Doreen, the wife of Deaf Willie, sat stiffly upright in the front of Jacko's car, clutching a handbag in her lap. Her face was pale, and her lips were twisted into a strange expression compounded of fury and dread. She was a large-boned woman, very tall with broad hips, and tending to plumpness because of Willie's liking for chips. She was also poorly dressed, and this was because of Willie's liking for brown ale. She stared straight ahead, and spoke to Jacko out of the side of her mouth.
"Who've took him up the hospital, then?"
"I don't know, Doreen," Jacko lied. "Perhaps it was a job, and they didn't want to let on who, you know. All I know is, I get a phone call, Deaf Willie's up the hospital, tell his missus, bang." He made a slamming-the-phone-down gesture.
"Liar," Doreen said evenly.
Jacko fell silent.
In the back of the car, Willie's son, Billy, stared vacantly out of the window. With his long, awkward body he was cramped in the small space. Normally he enjoyed traveling in cars, but today his mother was very tense, and he knew something bad had happened. Just what it was, he was not sure: things were confusing. Ma seemed to be cross with Jacko, but Jacko was a friend. Jacko had said that Dad was up the hospital, but not that he was ill; and indeed, how could he be? For he had been well when he left the house early this morning.
The hospital was a large brick building, faintly Gothic, which had once been the residence of the Mayor of Southwark. Several flat-roofed extensions had been built in the grounds, and tarmacadamed car parks had obliterated the rest of the lawns.
Jacko stopped near the entrance to Casualty. No one spoke as they got out of the car and walked across to the door. They passed an ambulance man with a pipe in his mouth, leaning against an antismoking poster on the side of his vehicle.
They went from the heat of the car park into the cool of the hospital. The familiar antiseptic smell caused a nauseous surge of fear in Doreen's stomach. Green plastic chairs were ranged around the walls, and a desk was placed centrally, opposite the entrance. Doreen noticed a small boy nursing a glass cut, a young man with his arm in an improvised sling, and a girl with her head in her hands. Somewhere nearby a woman moaned. Doreen felt panicky.
The West Indian nurse at the desk was speaking into a telephone. They waited for her to finish; then Doreen said: "Have you had a William Johnson brought in here this morning?"
The nurse did not look at her. "Just a minute, please." She made a note on a scribbling pad, then glanced up as an ambulance arrived outside. She said: "Would you sit down, please?" She came around the desk and walked past them to the door.
Jacko moved away, as if to sit down, and Doreen snatched at his sleeve. "Stay here!" she commanded. "I'm not waiting bloody hours-I'm stopping here until she tells me."
They watched as a stretcher was brought in. The prone figure was wrapped in a bloody blanket. The nurse escorted the bearers through a pair of swing doors.
A plump white woman in sister's uniform arrived through another door, and Doreen waylaid her. "Why can't I find out whether my husband's here?" she said shrilly.
The sister stopped, and took the three of them in at a glance. The black nurse came back in.
Doreen said: "I asked her and she wouldn't tell me."
The sister said: "Nurse, why were these people not attended to?"
"I thought the road-accident case with two severed limbs looked sicker than this lady."
"You did the right thing, but there's no need for witticism." The plump sister turned to Doreen. "What is your husband's name?"
"William Johnson."
The sister looked in a register. "That name isn't here."
She paused. "But we do have an unidentified patient. Male, white, medium build, middle-aged, with gunshot wounds to the head."
Jacko said: "That's him."
Doreen said: "Oh, my God!"
The sister picked up the phone. "You'd better see him, to find out whether he is your husband." She dialed a single number and waited for a moment. "Oh, Doctor, this is Sister Rowe in Casualty. I have a woman here who may be the wife of the gunshot patient. Yes. I will… we'll meet you there." She hung up and said: "Please follow me."
Doreen fought back despair as they trod the linoleum corridor floors through the hospital. She had dreaded this ever since the day, fifteen or more years ago, when she had discovered she had married a villain. She had always suspected it; Willie had told her he was in business, and she asked no more questions because in the days when they were courting a girl who wanted a husband learned not to come on strong. But it was never easy to keep secrets in marriage. There had been a knock at the door, when little Billy was still in nappies, and Willie had looked out the front window and seen a copper. Before answering the door he said to Doreen: "Last night, there was a poker game here: me, and Scotch Harry, and Tom Webster, and old Gordon. It started at ten, and went on till four in the morning." Doreen, who had been up half the night in an empty house, trying to get Billy to sleep, had nodded dumbly; and when the Old Bill asked her, she said what Willie had told her to say. Since then she had worried.
When it's only a suspicion, you can tell yourself not to worry; but when you know your husband is out there somewhere breaking into a factory or a shop or even a bank, you can't help wondering if he'll ever come home.
She was not sure why she was so full of rage and fear. She did not love Willie, not in any familiar sense of the word. He was a pretty lousy husband: always out at night, bad with money, and a poor lover. The marriage had varied from tolerable to miserable. Doreen had two miscarriages, then Billy; after that they stopped trying. They stuck together because of Billy, and she did not suppose they were the only couple to do that. Not that Willie shouldered much of the burden of bringing up a handicapped child, but it seemed to make him just guilty enough to stay married. The boy loved his father.
No, Willie, I don't love you, she thought. But I want you and I need you; I like to have you there in bed, and sitting next to me watching television, and doing your pools at the table; and if that was called love, I'd say I love you.
They had stopped walking, and the sister was speaking. "I'll call you in when Doctor's ready," she said. She disappeared into a ward, closing the door behind her.
Doreen stared hard at the blank, cream-painted wall, trying not to wonder what was behind it. She had done this once before, after the Componiparts payroll job. But then it had been different: they had come to the house saying, "Willie's up the hospital, but he's all right-just stunned." He had put too much gelignite on the safe door, and had lost all hearing in one ear. She had gone to the hospital-a different one-and waited; but she had known he was okay.
After that job she had tried, for the first and only time, to make him go straight. He had seemed willing, until he got out of the hospital and was faced with the prospect of actually doing something about it. He sat around the house for a few days; then when he ran out of money he did another job. Later he let it slip that Tony Cox had taken him on the firm. He was proud, and Doreen was furious.
She hated Tony Cox ever afterward. Tony knew it, too. He had been at their home, once, eating a plate of chips and talking to Willie about boxing, when suddenly he looked up at Doreen and said: "What you got against me, girl?"
Willie looked worried and said: "Go easy, Tone."
Doreen tossed her head and said: "You're a villain."
Tony laughed at that, showing a mouthful of half-chewed chips. Then he said: "So's your husband-didn't you know?" After that they went back to talking about boxing.
Doreen never had quick answers for clever people like Tony, so she said no more. Her opinion made no difference to anything, anyway. It would never occur to Willie that the fact that she disliked someone was a reason for not bringing him to the house. It was Willie's house, even if Doreen had to pay the rent out of her income from the mail-order catalog every other week.
It was a Tony Cox job that Willie had been on today. Doreen had got that from Jacko's wife-Willie wouldn't tell her. If Willie dies, she thought, I swear to God I'll swing for that Tony Cox. Oh, God let him be all rightThe door opened and the sister put her head out. "Would you like to come in, please?"
Doreen went first. A short, dark-skinned doctor with thick black hair stood near the door. She ignored him and went straight to the bedside.
At first she was confused. The figure on the high, metal-framed bed was covered to the neck in a sheet, and from the chin to the top of the head in bandages. She had been expecting to see a face, and know instantly whether it was Willie. For a moment she did not know what to do. Then she knelt down and gently pulled back the sheet.
The doctor said: "Mrs. Johnson, is this your husband?"
She said: "Oh, God, Willie, what have they done?" Her head fell slowly forward until her brow rested on her husband's bare shoulder.
Distantly, she heard Jacko say: "That's him. William Johnson." He went on to give Willie's age and address. Doreen became aware that Billy was standing close to her. After a few moments the boy put his hand on her shoulder. His presence forced her to deny grief, or at least postpone it. She composed her features and stood up.
The doctor looked grave. "Your husband will live," he said.
She put her arm around her son. "What have they done to him?"
"Shotgun pellets. Close range."
She was gripping Billy's shoulder very hard. She was not going to cry. "But he'll be all right?"
"I said he'll live, Mrs. Johnson. But we may not be able to save his eyesight."
"What?"
"He's going to be blind."
Doreen shut her eyes tight and screamed: "No!"
They were all around her, very quickly; they had been expecting hysterics. She fought them off. She saw Jacko's face in front of her, and she shouted: "Tony Cox done this, you bastard!" She hit Jacko. "You bastard!"
She heard Billy sob, and she calmed down immediately. She turned to the boy and pulled him to her, hugging him. He was several inches taller than she. "There, there, Billy," she murmured. "Your dad's alive, be glad of that."
The doctor said: "You should go home, now. We have a phone number where we can reach you…"
"I'll take her," Jacko said. "It's my phone, but I live close."
Doreen detached herself from Billy and went to the door. The sister opened it. Two policemen stood outside.
Jacko said: "What's this, then?" He sounded outraged.
The doctor said: "We are obliged to inform the police in cases like this."
Doreen saw that one of the police was a woman. She was seized with the urge to blurt out the fact that Willie had been shot on a Tony Cox job: that would screw Tony. But she had acquired the habit of deceiving the police during fifteen years of marriage to a thief. And she knew, as soon as the thought crossed her mind, that Willie would never forgive her for squealing.
She could not tell the police. But, suddenly, she knew who she could tell.
She said: "I want to make a phone call."