Mr Parker-Wright was rather pleased that it was his turn to choose the music. He didn’t fancy operating on the poor little tot to anything jolly. He chose Bach: the suites for unaccompanied cello. The acoustics were superb in the operating theatre. It was all those hard surfaces. He’d had a good sound system installed at his own expense. It made the work, much of it routine, tolerable. The bureaucrats who now ran the hospital didn’t like it. He’d had a memo saying it was ‘setting a precedent’. He’d laughed and pinned it next to his year planner where a formidable number of working days were marked with red stars.
He knew that he was revered and even loved by both his staff and his patients. One complete wall of his office was covered in thank-you notes and children’s drawings. It was well known that he had a sweet tooth. A drawer in the office filing cabinet was full of boxes of liquorice allsorts, his particular favourites.
As the sonorous notes of the cello reverberated around the theatre, he took a scalpel and opened up Storme’s abdomen. “Spleen’s ruptured,” he said to his team. “I’ll take that nasty old thing out for you, my darling,” he said to Storme. “You won’t miss it.”
As he worked he hummed along with the cello. He knew every note. When the tape stopped there was silence, apart from the sound of the machines that were keeping Storme alive. There was none of the repartee that usually enlivened Mr Parker-Wright’s operating sessions. He opened her skull and saw that there was fresh bleeding and clots on her brain. “See,” he said savagely to Storme. “That’s what you do when you fall out of your cot.” Then he controlled himself and said quietly, “They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.”
His surgical registrar said, smilingly, “And I’d always thought you were so liberal and humane, Jack.”
Mr Parker-Wright smiled back and said, “Oh, but I am, I am, except on the question of eugenics. I’m with Hitler on that one.”
Afterwards, when Storme had been taken to the recovery room, and Mr Parker-Wright had gone to phone his wife, opinion was divided between those of his team who believed the eugenics remark and those who thought he’d been making one of his infamous black jokes.
♦
Tamara wanted to return to the hospital as soon as she’d finished her coffee, but Crackle didn’t see the point of hanging around in there.
“There’s nothing we can do, is there?” he said.
“No, I know, but I just want to be there, Crack,” she said. She scraped flakes of black varnish from her fingernails using the long thumbnail of her right hand. Crackle watched her irritably. She looked a right dog tonight, he thought. Her spots were showing through that white shit she put on her face. And she’d got too thin; she was a bag of bones, apart from her belly.
From where he was sitting in the café he could see the prison where Bilko, his best friend in all the world was. And if he turned his head, he could see the hospital where his little daughter was having an operation. His eyes filled with tears. Nothing ever went right for him, not for long.
“Shall I phone my dad and tell him?” Tamara had already got a twenty-pence piece in her hand.
“No.”
“I ought to tell him. He worships her.”
“He’ll be pissed by now. I don’t want him at the hospital pissed.”
Tamara put the twenty-pence piece back in her pocket.
Crackle stared down into his coffee cup and mentally catalogued his problems.
He owed £750 to Neville’s Motors for a car which he’d crashed after three days because the brakes failed him on a tight bend. Then there was the poll tax and the council tax. Fuck knows how much that was. Then there was Kerry—a girl in Nottingham who reckoned he was the father of the kid she was expecting. But it couldn’t be him because he’d only shagged her twice! He’d heard his brother was looking for him and threatening to kick his head in over the money he’d borrowed. Then he was up in court on December 22nd for driving whilst disqualified, no tax, no insurance, which everybody did. So why was he the only one stopped by the police? He didn’t even have the poxy car no more. There were other things: he’d missed two appointments with his probation officer and the social were on his back. They’d found out he was living with Tamara. He’d stopped opening their letters. They were in a pile on top of the telly with other important documents like Storme’s birth certificate and the lottery tickets. Then there was the crack.
He was sick of his life.
Crackle wondered what Bilko was doing right now. Was he in his cell or was he having a laugh with some of his mates on the wing? Crackle was almost aggrieved that he’d never been sent to prison. It was humiliating to be given a community service order. Digging the garden at a hostel for loonies wasn’t a proper punishment. He wanted a man’s punishment. He’d done some bad things in his time. For two weeks he’d done the water scam, telling old people that he’d got to turn the water off in their bathroom, and nicking stuff out their bedrooms. They always kept their valuable stuff and their money in their bedside drawers. The stupid fuckers deserved to have it took off ‘em.
He’d only done it for two weeks because on the Friday of the second week he’d been caught by an old woman. He’d told her to turn both the taps on in the kitchen and wait until he called her to turn them off, but she’d grassed him up and called the police. He’d heard her shouting down the phone; she was deaf. She’d told him on the doorstep he’d have to speak up. He hadn’t meant to knock into her in the hallway; she got in the way. It made him feel bad when he saw her picture in the paper. Her name was Mrs Iris Knott and she was eighty-five. Crackle couldn’t work out how her face had got in such a mess; she must have fell on something. He would never hit an old lady. He wasn’t an animal like it said in the paper. Further down the page, after Crackle’s description, Mrs Knott had appealed to the thief for the return of her engagement ring. She’d worn it for sixty-seven years and had only taken it off because she had lost weight, and she was afraid that it would slip off her finger. Crackle had seriously thought about giving the ring back to her, but how would he get it to her? He couldn’t remember the number of the road she lived on, and anyway it was worth nothing, he’d only got fifteen quid for it. She shouldn’t have put it in the bedside-table drawer. Old people should be warned. The government should do it, thought Crackle.
Tamara scraped her chair back and stood up. “Two hours is gone,” she said.
“Sit down,” said Crackle.
“Please, Crack,” said Tamara. But she sat down. She knew Crackle liked to make the first move in anything. He warned her about it when they first got together. The first move and the last word.
While she waited for him she looked out of the window at the hospital. She could just about see it through the falling snow.
♦
Waiting for them in the corridor at the hospital, next to the room where Storme lay in a tangle of tubes and wires, was a social worker, Kevin McDuff, and a policewoman, PC Billings. Mr Parker-Wright brought everybody into his office and informed Crackle and Tamara that it was his clinical opinion that Storme’s injuries were non-accidental.
“Are you sayin’ we done it?”
Crackle was outraged.
“I’m saying somebody did it. Somebody bigger and stronger than a fourteen-month-old child. There are two old fractures. Do you want to see the X-rays?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he pulled an X-ray from a buff-coloured folder and slapped it up against a brightly lit box on the wall.
“She would have sustained this one,” he pointed to one of Storme’s X-rayed ribs, “when she was about four months old, and this one,” he indicated the bone in her upper arm, “about three months later. She would have been in considerable pain. She must have cried…” He looked from Crackle to Tamara and waited.
“She did used to cry a lot,” said Tamara. “I used to give her Calpol.”
“The mother’s friend,” said Mr Parker-Wright ironically. Kevin McDuff nodded in recognition. “Calpol is a liquid sedative,” he explained to PC Billings, whom he assumed, from the set of her jaw, to be childless. “We quite often find our mothers slipping it to their little ones, in here.”
But she said, “I know all about Calpol. I used it myself when mine were teething.”
Crackle said, “So, what’s happening then?”
Mr Parker-Wright said, “As Storme’s consultant I am formally advising Mr McDuff here and PC Billings that you and your partner are not to be allowed any kind of access to Storme whilst she is in my care in this hospital.”
Crackle shouted, “You can’t do that!”
Mr Parker-Wright continued, “She is a very poorly little girl and right now, she is actually fighting for her life.”
“I love the ground that kid walks on,” said Crackle. He had tears in his eyes again. Now the bastards were preventing him from seeing his kid.
Tamara said, “I’ve never hit her hard, just a little smack when she’s been naughty; playing with the electric…” Her voice trailed away into teary incomprehensibility.
PC Billings said, “Who did it to her, Tamara? If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
Tamara put her head down on Mr Parker-Wright’s desk and closed her eyes and covered her ears. The bad thing that she always knew would come one day had arrived.