In the stroke ward were a dentist, a heavy-metal bass player, an underwater welder, a politician, and Nat Wharton, bigshot drug dealer, whose bed was surrounded by a posse of gun-toting cops, each of them as large as a truck laden with opium.
The bass player didn’t know if she was in Carnegie Hall or a hall of mirrors. She listened to the faint boom ba boom of her hapless heart, trying to detect the backbeat and ascertain if the instrument was in four-four time.
The dentist, a drip in his mouth, was reminded of drills, scales and polishes, yanking out teeth with tongs, and reluctant mouths being assaulted by sixteen fingers and four thumbs.
The underwater welder recalled the bends, tugging on his safety line, the hurried attempt to yank him from the marine depths. He was back there now, surely: scared, reliant on strangers to save him, with a sickening sense of swallowing water and sinking to the eternal, irredeemable depths.
The politician had been a braying advocate for letting ‘the market’ offer solutions to the dilemmas of life and death in the NHS. Now she lay like a slab of unattended flesh, wanting the Asian nurse to hold her hand, the Croatian registrar to look at her heart machine, the African consultant to reassure her, and promising whichever medical deities who were listening she’d never again vote to stop immigration, and would always speak up in parliament for the NHS – if they could pull her from death’s door.
And Nat Wharton – on the mend, unlike the twats around him who all seemed to be forming a queue for the mortuary – knew he’d blown his chance of freedom when his ticker had betrayed him just as he was about to board the evening plane from Cardiff to Malaga. An informant in the drug squad had texted: Heat on. Beat it! The filth had the goods on him and were about to pounce. He was within a few feet of the plane ramp when his chest had tightened like a tooth in a vice, his mind had darkened like the ocean bottom, his head had begun to thump like thrash-metal bass and drums, his ears to ring like the Commons’ division bell.
And now the bastard medics were making him better, well enough to go before the beak and be awarded twenty years confinement in Swansea nick. The barely breathing corpses around him didn’t know how lucky they were. If they recovered, they had some kind of life. If they died, a noble funeral awaited, eulogies, a priest in robes blessing them with holy cant.
No such double options for him. Bars like octopuses’ tentacles, restraining, gripping. Doors like rows of enormous teeth, never opening, grinding, crushing. Silence, twenty-three hours a day, a hundred and fifty decibels quiet. Jailers, strutting prime-ministers, ordering your life. Why hadn’t he died by that plane? He’d have had criminal royalty at his burial. Praise, toasts to him, tears. Shit! Utterly blown it.
