Page 44 of Watching You
The clothes he’d been found in – jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt – had long since been consigned to the hospital incinerator. Instead, Vic had been gifted some porter scrubs in a dull shade of grey, and they were remarkably comfortable on areas where he’d been tubed, prodded and poked for so long. Also donated had been a pair of plastic sliders. No one seemed to know where his trainers had ended up, and in the grand scheme of things, Vic wasn’t going to make a fuss about that.
His favourite nurse, the one he had something of a crush on in spite of the fact that he’d seen how she looked at one of the junior doctors, brought him his discharge papers.
‘There’s a rehab meeting here on a Wednesday night,’ she said. ‘It’s free. All sorts of people go. No judgements. Why don’t you give it a go?’
‘I’m not an addict,’ he said, as he signed three different piecesof paper and accepted a bag of the drugs he was going to need for the next month given the mess he’d made of his stomach lining.
‘You don’t need to label yourself to understand that it would be good to get help,’ she said. ‘Next time, we might not be able to save you, and if we do, you might not like what’s left of your body.’
‘Because I’m so gorgeous now?’ He grinned and was painfully aware of the two teeth he was missing.
‘Because we all have only one body and one life, and the people here who’ve looked after you care very much that you don’t waste it. Will you at least think about it? If you’re not ready now, maybe in six months.’
Vic wanted to say something clever or glib but all he managed was, ‘Yeah, sure. Thanks.’
The nurse turned to leave. ‘You’ll be okay then? Someone’s going to look after you, I hope. Life’ll be tough for a while yet.’
She was kind and genuine, and it brought a lump to his throat that he’d thought he was past feeling. Vic nodded. He wasn’t quite sure how his voice would sound if he tried to answer.
‘Well then, I’ll leave you to it. Remember, call the nurses’ desk if you’re worried about anything, and you have a follow-up appointment in a fortnight that you really must keep. Swing by the ward, why don’t you, so we can see how you’re getting on?’
She left, and he wished he’d been able to say something – anything – in reply.
He shuffled out of the room, still getting used to the sliders on his feet, taking it slow with the crutches. Just outside his door, he paused. The one thing he could do was walk off the ward with his head held high, looking like a man. Perhaps it was because he resembled someone with a responsible job in the porter scrubs, or maybe it was three weeks without drugs andwith regular meals, but he felt like a different man, or at least as if he had the potential to become a different man.
He exited the ward, took a deep breath, balanced the crutches in a corner where they could be found and returned to the store, then slowly made his way to the lifts.
‘Excuse me, can you tell me the way to the café?’ an elderly lady asked him.
She thought he worked there, he realised. He smiled and pointed to the far end of the corridor. ‘It’s that way, through the double doors and across the courtyard.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ she said.
He watched her go, feeling an odd pressure under his diaphragm, a sort of fizzing. It was happiness, it hit him, natural rather than drug-induced, and it had come from the sense that someone saw him as responsible, helpful. Human. Someone had needed him, even if it was only to answer one little question. She hadn’t even been scared of how he looked. The scrubs, it seemed, had erased all the other shit – his past misdemeanours, his drug abuse and his failure to look after his body.
An idea occurred to him, silly no doubt, a pipe-dream maybe, but was there just a chance that he could pull something good from the wreckage of his pointless existence?
He stepped into the empty lift that had just arrived with a ghost of a smile on his lips, unaware of the person directly behind him who slipped a needle into his neck before he could move and exited again before he could react.
By the time the lift had been summoned to the ground floor, Vic Campbell’s late-come dream of turning things around and becoming a hospital porter was no longer viable.
Chapter 31
Body Five of Eight
Sixteen Months Earlier
It wasn’t sound that woke Beth in the middle of the night, but the absence of it. She’d grown used to her daughter’s small-hours wanderings, so much so that they had become like white noise to her. Molly in the kitchen rummaging in the fridge, running a 3 a.m. bath, pacing in her bedroom just before dawn.
They’d reached an impasse of sorts that on days when Beth couldn’t pick her up, Mol would make her way home from the studio by 9 p.m. to ensure that she ate one decent hot meal, changed her clothes, took her eyes off the canvas for a while and generally decompressed. Beth was aware that what she was asking was as much for her own sanity as for her daughter’s but that didn’t matter. The only important thing was establishing some boundaries, a routine from which a new normality could grow.
Then two days ago a school friend of Mol’s had got in touch to say there was a photo on social media that showed her hurting an animal. Beth had got home to find Molly in her wardrobe crying in the dark. The forty-eight-hour spiralhad forced some decisions. She’d called an estate agent, put the house on the market, made enquiries with friends about jobs that might suit her far away from Scotland, and turned off the Wi-Fi in the house so that Molly wouldn’t be tempted to seek out the image.
If her surgical team hadn’t already been short-handed, she’d have simply taken the time off, but instead she’d ended up in a twelve-hour surgery trying to save the life of a motorcyclist who’d hit a patch of oil. Mol had seemed better when she got home. Calmer, at least. And now she was silent. That was good, Beth told herself, as she listened in the darkness. Perhaps her daughter was actually sleeping for once. Even if that sleep was born of exhaustion rather than a desire for rest, it was better than the awful half-awake half-nightmare existence of the previous year. She got up quietly, anxious not to disturb her daughter, and padded across the hallway, opening Mol’s door a couple of inches to peer inside.
All the breath left her body.
She rushed forward, grabbing Molly by the shoulders and shaking her, spilling the pill bottles her daughter had emptied across the carpet.
