Chapter One

Teeth Marks

Rose Moxham

Nick stood outside the pub until the saloon doors stopped swinging. His helmet felt heavy, as if all the night’s bitterness had been scooped into it. It was just another thing to crush his pride. He slipped the chinstrap over the handlebar and mounted the bicycle.

The doors flapped again as Robbie emerged with his arm slung around the Irish girl. ‘Back to the bad old days, mate!’ he yelled gleefully as Nick took off down the hill.

The wind felt perilous. It numbed his ears and pinned his mouth back into a crazy grin. All this speed – it felt good. He didn’t bother with the brakes, gave up trying to get a grip on the pedals. He spread his legs and let the steep incline carry him, hurtling past those stagnant shops, past the sleeping homeless guy, overtaking a car. The dogs free, barking and running after him. They loved him, even if Jude didn’t. And at the bottom of the hill, coming up to meet him like two pearly torpedoes, were Dave Bear-claw’s spectacularly white winklepicking shoes. He’d done what Robbie had told him and spruced up his feet.

Dave Bear-claw stepped out onto the road to wave at Max turning the corner in his beat-up ute.
The dogs were howling down the hill and so was Nick, who swerved to save Dave’s shoes at the very instant that Dave stepped back. As Nick lost control of the bike he heard the dogs barking joyfully at Max as if he were the prodigal son home at last. Fear made Nick fling out his hands to protect his face, to save it from ending up like his heart. His head had to take care of itself. Nick sailed past the flash of Dave Bearclaw’s ringed fingers, still raised in greeting to Max – or raised in thanks to some god for not letting him be run down by a fool on a bicycle. Or raised to say ‘Stop!’

Too late, Nick was on his way.  

 
This is what happens.

Strangers come, flashing a torch into his face every hour, demanding that he tells them what day it is and what his name is. They pinch his toes and his fingers to make sure they’re still attached and that he has a grip on all the different kinds of pain. They take away his clothes, wrap him in plaster, drape him in a gown and deposit him on a trolley. He lies there waiting for someone to give him a drink, and then he waits for them to bring him a bottle so he can piss it out. A nurse brings a blue plastic thing shaped like a teardrop and plonks his dick into it. How can you piss into that? At last he does, and then he waits for somebody to take it away. While he waits he wonders whether it was really Jude’s face hovering over him in the ambulance, or another delusion. He forgets the bottle is still there.

He reads Nurse Sunni’s nametag and hears her practiced little sigh as she mops up the urine from his plaster and washes him down none too gently. She rolls him over to get the sheet out from under him, and back again to insert a clean one. Every roll and flick of the sheet hurts, but Nurse Sunni is right because it gets the blood moving and you’ll be less prone to bedsores, Mr Green. With thin eyes and a tight smile she snaps the sheet over him.

In the small hours they move him into a ward. His arms have been cemented all the way, past his wrists, so he can’t even move his fingers. Each end of the pin poking through the knee of his right leg is attached to strings and pulleys that go to the end of the bed and over it, where a weight hangs, keeping his leg nice and straight. Only his left leg is free. He could tap five toes if music hadn’t abandoned him.

The only beat is his pulse and that’s getting feathery.

There’s a voice behind his eyes saying he could have done things differently. But he doesn’t know what, or how, and after all, it’s only a voice.

When Nick woke there was a strand of hair in his mouth that he couldn’t spit out, and an old man was glaring at him from the next bed. At the foot of his bed was a woman who was roughly the size and shape of a thunderhead. For a moment his pain shrank in her presence. Moonfaced, heavy eyes outlined in black like Cleopatra, she wore a pink cotton blouse with a burst seam across one lumpy shoulder. A boxy black purse hung from the other. She was holding his patient-chart and her absurdly soft and breathy voice wafted over him, giving him news of himself.

‘His name’s Nick Green and he’s fractured. They’d ship him home,’ she said, pausing to give him a slow wink, ‘but nobody’s there, so he’s in for a few weeks.’

‘Sounds like a drifter, and a bloody noisy one.’ The old man’s red-eyed stare reminded Nick of a cattle prod. ‘Kept me awake with your howls, you did.’

‘Well, he’s all broken up,’ the giant woman said. ‘He’s got plenty to howl about.’ She read more from the chart. ‘Bilateral compound fractures of the radius, ulna and carpus bones.’ She nodded at the plaster encasing Nick’s forearms and wrists. ‘And mid-compound fracture of the right femur. That’ll be your leg,’ she informed him with a cheery smile. ‘Broken the same as Al’s was.’ She turned to the old man.‘You remember that, Eric? When Al slipped over last year?’

Eric nodded. ‘A disgrace.’

‘Al’s from my ward,’ the woman burbled at Nick, pointing to a vacant-faced man in the bed opposite his.

‘Say hullo to Nick, Al.’Al waved feebly as the woman replaced Nick’s chart at the end of his bed. ‘He broke it when he slipped on his tapioca pudding.’ She advanced towards Nick, her short purple skirt straining helplessly against her thighs. ‘What did you do to break yours?’ 

‘I think you’re scaring him, Lindy,’ said Eric.

Darkness filled the air as Lindy’s face loomed over Nick; her open pores were filled in with make-up that was too dark for her complexion, defining an imaginary jawline. For an anxious moment he thought their eyes would lock, but she was quick and slid over his gaze as if it wasn’t quite solid. She pulled the strand of hair from his mouth before proceeding towards Al, who’d curled into the shape of a question mark under his sheet.

‘Where’s my whip!’ she shrieked. ‘Where’s my planet!’ She pulled the curtain round Al’s bed, and his bedside chair groaned when she sat in it. She kicked off her grubby pink stilettos and they were the only evidence of her, poking out from beneath the curtain.

Nick’s head sank back into the pillow, his cheeks inflated with relief. Then the old man in the next bed coughed the kind of cough Nick associated with lonely park benches.

‘Eric’s the name, Nick.’ Nick turned his head towards him. He was just a bunch of bones, held together by skin as thin as a condom and as blue as his bloodshot eyes. Eric was so old he had a gold tooth.

Nick didn’t want to talk; his body hurt every time he breathed and he had nothing to say. But he felt obliged; they were neighbours, and might be for some time.

‘Where am I?’

It wasn’t the question he’d meant to ask. He’d meant to ask what planet Lindy had lost, but had decided at the last moment that it could be one of those stupid, risky paths he was prone to take. Eric cackled with laughter. Across the divide, in the bed next to Al, another man gurgled.

‘You’re in the orthopaedic ward,’ said Eric. ‘We’ve all got something broken, except Al. He doesn’t have anything broken this time, just a kidney problem, among other things.’ He nodded at the man who’d gurgled, and around whose head was a steel halo, attached to his cheekbones. ‘Bert fell off a roof and fractured his jaw and pelvis, and I fell off my chair and got a cracked neck-of-femur, among other things.’

Eric surveyed the room. ‘When you add it up, what with Bert’s jaw wired shut and Al’s natural reticence, you and I are the only ones capable of a conversation. But that’s the nature of an orthopaedic ward.’

‘Yeah, but what town am I in?’

‘Marston.’ Eric eyed him as if he were worse than a drifter; as if he were somebody cast adrift. ‘They brought you in from Crundle, don’t you remember?’ Baring his flash gold tooth, he added, ‘It’s a tiny place, don’t suppose there’s much there to remember, these days.’

There was plenty to remember, but just then a trolley rattled in, pushed by a wiry wardsmaid in a pink uniform. The wardsmaid plonked a breakfast, hidden under a metal lid, on each man’s steel bed trolley.

Al’s was whisked inside the curtain by Lindy. Her voice could be heard softly waffling to him, then suddenly a clang of the lid and she cried out. ‘This egg’s fried!’

The wardsmaid sighed, but stopped and waited as Lindy emerged from the curtain and stomped barefooted towards her with the offending plate.

‘A boiled egg, please, Pat.’

Without a word, Pat lifted the lids of the rest of the trays until she found a boiled egg and exchanged it with Al’s fried one. ‘Anybody could poison an open egg like that,’ Lindy said, bearing the egg back to Al.

‘It’s okay ,Al,’ she said, disappearing behind the curtain. ‘We’ll take the yolk out, and then it’ll be all white and pure.’

Nick waited, but nobody came to feed him, so he stared out the window at a cow-shaped cloud that was floating bellyup. Yeah, he remembered Crundle. That was where he’d left Jude and the rest of his life, when all he’d meant to do was have a working holiday with his mate.

Someone was noisily scuffing down the corridor. A woman, skinny as a thread, stopped at the door to catch her breath. The antennae on her furry bumblebee slippers quivered as she shifted from foot to foot, gathering herself and darting curious glances at Nick from under a stringy fringe of hair.

‘Lindy!’ she called at last, darting towards Al’s curtain. ‘Mark’s back.’

A burble came from behind the curtain.

The woman poked her head inside. ‘Hi Al,’ she said. ‘You eating all right, hon?’ The chair squeaked as Lindy rose. Her feet slid onto the stilettos; they were at least two sizes too small, overhung with great slabs of cracked heels.

The thin woman pulled back Al’s curtain with a spindly hand, then tottered after Lindy sweeping towards the door. ‘You’ll never guess where he’s been,’ she said breathlessly, oblivious of Lindy’s darkening face ahead of her. ‘Or who he went with.’ Her voice trailed down the hallway until it was cut short by Lindy’s shriek for her whip.

‘That was Trace,’ said Eric, pulling the crusts off his toast. ‘She and Lindy are thick as thieves – they’ll have the whole bloody ward down here soon, visiting that poor bugger.’

Nick took stock of his situation. He was in a hospital in the wilds of Marston with a bunch of fruit loops. Staring at Al’s shape under the sheet, he wondered how a guy with a kidney problem ended up in a broken bone ward, but decided the story would take longer than he wanted to listen.

‘Who’s Mark?’ Nick asked.

‘How would I know?’ Eric snapped. ‘I don’t live here.’

The corridor came alive with footsteps, clacking with purpose and an impatient echo. Nick turned his head towards the door.

‘Ah, lucky lad,’ Eric muttered through his eggs. ‘Here’s our Nurse Sunni come to feed you.’ 

 
Once there was a little brother and a best mate – and then along came a girl.

Nick tried to wake up, but the microphone kept falling from his hand. Caught in the dream, he was a singer on a stage. His joints had seized up and he’d forgotten the words to a song he’d never known anyway. His tongue thickened into cotton wool, his feet went numb. Watching the audience was like watching the enemy, and their sharp hisses soon pricked his feet back to life.

Bowie was at the end of the bed, plucking at his big toe.

‘Wake up, wake up! You said you’d come to Time Warp with me.’

‘I never said that. When did I say that?’ 

‘You said it! You’re leaving tomorrow. It’s your last chance to kill Lola Starke.’ The panic that had suffused Bowie’s face was untainted by any trace of reason – it was so pure that Nick gave in without his usual resistance.

‘Yeah, okay.’ The singing dream retreated to the pit of his stomach, back where it belonged, until he figured out one day what to do with it. He rolled out of bed and lazily dressed, calling for Bowie to fish his new boots out from under the bed…