There was correspondence in Martin’s files as well (“Thank you so much for your letter. I’m so glad you like the Nina Riley books. Best wishes,Alex Blake”). Perhaps the strangers pissing themselves with laughter would find his address and return the laptop to him. Or perhaps they would come to his house and steal everything else he had. Or perhaps a car would run over the laptop, crush its mysterious motherboard, warp its plasma screen.
The Peugeot driver was conscious and quite lucid now. He had a fierce-looking lump on his temple, as if an egg were buried beneath the skin. “My Good Samaritan,” he said to the female paramedic, nodding in Martin’s direction. “Saved my life.”
“Really?” the paramedic said, unsure whether to believe such hyperbole. The Peugeot driver was wrapped in a large white cotton cellular blanket like a baby. He struggled to remove his arm from the swaddling and extended it toward Martin. “Paul Bradley,” he said, and Martin shook his hand and said, “Martin Canning.” He was careful not to squeeze the Peugeot driver’s hand too hard in case it would cause him more pain but then worried that his handshake might seem wimpish. Martin’s father, Harry, was firm on the matter of manly introductions (“You’re not a fucking limp-wristed Mary-Ellen-shake hands like a man”). He needn’t have worried. Paul Bradley’s surprisingly small, smooth hand gripped with the vicelike efficiency of an automaton’s.
Martin hadn’t touched another human being for months, except accidentally, taking change from a cashier in the supermarket, holding Richard Mott over the toilet bowl one night while he vomited up an evening’s worth of alcohol. He had helped an old woman onto a bus a week ago and had been surprised by how he’d been moved by the touch of her weightless, papery hand.
“You look like you should be lying here, not me,” Paul Bradley said. “You’re white as a sheet.”
“Am I?” He did feel distinctly weak.
“It was a nasty incident by the sound of it,” the paramedic said. “Incident”-that was what one of the policewomen had called the road rage. “We’ll need to take a statement about the incident, sir.” A nice neutral word, almost like “innocent.” Perhaps he could use it for what had happened to him. “Oh, yes, well, when I was in Russia there was this unfortunate incident…”
When they entered the A and E, a receptionist asked Martin for the Peugeot driver’s details, and Martin realized he had already forgotten the man’s name. The Peugeot driver had been wheeled off into the hinterland of the ward, and the receptionist gave Martin a teacher’s look and said, “Well, could you find out? And get an address and a next of kin as well.”
Martin went looking for the Peugeot driver and found him in a curtained cubicle, where a nurse was taking his blood pressure. “Sorry,” Martin whispered, “just need his details.” The Peugeot driver tried to sit up and was pushed gently down by the nurse.
“Take my wallet out of my jacket, mate,” the Peugeot driver said from his prone position. A black leather jacket was hanging on a metal-framed chair in the corner, and Martin reached gingerly into the inside pocket and retrieved a wallet. It felt oddly intimate to be searching through someone else’s pockets, like a reluctant thief. The jacket was an expensive, buttery leather- lambskin, Martin guessed-and he had to stifle a desire to slip it on and feel what it would be like to be someone else. He waved the wallet at the nurse to show that he had it, that he was innocent of all trickery, and she gave him a nice smile. “Shall I look after your bag?” he asked the Peugeot driver. The bag, a holdall, had traveled with them in the ambulance, and the Peugeot driver said, “Cheers,”which Martin took to be acquiescence. The holdall looked almost empty but was surprisingly heavy.
The receptionist rifled efficiently through the Peugeot driver’s wallet. Paul Bradley was thirty-seven years old, and he lived in north London. He had a driver’s license, a wad of twenty-pound notes, and a rental agreement with Avis for the Peugeot. Nothing else, no credit card, no photographs, no scraps of paper with phone numbers scrawled on them, no receipts or ticket stubs. No sign of a next of kin. Martin offered himself for the role and the receptionist said, “You didn’t even know his name,” but nonetheless wrote down “Martin Canning” on the form.
“Church of Scotland?” she asked, and Martin said, “He’s English. Better put Church of England.” He wondered if there was a Church of Wales. He’d never heard of one.
The hospital was more like a station or an airport than a hospital, people stopping off on their way somewhere rather than being there for a reason. There was a café and a shop that was like a small supermarket. There was no indication that there might be sick people anywhere.
He took a seat in a waiting room. He supposed he would have to see it through now. He read the whole of a Period Homes magazine and a copy of Hello! that dated to three years ago. He remembered reading somewhere how hepatitis C could live outside the body for a long time. You could pick it up just by touching something-a door handle, a cup, a magazine. The magazines were older than the hospital. Someone must have boxed them up and brought them from the old Royal in Lauriston Place. Martin remembered being in the A and E there, his mother had scalded her hand while on a rare visit to him. That was the only thing she remembered about the visit, not the drive out to Hopetoun House, where they had a lovely walk of the grounds followed by afternoon tea, not lunch at the Balmoral Hotel, nor the visit to Holyrood Palace-only the way she had managed to pour water from the kettle onto her hand. “Your kettle,” she said, as if Martin were directly responsible for the boiling point of water.
The waiting room had been like something from the Third World, filthy, with old chairs that smelled of urine. She had been taken into a cubicle with pale green curtains that were stained with dried blood. Now the old hospital was being converted into flats, among other things. Martin thought it was odd that people would want to live where other people had died and been in pain or simply been bored to tears sitting in Outpatients waiting for an appointment. Martin himself lived in a Victorian house in the Merchiston area, and before it was a house there had, presumably, been a field there. Living somewhere that had once been a field seemed preferable to living somewhere that had once been an operating theater or a morgue. People didn’t care, there was a hunger for housing in Edinburgh that was almost primitive. A report in the paper last week recorded a garage selling for a hundred thousand pounds. Martin wondered if people were going to live in it.
He had bought his own house three years ago. When he moved to Edinburgh-after signing his first publishing deal-he lived in a small rented flat off the Ferry Road while he saved for something better. He had been as obsessive and crazed as every other house hunter in the city, poring over the property listings, pouncing off the starting blocks like a sprinter for the viewings on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
He fell in love with the Merchiston house as soon as he walked in the door one misty October day. The rooms seemed as if they were full of secrets and shadows, and the fading afternoon light had shone dully through the stained glass. Opulent, he had thought. He had a vision of how it must have been once, heard it echoing with the laughter of old-fashioned children, the boys wearing striped school caps, the girls in smocked dresses and white ankle socks. The children were conspirators, thinking up merry japes in front of the nursery fire. Everywhere the house was busy with life: a maid who washed and scrubbed willingly-no class resentment-and who sometimes aided and abetted the children in their japes. There was a gardener, and a cook who prepared old-fashioned meals (kippers, blancmanges, cottage pies). And overseeing everything a loving pair of parents, gracious and good-tempered, except when the japes got out of hand, at which time they became stern and solemn arbiters. Father commuted every day and did something mysterious “at the office” while Mother threw bridge parties and wrote letters. On darker days Father was mistaken for a criminal or a spy and the family was forced into temporary hardship and poverty (Mother pulled it all off magnificently), before everything was explained and restored.