— How has he deteriorated?
— I’d rather not say, but he poured the kettle all over his trousers. He probably wanted to get a stain out of the trousers, she adds as an afterthought.
But the doctor isn’t listening.
— So you witnessed it?
The doctor exits the least comprehensive interview with a family member of his career and nods to another.
— Nothing doing, he says. We’ll have to have his hearing tested to rule out mutism.
~ ~ ~
Martin John is in his hospital bed and opposite is a new woman who wants only to hear about Beirut. He has found her. They lie on corresponding sides of the ward and exchange words throughout the day and night on an ever circling/recycling loop. Beirut and the dogs and the shoes and the women and the bread and Beirut and back.
It’s lovely, he thinks. And then it ends.
She does come back. The woman. And she goes again or maybe it is that he goes? Somebody goes.
His mother comes back, but her visits are interrupted by all the travel required. Mam leans down to his ear by the blanket and hisses.
— You’re a filthy creep.
She may or may not have said they were going to execute him. It was hard to hear because someone down the ward was yelling and that bed over there with the yeller was suddenly surrounded.
The woman in the bed opposite is brilliant. She shouts that mam is trying to kill him.
One night she crawls in beside him.
Her feet aren’t even cold.
They lie there. He rigid.
They stare up. They don’t look at each other.
Really.
Her feet are not cold because she is wearing socks.
A nurse discovers her.
I wasn’t here, I wasn’t there, she says.
Neither here nor there is where she was.
Martin John keeps his eyes shut.
Until it passes.
He doesn’t like Meddlers.
The nurse smells like a Meddler.
The woman was only visiting is all.
Was it strange?
It mighta been.
The visiting woman is stirring Meddlers.
Martin John does not like Meddlers.
He moves a pillow to the side of each ear like barricades to keep the Meddlers back.
How to keep the woman back who brings the Meddlers?
The next time the woman opposite visits him in his bed it is even stranger. Very strange altogether.
He doesn’t like it.
— Nurse, nurse, she’s in my bed, he shouts. Get her out.
— What are you shouting about? the nurse says.
— Get her out, he says.
— There’s no one in your bed. Stop, would you, before you wake the other patients.
The nurse says if he isn’t going to go to sleep, she’s going to have to put him to sleep. Or did he mishear her?
Martin John, again, finds the woman opposite him on the ward in his bed.
— There isn’t enough room, he protests.
Nonetheless she rolls in beside him, shoving him over.
She asks him questions this time.
Questions he is tired of answering.
She is very interested in Beirut.
Perhaps a bit too interested.
We don’t know yet, he thinks. We don’t know what way she’s going to go. We don’t know whom she may be in touch with.
He doesn’t answer.
She calls out again.
Can you hear me Beirut?
The woman across from him is brilliant.
The problem is she attracts Meddlers.
She is brilliant until she visits him in bed.
Until she attracts Meddlers.
Martin John does not like Meddlers.
He has made mistakes.
But he has never liked Meddlers.
That’s a fact.
The woman in the opposite bed must stop bringing Meddlers.
Her Meddlers are a problem.
Martin John tells her this.
Very loudly.
He tells her this after she has told mam she is going to kill her for the way she’s treating Martin John.
Mam is very nervous and leaves the ward.
People surround the bed.
Both beds.
She has done it now, Martin John thinks.
She had brought Meddler Bedlam upon them.
She has brought Meddlers to their pillows and to peer inside their eye sockets. He can’t help her now, he thinks.
She’s gone too far.
She’s too far gone.
Martin John is removing his pyjama bottoms and walking about the ward with only his top on, allowing his bits to be wobbly and loose below.
At first the other patients suggest he’s forgotten his trousers. Then the man in the bed who once went to Spain says, Put your fucking trousers on, I don’t want to look at your cock.
~ ~ ~
“Mate, you alright?” Silence.
The police have a problem. The suspect lies curled below, by the wheels of the train, wrapped around them. They can only see the back of his head and neck. His legs are under the carriage.
Who let him down there?
How to get him up?
~ ~ ~
“Mate you can’t be down there. So I need you to come up.”
Silence.
“If you are not going to come up we’ll have to come down and get you.”
Martin John has wedged himself, somehow, no one watching entirely sure how, below on the track by the train wheels. He looks to be underneath the train, but a part of him is showing. Enough to indicate: A man is down here.
“Mate, can you hear me? If you can hear me, wave your hand.”
Silence.
For Martin John, where there are police there may also be firemen.
The police are gathering pace, unrolling Tactic Number Two.
“There are a lot of people on this train who want to get to Wales to catch a boat. The longer you stay down there the more likely they’ll miss it.”
Silence.
He’s lying. The copper is lying. Martin John knows you have to change in Nuneaton. What sort of an eejit do they take him to be? The only prick that wouldn’t know that would be Baldy Conscience. Baldy probably told them that Martin John’s a simple fella, maybe a backward fella. Maybe a fella who doesn’t know stuff, the sorta fella who watches the Eurovision. He knows stuff. He knows things that you don’t even know. He knows the fucken train timetables backwards.
The police seem to think Martin John is making a suicide pitch.
He is making no such thing.
He is down here because his circuits were interrupted.
He is down here because they have not taken his charges against Baldy Conscience seriously.
He is down here because he is fed up with the metal bedside table in the hospital ward, where they have been keeping him since the firemen, knee abrasions and the tip-slip.
But most of all he is down here on account of that nun he met 15 minutes ago, and it did not work out well between the two of them. It’s the nun’s fault.
There’s some confusion over Baldy Conscience being the nun. They are not clever, these police officers. I mean, how, with her habit, would you even begin to tell if a nun was a Baldy Conscience?