Thicker Than Water

’

‘Makes sense. In prison, most people are strong enough to fight back.’

It was around lunchtime of the next day, and a lot of my aches and pains were maturing rather than fading. I had a huge dressing on my cheek that made me look a little bit like Claude Rains as the Invisible Man, and I was doped up to my eyeballs on drugs that had lightened my discomfort by shutting down large and important par viblts of my brain.

Things being how they were and the day being overcast, Nicky had volunteered to come around in person and fill me in on the progress he’d made with my data.

He normally prefers to avoid away games and make me come to him, but I think he was curious to see how badly I was damaged. Of course a hospital is a safe, antiseptic environment, cooled by air-conditioning and wiped clean regularly with powerful disinfectants: that hits Nicky where he used to live. And on top of all that he was enjoying the attention, aware that the orderly who’d come through briefly with the medicine trolley had run off to tell all the junior doctors that they had a zombie in the place, and that a small horde of them were now watching him from the nurses’ station while pretending to sign prescriptions. They were all aching to dissect him and to debrief him about life after death at the same time. The ones with the strongest curiosity and the weakest morals would probably end up on Jenna-Jane’s staff at the Queen Mary MOU."

"By contrast, my fellow patients were mostly ignoring him: but then, we were all of us fire-damaged, chipped at the edges or generally shopworn.

This was a recovery ward, but the term was being applied fairly loosely. There was a guy with hair so lank and plastered to his head that he looked like he’d been given the first part of a tarring and feathering, who twitched and chewed his knuckles a lot and seemed to be in some kind of withdrawal; another, much older man who drifted in and out of sleep with a look of faint surprise perpetually dissolving back into torpor; a kid probably still in his teens, his pyjamas drenched with sweat, who wore cordless headphones and rocked gently to his own inner beat. And there was me. Mostly we respected each other’s space - or in some cases were maybe unaware of each other’s existence.

That suited me fine. I was looking at this brief stay in the way that old lags look on short stretches of imprisonment: you do your time, interacting with your environment as little as you can, and then you walk.