THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Five - Part One

APPROACHING

 

While Joey waited with Clare in casualty at the hospital he imagined what it would really be like to pummel somebody to death with a metal pipe.

It was being in hospital that had made him think of it. Hospital was not his favourite place in the world – it threw his memory mind back down too many mental passageways that he’d done his best to seal off. The mental health secure unit where he’d spent the latter part of his teenage years and his early twenties (on and off) had done its damage, creating in him; among other things; a reticence and mistrust of the sterility; the forbidden areas; the clinical jargon: all things designed to keep him in a certain place, both psychologically and physically.

If hospital wasn’t bad enough on its own; that, coupled with Silent Hill – the video game he was working on – almost gave him the shivers. The original Silent Hill game involved a man who crashed his car in the outskirts of a mist-enshrouded town. When the man wakes up he discovers his daughter has disappeared, but when he goes after her he finds the apparently deserted town is infested with daemonic creatures. There were hell hounds, giant bat-winged things, and his worst: little silent knife-wielding midgets that crept out of the darkness to kill him. Part of the game involved searching a filthy derelict hospital and in there it was faceless, inhuman nurses, staggering down the corridors, that represented the threat.

Being in casualty kept making him think of that: how any other time (in the game), if he saw a nurse he would strike first, smashing her over and over again on the head with the long iron pipe the hero had collected. There was even a nurse who seemed to be good for most of the game but became just as nasty later on, trying to kill him. If that didn’t prove that nurses couldn’t be trusted then nothing did.

Now that he was here, forced to sit for already over an hour, surrounded by sick and surly individuals, he imagined doing it to all of them. Casualty was always full of unsavoury types, the kind of nasties he’d been locked up with in the secure unit. It would have been a pleasure to whack them around the face until they were dead with a real iron pipe. To pass the time he visualised what it would be like, striding between the plastic chairs, swinging the pipe around his head, smacking that ugly fat man on the back of the neck, clipping that shrivelled old lady under the chin, watching her stumble backwards before bringing the pipe down hard onto the creeping baby that was crawling toward him on the dull tiled floor.

He chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” said Clare.

“Nothing.”

She was sitting beside him; uncomfortably close. She seemed completely indifferent to it, legs crossed, reading an old women’s magazine, flicking the pages quickly until she found an article that caught her eye before flicking on again. Joey wasn’t indifferent at all. He was big enough to need more than one seat. The fact that Clare had chosen to sit right beside him meant that her thigh was pressed constantly against his. He didn’t know if it was intentional but he wanted it to be. Surely it had to be. Every woman he’d known in his life had kept a fearful distance away from him but Clare never did. Did that mean she was just a tactile, open person, or (as he hoped) that she liked him? Maybe really liked him? He wanted to ask but he was as afraid as always. He never acted on anything. And knowing that made him want to hit something again.

It was the same with the receptionist: the way she’d looked at him when he and Clare came in, while Clare explained what had happened to them. She’d smiled at Joey, looking right into the shade of his hood to see his eyes; really smiled. He honestly didn’t know if that meant she liked him. Maybe it did. Maybe she wanted him to make a move. Or maybe not.

And how would he ever go about making a move anyway? Going up to her in the middle of Accident & Emergency had to be a bad idea, but perhaps outside of the hospital, later, when it was dark... Maybe coming up behind her in the car park after he’d waited until she finished her shift. Or if he followed her home and sidled up to her as she was unlocking her front door. Would she like that? She’d smiled at him after all.

It was all so confusing. But the longer he felt Clare’s thigh against his, the surer he was that she wasn’t really reading the magazine she kept flicking through. She was waiting for him to take the first step.

Clare wasn’t waiting for Joey to take the first step.

Like every other woman he had ever known she was intimidated by his size and by his social difficulties. But she was also determined not to show it. If he had problems fitting in, the worst thing she could do (she reasoned) was to keep him at arm’s length. Clare had decided shortly after Joey moved in that she was going to treat him just like anybody else, whether he kind of scared her or not. If she’d known her well meaning closeness was having the effect on him that it was, she might have felt differently, but she wouldn’t have run screaming. She’d always set herself the goal of trying to make those around her as happy and comfortable as possible. She would have set the record straight but she wouldn’t have hurt his feelings if she could help it.

But she didn’t know and Joey continued to stare down at the hot point of contact between their legs... wondering.

If there was any indication in Joey’s demeanour of the intensity of his thoughts, Clare was oblivious to it. She was barely even reading the magazine articles she paused to stare at. She kept running it over in her head: what had happened to them. Nothing made sense and she was really starting to think that no one in the hospital was going to take it seriously anyway. She and Joey were blatantly fine. The receptionist had been smirking while Clare explained to her the events of that evening. Obviously she hadn’t mentioned the dog and her own theory about a ghostly spirit causing the effect but she might as well have done for the seriousness the girl (who was barely out of school by the way) had given it.

Clare had stopped herself before she mentioned the sun burn. With credulity already stretched thin, it was clear that the receptionist (and most likely the doctor to come) wouldn’t believe a word of it. It was unlikely they were going to be seen any time in the next six hours. With no current symptoms and a very odd story it was a wonder they hadn’t been sent away for wasting hospital time. She wondered if maybe that would have been the best option.

She was still wondering that when a man came into casualty with a little girl in his arms. He walked up to the reception booth and set the girl down before he started speaking. Clare wasn’t in the habit of checking out every man she saw, especially in such seedy environs as this, but she did give him the once over. Perhaps it was the little girl. That made him inaccessible and that meant she could entertain the idea of it, knowing nothing would come of it. And he was nice looking, at least from the back: muscular and slim; his clothes a bit too dirty and dishevelled to rate as someone she might at one time have talked to, but not too bad to look at for a moment.

Then he glanced round, scanning the occupants of the room and two things immediately struck her. The first: that he was fearful and suspicious; almost like a fugitive. The second: that she knew him. That she had in fact slept with him once upon a time. And that she’d been very much in love with him. Fifteen years earlier.