By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
Day Two
18) Paul Waking
Pain wakes him.
Semiconscious, he tests the pain. His right hand, under him, is throbbing like another heart.
He frees the squashed hand and turns onto his back. The movement, plus the pain, accelerates the pulse. The hand lays across his stomach echoing his heart.
Remembering last night, how late he came home, he thinks how tired he must be.
Sleep doesn't come.
He slides his head around on the pillow to look at the clock's red numbers.
He can't make sense of them. Yes, he can, 5:22. Hour and a half yet.
His eyes stay open looking at the red numbers. 5:26. He is prepared, lying uncomfortably here on his back, to measure the relentless progress of the sleepless morn towards the alarm, to be relieved of his vigil by the morning's song. Radio serendipity.
He will be tired.
His left eye hurts. He brings movement to his body and, with his good hand, touches the puffy upper lid of the eye. The eyeball under the lid is as warm and as round as a newly laid egg. He can't remember being hit in his left eye. He'd said the same last night when he'd looked at the blue veins and the small red capillaries like little rivers running from the white skin into the purple lake of the bruise.
Now he goes over the fight, detail by detail, from its inception in the pub, the expression of the onlookers.... He is trying again to see if he gave cause for the attack on himself, or was he guiltless? Not that it makes any difference; if he wasn't to blame, it means he's again just unlucky, and for once he'd rather that he'd had some part in it than to be just unlucky. Again.
He can't remember seeing the man before the moment of anger, of his suddenly being there before him.
He grimaces as he recalls the semi-grappling outside the pub and wishes he'd run off when he'd seen the police. The grimace has made him aware that his lips are puffy. He can't remember being hit in the mouth.
The lips, on being parted, have let the damp bedroom air meet the night's concentrated mucus. He tastes sour beer. He reminds himself, apart from a couple glasses of wine with the meal, that he only had the one pint. But, like a dry sponge, his body is unused to drinking.
The fingers of his left hand too are sore and swollen. They do not throb like the right. His enlarged bottom lip has a split in its centre.
To test his fingers for damage, and to not disturb Julie, he slowly presses each of his left fingers against his breastbone. Of course, he remembers, he'd been double-punching after the police station.
He sees the man sat on the low wall, blood running out of his face, retching and cursing. And Paul knows that the man will have collapsed somewhere in the night. Probably, the instinct of the wounded taking him out of sight, down by the dark fence where Paul had wanted him to be.
Last night, getting home, Paul was full of anger at the man, at what he had caused to happen. He had let that anger out to Julie who, glad only to have him home, had weeping washed his cuts and held his head.
Paul hadn't then given a thought to the man's welfare. Now he knows that if he hurts this much, and he was handing out the damage, then the man must have been hurt even more.
Paul sees him sat on the low wall with all of his face bleeding. He will have flopped back onto the lawn and choked to death on his own blood or vomit. His body is there waiting to be found at first light, the grey face fixed in the grinning grimace of death. And the joke's on Paul, because the police will know immediately that it is Paul who killed him.
He makes himself go through it again, from the pub to the police van, from the cells to The Caution, to the man's swaying over his own dribbling blood. Inexorably connected. His two hearts beat faster.
What will he tell Michael?
"Don't fight," he has told him, "Don't fight." What will this do to him? And he won't be here to see. Little Alice too.... And back will come Julie's husband. If he's around. Last seen with a bottle in Blake Gardens. Was the man last night a friend of his? Was that why? No. No connections there. But what will he tell Michael?
Paul enjoys talking to his children, teaching them, giving them other versions.
"Never have a disease named after you," he told Alice, "you'll be the first to have died from it."
"D'you know," he told Michael after a video, "in a real firing squad execution the firing squad don't stand more than two yards from the prisoner. And when they kill him they blow a hole in his chest big enough to put your head in."
"Why," Michael asked him, "would I want to put my head in a man's chest?"
No firing squad for him, even if it is murder. Just prison again. He wished someone had talked to him. He too had wanted to be told he was doing well, that what he had done was right. He didn't like working things out for himself. He wants to be safe, now. To know that what he did last night was right. This is pain. This is pain, he wants to say to his children. He wants to twist their thin arms, pull their hair. This is pain. Learn to avoid it.
Paul doesn't understand.... Paul doesn't understand industry, commerce, finance, family life, children, parents, grandparents, people.... Paul doesn't understand what has happened to him now. He doesn't know if his confusion comes from fear or his fear from his confusion. Why me?
Come back sleep. Let me lose this muddling world. Although in sleep he will be absolutely alone. Which is why, he knows, his children put off going to sleep. They have to learn to not be afraid of shutting off, of closing down for a whole eight hours. Who will they be when they come back up?
"Julie?"
commentary.... Hindsight doesn't help. This part-remembered part imagined past was a strange place.
True Stories
In October 1989, after an evening in the Labour club with her mother, Marie Milcoy went home to her flat in Sydenham Road and set fire to her bed. 31 year old Marie Milcoy then went to a telephone kiosk and called Social Services. When the police came and asked where she lived Marie Milcoy said, "Nowhere now. I've just set fire to it."
In November 1989, in the early hours of the morning, Mrs Nash, of Longstone Avenue, Bridgwater, called the police to her house. The police arrived to find a distressed Mrs Nash standing in the street with her small children. The police had to pick their way through broken glass to get to the house. Timothy Anthony Nash, 26 years old, swore at the police and ran away. Mrs Nash said that she was surprised when the police arrested her husband.
In March 1990 the lock-up Post Office in Hamp, Bridgwater, was burgled for the fifth time in a year. Mrs Janet Beckett, the Post Mistress, said, "Once again we discovered the break-in, not the police. This estate seems to be a no-go area as far as the police are concerned."
Chief lnspector Dave Winters said, "It is not true to say there are any no-go areas in Bridgwater as far as the police are concerned. We are on patrol 24 hours a day, every day, but the limitations on our physical resources mean we cannot keep a non-stop continual watch on any area."
