Crackle and Tamara didn’t understand the words the tall posh doctor used when he told them what was wrong with Storme. But after he’d finished talking, when he said to them both, “Do you understand?” they said, “Yes.”
“Is there anything you’d like to ask me?” he said.
They looked at each other and then looked at him and said, “No.”
“Perhaps you’d like to go and have a cup of tea?” He wanted them out of the way. He couldn’t bear the stench of them in the small hot room. He was disgusted by their stupidity. He knew, almost for certain, that the child’s injuries were non-accidental. He had already informed the police. “There’s a cafeteria downstairs. She should be out of theatre by half-past seven.”
“Two hours,” said Tamara.
There was a big clock with severe black hands on the wall of the Parents’ Room.
Congratulations, you can tell the bloody time, thought Mr Parker-Wright who was the father of Julian, Felix, Harriet and Jessica. All of whom, at that very moment, were at music practice in the dining room of the Georgian house his wife kept so beautifully. He would miss their bedtime again. He went to the door and held it open for Crackle and Tamara. Obediently they got up off the hard sofa which doubled as a bed at night, and walked out into the corridor. They passed the room where Storme was being prepared for exploratory surgery and were steered to the lift by Mr Parker-Wright.
“So if we need you, we’ll find you…?”
“We’ll be downstairs,” said Crackle.
♦
He couldn’t wait to get outside. The heat was killing him. He was sweating under his leather, and he was desperate for a fag. When the lift door closed he battered the large ‘No Smoking’ sign with his fist.
“Fucking stupid!” he said. “Just when you need a fag, when your kid’s filled up with tubes, you can’t have one.”
Tamara couldn’t get the picture out of her mind. The one where Storme was lying on a high cot, wearing no clothes, with a thick tube that looked like a vacuum-cleaner hose in her mouth, and other see-through tubes in her nose and wrists. The nappy-rash sores looked scarlet next to the pure white sheet on which she had been laid. The brightness of the overhead light illuminated the accumulated grime on her body. And she could see now that, apart from the big green bruise, there were other bruises; smaller and in the pastel colour range. Tamara had watched Mr Parker-Wright counting these bruises. He handled Storme’s body as gently as a man taking fragile eggs from a nest. They wouldn’t allow Tamara inside the room because of the germs, but they allowed her to look through a window in the door.
Occasionally the staff nurse and the other nurses would straighten up from their work on Storme, and look at her. Tamara wished that they would smile, but their faces were set hard, which wasn’t fair because she was the mother of a baby who needed an emergency operation. Crackle couldn’t bring himself to look through the window, he was too sensitive.
♦
Every pale, wooden table in the cafeteria displayed a small Perspex sign which said, “This is a non-smoking table.”
Crackle said, “Fuck it, I’m going over the road.”
Tamara followed behind as Crackle plunged angrily into the labyrinth of corridors, looking for an exit. She knew the way out, but she dared not tell him, fearing the explosion of rage that she knew was coming. Mr Parker-Wright had spoken to him with the utmost courtesy, but had managed at the same time to convey the message that he thought Crackle was a total moron.
Tamara knew that Crackle was clever, he could read and write, and he knew a lot of things about the world. Rivers and South Africa, and music and Dennis Wheatley, the man who wrote the books Crackle kept by the bed. When they eventually got outside Crackle threw her a cigarette, which she failed to catch. It dropped on to the snow and he called her a ‘stupid cunt’ and hit her on the side of her head. But the blow didn’t hurt her much and it wasn’t on her face, so there wouldn’t be a bruise. She dried her tears when they got to Veronica’s Cafe.
“I love you so much,” she said to him, just before he pushed open the door.