“What about the police?”
“The ambulance driver called them. He took one look at you and reported it.”
My mother put her hand on my good arm, eye to eye:
“Who did this to you love?”
My cold right hand throbbed to the pulse beneath the bandages.
“I don’t know.”
Back home, Wesley Street, Ossett.
The taxi door slammed shut behind me.
I jumped.
There were brown smears on the Viva’s passenger door.
My mother was coming up the drive behind me, closing her bag.
I put my left hand into my right pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Don’t be daft, lad.”
“Mum, please.”
“You’re not fit.”
“Mum, stop it.”
“No, you stop it. Don’t do this to me.”
She made a grab for the car keys.
“Mum!”
“I hate you for this, Edward.”
I reversed out the drive, tears and black flashes. My mother, standing in the drive, watching me go.
The one-armed driver.
Red light, green light, amber light, red.
Crying in the Redbeck car park.
Black pain, white pain, yellow pain, more.
Room 27, untouched.
One hand cupping cold water over my head.
A face in the mirror running brown with old blood.
Room 27, all blood.
Twenty minutes later, on the slow road to Fitzwilliam.
Driving with one hand on the rearview mirror, eating the lid off a bottle of paracetamol, gobbling six to null the pain.
Fitzwilliam looming, a dirty brown mining town.
My fat white right hand upon the steering wheel, left hand through my pockets. My one good hand and my teeth unfolding a torn-out page from the Redbeck’s phone book:
Circled and underlined.
FUCK THE IRA was sprayed on the iron bridge into town.
“Aye-up lads. Where’s Newstead View?”
Three teenage boys in big green trousers, sharing a cigarette, spitting big pink-streaked chunks of phlegm at a bus shelter window.
They said, “You what?”
“Newstead View?”
“Right by offy. Then left.”
“Ta very much.”
“I should think so.”
I struggled to wind up my window and stalled as I drove off, the three big green trousers waving me off with a big pink shower and two forked fingers all round.
Under my bandages, four fingers smashed into one.
Right at the off-licence, then left on to Newstead View.
I pulled over and switched off the engine.
Newstead View was a single line of terraces looking out on to dirty moorland. Ponies grazed between rusting tractors and piles of scrap metal. A pack of dogs chased a plastic shopping bag up and down the road. Somewhere babies were crying.
I felt around inside my jacket pockets.
I took out my pen, my stomach empty, my eyes filling.
I stared at the white right hand that wouldn’t close, at the white right hand that wouldn’t write.
The pen rolled slowly off the bandages and on to the floor of the car.
69 Newstead View, a neat garden and flaking window frames.
TV lights on.
Knock, knock.
I switched on the Philips Pocket Memo in my right jacket pocket with my left hand.
“Hello. My name is Edward Dunford.”
“Yes?” said a prematurely grey woman through bucked teeth and an Irish accent.
“Is your James home?”
Hands stuffed deep into a blue housecoat, she said, “You’re the one from the Post aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“The one that’s been talking to Terry Jones?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want with our Jimmy?”
“Just a quick chat, that’s all.”
“He had enough of a chat with the police. He doesn’t need to keep going over it. Specially with likes of…”
I reached out to steady myself, grabbing at the frame of the front door.
“You been in some kind of accident have you?”
“Yeah.”
She sighed and mumbled, “You’d better come in and sit yourself down. You don’t look right clever.”
Mrs Ashworth shooed me into the front room and a chair too close to the fire.
“Jimmy! There’s that gentleman from the
My left cheek already burning, I heard two loud thumps from the room up above.
Mrs Ashworth switched off the TV, plunging the room into an orange darkness. “You should have been here earlier.”
“Why?”
“Well I didn’t see it myself like, but they said the place was swarming with police.”
“When?”
“About five this morning.”
“Where?” I asked, staring through the gloom at a school photo on top of the TV, a long-haired youth smirking back at me, the knot in his tie as big as his face.
“Here. This street.”
“Five o’clock this morning?”
“Yeah, five. No-one knows what it were about, but everyone reckons it were…”
“Shut up Mam!”
Jimmy Ashworth was standing in the doorway in an old school shirt and purple tracksuit bottoms.
