21

AT WORK THE following morning there was no sign of Wayne.

It was now ten fifteen, I was on my third patient of the day and the other clinicians were speculating as to the reason for his absence.

Absence with no explanatory call was not like Wayne.

Gary took it upon himself to phone him but could get no answer on either the mobile or landline, so after asking each of us whether we thought he should inform head office, and each of us saying no, inform them the following day if he still hadn’t turned up, he went ahead and did it.

After the events of Saturday, I wasn’t completely surprised Wayne had gone AWOL, but it was a little worrying, as it was so out of character. Wayne never missed work unless he was incapacitated by illness, and he would always call. He would leave lists of instructions for us, as though he were truly indispensable.

Where the hell was he? If I could turn up for work after what had happened, so could he.

Perhaps Wayne was thoroughly ashamed of his behaviour on Saturday and had gone on a drinking bender. Perhaps he’d be back tomorrow, looking worse for wear, full of apology.

As I said, after my bang on the head on Saturday night, my memory of leaving Wayne’s was a little hazy. I could recall him babbling, telling me repeatedly he was sorry for his actions, that he might not make it into work on Monday. He said he might need a few days to clear his head. Or at least I think he did. Now I wasn’t sure what I remembered.

I’d gone home and crashed. I didn’t need the bottle of Night Nurse, the trauma to my head inducing a solid ten hours of dreamless sleep, the like of which I couldn’t remember having since I was a teenager. I’d woken disorientated and dizzy, with little memory of the drive home, feeling relieved nonetheless that my body had taken charge, falling into such a depth of sleep that I was spared the ordeal of reliving the night at Wayne’s over and over in my head.

After a long soak in the bath, by ten o’clock the following morning my body seemed intact. My senses were functioning again and with only minimal swelling to the head and a scalp wound hidden by my hair, brunch at Petra’s hadn’t seemed such a disastrous way to finish off the weekend – all things considered.

Except now I had a date.

I had a date with the brother-in-law of the guy I was screwing for money.

I had tried, repeatedly, after agreeing to it, to worm my way out of it. But Nadine was smarting after her exchange with Scott, and the whole situation became a stand-off between the two of them. She was convinced that Scott was unfairly pigeonholing her brother, as was typical when people chose to live differently to him, and the more he tried to talk her round, the more she dug her heels in.

Also, where at first Petra had sided with Scott, in so much as she believed Nadine’s brother would be an unsuitable choice at this stage in Roz’s life, as she phrased it, she ended up doing a complete about-face, declaring, ‘Who are we to decide who’s right for her?’

Petrified of saying the wrong thing, of tripping myself up, I watched the situation unfold with increasing horror, as Scott dragged up instances of Nadine’s brother’s fecklessness.

Needless to say, with all that swimming around in my head this Monday morning, and a full patient list, I couldn’t ruminate for long on Wayne’s absence, so I left it to Gary to try to track him down.

Keith Hollinghurst groaned now as I sprung the joints of his thoracic spine. There was a spinous process – T8 – that had become perpetually lodged and proved stubborn to get moving. I climbed on to the treatment couch, straddling Keith from behind to get my full weight perpendicularly over the top of him, and pressed down through my thumbs.

After twenty pushes, Keith begged for mercy, and some air – it’s pretty impossible to take a breath when having this performed – and told me, craning his neck and puffing hard, that he had a proposition for me.

‘Not another one,’ I said, remembering the last time.

‘Hear me out. Not . . .’ and he nodded his head where the word ‘wanking’ should be, not able to bring himself to say it in the presence of a lady. ‘No more of that nonsense,’ he said guiltily.

I climbed down and washed my hands as Keith struggled with the task of turning himself over – imagine a woodlouse trying to right itself. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be long before Keith, like the humble woodlouse, would become marooned in one position and couldn’t turn over without assistance.

Once sitting, and with his breathing near normal, he told me he’d bought a small bed and breakfast at auction. ‘Daft, really,’ he said. ‘The money was burning a hole in me pocket and I bought the thing without thinking.’

I had no idea where he was going with this, and knowing Keith and his previous requests, it really could be anything. So I remained quiet.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘when I looked at it, I realized it’s going to be hell to staff. You gotta live on site with those things, or else they don’t make money . . .’

He started to cough at this point. Big, hacking coughs.

I handed him a wad of tissues and waited as he hawked up the phlegm. This took three growls and another long spate of coughing. Without comment, or even a flicker of disdain, I passed him the bin to drop in his deposit of soiled tissue.

On first qualifying as a physiotherapist, each clinician rotates between departments to accrue a wide base of knowledge and to give them some idea of the area in which they would like to specialize. It was on one such placement, respiratory care, that I developed my poker face, used for dealing with such stomach-turning situations as the removal of Keith’s phlegm.

The woman was a tiny bird-like thing, as most chronic bronchitis patients are – the sheer amount of energy needed for breathing, to get the air into their compromised lungs, tends to use up calories faster than they can ingest them. Her chest rattled like an old Ewbank as she spooned tomato soup into her mouth. Beside her was her sputum pot. Each respiratory-care patient had one to spit their secretions into, and it was my job to check the colour of them every few hours for signs of infection, blood and other nasties. With her glazed eyes fixed on the TV hanging from a bracket high in the corner of the room, I watched as she dipped her bread into the sputum pot, twice, before chewing on it thoughtfully.

Anyway, all this to say, I was not totally grossed out, as most would be by Keith in this instance, and was genuinely interested in what he had to say next.

He dabbed at his eyes. ‘I’ve got builders in there at the moment, tearing the place apart.’

‘What are you planning to do with it?’

‘Offices,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want one.’

I waited.

‘Not on a lease,’ he said. ‘Just month-to-month rent. All bills included except phone. There’ll be a downstairs toilet and space for your punters to wait in the hallway.’

‘How much?’

‘Seven hundred a month. But I’ll waive the first two months’ rent, let you get on your feet, if you treat me for free when I need it.’

‘You would do that?’

‘You’ve always seen me right, Roz. And I know you don’t like it how Laughing Boy out there’s always got his eye on you, ­controlling your every move.’

‘You mean Wayne?’

‘You could work for yourself again, love,’ he went on. ‘Be your own boss. What do you say?’

I did a quick sum in my head. With what Keith was offering, overheads deducted, I could increase my weekly wage by around thirty per cent. That was as long as I didn’t screw up again.

‘I’d say thank you, Keith,’ my voice catching as I spoke his name. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

And he smiled broadly.

‘Grand,’ he said. He touched my shoulder affectionately, as he could see I was tearing up. Then he gave me a firm pat, the way you would a Welsh Cob you were particularly fond of. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘That’s my girl. It’ll be yours to move into in a month.’