Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

When he woke to find himself dumped like a sack of refuse on the cobbles in a corner of that lane, he was aware at first only of a huge confusion, and thought a great mistake must have been made but one that in a moment would be set right. Nothing made sense. He was not supposed to be lying here like this; how had it happened? It was dark, and there was someone leaning over him, breathing foul fumes of alcohol and general bodily rot. He felt a hand scrabbling inside his jacket and instinctively clamped his arm against his side, and the figure above him reared back. “Whoa, Jesus!” a rough voice said in fright. “I thought you were dead.”

He was not dead, certainly not, for if he were he would not be feeling this remarkable, quite remarkable, pain. There was a pounding in his head, too, and something was wrong with his back, and his left ankle was twisted under him, but none of this compared to what was happening in his hand. Before he looked at it he imagined it surrounded by a pulsing crimson fireball, as if such pain must be visible. When he lifted it to his face there was no flame, but the perspective was wrong, or the angle, and it did not look like his hand. Was that blood? Yes, a great deal of blood. And a part of his hand, unaccountably, was missing.

“You’re in a bad way, Captain,” the foul-breathed voice said. “Can you get up on your feet, at all?”

He was worried about his wallet. That must have been what this fellow leaning over him had been searching for inside his jacket. He kept it in his right-hand breast pocket, which meant he would have to reach for it with his left hand, but that would not be possible, not with his left hand in the state that it was. He tried with his right hand, but it was too awkward, and the effort made him feel dizzy, which in turn made him feel sick. He leaned aside and vomited briefly onto the ground. “Jesus,” the voice said again, in sympathetic wonderment. That this stinking fellow was still here was a good sign, for if he had found the wallet he would surely have run off.

A cat was sitting on top of the wall on the other side of the lane; he could see it outlined against the last faint luminance in the western sky. What must the animals make of us and our doings, he found himself wondering; we must seem to them mad beyond measure.

The figure above him was a young man with a wispy beard and no front teeth. He smelled like a Christmas dinner gone bad. Somehow, together, they got themselves to their feet-it seemed to Sinclair that he was helping the young man as much as the young man was helping him. This was funny, and if he could have managed it he would have laughed. Clinging to each other the two lurched up the lane and out onto Fitzwilliam Place. It was nearing midnight and the street was empty. He gave the young man a half crown that he found in the watch pocket of his waistcoat, and the fellow saluted smartly, and called him Captain again, and asked him if he would be all right, and shuffled off.

Now what? He tried flagging down a taxi, but when the driver drew close enough to see the state he was in he shook his head and drove on. He could try walking home, but he had definitely pulled something in his back, and the ankle that had been twisted under him felt as delicate as glass and at the same time heavy and hot as a lump of smoldering wood. His left arm he held close across his chest, the hand with the missing finger pressed protectively into the hollow of his shoulder. The pain in it made an enormous steady dull beat. He wondered how much blood he had lost-a lot, given the light-headedness he was feeling.

He crossed to the square and hobbled along by the railings, under the silent trees, assailed by the heartlessly tender perfumes of the night. A girl was standing in inky shadows at the corner. As he approached her he caught the wary flash of an eye.

“It’s all right,” he said, “I was in an accident. Will you help me?”

She was no more than sixteen or seventeen, painfully thin, with a peaky face under a black scrap of a hat pinned at an angle meant to be jaunty but that only increased the overall melancholy of her aspect.

She was still eyeing him with misgiving. He asked her again to help him and she said that she was a working girl, and what kind of help did he want, anyway? He said he needed an ambulance, and that his hand was injured, and that he had taken a tumble and was finding it difficult to walk; would she telephone for an ambulance?

“What happened to you, anyway?” she asked. “You don’t look to me like you were in an accident.”

Her fear was abating, he could see.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I was attacked.”

“Was it that fellow that was helping you? I know him, he’s a drunken bowsy.”

“No, I don’t think it was him. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“He wouldn’t be able to, anyway, that fellow.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “My hand is paining very badly,” he said. “Will you telephone for me, will you ring nine-nine-nine?”

She hesitated. She was no longer afraid, now, only impatient and put out, but still, she was a woman and therefore, as he guessed, could not be entirely unsympathetic. “There’s a box down at the corner,” she said. “Have you pennies?”

He gave her the coins, and waited, watching her walk down to Baggot Street, wobbling a little on her high heels, and step into the lighted phone booth. The pain in his hand made him grind his teeth. He was worried that he might faint. Presently the girl came back. “They’re sending the ambulance,” she said. “You’re to stay here.”

He leaned his back against the railings and she began to move away. “Will you wait with me?” he said. He suddenly felt very sorry for himself, but at a remove, as if he were not himself but some suffering creature that had come crawling to him for help, as he had come to the girl. “Please? I’ll pay you-here.” He reached his right hand fumblingly under the right flap of his jacket, and managed this time to find his wallet, which amazingly was there, untouched. He held it open to her. “There’s a five-pound note in there,” he said. “Take it.”

She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Give us a fag,” she said. “I don’t want your money.”

He got out his packet of Gold Flake and turned so that she could reach into his pocket and find his lighter. When they had lit up he asked her name. “Teri,” she said. “With one r and an i. ”

“Teri,” he said. “That’s nice.” The first lungful of smoke made his head swim.

“It’s Philomena, really,” she said. “Teri is my professional name. What about you?”

“John,” he said without hesitation.

She gave him another narrow-eyed look. “No, it’s not,” she said.

He was about to protest, but her expression stopped him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s David. Really it is.”

“David. That’s a good name. Not Dave, or Davy?”

“No. Just David.”

They heard a siren starting up in the distance.

“I’d have let you into my room,” Teri said, “only my fellow might have arrived in on top of us.”

“Your fellow?”

She shrugged. “You know.”

He was astonished all at once to feel his eyes prickle with tears. “I wish you’d take that fiver,” he said, with sorrowful fervor. “It’s only a way of saying thanks.”

She considered him for a moment, and her eyes hardened. “Saying thanks to the whore with the heart of gold, eh?” she said, sounding all at once far older than her years. Way down at the end of the long avenue a flashing blue light appeared. “Here’s your ambulance.”

She turned and walked away, her heels clicking.

His hand throbbed.

And then there was the strangeness of being in hospital, where everything was familiar and at the same time topsy-turvy. The ambulance brought him to the Holy Family-of course, where else, given the grotesqueness of all that was happening? His place of work was in the basement but they put him upstairs, in the new wing, in a big ward with thirty or more beds in it. He had been treated first in Emergency by an Indian intern whom he knew from seeing about the place, a whimsical fellow with a high-pitched laugh and remarkably beautiful slender hands that were the color of cocoa on the backs and brick pink in the palms. “Oh dear oh dear,” the Indian said when he saw the wound, “what happened to you, my friend?”