The Tied Man

He stood at Finn’s side and stroked the prone man’s face.  ‘Your friend is in a very vulnerable position at the moment, isn’t he?’

Finn made an inaudible sound of protest and tried to move away.

‘Finn, my dear boy!’ Maxwell’s demeanour changed again and he became the charming consultant, adored by women of a certain age for his soft hands and caring manner.  To me, the sudden switch made the man even more terrifying: I could see him literally getting away with murder.  ‘It was something of a surprise to hear you’d be paying me a visit at the workplace, I must say.  How are you feeling now?  A little better, yes?’

No reply.  Maxwell stooped so that his face, with its snow-white goatee and expensive pince-nez glasses, was mere inches from Finn’s.  ‘Well, when you do find  your tongue, I suggest you explain to Lilith here the virtue of silence.’  He strutted to the door.  ‘I’ll be seeing you at Christmas, Finn – I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet by then.  And Miss Bresson?  It’s been an absolute pleasure.’

The door clicked shut and those hand-crafted shoes echoed down the corridor.  Finn pushed his oxygen mask to one side.  ‘Cunt.’

I didn’t need to ask.  ‘He’s a client.’

‘Uh-huh.  Saves his pocket money.  Fucks me f’ two days straight. ‘Christmas treat’.  Filthy bastard.’  He frowned, as if hearing his words for the first time.  ‘Jesus, Lili, this isn’t a fuckin’ life, is it?’  He squeezed his eyes shut against the world and turned his face to the wall.

I pulled the orange nylon blanket over his shoulders and ran my hand over his forehead as if by doing so I could wipe away the traces of Maxwell’s corrupted touch.

‘Can I sleep now?’ he asked, already tumbling back into a drugged slumber.

‘You do that,’ I whispered.  ‘Sweet dreams.’

I didn’t move until I was certain Finn was sound asleep then, afraid that if I too began to doze I would never wake up in time, I stood and stretched and caught sight of myself in the mirror above the sink.  The sleek, ebony bob of the previous day now hung in lank strands around my face, and the hard glare of the strip light gave me a ghost’s pallor and illuminated the sooty shadows under my eyes.  ‘God, Clarissa, you look like Chi-Chi the fucking panda.’

I said the name without thinking, and in doing so summoned up a demon.  The walls closed in and the hospital’s miasma clawed at my neck and I bolted from the room, blindly hurtling along the maze of corridors until I crashed through a fire door into an overgrown quadrangle with a stagnant, slime-filled pond.  I threw up the meagre contents of my stomach into a straggling, diseased rosebush.

Before I knew it, my retching transformed into desperate sobs that became great, racking howls that hurt my chest and burned my neck and made fat tears that carried the final traces of last night’s mascara in stygian streams down my face.

‘Oh duck, why don’t you come in before you drown?’

I spun around, wiping snot, tears and make-up across my face with the back of my hand.  A smiling woman with a neat perm and a matter-of-fact face stood in the doorway, proffering a mug of coffee and a clean handkerchief.  The name badge on her bottle green tabard told me she was Agnes, a Friend of Castlerigg Hospital, Happy to Help.

‘Standing there in the pouring rain in just your vest.  You’ll catch your death.’

‘ I’m not that lucky,’ I sniffed.  I hadn’t even realised it was raining, but the storm had finally broken.  Huge raindrops pounded the earth and sent up tiny explosions of dust and the distant rumble of thunder promised relief from my slow suffocation.  I was already soaked through.

‘Come on, love.  Get inside and drink this.’ Agnes enticed me back inside as though I were a feral cat.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t got any change on me,’ I began, but Agnes shushed me.

‘Apparently you told the Wicked Witch of the West what she could do with her bloomin’ stapler,’ the woman said with a wicked little grin.  ‘And flattened that little security beggar in his Hitler suit.  You’ve earned a coffee.  In fact, I might even stretch to a chocolate digestive.’

I took the mug from her and the tears threatened to return.  ‘Please don’t be too nice to me,’ I implored.  ‘I don’t think I could cope with that right now.’

‘You see a lot of that, working in this place.’ Agnes handed me a tissue.  ‘People holding it together, I mean.  Especially the women.   I take it that’s your young man in one of those rooms back there?’