Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

But by the time she was back with the cocoa, he was asleep.

In the deep of the night, he awoke again and they sat side by side on the edge of the bed, with the bulb of the Anglepoise turned to the wall, and they drank cocoa, like old times.

She asked him if there was any pain. Only a kind of numbness, he said. Down the left side.

‘Do I have a fractured skull, anything like that?’

‘You’ll have to see a neurologist to get it hard and fast. Might be a hairline, but I don’t think so. There’s some brain-stem damage.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Neural. It’s what causes the numbness, the way your voice is slurring. And why you won’t be walking a straight line for a wee while. They’ll repair themselves, the nerves, in time. Meantime, you’ll keep forgetting things and you won’t be able to think as fast as you’d like or do things as efficiently. So take a breath before you jump in and — no offence, I tell this to everybody — you need to watch your temper. Meantime, relax. You were luckier than I can tell you. You were gone a good long time. According to the rulebook, you shouldnae be back at all, no way, know what I’m saying?’

‘I died?’ He’d have forgotten their earlier chat; this was normal.

‘Aye, you did. You were gone … quite a while. Lucky man, eh?’

‘You think so?’ Not sounding too convinced. Oh, this is all wrong, Andy thought. This is perversely wrong.

‘How long am I going to be banged up in here?’

‘Way you’re coming along, you could be out in a week. Long as there’s no complications. But we do need to watch you. All you have to do, Bobby, is rest, rest and rest. Anybody to look after you at home? Girlfriend? Mother?’

‘Died when I was a little kid. Got knocked down in our lane.’

‘Oh.’

‘Runs in the family,’ Bobby said. ‘Getting knocked down.’

‘I’m sorry. You … you still don’t remember what happened to you?’

Bobby shook his head, with a wisp of a smile, then he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a long moment. Something she’d seen him do several times before.

‘Why you keep doing that with your hands?’

‘It’s …’ He hesitated. Then talked about there being a kind of thick glass screen, between him and everything he perceived. ‘A sense of … separateness . ‘

‘Like you’re not part of what’s going on?’

Bobby Maiden looked at her out of his red white and blue eye. She was feeling her way here, going with the instincts, but she had his attention.

‘And there’s something you think you ought to be able to get through to? Because you have a feeling you could before? Don’t look so surprised, Bobby. I’ve been in this game a good long time.’

‘It’s normal?’

‘It’s no exactly normal . I’ve known it before with patients who …’

‘You had many like this? People who died and came back?’

‘Aye. And people who came close to it and then came back. Most of them …’ She looked into his eyes. ‘… most of them said it was the most wonderful thing ever happened to them.’

Thinking back to some of the patients she’d had who’d died, or almost, on the table and come back. Nothing as dramatic as Bobby, no more than a few seconds most of them. But, aye, the same story with a few variations. Maybe seeing themselves lying on the operating table. Then, often, a bright light, more glorious than anything they’d ever seen or imagined. Sometimes green fields and lovely gardens with fountains. And the famous long tunnel, the umbilicus, one end in this life, the other in …

Chemicals. Most neurologists were agreed that this was brain chemicals, the more optimistic of them suggesting there was obviously some shutdown mechanism in the brain that was triggered by the death process. The brain turning on the soft lights and sweet music. Departure lounge stuff.

And when they came out of it, the world could seem, for a short while, a hard, bright and fairly brutal place — maybe Bobby’s slushy, February streets had covered that aspect.

And yet, for almost all of them, there was this lingering memory of the glorious light, something they’d hold on to the rest of their lives. More than a hope … a certainty. That everything, in the end, would be very much OK.

While this guy, who’d had more opportunity than any of them to bask in the paradise vision …

‘Bobby, are you religious at all?’

‘Well …’ He thought about it. ‘Kind of knocks it out of you, being in the Job.’

‘Was it ever there?’

He did it again with his hands, palms squashed into the eyes. Must surely hurt him to do that. Maybe that was what he wanted.

Pulling his hands away, he looked like a child waking up in the middle of the night and finding itself not in its cosy room but on some bare hillside.

‘I was never that scared of death. Scared of dying, maybe. But that’s how most people are I suppose.’

‘Dying’s usually no that bad, these days,’ Andy said. ‘Any nurse’ll tell you that.’

‘I am now.’

‘What?’

‘Scared. Shit -scared. Don’t know where the hell you go, but I’m buggered if I’m going back. I mean, OK, I realize one day, but … Oh, shit . ‘

The tremble was so prolonged it was like his skin rippled.

‘Bobby, let me get this right …’

Andy felt cold just looking at him. Got the feeling it was only the separateness, caused by the slight brain damage, that was stopping him from turning into a basket case.

‘… this has left you with a fear of death ?’

His face was so white, his bad eye was like a target in the snow.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I don’t even want to think about it.’

Marcus couldn’t face going back to the Castle, breaking the news to Mrs Willis, so he walked. Walking the rage out of his system, each step grinding Falconer’s smug face into the tarmac, all the way to Ewyas Harold, damn near six miles.

Mrs Willis wouldn’t be worried when he didn’t turn up for breakfast. Used to his ways. Perhaps she’d go back to bed. Hope so.

On the way back, fatigue dragged Marcus into a field and he sat down under a tree, wiping the rain and sweat from his nose and his glasses, watching the clouds leak.

Malcolm wandered around, picking up the ghost trails of rabbits and foxes and badgers. Marcus leaned his head against the tree trunk. Nobody would understand what it would mean to him, not being able to walk to the Knoll, along that very obvious ley line from the Castle, to watch the sun rise over the distant Malverns. Feeling there a sense of home that he’d never experienced before, throughout his career as an English teacher in four different schools, Hartlepool to Truro. All through his marriage.

Not that there’d been anything wrong with that . Only wished there’d been more of it. But Celia had died not three years after Sally, following a bloody hysterectomy, and nobody would convince Marcus that one death hadn’t led directly to the other. It should not have been fucking incurable.

Bloody doctors.

And bloody priests. And bloody politicians and professional academics. And bloody lawyers and judges and television pundits and all would-be shapers and organizers of other people’s bloody lives.

And teachers? Yes, all right, bloody teachers too. When they’d offered early retirement, he’d snatched the money and run with it. Run away. Ending up, faintly bewildered, in Herefordshire, where he was born. Thinking there was still, in theory, time to do something, to push back the boundaries of life.

And yet depressingly aware that his life had actually shrunk.