sure.’
‘On any meds?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Aren’t you going to give her something? If you’re not, I don’t really understand why you’re here?’ says the man with the cane, sitting up again.
‘Rosie needs to go to hospital. They might well give her some kind of sedative there, but there’s nothing we carry that we can give right now.’
‘And you’re some kind of medical person, is that right?’
‘Yes. But the only thing that we can do is make sure that Rosie is safe, that she gets taken to hospital in the safest way possible. The problem really is with the stairs. I’m afraid the police are the experts at this kind of thing. We’re going to have to get them over to help.’
‘So you’re a medical person, but you’re calling the police, and she needs to go to hospital. I don’t understand.’
Rosie throws herself up into an arch, and looks around the room like a demon conjured up through the floor.
‘We can’t take her out like this. She’ll hurt herself and everyone else,’ I tell them, when this raging fit subsides. ‘Let me just get them running.’
I turn to make the call. I notice the table set out with party food along the wall, sandwiches, biscuits, crisps and a large patterned plate with a half eaten cake. In the centre of the table there is a hefty plastic frog; with a crown tipped back on its head and its eyes and mouth sprung wide with delight, it slowly pulses with light – green, then red, then purple, orange and yellow.

***

Half an hour later, a police van pulls up next to the ambulance. I go down to brief them on the scene.
‘That was tricky to find,’ says one of them. I lead them back up to the flat.

Whilst they assess the scene in the living room, I talk to the first woman in the kitchen.
‘I’ll follow up in the car,’ she says. ‘I haven’t had anything. I’m the one driving my husband home,’ the man with the cane, it transpires. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some cake?’

Back in the living room the police are worried about the logistics of a forcible removal down those stairs; the sergeant says he wants to stay on scene for a little while longer. Rosie seems calmer now, exhausted by her exertions. She still seems dangerously volatile, though; when the police tentatively unstrap her legs and sit her up, she rubs the spot where they had been secured and eyes up the distance to the hallway.
I’m chatting in the hallway to a police officer and a couple of the other party goers when the man with the cane suddenly appears. He walks up to me and waits for me to finish my sentence. When I look at him he smiles and says: ‘I’m sorry but I’d regret not doing this for the rest of my life.’ He reaches out, puts his hand on my shoulder, and looks square into my eyes. ‘You are the most useless prick I’ve ever met in my entire life.’ Then he turns and limps off back into the room.
The shock of it rinses through me, through the people I was talking to. Led by a sense of outrage I follow him to the room and stand in the doorway as he retakes his place in the chair.
‘That is unacceptable abuse!’ I say to him. Everyone looks at me, the police, the party goers and restrainers - even Rosie. ‘Where do you get off thinking you can talk to me like that. I came here to help you.’
He slumps in the chair, throwing his right arm over the back of it and arching up his head in a pastiche of a naughty child. ‘Oh I’m sorry if I offended you. Please accept my apology.’
I turn and go back to pick up my conversation, but the shock of it has robbed me of the power to think or speak about anything else.
‘Just ignore him,’ says Frank. ‘He’s an idiot.’
But instead I go into the kitchen to speak to the man’s wife. She is sitting looking exhausted on a chair, the rags in her hair loosening and slipping out.
‘You’re not responsible for your husband, and I know he’s had some stuff tonight, but I know you’re sober and I just wanted to explain to you exactly how unpleasant he was so you can tell him in the morning.’
‘I’m really, really sorry,’ she says. ‘I can only apologise.’
‘He touched me on the shoulder, looked into my eyes, and he said to me: “You are the most useless prick I’ve ever met in my entire life.” That’s what he said. I just wanted you to know.’
‘I’m sorry.’
And then another impulse takes me. I grab a piece of paper off the top of the fridge and I start writing.
‘This is my name. This is where I work.’
I hand her the paper.
‘I expect a full apology in the morning.’
And as soon as I do it, I hear that voice again. Okay – but can you just try it again with more authority, less pout – I don’t know, just try.

suspicion

Two o’clock in the morning and the frontage of the automotive parts warehouse is cut out of the night with halogen. Marie is sitting waiting for us on the low wall out front, her right arm hanging out of the sleeve of her jacket countess-style, her left gripping a mobile.
‘Let’s get on the ambulance and have a chat there,’ I tell her. I touch her elbow to guide her to the step; a seamy, unwashed fug rises from her like steam from a pony.
She strides in to the vehicle and sits on a chair.
‘It’s my arm,’ she says.
‘Let’s have a look, then.’
I help her off with her jacket.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I’ve been staying round at my boyfriend’s. I woke up and my arm was numb. That’s it.’
‘Ever happened before?’
‘No.’
‘Any trauma?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you fallen on it? Hurt yourself in any way recently?’
‘No.’
‘Any unusual lifting or exercise?’
‘No.’
‘What’s your health like normally, Marie?’
‘Fine,’ she laughs, dipping her head, tails of lank brown hair swinging over her eyes. ‘Why?’
‘Do you take any medication for anything?’
‘Depression, ADHD, ODD and Bipolar disorder. That’s it.’
‘ODD?’
‘I thought you were supposed to know this stuff.’
‘Well. Every day you learn something new.’
‘Every day,’ says Frank, leaning back against the side of the ambulance and shutting his eyes.
‘Can you feel that?’ I say to her, prodding gently around her shoulder.
‘Yes.’
‘And that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you move your arm at all?’
‘Some.’
‘Where do you live?’
She tells me the address, a hostel just round the corner from the hospital.
Frank unfolds his arms and straightens up.
‘Okay Marie,’ I say. ‘I’ve no idea what’s wrong with your arm. The only thing we can do is take you up the hospital to see a doctor.’
She nods, settles back into her jacket, checks her phone for messages.
‘But really - couldn’t your boyfriend have taken you up there?’
‘He’s got work tomorrow.’
‘So what was the plan? Given that it’s two in the morning? You wake up with a numb arm, and you go out on your own into the street? Is that even safe?’
‘I thought it would ease off.’
‘So when it didn’t you called for an ambulance?’
‘Yep.’
‘And your boyfriend doesn’t know anything about it.’
‘He’s got work tomorrow.’
‘But you didn’t phone a taxi.’
‘I’m sick.’
Frank opens the door, and the night leans in.
‘See you the other end,’ he says.
The way he says it, it could be the eighth circle of hell.

the parrot and the palm

‘One thing I learned yesterday.’
‘Go on.’
‘You only ever see the same side of the moon.’
‘Never the dark side.’
‘Even though that does get light sometimes.’
‘But not so you’d notice.’
‘And do you know why?’
‘Why?’
‘Because the moon spins so slowly on its axis, by the time it’s made one trip round the earth it’s only spun round once. So it’s always the same side facing us.’
‘But hang on a minute. The earth is spinning as well.’
‘Yeah. And the moon spins round that.’
‘So if everybody’s spinning, why don’t you see the back and the front.’
I hold up my fists and ineffectually turn them this way and that for a moment.
‘Well. If you saw the animation on You Tube you’d understand.’
‘Like you, you mean?’

Frank turns the truck into the road. Up ahead we can see the hazard lights on a car winking on and off. He heads towards it.

‘But you know, if you were in the southern hemisphere, it’d be upside down,’ I carry on, trying to claw back the ground I’d lost.
‘What? The moon?’
‘We see the man in the moon. They see something else.’
‘What do they see?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t get that far.’
‘Waltzing Matilda?’
‘No. I think that’s when you go off into the bush with a rucksack.’
He looks at me sideways as we pull up behind the car.
‘I think you need to check out some other websites, Spence.’
‘I think you’re right.’

A plain-clothes police officer comes up and stands by the window. Frank lowers it.
‘Sorry to drag you out,’ says the officer. ‘I don’t think he’s been badly hurt, but I just wanted a professional view.’
His disguise is not so much in his clothes as in his face. He has a wide and friendly mouth crammed with the kind of teeth you might expect to see in a fox; with his spiky ginger hair glistening in the yellow light of the streetlamp, he shifts his weight happily from foot to foot like an excitable, vagrant clown.
‘No worries,’ says Frank.

* **

Mr Norris’ flat is really just one big lounge, and really the one big lounge is just one big tree – a gigantic palm, rising out of a clay pot the size of a roll-top bath, its leaves arching over everything like monstrous, glossy green chevrons. At the foot of the palm is a decorative Chinese birdcage, the door standing open.
‘She’s up there,’ says Mr Norris. ‘If you’re wondering.’
‘I was.’
‘Do you like parrots?’
‘Hm.’
I find a place to stand on the carpet; my boots crunching on a scattering of sunflower husks.
‘So tell us what happened to you tonight?’ says Frank, pushing a frond aside and standing next to Mr Norris. ‘We’ll come to the parrot later.’
‘It’s all absolutely hideous. I’ve lived here twenty years and never had anything like it.’
The police officer reaches a hand into the air between us like a referee.
‘I’ll just be outside if you want me,’ he says.
‘Thank you so much officer,’ says Mr Norris. ‘I do appreciate everything you’ve done.’
‘Have a word with these people then I’ll jump in again.’
He reaches into his jacket pocket for his radio as he leaves; I half expect to see him haul out a line of flags.
‘So. Mr Norris,’ says Frank. ‘I understand you’ve been assaulted.’
‘Yes. Mr Jephcoat has only been in the basement a month and he’s already making a nuisance of himself. I thought he was all right at first but it’s all gone horribly wrong. You see we’ve got this neighbour, Mrs Jennings. I’m afraid she’s got mental health problems...’ he semi-whispers the words, ‘and consequently every now and again she crashes about a bit. It’s just something one gets used to. We’ve all got our quirks, heaven knows. But for some reason Mr Jephcoat has decided that every time she makes a noise he’ll play his music extremely loudly, and of course that rebounds on everyone.’
‘So what happened with the assault?’
‘I’m coming to that. So he was playing his awful music, and the following morning I saw him down in the gardens, so I went up to him and we had a chat about it. And that’s the funny thing. It was all absolutely fine, he seemed fine, so I thought “There, got that sorted”. But late tonight – oh, I don’t know what time it is now – late tonight I got a knock on the door. I should’ve known something was wrong because Clothilde flew straight up into the centre of the tree, where she is now, if you can see. That’s her safe place. She’s as good as a burglar alarm.’
‘Handy.’
‘So I opened the door and there was Mr Jephcoat with a little yellow saw in his hand and very red in the face.’ “I’ve done it” he says. “Done what?” “I’ve cut down that blasted tree.” “Whatever are you talking about? What blasted tree?” And then I just knew. “Oh, not the bay.” “It’s gone” he said. “But that’s taken twenty years to grow. I planted it the day I moved in. Tell me you haven’t,” I said. “Come and look” he said. So I followed him out and it was true. There were branches and leaves absolutely everywhere, and to make matters worse, he’d walked all over the flower beds so he could throw most of the debris over the wall into Mrs Jennings’ garden. Well I was furious. Saw or not I went up to him and told him what I thought. “This is unacceptable” I said, or something, I can’t remember exactly. So then he grabs me round the neck and presses me up against the wall. It was dreadful. He was breathing very heavily, like a mad bull, and his head looked like it was going to pop. I thought he wanted to strangle me, but after a minute or two he let me go, and stormed off back into his flat.”
‘Sounds nasty,’ says Frank, leaning in and feeling Mr Norris’ pulse. ‘Do you have any pain anywhere?’
Mr Norris looks up sadly.
‘No. The police wanted me checked over, otherwise I wouldn’t have called you out. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’
There is a tiny rustling from high up in the tree. I change my position and just manage to catch a glimpse of a lumpish, yellow and green shape, wriggling deeper back into the heart of the palm.

breakfast call

‘The woman on the phone said I had to get down on the floor and press up and down on his chest, but I couldn’t, not with my condition.’
I’m sitting with Steve on a broad yellow sofa; from our position we can see and hear the crews working on his father in the kitchen – the calm requests and comments, the beeping of the metronome, the passing of seconds and then minutes as relentlessly as the sweep of the second hand on the clock above the doorway.
‘See his feet moving? Is he conscious?’
‘No. It’s a mechanical thing, because of the chest compressions. Are you sure you don’t want to come and sit a bit further off, Steve? It’s an upsetting thing to watch.’
‘He’d want me here. I won’t leave him.’ Steve inhales wetly, then looks down to the tissue in his hand, absently watching it turn over and over in his fingers.
‘I knew something wasn’t right,’ he says. ‘We’ve got this routine. Dad gets up at half five, comes down to the kitchen, has a cup of tea and takes his pills, puts the washing on, sets out the breakfast things, then comes up to run me a bath and get me out of bed. But when I opened my eyes the house was quiet, and I looked at the alarm clock and it said half past eight, so I just knew something had happened. He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘We’re doing everything we can, Steve. You’ve got the best team possible in there. If anyone can help your dad it’s them. We’ve just got to wait and see.’
‘But I know he’s dead. His tea was cold. There’s nothing you can do. I just wish I could’ve done something myself, but it’s difficult enough to walk, let alone get on the floor.’
‘You called the ambulance, Steve. That’s the main thing. You did everything you could.’
‘He’s dead though. I can’t believe it.’

In contrast to the crowded kitchen off to our left, the sitting room stretches out around us cool and quiet, thrumming with order in the early morning sunshine, every picture and ornament, cushion and cabinet freshly dusted and meticulously placed.
‘You keep a lovely home,’ I say to Steve. ‘How long have you lived here?’
‘We moved when my mum died. About ten years now.’
‘It’s so bright.’
‘Yeah. It really catches the sun.’
‘Lovely garden out there, too, by the looks of it.’
‘He never stopped.’
He runs up against the idea of that, and pauses a while. Then he reaches for the phone on a side table.
‘Can you call Janice for me?’ he says, handing it over. Then: ‘Wait. No. I’ll do it.’

***

Time slips slowly through the house.

In a neighbouring garden, some children come out to jump on a trampoline; their shouts rising happily on the bright blue air.

The activity in the kitchen changes, becomes less focused, more contemplative, post event. The metronome is switched off. The lead paramedic comes in and kneels beside Steve. He says they did all they could and gave him every chance, but it was probably just too long since he collapsed. He says Steve’s Dad has died, and he’s sorry. He says he knows it’s no consolation, but in his experience, by the look of everything, it would’ve been quick.
‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
The team withdraws, the kitchen gets tidied, everything the same – the cup of tea and the handful of pills on the breakfast counter – but now Steve’s Dad lying on the floor beneath a blanket, his head on a pillow.
‘I want to kiss him goodbye but I can’t get down there,’ he says.
‘Shall we make your Dad comfortable on this sofa?’
‘No. He wouldn’t want that. He wouldn’t want to mess it up.’
‘We can put sheets and things down.’
‘No. Could you just lift him up so I can kiss him, then leave him back where he is?’
‘I’ll talk to the others.’

Frank gets a scoop stretcher from the truck. We load Steve’s Dad onto it, then lift him up onto the counter. I bring Steve into the room; he hobbles over and kisses his Dad on the cheek.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ he says, over and over again.
His Dad’s face has the haughtiness of death, a wax representation of the man that was, but easing imperceptibly, like the impression of a footprint at the edge of an ocean, succumbing grain by grain to the dissolution of all things.

‘You can make him comfortable on the floor again if you want,’ says Steve.
‘Okay.’
We lower him down.

In the neighbouring garden, the children are called in to breakfast.

names

Paul the social worker is waiting for us out on the pavement; he leans out on tip-toes and waves his folder in the air to attract our attention.
‘It’s a difficult situation,’ he says as we gather round the cab of the truck. ‘Mrs Macaulay doesn’t want to go to hospital, so I’m not sure how successful we’re going to be. We might have to get the police involved, but let’s see how far we get with a little gentle talking first.’
A small, gently rounded man, he stands in the sunshine radiating as much empathy and goodwill as a freshly laundered soft toy. He adjusts his glasses and smiles. ‘Such a beautiful day today. Anyway chaps. Mrs Macaulay is eighty-four, going downhill a bit these past few months. Recent diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia with a query on dementia. Non-compliant with meds since the start of the year, self-neglect generally, abusive. Not sure about the actual threat of violence. Her grandson Jeremy is here. I’ll introduce you.’ He holds up the folder. ‘I’ve got all the paperwork, of course.’
He leads us up a set of steep concrete steps to the open door of a small, red-brick house. A weathered thirty-year-old man appears from inside, licking a roll-up cigarette and lighting it with the air of someone ready to stand back and await developments.
‘She’s locked herself up in the bedroom,’ he says, tossing the match into the garden and then squinting up and down the street. He picks a strand of tobacco from his bottom lip and looks us over. ‘She says she’s not going.’
Paul grimaces. ‘I know. I know. It’s tricky.’
‘Tricky!’ says Jeremy. ‘Good luck. She was spoon feeding a doll all last night.’ He stands aside to let us pass through a cloud of blue smoke. ‘But watch yourself. She’s already waved a Bowie knife in my face, and she keeps an iron bar by the bed.’
‘Mm. Maybe we’d better get the police along,’ says Paul, hugging the folder to his chest at the bottom of the stairs.
‘I don’t mind having a word through the door in the meantime,’ I say to him. ‘I’ll jump back down if she comes out swinging.’
As I walk up, I think about that scene in Psycho where the detective gets stabbed up on the landing; the camera watching from high up in the corner of the ceiling as Mrs Bates scuttles out and plants a carving knife in his chest. But this isn’t the Bates residence. There’s an old Hoover on the landing, and a bunch of appliqué violets in a frame on the wall.
‘Hello? Mrs Macaulay?’ I say, laying a hand lightly on the door – a cheap, three ply affair with a straight lever handle and a mortice lock.
‘Go away.’ The voice is high pitched and quivering, like a young girl pretending to be old. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Mrs Macaulay? My name’s Spence. I’m with the ambulance. Can you open the door so I can say hello properly?’
‘I said go away! I’m not going to let you take me. I know you. You’ve want to drag me out and dump me. You want to cut me up. And I won’t let you. Go away.’
‘Mrs Macaulay? We’re just worried about your health. We’re worried you’re not yourself and we want to help.’
Silence.
‘Mrs Macaulay?’
There is a sudden thump against the door and I pull back.
‘I’ll kill you!’ she screams. ‘You’re not taking me.’
‘Come on, Mrs Macaulay. We’ve just come here because Jeremy and your family are worried you’re not well.’
‘I have no family. They’re all dead.’
Suddenly there is the sound of someone stumbling over furniture to get to the other side of the room, then screams through the window ‘Help me! Help!’.
‘The police are en route,’ says Paul up the stairs.
Silence from the room.
‘Mrs Macaulay?’ I say at the door again. ‘Are you okay?’
I hear her clumping slowly back towards the door.
‘Why are you still here?’ she says at last, breathing hard close up to the crack. ‘I’ve told you. I’m not going to be dragged off and cut about.’
‘All we want is to meet you face to face. Come on. Open the door and say hello.’
There is a pause, and then she whispers: ‘Why don’t you fuck off back home to your prostitute wife?’

***

Later that morning we’re driving through the backstreets.
‘Look at that,’ I say to Frank, nodding to a run down café on the corner. ‘That’s got to be the worst name in the history of catering. Burpers.’
‘I always thought Sam n’Ella’s could really work,’ he says.
‘And then, if you were a hairdressers, maybe you could call yourself Crawlers.’
‘Blunts.’
‘I’m thinking of opening a swimwear shop: Crabbies.’
Frank laughs.
‘Talking of names,’ he says. ‘You didn’t tell me Mrs Macaulay knew your wife.’

the continental

A&E is overrun, has been all week. Pushing Mrs Riseborough on the trolley through the swing doors, it’s as if we’ve just stepped into the blood and carnage of an epic painting by Delacroix, with a health care assistant waving an x-ray form in the air, rallying the charge.
‘I’ll just go and have a chat with the nurse,’ says Frank, sauntering off through the chaos.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask Mrs Riseborough. Her breathing is dreadful, a chronic rattle-bag of wheezes and rubs. She didn’t want to bring the nasal canula she uses at home because the respiratory nurse had told her not to take any equipment out of the house. Instead, she’s using one of our low-flow oxygen masks, holding it off a little way from her nose and mouth, like a dowager sniffing an exotic plant.
‘I’m feeling hot and I don’t want anything to make me hotter,’ she says. ‘I hate to feel restricted.’
‘I can understand that.’
A drunk tries to throw himself off a trolley, and his equally drunk friend thinks sitting on him will help. Security run from place to place, restoring order with fat, black leather gloves.
‘I’m sorry it’s all a bit of a mess at the moment,’ I say to Mrs Riseborough. ‘Time of year or something. But hopefully we won’t be too long.’
‘Don’t worry about me, dear. I’m quite comfortable, thank you.’
A scream from behind some curtains. A kid wrapped in a blanket drifts past in bare feet.
‘So. What did you do before you retired?’ I ask Mrs R. to distract her from her surroundings.
‘You’d never guess to look at me now but I was a dancer. I auditioned for the Continental up in town – quite famous in its time. Have you heard of it?
‘Yes. Very famous. A kind of Moulin Rouge cafe revue place, wasn’t it? With comedians and singers between dances?’
‘That’s it. I went up town and auditioned and they said “Okay. You can dance all right, but we need to see how you go.” So they took me on for a week, and renewed the contract every week after that, and that’s how I went on for eight years. I had a wonderful time.’
‘When was that?’
‘Just after the war. About nineteen forty-nine, I should think. A really wonderful time. I worked with all the famous stars. Whatsisname – thought himself a real ladies man. He wasn’t all that, but he wouldn’t be told. And you-know who, off of the telly. We had these skimpy costumes – feathers and lace, all very arty, you know - nothing sordid. I met my Bill there.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘He’d just been demobbed and was up town working. He came by the theatre once and saw me on the stage and really took a fancy to me. So he used to come every night from then on, and in the end he plucked up the courage to have a word with Harry on the stage door – Harry was a lovely man, really knew what was what, really looked after us girls. So Harry said “Of course. Come through and say hello.” So he let him backstage one night. Well, I was coming off stage and there was Bill, looking all shy and shifty and holding out my dressing gown. He was such a dear. So he takes me out to dinner and that was that. And here we are, sixty years later – sixty two actually, if you count the last two, which I do, even though he’s gone now.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘What can you do?’ she says, taking another gasp of air. ‘It’s life and you’ve just got to make the best of it. I said to the doctor “Be straight with me now. I want to know what’s wrong with me and how long I’ve got”. “Are you sure?” he said. And I told him. I said “Absolutely” I said. “I want to be like Bill. I want it laid out flat so I can have a good look at what I’ve got and know what it is I’ve got to do about it.” “Well,” he said, “There’s not an awful lot that can be done about it,” he said. “I should think you’ve got about four to five weeks.” “Good,” I said. “Thank you very much.” Because you know I’ve had a wonderful life and I’m not sorry about going. I’ve had my lot. I danced at The Continental, I married a lovely man, I had a lovely family, and what more can you say about it?”
She lays a frail hand on mine and smiles at me. Her face has been ravaged by illness, but the cheekbones are as high and fine as they must always have been, and her eyes as blue.
‘I was a fabulous dancer,’ she says. ‘And you know what my daughter Chloe said? She said “When you’re gone, Mum, don’t for Gawd’s sake let anyone else have them photos.”

a painted wall

The moment Frank puts his hand on the latch of the gate, a monstrous dog rears up behind it, slamming into the wooden slats, barking viciously.
‘Jesus Christ!’ says Frank, jumping back. ‘The size of it!’
The dog stops barking just as suddenly, and presses its piano-sized head up against the top, breathing hard and looking at us with a cold, shark-black eye.
There is a brief stand-off as the dog – surely the bastard offspring of a Shetland pony and a wolf – stares at us, gauging distances, thicknesses. Then it starts again, coming at the fence with every ounce of hatred in its body. The pine slats shudder.
‘Fuck me.’
Just then, a woman appears in the yard. She strides up to the beast, slaps it on the nose and takes its place at the fence, peering at us over the top with much the same expression.
‘It’s only Jessie,’ she says. ‘But come round the front if you don’t like dogs.’
‘Right.’
We pick our way along the alleyway, past car parts and carrier bags, and meet her at the front door.
‘Julie’s upstairs.’
The house would feel crowded if you wore a jacket; as it is, every surface and corner, shelf and recess, is comprehensively junked-up, an accumulation of stuff in settled, dateable layers. We pass a sitting room given over to a wall-sized TV screen and a white leather sofa whose three occupants seem to have absorbed the hue and form of the cushions they lie amongst. They barely look up as we pass.
From the top of the stairs we can hear the anguished groans of a young girl.
‘Baby’s coming,’ says the woman, following behind us.
‘Can I ask what relation you are?’ I say to her. If she had said Great Grandmother I’d have believed it; she has a coarse, desiccated look, a pulling in around the mouth and eyes, and a hint of ash when she shakes her pony tail out.
‘Her mum,’ she says. ‘Jake’s the father. He’s up there.’
We go on into the room of a young teenage girl, fluffy, white, heart-shaped photo frames on the wall, My Little Pony figures on the window-ledge, and a crowd of Care Bears and cuddly Disney characters set four deep along the top of the chest of drawers, jostling for position like some nightmarish audience ready for the show. A small girl is lying on her left side on the bed, her legs drawn up to her swollen belly, her arms clutching her knees. Her eyes are closed, and her damp yellow hair has fallen across her face. Jake, her partner, is sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand draped on her leg, a mobile phone open in the other. He looks up as we come in, and springs away to the side as if we’d caught him cheating.
‘How often are your contractions, Julie?’ asks Frank.
‘I don’t know. It just hurts. Mum!’
‘It’s okay Julie. Listen to the man.’
‘Has everything been normal up till now?’
She groans.
‘Yes?’
She still has on her tracksuit bottoms. They look dry.
‘How long has she been like this?’
‘I don’t know. Since about six?’
I know Frank is thinking the same as me. Delivering a baby in this cramped little room would be less than ideal. And taking into account all the variables - the partner, the dog, the people in the room downstairs - the chances of an uncomplicated delivery seem remote.
‘Let’s ride this one out and then we’ll get you down to the ambulance,’ he says. ‘The hospital’s only round the corner.’

***

‘I’m glad we didn’t have to deliver that one,’ I say to Frank in the cab, clearing the job off the screen.
‘It would’ve been all right,’ he says. ‘We could’ve used one of those Care Bears as a pad.’
Another job comes up immediately.
‘You have got to be kidding.’
Birth imminent, the other side of town.

***

The other side of town, and even though it’s only five minutes away, for all the differences there are between the two places it may as well be the other side of the world. Whilst the streets of the first estate were set close like the high-sided runs of some penal colony; the feel here is of light and air and space, the sun smiling in an arc across the neat grass verges and gardens of Spring blossom.
Mrs Jessop is on all fours in the bedroom, naked from the waist down and panting to avoid pushing and delivering too fast. Mr Jessop is by her side, rubbing her back and whispering encouragement. We break open the maternity pack. She declines Entonox. The baby’s head bulges out slowly, then after a moment or two the rest of the body follows. She turns and takes the bloody infant on her breast, sobbing and laughing; we help her clear the baby girl’s face; she swaddles her, and lays her on to suckle.

Half an hour later, the midwives arrived and in charge, we’re sitting in the kitchen as a family friend makes us tea. The Jessops have only just moved here. The place is stripped out, back to bare board and plaster. The basics of the kitchen units are in, but everywhere else there is a sense of a bright new home being worked up from a sound base. The main wall of the kitchen is covered in writing – a happy graffiti to be painted over soon and worked into the fabric of the house like domestic white magic – all by the friends and relatives who’ve stopped by to help over the last few weeks, making everything ready for the baby.
‘It’s going to be a lovely place,’ says Frank, looking out into the sweet little garden and sipping his tea. ‘Good choice.’
I look over the graffiti wall again, the signatures and messages, the cartoon flowers and smiling faces. I wonder how many babies will be born today, across the world. And I wonder what’s been written for each of them, and what’s been done, in the days and weeks and months before they came.

convoy

Mrs Eldridge is sitting in her wheelchair ready to go, an imitation snow fox blanket over her lap and a furry, zebra print poncho over her shoulders. Her hair is gathered up and gelled into an extraordinary beehive, a silvery sculpture so perfect it could be a comedy wig, with a sheen like the gloss on a giant sugared almond. Her expression is as sweet as the hair – a contented, confectionary glaze to her face, as if some current of sweetness was rising up through her, up from the luxurious pillows of the chair, focused by the cone of the poncho, lifting the corners of her mouth, pushing up her eyebrows and gathering in the beehive.

‘She’s been off her legs these past four years,’ says Mr Eldridge, bringing the last of the bags through. ‘But this last week she just hasn’t been able to do a thing.’
‘Has the doctor been out, then?’
‘Oh yes. He said for her to go in.’
‘Did he leave a letter?’
‘A letter? No.’

Mr and Mrs Eldridge are both ninety three, married at twenty one, the world gone to hell, but the two of them making a stand together outside the church, laughing happily into the camera, the bride leaning forwards as she struggled to hold down great layers of white lace and crinoline with one arm whilst keeping the other firmly threaded through the arm of the sailor groom by her side.
‘I see you were in the navy then?’
Mr Eldridge puts a bag down by the wheelchair and straightens up.
‘Escorted the Russian convoys through the war,’ he says, then adjusts the blanket across his wife’s lap.
‘Blimey,’ says Frank. ‘That must have been a tough time.’
‘Well it was fucking cold, I remember that much. But we made it through. Didn’t we Grace? We made it through.’
He lightly fetches on his jacket, and it seems to hang directly down from his shoulders without touching any other part of his body. I pick up all the bags and Frank takes up his position at the back of the chair. As he makes to go I ask Mrs Eldridge if she’s comfortable enough, but she says nothing, smiling exactly as she did before, without the least change of expression.

ambulance noir

This job is so far off patch we may as well be setting sail for Marrakesh. A low priority call, we figure a local crew will come up long before we get there. But the minutes roll on as smoothly as the road, and the country changes and becomes unfamiliar. It’s warm enough to open the window, the radio plays a stack of good songs, but it’s still tedious that we’re expected to run on this one, and I can’t help prodding Control for updates every few minutes. The dispatcher gets annoyed.

‘Give me your mobile number. Talk to the PSIAM desk yourself,’ he says.

I’ve always pictured the PSIAM desk as a dimly lit backroom in Control, richly furnished with rugs, palms, overhead fans, a mahogany desk and a hookah, a Bakelite phone and a bronze eagle, Sydney Greenstreet sipping sweet, cardamom-flavoured coffee, sweating in an off-white suit, something heavy in his pocket.
‘Sidney here,’ he wheezes. ‘Good morning, Spence.’
‘What’s the story, Sidney?’ cringing like Peter Lorre. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like it, I tell you.’
‘I hate to send you boys out there,’ he sighs. I hear a noise, like the slapping of a fly-swatter and the scattering of papers. ‘A dreadful waste of everyone’s time, I’m sorry.’
‘So tell me again what it’s about?’
‘An eighteen year old chap suffers low potassium. Ongoing thing, hereditary. Starts feeling low a week ago, usual symptoms of tingling in the arms and legs, but doesn’t have his usual medication to correct it. He says he’s moved house and hasn’t registered with a GP in the new area yet. He does have a repeat scrip but says he wasn’t sure if the pharmacy would accept it. He’s living with three other people. None of them seem interested or able to take the scrip to the pharmacy. They say they have no car and no money.’
‘Did you Google the nearest pharmacy, Sidney? Did you find out if they could walk?’
‘I did, Spence. I did. Nought point five miles, Spence. A light afternoon stroll. Even I could manage it.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘Not a thing. The phone went quiet.’

As it does now.

‘I told them that this was not what the ambulance service is for,’ he carries on - the sound of a pistol barrel being broken open and spun? - ‘but they still demanded an attendance. So there you are. All our other vehicles are on other jobs, or getting diverted. I’m afraid it looks like you’ll be stuck with this one, Spence. I’m sorry. I’ve done my best.’
‘It’s not your fault, Sidney.’
‘It’s this damned system. Let me know how you get on.’
I hang up.
‘They want us to attend.’
‘Shit,’ says Frank.

***

There’s a middle aged woman and a younger girl smoking and chatting outside the house. They wait until we’ve parked, then turn and lead us up to the patient. Rich, the eighteen year old, is lying on his back under a stained and uncovered duvet. A pleasant faced kid, he nods as we walk into the room and introduce ourselves. His girlfriend, her mother and a family friend, file in after us. The family friend perches on the edge of the other bed in the room and continues to play a game on his phone, held up close to his face, using both thumbs and maybe the tip of his nose.
‘My arms and legs are pretty much completely numb now,’ Rich says. ‘Sorry.’
‘I understand you ran out of your meds. Why was that?’
He makes a face.
‘But you do have a scrip?’
‘Yep. I didn’t know if it would work, though.’
‘But you didn’t try?’
‘No one would go and get it for me.’
I turn to the mother, a pale faced forty year old, weighed down by years of mascara and a leopard print dressing gown.
‘Could you really not have taken his scrip down to the pharmacy? This has been a few days coming.’
‘I don’t have the money.’
Usually about this time I let things go and retreat into a more resilient kind of politeness. But there’s something about all this – the distance we’ve travelled, the terrible waste of resources, the shocking passivity in the room – that makes me want to ride it out for longer.
‘What about you?’ I say, turning to the girlfriend. ‘Couldn’t you have helped out?’
‘I haven’t got a car.’
‘You could’ve walked.’
She shrugs.
‘And you?’ to the boy on the phone. ‘What do you think?’
He frowns and leans harder into the phone.
Frank shifts in the doorway.
‘A few bananas and an energy drink usually puts things right,’ says Rich, helpfully. ‘But there weren’t any.’
‘Bananas,’ I say to the mum.
She shakes her head as if I’ve offered her one.
‘There’s a supermarket at the end of the road,’ I say. ‘I’ve never seen such a big one. Have you Frank?’
He smiles.
‘It’s the size of a small town. They’ll have bananas. Couldn’t you have got him a bunch?’
‘Like I say. I don’t have the money.’
‘For a couple of bananas?’
She shrugs.
‘Have you any idea how much it’s cost to run an ambulance out here?’
I look back at Rich. He’s lying with the same expression on his face, waiting for something to happen. ‘You’ll be hours up the hospital.’
‘I know.’
There’s a silence in the room. Everyone’s waiting for me to say something. I think of Sydney, standing by the phone, dabbing his forehead dry with a handkerchief.

‘I suppose we’d better go to the hospital, then. Who’s coming with him?’
The two women stare at the boy with the mobile phone. After a while he looks up and says: ‘What?’

well?

‘Do you ever get to drive?’
‘We swap over at the hospital. It’s pretty much fifty fifty.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘On blue lights?’
‘Sometimes. It breaks the day up.’
‘All the knowledge you people have. You’re like doctors nowadays.’
‘Well – not really. Doctors have to study a lot longer. They’ve got five years of medical school, then two more working in different areas before they’re qualified to practise. So that’s seven. A paramedic degree takes three. My technician course was ten weeks.’
‘There’s nothing you can’t do.’
‘Well...’
Mr Halliburton is sitting on the ambulance chair, his corduroy trousers riding up, exposing his sock garters, his aged mother nervously turning a paper tissue over and over in her hands.
‘All right?’ he says, leaning over and tapping her on her papery arm.
She smiles sadly, then moves her arm from under his hand to dab ineffectually at her nose. Mr Halliburton sighs, adjusts his position, then peers restlessly out through the slats of the window.

I’ve often thought there must be a Handbook of Ambulance Misconceptions somewhere. Part of a secret, international series – one for every job in the world, with a preface roughing out the basic howlers, a stock of questions indexed at the back. I’d bet if I was a trapeze artist, Mr Halliburton would be waiting for me backstage, nodding and winking and drawing himself up to say: ‘I couldn’t do your job, mate. All that swinging about.’

We go over a bump and it seems to shake him from the window into conversation again.
‘I couldn’t do your job, mate’ he says. ‘All that blood and guts.’
‘There isn’t that much trauma.’
‘All that piss and vomit. I couldn’t do it.’
‘We get our fair share of drunks.’
He looks at me, and his eyebrows start to creep up ominously, like a release valve finally giving way to the pressure of the ultimate question.
‘I bet you’ve seen some things,’ he says. ‘ I bet you’ve got some stories to tell.’ He licks his lips, folds his arms and waits.

It makes me cringe, but I can’t say I blame him. I know that the reason I feel uneasy is because I recognise the same curiosity to hear this stuff myself. On the face of it – the cool, rational face - I joined the ambulance service for the hours, the wage, the driving, the out-and-about spirit, the patent usefulness of the job. And all those things stand, of course. But I know too that beneath this safe, CV language move darker, less admissible currents – the urge to satisfy my curiosity, to see what death looked like, how it moved, what it meant. Essentially I wanted to know what the traumatic and bloody events I read about in the papers and soak up endlessly on TV and in films – I wanted to know how those things behaved in real life, and what they might mean to me. I wanted to know if I could cope.

So now – if I was honest, if I tried my best to think about all the jobs I’d done, to tell him what I’d seen and felt and heard over the last four years, what really could I say? What did it come down to? A story about a dead man and his dog? A railway line? An overflowing bath?

‘Well?’ says Mr Halliburton.

bogof

Ralph normally works up country, but an overtime shift has landed his response car rudely and squarely in the centre of town. A paramedic for thirty years, Ralph carries his experience as lightly as his epaulettes. If it wasn’t for the uniform he could be a retired headmaster, his benign smile only slightly undermined by the ascetic pinch to his face, as if things just kept turning out the same despite all hopes to the contrary.

The first time we back him up he’s on a job at a solicitor’s office. We are shown in by a Kevlar stockinged secretary past a rack of leaflets and brochures on personal injury claims, through to a consulting room out back. The table and chairs have been pulled to one side, and lying stretched across the carpet tiles, crying and slapping at her forehead is a large woman in a white brocade dress. Ralph is kneeling next to her, trying to persuade the woman to open her eyes so he can shine a light in them. He smiles pleasantly as we come into the room.
‘Hello chaps,’ he says, standing up. ‘Well. I haven’t long been here myself, but what we seem to have is a woman in her thirties – Jamila - who complained of a sudden pain in her head and neck, looked as if she was going to faint, and was helped to the floor by this kind gentleman.’
‘She didn’t fall or hurt herself in any way,’ the man says in a clear voice. ‘I made sure she was still breathing, then I phoned for help.’
Ralph pauses for that to sink in, then continues.
‘And that’s as far as I’ve got really. Her pulse and SATS are fine. She’s shaking as you can see but it’s not any kind of seizure. I haven’t been able to get an awful lot more out of Jamila than her name, though.
I lean in past his shoulder to get a better look at her face.
‘I know Jamila. I went to her a few weeks ago.’
I straighten up and nod back towards the door, then step away from the patient. Ralph distributes his smile evenly around the room once more for good measure, retreats, then moves in close to me like a priest about to hear confession:
‘Frequent flyer. Always the same presentation – finds a floor to lie on, pains in head and neck, big shakes, big drama, they’ve never found anything at the hospital. Exactly the same as last time.’
‘I see.’
We both turn back into the room.
‘Well,’ says Ralph, clapping his hands. ‘Shall we help you to your feet, Jamila?’ She stops crying and runs me through with a look. ‘Let’s get you out to the ambulance where it’s a bit more private.’
‘Is she going to be all right?’ asks the man in the corner, hastily putting aside a folder and adjusting his tie. ‘I thought it looked pretty bad.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ says Ralph. ‘Don’t worry.’
We help her up, and lead her back through the office. The receptionist scrutinises us from behind the desk.
‘I have a list of contacts,’ she says.
Ralph takes the printout and thanks her warmly.
Out on the ambulance, Jamila makes herself comfortable on the trolley, then resumes her attitude of distress, her long white dress flowing over the sides of the trolley like she’s the corpse of a Victorian tragedienne lying in state. She begins slapping at the side of her head.
‘I just want to press this vein, here. Could you press it for me? Everything went black, then dancing light, bright light, then flash! Then out of focus. You, for instance – when I look at you – to begin with it’s like oh my god what is this creature with two faces and many eye and then now it’s like oh, okay, almost normal. I just wish you would reach in and press my head here.’
‘I see,’ says Ralph. ‘So, chaps? You don’t want me for anything do you, guys? It seems as if you can cope. All right if I shove off?’
‘No problem, Ralph. See you later.’

But it’s sooner than we think.

Barely two hours later, we are heading back to base for lunch when we’re diverted to back up a car on scene at a collapse in a restaurant. Frank drives with the murderous precision of a hungry man, and within five minutes we’re turning into the road. Ralph’s four by four is parked up outside the pizza place, with a bored waiter standing guard, a cigarette discretely cupped in his hand. When he catches our attention he nods for us to follow him inside, then turns and flicks the cigarette away.

Despite or maybe because of the dazzling afternoon sun, the interior of the restaurant is muted and dark. Ralph is standing in the centre of a small group of people; sitting in the centre of the group, a young man in a pin stripe suit, an ornate black walking stick in one hand, a bag of medication in the other.
‘Well, well,’ says Ralph as we walk over to them. ‘Nice to see you again.’
The group parts to let us in.
‘This is Jasper. Jasper is twenty two. He appears to have had some kind of seizure. He suffers from a whole raft of illnesses, don’t you? ...’
I catch Ralph’s eye and as discretely as I can mouth the word: Munchausens.
Ralph’s expression barely registers the exchange, but I can see he has understood. He continues his train of thought for a second longer: ‘... Parkinsons, Diabetes, Epilepsy, heart problems – you name it, Jasper’s probably – erm – just excuse us for a second, would you?’
We both step over to the restaurant lobby.
‘I don’t want you thinking that every patient we go to today is a phoney,’ I whisper.
‘But?’
‘But Jasper is very well known up at the hospital. The diabetes is real, but everything else is strictly Hans Christian Andersen. Even if we took him up there they wouldn’t see him. Last time I saw him at A and E he had a security guard sitting on him in the car park, waiting for the police.’
‘What for?’
‘Hitting a nurse with his stick.’
‘I see.’
We turn back to the group. Jasper has struggled to his feet and is making a fuss about what bags he should or shouldn’t have.
‘Look here,’ he says, straightening his arms to adjust his starched cuffs and almost falling backwards into a floral display. ‘I don’t want to cause a fuss. I’m sure there are people much more deserving of your attention at the moment than I am. I simply want to go home and carry on with some extremely important, extremely high value business transactions.’
‘Why don’t we have a chat on the ambulance, Jasper? It won’t take long. Just to make sure everything’s in order.’
He sighs. ‘I honestly don’t – oh - I suppose if you think that’s what’s medically required. But this is highly embarrassing for me. It’s just Parkinson’s you know. And there’s not an awful lot one can do about that, is there?’
‘Come on, Jasper.’

Outside on the ambulance Jasper employs all his usual methods of delay, his campaign of passive resistance taken to the maddening, improvisational levels of a clown. At one point, an alarm starts to sound. He hunts through the pockets of his jacket, and the bag of medication, scattering packets of pills across the trolley, chasing the bleep into a document folder of phoney contracts and pseudo-business correspondence. Eventually he retrieves the electronic device and switches it off.
‘To remind me to take my medication,’ he says. ‘Now – what have you done with my stick?’
Ralph smiles and goes to leave the vehicle. ‘Goodbye Jasper.’
By the back door I say to him: ‘That’s weird. Two patients – two frequent flyers. But I don’t want you to think every patient we go to is a psyche, Ralph.’
He rests a comforting hand on my shoulder.
‘Don’t worry, Spence. But have you ever thought – and it’s just a thought - maybe you attract them?’
He laughs, shakes his head, and saunters off to his car. I climb back into the truck.
‘Ah. Good. There you are,’ says Jasper. ‘I was just telling your colleague. Chest pain.’

a pattern of circles

‘Have you come for me now?’

Geoffrey levers himself up in his chair to look at us as Maggie shows us into the room. It is icily cold outside, but the sun is sharp and bright. It splashes in through the windows and casts every item of furniture, every picture, photograph and domestic item into brilliant relief.
‘Hello Geoffrey. I understand we’re taking you to the hospice.’
‘Yes. I’m all done now and I’m going there to die.’
‘Right.’
He settles back into his chair.
‘Do you suppose I might have time to finish my tea?’
‘Of course.’
Maggie shows us to the sofa next to Geoffrey’s chair.
‘Can I get you boys a cup?’ she says.
‘Why not? Always time for a cup of tea.’
‘How do you take it?’
She stands in front of us, hand in hand, a small, neat woman with a generous smile, her hair as perfectly ordered as the heavy tartan skirt pinned around her waist. ‘Milk and sugar?’
Geoffrey shifts in the chair again and almost spills his cup across his middle.
‘Oops!’
Frank helps him re-balance, then finds a cloth to dab his jersey dry.
‘Thank you so much,’ he says. ‘How clumsy and stupid I’ve become.’
‘It’s your illness darling,’ says Maggie, superintending the clean up. ‘All right? Okay? Shall I get you another?’
‘No, darling. This is absolutely lovely.’
She hobbles off to the kitchen.
‘I’ll give Tony a ring in a minute,’ she says over her shoulder.
Frank carefully hands Geoffrey his cup back, then sits down.

Geoffrey is ninety three. Age and illness have robbed him of substance; he sits in his chair like a meticulously realised soft toy of the man that was, the strands of hair across his head and the lines of his pencil moustache picked out in silver thread. The most vital thing about Geoffrey are his eyes – two dabs of aquamarine beneath the liver spots and the spilling, waxy flesh of his face.
‘I flew with Bomber Command,’ he says, turning just sufficiently to look at us, almost dropping his tea again in the process. It’s an odd feeling, as if he were scanning us for traces of the people we might have been. ‘Stirlings, Lancasters, Wellingtons. I’ve had my adventures. But now I’m just so damned tired. I’m no good for anything anymore and I just want to sleep
‘Most of my lot were in the army,’ I say. ‘But my Mum had a cousin, Arthur, who was a tail gunner in a Lancaster. She used to say she remembered standing on his shoes and dancing with him once when he came over on a visit.’
Geoffrey smiles gently.
‘Did he live?’
‘No. I’m afraid not. He was shot down somewhere over the North Atlantic.’
‘So many of us were.’
Maggie has come back in and settled herself in the opposite armchair.
‘Poor fellow,’ she says. ‘Such a waste. Do you know how many we lost? Fifty six thousand. Fifty six thousand! And it’s still going on today. All those boys in Afghanistan. There just never seems to be an end to it.’
Geoffrey takes another trembling sip of his tea.
‘Almost there,’ he says.

‘The hospice is lovely,’ says Frank. ‘Out in the country. Beautiful view of the hills.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the staff there are always so friendly.’
‘Splendid.’
Geoffrey regards his wife.
‘Sixty five years we’ve been married. Just when it all finished. After a long and difficult courtship.’
Maggie laughs and dips her head; for a moment she could be twenty years old, swinging her legs on a chair at the side of a dance hall, waiting to be asked.
‘Long and difficult, my eye,’ she says. ‘It took five minutes and you know it. But things were different then. You didn’t have the luxury of time.’
‘No. No, that’s true. I know it.’ After a pause he says: ‘Sixty five years. I think we’ve come to – an understanding.’
‘Yes. I think we have.’

I put my empty cup down on the coffee table. I notice the scene beneath the glass: an ancient alabaster carving, medieval knights clashing swords on a battlefield. The sunlight lowers as the afternoon moves on. It intensifies through the windows, falling across us all and everything around us, the black and white photographs, the tea cups, our carry chair waiting in the corner, and framed in dark wood on the opposite wall, an embroidered piece, a simple pattern of three circles, blue, white and red.

the god of the smoking mirror

I’m on the bathroom floor, my hands clasped around the toilet bowl, my eyes reflected back at me from its waters. I’m trying to rise above it all, these relentless bouts of nausea and vomiting, to find peace beyond the sickness; the white ceramic is a welcome chill against my cheek.

It started so well. I wasn’t working, the girls were off school, and my wife had a meeting up in town. So I took the girls to the British Museum and we all planned to meet up at the end of the day in a pizza place off the Strand.

We spent the morning gently grazing with the rest of the tourists, room through room with a copy of the museum map in one hand and a camera in the other. But the longest time we spent by any cabinet, longer than the mummified cats, the golden galleon table ornament, the Saxon helmet and the Iron Age burial, was in the Americas room, in front of the carefully lit display of Aztec ceremonial pieces. One in particular: a skull representing Tezcatlipoca, God of the Smoking Mirror. It was decorated with bands of blue turquoise and black lignite, the eyes polished spheres of iron pyrites on discs of white shell. From either side of the mask, two neatly coiled straps of deerskin, which the priest used to tie on the mask for the ceremony.
‘Imagine what that must have looked like grinning over you on the table.’
‘With that knife,’ pointing to the blade with the crouching warrior handle.
‘Urgh.’
The girls moved on, but I stayed a little longer, staring at the skull, until a sudden flash from a camera bounced off the glass and dazzled me back.

Outside the museum the clouds had lowered and a fine rain was dragging across the city. We hurried on, down Museum Street and on into Covent Garden. But in the plaza the traders were packing up already; there was a wintery chill to the place, and only the hardiest tourists were still sitting outside on the iron seats, hunched like survivalists over plastic trays of noodles.

The offices where my wife, Hannah, was having her meeting were as closed up as the market. The CEO was in town, and a man in a fluorescent jacket wanted to know exactly what our intentions were, intercepting us as we hurried across the forecourt towards the lobby. In our bedraggled state we managed to persuade him that we meant the CEO no harm; he waved us on, we pushed through the revolving doors and found sanctuary on some over-stuffed leather chairs beneath a potted palm. Chloe picked up the Financial Times and pretended to check her shares. After ten minutes or so of trying to pass ourselves off as a raggedly eccentric billionaire family, we were rescued by Hannah and we all left for the pizza restaurant. I tried to catch the receptionist’s eye to say thanks for letting us have a seat, but she remained professionally welded to the screen.

We’d been to this restaurant before, a backstreet Italian-Schmitalian place where the pizza just about makes up for the décor and music. It was lovely to be warm and out together though, and I settled in. But half an hour into the meal I began to feel an ominous churning in my stomach; an hour or so later out in the street as we made our way back to the train station, I was rinsing as white and green as the advertising for the soya dessert they were promoting on the station forecourt. A salesman put an open tub under my nose and asked me what I thought; it was all I could do not to vomit into it. I shook my head in horror and hurried on.

The train ride took a hundred years. Rush hour, and every station stop it seemed they were actually herding cattle onto the train. My skin prickled; the windows ran with my sweat. I tried positive visualisation, that every clatter of the rails was bringing me quickly over ground to home, but then I’d look at my watch and see barely a minute had passed and we had half an hour to go. I groaned and yawned again, struggling to hold back a tsunami of vomit that would surely sweep everything ahead of me down the track to the next stop, bobbing with screaming passengers, laptops, rucksacks, hats, magazines, book club specials. I buried my fingers into my face in an effort not to embarrass myself any more than I already had. When I looked up again I imagined I saw the Aztec priest, holding onto the straps with the others, innocently reading the paper over his neighbour’s shoulder, with the skull of the God of the Smoking Mirror gawping at me from around his neck.

It would be impossible for me to overstate the bliss I felt on making it home. The comfort, the peace, the warmth. It is a treat lovingly made in heaven to be up here now on the bathroom floor, throwing up into this deliciously cool and clean toilet. Despite the hideous mechanical emptying, the Alien-like slavering extensions of the jaw, the washing-machine noises – my body seems to know what to do - I am profoundly happy to be here. An atheist, I thank God with every fibre of my being that I am home, miraculously brought back here, away from the train of despair, to this blessed place where I can be myself and do whatever I need to recover. And as the dreadful mechanics of the sickness subside, I prop myself up against the bath, and think – not for the first time – how enormously comforting it is in times of extremity to appeal to some bigger, all-powerful spirit. I picture those Aztec craftsmen, decorating the skull with their fine mosaic pieces, carefully setting the eyes, attaching the straps. I think about the priest, tying it on for the ceremony.

Anything to appease the spirit of the time, to find favour, to make it home.