Emotionally Weird(108)

‘Poor old Pike,’ Professor Cousins said quietly to me. ‘I’m afraid he had another accident while he was in here.’

On Christopher Pike’s bedside locker there was a glass of sticky-looking orange squash and a bunch of yellow Muscat grapes, proving that somewhere else in the world there must be heat and light.

‘I don’t know,’ Professor Cousins said, making a great performance of chewing on a grape. ‘I may as well transfer the English department to the DRI.’ Christopher Pike gurgled something incomprehensible from inside his mummy suit.

‘You’ll soon be back on your feet, dear chap!’ Professor Cousins shouted at him.

‘He’s not deaf,’ the patient in the neighbouring bed remarked, without taking his eyes off the Courier he was reading. Christopher Pike made some more incomprehensible noises and his neighbour put down his newspaper and inclined his head towards him like a rather poor ventriloquist to translate the gurgling but then frowned and shrugged and said, ‘Poor bastard.’

The ward sister swept in ahead of a consultant who in turn was followed by a group of medical students like a gaggle of goslings. I recognized a couple of them from the union   bar.

‘Out,’ the sister said peremptorily to us.

We found Maggie Mackenzie restrained by the tight tourniquet of starched white sheet and baby-blue coverlet. Her hair was a knotted mass of grips and snakes and plaits on the pillow. Her face bore a vague resemblance to corned beef and a deep blue bruise had bloomed on her forehead. I touched my own bruise to see if it was still there. It was.

Professor Cousins offered Maggie Mackenzie a Nuttall’s Minto. She ignored him and said, in an even more crotchety way than usual, ‘I’m lucky I’m not dead. They’re keeping me in for a day or two, I’m concussed apparently.’

‘I was concussed once,’ Professor Cousins said, but before he could embark on this familiar tale, a bell rang to signal the end of visiting-time – although for a moment Professor Cousins was under the impression that the hospital was on fire.

‘Well, goodbye,’ I said awkwardly to Maggie Mackenzie and, uncertain what was appropriate in the circumstances, I patted one of her washerwoman’s hands that lay atop the coverlet. Her skin felt like an amphibian’s.

As we made our way out through the overheated corridors of the DRI, Professor Cousins cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. ‘They’re trying to kill me, you know,’ he said conversationally.

‘Who?’ I asked, rather impatiently. ‘ Who is it exactly that’s trying to kill you?’

‘The forces of darkness,’ he said conspiratorially.

‘The . . .?’

‘Forces of darkness,’ he repeated. ‘They’re all around us and they’re trying to destroy us. We should get out of here,’ he added, ‘before they spot us.’

~ No-one’s trying to kill him at all. He’s just paranoid, isn’t he? Nora says irritably. He’s just a red herring. And the old people – I bet they’re just paranoid as well.

‘Ah, yes, but that doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get them.’

~ You’ll never make a crime writer.

‘This isn’t a crime story. This is a comic novel.’

I abandoned Professor Cousins to the forces of darkness and made my way home, taking a mazy route through the back streets of Blackness until finally pitching up on the Perth Road. There was an ambulance on the street, blue lights flashing, and with a sense of alarm I realized it was parked outside Olivia’s flat. Olivia herself appeared – pale and unconscious and strapped on a stretcher, rather like Dr Dick before her. The same ambulanceman was there, as if there was only one crew in the whole city. When he caught sight of me this time he gave me a suspicious scowl of recognition. I suppose I did seem to be in attendance at rather a lot of mishaps.

A distraught Kevin appeared as if out of nowhere, along with all three of Olivia’s flatmates. ‘An overdose,’ one of them whispered to me.

‘I found her,’ Kevin said when he saw me. He was sweating uncomfortably and a wheeze like that of Mrs Macbeth’s old dog was coming from his chest. ‘I came to ask her if I could borrow her George Eliot essay,’ he said.

‘She did Charlotte Brontë,’ I said flatly.

‘She had an abortion yesterday,’ one of her flatmates said to me as we watched Olivia being loaded into the back of the ambulance. ‘It’s a shame, she loved babies.’

‘Loved?’ It was only then that I realized that Olivia wasn’t unconscious – Olivia was dead.