Peter May - Runaway

He felt Dave dunting him, and glanced over his shoulder to see Ricky wheeling Maurie out of the ward.

‘Anyway, thanks for your help, nurse. You can always come to my funeral.’

Her eyes opened wide, and he grinned.

‘Just kidding.’ And he turned to follow Dave out into the hall.

Ricky had a good twenty yards’ start on them and wasn’t hanging about. They almost had to run to catch him up.

But as they did, Maurie started shouting, ‘Stop! Stop!’ and a panicked Ricky pulled up sharply.

Dave reached them first, then Jack, both of them breathless.

‘What the hell is it?’ Jack gasped.

‘I need to go,’ Maurie said

Jack looked up to see the men’s toilet sign above the door to their right. He cursed under his breath. ‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No, it can’t. Just help me out of the chair. I can do this on my own.’

The three of them helped Maurie to his feet and stood fretting in the corridor by the wheelchair as the toilet door swung shut behind him. Visitors and nurses, and the occasional doctor, drifted by as they waited. And waited.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Dave whispered eventually through clenched teeth. ‘What’s he doing in there?’

Jack sighed. ‘I’ll go and find out.’

He discovered Maurie on his knees in a cubicle, his arms around the bowl of the toilet as if he were embracing it, retching and vomiting between huge gulps of air.

‘For God’s sake, man, what’s wrong with you?’

Maurie gasped, ‘I’ll be alright in a minute.’ And he threw up again. When he’d caught his breath, he said, ‘It’s the chemo.’

‘I thought you were stopping it.’

‘I just have.’ This time he dry-retched. ‘I think that’s all for the moment. Help me up.’

Jack helped him to his feet and fumbled in a pocket to retrieve a hanky to wipe the saliva and sick from his old friend’s lips and chin. ‘It’s not too late to give this up, Maurie. We can still take you back.’

Maurie turned sad brown eyes on him, so large now in his shrunken face, and Jack saw the determination that still burned in them. ‘Not a chance!’

Back out in the hall, Maurie slumped almost semi-conscious into the wheelchair, and they set off again towards the lifts, anxious to be out of there just as quickly as they could. But as the lift doors closed behind them, they heard a nurse’s shrill cry from the far end of the corridor.

‘Mr Cohen! For God’s sake, where’s Mr Cohen?’

It seemed to take the lift an eternity to descend to the ground floor, and the palpable silence in it was thick enough to slice. Not one of them dared to meet the others’ eyes. When, finally, the doors slid open it was only to reveal the acres of lobby that had to be crossed before they could escape into the night, and a uniformed security man standing by the doorway.

Jack tried to swallow as his tongue stuck to the roof of a very dry mouth. ‘Don’t rush it,’ he said under his breath. ‘Just take your time.’

But Ricky was off as if the flag had just been raised on pole position at a Grand Prix. Jack and Dave struggled to keep up with him.

They were halfway across the hall when a wall-mounted phone beside the security guard rang, and he lifted the receiver. He listened for a moment, then his eyes raked the lobby as he spoke, settling on Ricky and the wheelchair before he hung up. Jack saw a tiny trickle of sweat run down Ricky’s neck from behind his ear.

The guard glanced at his watch, then raised a hand to stop them. ‘Excuse me, doctor,’ he said.

For a moment Jack thought Ricky was going to faint, but from somewhere he managed a mumbled, ‘Yes?’

‘You got the time on you? My watch seems to have given up the ghost.’

Ricky’s relief almost robbed him of the ability to stand up, and he very nearly staggered as he let go of one handle of the wheelchair to look at his watch. ‘Quarter to eight,’ he said.

‘Thanks, doc.’ The security man held the door open for them. ‘Better wrap up warm, it’s bloody cold out there.’

By the time they got to the top of the hill they were all wishing they had been able to find a parking space at the bottom of it. It took all three of them to get Maurie up the steep incline, past the Langside Library and the shops below the tenement flats that climbed the rest of the way to the roundabout.

When they reached the car, Ricky said, ‘I can’t let go. There are no brakes on this thing.’

Jack tutted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the genius, son. Turn it sideways.’

‘Oh. Aye.’ Ricky seemed chastened.

He unlocked the car, and the three of them helped Maurie into the back seat.

Then Ricky said, ‘What are we going to do with the wheelchair? Even folded up we’re not going to get it into the boot.’

And they turned in time to see its front wheels swivel, setting it on a course back down the hill.

Dave cackled. ‘Aye, well, that solves the problem.’

‘Jesus!’ Ricky started after it. But it was gathering pace quickly, and he realized almost immediately that he was neither fit enough nor fast enough to catch it.

The three of them stood by the car, watching as the empty wheelchair went careening down the hill, bouncing jauntily off parked cars and walls as if it were revelling in undreamed-of speed and freedom. Until it smacked into a pillar box on the corner of Sinclair Drive and came skidding to a halt on its side, half wrapped around the pole of a Give Way sign. Just as two uniformed police officers on foot patrol turned the corner.

‘Holy shit!’ Dave said, which was their cue to get into the Micra as quickly as they could. Like schoolboys fleeing the scene of the crime.

Ricky fumbled with the keys and started her up, pulling out into the traffic without indicating or looking. A large van blasted its horn at them.

‘Nothing like an inconspicuous escape,’ Jack muttered, turning a dark look towards his grandson.

But Ricky was oblivious. He accelerated away, across the roundabout and down Langside Avenue towards Shawlands Cross, tiny beads of cold sweat gathering across his forehead.

Without taking his eyes from the road he said quietly, ‘I’ll never forgive you for this, Grampa. Never!’

Ricky took the road through East Kilbride on to the dual carriageway that linked up with the M74. The southbound lanes of the motorway were quiet, and by ten they were long past Crawford and heading into the bleak, rolling wastes of South Lanarkshire. Darkness had crept up on them like a mist, sombre and silent, like the mood in the car itself.

The adrenaline-pumping moments at the infirmary were behind them, and now that they were on the road the cold reality of this madness on which they had embarked sat among them like a fifth presence. White lines caught in the headlights passed beneath them with hypnotic regularity, and the constant whining pitch of the little car’s motor filled their collective consciousness.

Maurie was asleep in the back, his head fallen on to Dave’s shoulder. Dave sat upright, with glassy eyes, his rucksack resting on his knees.

Jack glanced back at him, struck by a sudden thought. ‘What have you got in the rucksack, Dave?’

Dave folded his arms possessively around it. ‘Nothing.’

‘It must have something in it.’

‘Just my toilet bag and some underwear.’

‘Seemed kind of heavy for a toilet bag and underwear.’

Jack had lifted the rucksack off the back seat while they were manoeuvring Maurie into the car. The weight of it had registered then, but he had forgotten until now.

Dave shrugged, silently defensive.

‘Have you got booze in there?’

‘No.’ His denial came too quickly.

Ricky glanced across at his grandfather. ‘What if he has?’