‘You an incredibly lucky somebody.’
‘You could of died.’
‘But Floyd saved your life.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
‘Ja, they would of come back to finish you off if it wasn’t for Floyd.’
It made no sense to me that he should have leapt to my defence after what had happened. But it seemed crystal clear to them. Errol, dusting a confetti of shiny glass from his padded shoulders, said: ‘You a puss, Churl — but you one of our boys. Leave it or lump it.’
Hunky Dory reappeared. ‘I called 911 and wah-wah-wah,’ he declared, which was his way of saying that he’d summoned an ambulance.
*
The ambulance men put Floyd on a breadboard, for the spine, they said, and wrapped him in aluminium foil like a garlic loaf, for the shock. He looked smaller than usual. They carried him out through the glass doors. Incongruously, I thought of Merle. I saw her packaged by the undertakers, stuffed into a fluffy brown bag with a zipper up the front, like an oversized slipper. The idea was suffocating.
There was a muddle on the landing outside as they bundled the stretcher onto the escalator. In the midst of it all stood Wessels, with the silver boater on his head, swinging his crutch imperatively and bawling out instructions. His face had been rather inexpertly polished, except for the chin, which was as shiny as a toecap. The sight of me seemed to enrage him.
‘It won’t help to have a long white face,’ he said. ‘If you truly sorry for what you done, you can make yourself useful. Go with to the hospital.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I say it might help to have a white face along.’
What relevance this had, seeing that I myself was as black as the ace of spades, was beyond me. In any event, I had no wish to go about in public looking like a greasepainted minstrel. I turned away and watched the ambulance men descend towards the pavement with their burden. The ghouls had gathered, crowding around the open doors of the ambulance, trying to catch a glimpse of Floyd.
Then Wessels stuck the crutch in the small of my back and thrust me bodily onto the escalator.
In my younger days I might have vaulted clear, like that daredevil in the tartan underpants; but when a man of my age finds himself upon a ‘moving staircase’, he moves with it, willy-nilly. I descended. A distracting consideration echoed in my mind: could one be carried downwards by an escalator? Strictly speaking. The very normality of the distraction reassured me that I had come to my senses. De-escalation. The sort of ugly back-formation that would be in the book on top of the cistern. Along with the sayings of sailors and whores. Anything goes.
I had every intention of returning to the fray. It was not as if I could be ‘bounced’ from the Café Europa, especially not by Wessels. I would go straight up again, I would take hold of his foliose lapels and shake him until his epiglottis rattled. Didymus. Skeuomorph. Jughead. Imagine quaffing the contents of that bonce — that watery pap! Point made, I would track down Moçes, the hero of the moment, and thank him for his help. A small reward might be in order. And then I would retrieve ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ and leave the whole lot of them to the mess they were in. That ersatz eighth edition could stay where it was, at the mouth of the sewer. I had every intention … But on the pavement, I bumped into the improvable girl, clambering into the ambulance. The child looked quite lost against a backdrop of cheerful onlookers. Evidently, the sight of a broken crown tickled them.
‘What are you doing out here?’
‘I’m going with Floyd to Casualty.’
‘Where’s his girlfriend?’
‘She won’t come. She says he’s just being pathetic and he’s not going to spoil her bash with his nonsense.’
My heart went out to her. She must have sensed it, because she began to plead with me to accompany her. I felt my resolve weaken. I should do the decent thing. Who else could be relied upon? Dimly, I couldn’t help wondering whether I had played some part in this fiasco. Floyd’s bloody head rolled over on the pallet. The wound was like the flesh of an olive peeled away from the pip. The doctors might give him a talking-to while they were stitching him up. Perhaps it would all work out for the best.
An ambulance man nearly saved my bacon by holding up a bloodstained rubber glove. ‘You can’t come with. Only the wife in the ambliance.’
But the girl said, ‘He’s my father-in-law’ — as if that were within the bounds of possibility — grabbed me by the arm, and before I knew it, they had hauled me aboard and slammed the door behind me. The sirens broke into a Hunky-Doryish melody.
‘I’ve never been in an ambulance,’ she said.
‘Neither have I. Strong as an ox.’
She smelt of watermelons. It reminded me of the watermelon feasts of my youth.
And then Floyd groaned: ‘You gotta stand by me, Mr T. Don’t let me die, man. Don’t let me die.’
*
I had a funny turn on the way to the hospital.
It started with my crooked reflection looking back at me from the shiny surface of some piece of equipment. Crank. An eccentric person, especially one obsessed by a particular theory. See cranky. Perhaps from obsolete crank, rogue feigning sickness. I was sick. I belonged in an ambliance. I should lie down on the other stretcher. Flawless backflip with a double twist to crank, part of an axle or shaft bent at right angles. From crincan, related to cringan, fall in battle, originally ‘curl up’. I was bent. Twisted in the wrong place. Crinkum-crankum. I needed straightening out. Ortho — as in orthopaedic, orthographic — from the Greek orthos, straight. ‘You’re so straight.’ I moved myself backwards and forwards, watching my shape deform around the elbow in a silver tube. My head distended into a soggy melon, elongated impossibly, like a blob of molasses on the end of a spoon, until it suddenly flowed around the bend and stretched my neck into a long thin string. Just as my head was about to detach itself entirely and plummet, I moved slightly, causing my shoulders to swell up and flow after it in a rush. An abrupt constriction in the chest. My recent past, unsavoury to the last morsel, churned in my stomach and threatened to revisit the outside world.
The girl put her hand on my arm. Her voice was sweetly scented, candy-striped in flavours of green, it came close to my ear. ‘Are you okay, Phil?’
Jesus Theodosius Christ. I drew her attention to the shape of my head.
‘Lie down. They won’t mind.’ A confirming glance at the ambulance men, solicitous phantoms in a miasma of Old Spice and congealed regulations.
She pushed me back, and soft and melting as I was, I keeled over on my side. The canvas stretcher was red, and so was the rubber sheet, and the blanket. Sensible choice. My feet got left behind on the floor, and she picked them up like a pair of shoes, very professionally, I thought, and put them on the end of the stretcher. Long practice, probably, with a drunken father. Harvey Wallbanger, everyone’s pal.
Floyd was trying to speak, but they had clamped an oxygen mask over his jaw. Blood welled in his crizzy hair, and one of the ambulance men swabbed it with the tea cosy. Blood was dripping out of the aluminium foil too, around the waist, and splashing the leg of the girl’s jeans. I tried to raise my arm to point it out, but it was glued to the stretcher.
Lava lamps. Never had the temerity to buy one. I used to see them in the display window of the Okay Bazaars in Eloff Street, on the way home from Posts and Telecommunications. What was that substance? It always seemed to be red. Was it magma? Magma come louder. Magda. Merle. Mazda. Bogey. Bonsma. Organs suspended in … that other substance the lava was floating in … Amniotic fluid? Glycerine? Oil. Muddy Waters. Meltdown in my overheated brainpan, my head full of words, my prolix crackpate, my derivations running into one another. The sump. The sumptuous. The crankcase. I am not the crankcase, I am the crank itself. I have been moulded into a shape that was once useful, but is useful no more. I saw the crank. It looked like an S fallen flat on its face. A proofreader’s mark: transpose. Cause to change places. Change the natural or the existing order or position of. The crank was made of hardened steel, and it was lying in a crankcase made of oak and lined with velvet. The velvet was blue, midnight blue. And the crank was me, that rigidly mortised form, that stiff. I was lying in my casket the way I prefer to lie in my bed, on my side, with my knees drawn up and my hands clasped between them. I was lying like that now; the rubber sheet that cleaved to my cheek smelt of methylated spirits. My stomach heaved.