Stuart Pawson - The Mushroom Man

The sister had no further information for us. I supplied her with Annabelle's name and address for the admission forms, but wasn't much help with next of kin. When she asked me my relationship to her I just said: "Friend."

A policeman from the ARV, wearing a bulletproof vest over his shirt, was sitting on a chair in the middle of the corridor that led to the operating theatres. He nursed a Heckler and Koch automatic in the crook of his arm. Another cop stood surveying the scene in the waiting room, arms folded, legs apart; as implacable as the Colossus of Rhodes.

Gilbert approached him cautiously and showed his ID. They talked and nodded, and Gilbert pointed to me, obviously telling him who I was.

When he rejoined us I said: "Look, I'm staying here for as long as it takes, but you two might as well go home. I'm grateful to you both for coming."

It made sense, so they left. The sister suggested I use the staff canteen, but I declined. She let me wait in her office, and a male nurse brought me a coffee.

Every thirty or forty minutes I stretched my legs in the waiting room.

New faces replaced the ones who were either patched up and sent home or admitted into a ward. The place grew slightly more quiet as the night passed. The occasional boisterous drunk fell silent when he saw the police presence. Several clients appeared to be regulars. A down-and-out who said he had blue spiders crawling all over him was dealt with patiently and then propelled out through the door. Everybody called him George. I wandered down a corridor, between the cubicles, and found myself in the resuscitation room, where the ambulances bring the serious cases. Annabelle would have passed through here. The victim of a hit-and-run was being attended to. Through a gap in the curtains I saw the doctor pull the blanket over the man's head, then wipe the sleep and the sweat from his own eyes.

I went to the bathroom. The walls were covered in graffiti and most of the taps had been left running. When I washed my hands flakes of dried blood from under my fingernails went down the plug hole Back in the sister's office I watched the sky growing grey over the chimney pots and high-rise flats. A porter on the next shift arrived, and left his newspaper on the desk. I glanced at the folded bundle today was the first day of the new football season.

"Mr. Priest?"

I turned towards the voice. It was the sister.

"Mrs. Wilberforce has been taken to the I.C.U. You can see her for a few moments."

I jumped to my feet. "How is she?" I demanded.

The sister held up her hand to curb my haste. "I have to warn you," she said, 'that she is very ill, and is likely to remain on the critical list for some time."

"But she'll live?" ' This way. I' 11 take you."

She led me back through the res us room to the intensive care wards.

We entered one and she introduced me to Annabelle's nurse, but I never heard her name. There were six beds in the room, with Annabelle in the end one.

She was laid out flat, with just a thin sheet over her. A blue device was sticking out of her throat, with a corrugated tube leading to a ventilator machine that was doing her breathing. A thick orange tube came from under the sheet and ended in a bottle on the floor. There was a drip leading into her arm and a battery of instrumentation alongside her bed that wouldn't have looked unreasonable on the flight deck of Concorde.

I couldn't take it all in. What had I allowed to happen to the beautiful, vivacious woman I was with a few hours ago? Last night she'd been giggling like a schoolgirl for the first time in years, and I had congratulated myself for bringing about the change in her. Now she was being kept alive by electrical impulses and motors and pumps; and I was to blame for that, too. Two years ago I had been shot by another madman. I wished it was me again this time.

"What's happening to her?" I whispered.

The nurse tried to tell me, but I didn't catch much of it. She used words like intubated and pneumothorax. Annabelle had a punctured lung and damage to various other organs. She'd lost most of her blood. The nurse said she was responsible solely for caring for Annabelle.

"Please look after her," I whispered. "She means a lot to me."

"We will," the nurse promised, assuming it was her I was addressing.

"Can I come back later and sit with her for a while?"

"Yes, of course."

"Thank you."

I gazed into the gas fire until my eyes burned. When I couldn't keep them open any longer I swung my feet on to the settee and fell asleep.

Sam Evans woke me, tapping quietly on the window. He was carrying the bottle of milk from my doorstep.

"You look a mess," he declared. "Have a shower and put some clean clothes on, while I make coffee."

My resistance had vanished, so I asked him to ring the hospital for me and did as I was told. In the bathroom I stripped naked and bundled everything together, for throwing in the dustbin. I was under the shower when he poked his head around the door. "She's still critical but there's no deterioration in her condition. I would say that's good news."

"Good. Thank you, Sam."

The clock inside me didn't know what time of day it was, so I had a big bowl of cornflakes for lunch. Surprisingly, Sam approved of my diet.

Shortly after he went, Nigel and Sparky arrived, in different cars.

Nigel was returning mine, but he left it out on the road. Sparky dropped his into the drive.

"I've been thinking," he said as I let them in.

"In that case you'd better sit down," I told him. Nigel asked if he could make coffee.

Sparky went on: "The press are asking questions about Annabelle.

They've found out who she is and have decided she's the latest victim of this Mushroom Man. It's only a matter of time before some kind soul earns his forty pieces of silver by telling them about your involvement, so we're swapping cars. It might throw them off the scent until the story dies. I think you ought to bugger off somewhere you can't do anything here but I don't suppose you will."

Nigel agreed with him, but I shook my head. "I'm staying," I said.

When they left I walked outside with them and we stood talking in the garden for several minutes. Sparky knows about gardening. He told me what to do with the perennials, but I didn't listen. Listening has always been one of my problems. The house martins were gathering on the phone wires, and a blackbird was gorging itself on the berries on next door's mountain ash. The man over the road was dismantling his barbecue.

I nodded in his direction and said: "That marks the official end of summer."

"It's still only August," Sparky protested. "What happened to all this global warming. It's more like November."

"Ah," said Nigel. "That's the strange effect of global warming. We'll actually get cooler. The weather in Britain is governed by the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean. As the icecaps melt, due to the warming, the meltwater cools the seas, so we'll have cooler weather."

Sparky gave him the scowl he usually reserves for burglars who swear blind that they were drunk and were convinced that the penthouse they were stripping really was their own squat. "Are you 'having us on?" he said.

I was shivering when I went back inside. Nigel had given me an envelope containing stuff from the bloodstained jacket I'd left in the City nick. It was my wallet and some loose change. And the ticket stubs and programme for the concert. I opened the programme and read from the translation of the ancient verse:

O Fortune, variable as the Moon. Always dost thou wax and wane.

My mind flashed to the new moon I'd seen the previous Tuesday as I drove away from Annabelle's, but this time I had no defence against the bad memories it invoked.

I sat all that night in the corner of the intensive care unit. A different armed policeman was on duty outside the door. Two patients had moved out, another was brought in. I watched the ventilator rising and falling, and the green blips moving across the ECG screen. The nurses had an office area in the middle of the room. They were constantly checking their charges, moving quietly and efficiently. They read dials, made notes, felt brows and changed drips. I could understand why intensive care nursing was so satisfying.