Matt Beaumont - Staying Alive

A voice calls out, ‘Mr Colin?’ I look up to see a tired-looking doctor scanning the reception. I rise from the bench, but before I follow him I turn to the girl. ‘Thanks for getting me the coffee…And for the company.’

‘No problem. Take care of yourself, yeah?’ she replies with apparent sincerity.

‘Thanks—you too. What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Fish.’

That would explain the cod.

‘ Fish… That’s really…Er…I’m Murray.’ And then, because I haven’t been able to shake the feeling, ‘You look familiar, you know.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Unless you’re the twat from Tesco who keeps moving us on from their ATMs.’

‘No, that wouldn’t be me…Bye, then.’

‘Yeah…See you ’round, man.’

I almost ask for my change—the coffee was only 50p—but I stop myself. My life is at a fairly low ebb, but I still think she needs the money more than I do.

Maybe she’ll use it to buy soap.

But I doubt it.

7.21 a.m.

It seems like an hour since I last checked the time, but it was only two mintues ago. I’ve been sitting on the wall outside my flat for just over forty-five minutes. I walked here from Saint Matthew’s. After the doctor had finished I looked for Fish—I was going to ask her for a pound for the bus fare—but she’d left. Now my body is even colder than it was when I arrived at the hospital, which I didn’t think would have been possible. There is an upside, though—my right hand is so numb that I can’t feel any pain for the first time since I punched the car. A bandage covers the four stitches in my knuckles. My ring and little fingers are strapped and splinted. Seems I was wrong about my body’s lack of criminal bones. I have at least two, both of them fractured.

My peripheral vision catches something and I quickly look round to see movement through the window of the groundfloor flat.

At last.

I shake my legs to check that they’re still capable of movement before slipping off the wall, climbing the steps and ringing the bell to flat A. I see a hand part two slats in the venetian blind of the bay window, and my neighbour’s eyes peer at me through the gap. I hope they belong to Paula and not to her slightly scary girlfriend, whose name I can never remember. After a moment the intercom gives a farty buzz and I lean my shoulder into the door. Inside, a yawning, crusty-eyed Paula is standing in her doorway. She’s wearing a long, baggy T-shirt printed with a picture of, surprisingly, Sigourney Weaver (skin-head Alien 3 model). Surprising because Paula goes to great lengths to avoid the shaved head and swagger of stereotypical dyke-ness—obviously all the effort goes out of the window when she goes to bed.

‘Bloody hell, Murray, what happened to you?’ she asks.

I guess I don’t look my best, then.

‘Oh, nothing much. I fell…outside the office. Spent all night in casualty—it was like Piccadilly Circus,’ I say. I didn’t want to lie, but there was no way I was going to tell her the truth. ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I left my jacket at work and my keys were in it. Can I nick my spare set back?’

‘Yeah, of course.’ She disappears into her flat.

Aminute later she’s back with a key ring.

‘Are you really OK?’ she asks.

‘Yes, really . Thanks for these,’ I say, jangling the key ring.

‘Murray,’ she says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something?’

Here we go. You want to know how I’ve been coping since Megan dropped me for a barrister with a highly developed social conscience, TV charisma…

‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—’

…a million-pound house close to several cabinet ministers…

‘—I’d hate you to be upset—’

…and an impregnable (to idiots, at least) Bentley.

‘—but would you mind having your TV on a bit quieter? We could hear everything the other night and Apollonia—’

Apollonia! How could I forget?

‘—is a really light sleeper.’

Fine—so you really couldn’t give a damn that I’m a miserable, lovelorn wreck—one, by the way, coping manfully with a potentially cancerous tumour—and that my one and only comfort is to watch repeats of Seinfeld on Paramount with the volume right up to drown out my sobs as I cry at all the bits that Megan used to laugh at hysterically. Well, fuck you too.

‘Yeah, sorry, Paula, I’ll keep it down.’

7.34 a.m.

As my (very, very hot) bath runs I go to my wardrobe to choose some clothes. I pull out a mid-grey suit—one of several mid-grey suits I possess. I hold it up and wonder if it’s suitable attire for the kind of appointment I’ve got in less than three hours. It looks a little formal for a cancer verdict. It’s more the other kind of verdict—you know: ‘And how do you find the defendant?’ It will have to do, though. I’ve got a meeting in Croydon this afternoon. I shouldn’t think I’d get past Schenker security in anything other than mid-grey. At the height of post-9/11 fever they had a walk-through metal detector in their foyer, but now they’ve replaced it with a spectrometer.

Needless to say, Niall Haye loves it there—Croydon is his spiritual home. He needs only the flimsiest excuse to board a train for the Schenker Bunker. This afternoon’s is a slimmer-than-slim excuse for a meeting—we’re presenting draft thirty-two of the script, which is all of three words different to thirty-one—but I’m duty-bound to attend.

I lay the suit on my bed and go to the front room—I need to call Barclaycard, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Morgan Stanley and Goldfish to tell them I’ve lost my cards. (To which they’ll doubtless reply, Good—it’ll save us the bother of calling on you to seize them and then casually beat the shit out of you as a warning to other piss-takers. ) I sit on the sofa and as I reach for the phone I see the red light on the answering machine blinking at me. I press play .

‘You have—one—new message—’ the familiar synthesised voice announces, ‘left—yesterday at—eleven—thirty—seven—p.m.’

Beep!

‘Murray, it’s me,’ says another familiar though less robotic voice. ‘I was really hoping you’d be home, because it’d mean that what I just saw was an hallucination…Obviously not. I think we’d better talk…Oh, and by the way, don’t you think it’s about time you took my voice off the answering machine?’

Funny that. For weeks I’ve been desperate for Megan to call.

Now that she finally has my heart…s

i

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friday 21 november / 9.52 a.m.

Like A&E last night, Outpatients is quiet.

As a morgue .

But, hey, maybe they’ve cured everyone; the London Borough of Waltham Forest is now a tumour-free zone…Oh yeah, and it’s twinned with Never Land.

Actually, given that this is my first ever trip to a hospital where the news could be truly dire (as opposed to being dire only in my paranoid fantasies), I’m coping pretty well with my nerves. Keeping a lid on things.

I look at the only other patient. He’s a ginger nut, about my age. Needless to say he isn’t wearing a mid-grey suit. He’s in faded black jeans and a red and white Arsenal shirt that clashes disastrously with his hair.

Should have worn the away strip, matey.

Even so, he isn’t wearing a mid-grey suit. Lived-in jeans and favourite team shirt seem suitable wear in which to receive possibly life’s final piece of significant news . Not a suit in which your own mother would have trouble picking you out in a crowd.