Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘Possibly,’ she said at last. ‘But not for a long time.’

‘Will you go take a look?’

She didn’t answer for a moment. She was looking at me as if she was trying to read something in my face. Or maybe she was just exasperated by my inadequate verbal photofit.

‘If I’m passing,’ she allowed, ‘I’ll take a look.’

‘Thanks, Juliet.’

‘ If I’m passing, Castor. You wait patiently and you don’t hassle me. I’ll call you as and when.’

‘Thanks,’ I said again.

That would have to do, for now. I thanked her for the advice about jugulars and hit the road.

I hadn’t thought about Anita in years, and now suddenly I couldn’t get her out of my head. Every time my mind went into idle, as it did while I was Tube-hopping south and west across London, old memories of her kept popping up out of nowhere — no doubt shaken and stirred from the cerebral substrate by the pants-wetting trauma of seeing my name written in Kenny Seddon’s blood.

Had I fancied her? Jesus, who was I trying to kid? Of course I had. More than once, in fact. The first time had been when I was four and was dragged against my will to Northcote Road Primary School to see my brother Matt playing Joseph in the nativity play. Anita was his Mary, and I liked the way she smiled. She delivered her lines nicely, too. I committed two of them to memory, and used to repeat them to myself every once in a while for the sheer pleasure of the sounds: “Come, Joseph. I am close to my time and we must reach Bethlehem before our baby is born” and “I thank you for your gifts and for your great kindness.”

But that was just a childhood infatuation. The year after she stabbed Kenny — the year she turned sixteen — Anita was the most beautiful thing that had ever walked on two legs. And she’d saved my life! So naturally I was besotted with her to the point of insomnia, and used her as the raw material for a thousand fantasies ranging from the sloppily romantic to the baldly pornographic.

It didn’t help, though. She’d completed her metamorphosis by that time: she was all grown up and I was a kid. The yawning chasm of two years was way too wide to vault across — at least in that direction: if I’d been older than her it would have been a different story. She dated one of the boys who loaded the vans at Hannah’s pie bakery in Arthur Street: a guy named Alan, who was eighteen and had all the advantages of a job, a car and a total absence of acne. I hated him and wished harm on him, even though he’d once given me a quid to put a bet on for him at Coral’s.

But that passed. It always does. You learn to scale your desire to things within your scope, when you’re fourteen. Or at least you learn to distinguish between desires you can hope to satisfy and ones that are just between yourself, your conscience, and the box of tissues on your bedside table.

By the time I finally lost my virginity — to Carole Aubrey in the car park of the Red Pepper Club on Rice Lane — I wasn’t even fantasising about Anita on a regular basis. The top slots were filled with movie actresses and female vocalists, interspersed with a few comic-book characters who really belonged to an earlier stage of my adolescence.

But I still saw Anita around, because Walton was a small place. Too small for her, I thought. I always expected her to leave, because it seemed to me at that time that leaving was the prerequisite for having any kind of a life.

And we were still friends, in the way that people who’ve collected frogspawn and played knock-down-ginger and climbed on factory roofs together will tend to stay friends. I bought her the occasional drink at the Breeze or the Prince Arthur, and we’d share family news. She’d ask how Matt was getting on at the seminary, and I’d lie because I didn’t really know. And I’d pretend to take an interest when she told me about Dick-Breath’s progress at the Prudential, from doorstep insurance salesman to team manager and all-round messiah.

Once — only once — I made a pass. It was New Year’s Eve, when you can get away with a lot of indiscriminate kissing: the general rule being that you took it as far as you could and had a plausible get-out clause if the lady objected. I swung into the Breeze with a couple of mates ten minutes before the towel went up, hog-whimpering drunk, kissed my way down the length of the bar — maidens and matrons and all — until I got to Anita who was standing in the corner watching her cousin feed the one-armed bandit.

We clinched, and it was good. Deep, and intense, and lasting as long as our lungs did. But when I tried to come back for seconds she touched the tips of her fingers, very lightly to my chest, and shook her head. I saw tears rising in her eyes, and I was alarmed. Tears? For who?

‘You okay, ’Nita?’ I asked her, taking pains to get the consonants in the right order because being able to handle your booze was part of the measure of a man in Walton.

‘I’m fine, Fix,’ she said, looking away for a moment while she blinked the tears back under control. ‘I was just — I was waiting for someone, and he didn’t come. I’ll be all right.’ She looked up at me again, giving me a dazzling and almost completely convincing smile.

I bought her a Babycham, which she didn’t touch.

We talked about politics and punk rock — and then, when I was really drunk, I told her about what I was and what I could do with a tin whistle. This was before the rising of the dead went from a trickle to a torrent, and long before exorcism had become an everyday profession, but Anita listened without comment. When I got to the part about my sister Katie, she pressed her hand to the back of mine where it rested on the table, willing me comfort.

I walked her home, and she gave me another kiss. On the cheek, this time: a thank-you kiss. I realised that that was as far as it was ever going to go between us, and I didn’t mind because it was cool that we’d had that moment of contact rather than a grope, a hangover and a lingering sense of embarrassment.

But whoever it was that stood her up that night, he needed his fucking head examined.

I like the Royal London: it’s got a bit of class, as hospitals go. Tell me it wouldn’t lift your spirits to be wheeled out of an ambulance past that terrific eighteenth-century façade. ‘Bloody hell,’ you’d think, ‘I’m going up in the world.’ But the neo-brutalist nightmare they’re nailing onto the back of the building is a different bucket of entrails entirely, and for my money you can keep it.

Kenny was in intensive care, Coldwood had said. I walked in off the street, striding straight ahead past the A&E reception desk and the assembled sick and lame. I was gambling on the ancient truism that people are much less likely to challenge you if you look like you know where you’re going, and it seemed to work: or at least it got me a long way, through A&E and Outpatients and into the slightly dilapidated annexe where the intensive-care wards were located.

The dead watched me every step of the way. In fact, I was having to walk right through some of them, because they were as thick on the ground as leaves in autumn — and like leaves in autumn they presented a rich, mesmerising spectrum of decay. Lots of people die in hospitals, and they die from a lot of different things, all of which leave their marks on the spirit as well as the flesh.

Nobody knows why some people get up again after they’ve been laid in the grave and others don’t: Juliet puts it down to a character flaw, a fear of taking the necessary jump head-first into another mode of existence. But she’s always fought shy of explaining how that other life works or where it’s situated or how much a square meal costs there.