Page 43 of Watching You
In a second he was on his knees trying desperately to find a pulse, laying her out so he could make sense of what was going on. He could hear his father saying their address and confirming that no, they didn’t have any dogs in the house, and that yes, the front door would be unlocked.
And now his mother wasn’t breathing at all. It was his fault. He’d wished it and wished it, had even told her that he wished she was dead. He’d all but done a deal with the devil to make it happen.
His father appeared in the doorway.
‘The lady says if she’s not breathing, you’re to do the kiss of life until the ambulance turns up,’ his father said. ‘I can’t do it. My asthma’s playing up.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Karl whined. ‘Dad, I can’t.’
His father shrugged uselessly and looked down at his slippers. Karl knew the choice was his to make, and his alone.
‘Oh Christ,’ he said.
He had no idea how to do it, had never done a first aid course, but he’d seen it on TV and that would have to be enough.
He slid one hand under her neck, pinched her nose shut with the other, closed his own eyes so he didn’t have to see her up close, and blew hard into her mouth. She tasted like crap, and the air that came back out was vile, but on he went.
She couldn’t die because he’d wished it on her. He couldn’t pay the price for that with whatever he had in the way of asoul. She needed to live so that he could leave properly, as he’d intended. She had to live so that he hadn’t been the one to kill her. On he went. Pushing oxygen into her lungs, then stopping to lace his hands together, one on top of the other, pumping her chest.
He had no idea how much time had passed when the paramedics entered, but they took over from him, telling him well done, good job, how brave, what a difficult thing to do, and that he might just have saved his mother’s life. How little they knew.
It was a heart attack, they said. No time to lose. Then she was in the ambulance, lights and sirens, the whole nine yards, him and his dad following on behind to the new hospital, St Columba’s.
There, they had to park in a multi-storey that was far too tight and far too busy. He helped his father out and held his arm as they walked down three flights of stairs to the main concourse and followed the signs to accident and emergency. Then there was another delay as they signed her in, and finally they were taken through to a waiting area until a doctor could come to speak with them.
His mother had been taken into surgery, they were told. It might be a long wait. If they wanted to go home, someone would call them. No, they said, they would wait there. Directions were given to the cafeteria and the multi-faith chapel, as if that was going to help. The surgeon operating, they were told, was the very best. If anyone could save his mother’s life, it was her.
Two hours later, Karl told his father he was going to buy coffee and sandwiches from the shop. He’d be right back. No news was good news. Not to worry.
Karl went outside and stood in the rain to wash away the memories of that day, to take away the taste of her mouth and wash clean his grubby guilt. The rain, it turned out, was useless.
By the time he went back inside, Barbara Smith was dead.
Karl took his guilt, wrapped it in so many layers of blaming others that the original emotion was impossible to locate, then coated it in a murderous fury and polished it until it shone.
Chapter 30
Body Four of Eight
12 June
Vic ‘The Belt’ Campbell had been occupying half of a double room at St Columba Hospital on a high-dependency ward. He’d been dropped off three weeks earlier at the entrance to A&E, literally pushed out of a car that barely stopped moving by a mate with whom he’d done some meth then chased it with some cocaine while sharing a bottle of home-brewed vodka.
When he’d started foaming at the mouth, his friend had responded by taking a video of it. Then Vic had started fitting, and that was less entertaining. His friend, a fellow gang member, had started calling round for advice, and the consensus had been to get him to the hospital but to get the fuck out of there as fast as possible without drawing too much attention.
He’d drifted in and out of consciousness, tried to focus when they’d slapped his face, been vaguely aware that some brighter member of his crew had grabbed a handful of dirt on the way out and obscured both number plates, then they’d squashed and squeezed him onto the back seat and, in the words of the man in the front passenger seat, driven like fuck.
CCTV avoidance necessitated hoods up as they’d tried to push him out onto the pavement, and by then Vic was so out of it that he hadn’t heard the car as its wheels screeched on exit. Most of his new brothers were wanted for something or other. There was always a violence charge or a drugs investigation, a theft, housebreaking or failure to pay a bloody fine. The place where they lived was as anonymous as they came and owned by the sort of landlord who only wanted cash, nothing in writing, and who had his own unpleasant way of dealing with people who didn’t deliver on time.
Vic was all in with the gang. They were the family he’d never had. Coming from a failing care system, he’d needed some people he could rely on. And if sometimes he had to do some crappy things to pay his dues, then that was life. No one else had ever been there for him.
He’d been found outside the hospital almost immediately, taken inside on a stretcher, and from that moment on, he had no memory. Later, he’d been told that he had actually died at one point but the resuscitation team had worked their medical wonders and brought him back. Then he’d been hooked up to various anti-opiates, had his system flushed out, and left in a semi-comatose state for his body to either mend or give up the ghost.
A week later, he’d come round. There’d been a visit from a police officer, a social worker, a counsellor and a drug rehabilitation worker. For the first day, he was too weak to get up to use the bathroom. If nothing else could persuade him that he should never touch drugs again, the humiliation of having a young, beautiful female nurse turn her head from the stench as she wiped him after he’d crapped in a cardboard bowl was a powerful argument for abstinence.
The same nurse had held up a mirror up in front of his face as she’d cleaned his teeth and washed his face, and he’d finally seen the damage – the toll – his life choices were taking. His skin was a mess, but that didn’t matter because he had enough face tattoos that you couldn’t really see much else. His regularly shaved hair was growing back in rough patches, and several of the piercings in his ear had ripped as he’d hit the pavement, causing additional infections. He was also, apparently, substantially underweight. Scotland’s gangs, he’d thought but not said, weren’t known for the nutritional value of their catering. You probably had to go to Italy or Mexico for a gang with those skills.
The police had decided, in the circumstances, not to charge him, and there was nothing anyone could do if he declined to engage with drug rehab, which was how the day had come when he could finally walk out, with the help of crutches anyway, to meet his mates in a pub a few streets away. The hospital desk had let him make the call to arrange it given that he’d been dropped off with literally nothing.
