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  One Foot in the Grave

  A James Pibble Mystery

  Peter Dickinson

  1

  Her kiss burnt on his forehead. Keyed senses, distracted by the powdery odor of shampoo, didn’t at once register that the fire was frozen.

  “Ice cream for supper?” he murmured.

  Her green eyes blinked and widened. She made a face of mock alarm.

  “Once a detective, always a detective?” she said.

  He replied with a deliberately sleepy mumble, and watched through half-closed eyes as she finished her routine in the room. Everything she did was suffused with surplus life, as though her body was humming with pleasure in its own existence; but these energies didn’t spark out of her at random; despite her roundness of feature and general chubbiness, she was no sprawling and chaotic earth mother, but taut and neat and coiled into herself like the bud of a many-petaled flower—an effect enhanced this evening by the ordered curls of her freshly washed hair.

  He always watched her, for the pleasure of it, but tonight he tried to extract every quantum of life from her presence and use it to feed his own strength. The concentration on her made her seem to be working more briskly than usual, so that it was no time before she stood by the door, slid the light-control down to its nighttime dimness, raised her short-fingered hand in blessing, went.

  As always her heels clicked twice on the parquet outside the door, and then the thick pile of the corridor carpet muffled her footsteps. He listened for the hiss of the door push on Mrs. Culver’s room, but it was drowned by a sudden swish of storm against his window. Although he was already clutching the fold of sheet which she had just smoothed over his chest, he hesitated. For so long now in his mind the sigh of the door push had been his signal to begin that although he knew Mrs. Culver’s door must have opened and closed, it was difficult to move without hearing it do so. All his remaining energies seemed budgeted, so that without the signal he could not find even the tiny bit of moral surplus needed to begin.

  The hesitation stretched to a few seconds, then he willed hand and arm to drag the bedclothes aside. He slithered his feet over the edge of the bed and pushed himself slowly up till he was sitting.

  So far so good, but to stand he would have to make a single effort—there could be no halfway resting stage without her arm round his shoulders to steady him. He took two long breaths, clutched the iron bedhead with both hands and heaved, willing grip and arm muscles to remain taut through the blackness. It came and went with the familiar faint roaring. When it cleared he was still standing, still gripping the bedhead so fiercely that it was hard to persuade his fingers to release their hold. One hand at a time he forced them open and stood unsupported. Excellent.

  All now was planned and replanned, many, many times; but the planning had been done in the fragments of coherent thought, which were all an old mind seemed able to hold on to at any one time; they were the pieces of a patchwork which he was now stitching into the long-imagined pattern. Each piece as he added it was certain to be slightly different from its planned shape, and so the pattern would grow through cumulative distortions to something, perhaps, he could not have imagined. There was no point in fretting about that now. Too late. Or too soon.

  Supporting himself on the bedside table, he shuffled round to the wall and picked up the walking stick from where she always leaned it. Then he crossed to the bath cubicle, opened the door and switched on the light.

  When he had first come to Flycatchers he had been barely conscious of what was happening round him, aware only of the change from cold and disorder that had become squalor to a new sphere of warmth and efficiency. His senses had returned to him by fits and starts, until the almost dictatorial precision of the hospital routine had itself begun to seem oppressive. It was then that he had first noticed that the door of the bath cubicle opened in such a manner that it obscured the one-way observation panel in the main door of the room. This welcomed flaw in the general gloss and competence had seemed at first simply pleasing; but when he had begun to make his plan, and had realized that he could use the flaw, that had been a good omen. Any of the other staff who glanced in would assume he was using the bathroom. Of course, if she were to come back she would know something was wrong, because she had helped him to the lavatory only five minutes ago; but she wouldn’t. She was with Mrs. Culver now; then she would do Mr. X, and then Lady Treadgold. He knew because he’d asked her, weeks ago, when the plan had been little more than a notion.

  “Detecting again?” she had said, laughing with surprise.

  “Not at all. I like to know what you’re doing so that I can think about you doing it.”

  She had laughed again, but told him in detail. He still thought that the second time there had been as much pleasure as surprise in her amusement. As he turned from the doors he drew his pajama sleeve across his forehead, unconsciously trying to wipe away her goodnight kiss, and with it the guilt of deceiving her.

  Clothes next. It had always seemed necessary that he should dress himself, though he was aware that his practical reasons were inadequate. Certainly he must stay warm for a while; possibly, if he had the bad luck to be glimpsed by one of the staff downstairs, they would accept that a properly clothed man had a right to be there, but not one in a dressing gown. But in fact he was determined to dress in order to show that he still could, was still to that extent free.

  He shuffled to the wardrobe and slid the door back. By the dim night-lighting he stared at the ranked garments, all strangers. They were of good quality and had been bought to fit him, but he still couldn’t think of them as his. Only his hat was a friend. Unplanned, a memory made him pause. North Kensington, a freezing room, once grand with its high molded ceiling, now dank, grimy, reeking. Chappie slouched on bed, resigned to arrest. No other furniture, except one chair and one cheap wardrobe, warped beyond closing. Cursory search, nothing there, nothing—paper bag in corner containing sandwich crusts, two empty cider bottles, tangle of wire coat hangers on floor of wardrobe and on rail one threadbare black overcoat and one curious dark heavy suit, both doled out from some probation officer’s private hoard when the chappie had last come out of nick, five weeks back. The chappie’s face and name and crime were quite lost in the quicksands of memory, but the clothes still floated on the top. He could almost feel at his fingertips the nap of that overcoat and the unwearable feltlike thickness of that suit.

  He lifted down one of these overcoats, light but warm, dark blue with a cavalry cut; then a suit of brown tweed. He carried them to the bed and laid them carefully down so that he could slide the trousers off the rail, turn and drop them the right distance from the bed. He fetched socks and a neck scarf from the drawer in the dressing table, laid the scarf beside the clothes on the bed, unrolled the socks and dropped them next to the trousers. They fell beautifully. Good omen.

  He felt his lips twitch in self-mockery. It was five months plus a few days since he’d last tried to dress himself unaided, and by all accounts he hadn’t made much of a go of it. That episode too was in the quicksands, but later he had been told that a social worker had found him unconscious, exhausted by his struggles like a fox in a gin trap, with both his feet jammed fast in one trouser leg and a long gash in his calf where he’d apparently been trying to cut himself free with his nail scissors. Ridiculous, and made more so by the attitude of his rescuers, a sense of admiration for the old man, starving, chilled through, delirious, yet still able to try and save
himself—just as if he’d been that fox in the gin trap biting its own foot off to free itself. But they had been right in a way they didn’t understand. An element of wildness creeps back into the old, however tamed may have been their workaday lives. He had guessed at it sometimes, a flicker behind the eyes of pensioners as they despaired of explaining their troubles to the desk sergeant. Now he knew it from the inside. He was wild, and this was a wild night. The last storm of winter.

  He nodded, assenting to the omen of the socks and trousers. Pantaloonomancy, that had been his name for it in the days when the way the clothes fell had been an augury for each day’s dealings with him. Tonight there would be no debacle, no gin trap. He leaned his stick on the bed and shuffled round to the back of the chair until he could nudge it on its uncanny smooth castors to the right place by the clothes on the floor, and then returned to its front, felt behind him for its arms and lowered himself. The last six inches went with a rush that made the air grunt from his lungs, but no blackness came. He never normally sat in this chair, because he doubted if he could rise from it without help, but his own chair was too high for the trouser technique. Suddenly he was worried about how this would go; it was something he had barely considered during his planning, because he had done it so often that it seemed to present no problem. Now he saw that five months is quite long enough for a late-acquired skill to rust.

  He leaned forward just far enough to see the exact position of the trousers in front of the chair, swung his weight onto his left buttock, used both hands to lift his right leg just above the knee and swung the dangling foot into its starting place on the trouser bottom. Then the left leg. Fine, but that seldom seemed difficult. Now he leaned his body forward and pulled the waistband of the trousers up his calves until the weight of his feet in the legs stopped him. Next he leaned even further, took hold of the cloth on either side of his right foot and tugged it, one side and then the other, easing it inchmeal under the sole until the foot itself at last crept into the open at the far end of the tube. He rested, gazing at it, as though it were some blind white creature that had crawled out of its cave into the dim light. He was almost unable to feel its existence as part of himself. For all these years it had done its half-share of taking him wherever he fancied, unregarded except when it chanced to send twinges of revolt to the capital brain—corns on those iron miles of pavement in his bobby days, the true pain of a smashed metatarsal when the Islington Rapist had bombarded his besiegers with his collection of erotic statuary. Now it seemed barely governable. Few messages came. But it still lived, as if with a strange, brainless life of its own, a white cave-thing.

  He let his foot hypnotize him for less than a minute, then worked its fellow through the trouser leg. After that came the socks, using the same process. Now came the transition to what he thought of as Stage Two. He sat on the edge of the chair and pulled as much of the trousers as possible right up onto his thighs so that when he had twisted round to kneel on the floor there would still be enough slack to allow him to fasten the waistband. He straightened, allowed the inevitable blackness to come and go, and eased his buttocks to the chair rim. Gripping the right arm of the chair with both hands, he twisted his legs to the left and started the pivoting movement, forward, round, down. … Smoothly the chair glided away. For an instant, far too early, he was kneeling as he wanted, but the chair slithered on and he was still clutching the arm until he was stretching like a novice who tries to land from a dinghy and finds himself taut above the water with his hands on the quay and his feet still six feet away in the boat. Fool, he thought as he fell. You forgot the castors. He heard the thud of his body hitting the carpet and the creak of air compressed through his larynx but felt no pain at all. Fool.

  He allowed his lungs to gasp and steady before he rolled fully onto his front. He gathered his arms beneath his chest and pushed himself up into a crawling posture, keeping his head hung low to check the flow of blood away from his brain. Crabwise, so as not to drag the trousers back down his legs, he edged toward the bed and hauled himself slowly into the posture of prayer, judging the limit of the blackness all the time and staying outside it. Now he could feel for the waistband, haul it up and with quivering fingers fasten it. Now the zip.

  Some mornings those few months back it had taken him almost two hours to get from kneeling to sitting—endless attempts, failures, rests, restarts. Other days he had achieved it in a single spasm. Tonight two or three failures would be too many.

  Still kneeling, he sidled to the bedhead, gripped its top with one hand and with the other forced his right leg forward and upward until the sole of that foot was flat on the ground. He rested, gathering his will, and heaved. As the darkness roared through him he used his dying awareness to lean his body forward, and so came to, perhaps only a few seconds later, lying face down across the pillow. Good. Now he twisted carefully onto his back and sat up, judging the retreat of the blackness by habit. After the stupidity with the chair he was back on course. Jacket and overcoat were habit too, tedious but not difficult. His arms were so much better than his legs. He could twist, fumble, manipulate, shrug until each collar nestled against his neck. His hands were scarcely quivering as he tied the neck scarf and tucked it under the lapels to hide the pajamas. At last he could grip the bedhead as before, will muscles and finger bones taut, heave, stand.

  When the blackness cleared he was in the same position as when he had first risen from the bed, only now he was almost dressed.

  He looked at his watch for the first time. Twelve minutes. She would be saying good night to Mrs. Culver now or perhaps already on her way to Mr. X, and she’d spend at least ten minutes with him, prattling away, hoping to extract some new clue to tell her tame detective … only I’m wild, he thought. Wild. Biting my foot off.

  He crossed the room again and used his walking stick to hook a pair of shoes out of the cupboard onto the floor. They were the newfangled sort—slippers, really, without laces—so it was easy enough to prop himself against the cupboard and coax his feet into them. Finally he reached his hat off the shelf and put it on. It nestled round his scalp, familiar, restorative, the only piece of clothing which his rescuers had seen fit to carry over from his previous existence into this one. Its touch seemed to give him not only extra strength and purpose, but even his real identity. He stopped being the vague thing he had been for the last five months—a pity object, a healing object, to one person perhaps a love object—and became a man with a name. James Willoughby Pibble, ex-Detective Superintendent C.I.D.

  Turning from the cupboard, he looked at himself in the long mirror. He saw a ghost, the ghost of Jimmy Pibble, the faintest of faint remains of a life once lived. He was standing in the beam of light from the bathroom door, so he was only half a man, all his left side as invisible as the dark side of the moon. The other half wavered in the dimness—face pale as mist, lips a dark scab, no sign of an eye in the deep socket—a creature as weightless as the dry bone of a bird. All that was left. Not long now. The last storm of winter. The cut of the coat added to the ghostliness of the image; if anyone did glimpse him they might well think him a revenant from the days of Edwardian house parties. The storm whined at a gutter. It was a night for ghosts.

  Moving ever more confidently as the plan proceeded without mishap, he took another overcoat and two suits to the bed. He rolled the bedclothes carefully aside and laid the coat and suits down where he had been sleeping. Not enough bulk. Quite definitely walking now and no longer shuffling, he went to the bath cubicle and fetched the fat towel and the extravagant sponge, laid them on the clothes and patted the whole pile into shape. He had to brace his thighs against the edge of the bed to pull the bedclothes back over the dummy without dragging it out of shape. All his life he had tended to sleep with his head drawn well down into the bedclothes, and since the plan had taken shape he had exaggerated the habit. She had teased him about it, but he’d simply said the night-lighting disturbed him. And since there was n
o chance of his remaking the bed to her standards, he had coaxed her to stop tucking the bedclothes in. She hadn’t liked that. Dangling blankets, all night. Tsk.

  “I wouldn’t let any of the others sleep like that, you know.”

  “Why?”

  He’d only meant what was the harm in sleeping as one chose, but she’d answered another question.

  “Because they aren’t really real. So they might as well do things my way.”

  “Am I real? I hardly feel it, in this place.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense—it’s bad for you. Just remember you’re real, but the others are all—all gnomes.”

  “Hobbits?”

  “Orcs more likely. Retired orcs. I bet Mr. X has got his dragon hoard somewhere.”

  How long had all that taken? Another nine minutes. Would she have finished with Mr. X? Lady Treadgold refused to be bedded down until two in the morning, and in any case Jenny was frightened of her. …

  Almost but not quite in panic, he pushed the visitor’s chair into place, shut the wardrobe, crossed to the door and looked round. Anything she wouldn’t expect to see? The clothes he’d worn that day were as she’d left them, folded neat as a map on the dressing-table stool. The dummy … who could tell? He’d never seen himself from this angle. He nodded to it. You’re not real either now, he thought. Bye.

  He entered the bath cubicle, switched off the light, closed the door to a chink. Very carefully, mistrusting the reliability of touch, he felt his way to the tall stool that stood by the handbasin and eased his buttocks onto it, leaning his back against the tiled wall. A long sigh wandered from his lips. Rubbish, he thought. You aren’t exhausted—you’ve hardly started. Rest. Between three and seven minutes, on previous form.

  Now that he was still he became more conscious of the storm noises. Rain turning to snow, the wireless had said. Deep drifts in the north. He had sat in his chair, watching the last light fading, and seen thin flakes like ice chips beginning to swirl past the darkness of the big cedar. The storm was hissing now through those somber needles; one of the branches creaked in the gusts. The grip of his will, the impetus of the plan, began to fade, and his mind floated into its weary trick of repetition of phrases jumbled beyond meaning or memory of an origin … the boiler house is blowing in the wind … there’s that Frenchman … forty-three degrees of thirst. …