Deep Sleep Read online

She looked at him, her eyes widening in horror, looked at the direction of his gaze, uttered a small cry subdued in a rising tide of fresh nausea, looked at Bailey in plea. ‘Sir, Mr …’ He was crouched, feeling the surface of the nylon carpet with delicate fingertips. Clinging to the tough surface were yellow threads, fluff, and, in spots, a stickiness he knew to be blood, that viscous texture horribly familiar. Far beneath the bed, in an otherwise tidy room, he could see a child’s training shoe, adorned with dim red flashes on the side.

  ‘Tom was here all right,’ Bailey said slowly. ‘His satchel’s in the kitchen. He was here, with someone else. Duncan, you have to get her to hospital. Now.’

  ‘It was that fucking chemist, wasn’t it? Him, he did this, didn’t he? He fucking did. You slope off to be with your fucking boyfriend. Where is he, where is the bastard?’

  ‘Duncan, can it. You’ve got to get her to hospital …’

  Kim began to cry, a retching cry, graceless in agony. Something terrible, a threat, a touch of clammy hands was crowding at her memory, making her whimper, wanting touch, but despising it.

  ‘She can walk,’ Duncan said brutally, relinquishing his hold on her like an abandoned toy. ‘If she can go to bed with him, she can walk. I got things to do. I’ll get that bastard.’

  ‘There’s the bomb. First things first. You’re a sod, Duncan.’

  Bailey was aware that his voice was high, his temper dangerous and all his diplomacy gone.

  ‘Screw the bomb,’ said Duncan. ‘It’s a con. Get out of my way.’

  The rain had begun in earnest. An icy rain which fell in soft, cold sheets, straight lines of moisture unmoved by wind. Pip could not distinguish between what was rain on his face and what was tears, but the latter flowed with the same relentless ease, salty in his mouth, dribbling down his chin: tears flowing without sobbing or heaving, well behaved, very silent tears. Symptoms of despair, and more, the sadness of loss. Never to plant his seed without disgust, never know what it was like to be carried beyond himself on a tide of passion. Never, oh, my love; only the same feeling of rage when he struck Tom as the rage he had felt when Margaret had said, Shut the window please, it’s cold in here.

  ‘You all right, Tombo?’

  There was silence. Oh Christ, such silence with the rain falling over them both. Tom and he were covered in a plastic sheet, the boy on his lap, sleeping trustfully, a sensation of warmth against Pip’s chest he felt he almost enjoyed. Perhaps this would have been some substitute, a child of his own. Pip looked down at Tom’s dark, wet head with something approaching affection. Something in him could never have liked any child, particularly this skinny little boy, a nervous, pansyish creature who reminded him of himself. A fretful boy who either asked too many questions or remained speechless, his whole attitude one of profound suspicion. The creation of such a large and brutish father, the kind of man women loved. Hateful, both of them, but for now, the boy was warm, and in his own arms, almost loving.

  ‘I hope I didn’t give you too much,’ Pip murmured to no one. In his mind’s eye was the bottle: impossible to say how much was too much: you could only tell when they stopped breathing and Tom had not stopped breathing. He presumed Daniel had stopped breathing on thrice the daily dose of physeptone, bullet pills of poison only to be swallowed by someone made unwary by a big, heavy blow. Mother had stopped breathing and Margaret; Tom did not. As if it mattered, but it did. The plan was clearly for Tom to stop breathing, but preferably not with some lethal overdose in his frenetic bloodstream.

  ‘You all right, Tom, boy?’ He said it louder. The silence was reassuring, but curiously dissatisfying. He shook the boy. Small feet, one without a shoe, looked sad as they protruded from beneath the blanket of clear plastic grabbed from the back dispensary as they left. Pip did a last mental check, wishing the tears were less blinding than the rain.

  ‘Right. Kim never saw anything. Asleep. Will wake up feeling sick. Too much Night Nurse in her tea, doubt they’ll test blood, you can always depend on ignorance. They’ll only find alcohol. All signs, duster, white poly bag, removed into bin. Through dispensary, no muddy feet. Careful, careful. Not more than a few milligrammes of stuff in this boy either, not by the time they find him in the morning or whenever this stupid bomb business is over. Meanwhile, everyone, this is what happened. Little Tom ran away over the building site because he is frightened of crowds, never was a kid who could stand crowds, couldn’t even take a Christmas party, Mrs Beale told me. Fell into one of the holes. An accident. Like all of this, really. Not my fault. Little bastard; you shouldn’t have come home, you hear? You shouldn’t …’

  Pip felt in his pocket. On their way downstairs, gasping under Tom’s weight, he had collected some of the worst stuff from his back room. Methadone, a little morphine. One vague plan was to give some to the boy, another half-formed plan to chuck it away in the same way he could hide the child. This plan was messier. Logical plans always avoided mess.

  They were sitting below the hoardings at one end of the building site which both of them had explored, one with feet, the other with eyes, fascinated in different ways by the subterranean domain of mud which made for this strange series of vaults below the level of the earth. Pip remembered hating Tom most when Tom had begun excavating for Australia, from the yard. Not because of his proximity to the back dispensary, which Tom would find anyway, but for the similarity with something he had done himself. People like Tom and he were always excavating for a hiding place and it had always seemed as if the builders were doing no more than the same. Useful, said Pip to himself, trying to harden his own features, breathe hard, think hard. Concentrate, to survive. And this little one will go in one of those pits. Only a small fall into one of those dark graves called foundations. I’m sorry, boy.

  The hissing of the steam persisted fifty yards away. Pip could not guess if the sound itself had increased or if they were simply closer to the awning erected against the rain. Arc lights and vehicles shrouded the sound like Quatermass and the Pit. Men busy in an island of light, leaving all the rest a pool of darkness, the noise fit to mask all footsteps over the mud. Move soon: put this boy down, he won’t sleep for ever even with these cuts on the head, inflicted in revenge with the smooth rim of the anaesthetic mask. Soon. Any minute now. If only the child were not so warm: if only he could stop crying. Never, never, never. Oh, my love.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘DO not deliver an emetic if there is any chance of chloroform. She’ll be nauseous anyway. If she’s conscious, nothing but air; sit upright, keep airways open. Avoid excitement. If young and healthy, she’s already past the risk of heart failure. Just let her gulp oxygen. Liquids, fruit juice if she can take it.’ Hazel paused for breath, listened.

  ‘Methadone? Narcan, intravenously. A lot. Not a stomach pump, for God’s sake. Plenty of narcan, always brings them round.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Helen hesitantly. Then, ‘Are you all right?’ Dr Hazel had poured acid on both their endeavours, but she never relinquished a friendship easily. She wondered as she spoke why she had mentioned methadone, as if the thought of Daniel Maley had provoked it.

  ‘Am I all right? A greatly overused query, but yes. Phone any time you need. A bomb, you say? And not left by the Irish? We like a good bomb.’

  ‘You need a new job.’

  ‘Find me one, then.’

  ‘I shall.’

  Another phone call. Bailey’s voice with a coughing in the background.

  ‘Helen, can you come here, now? They’ll let you through: I said you were a nurse. Only I can’t really expect anyone else to volunteer. If you see what I mean, not fair, only …’

  ‘Yes. Yes of course.’

  ‘And you know the way.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes of course you do. You left a bag full of things from that chemist’s shop. In the kitchen, a few days since. I recognised the labels.’

  She might have known her own inability to keep a secret and the thought of his quiet but unf
ailing observation made her smile. The distance was barely three-quarters of a mile, the sensation of movement and cold faintly enjoyable. The car made Helen feel slower, a person carried without volition with all her reflections as varied and vivid as the lights from the crane which no longer promised celebration. There were visions of dancing hospital beds, masks, small, fleeing boys and the inconsequential thought of how infrequent were the opportunities in life for someone like herself to be brave. Bravery was the stuff of dreams, the lot of police officers and soldiers. Her few acts of courage seemed to have been merely accidental and this was no exception. Someone removed a tape from across the road and waved her on like royalty, making her feel foolish as well as wishing that all driving were as easy as this. Queen of the road: the only thing moving in half a square mile.

  Finding the right flat in Herringbone Parade posed no problem since the environs of the place were etched in her mind. She passed the chemist’s and jolted to a halt. The window in Carlton’s Caring Chemist was smashed, leaving a jagged hole, eloquently violent. She tried to ignore that, stopped in the road beyond where the dark hissing made her shiver, mounted the steps towards where the chemist’s balcony fitted snugly against that of its neighbour. Such cosy passage from one to the other: no one had thought of that. There was suddenly no reason for speed: she paused again for a backward look at the building site; found the size and depth of the foundations faintly shocking. To live here must be like living next to a mine. Such large excavations, sites for future houses, looking like graves for giants. The rain glistened in the depths: the contours of the ground were uneven: all of it seemed to move with strange shadow and she believed she could see figures. Only here did this hidden and massive quantity of explosive become real, like a primeval monster about to rise. Helen shivered, and went through the door left open by Bailey.

  He stood in a drab kitchen where every dish was clean, every scuffed surface polished beneath the unsympathetic strip light of the ceiling. On the lino floor there was a small, sinister patch of blood. Bailey’s skin looked yellow.

  ‘Stay with her, will you? Tell her I’ve gone to find Tom.’

  ‘I wish you’d explain. The son? Here?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he was. Also the chemist. You were right about him, I think, but this is no time for apologies. One of them’s been cut, don’t know which. Worse still, Duncan’s gone in pursuit.’

  ‘Oh. Duncan the destroyer of evidence.’

  Bailey looked towards the bedroom. ‘If only that were all.’ He disappeared down the steps, soundless in the rubber-soled shoes.

  ‘Bailey!’ she shouted after him, her voice lost in the rain. ‘The building site … Careful. Look at the shop, window broken …’

  He might not have heard. She sounded like a fishwife in the silence: she felt absurdly like a woman leaning from a tenement window and shouting at the kids to bring home fags.

  Kimberley Perry looked at the new visitor with the sourness of anxiety.

  ‘Hallo.’

  ‘Hallo.’

  ‘He said you weren’t a nurse, but you’d know what to do. Shoot me, I would. I don’t know what I’ve done or what the fuck’s happened. I don’t know why I feel like shit, and I’m a bloody pharmacist. What the hell did I take? Tell me. Please. Nothing much more than a dozen bloody cups of tea. Where’s Tom? He’s all right, isn’t he, and who are you anyway?’

  ‘His friend. Bailey’s, I mean. I don’t suppose he told you much.’

  ‘Not exactly. Not much, not anything.’

  ‘He’s like that. Aren’t they all? They think we’re stupid.’

  Slowly, reluctantly, they smiled at each other. Even in this state of sick distress, Helen thought Kimberley Perry looked strangely magnificent, like a vision of some déshabillé dancer from the Folies Bergère in the days when it was fashion to be large. She had been making a half-hearted attempt to dress, one stocking half up to the knee, the blouse half on, thick hair all over, all sense of modesty gone, but, even in distress, embarrassed to be found thus. The smell in the room was putrifying.

  ‘Out of here, I think,’ said Helen. ‘Shut the door on it, wash your face and nothing else. Windows open, all over …’

  ‘I didn’t shut it. I never have the window shut …’

  ‘Never mind. Clean clothes, but don’t touch anything. And then …’

  ‘Not tea. Not bloody tea. That bastard put something in my tea.’

  Light was beginning to dawn in Kim’s dull eyes.

  ‘Coffee then,’ said Helen. Again, they smiled.

  ‘Men,’ said Kimberley Perry with a touch of her old asperity. ‘What a load of arseholes. Where’s my son? Where’s my Tom?’

  Duncan had never known how close his wife lived to her would-be lover. Even Tom, wary of Dad’s temper, had never said how Uncle Pip lived right next door at the domestic level as well as working cheek by jowl, to say nothing of bum to bum, in that overcrowded shop. Duncan, ever woolly about details, never quite imagined the proximity, although if he had thought, he would have known it. Somehow he never visualised neat little Pip, so precise in answering the phone and the parking of his car, to be quite as near as that in those depressing little flats. On that account he did not leg it over the balcony in search of the man who had abused his wife: he ran downstairs, and round the corner to the shop front where he had peered surreptitiously on so many occasions, picked up a plastic bread crate abandoned by the baker, and hurled it through the window. The sound of smashing glass did not diminish his rage, a rage made worse by the knowledge of his own injustice, his inability to do anything else but react. Duncan followed the hole he had made into the shop itself. There was a stand of toothpaste en route to a night light at the back, illuminating the written wish that all customers would have a happy Xmas. Heavy breathing at the counter was enough to move the tinsel strands in yellow and gold which drifted down towards Duncan’s face. Pip’s thumb tacks into the ceiling were inefficient and the tin foil drooped. Duncan seized it in one fist and tore it down.

  ‘Come out, you randy little bastard, where are you …’

  He did not expect a reply, nor was there one. Duncan stepped into the dispensary, marginally calmer. A slight breeze caught him from the jagged window and one large shard of glass fell with a delayed crash. He was legs, arms, underused muscle, sweeping away with one hand the contents of a shelf. Prepackaged goods, impossibly bound in cellophane and cardboard, fell to the floor. He squinted in the dim night light to read the label of a carton which fell against his head on the way down. Take three times a day. Towards the back of the room were more piled boxes, neat, obscuring a door under which shone a light. Duncan paused, smelt the familiar challenge of a door locked. He measured the length of the small corridor in which he stood, kicked the handle twice, winced as pain shot up into his knee, then cannoned against the wood. A flimsy door, easy Yale lock: the frame hung crooked as he went inside. A skill of his, to shoulder a door without propelling himself forward into the arms of enemy or dog, recovering soon enough to come to a breathy halt, with his hands over his groin, to protect what heavyweight denim could not. Silence. The place, empty, tiny, cramped and neat, enough to still all momentum, drown all sensation. The smell alone was one of aggressive innocence, the antiseptic smell of the hospital ward. Of righteousness and helplessness, persons in white coats saying they knew better, swallow this poison, and expecting obedience. Books ranged in neat lines, laboratory equipment, cupboards open. Duncan paused, awed by a sense of learning. Remembered instead the sense of revenge inflamed by a warmth and light in here. He caught sight of a small but uncongealed spot of blood on the floor.

  Duncan cannoned through the second door, somehow expecting a succession of rooms, only to find beyond a deserted yard and the steps back upwards, the reverse of the route he had just followed in blind anger. In such anger, Duncan had only ever gone wherever he was led, directionless without guidance. He was essentially quite lawless: like a police dog which followed scents without landm
arks, baying with excitement, protected later for its indiscretions. Part of him knew this, none of him cared. Get the bastard. The scent propelled him through a hole in the hoardings the other side of the road. Rapidly, hideously downhill in the rain, a sliding slippery slope like a sledge run, a trap. Stones and bricks fell against him: the bricks from some old cellar kept back by mud. He sat there, soaking and panting. Duncan had always needed a team.

  Tom had never had a team, not even a quorum. He had been awake for a few seconds, which felt like minutes or hours, hugged as he was to this damp, muscular chest. Only when the man moved, rising with a sigh, did Tom’s drugged mind begin to function, surfacing into fear with a swelling of nausea. But he was clasped tight in iron arms, large hands forming a cradle beneath his own buttocks, round his head polythene rustled with deafening sound. The chest was warm, but Tom had no sensation in his feet. His arms were folded against his chest and for a moment, he wanted to close his eyes again. He submitted to the temptation, but they refused to stay shut although he squeezed tight. Peering sideways, he began, in a series of blinks, to see where he might be and with whom. Then he opened his mouth to scream, but his throat, nose and ears were full of the sweaty scent of Pip’s shirt and Pip’s distinctive, lavender-flavoured, antiseptic smell. Tom’s arms moved in compulsive disgust. Pip stopped abruptly.

  ‘You awake, Tom, boy? Are you?’

  Tom slumped. The voice was ominous, full of sedulous concern, the voice he knew and recalled hanging over him as his lungs filled with fumes: the same voice, now a loud whisper echoing against his head. There was silence all round them. Tom maintained it and Pip sighed again, adjusting the weight he carried by hoiking Tom further towards his shoulder as he walked. Footsteps squelched in the mud, slow, ponderous and purposeful, the rain easing down Tom’s neck behind the cover. They were walking on a ridge between the foundations, Pip beginning to move slightly faster.

  Urgency carried him forward to the destination he could see from the upstairs window. The foundations between which he trod had been mere scrapings of the earth when he had noticed them first on the night Margaret died, but now, below where the crane stood like a cross in the sky, and furthest away from the service road, was the largest excavation of all. Water below, only a few inches, but black water, ready to freeze before morning. He reached the edge. A mere sixteen feet of digging, plenty deep enough. Pip looked down, slightly giddy. If he threw Tom in here, he would hit the bottom via the side, revive perhaps for a minute or two, and perish quietly. In his mind’s eye, Pip could hear the splash, the possible breaking of bone, the ensuing silence. No, not thrown: too brutal and the strength was draining from his numbing arms. The boy must merely be dropped, after a fashion. He walked carefully to the crumbling brink, leant right over carefully, Tom’s foot swinging into view. Abruptly Pip heaved upright. The sight of that foot, a human piece of what he carried and held in this embrace, was unbearably pathetic, and the tears which had blinded him before were ceaseless still, blurring that spectacle of lethal black water. Feet without shoes. He hauled himself upright, panting.