fourteen. Or at least you learn to distinguish between desires you can hope to satisfy and ones that are just between yourself, your conscience, and the box of tissues on your bedside table.
By the time I finally lost my virginity — to Carole Aubrey in the car park of the Red Pepper Club on Rice Lane — I wasn’t even fantasising about Anita on a regular basis. The top slots were filled with movie actresses and female vocalists, interspersed with a few comic-book characters who really belonged to an earlier stage of my adolescence.
But I still saw Anita around, because Walton was a small place. Too small for her, I thought. I always expected her to leave, because it seemed to me at that time that leaving was the prerequisite for having any kind of a life.
And we were still friends, in the way that people who’ve collected frogspawn and played knock-down-ginger and climbed on factory roofs together will tend to stay friends. I bought her the occasional drink at the Breeze or the Prince Arthur, and we’d share family news. She’d ask how Matt was getting on at the seminary, and I’d lie because I didn’t really know. And I’d pretend to take an interest when she told me about Dick-Breath’s progress at the Prudential, from doorstep insurance salesman to team manager and all-round messiah.
Once — only once — I made a pass. It was New Year’s Eve, when you can get away with a lot of indiscriminate kissing: the general rule being that you took it as far as you could and had a plausible get-out clause if the lady objected. I swung into the Breeze with a couple of mates ten minutes before the towel went up, hog- whimpering drunk, kissed my way down the length of the bar — maidens and matrons and all — until I got to Anita who was standing in the corner watching her cousin feed the one-armed bandit.
We clinched, and it was good. Deep, and intense, and lasting as long as our lungs did. But when I tried to come back for seconds she touched the tips of her fingers, very lightly to my chest, and shook her head. I saw tears rising in her eyes, and I was alarmed. Tears? For who?
‘You okay, ’Nita?’ I asked her, taking pains to get the consonants in the right order because being able to handle your booze was part of the measure of a man in Walton.
‘I’m fine, Fix,’ she said, looking away for a moment while she blinked the tears back under control. ‘I was just — I was waiting for someone, and he didn’t come. I’ll be all right.’ She looked up at me again, giving me a dazzling and almost completely convincing smile.
I bought her a Babycham, which she didn’t touch.
We talked about politics and punk rock — and then, when I was really drunk, I told her about what I was and what I could do with a tin whistle. This was before the rising of the dead went from a trickle to a torrent, and long before exorcism had become an everyday profession, but Anita listened without comment. When I got to the part about my sister Katie, she pressed her hand to the back of mine where it rested on the table, willing me comfort.
I walked her home, and she gave me another kiss. On the cheek, this time: a thank-you kiss. I realised that that was as far as it was ever going to go between us, and I didn’t mind because it was cool that we’d had that moment of contact rather than a grope, a hangover and a lingering sense of embarrassment.
But whoever it was that stood her up that night, he needed his fucking head examined.
I like the Royal London: it’s got a bit of class, as hospitals go. Tell me it wouldn’t lift your spirits to be wheeled out of an ambulance past that terrific eighteenth-century façade. ‘Bloody hell,’ you’d think, ‘I’m going up in the world.’ But the neo-brutalist nightmare they’re nailing onto the back of the building is a different bucket of entrails entirely, and for my money you can keep it.
Kenny was in intensive care, Coldwood had said. I walked in off the street, striding straight ahead past the A&E reception desk and the assembled sick and lame. I was gambling on the ancient truism that people are much less likely to challenge you if you look like you know where you’re going, and it seemed to work: or at least it got me a long way, through A&E and Outpatients and into the slightly dilapidated annexe where the intensive-care wards were located.
The dead watched me every step of the way. In fact, I was having to walk right through some of them, because they were as thick on the ground as leaves in autumn — and like leaves in autumn they presented a rich, mesmerising spectrum of decay. Lots of people die in hospitals, and they die from a lot of different things, all of which leave their marks on the spirit as well as the flesh.
Nobody knows why some people get up again after they’ve been laid in the grave and others don’t: Juliet puts it down to a character flaw, a fear of taking the necessary jump head-first into another mode of existence. But she’s always fought shy of explaining how that other life works or where it’s situated or how much a square meal costs there.
These ghosts, anyway, were mostly afraid and mostly confused. Their deaths were variations on a theme: arbitrary, painful, early, undeserved, uncomprehended, lingering, undignified, lonely, pointless. They were exactly the type — if you can talk about the psychology of the dead with a straight face — to retain the trace of their injuries and diseases in their risen forms. So I was looking at, and stepping through, a standing exhibition of all the horrible things that can go wrong with the human body both when it’s damaged from outside and when it rises against itself.
Some of them tried to talk to me, their voices thin and high and warped by a distance that wasn’t purely physical. I ignored them and kept on walking. There was nothing I could do for them, apart from playing them the short, sharp tune that would push them off the rim of oblivion — and I don’t do that kind of thing any more unless my back is really to the wall, for the simple reason that I don’t know where I’m sending them. I’m a Pied Piper who learned somewhere down the line to see the rats’ point of view.
Following the signs I climbed a stone staircase enclosing the wrought-iron gridwork of a Victorian elevator, coming out onto a wide landing whose quarry-stone tiles were ancient enough to be dished in the middle.
Unfortunately there were two intensive-care wards, one to each side at the head of the stairs — and each of them was behind a set of double doors that bore a chrome lozenge at chest height on the left-hand side: a digital combination lock, known among professional thieves as a yes-or-no.
The riddle of which ward Kenny had been admitted to was solved immediately by the uniformed constable standing guard on the door to my right. That just left the two obstacles — the lock and the copper. Maybe I could use the one to fend off the other, but only if I got the timing right.
I headed right on over to the door, trying to keep the air of brisk certainty up and running and facing down Mister Plod with a stare of cold superiority.
‘Evening,’ I said.
‘Evening, sir,’ he answered. His gravelly voice matched his shoe-leather skin and brick-shithouse build. He looked like someone who’d jumped a plane out of Zimbabwe just ahead of a bunch of pitchfork-wielding farm workers. He also looked as though he didn’t like me very much, based on first appearances, and was prepared to hate me on further acquaintance. If Basquiat had stationed him here, maybe he was one of her two ‘questionable use of force’ gents. I looked forward cordially to never finding out.
I only locked stares with him for a moment: then I turned my attention to the lock. It was a Baring Streamline-D, which meant it had a four-digit key and three factory defaults. And I used to know what they were, right off the top of my head, but that was back in my student days when stage magic and escapology were the only things I could get serious about. These days I have to rely on the mnemonic, invented by my sensei Tom Wilke, the Banbury Bandit:
Which if you take the initial letters of each word translates into 1563, 7294 and 6530 (the z standing for zero).
Digital locks are called yes-or-nos because unless you’re big on logic gates and home electronics, whether or not you can pick them comes down to a single question: did whoever put the lock in bother to change the factory default setting?
Trusting to the morally deficient saint or angel who watches over the affairs of exorcists and career criminals, I keyed in the first combination. I was already pulling on the door handle as I hit the fourth digit, and since it didn’t yield I belted into the second combination without a pause.
7294 did the trick. The door came free with a metallic quack. Giving the constable an amiable nod, I walked
