One Foot in the Grave Read online

  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

  Only 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 stethos
cope, 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.