Why We Die (5 page)

. . . She had to snap out of this. Morbidity was starting to stain her outlook; starting to taste like the air she breathed. Which this morning had mostly been other people’s exhaust fumes.

The hospital was barely ten minutes’ walk from Sweeney’s, and a bus had arrived after a mere fifteen, so it hadn’t taken more than half an hour to get here. Finding Mr Hunter hadn’t been difficult, either: he was the only crossbow wound admitted lately. But it hadn’t been visiting time, and the staff on duty hadn’t been impressed with either of her business cards: not the one which said what she actually was, nor the one claiming she was a journalist.

‘It’s your lot were saying he was dead the other day.

’ ‘I think you’ll find that was TV,’ Zoë said. ‘Or radio. I’m strictly ink and paper.’

‘Nice for you. You can wait along there.’

Waiting was never her strong point, and especially not in a cheerful room; one of those places whose very paintwork screamed
Could Be Worse
. Paintings by children she had to assume had been patients; whose fortitude should have been a lesson, yes, Zoë knew. But she’d had her car stolen, as accompaniment to a bill she couldn’t afford, and this was not her day regardless. Through the window she looked down on distant undramatic roofs. Sounds carried of doors shutting, of everyday shoes on institutional floors. Half a dozen chairs had been stacked against one wall, beneath a notice reading
Awaiting Removal
.

So she’d flicked through a magazine, and encountered an article about Positive Thought, the cure for everything. The Secret To Health, apparently, was A Happy State Of Mind. Happy? Totalitarian state of mind, more like: no sulks, no anger, no kvetching about the weather. No wondering why things went wrong, even when they obviously fucking did. No swearing. And, of course, no cigarettes, no alcohol, no fatty foods . . . One of those Total Health Diets where you lived to be a hundred, but every last minute felt like death. Capital Punishment – punishment by capitals – had sneaked in through the back door.

And death was the ultimate removal, of course: death was change of address, no forwarding. Your number disconnected for all time. Right that moment, at the end of this corridor, sitting in a plastic bucket seat, it was hard not to figure this an ante-room to death – maybe the entire building was. Like the joke says: you don’t want to end up in hospital, they’re full of sick people. And sick people died. As, in the end, did healthy people . . . Just one more change of identity, in a lifetime spent being one thing then another. Young/old, happy/sad, alive/dead. The ultimate deed poll alteration. You could change your name, change your habits, but eventually, you got what was coming.

And here was why death had been on her mind: she had had her own scare lately, Zoë Boehm. It had come to nothing, her brush with death, but the best you could say of that was that it was rehearsal only. It had been an act of subtraction: a good doctor had taken away the thing that had frightened her, which had turned out not cancer, but a cyst. So what still frightened her? How come she still had nights where sleep ended before it began, and dawn found her upright in an armchair, sipping tap water in a room with open curtains? Because she wanted to retain her identity was why. She was not yet ready for removal. And she’d come close, if only in imagination, to what that removal would be like. It would not simply be the end of Zoë Boehm. It would be the end of everything – of armchairs, tap water, curtains: everything. The fact that they would continue for other people didn’t count. She’d discovered she wasn’t going to be around forever any more.

In her good moments, Zoë worried she’d allow a few bad months to turn her into a health zombie. And the rest of the time, she took her pulse and checked the calendar and carried on giving up smoking . . . And besides, and besides, and besides. There were many possible futures, and one of them was hers. The slow decline into senescence, or the rapid burnout of a mattress fire. Positive thinking only took you so far. You could look on the bright side – that it was the knowledge of inevitable closure that made the remainder sweet. That the trite was also the true: all good things come to an end. That this was the natural state of things, and nature must have its way. And that two positives don’t make a negative. Yeah, right.

Or you could carry on being yourself, and try to put what lay ahead behind you. Which was her current plan.

In time, she’d been allowed to come and speak to Derek Hunter; in time, she’d reached this point in their conversation:

‘Did they say anything?’

‘I think they might’ve . . .’ His face scrunched into concentration. Fiftyish faces had earned their lines. Zoë tried to read what these might mean, and guessed at puzzlement, spite, confusion . . . Concentration looked like it might be new. ‘I think he might’ve. The one with the crossbow.’

‘You remember what it was?’

He paused. ‘I was too busy being shot to notice.’

Fair point.

Over the way, the patient was succumbing to something approaching panic. His words weren’t clear, but the tone was unmistakable: querulous, importunate. The voice of someone who’d been giving it a little thought, and wasn’t keen on the conclusions. Not when these invoked a curtained bed and a loud-voiced nurse.

‘Did he have an accent?’

‘Who?’

‘The one who spoke. The one who shot you.’

She gave him a moment to think about it. They’d been through most else: height, weight, clothing. He’d had nothing to tell her she hadn’t gathered from Sweeney. The masks might have been interesting, if the villains had gone for something post-Tarantino – American presidents, Disney characters, Spice Girls – but stockings were useless. Sometimes it was hard to tell traditionalism from lack of imagination.

‘De Niro. He sounded like Robert De Niro.’

‘De Niro.’

‘You know him?’

‘I know of him. Yes.’

‘Well, that’s who he sounded like. Bobby De Niro.’

‘. . . Thanks, Derek, You’ve been a help.’

She tossed the notes she’d made into a bin on her way out. The Deer Hunter. Robert De Niro. Life was too short, really.

A sign by the door reminded her that her mobile should be turned off. She remembered that hers wasn’t just as it started to ring.

Smoke that had been a thick black smudge blotting out sunlight was now a greasy ribbon spiralling skywards. On her walk from the city centre – she’d taken the route past the multi-storey and through the estate; across the bridge which overlooked the vacant space where the house had exploded a few years previously – it had reminded her of those hot air balloons which took off from the meadow next to the ice rink. Usually with an advertising logo attached, though all this one said was
Used Car
.

Zoë was reasonably proud of not smoking any more. It was definitely a retrograde step that her Sunny had taken it up.

She’d walked down the main residential road this side of the river, then taken a right which led her past the local nursery school, and along a lane bisecting an adventure playground and a playing field which had once been dead ground: the former site of a gas works, whose industry had rendered the land dust-grey and hopeless. But it had been reclaimed in recent years; there was a basketball court now, and a five-a-side pitch whose goalmouths were muddy with use. On it, some kids were kicking a ball about. There was no good reason for the scene not lifting the heart. Except for the greasy black ribbon up there: the one that said her car was dead.

A gate blocked the lane halfway, but it was swinging open. The chain that should have secured it glinted in the ditch that ran alongside. The lane itself, heavily rutted, ended in a broad fenced area alongside the railway tracks, which were spanned by a concrete bridge with metal railings. A police car was parked dead centre, and a Dorm-obile on bricks, which had been in place long enough for bushes to have grown round it, was rusting quietly in a corner, its panels daubed with psychedelic whirls and swooshes. Short of carbon dating, it was impossible to tell which particular sixties revival this had died during.

There was a policeman sitting in the cop car, writing in a notebook, or possibly doing a crossword. Another stood by what had been, earlier this morning, Zoë’s car: her red Nissan Sunny, which was now kind of melty grey.

‘Ms Boehm?’

The standing cop had removed his jacket. Various bits of equipment rattled against his frame.

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, here it is. I’m sorry.’

He seemed friendly and sympathetic, which meant he’d never heard of Zoë Boehm.

‘You were quick. It only went missing a couple of hours ago.’

‘It was phoned in. Parked in town, were you?’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

Zoë supposed she’d missed a fire vehicle. Her wreck of a car was streaked with foam. Its flames hadn’t died by themselves.

The policeman said, ‘You have to wonder, don’t you?’ This was his theme: you had to wonder and it made you think. ‘Adventure playground to one side, football pitches to the other. And they tell you it’s having nothing to do sends kids off the rails.’

Zoë wasn’t so sure you could draw such straight lines between events.

‘Then there’s the fire-starting. Erases the evidence, sure, but it’s a kick in itself.’

‘Kids?’

‘Who else?’ He took half a step back, as if the heat had grown too much. ‘It’s not an especially grown-up thing to do.’

‘It wasn’t an especially joyride kind of car.’

‘We IDed it by the plates. Couldn’t tell the make, just by looking.’

Point. Whatever it was now couldn’t be called a
make
. An unmade, perhaps.

‘It was a Nissan. A Sunny.’

‘Red?’

Zoë nodded.

‘That’ll be it. Honey for the bears, red. It’s a go-faster colour.’

And Zoë had seen them before, of course: under motorway bridges; in the corners of fields. Cars reduced to exoskeletons; scorched the colour of rust, as if time had bullied them into their own future selves: relics from a future which didn’t enjoy machinery, and whose plastics couldn’t stand the heat . . . She’d seen them before, but she hadn’t seen this one. This had been
her
car, damnit. Her car, which she’d taken care of. Which Jeff from the garage had monitored regularly. Which Zoë herself had cleaned religiously – i.e. once a year, round about Christmas.

‘It usually happens at night, doesn’t it?’

‘Time was they were all tucked up by eight. Biggest thing happening was the tooth fairy.’

‘But I get lucky in broad daylight.’

‘There’s always someone at the sharp end of the averages,’ he said, with a philosophy born of observing something happening to somebody else.

He took her details, explained some stuff about insurance, and confessed he had no idea what would happen to the car. He imagined the council dealt with burnt-out wrecks. He’d put a
Police Aware
sticker on it; meanwhile, there was nothing to see here. Move along, now. He didn’t actually say that last bit. She nodded and walked away, from both him and her car’s smoky ruins; took, without considering what she was doing, the steps up to the bridge over the railway line. A little to the south, this side of the gravel mounds bordering the tracks, sat disused rolling stock: canvases for local tag-artists. In the opposite direction, across the river, lay the station. The sky above was a blue surprise, embroidered with just the odd scrap of cloud, and on the far side of the bridge, vaguely visible through the trees, were buildings belonging to a college sports ground: squash courts, maybe a cricket pavilion. Immediately below Zoë, four sets of tracks pointed in both directions at once. You could hear them singing moments before a train arrived, but they were quiet as she fished her mobile from her pocket.

It surprised her that she had his number locked in her memory. Perhaps it was just locked in her thumb, which jabbed it out as if pushing needles through his skin . . .

‘Poland.’

‘One day, Bob, I’m going to finish the job I started and squash you like the bug you are.’

‘Zoë Boehm. Having a good day?’

‘Bob Poland. Not at work?’

‘Fuck you.’

Needle or not, it wasn’t hard to get under his skin . . . She’d cost Bob Poland his job. However he was earning his keep these days, she doubted it gave him the kick being on the force had.

Against the odds, this lifted Zoë’s mood. She looked back, and saw a thin comma of smoke curling into the overhead: her car’s last punctuation mark. At least she wouldn’t be spending the next two years trying to coax another month’s life out of it.

‘How’re the job skills shaping up, Bob? Hotwired anything more upmarket than a Sunny lately?’

‘Taping this?’

‘You’re watching too much daytime TV.’

‘Gosh, Zoë, you sound like you’re out in the open. Not calling from your car?’

‘You know what gave me the clue it was you, Bob? It was something only a real fuckwit would do.’

‘This one’s for your dictaphone.’ He cleared his throat, and spoke slowly, his faint Scots burr humming through. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Thanks, but I don’t need to hear you deny it to know you’re lying. Just opening your mouth does that much.

’ ‘I hear you got your nose caught in a VAT-trap. That must sting. Your sort don’t like parting with money, do you?’

‘Works every time. Scratch a thug, you’ll find an anti-Semite.’ Vice versa worked too. A train was coming, Oxford-bound, but very very slowly. ‘I’ve a job on at the moment, Bob, but I’ll get back to you soon. See how life’s been treating you since you last tried messing with me. And then I’ll fix your wheels, like you just fixed mine.’

‘You’ve had your go, bitch. You think fate’s gunna swing your way again? Your good luck’s used up. It’s downhill all the way.’

‘So I could strive real hard in this life and still have a haircut like yours in the next?’

‘Hang on to your sense of humour, Zoë. You’re going to need it.’

The phone died, then the train blotted the silence out as it crawled asthmatically towards the station.

Bob Poland . . . Describe Bob Poland. He was a six-foot jawless stringbean who used to be a cop; a man whose nearly spherical head topped a narrow frame like a concrete ball tops a gatepost. It would be the most obvious thing about him, if it weren’t for his being a prick . . . For the first few years of their working relationship, he’d been Zoë’s police contact; someone she gave money to in return for information. Then he got involved with people who wanted to kill her, which had ultimately cost him his job. Apparently, he remained pissed off about this.