V 02 - Domino Men, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a while.  Work’s been hectic.  You know how it is before Christmas…”  But my voice sounded hollow and insincere and I stopped and sat awhile, not speaking, listening to the cold metronome of the machine.
    Eventually, I heard someone walk up behind me.  From the clack of her high heels and the smell of the only perfume she ever wore, I knew who it was before she even opened her mouth.
    “Poor old bastard,” she said.  “Even I feel sorry for him now.”
     
     
    You’re probably surprised that she even bothered to turn up at all.  To be honest, I don’t fully understand it myself.  But then things always seemed so complicated between them.
     
     
    Mum circled her big, meaty arms around my waist and pulled me close.  Caught unawares, squeezed anaconda-tight as a tsunami of scent broke over me, I was eight years old again and, for a second, felt almost happy.
    We sat beside him in silence.  I held the old man’s hand whilst Mum produced a book of puzzles and set about working through a page of Sudoku with the single-minded pertinacity of Alan Turing squaring up to a fresh cipher from Berlin.  The quiet was broken only fitfully, by the beeps of Granddad’s machine, the rap-tap of my mother’s pen on paper, the occasional passing of a nurse and the distant echo of a telephone.  We saw no doctors, no one came to ask who we were or what we were doing and the other patients who shared his ward made no noise at all, not the slightest sound or whimper.  I’m not sure exactly what I’d expected — death rattles, I suppose, ragged breathing and delirium — but the business of mortality is quieter than you’d think.
    We’d sat in the same miserable tableau for at least half an hour when something appeared in the window behind my granddad.  First a frond of red hair swaying in the breeze, then a squitty, pinched face, then a yellow safety jacket, a squirt of foam, the underside of a sponge puckering against the pane.
    It looked miraculous, as though the man was levitating.  The illusion was shattered when the window cleaner peered through the glass, looked directly at my mother and winked.  Mum giggled, the sound of it grotesquely out of place here, like laughter in a morgue or a smirk at a cremation.
    I gave the man my frostiest look but I’m afraid I saw Mum grin back.
    As if in response to this pantomimed flirtation, the life support machine made a chirrup out of sequence, a squeak of distress, an electronic hiccup.  I was on my feet at once, the window cleaner forgotten, casting around for someone to help.  But almost immediately the machine returned to the same rhythm as before and Mum told me to stop flapping and sit back down again, all the while admiring the window cleaner from the corner of her eye.
    She left a short while later, muttering something about meeting a friend for a drink.  Evidently I was not invited so I stayed and sat with Granddad, gripping his hand in mine until, eventually, the nurse returned, growled that visiting hours were over and motioned me toward the door.  I laid Granddad’s hand beside him on the bed and, feeling guilty but grateful, walked back into the light, the beeps of the machine still echoing in my ears.
     
     
    It was cold outside, already growing dark as the day surrendered to the eager dusk of winter.  My breath steamed in the air and I was looking forward to getting home when something immensely improbably happened.
    First, there was a noise — a sort of faint yelp, a stifled cry, a distant yell of shock.
    Then the air seemed to shudder before me and I glimpsed a blur, a kinetic smudge or red, yellow and black.  Finally, there was a dull, decisive thwump as something big, fleshy and in pain sprawled by my feet.
    I stood very still.  I looked away.  Then I looked back again just to check that I hadn’t imagined it.  But there he was, still there.
    A man had fallen from the sky, missing me by inches.
    Too numb to move, I stared at him and he,