A Man With One of Those Faces (The Dublin Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Paul glanced at Brigit. Her eyes were turned towards the overcast sky, mentally working her way down a list of questions. She was always going to be the ‘further questions’ type.

  “So what’s the deal with the slips then?” asked Brigit. “Are you on parole or doing community service or something?”

  “No,” he said, cringing slightly at the defensive edge in his own voice. “I’ve never even been arrested.” Now that was a lie. “I’m just the charitable sort.”

  “But since when do the charitable sort have to get someone to sign a form to verify that they’ve done six hours of visits a week?”

  In lieu of an answer, Paul tossed the butt of his cigarette into the drain and pulled his phone out of his back pocket.

  “We’d better get a move on if you want me to do this visit.”

  “Right yeah,” said Brigit. She dropped her own cigarette and crushed it under her foot, while simultaneously pushing her hair back behind her ear, embarrassed at having over-stepped the mark.

  Paul glanced across the road. The fox was now sniffing at the sandwich it had retrieved. Rather than eating it, it elected to urinate on it instead. As reviews went, it was pretty damning.

  Chapter Two

  “Have you been listening to me?”

  “Of course I’ve been listening to you.”

  He hadn’t been listening to her.

  To be fair, Paul had started out listening to her, as she’d explained the exact nature of the favour she was asking for, but then, he’d started thinking about disinfectant. Why did hospitals smell quite so strongly of it? They reeked of the stuff. He passed so many teary-eyed people in the halls, it was hard to know if gramps had popped his clogs or the fumes were just making their eyeballs burn.

  Nurse Brigit stopped outside one of the private rooms, so abruptly her plastic soles gave a tiny screech on the tiled floor.

  “So.” Paul pointed casually at the door. “This is her?”

  “Him!” she said. “This is HIM.”

  “I knew that. I meant ‘her’ as in the room. Rooms are feminine, everybody knows that.”

  “My arse.”

  “Also feminine, and may I say…”

  “Shut up,” she said. “So, to recap, for those who have been paying absolutely no attention: this gentleman came in three weeks ago but he’s not had any visitors.”

  “Who is he expecting? Family? Friends?”

  “No idea, but he asks three or four times a day.”

  “Right,” he said. “And refresh my memory. His name is?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Martin Brown. He’s doped up quite a lot of the time and when he isn’t, he’s not exactly sunshine and lollipops. He made one of the trainees cry yesterday.”

  “Oh excellent,” he said. “He sounds like a blast.”

  Brigit placed her hand on his arm and lowered her voice.

  “Look, he’s a miserable pain-in-the-hole for sure, but he’s not going to be here long. He’s riddled with cancer. From what I know, he ignored all advice and treatment options for three years, and now he’s come home from America to die. He’s all alone – trying to come to terms with the inevitable. So just – y’know…”

  Paul took a deep breath, tasting antiseptic at the back of his throat, and sighed it out. “OK. Let’s do this.”

  She knocked on the door and opened it quickly. As he stood outside, Paul could hear an inhalation of artificial air, followed by a low, rasping voice.

  “Fuck sake, call that…” A gasp. “… knocking? What if I’d been…”

  “I’d have hit it with a spoon. They teach us that in training.”

  “Fucking… C…” Paul could hear a couple more agitated inhales.

  “Now now, Mr Brown,” she said. “Let’s not have you wasting your breath proving chivalry is dead. You’ve a visitor.”

  Paul slowly stepped inside the room. It was all he’d come to expect of the modern hospital room – clean, neat, soulless. There was a TV, stuck up in the top corner opposite the bed, soundlessly showing a repeat of a sitcom that nobody liked the first time. The only attempt at decoration was a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall facing the door – her lips pursed, head tilted – like she was listening with the most sincere concern. Jesus may’ve died for your sins, but his ma was the one who was willing to listen to your excuses.

  The lighting was dim but Paul didn’t need to be a doctor to see that the frail figure sitting up in the bed wasn’t long for this world. He looked like a big man that someone had let the air out of. His flesh hung, pale and loose. It looked as though his skeleton was wearing a suit of skin that was now several sizes too big for it. Various wires and tubes led to surrounding machines, to ease the pain or prolong the suffering. It was hard to tell how old the man was. He’d reached the place where time isn’t measured in birthdays, but days, maybe hours, until the end. His gaunt hand held an oxygen mask up to his face. He glared at Paul as he inhaled a shallow breath of air. There wasn’t enough antiseptic in the world to get the stench of death out of this room.

  Brigit took away the tray with the untouched meal that was sitting on the table in front of him.

  “Get out.” Brown spoke in a coarse whisper.

  Paul was all set to turn on his heels when he realised that last comment wasn’t directed at him.

  Brigit looked between the two of them. “Right – I’ll leave you boys to it. I’m sure you’ve a lot of catching up to do.” She folded the table down and stowed it at the side of the bed, before carrying the tray towards the door. As she left, she shot Paul a look that said ‘have fun’.

  Paul watched the door close. Suddenly, a rainy bus stop didn’t seem so bad. This man made his flesh itch beneath the skin. He’d met many people who were near the end but it hadn’t felt like this. This was different. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was.

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Paul was trying to leave Brown time to decide, to decide for the both of them, who Paul was. He wondered if the man was ever going to speak. Maybe he was dead? Was it possible for someone to die without moving – eyes still open, peering out from his glowering death mask? Was life that binary? Could someone just silently flick the switch to off?

  Brown sucked in a ragged breath and held the oxygen mask up to his face again. He wasn’t dead yet.

  Paul cracked first. “So, how’re you feel…”

  “I knew you’d come,” he interrupted. He said it with a simple air of finality, like Paul was the unavoidable tax bill in the post.

  “I just wanted to see how you’re getting on.”

  “Oh fucking peachy.” He waved his free hand at the chair beside the bed. It was tough to discern Brown’s accent amidst the wheezes and growls but there was definitely a hint of inner-city Dublin in there somewhere, mixed with the twangs of someone who’d spent time on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Paul walked over and sat down. He didn’t attempt to touch Brown; he got the definite impression that he wasn’t the handholding sort.

  “So, how’s the food?” Paul ventured.

  “Do you believe in heaven?”

  Ah OK – it was going to be one of these chats. Not one of Paul’s favourites, but he at least felt like he knew where he was again. He glanced up at Mary on the wall, her calm head-tilt asking, ‘well, do you?’

  He settled into his one-size-fits-all script, designed to work for God-botherers and atheists alike. “I personally think there is an afterlife where we see our old friends again and…”

  Brown’s eyes bored into his. “Don’t threaten me.”

  “No, I…” The brief moment where Paul had felt like he’d a handle on the conversation slipped away.

  “If there’s a heaven, there’s a hell and…” A gasp. “I know where I’m headed. Six feet under the rock…”

  A juddering fit passed through Brown’s body. He convulsed slightly and wheezed into his mask. Paul considered calling for a nurse until a slight change in Brown’s fac
ial expression stopped the words in his throat. The crazy old bastard was laughing, although it descended fairly quickly into a coughing fit. With his right hand, Brown pulled the oxygen mask slightly further away from his lips, while with his left, he dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief. As he moved it away, Paul noticed a spot of blood on it. He quickly averted his gaze and stared into those big brown eyes of the Virgin Mary. How do they know they were brown? Every hospital room he sat in had a picture of her on the wall and she had those big, brown, puppy-dog eyes in every one. Were they mentioned in the Bible? Right after the bit where they explained that, surprisingly for a man born in the Middle East, Jesus was a white dude.

  The reason Paul was so ardently maintaining eye contact with her lady of the unimpeachable fu-fu was that he was not good with blood, people’s in general and his own in particular. This normally wasn’t a problem. It was surprising how long you could go around a modern medical facility without actually seeing blood. It was like the oil in a state-of-the-art car: you only saw it when something was really going wrong.

  Brown dabbed the handkerchief on his lips and then waved it across his face, as if swatting away an imaginary fly, before shooting an annoyed look at Paul. He waved the hankie again with a tad more urgency. With a jolt of embarrassment, Paul realised he was trying to indicate the glass of water on the bedside cabinet. He reached across and brought it over to him.

  When the storm had passed, Brown took his lips from the straw and Paul carefully placed the water back on the bedside cabinet. As he turned back, Brown had angled his head slightly and was giving him an appraising look.

  “You really are the spit of him. There’s a fair bit of your uncle in there too…”

  Paul didn’t know what to say, not least because the way Brown said it, it didn’t sound like it was meant to be a compliment.

  Brown looked up at the ceiling with a thousand-yard stare, as a long silence stretched out between them. Paul was taken aback to see a solitary tear navigate its way down the creases of the man’s care-worn face. “I swear to God, I didn’t know… what he… I never knew.”

  Then two seconds later, Brown’s tone changed to almost chatty. “Last time I saw you, you were only a wee baby.” He looked away and down, his already weak voice sinking further. “I’ve not seen my girl in thirty years…”

  Brown stared at the TV in the corner, not following it but just for somewhere else to look.

  “Would you like to?” Paul ventured.

  The look Brown shot him left Paul in no doubt that he’d said the wrong thing.

  “She wants nothing to do with me… I mean… She knows nothing…” He drew a breath from his mask again. “Leave her be.”

  As he sucked in more of the precious air, he gave Paul a look he couldn’t read. Sadness, defiance, anger – there was too much going on that Paul didn’t understand for him to have any hope of keeping up.

  “Y’know, when you get to the end, it’s not the…” Brown paused, ”surprises that get ye, it’s the sheer fucking predictability. You’re Gerry’s son. You’re going to do your damnedest to be him, whether you realise it or not. So when I tell you I’ve said nothing, you’re not going to believe me. You’re going to use her… because that’s what we do.” He looked at Paul again, his voice falling to a whisper. “You… do look a lot like your uncle.”

  This had gone far enough. Whoever this guy thought Paul was, it clearly wasn’t somebody he wanted to see.

  “Look, I think there’s been some mistake, I’ll let you…”

  As Paul got up to leave, Brown’s hand shot out with surprising speed and grabbed Paul’s wrist.

  “No, don’t… please.” There was a whimper in his voice now. “For an old friend of your father.”

  Paul looked towards the door, floundering. Maybe the best thing for this man’s tortured soul would be a sedative to give him rest from whatever was tormenting him? At some point, he clearly must’ve been a nasty individual, but that was long ago. Now he was a sad and empty husk, being crushed under the weight of his own conscience.

  Brown started coughing again. He brought his left hand with the handkerchief back to his lips. His eyes turned pleading towards the glass of water. Paul reached over to get it and sat on the edge of the bed.

  As Paul held the water out, Brown lowered his left hand back and slipped it under the bedding.

  “Thanks.”

  He took the straw into his lips and started slowly drinking from it. Paul could see him fidgeting around under the sheets out of the corner of his eye, but he was keen to avoid another sight of the bloodied handkerchief. That’s why he kept his eyes firmly locked on Brown’s. As he looked into them, he instantly realised something was wrong, very wrong.

  Brown’s right hand clamped onto Paul’s throat. Paul dropped the glass, which bounced on the bed before shattering on the floor below. His hands instinctively latched onto Brown’s arm, trying to pull it away. Brown’s eyes were wild and he seemed freakishly, desperately strong. Focused as he was, Paul barely registered Brown’s left hand, swinging up at the edge of his field of vision. Through some primeval survival instinct Paul turned his body at the last moment, causing the swinging hand to miss his head and instead make contact with his right shoulder. He felt a stabbing pain, followed by an inexplicable wetness, expanding on his arm.

  In the rush of confusion and fury, Paul couldn’t really register what had happened. He tried to stand and heave himself bodily away from his assailant but his left foot slipped on the wet floor, sending him tumbling to the ground. Brown lost his grip on Paul’s throat, but grabbed at the collar of his shirt. Paul’s momentum dragged Brown down to the floor on top of him. Various machines clattered to the ground in his wake, coming off worse in a clash with gravity and a mad man’s fury.

  The blessed respite from Brown’s vice-like grip around Paul’s throat was short-lived. Brown may have been not much more than skin and bone but he was more than enough to knock the air painfully out of Paul’s lungs as he landed on top of him.

  There was a moment of peculiar calm as both men searched for breath. They gasped like two landed fish left to suffer on the deck. Paul could hear an unpleasant rattle in his own throat, a clicking sensation accompanying every struggling breath.

  Brown recovered first. He worked his body around, like in some demented game of twister, bringing his face to within inches of Paul’s. Brown’s blood-stained mouth gapping under wildly leering eyes. His breath was putrid, as if whatever was rotting his insides away was bubbling up, coming to consume them both. Paul lay transfixed – like his mind had decided this was all too much and it was just going to shut down and wait for reality to come to its senses.

  “You… took… everything… from… me!” The breath that carried the words blew like a foul wind across Paul’s face.

  Then Brown reared back.

  Paul’s arms were pinned. He struggled to free them as Brown raised his left hand above his head. Paul registered a flash of something there. He flinched as Brown’s hand descended.

  Halfway through its arc, Brown’s arm spasmed, and whatever he’d held in his hand flew from his grasp, skittering across the floor. Enraged, Brown turned to see the IV cable that was restraining him. He howled in animalistic frustration as he heaved at it. The effort sent him crashing headfirst back onto Paul, leaving them lying face-to-face once again.

  Brown croaked a harsh laugh of madness, which quickly transformed into a retching cough. Something hot and wet landed on Paul’s face. All he could see now was the snarling mouth above him, blood dribbling down between the uneven, yellowed, tombstone teeth.

  Then there was the sound of the door crashing open, a scream and motion.

  The hands of unseen angels grabbed at Brown, dragging him away. Paul’s last sight of him was his death-mask face leering back. Paul turned his head away, which was when he noticed the blood beginning to dye the shirt around his shoulder red and then…

  Then he blacked out.

 
He was not good with blood, people’s in general and his own in particular.

  Chapter Three

  “You are, in fact, extremely lucky!”

  He beamed at Paul with the kind of warm, disarming smile that’d be highly likable in most situations. Right then, Paul was having a hard time not punching him squarely in the face.

  “Really?” Paul asked, “Because I thought I’d been stabbed in the shoulder. Have I not been stabbed in the shoulder?” He decided to go with sarcasm. He’d already been in one violent encounter that night, and he didn’t think he had another one in him. Besides, the doctor seemed genuine, if a tad weird. He would’ve expected to see a lot of unusual stuff in casualty in the wee small hours, but enthusiasm from a medical professional was still unnerving. It was especially unnerving coming from one who had just explained to him how he now had seven stitches in his right shoulder. It was heavily bandaged and the attached arm was in a sling to keep the pressure off.

  From what Paul could gather, he’d been transferred by ambulance from St. Kilda’s Hospice to the A&E unit at St. Katherine’s. He’d been pretty out of it. He guessed that, somewhere along the line, he’d been given something for the pain.

  Dr Sinha was 27 and from India. He had a full licence to practise medicine over there, having qualified third in his class. Then he’d passed the Irish clinical exams first time and with flying colours. He decided to come to Ireland as he’d heard how friendly the people were.

  The reason Paul knew all this was that he’d listened to Dr Sinha patiently explain it three times to the drunken husband of the woman with a broken leg on the far side of the ward.

  Hubby was a lawyer and had spent a considerable amount of time trying to negotiate his way out of the shattered limb on his wife’s behalf. Apparently they had a skiing holiday booked, and this ‘did not mesh’ with her having a broken leg. With the patience of whatever Hindus had in lieu of saints, Dr Sinha had understood entirely when Hubby had insisted on a second opinion. He was now sitting beside his wife’s bed, waiting for the ‘proper doctor’ to show up. Hopefully somebody who’d gone to school with, so they could do some secret handshake and get the whole thing downgraded to light bruising.