'Yeah.'
'Good,' Cassie said with satisfaction. 'His turn for the dreaded plaster.'
Bananas saw Angelo's gun and leaned to pick it up.
'Don't touch it,' I said.
He looked up enquiringly, still half bent.
'Fingerprints,' I said. 'Jail him for life.'
'But-'
'He shot me,' I said.
I saw the disbelief on their faces begin to turn to anxiety.
'Where?' Cassie said.
I made a fluttery movement with my left hand towards my chest. My right arm felt heavy and without strength, and I thought unemotionally that it was because some of the muscles needed to lift it were torn.
'Shall I get an ambulance?' Bananas said.
'Yes.'
They didn't understand, I thought, how bad it was. They couldn't see any damage, and I was concerned mostly about how to tell them without frightening Cassie to death.
It wasn't that at that point it felt so terrible, but I still knew in a detached fashion that it soon would be. There was an internal disintegration going on like the earth shifting, like foundations slipping away. Accelerating, but still slowly.
I said, 'Ring Cambridge hospital.'
It all sounded so calm.
I slid down, without meaning to, to my knees, and saw the anxiety on their faces turn to horror.
'You're really hurt,' Cassie said with spurting alarm.
'It's… er… er…' I couldn't think what to say.
She was suddenly beside me, kneeling, finding with terrified scarlet fingers that the entry wound that didn't show through the front of my padded husky jacket led to a bigger bleeding exit at the back.
'Oh my God,' she said in stunned absolute shock.
Bananas strode over for a look and I could see from both their faces that they did know now, there was no longer any need to seek the words.
He turned grim-faced away and picked up the telephone, riffling urgently through the directory and dialling the number.
'Yes,' he was saying. 'Yes, it's an emergency. A man's been shot. Yes, I did say shot… through the chest… Yes, he's alive… Yes, he's conscious… No, the bullet can't be in him.' He gave the address of the cottage and brief directions. 'Look, stop asking damn fool questions… tell them to shift their arse… Yes, it does look bloody serious, for God's sake stop wasting time… My name? Christ Almighty, John Frisby.' He crashed the receiver down in anger and said, 'They want to know if we've reported it to the police. What the hell does it matter?'
I couldn't be bothered to tell him that all gunshot wounds had to be reported. Breathing, in fact, was becoming more difficult. Only words that needed to be said were worth the effort.
'That pistol,' I said. 'Don't put it… in a plastic bag. Condensation… destroys… the prints.'
Bananas looked surprised and I thought that he didn't realise I was telling him because quite soon I might not be able to. I was beginning to feel most dreadfully ill, with clamminess creeping over my skin and breaking into a sweat on my forehead. I gave a smallish cough and wiped a red streak from my mouth onto the back of my hand. An enveloping wave of weakness washed through me and I found myself sagging fairly comprehensively against the cupboard and then half lying on the floor.
'Oh, William,' Cassie said. 'Oh no.'
If I'd ever doubted she loved me, I had my answer. No one could have acted or feigned the extremity of despair in her voice and in her body.
'Don't… worry,' I said. I tried a smile. I don't suppose it came off. I coughed again, with worse results.
I was trying to breathe, I thought, through a lake. A lake progressively filling, fed by many springs. It was happening faster now. Much faster. Too fast. I wasn't ready. Who was ever ready?
I could hear Bananas saying something urgent but I didn't know-quite what. My wits started drifting. Existence was ceasing to be external. I'm dying, I thought, I really am. Dying too fast.
My eyes were shut and then open again. The daylight looked odd. Too bright. I could see Cassie's face wet with tears.
I tried to say, 'Don't cry,' but I couldn't get the breath. Breathing was becoming a sticky near- impossibility.
Bananas was still talking, distantly.
There was a feeling of everything turning to liquid, of my body dissolving, of a deep subterranean river overflowing its banks and carrying me away.
Dim final astringent thought… I'm drowning, God damn it, in my own blood.
CHAPTER 21
Cassie's face was the next thing I saw, but not for more than a day, and it was no longer weeping but asleep and serene. She was sitting by a bed with me in it, surrounded by white things and glass and chromium and a lot of lights. Intensive care, and all that.
I woke by stages over several hours to the pain I hadn't felt from the shot, and to tubes carrying liquids into and away from my log of clay and to voices telling me over and over that I was lucky to be there; that I had died and was alive.
I thanked them all, and meant it.
Thanked Bananas, who had apparently picked me up and put me in my own car and driven me at about a hundred miles an hour to Cambridge because it was quicker than waiting for the ambulance.
Thanked two surgeons who it seemed had worked all day and then again half the night to staunch and tidy the wreckage of my right lung and stop blood dripping out of the drainage as fast as the transfusions flowed into my arm.
Thanked the nurses who clattered about with deft hands and noisy machinery, and in absentia thanked the donors of blood type 'O' who had refilled my veins.
Thanked Cassie for her love and for sitting beside me whenever they'd let her.
Thanked the fates that the destructive lump of metal had missed my heart. Thanked everyone I could for anything I could think of in gratitude for my life.
The long recurring dreams that had come during unconsciousness faded, receded, seemed no longer to be vivid fact. I no longer saw the Devil pacing beside me, quiet but implacable, the master waiting for my soul. I no longer saw him, the Fallen Angel, the Devil with Angelo's face, the yellow face with frosted hair and black empty holes where the eyes should have been. The Presence had gone. I was back to the daft real enjoyable world where tubes were what mattered, not concepts of evil.
I didn't say how close I had been to death because they were saying it for me, roughly every five minutes. I didn't say I had looked on the spaces of eternity and seen the everlasting Darkness and had known it had a meaning and a face. The visions of the dying and the snatched-from-death were suspect. Angelo was a living man, not the Devil, not an incarnation or a house or a dwelling place. It was delirium, the confusion of the brain's circuits, that had shown me the one as the other, the other as the One. I said nothing for fear of ridicule: and later nothing from feeling that I had in truth been mistaken and that the dreams were indeed… merely dreams.
'Where is Angelo?' I said.
'They said not to tire you.'
I looked at the evasion in Cassie's face. 'I'm lying down,' I pointed out. 'So give.'
She said reluctantly, 'Well… he's here.'
'Here? In this hospital?'
She nodded. 'In the room next door.'
