the time I reach Highbury amp; Islington station I’m wheezing audibly and my lungs are burning with pain. It’s nothing compared to the excruciating torture going on in my thighs, which haven’t had to pump so hard since some dim and distant school sports day. This agony, in turn, fades into insignificance next to the paroxysms of pain firing off in my hand. I look down at it. It’s so red and sticky with blood that I can’t make out where it’s cut. I try to flex it, but nearly pass out with the effort. I’d throw up again if it weren’t for the fact that Kate Moss is already wearing my guts on her cleavage.
As the pain recedes slightly it strikes me that there is virtually no movement in my ring and little fingers.
Something else hits me—where the hell is my jacket?
friday 21 november / 2.03 a.m.
I arrive at Saint Matthew’s only eight hours early for my appointment.
But I’m not here to see Doctor Morrissey.
This is Aamp;E.
I walked, of course.
All the way from N1 to E11.
My wallet and my tube pass were in my jacket.
It was a slow, freezing walk, every step jarring fresh pain into my fingers. Despite the agony I didn’t want to come to the hospital. No, I wanted to crawl home to bed in the hope that half a night’s sleep would somehow set things right. Bed is where I’d be now if halfway across Hackney Marshes I hadn’t realised that my front door keys had been in—where else?—my jacket.
I read in the Standard that this is Britain’s busiest casualty department. Apparently it boasts the longest waiting times and the most assaults on staff, and the doctors here know nearly as much about tweezering bullets from crack-crazed gangstas as the guys on ER. Seems I’ve caught the place on a quiet night though—not a single lurching drunk with a pint glass embedded in his head at a jaunty angle. Even so, I’m told that I’ll have to wait at least an hour.
I sit down on a chilly perforated steel bench and watch a girl drop some coins into a vending machine. She waits a moment before pulling out a Styrofoam cup of steaming liquid. She cradles it in her hands and walks it to the bench facing mine. I watch the vapour rise from the cup and—even though it’s almost certainly whatever the NHS passes off as coffee, and by definition undrinkable—I want it.
I’ve never felt so cold in my life. The ambient temperature in Aamp;E would be comfortable enough in normal circumstances, but my body is so iced up that I’d need to sit in an industrial bread-oven to have any hope of bringing warmth to my bones. Right now a cup of whatever passes for coffee represents my only chance of raising my temperature. I stare at the girl. She’s vaguely familiar. But she has long purple hair and the grime-encrusted look of homelessness. All my acquaintances have addresses and hair colour that passes as natural—even when it isn’t. But she does look familiar. I dismiss it—probably gave her a quid once outside the station. She takes a tentative sip from her cup. Her caution isn’t surprising—she has a ring through her bottom lip, which must make drinking hot beverages an ongoing hazard. I’ve always wondered about body piercing. Doesn’t it compromise everyday activities? Things like eating, peeing, sex, breast-feeding, navel de-fluffing and walking unhindered through airport metal detectors. Or, for that matter, getting work. All those rivets would surely hinder her prospects of a job in…say…account management at…for example…Blower Mann/DBA. She peers back at me through the gaps in the lank curtain of fringe, and…Is that a sneer? She must be reading my mind. And if she’s thinking, God, not long past thirty and already he’s thinking like his mother, well, I wouldn’t blame her.
She takes another sip of her steaming coffee-style beverage.
I so want some of that.
Hang on. Not everything was in my jacket. Haven’t I got some money in my trousers? I shake my legs gently and experience a wonderful sensation. Chinking change. I stand up and reach my left arm across my body in an attempt to feed my hand into my right pocket. Left hand to right pocket is a manoeuvre that I suspect even a bendy Mongolian contortionist would have to think about—a knackered and stiff-with-cold me doesn’t have a prayer. I look at my bloody right hand and wonder if it’s up to it. I have no choice but to try so I gingerly feed it in. I’ve got no further than an inch when I feel a jolt of pain as my little finger catches the lip of the pocket. I try to strangle the Aagh!, but I’m too late. The admissions clerk doesn’t look up from his computer, but the girl does and she calls out, ‘You OK?’ I nod my head, but I guess I don’t look too happy because she adds, ‘Wanna hand?’ I shake my head and look down at my pocket—there must be a way of getting in there.
This is like a rubbish ‘based on a true story’ TV movie; Luke Perry and the bloke who used to be Pa Walton as rescue workers standing at a cave entrance, post-landslide.
Luke: There must be a way of getting in there.
Pa Walton: We gotta find it, son. If we don’t rescue the change from Murray’s pocket there’s no tellin’ how long the guy will hold out.
Luke: I got it! You can get the chopper to drop me on his waistband and I can abseil down from a belt loop.
Pa Walton: That’s pure crazy. No one’s ever made a climb like that…and lived.
‘Whatever it is, you ain’t gonna get it with that hand.’
I look up. It isn’t Luke or Pa Walton. The studded girl is in front of me.
‘It doesn’t matter—it’s only some change,’ I mumble.
‘Let me,’ she says and she thrusts her hand where no girl has been since…I was going to say Megan, but, actually, Doctor Morrissey was fumbling around my groin only eight days ago. Her hand, though, wasn’t decorated with weeping scabs and a tattoo of what looks like a cod.
Moments later it re-emerges from my pocket clutching nine or ten one pound coins, a fifty-pence piece, two tens and assorted coppers. ‘If you were gonna get a coffee with this, don’t bother,’ she says. ‘It tastes like a rat pissed it out.’
‘As long as it’s hot I don’t care too much.’
I reach out for the money.
‘It’s OK, I’ll get it. Milk? Sugar?’
2.56 a.m.
She’s eighteen. She has ambitions. She wants to be a tattooist. Or a psychiatric nurse. Or an environmental terrorist. Or a model. Or a contestant on Big Brother. Or a bus driver. Or—truly fanciful, this one—a long-haul flight attendant (‘ Chicken or Beef? Nah, don’t bother, mate—they both taste like a rat shat it out.’) But she’s between jobs at the moment. She loves dogs but not cats, ecstasy but not acid and The Matrix though not the sequels. And she stinks. BO, KFC, Bamp;H, Woodpecker and—ever so faintly—piss all jostle for my nose’s attention. She smells because she hasn’t had a bath or, I suspect, a change of clothes for some time. This is because she lives in a squat in a condemned tower block on the Cathall estate in Leytonstone.
I
