The Next to Die Page 2

  “She’s drifting in and out of consciousness, dear,” says Bridget. “Whatever’s passed between you, she really can’t hurt you now.”

  Yes she can. She can say something before she dies. She could say that my turning up after all those years made her get cancer . . .

  More hand-patting from Bridget.

  “I think you’d benefit from a chat with one of our counselors,” she says.

  “Do they have either a large bag of morphine and a syringe they’re willing to hand over or an ability to cure terminal cancer? If not, I think I can manage without them.”

  Drew would be apoplectic with rage if he could hear me. He insisted I stop making morphine jokes or else the ward staff would grow suspicious. And it’s disrespectful, he said.

  That’s what I do, though: I joke. It’s the only useful contribution I make to society. In situations where jokes don’t cheer people up, I might as well not be there. Which, coincidentally, is what I want. I would love not to be here on Ward 10 today.

  “How about a cup of tea?” Bridget suggests. “And maybe after that you can go back in and see Marion?”

  “Do I have to pretend I will to get the tea?”

  She leaves me alone, finally, walks away with pursed lips.

  Another nurse—young, with hair that’s crew-cut short apart from one long, skinny braid draped over her shoulder—approaches from the other side. “Kim!” she says. “Remember me? Fiona?”

  “I remember your braid.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay as long as I don’t have to go back in.” I indicate the doors behind me. “Your colleague Bridget keeps trying to persuade me.”

  “No.” Fiona shakes her head. “Don’t do anything you don’t want to. If you want to sit here, that’s what you should do. If you want to go home and sleep, do that. Whatever feels right to you.”

  “I swallowed a ringpull,” I tell her.

  “What?”

  I hold up my Fruit Rush can. “I feel fine and it was a few minutes ago now, so . . . no worries, I guess.”

  “You swallowed the ringpull from that can? Are you sure?”

  I nod.

  “Then you should go to the emergency room.”

  “Really?”

  “Just to be on the safe side. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, but you don’t want to end up with a perforated—” Fiona stops. Drew has appeared beside us. I didn’t hear the door open.

  He’s been crying again. “They’re going to give her more platelets,” he says.

  “What? Drew, that’ll only—”

  “Help her live longer. Yes, that’s what I want. It’s what the doctors want. Strangely, the only person who seems not to want it is you.”

  “And Marion. Don’t forget her.”

  Fiona has tactfully withdrawn, leaving us alone.

  There’s a burning tightness in my chest. I often get it in Drew’s presence.

  “She can’t speak, move or make herself understood,” I say. “She knows she’s finished, and she’s got a week at the absolute outer limit. Do you think she wants another week like this, honestly? Wouldn’t you rather be dead? I would.”

  “I’m not God, and neither are you, Kim.”

  “Neither is anyone—that’s the problem! Have you persuaded them to catheterize her yet?”

  “I haven’t tried. I don’t want her to get a bladder infection. We’ve been told that’s a possible—”

  “She hates being changed. How can you not see that?”

  “I have to act on the doctors’ advice.”

  “Even if they’re all dicks?”

  He sighs. “Your arrogance is . . . making this harder.”

  “Drew, please. Please think properly about it. Marion has a few days left—maybe three or four, with more platelets. Imagine you’re her.”

  He recoils. “Oh, well, that’s a lovely thing to say, isn’t it? So you want me to imagine I’m dying of cancer?”

  I stare at him for a few seconds, speechless. A smiling woman in a blue and black coat is heading our way with a large Tupperware container in her hand. I can see through the plastic that the contents are beige, not dark brown. Cereal bars, then, or macaroons. That’s good; a bit of variety. There’s been one delivery of chocolate brownies already today. This is an aspect of life on a cancer ward that I hadn’t anticipated and wouldn’t have predicted: at least once a day, a female relative of a former patient turns up with a bag or box of some kind of edible treat, as a thank-you to the ward staff. They do so whether their loved one has survived or died. I joked to Drew yesterday about this being the equivalent of tipping a taxi driver whether he drops you at your front door or dumps you in a skip miles from home. “What’s wrong with you?” had been his response.

  The relatives of cancer patients do not, it seems, stop at cereal bars. They also sometimes send flowers and they always, without fail, bring in or send thank-you cards. There’s a ward noticeboard with dozens pinned to it. Most are pastel-colored with tasteful pictures of birds, flowers or leaves on them, though one that appeared yesterday is plain white, smaller than all the others, and actually has the word “Death” clearly legible on the front. That made me chuckle; at some point the ward obviously treated someone with a family that was opposed to euphemism on principle. That’s the kind of card I’d send, I think: “Dear ward staff, You totally failed to defeat death, but thanks for trying. Bit harder next time, eh?”

  Once the woman with the Tupperware has left her offering on the reception desk and gone, I turn on Drew. No need to say, “Where were we?” When I’m in the middle of trying to win an argument, I never forget where I was up to.

  “Is it going to be grimmer for Marion or less grim to spend her remaining time being changed by strangers? Don’t you think she’d prefer to just lie there catheterized and not be endlessly mauled?”

  Drew blinks away tears. “I can’t take this,” he says. “I need to get some air.” He moves fast. Gone. I don’t blame him.

  Fiona sticks her head out of the ward kitchen. “Everything okay?”

  “Which bit of me’s in danger of perforation?” I ask her.

  “Pardon?”

  “From the ringpull. Gut? Bowel?”

  “Oh.” She looks around with an air of guilt, checking that no one’s listening. “Look, I thought about that while you were talking to your brother. My official advice has to be: go to the emergency room, get it checked out. But if I were you, if you asked me what I’d do in your shoes . . .” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Nothing. You’ll be fine. It’ll come out at some point, won’t it? If you go to the emergency room, you could be waiting for hours. You might miss . . . Well, I mean, it’s more important for you to be here, isn’t it?”

  “I might die of a perforated liver and sue you. In that order.” I blink away tears and grin to let her know I’m joking. I’m touched that she decided to give me good advice instead of the official advice.

  On the other hand, I don’t want to stay here on the ward. If Drew can walk out, I can too.

  “I’m just going to go and look for Drew,” I tell Fiona. “Check he’s okay.”

  Without waiting for her response, I head for the exit. Once I’m out of Ward 10, I can’t help thinking what I always think: I got out. I can’t go back.

  I can, of course. Can, have to, will. I know it’s physically and psychologically possible for me to sit in the corridor outside Marion’s room. Inside it, with Marion: impossible. But I can do immediately outside the doors, so I won’t let myself pretend I can’t.

  I take the lift down to the ground floor and go outside and round the corner to check on my car. This morning I found what looked like an ideal parking spot, with a huge sign next to it that read NO PARKING HERE, outside the Jocelyn Hodges Maternity Centre, a department of the RGI, with its own name and building.

  So far, so good: no clamps. There’s a woman with dark hair in a ponytail smoking outside the main entrance. Every time she moves, the sensors pick it up and the doors slide open. Then she moves again and they close. She’s talking on her phone in what sounds like a French accent.

  I walk around the front of my car to check that no one’s stuck an unpleasant note or a demand for money on the windshield. Again, I’m in luck. I’m close enough to Ponytail Woman now to hear her side of the phone call.

  “They say I can have a local, but then I can’t eat or even drink water for six hours before the op, in case I need a general later, highly unlikely though that is.”

  Of course you can eat and drink beforehand, I think to myself. Just don’t tell them. What are the odds of Ponytail Woman needing a general anesthetic? Even if she does, what then are the odds of her puking and suffocating to death? Why is the medical profession, with the honorable exception of Fiona, so intent on creating guaranteed inconvenience, and even suffering, as a means of avoiding that one-chance-in-a-million catastrophe that’s bound not to happen?

  I keep my wisdom to myself, in case I end up dying of excessive perforation. I don’t want Ponytail Woman to spend the rest of her life saying, “. . . and it turned out that the woman whose advice I took was that idiot comedian who died after swallowing a ringpull and doing nothing about it.”

  I can’t think of a valid excuse for staying out here any longer, so I turn and head back toward the Death Hub. There are three people smoking outside the hospital’s main entrance, all standing in front of signs that read, NO SMOKING OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL.

  Yes smoking outside the hospital, actually. God, I wish I smoked. If only it didn’t taste and smell disgusting, turn your fingers yellow and kill you.

  And now here comes a fourth smoker, bursting out of the doors with a cigarette ready and waiting in her mouth. She lights it, looking up at me as I approach. Her shapeless clothes hang off her: black hoody, baggy blue jeans. “I’m not even a smoker,” she says. “But there are some days that just . . . you know?”

  I manage a noncommittal “Mm.” She’s blocking my way. “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “I’m . . . Sorry, have we met?”

  “No.” She holds out her hand for me to shake. It’s small and pink: no nicotine stains on the fingers. Maybe she only took up smoking today, as a way of coping with having to be here. “But I love your work. You’re Kim Tribbeck, aren’t you?” Her voice is sweet and makes her sound younger than she looks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Well, sort of. I was Kim Tribbeck, and I hope to be again. At the moment I’m someone who has to be in a hospital.”

  She comes to stand by my side, as if we need to keep a lookout together. “I’m Faith Kendell—two ‘e’s. Most of my family pronounces it Ken-dell, otherwise everyone gets it wrong. I’ve seen you up there.”

  I’m wondering if she means onstage or on TV when she says, “Ward Ten. Not much fun, is it?”

  “Have you . . . Are you . . . ?”

  “My mum’s on the ward at the moment. Bone cancer.”

  Okay, now I know how to talk to her.

  “How long’s she got? My gran’s got a few days, tops.”

  “Oh, Mum might have a year, year and a half if she’s lucky. You’re here with your brother, aren’t you?”

  I nod. “You probably heard us yelling at each other before.”

  “I won’t lie: I did hear some of it, yes. Honestly, I think it can make it harder having a bigger family at a time like this. I’m an only child, so I don’t have to deal with anyone else’s issues. It’s just me and Mum.”

  I feel guilty that this woman has noticed my predicament while I haven’t noticed her at all.

  “Course, it’ll be harder for me once she’s gone. I’ll be on my own then.” Faith shrugs.

  I mumble something about friends and support networks. I don’t know enough about friendship to be able to speak confidently on the subject. Not confidently and positively, anyway. “Actually, it’s hypocritical of me to recommend friends,” I feel obliged to add. “Can’t stand the things, myself. They’re less reliable than cheap earphones and budget airlines put together.”

  “I’m not much of a one for friends either,” Faith says briskly, as if I’ve suggested something frivolous. “They’re too much work—like houseplants.”

  “I agree. Also like houseplants, they all die in the end. What’s the point?” I qualify this with, “Sorry. Ever since my grandmother’s been dying, I haven’t been able to stop making death-related jokes.”

  “You’re right, though. If only someone would say to me, ‘I’ll be your friend, and I’ll expect no more from you than a dead houseplant.’ That’d be good.”

  “I’d say that to a prospective friend,” I tell her.

  “You would?”

  “Yep. Wouldn’t be able to put in much more effort than a dead houseplant myself, so I’d accept being treated like one as a fair deal.”

  Hooray: I’ve made someone laugh. More than I’ve managed to do on the cancer ward so far.

  “Mutual dead-houseplant friendship,” I say. “It’s an interesting concept. Unconditional acceptance of no effort on both sides.”

  “Sounds like the way forward to me,” says Faith.

  “Kim.” It’s Drew, behind me. Once again I didn’t see him coming.

  “I’m going back up now,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head. He’s waiting for me to work it out without him having to tell me. From the look in his eyes, it can only be one thing that he’s not telling me.

  “Oh no,” Faith whispers.

  This is a bit daft. One of us ought to put it into words, to check we’re not all standing here wrapped in a strange, gloomy calm for no reason. It looks as if that one will have to be me.

  “Marion’s dead,” I say.

  Time to make a white card with nothing but the word “Death” on the front and pin it to Ward 10’s noticeboard.

  My breath catches in my throat. Why do I have a sudden feeling of . . . it’s not exactly déjà vu, but it’s not far from it. Is it the white card on the board?

  What else could it be?

  Something important, says a stubborn voice in my head. Something you glimpsed for a fraction of a second and can’t see anymore.

  Lifeworld online, January 2, 2015

  SAME OLD STORY: MISOGYNY KILLS

  by Sondra Halliday

  So now we know his official nickname, this killer who has claimed four lives so far. The police didn’t want us to find out, which makes it rather strange and counterproductive that they invented such a memorable monicker for him: Billy Dead Mates. Of course someone’s going to succumb to temptation and leak a soubriquet like that. For all the police talk of confidentiality breaches and regrettable information spillages, they wouldn’t have created the tag if they hadn’t hoped it would stick and spread.

  Remember the Name the Teddy stall at your local primary school’s summer fair? This is the grown-up, serious-crime version: Name the Evil Killer. If this monster goes down in the history books as Billy Dead Mates, a few sad-sack cops will have made their mark upon the world. That’s what the witty alias is all about: police egos. How much do you want to bet they’re all men? The names I’ve heard so far in connection with the investigation are male without exception: DC Simon Waterhouse, DI Giles Proust, DC James Wing, DS Neil Dunning. “I might not have caught the notorious killer,” these chaps will brag to their grandkids one day, “but I sure as hell gave him a catchy nickname.”

  Just as Billy must think he’s such a smartypants to have eluded capture for so long (it’s nearly four months since his first kill) so must the detectives hunting him be patting themselves on the back for their verbal cunning. Our Billy certainly seems, on the face of it, to be murdering pairs of close friends. His first two victims, Linzi Birrell from Combingham in the Culver Valley and Rhian Douglas from Poole, Dorset, were well-known “BFFL,” to use their favored terminology. Billy’s third and fourth victims might have been older, more affluent and less reliant on text-message acronyms to describe their relationship, but they too were best friends for life. Angela McCabe from Chiswick and Joshua Norbury from Spilling were “closer than siblings,” according to Norbury’s actual sibling, Lisa.

  It’s easy to see the logic the police must have followed: “This murderer is killing pairs of best friends! Billy Dead Mates is the perfect name for him! It’s a playful reworking of Billy No Mates!”

  Can’t you just imagine the discussions they’ve been having, all these DC No-Solves who have failed to put an end to the killing spree? “These murders must be about friendship. Perhaps he resents best friends because he never had a bestie himself,” they say to one another.

  By calling him Billy Dead Mates, they’re inviting us to sympathize with a murderer. “Poor, lonely Billy” is the subliminal message. “If only someone had extended the hand of friendship and provided a shoulder for him to cry on, perhaps he wouldn’t have grown desperate enough to kill.”

  And just who might these hypothetical people be who failed to invite poor Billy to their sleepovers and summer houses? Could they be girls and women, by any chance? We’re usually the ones expected to open our hearts and our legs, to provide emotional sustenance to needy men incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions. Make no mistake: although no male detective has said so explicitly, if Billy has been lonely all his life, then the underlying assumption is that somewhere, somehow, a woman is to blame. Perhaps his mother didn’t let him play out with the other children on their street or an ex-girlfriend humiliated him by mocking the size of his todger. Does he maybe have a shrewish wife who never lets him go to the pub with the lads after work?

  I’m beyond certain that if I were to put all this to DI Giles Proust or DC Simon Waterhouse, they would vehemently deny they’re thinking along these lines. They’d insist that they blame Billy and no one but Billy for the four murders he’s committed so far. They would claim that the name Billy Dead Mates, with its implicit reference to Billy No Mates, was in no way intended to elicit sympathy for a killer. To which I would say, “Oh, really? Then why aren’t you calling him Billy Dead Women?”