To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

stairs. That’s what it’s all for, Roy. We said. To get you to break and mend yourself and react and come back different. Ach, laddie,” he tenderly said, not to me.

An oldish man had emerged from the hospital entrance. He stopped on the forecourt and put a handkerchief to his face and wept, his shadow falling black in front of him.

In the other shadow beyond the blinding light, Leo and I stood and watched him.

Softly Leo murmured, “That is what life does. That’s what we get. However stupid or clever or rich or poor or good we are. So take it by the seat of its pants. Rebellion. We move first. And if we get hurt? If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.”

“Hamlet,” I said.

“Hamlet. Shakespeare. There’s a feller knew a thing or two. And look where it got him. In the ground. Y’know, some teacher once said to me that the only flaw in Hamlet, both the play and the character, is their predictability. But Roy, Hamlet isn’t predictable, even though you know how it, and he, is going to end.”

The man had put his handkerchief back in the pocket of his coat. It had been linen, I suppose. Not Kleenex. He walked past us into the car park, not seeing us. He would be driving away alone. As we all do, in the end.

He was in a glass-walled room set apart.

I gazed through the glass. It was him.

I could see that, even with the network of wires and tubes, the machines that clicked and whirred, the strange specific pillows.

It was Joseph. Sej.

And a doctor came out and spoke to me.

“Mr Phillips? You’re his uncle, I gather.”

“Yes.”

“Right. Well I can tell you what we know so far.”

When we had got up to the correct floor, the young woman called Liss was standing in the bright light among the piles of magazines you look at in hospital waiting areas, trying to take in articles and pictures of super models and rabbits, with your heart in your mouth.

Liss had a plastic cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking. Like Marga she could doubtless cry to order, but now she came up to Leo and he held her and she howled. Her jumper was a deep purple-blue.

C was there too in a navy shirt. He raised his hand to me.

“Hi, Roy. She’s upset.”

“I’ve seen her upset,” I said.

“Sure. But that wasn’t for real. How are you, OK? Hang on,” he added. “I’d better give you these while I think of it.” He handed me a set of keys. They were mine, the originals, the ones I’d posted back through the front door of the house. Meaninglessly I shoved them in my pocket. Props… keys, cars… the toy white dog, by now dry-cleaned of the ketchup poured over it to represent its running over – yes, Marga had flourished that too, to show me no animals had been harmed in their production…

Did Alice ever feel, in her sinister Wonderlands, as if she were losing her mind?

Leo had already got hold of someone and informed them I was Sej’s uncle. “Be a relative. The only way you’ll be able to get near him. What name do you want to use?”

Oddly I’d thought at once that changing my name would be a sensible move. William crossed my mind, my father’s name. But then there was my mother. She’d been called Denise. Quite a daring French name in the late twenties. “Denis,” I said, “Denis Phillips.”

“They have Sej as Joseph Traskul. Phillips – Traskul?”

“Then I must be his mother’s brother, mustn’t I?”

“I understand,” said the doctor now, “your nephew collapsed due to a mixture of pain-killers and alcohol, and hit his head on the corner of a table. This was what his friends thought. The injury is consistent with that. Perhaps they’ll have told you Joseph was attacked a short while before – some blows to the ribs. Not too serious. And there’s an old injury – a titanium pin in the right leg. But he was depressed?”

“I didn’t know.”

“No, of course not. This must be a shock. You’ve come down from Manchester, they said.”

“His skull’s fractured?”

“That’s the better news. It isn’t. To be honest, Mr Smithson – that’s the surgeon – took a look at him and had a definite feeling there was a hairline fracture. But there isn’t. But it’s a major concussion. The brain is bruised. In these cases, I’m afraid, we can only hope for the best. Sometimes there is damage to nerves, and so on. It can affect…”

Just then something happened in the room, a flare of green lights and a terrible beeping screeching sound.

The doctor forgot me, sweeping me aside.

From nowhere nurses of both genders came rushing.

Leo ran up, grabbed me and pulled me away.

I was standing by a blue wall, (or do I only imagine it was blue?) and there was pandemonium in the glass-walled room, a white flurrying like snowfall on a windy night. And then out came the bed very fast, with his body on it, and all the wires snaking out of him, and machines wheeled along with him, his head turned away, his closed eyes stained darkly, and one hand lying deadly. His pianist’s hand.

And the woman called Liss put her arm round me. She was sodden with tears and her nose ran. She said gently, “Roy, it’s all right. We’ve all done this in the past. He’s been hurt so often. He makes us. Don’t be sad. He’d never blame you.”

The four of us, C and Liss and Leo and I, stood by the blue wall and watched as they hurried him away and were gone with him, while overhead the lights burned white.

9

I always dreamed I met him where there was water. Fluidity, what was mutable, in alchemic terms. His danger was apparent in the dreams, also the psychosis of