The Case Against ~ Chapter One
Oct. 28th, 2008 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanThe strange things that occur to you, lying awake at 4am because you're sure there was a noise like the front door being opened, but even after going to check, unable to go back to sleep easily...
The word/phrase 'NaNoWriMo' bobbed up & I had another of my bi-monthly-or-so guilty pangs regarding the great unfinished novel, now nine years out of contention for 'Greatest Book of the Twentieth Century' & running ten years late for the publishers... whoever they might have been.
So, a bit of re-wiring & re-writing this evening & for the few curious, may I humbly present:
CHAPTER 1
(It’s My Party And I’ll Die If I Want To)
I woke up in pain. A pain that seared its way from my left shoulder down into my chest cavity, up my neck & into my skull, burning through my sinuses & eardrums in a blitzkrieg of the senses. It felt like the S.A.S. was blasting the hell out of any stray terrorists hidden in my head. Something was pressing down on me, making any movement seem like too much effort for an agonizing reward. And for god’s sake, could someone please turn all that roaring, thumping noise down? Wait a second, that thumping… it sounded like a heartbeat…. Mine. Then this wasn’t a dream & all this pain, noise &… oh shit… nausea… must really be mine! Something seriously nasty must have happened to me. What? Maybe that could wait a while. Well, the least I knew was – I was awake, therefore alive, so it can’t have been fatal. Good. In fact, great! Okay, what else? Time to crank those besieged neurons into action. I think, therefore I am... in pain. A whole lot of pain, really. Now that I was kind of conscious, various other body parts were filing damage reports. They could wait too. So, where am I? I thought that was the easiest question, so concentrated on opening my eyes while trying to ignore a strangely familiar odour.
On the third attempt, my eyes stayed open. As everything began swimming into focus, I could see that my world consisted of grey curtains & a lot of shiny metal stands with tubes hanging from them, a couple of which were attached to me. I was pressed firmly into a narrow bed by the unyielding tautness of pale, sickly blue bedclothes. That explained the peculiar aroma - only a public hospital can smell so disinfectantly clean. Hang on… hospital? What’s the old saying about waking from a bad dream into a nightmare? Frying pan into fire… bad to worse? I half expected Rod Serling to step through the curtains & welcome me to the Twilight Zone. Otherwise, I had no idea how else could I be here - stuck in some E.R. without a Chicago Hope? I resisted the urge to just close my eyes & try again later, this was too important to miss.
With the ‘where’ question taken care of, there were only ‘what’ & ‘why’ left to consider. If I was in a hospital, surrounded by trolleys & tubes, that plainly confirmed something nasty had definitely happened… to my neck & shoulder for starters. Why? Oh god, I think I had a vague notion as to why - & I didn’t want to dwell on it. Try thinking about something else. Yes. Right, ‘how’ did I get here, ‘how’ long had I been here & by the way… ‘why’ did everything hurt so much? That would probably do for the moment. I knew by now I certainly wasn’t feeling particularly hearty, but was I whole? Had I lost anything important while I’d been out?
I could see the outline of my legs stretched out under the cotton blanket, so I knew they were still attached, but why did the top half of me hurt so badly? That, I think, was the best question of the lot & one I definitely couldn’t answer on my own… I needed a lifeline, so I reached for the bedside buzzer to tell everyone within earshot that I was alive & not very well. Well, okay, I tried to do that, but quickly & painfully discovered my left hand wasn’t capable of any kind of willful movement. I could move my right hand, but it was shaking so badly that it sent tremors up my arm & into my chest, making me yell in agony & collapse back onto the pillows with the whole world spinning crazily in my skull. This was bad... Was this fatigue? Shock? Delirium? Side effects from the anaesthetic? Well, yes, yes, yes & I hoped not. But even with the new sensations from my left side still assaulting my head, I recognised a couple of these more familiar symptoms – On top of everything else, I needed a cigarette. Badly. The thought that right now possibly wasn’t the best time to light up didn’t stand a chance. Not in the face of the one thing I knew could make me feel better.
A quick eyes-only inspection of my standard-issue hospital gown showed it didn’t have any pockets. No surprises. And it didn’t take Eisenstein to figure out that, even if it did, they wouldn’t come pre-stocked with my favourite French smokes. Alone in a godless hospital, wounded & out of cigarettes. In such dire circumstances, who would take the time to bring Gitanes to a wounded soldier? Split the problem in two - who loves me enough to make me happy; or who loves me enough to make me stop smoking? Where can I find totally unconditional love & support these days? Just as I’d abandoned all hope of the Red Cross ever finding me before the Quit For Lifers did, my salvation walked in to the room all by itself.
Kate.
Any other person would have pointed out that this wasn’t a private ward & that, besides, there are supposed to be laws against this sort of thing, but not Kate. No question, no comment & I had a pack of twenty politically incorrect French lungbusters, a lighter & an ashtray within half an hour of being conscious. Immediately after, Kim arrived with another pack &, more endearingly, one of my old black nightshirts. I love my friends. Kim knew, from past experience, how much I hate the indignity of hospital gowns - a sad, pathetic piece of cloth that hospital staff bundle you into after doing whatever it is they do to you while you’re unconscious. It’s the ultimate stigma of the helpless invalid. No way was I going to be seen half-dead in one for a moment longer than necessary.
In all my eagerness to look cool in my discomfort, I’d forgotten I would need some help putting on my nightshirt... & hadn’t thought at all about how much it would hurt me doing it. It didn’t take long to remember... the slightest movement of anything on my left side was excruciating. Manfully, I stifled my screams & swearing while Kate & Kim gently untied the hospital gown & carefully threaded my arms through the black shirtsleeves, with the help of a nurse, who gave me a glass of water & two white tablets to swallow as a reward. Fast-acting painkillers I hoped - I had lots of fast-acting pain.
Like an ambushed military patrol, my memory was returning in bedraggled sections. Kate I remembered seeing very recently, but it had been a long time between drinks, or anything else, with Kim. How did she know I was here? Last time I’d seen her was almost a year ago, after a Ray Davies gig & we were not quite sober. Kim, the failed R&B singer & I, the failed artist, had then landed in some all-night Newtown pub conducting a post-mortem on the various reprobates we’d been to university with. Even the most militantly idealistic & depraved of them had, it seemed, backslid guilelessly into affluence, suburban domesticity & model citizenship. Whatever happened to the revolution? Who had won? Was I a casualty? Which brings us back to the hospital.
My pair of self-assigned antisocial workers assured me they could explain everything, which was a kind of relief. They said I’d better have my story together by the time the police arrived & since the cops had already been informed I was awake, that wouldn’t be long. Just a second… what did they mean ‘my story’? And did they mean story as opposed to truth?
Yes they did. Oh joy. Oh marvellous. Oh shit. Okay fine, I agreed to all that, but I wanted the truth first. What day was it? How long had it been since I’d been enduring the world’s longest-ever instrumental break in ‘Wake Up Little Suzie’ & was it still going? Through the past darkly came two questions: When would I get to sing another verse? Why am I falling backwards with blood going everywhere? The first one was, frankly, a moot point now, but as to the second... “Could somebody please explain exactly how I’ve woken up in here with only one & a half functioning arms?”
They looked at each other, then both started talking at once. Kim laughed & indicated that Kate should start, but I knew she wouldn’t keep quiet for long. Their tag team answer was this: that during the obligatory jam session at my party last night, I had been shot in the left shoulder (that explained all the agony), but nobody had seen whodunnit. Had I noticed anything? Stupid question... everybody was completely entranced by the band - especially the band. Being the kind of people they are, they probably wouldn’t have even noticed I’d fallen over unless I’d collapsed on whoever was soloing at the time. After I had elegantly knocked over a bookcase & hit the deck, but before chaos & panic descended, Agnetha & Margarita had taken charge of the whole shooting match. That made sense too, being the kind of people they are.
Between the two of them, they concocted a story that had only a couple of special guest appearances by the truth. First & most importantly, there had been no party that night - which would save the police interviewing people whose careers could be adversely affected by any hint of a rock’n’roll ethic. Secondly, because it would have been slightly inconvenient to have a barrage of overly-inquisitive police-persons rummaging through my recently acquired baggage (more about that later), I had instead been blasted while escorting a female friend through the tunnel under the railway between the main drag of Ashfield & my home.
The other party guests had apparently readily agreed to all of the above, none more so than Brian, the Right Honourable MP. As everybody pitched in to clear away instruments, glasses, ashtrays & the remaining chips’n’dips’n’munchies, the two women attended to part B of the plan (& it gets a bit gruesome & Teutonically efficient here, so avert your eyes if your sensibilities are of the ‘delicate’ kind). First, they ripped a couple of strips from my blood-soaked shirt, then sent Kate down to the aforementioned tunnel under the railway & had her dab & smear my precious fluids over the damp slimy bricks, which would help to give the police the completely wrong impression of me.
Meanwhile Margarita & Agnetha went doorknocking. They soon discovered that my flat contained the only signs of life in the whole building. If I hadn’t been passed out & bleeding on the floor, I could have saved them the trouble. Of the three other apartments - my landlord had been forewarned about the party & scarpered, flat 2 had been empty for months & the Indian sailors in the flat below mine were out earning an illegal income delivering junk mail. There are a million stories in The Naked City, but they wouldn’t have one to tell.
It was simple after that to evacuate my place & have Kate play the devoted friend, calling ambulances & other trivial stuff like that. For my part, I could vaguely recall some brief, unconnected sections of the ride of my life; they give you great drugs in those speeding white vans, but then… sweet oblivion. And so, here I was - my left arm immobile from shoulder to elbow & only slightly agonising to move below that, sidelined indefinitely from the great game of life. Restless, pained, dazed & confused.
Mostly because this mishmash of falsehood & fact was way too much too soon. My head started spinning again as I struggled to sort out the plain truth, the half-truth & nothing but brazen lies in order to make sure I told the right story to the right people. My only objection was that, as a matter of practice, I prefer to have more than just a glimmer of truth in any barefaced alibi I need to repeat ad infinitum to wives, lovers, mothers, doctors, police, lawyers, magistrates... those kinds of authority figures. Over-ruled.
So of course, later on, when this hastily concocted storyline I had to recite was nearly the literal death of us all, it was obviously my fault entirely.
Their duty done, Kate & Kim returned to their own conversation, which I’d rudely interrupted by waking up. I knew these two hadn’t met before, but it seemed there was already common ground established between them. I tried to follow, but the subject seemed to keep changing faster than I could handle, so gave up. Have you ever noticed how, when you’re semi-mortally wounded & surrounded by wonderful & supportive women, they end up just talking amongst themselves, forgetting why they came to your deathbed in the first place? I hate feeling superfluous. Especially around these two particular women & especially when, just for once, I deserve to be the centre of attention. A little sympathy for the devil, please... even the Guns ’n’ Roses version would do. I tried groaning. Kim turned to me. “Alas, poor Yorick!” she said as she ruffled my hair.
Kate smiled. “Methinks the laddie protesteth too much. ’Tis but a scratch sunshine.”
“Get thee to a nunnery.” Her eyes lit up at the prospect.
No one could say I didn’t try, but Kim & Kate had both seen my ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ routine before & been unimpressed the first time. I surrendered & agreed to get some rest, as long as they kept a lookout while I had a smoke first. Try getting a cigarette out of a plastic wrapped packet, into your mouth & lit with only one shaking hand. It’s not easy, but it was worth it. As blessed St Nicotine had her Gallic way with my lungs, I began to feel somewhere close to relaxed.
Even so, I still felt my two towers of strength & support should be applying their fine minds to something a little more relevant, like who shot me & why. However, this pair was much happier discussing some up & coming beachside production of ‘A Winter’s Tale’. Now there was a play you could only get me to sit through at gunpoint.
An appropriate sentiment - since just then a pyrex jar containing the bullet which the doctors had extracted from my body was ceremoniously dumped in my lap by a demure nurse with strawberry blonde hair. Here at last was someone who could provide some useful information, so I wasted no time in starting my detective work. I found out that she was single & lived in nurses quarters (taking indignant offence when I called it ‘The Smorgasbord’). She wasn’t looking for anybody right now, didn’t have a private phone line or a mobile (Yeah… right) & had never been out with an artist. She did hint that she preferred to stick to doctors & went all red when I asked if she liked sticking to them with honey. As she backed nervously to the door, I offered her one last, sage piece of advice. “Find an anaesthetist... I hear they’re real knockouts.”
I blame the drugs. Normally, they don’t run away quite so quickly.
Next, the cops. Showtime! In answer to the usual questions, my replies came down to: Nope, I hadn’t noticed anything. Come on, when you’re walking through a dark tunnel at night with a stunning woman, what are you lookin’ at? What had Kate said? Much the same as you, sir. As they left, they said they’d get back to me.
“Just so long as you can stop whoever it was doing the same.”
Fortunately I suppose, I still didn’t know enough about the true events surrounding my show-stopping performance to have fudged my story, so I was pretty sure the cops believed me. But I wanted to know more - everything in fact. Immobility hadn’t stopped Jimmy Stewart in ‘Rear Window’. Paraplegia hadn’t stopped Ironside, Quadriplegia hadn’t stopped Christopher Re… okay, so it did eventually, but a tiny hole in my body certainly shouldn’t stop me. Time to cross-examine the witnesses. Swathed in my black nightrobe, I decided to hold court.
Kate was a willing organiser, pulling out her impossibly small mobile phone & text messaging rapidly. Kim, however, true to her hermitous nature ‘sent her regards from the Queen of the Night’, or more simply ‘kissed me quick, she had to part’. It was three days before I finally remembered the two singers she’d paraphrased as she left. A lot of people complain that they’ve never met this old & close friend of mine, the more sceptical of them doubt she even exists. They should be so lucky.
A bit later when the usual suspects had turned up & the conference was in full flight, I was a tad grumpy & my shoulder hadn’t ached so much since my last visit to the Hellfire Club. There was precious little sympathy for my predicament going ’round, which forced me to complain & grimace heaps just to get the tiniest measure of the attention that flies about willy-nilly any time your maiden aunt gets a sniffle. It can be really embarrassing having to appeal for kindness in your own hospital bed... & to get little more than a perfunctory kiss on the forehead as your reward is close to galling.
Most of the guests from the party-that-never-was, had shown up. Saul & Agnetha were genuinely worried, Justin was cool, but a bit too blasé for my taste, the RedHead was downright callous & Vicki, when she finally arrived, was the only one who mothered & coddled me. I remember thinking at the time that I could be really happy if the others all went home.
Which reminds me... the real story behind how I finished up lying in a hospital bed bloodied, bandaged & bewildered, started when I was at home.
The word/phrase 'NaNoWriMo' bobbed up & I had another of my bi-monthly-or-so guilty pangs regarding the great unfinished novel, now nine years out of contention for 'Greatest Book of the Twentieth Century' & running ten years late for the publishers... whoever they might have been.
So, a bit of re-wiring & re-writing this evening & for the few curious, may I humbly present:
CHAPTER 1
(It’s My Party And I’ll Die If I Want To)
I woke up in pain. A pain that seared its way from my left shoulder down into my chest cavity, up my neck & into my skull, burning through my sinuses & eardrums in a blitzkrieg of the senses. It felt like the S.A.S. was blasting the hell out of any stray terrorists hidden in my head. Something was pressing down on me, making any movement seem like too much effort for an agonizing reward. And for god’s sake, could someone please turn all that roaring, thumping noise down? Wait a second, that thumping… it sounded like a heartbeat…. Mine. Then this wasn’t a dream & all this pain, noise &… oh shit… nausea… must really be mine! Something seriously nasty must have happened to me. What? Maybe that could wait a while. Well, the least I knew was – I was awake, therefore alive, so it can’t have been fatal. Good. In fact, great! Okay, what else? Time to crank those besieged neurons into action. I think, therefore I am... in pain. A whole lot of pain, really. Now that I was kind of conscious, various other body parts were filing damage reports. They could wait too. So, where am I? I thought that was the easiest question, so concentrated on opening my eyes while trying to ignore a strangely familiar odour.
On the third attempt, my eyes stayed open. As everything began swimming into focus, I could see that my world consisted of grey curtains & a lot of shiny metal stands with tubes hanging from them, a couple of which were attached to me. I was pressed firmly into a narrow bed by the unyielding tautness of pale, sickly blue bedclothes. That explained the peculiar aroma - only a public hospital can smell so disinfectantly clean. Hang on… hospital? What’s the old saying about waking from a bad dream into a nightmare? Frying pan into fire… bad to worse? I half expected Rod Serling to step through the curtains & welcome me to the Twilight Zone. Otherwise, I had no idea how else could I be here - stuck in some E.R. without a Chicago Hope? I resisted the urge to just close my eyes & try again later, this was too important to miss.
With the ‘where’ question taken care of, there were only ‘what’ & ‘why’ left to consider. If I was in a hospital, surrounded by trolleys & tubes, that plainly confirmed something nasty had definitely happened… to my neck & shoulder for starters. Why? Oh god, I think I had a vague notion as to why - & I didn’t want to dwell on it. Try thinking about something else. Yes. Right, ‘how’ did I get here, ‘how’ long had I been here & by the way… ‘why’ did everything hurt so much? That would probably do for the moment. I knew by now I certainly wasn’t feeling particularly hearty, but was I whole? Had I lost anything important while I’d been out?
I could see the outline of my legs stretched out under the cotton blanket, so I knew they were still attached, but why did the top half of me hurt so badly? That, I think, was the best question of the lot & one I definitely couldn’t answer on my own… I needed a lifeline, so I reached for the bedside buzzer to tell everyone within earshot that I was alive & not very well. Well, okay, I tried to do that, but quickly & painfully discovered my left hand wasn’t capable of any kind of willful movement. I could move my right hand, but it was shaking so badly that it sent tremors up my arm & into my chest, making me yell in agony & collapse back onto the pillows with the whole world spinning crazily in my skull. This was bad... Was this fatigue? Shock? Delirium? Side effects from the anaesthetic? Well, yes, yes, yes & I hoped not. But even with the new sensations from my left side still assaulting my head, I recognised a couple of these more familiar symptoms – On top of everything else, I needed a cigarette. Badly. The thought that right now possibly wasn’t the best time to light up didn’t stand a chance. Not in the face of the one thing I knew could make me feel better.
A quick eyes-only inspection of my standard-issue hospital gown showed it didn’t have any pockets. No surprises. And it didn’t take Eisenstein to figure out that, even if it did, they wouldn’t come pre-stocked with my favourite French smokes. Alone in a godless hospital, wounded & out of cigarettes. In such dire circumstances, who would take the time to bring Gitanes to a wounded soldier? Split the problem in two - who loves me enough to make me happy; or who loves me enough to make me stop smoking? Where can I find totally unconditional love & support these days? Just as I’d abandoned all hope of the Red Cross ever finding me before the Quit For Lifers did, my salvation walked in to the room all by itself.
Kate.
Any other person would have pointed out that this wasn’t a private ward & that, besides, there are supposed to be laws against this sort of thing, but not Kate. No question, no comment & I had a pack of twenty politically incorrect French lungbusters, a lighter & an ashtray within half an hour of being conscious. Immediately after, Kim arrived with another pack &, more endearingly, one of my old black nightshirts. I love my friends. Kim knew, from past experience, how much I hate the indignity of hospital gowns - a sad, pathetic piece of cloth that hospital staff bundle you into after doing whatever it is they do to you while you’re unconscious. It’s the ultimate stigma of the helpless invalid. No way was I going to be seen half-dead in one for a moment longer than necessary.
In all my eagerness to look cool in my discomfort, I’d forgotten I would need some help putting on my nightshirt... & hadn’t thought at all about how much it would hurt me doing it. It didn’t take long to remember... the slightest movement of anything on my left side was excruciating. Manfully, I stifled my screams & swearing while Kate & Kim gently untied the hospital gown & carefully threaded my arms through the black shirtsleeves, with the help of a nurse, who gave me a glass of water & two white tablets to swallow as a reward. Fast-acting painkillers I hoped - I had lots of fast-acting pain.
Like an ambushed military patrol, my memory was returning in bedraggled sections. Kate I remembered seeing very recently, but it had been a long time between drinks, or anything else, with Kim. How did she know I was here? Last time I’d seen her was almost a year ago, after a Ray Davies gig & we were not quite sober. Kim, the failed R&B singer & I, the failed artist, had then landed in some all-night Newtown pub conducting a post-mortem on the various reprobates we’d been to university with. Even the most militantly idealistic & depraved of them had, it seemed, backslid guilelessly into affluence, suburban domesticity & model citizenship. Whatever happened to the revolution? Who had won? Was I a casualty? Which brings us back to the hospital.
My pair of self-assigned antisocial workers assured me they could explain everything, which was a kind of relief. They said I’d better have my story together by the time the police arrived & since the cops had already been informed I was awake, that wouldn’t be long. Just a second… what did they mean ‘my story’? And did they mean story as opposed to truth?
Yes they did. Oh joy. Oh marvellous. Oh shit. Okay fine, I agreed to all that, but I wanted the truth first. What day was it? How long had it been since I’d been enduring the world’s longest-ever instrumental break in ‘Wake Up Little Suzie’ & was it still going? Through the past darkly came two questions: When would I get to sing another verse? Why am I falling backwards with blood going everywhere? The first one was, frankly, a moot point now, but as to the second... “Could somebody please explain exactly how I’ve woken up in here with only one & a half functioning arms?”
They looked at each other, then both started talking at once. Kim laughed & indicated that Kate should start, but I knew she wouldn’t keep quiet for long. Their tag team answer was this: that during the obligatory jam session at my party last night, I had been shot in the left shoulder (that explained all the agony), but nobody had seen whodunnit. Had I noticed anything? Stupid question... everybody was completely entranced by the band - especially the band. Being the kind of people they are, they probably wouldn’t have even noticed I’d fallen over unless I’d collapsed on whoever was soloing at the time. After I had elegantly knocked over a bookcase & hit the deck, but before chaos & panic descended, Agnetha & Margarita had taken charge of the whole shooting match. That made sense too, being the kind of people they are.
Between the two of them, they concocted a story that had only a couple of special guest appearances by the truth. First & most importantly, there had been no party that night - which would save the police interviewing people whose careers could be adversely affected by any hint of a rock’n’roll ethic. Secondly, because it would have been slightly inconvenient to have a barrage of overly-inquisitive police-persons rummaging through my recently acquired baggage (more about that later), I had instead been blasted while escorting a female friend through the tunnel under the railway between the main drag of Ashfield & my home.
The other party guests had apparently readily agreed to all of the above, none more so than Brian, the Right Honourable MP. As everybody pitched in to clear away instruments, glasses, ashtrays & the remaining chips’n’dips’n’munchies, the two women attended to part B of the plan (& it gets a bit gruesome & Teutonically efficient here, so avert your eyes if your sensibilities are of the ‘delicate’ kind). First, they ripped a couple of strips from my blood-soaked shirt, then sent Kate down to the aforementioned tunnel under the railway & had her dab & smear my precious fluids over the damp slimy bricks, which would help to give the police the completely wrong impression of me.
Meanwhile Margarita & Agnetha went doorknocking. They soon discovered that my flat contained the only signs of life in the whole building. If I hadn’t been passed out & bleeding on the floor, I could have saved them the trouble. Of the three other apartments - my landlord had been forewarned about the party & scarpered, flat 2 had been empty for months & the Indian sailors in the flat below mine were out earning an illegal income delivering junk mail. There are a million stories in The Naked City, but they wouldn’t have one to tell.
It was simple after that to evacuate my place & have Kate play the devoted friend, calling ambulances & other trivial stuff like that. For my part, I could vaguely recall some brief, unconnected sections of the ride of my life; they give you great drugs in those speeding white vans, but then… sweet oblivion. And so, here I was - my left arm immobile from shoulder to elbow & only slightly agonising to move below that, sidelined indefinitely from the great game of life. Restless, pained, dazed & confused.
Mostly because this mishmash of falsehood & fact was way too much too soon. My head started spinning again as I struggled to sort out the plain truth, the half-truth & nothing but brazen lies in order to make sure I told the right story to the right people. My only objection was that, as a matter of practice, I prefer to have more than just a glimmer of truth in any barefaced alibi I need to repeat ad infinitum to wives, lovers, mothers, doctors, police, lawyers, magistrates... those kinds of authority figures. Over-ruled.
So of course, later on, when this hastily concocted storyline I had to recite was nearly the literal death of us all, it was obviously my fault entirely.
Their duty done, Kate & Kim returned to their own conversation, which I’d rudely interrupted by waking up. I knew these two hadn’t met before, but it seemed there was already common ground established between them. I tried to follow, but the subject seemed to keep changing faster than I could handle, so gave up. Have you ever noticed how, when you’re semi-mortally wounded & surrounded by wonderful & supportive women, they end up just talking amongst themselves, forgetting why they came to your deathbed in the first place? I hate feeling superfluous. Especially around these two particular women & especially when, just for once, I deserve to be the centre of attention. A little sympathy for the devil, please... even the Guns ’n’ Roses version would do. I tried groaning. Kim turned to me. “Alas, poor Yorick!” she said as she ruffled my hair.
Kate smiled. “Methinks the laddie protesteth too much. ’Tis but a scratch sunshine.”
“Get thee to a nunnery.” Her eyes lit up at the prospect.
No one could say I didn’t try, but Kim & Kate had both seen my ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ routine before & been unimpressed the first time. I surrendered & agreed to get some rest, as long as they kept a lookout while I had a smoke first. Try getting a cigarette out of a plastic wrapped packet, into your mouth & lit with only one shaking hand. It’s not easy, but it was worth it. As blessed St Nicotine had her Gallic way with my lungs, I began to feel somewhere close to relaxed.
Even so, I still felt my two towers of strength & support should be applying their fine minds to something a little more relevant, like who shot me & why. However, this pair was much happier discussing some up & coming beachside production of ‘A Winter’s Tale’. Now there was a play you could only get me to sit through at gunpoint.
An appropriate sentiment - since just then a pyrex jar containing the bullet which the doctors had extracted from my body was ceremoniously dumped in my lap by a demure nurse with strawberry blonde hair. Here at last was someone who could provide some useful information, so I wasted no time in starting my detective work. I found out that she was single & lived in nurses quarters (taking indignant offence when I called it ‘The Smorgasbord’). She wasn’t looking for anybody right now, didn’t have a private phone line or a mobile (Yeah… right) & had never been out with an artist. She did hint that she preferred to stick to doctors & went all red when I asked if she liked sticking to them with honey. As she backed nervously to the door, I offered her one last, sage piece of advice. “Find an anaesthetist... I hear they’re real knockouts.”
I blame the drugs. Normally, they don’t run away quite so quickly.
Next, the cops. Showtime! In answer to the usual questions, my replies came down to: Nope, I hadn’t noticed anything. Come on, when you’re walking through a dark tunnel at night with a stunning woman, what are you lookin’ at? What had Kate said? Much the same as you, sir. As they left, they said they’d get back to me.
“Just so long as you can stop whoever it was doing the same.”
Fortunately I suppose, I still didn’t know enough about the true events surrounding my show-stopping performance to have fudged my story, so I was pretty sure the cops believed me. But I wanted to know more - everything in fact. Immobility hadn’t stopped Jimmy Stewart in ‘Rear Window’. Paraplegia hadn’t stopped Ironside, Quadriplegia hadn’t stopped Christopher Re… okay, so it did eventually, but a tiny hole in my body certainly shouldn’t stop me. Time to cross-examine the witnesses. Swathed in my black nightrobe, I decided to hold court.
Kate was a willing organiser, pulling out her impossibly small mobile phone & text messaging rapidly. Kim, however, true to her hermitous nature ‘sent her regards from the Queen of the Night’, or more simply ‘kissed me quick, she had to part’. It was three days before I finally remembered the two singers she’d paraphrased as she left. A lot of people complain that they’ve never met this old & close friend of mine, the more sceptical of them doubt she even exists. They should be so lucky.
A bit later when the usual suspects had turned up & the conference was in full flight, I was a tad grumpy & my shoulder hadn’t ached so much since my last visit to the Hellfire Club. There was precious little sympathy for my predicament going ’round, which forced me to complain & grimace heaps just to get the tiniest measure of the attention that flies about willy-nilly any time your maiden aunt gets a sniffle. It can be really embarrassing having to appeal for kindness in your own hospital bed... & to get little more than a perfunctory kiss on the forehead as your reward is close to galling.
Most of the guests from the party-that-never-was, had shown up. Saul & Agnetha were genuinely worried, Justin was cool, but a bit too blasé for my taste, the RedHead was downright callous & Vicki, when she finally arrived, was the only one who mothered & coddled me. I remember thinking at the time that I could be really happy if the others all went home.
Which reminds me... the real story behind how I finished up lying in a hospital bed bloodied, bandaged & bewildered, started when I was at home.
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Date: 2008-10-28 09:48 am (UTC)jaqi is a livejournal reader, not user
Date: 2008-10-29 04:25 am (UTC)