One Foot in the Grave (3 page)

Clutching his hat down with his left hand, he prodded his stick forward, leaned his weight on it, shuffled his feet a few inches and prodded again. God send no gusts from sideways! There were chips of ice in the wind. His eyes raced with tears. The flaps of his coat whipped and wrapped round his thighs, like arms clutching, imploring. He was running into the wind but making no progress, a race in a nightmare. His heart was talking now, murmuring its little bubble of strain at the top of each pulse, which would be in a few moments a gulp of pain, and then. …

Then, abruptly, the wind was still. It screamed across the courtyard, but he was out of it, standing gasping by a plain brick wall dimly lit from an upper window on the other side of the courtyard. All wrong. There was no wall in the plan! And the Liberator! Where was he? In front? Behind? The dream struggle, disorientation of time and place, seemed to close down completely, but the residual will gave a feeble little shrug of irritation. Somehow it was enough to shrug the world back into place. The fight against the wind had become a fight into the wind, so that instead of aiming at the corner of the garage he had slanted across to meet its main wall. Now he eased his stick into his left hand and with his right elbow propping his weight against the brickwork, worked his way along to the water butt at the corner. Beyond it the floodlights glared. When he huddled round out of the lee of the wall, the storm seemed to be made of light. The rain that had fallen all day lay in glittering pools in the weathered hollows of the York paving, but now what was falling was the finest of fine snow, racing in brilliant streaks across the lit arena. Through this dazzling space the colonnade reached out toward the wall of night beyond, and the storm hissed between the square brick pillars as if through the teeth of a vast comb.

When she had first wheeled him round the gardens, before he'd been strong enough to walk more than a yard or two, it had been one of those still, gleaming afternoons peculiar to mid-September. He had not actually looked at Flycatchers from the outside before. The path had turned a corner behind a monstrous hummock of rhododendron and there it was. Amazing.

“Well, that's Flycatchers,” she said. “Stupid sort of name for it, isn't it?”

“I don't know
—
old men dozing in deck chairs with their mouths open.”

“I'd never thought of that
—
only the birds. There are
lots of them about in summer. They sit on the croquet hoops and make little mounds of doings in the fairway.”

“My room's round the other side, I suppose.”

“That's right. You have to be absolutely stinking rich to see the downs from your bedroom. Look
—
do you see those shutters? They're bulletproof steel, electrically operated. The shareholders had them put in so that sheikhs can convalesce here without getting shot at. Why does it always make me think of a ship? It's nothing like, really. Something to do with the tower, d'you think?”

She had been right. A long white building with low-pitched purple slates, large, proportionless windows, a glass-roofed, iron-pillared veranda running half its length, odd niches in the facade dictated apparently by sudden changes of mind about the shape of the rooms within
—
a typical Edwardian white elephant, built for the select few to enjoy the
douceur de vivre
and now adapted to let their children die pleasantly. There was nothing shiplike about it, and yet it was a great liner, a veteran of imperial cruises, at anchor on this green swell of the downs. The shared perception made him think of her for the first time as anything other than the neat young woman who made her living in geriatrics.

“What's the tower?”

“Only a water tower, but you can see the Channel from the top. It's prettier than the house, isn't it? The ship's gone to Italy, sort of.”

She was right again. The tower was essential to the image
—
an Italianate fantasy, a campanile built of different colored brick in gaudy layers, and joined to the house by a brick colonnade. The sharp foreign accent created the harbor where the ship was moored, Naples, reeking in the sun, displaying its slums to these well-to-do foreigners like a beggar displaying his sores.

Now the ship was moored no longer. The gale made it heave and plunge as he loosed himself from the water butt and flung himself in a tottering rush for the first pillar. The paving lurched like a deck, but before he totally fell he was hugging the brickwork, hauling himself upright and readying himself, still panting, for the next swirling rush. Miraculously there was a rhythm: It was a game—he was a toy in the hurl and harshness of the wind, but provided he did what the wind wanted, it would not hurt him. He used his arms to push off from one pillar across the path of the wind, and let the wind force him back in a staggering curve against the next. The first two were black against the floods, and the third one part of the sudden dark beyond, but even so he seemed to know where it was, to clutch at an exact location in the hurtling blackness and find it still and solid. He felt, but did not see, his hat whirl into the darkness; its going seemed only part of his own. Hat and he were leaves in the wind, weightless, toys of the storm. He was laughing aloud, like a child on a stormy beach, in a high hysterical cackle he had never heard himself make before. When the storm fooled him with a sudden lull, so that he caught his stick between his legs and collapsed onto the paving, he lay for some time, gasping with laughter.

The hysteria died. His body became heavy. The storm was outside him, jostling at flank and shoulders, trampling over his body. His legs were too numb for feeling. Perhaps he'd broken one. Careless. She wouldn't like that. Tsk tsk.

The sense of her disapproval was so strong that he was unaware of forcing his body up onto hands and knees and beginning to crawl along the paving, and then it changed into relief that if he was able to do this he mightn't have broken a leg after all, and she wouldn't be so angry with him. Then he remembered that she was going to be angry with him whatever happened, and that memory slid him back onto the tracks of the plan.
Nearly there, nearly there,
he mumbled, nodding and grimacing to himself as he inched through the storm.

Something groaned in the wind. Vaguely he'd heard it before, but had thought it was just another storm noise, a branch of the great cedar near to breaking, perhaps; but now he grasped that it was close ahead, was in fact the door of the tower, wide open, swinging in the wind, hinges groaning. All wrong. Not part of the plan. He shook his head disgustedly, but crawled up the single step and into the tower.

Now he was in unexplored territory. There would be stairs going up—eighty-two; the sort of fact people told you. Garden furniture stored.
“It's locked so people don't go jumping off the top, but everybody knows the key's on a nail in the ivy there so we can get the deck chairs out. So it's just strangers can't jump. Club members only.”

Out of the wind he was much more aware of the cold. The effort of resisting it had given a sort of illusion of warmth, but now, as he paused to try to guess the position of the stairs, he felt a fresh sense of urgency. His reserves were running very low. Over there, it must be. He crawled across dry paving, brushed against a stack of light wooden objects, followed an apparently clear route, and there, yes, hard and straight as a tree trunk, the newel of a spiral stair. Twisting himself onto the lowest step, he immediately began to climb.

He had invented the technique for himself in his Hackney lodgings. Sit on bottom step; palms on edge of step above; lean back, shove with legs, heave with arms; neat as a tin toy, the buttocks slide onto the second step. Hold pose, careful in case the sudden lengthening of the body drains the blood down and brings in the roaring blackness. … No. Then palms on edge of step above, etcetera, and this time use hands to lift legs onto the first step, so that feet start next cycle two steps below buttocks … by the end of his time in lodgings he had needed to rest every three steps; but with returning strength he had worked up to eight at a time in his training sessions on the stairs beyond Turnbull's room. He was not so strong now. Start in sixes. Then …

Exercise barely warms the old. Thinned blood moves so slowly through clogged pipes that any heat roused in the central embers is lost before it reaches the remote capillaries. The numbness of his limbs infected his mind. The learnt rhythm, the plan, the will, pushed him up. He shut his eyes to concentrate all his residual forces; as the stair spiraled up, a slit of window shone with the glare of floodlighting, but he was aware of it only as the veined and red-blotched smear of his eyelids. He lost count of sixes, rested when the rhythm failed, started again, more urgent than ever. The ghost of reason gibbered that anywhere would do now, but the top of the tower had become his target, set like a footprint in concrete. Reasonless obstinacy, the last right. Exhaustion was itself a good.

The tower had rooms in it. An unimportant detail of the plan had allowed for this, so the first wedge-shaped landing, though it broke the rhythm, didn't surprise him. His mind had forgotten about it, but his body seemed to know what to do, slithering across the flatness and starting automatically onto the next flight. But by the time he reached the next landing he was so deep into the lowest wells of his resources that the alteration was like a break in a dream—the light-glare, the moment of quasi-consciousness, the mumbled query. He stopped. A strange mild warmth swam round him. He opened his eyes and saw through a doorway a bare room lit by the reflected floods. A thin pillared window. A garden chaise longue—all wrong at this height, like a boat in a tree. On the floor a knot of armored black, faint-glistening, snakelike. Something else wrong, not in the plan. The smell of the warmth. You feel warm, first time for weeks, when you know you aren't—but that would be a vague glow from inside, surely, not this. …

The awareness of things outside himself died in a fresh flood of urgency. The top. The top. She had to know he'd got there—then she'd know he'd understood what he was doing. She wouldn't know why, mustn't know why. … Time collapsed again. The rhythm of work became as involuntary as the double thud of his heart—palms, lean, heave, buttocks, knees. He must have rested, often, but wasn't aware of it, or of anything, until he was roused from the trance by a strange weight on his shoulders, rubbing heavily. A solid upright surface, through which he was trying to climb. Wind shrieking through cracks. Storm buffet. A door.

There was a door in the plan. Gingerly he twisted into a kneeling posture, rearing his body slowly, cautious of the inner dark. Padlock or bolt? Never been a chance to ask. Pat, pat. No feeling in hands. Sweep arm along surface, up, down … there! Lost. Found. Scrabble, fumble. Rage …

. . . And he was tumbling, dream slow, into whistling cold. No point in crawling. Just a little further. Slither an inch, clutch at leads, find handhold, pull … handhold useless, like slack cable.

Unwilled, his hand continued to drag at the loose thing, like a hound worrying some vile object out of a ditch, ignoring its master's shouts to drop it. His eyes opened, as if they too saw no further point in obeying the dissolving center and had become mere sightseers of this last drama, had found it dull and were looking around for other amusements. They wanted to see what the hand had found.

It was another hand. An arm stretched away from it.

Long idle servomotors juddered into life, triggered by the signal they had been set to recognize. From somewhere, hoarded against this impossible event, a current of new energy flowed, faint and erratic. He was on hands and knees, crawling forward to see what lay beyond the arm.

The water tower was topped by a roof like a lama's hat, supported on barley-sugar pillars. The floodlight, reflected from the white mass of Flycatchers, was caught in the pink plaster vault of this roof and shone dimly down onto the leads. The body lay face up, staring at this pink roof. The handsome mouth sneered at its frivolity. Pibble in turn stared at the body, puzzled, astonished, as the current of discipline faded. He'd done it! He'd brought it off! Pity she couldn't share … and how amazing that all that nonsense about an afterlife should turn out true! Only … mistake somewhere. Never been a film star. Never dressed in white lace shirt, breeches, shiny black riding boots. Typical! Given him the wrong body to hover over. Laid it out neat for him. Might have done something about the back of his head, though. Messy … and all wrong anyway, dammit! Didn't they know he had died of hypothermia? All planned. No mess at all. No need for the streak of blood running up across the film-star mask, where they'd turned the body over after bashing the back of its head in. Oh,
rubbish
!

Faintly the current of energy flowed back, aligning chaotic images into a sort of coherence. He wasn't conscious of turning, crawling toward the stair head, but he could feel his lips muttering.

“The blood's got to get to the brain. That's what matters. The blood's got to get to the brain.”

2

O
nly patches of numbness. Elsewhere slow aches, unfamiliar sudden pain bolts, haze, warmth. Hands sometimes, touching near these pain centers, small hands, round as a dog's paw, assured. Jenny's hands. Her voice, too, once or twice, in and out of the haze, muttering, angry, alarmed, mocking. No sense. Dark.

He became fully conscious with unusual suddenness. Without opening his eyes he knew exactly where he was—in his bed at Flycatchers. He felt very sore, and filled with a dull anger that the fulfillment of his plan had turned out to be a long and stupid dream. A fever dream. He'd been ill. That would account for the aches. Nearly died, perhaps. Typical, you lie snug, dying involuntarily, while in your dreamworld you are making furious efforts to kill yourself. Fail in both worlds, too. Typical. Disgusting. He opened his eyes, to distract himself from his inner distress, and saw an unfamiliar presence, a cream and chrome robot glistening beside his bed. Some sort of medical buffoonery. A cable from it was taped to his elbow, and his arm was strapped down. He shut his eyes again. The dream had been very vivid, and unlike most dreams couldn't be teased into fresh shapes by the half-conscious mind. The presence of the robot oppressed him. Either he'd been very ill, or Dr. Follick wanted to impress someone. Or they'd taken her away, and. …

Next time he woke, it was with more of the usual waverings of reality. She was there, taking his pulse. They'd chopped her hand off at the wrist and attached it to the robot. It was his own hand. No.

“Hello,” he whispered.

Her fingers twitched with surprise.

“Oh, Jimmy! How could you!”

“What time is it?”

“What day is it, you mean. You're a stupid old man!”

He opened his eyes. Something was wrong. Over the months a curious grammar had developed, with special moods expressed by tones of the voice, as though their relationship was too subtle to persist in the plain indicative. She was using the indicative now. He took refuge.

“I feel sore,” he mumbled.

“No wonder! You can count yourself lucky. If you'd been compos mentis when they brought you in, I'd have got out the iodine bottle and done you over with that! That'd have shown you!”

“In?”

“Don't come that. Lying there pretending to be gaga and then … Jimmy, did you have to? Couldn't you just have told me?”

“I'm sorry. Thoughtless …”

“Thoughtless!” she snapped. “Plain bonkers!”

Her hand was still on his wrist, though she'd lost count, surely. He moved his free hand across to touch it, forcing the movement through a fierce twinge. She frowned down at him.

“What are you going to tell them?” she said. “They're all waiting to see you.”

“Who are?”

“Follicle, for a start. He threw a fit. You know that wild look he gets when things go wrong, like a kid at a party getting overexcited. I've never seen him quite so far gone. I thought he'd burst! Floodlights still on, shutters still open, crazy old men out in storm, finding corpses—I thought he was going to throw himself down and drum his heels on the floor. He's calmed down now, I suppose. You'll be able to see for yourself, because I've got orders to tell him the moment you come to so that he can pass the word on to your other friends.”

“Uh?”

“Police, stupid. They're wild! I'm going to make a chart of your contusions, so I can prove if they start roughing you up. One out in the passage all the time. 'Smorning he tried to pinch my bum, so next time I came past I sort of tripped and spilled old Turnbull's bedpan over him. Only they'd changed shifts and I got the wrong one. What'll I tell Follicle?”

“I'm tired.”

“Of course you are, but … see how you're feeling after lunch, shall I? Manage an egg?”

“Urrh.”

“I'm sure you can.”

He let her take his pulse, then lay with closed eyes and listening to her moving around the room, adjusting the robot, humming as she worked. Never again, he thought. Never another chance. All your working life you are vaguely conscious of the coming shadow. Not me, you say. I won't be like that. I'd sooner be dead. But as if by one of those mathematical niceties at which nature is so adept, your will declines just faintly ahead of your body and mind. You can never quite bring yourself to do it. Only if, like Pibble, you have been most of the way down that dreary incline, and then miraculously hauled back, does the equation briefly reverse its sign. Now you can do it, pat. Now, before the downward slither begins anew. … For Pibble, that
now
had been the night of the storm, and would not come again.

It was Jenny who had performed the miracle, Jenny whom, therefore, he had let down by failing to take his chance. The determination formed in his mind that he would not tell her why he had gone out and climbed the tower. The resolve seemed as firm as its motives were feeble. Vaguely he told himself that she would be hurt, that she wouldn't understand … but at the same time he knew that part of his plan had assumed that if he had brought it off, then she would have understood. …

Though it was clear now that the dream had not been a dream, it still seemed as if its reality was maintained only by the reality of her presence. As soon as she closed the door, what had been certain began to blur and shift once more. A man's voice spoke in the passage and hers answered, sharp as a green lemon. He ached. That was real. Jenny was real. Everything else … wait … the man in the passage … she'd answered him, thus making
him
real … if he was still there … just got to get up and see. …

He started to rise, but his head was only six inches from the pillow when the darkness came suddenly down, roaring.

She woke him with lunch, and insisted on feeding him eggy mush, morsel by morsel, nurse and nothing else. She spoke little, he not at all. The plan had not allowed for failure; he realized now that he hadn't dared to imagine what she would think, say, do … how the relationship might wither. She picked up an invalid cup and held the spout to his lips. He sucked. It was Guinness. A dripple of hope.

“That's nice,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Dr. Follick will be here in five minutes.”

Not even the nickname.

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Don't know.”

“Please.”

For the first time her eyes met his, green in her flattish pale face. Normally there was a faint cast in her left eye, a sign of her being relaxed and cheerful. It wasn't there now. She bit her lip, thinking.

“You're going to have to mind your step,” she said. “Follicle's very in with the shareholders. Remember, we're really run for their benefit, so that they can have somewhere comfy to go when they get old, so however frightful they are we can't get rid of them once they're here. That means all the rest of the residents—people like you—have to be extra amenable, to make up. If Follicle tells the shareholders that somebody's a disruptive influence, then they have to go, no matter how much they're paying. So you see—you'll have to think of something. If you don't tell me what it is, I shan't be able to back you up, shall I?”

“Don't know.”

Her sigh was almost a snort as she turned from the bed, whisking the tray away in the same moment. Why the vehemence, the urgency? Doddering out one night, though a nuisance, hardly counted as disruption, surely. Doddering out, deliberately, to die, though. … He couldn't keep his mind engaged at all with the main question—what to say to Follick? It slithered around like a drill point sidling away from the marked spot on a surface too hard for it, now here, now there, and then suddenly biting into the softer stuff of memory.
A ward, fifty yards long, six inches between the huddled beds. The stench of age battling with the reek of disinfectants, and winning
—
an odor worse than any zoo. A particular pillow, the large gray face on it creased with perpetual weeping. The little Chinese doctor saying quietly and with no sign of surprise that the man was undoubtedly senile now, irrecoverably helpless. Greasy Jack Phillipps, grandfather of fences, who with all his wits about him three months before had decided this would be a cunning place to hide when the Great Christie's Raid went haywire. …

Fingers touched his wrist—not hers, but strong, dry, electric. He opened his eyes to see Toby Follick's face floating above him.

Pibble liked Dr. Follick. When, after the Hackney disaster, his normal perceptions had begun to return, enabling him gradually to become aware of the inappropriate opulence in which Thanassi Thanatos's random generosity had plumped him down, this liking had been one of the first excuses he had made to himself for staying on at Flycatchers. He was used to the masks of doctors. During the course of his working life he had come to approve of a mild level of charlatanism in those he had interviewed—doctors whose patients had disappeared, or done their wives in, or themselves, or had invented more ingeniously antisocial forms of dottiness. With experience he had come to believe that even the most fraudulent-seeming might be good at his job, and not despite the fraud but because of it. Then private experience had reinforced this belief. Pibble had chosen his own doctor, a jovial, lazy Greek, on the grounds that this one at least made no pretense at being anything more than a pretty moderate sort of healer. He had found too late that even this mild incompetence was a mask—Dr. Palagoutis had been a much worse doctor than he'd pretended. After such a man has failed to diagnose your wife's illness before it is terminal, you are less impressed by apparent openness and cynicism, more prepared to tolerate the masks of scientist or country squire or priest—or, in the case of Toby Follick, comic conjurer.

“Well, well, well,” murmured Follick, in tones of pleased surprise. The doggy brown eyes glistened with interest, as though Pibble were a rabbit which had popped out of the wrong hat.

Flycatchers' resident physician was a neat little man. There was no good reason, apart from his name, for Jenny's calling him Follicle. He was not conspicuously hairy nor shiny bald, but his hair was graying and receding tactfully in keeping with his age. For all that, the nickname worked, drawing attention to something intangibly odd in his appearance. Pibble had come to the conclusion that his head was a little too large for his body; perhaps at any rate it somehow added to the whole effect of an otherwise precise and sober middle-aged doctor exuding this happy experimental eagerness of a fourteen-year-old boy.

“Been a nuisance. Sorry,” mumbled Pibble.

“Far from it. Example to us all. How are you feeling?”

“A bit sore.”

“No wonder. Jenny, where's the holy book?”

Jenny moved for a moment into Pibble's sphere of vision, carrying the morocco-bound, gold-tooled folder in which patients' charts were kept at Flycatchers. She was not quite comfortable with Follick's manner, and this came out in an extra starchiness in her own. Follick studied the documents with care.

“Interesting,” he said. “I wonder … let's haruspicate a bit. Off with the altar cloths, Jenny.”

The medical rites continued, always with that slight element of parody throughout the proddings and peerings. Follick handled his stethoscope, for instance, not as though he actually expected it to turn into a snake, but as though he'd know what to do supposing it did. He seemed to be unusually thorough, but at last he straightened and stood aside, letting Jenny restore the authentic ritual by covering up the sacrificial animal.

“You're in remarkably good nick,” said Follick. “You ought to have killed yourself, you know.”

“Yes,” said Pibble, more firmly than he meant to.

“But you didn't, and that makes me think … there's something I'd like to … is he due for a surgery visit this week, Jenny?”

“No.”

“Fix one with Maisie, will you? Give him a couple of days to pick up strength—longer if he needs it; you might find he has a bit of a low tomorrow. … And we can do without that doofer now.”

He waved a dismissive arm toward the gadget by the bed. There was a curious moment of emptiness, everyone waiting for everyone else.

“You might as well take it down straight away,” said Follicle.

“Alan locks the store at eleven and has his break.”

“That still gives you ten minutes.”

Without waiting for an answer, Follick turned and strolled to the window, where he stood looking out, bathed in the wintry light. His coat was a snowdrift crisped with frost, out of which his head poked with the stunned but lively air of a skier who has just taken a huge but painless tumble. Pibble hardly noticed him because Jenny, as she unstrapped his arm and peeled the cable from the crook of his elbow, was having one of her rages, those controlled internal storms which she refused to let ruffle her surface, refused even to admit she had had, but which could be triggered off by incidents which would not have bothered anyone else. She eased the plaster painlessly from his skin, but he could feel her fury as if it had been an audible throb. She avoided his eye until she had to back to wheel the robot through the door. He winked. Now she let the rage flash from her eyes, and was gone. Follick turned as though the whuffle of the closing door was the signal he'd been waiting for.

“The cops are after you, James.”

“Ur.”

“We've been fending them off.”

“I'd better see them.”

“It's not as easy as that. You've had a near thing, you know. If Sankey hadn't been out looking for Tosca …”

“Ur?”

“One of the night security men, bloke called Tosca, was missing. What's more, he hadn't turned off the floodlights or closed the security shutters; he was supposed to do that from a couple of switches in the kitchen—first the shutters, then nip round and check they'd all closed, then the floodlighting. …”