Gerald Seymour: Rat Run

He could see it: a child lost in his imagination, succouring fantasies, playing solitary games around the married quarters at Tidworth, Catterick, Larkhall or Colchester… Father was the Northern Ireland expert and always there; mother, a deserter from a nursing career, full-time unpaid organizer of other ranks' wives clubs and counsellor of teenage brides on credit-card debt and trying to keep together a hopeless partnership. Walter and Araminta Kitchen had been too consumed with the job and the good deeds to notice that their lone child was isolated. He remembered coming into the kitchen with homework, arithmetic that he couldn't do, unaware that his father had learned that afternoon he was not sailing with the Task Force to the South Atlantic, and getting a volley of abuse over a gin glass for thinking homework counted in the scale of things, and running. Sent to boarding-school in Somerset. Short visits from his mother, and an aloof one from his father to see the school play. Worst day ever at school was his father's visit a year after his retirement as brigadier, with full dress and medals, to inspect the Combined Cadet Force. Not an unhappy childhood, compared to what some at the school put up with, but remote from love.

Of course he would join the army: his small act of rebellion, and it had taken bottle, was to decide – himself – when and where. And then the puce-faced, spluttering reaction of his father when he announced that he'd enlisted, that afternoon, and been passed through by a Birmingham recruitment office, to be a private soldier and bottom of the heap. 'Silly little bugger,' Walter had called him, and Araminta had said quietly to her husband, 'Not to worry, darling. It never lasts when middle-class boys go slumming it.'

All the sounds, that evening, of the estate had wafted up to his room: music and screams, the wail of the sirens, then the intermittent flashes of blue emergency lights.

The memories came round as if in a loop, as they always did. He was in childhood, father away and mother out. Too awake to sleep. No escape possible.

He heard the stampede of feet, the thud of them, then the hammering on his door.

Malachy felt the fear catch his body He crawled away across the floor towards the far wall. The beating on the door was ever more insistent, and there was the cry of Dawn's voice.

It came in a torrent when he finally opened the door. If he had interrupted, it would not have halted her. She was in her night clothes. No slippers on her feet. Incoherent and with tears welling.

'It's Millie… What happened to Millie? Do you not know? The bingo. She went. I got flu. I can't go to the bingo. I tell her. I say to get you to walk her, or not go.

Did she get you? She went on her own. I told her not to. Nobody ever goes to bingo alone and comes back alone. She did. They got her, the vagrants got her.

She's mugged. You know what she has in her bag? She never has more than five pounds, that is before the bingo starts. They went for her bag. After the bingo and a cup of tea there would be two pounds only. She didn't give it. She hung on to it for two pounds. They dragged her. She fell. She is an old lady. She hit her head, and then they took her bag.'

He rocked, felt himself cringe. He did not say what her nephew's opinion of him was: a loser and a failure. Malachy could not tell her that Mildred Johnson would not have asked him to walk her to and from bingo because he had said that a story of a catastrophe was nobody's business but his, that he was the last man from whom the proud, obstinate little lady would have begged a favour.

'She's in the hospital. The police had found her bag, without two pounds. In the bag is my name and my flat number. In my bag is her name and her number. I cried when the police told me… Why, Mr Malachy, did she not call you to take her and to bring her back?

Why? You were her friend. Why did she not ask you?'

'How is she?'

The nurse looked up. She had been hovering over the bed. 'Are you a relative?'

'No – no, I'm not. Just a friend.' Malachy held the flowers beside his leg and the water off them ran down his trousers.

'How close a friend?'

'I live next door to Mrs Johnson.' He was supposed to have been, once, an expert in interrogation. With the tables turned, now, the questioning unsettled him.

He shuffled his feet. The nurse's body blocked his view of Millie. It was the furthest he had been away from the Amersham since he had come to live there the previous autumn. It had been a big journey for him to get to the sprawled complex of St Thomas's Hospital. That morning, Dawn had come again to his door. She must have been on her way home after the early cleaning shift in Whitehall. He had thought of Millie, and the guilt had seared him.

'I suppose that'll do… ' The nurse had a freckled face and bags under her eyes, seemed half asleep with tiredness and spoke with an accent that was west of Ireland. 'She was knocked out. We thought about Intensive Care but there wasn't a bed. She got the best we could give her, but it wasn't IC, with pulse, blood pressure and pupils checks every half-hour, and we didn't think there was inter-cranial bleeding… That's why she's in General Medical. So, it's serious bruising to the head and a broken arm – not a complicated break. Always the same with the old folk – they hang on and don't let the bag go. Silly, but that's them for you.'

The nurse moved, started to smooth down the bed.

Millie, to him, looked so small. She was half sat up against a pile of pillows. She wore a loose-fitting smock, several sizes too large for her. Her face, usually proud, independent and haughty, was a coloured mass of bruises, and the right side of her grey hair had been shaved away above the ear. He could see the two-inch-long gash with the stitches in it. Her right arm was across her small chest, enveloped in a sling.

She seemed to stare at him, baleful and defensive. He did not know whether he was recognized, if that was the stare she gave to anyone approaching her bed. The nurse slipped a thermometer into her mouth, which was puffed, with distorted lips.

'She'll be in two or three days, because she lives alone and there's no one to look after her. Problem is that we might ship her out today, and if she starts vomiting or goes to sleep, we've an inquiry to worry about. When the swelling's down on the arm it'll be pinned or plated – and she'll have to manage. That's the way it is, these days.'

'There's a friend next door to her, a good lady. She'll be there.'

'And you said you were a neighbour.' The nurse put down the thermometer, then fixed Malachy with her eye. 'I expect you'll give her a hand – or do you go to work?'

'I'll do what I can,' he murmured. 'I don't suppose you have a vase?'

He had gone to the East Street market. He had considered how much he could spend. The benefit he was entitled to, after deductions, left him with eighty pounds to last for two weeks. Divided up that gave him spending money of five pounds and seventy-one pence each day. He had asked the woman on the flower stall for the best she could do with five pounds.

It was a good display of bright chrysanthemums that he had brought to the hospital.

The nurse reached to the bottom cupboard of the cabinet beside the bed and took out a man's urine-sample bottle, grinned, filled it with water from the basin, and took the flowers from Malachy. As if she'd made the judgement that he wasn't capable of flower-arranging, she did it for him and settled the stems in the bottle. 'The vases all get nicked,' she said. 'It's the best I can manage. Don't stay too long. You shouldn't tire her.' She left him.

Malachy sat on the end of the bed beside the little bump her feet made. He did not know what to say, or whether it was right to say anything. He tried to smile encouragement. She had turned her battered head enough to see the flowers. He felt his inadequacy.