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  A female voice said, ‘No, doctor, we’ve not yet been able to trace any relatives.’

  ‘Any change in his condition?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Well, let’s keep him on life support for a while longer. But I don’t think we’re going to see any change. He has massive internal injuries, and his Glasgow coma score remains at three.He’s clearly brain-dead, poor sod. Nothing more we can do. Just wait.’

  The man’s voice was familiar, but N.N. struggled to remember where he had heard it before. Then, just before he lapsed back into unconsciousness for the final time, he remembered.

  It was the voice of the maître d’.

  *

  Two days later, the duty intensive care registrar was doing his ward round. He noted that one of the beds in the unit was now vacant. It was bed number thirteen.

  The sister was staring at it sadly. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Every time we lose someone, I feel like a failure,’ she replied. Then she looked at the sticking plaster on his forehead. ‘Are you all right? Cut yourself?’

  ‘It’s nothing. He looked back down at the empty bed. ‘Always remember the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath:“Do no harm.” Right?’

  She nodded sadly.

  ‘It would have been harmful to keep him going. What kind of quality of life would he have had if he had lived?’

  ‘You’re right,’ she replied. ‘None. I suppose sometimes we have to thank God for small mercies. He’d have been a vegetable if he’d lived.’

  ‘You know, nurse, I’ve never liked that word, “vegetable”,’ he said. ‘Why not a “piece of meat”?’

  JUST TWO CLICKS

  Just two clicks and Michael’s face appeared. Margaret pressed her fingers against the screen, feeling a longing to stroke his slender, pre-Raphaelite face and to touch that long, wavy hair that lay tantalizingly beyond the glass.

  Joe was downstairs watching a football match on Sky. What she was doing was naughty. Wicked temptation! But didn’t Socrates say “the unexamined life is not worth living”? The kids were gone. Empty nesters now, her and Joe. Joe was like a rock to which her life was moored. Safe, strong, but dull. And right now she didn’t want a rock, she wanted a knight on a white charger. The knight who was just two clicks away.

  *

  Just two clicks and Margaret’s face would be in front of him. Michael’s fingers danced lightly across the keys of his laptop, caressing them sensually.

  They had been emailing each other for over a year – in fact, as Margaret had reminded Michael this afternoon, for exactly one year, two months, three days and nineteen hours.

  And now, at half past seven tomorrow evening, in just over twenty two hours’ time, they were finally going to meet. Their first real date.

  Both of them had had a few obstacles to deal with first. Like Margaret’s husband, Joe. During the course of a thousand increasingly passionate emails (actually, one thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven, as Margaret had informed him this afternoon) Michael had built up a mental picture of Joe: a tall, mean brainless bully, who had once punched a front door down with his bare fists. He’d built up a mental picture of Margaret, too, that was far more elaborate than the single photograph he had downloaded so long ago of a pretty redhead, who looked a little like Scully from the X-Files. In fact, quite a lot like the heavenly Scully.

  ‘We shouldn’t really meet, should we?’ She had emailed him this afternoon. ‘It might spoil everything between us.’

  Michael’s wife, Karen, had walked out on him two months ago, blaming the time he spent on the Internet, telling him he was more in love with his computer than her.

  Well, actually, sweetheart, with someone on my computer . . . he had nearly said, but hadn’t quite plucked up the courage. That had always been his problem. Lack of courage. And, of course, right now this was fuelled by an image of Joe who could punch a front door down with his bare fists.

  A new email from Margaret lay in his inbox. ‘Twenty-two hours and seven minutes! I’m so excited, I can’t wait to meet you, my darling. Have you decided where? M. xxxx’

  ‘Me neither!’ he typed. ‘Do you know the Red Lion in Handcross? It has deep booths, very discreet. Went to a real-ale tasting there recently. Midway between us. I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight! All my love, Michael. xxxx’

  *

  Margaret opened the email eagerly, and then, as she read it, for the first time in one year, two months and three days she felt the presence of clouds in her heart. Real Ale? He’d never mentioned an interest in real ale before. Real ale was a bit of an anoraks’ thing, wasn’t it? Midway between us? Did he mean he couldn’t be bothered to drive to somewhere close to her? But, worst of all . . .

  A pub???

  She typed her reply. ‘I don’t do pubs, my darling. I do weekends in Paris at the George V, or maybe the Ritz-Carlton or the Bristol.’

  Then she deleted it. I’m being stupid, dreaming, all shot to hell by my nerves . . . From downstairs there came a whoop from Joe, and then she could hear tumultuous roaring. A goal. Great. Big. Deal. Wow, Joe, I’m so happy for you.

  Deleting her words, she replaced them with ‘Darling, the Red Lion sounds wickedly romantic. 7.30. I’m not going to sleep either! All my love, M. xxxx.’

  *

  What if Joe had been reading her emails and was going to tail her to the Red Lion tonight, Michael thought as he pulled up in the farthest, darkest corner of the car park? He climbed out of his pea-green Astra (Karen had taken the BMW) and walked nervously towards the front entrance of the pub, freshly showered and shaven, his breath minted, his body marinated in a Boss cologne Karen had once said made him smell manly, his belly feeling like it was filled with deranged moths.

  He stopped just outside and checked his macho diver’s watch. Seven thirty-two. Taking a deep breath, he went in.

  And saw her right away.

  Oh no.

  His heart did not so much sink as burrow its way down to the bottom of his brand new Docksider yachting loafers.

  She was sitting at the bar, in full public display – OK, the place was pretty empty – but worse than that, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter lay on the counter in front of her. She’d never told him that she smoked. But far, far, far worse than that, the bitch looked nothing like the photograph she had sent him. Nothing at all!

  True, she had the same red hair colour – well, henna-dyed red at any rate – but there were no long tresses to caress; it had been cropped short and gelled into spikes that looked sharp enough to prick your fingers on. You never told me you’d cut your hair. Why not??? Her face was plain, and she was a good three or four stone heavier than in the photograph, with cellulite-pocked thighs bared by a vulgar skirt. She hadn’t lied about her age, but that was just about the only thing. And she’d caught his eye and was now smiling at him . . .

  No. Absolutely not. No which way. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

  Michael turned, without looking back, and fled.

  Roaring out of the parking lot, haemorrhaging perspiration in anger and embarrassment, switching off his mobile phone in case she tried to ring, he had to swerve to avoid some idiot driving in far too fast.

  ‘Dickhead!’ he shouted.

  *

  Margaret was relieved to see the car park was almost empty. Pulling into the farthest corner, she turned on the interior light, checked her face and her hair in the mirror, then climbed out and locked the car. Seven thirty-seven. Just late enough, hopefully, for Michael to have arrived first. Despite her nerves, she walked on air through the front entrance.

  To her disappointment, there was no sign of him. A couple of young salesmen types at a table. A solitary elderly man. And on the barstools, a plump, middle-aged woman with spiky red hair and a tarty skirt, who was joined by a tattooed, denim-clad gorilla who emerged from the gents’, nuzzled her neck greedily, making her giggle, then retrieved a smouldering cigarette from the ashtray.

  Michael, in
his den, stared at the screen. ‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘What a bitch!’ With one click he dragged all Margaret’s emails to his trash bin. With another, he dragged her photograph to the same place. Then he emptied the trash.

  *

  Back home just before ten, Joe glanced up from a football game that looked like all the other football games Margaret had ever seen. ‘What happened to your night out with the girls?’ he asked.

  ‘I decided I’d been neglecting my husband too much recently.’ She put her arm around him, around her rock, and kissed his cheek. ‘I love you,’ she said.

  He actually took his eyes off the game to look at her, and then kissed her back. ‘I love you, too,’ he said.

  Then she went upstairs to her room, and checked her mailbox. There was nothing. ‘Michael, I waited two hours,’ she began typing.

  Then she stopped. It was cold in her den. Downstairs the television had given a cosy glow. And her rock had felt warm.

  Sod you, Michael.

  Just two clicks and he was gone from her life.

  DEAD ON THE HOUR

  (originally published by the Mail on Sunday)

  The hour before dawn is the deadliest. The silent, ethereal period when the air is filled with an indefinable stillness; the darkness is spent but the new day has not yet begun. It is the hour when human resistance is at its lowest, when the dying, exhausted from the sheer effort of clinging to life, are most likely to slip their moorings and drift quietly away into that good night.

  Sandra held her mother’s hand; it was no bigger than a child’s, soft and fragile with leathery creases. And sometimes she imagined there was still a pulse, but it was merely the beat of her own pulse coming back at her.

  A tear rolled down her cheek, chased by another as she reflected on her past, her memory in selective mode, retrieving and presenting to her only what was good. She delved back into her childhood, when it was she who had been weak and her mother who had been strong, and thought about how the wheel had turned, as relentless and impersonal as the cogs of the grandfather clock downstairs. Strong. Yes, she had been strong these past months, spoon-feeding her mother an increasingly infantile diet. Supper last night had been pineapple jelly and a glass of milk. At 7 p.m. precisely.

  The clock was quiet; it seemed a long time since it had last chimed. She looked at her watch. A whole hour had passed, gone. Like the hour that ceases to exist or vanishes during the night when the clocks go forward to British Summer Time. It was three o’clock in the morning and then suddenly it was four o’clock. Sandra’s mother was alive and suddenly she was not.

  And now, equally suddenly, there was no hurry. Sandra clung to the thought as the one consolation through her grief. No hurry at all. She could sit up here for hours if she wanted. Sure, she would have to call the doctor eventually, and – she shuddered – an undertaker. She would have to get the death certificate. The vicar would make an appearance. There were relatives to be phoned. Probate. Her mind whirred as she remembered all the arrangements when her sweet father had died six years back. Escaped, she had sometimes thought, and felt guilty about that as she stared at her mother’s pitifully atrophied body.

  It was Tony who always made that joke. He said it was the only way her father had been able to get safely away from her mother. If he’d merely left her, she’d have tracked him down and turned up, pointing angrily at her watch, asking if he realized what the hell the time was.

  Yes, she had been a difficult woman, a tyrannical clock-watcher, selfish, petulant, unreasonable and, in her last years, spoilt and paranoid. Her brother, Bill, had emigrated to Australia. Escaped, as Tony put it. And her sister, Marion, had gone to America; also escaped, according to Tony. So the duty of looking after their mother fell to Sandra.

  Tony had always criticized her for that. She was too weak with her mother, he warned. She had always allowed the older woman to walk all over her, to dominate her, forcing her to live at home to look after her until she was past the age when she could have children of her own. It was not a bond of love, he told her, but of fear. He was right. Her mother had hated Tony for taking Sandra away, and she had hated him even more for not allowing Sandra to let her come and live with them until these last two years when she had been dying.

  Now, as Sandra sat clutching her mother’s lifeless hand, she realized that for the first time she was free. She would no longer have to set the alarm for six-fifteen in order to take her mother a cup of tea in bed at six-thirty precisely – as her father had always done. She would no longer have to bring her breakfast up at seven-fifteen precisely, or bath her every morning at eight o’clock precisely. She would no longer have to set her mental clock to call her every hour, on the hour, whenever she was out of the house, and no longer have to suffer the abuse when she was late with a call, or came home later than she had stated, or was late with the afternoon tea tray or the supper tray or the cup of warm milk at eleven o’clock.

  Slowly, half reluctantly, half anticipating her new freedom, she prised away the lifeless fingers one at a time, then laid her mother’s skeletal arm down. She turned out the light, closed the door, walked slowly to her own bedroom and slipped, exhausted, into bed beside Tony’s sleeping frame.

  No need to wake him. It could wait. A few hours of sleep and she would be better able to cope with the grim business ahead – choosing the coffin, the hymns, the wording for the death notices in the papers. She lay still, drained after her weeks of vigil, her eyes wet and her heart hollow with grief.

  She dozed fitfully, listening for the chimes of the grandfather clock, but heard only the rising, then abating, dawn chorus. Finally, she got out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown, closed the door and stood for a moment on the landing. Bitumen-black shadows rose out of the darkness to enfold her. She stared at the door of her mother’s room and felt a tightness grip her throat. Normally she would have been able to hear the clock ticking, but it was silent. Puzzled, she went downstairs into the hall. The hands of the grandfather clock pointed to three o’clock. It had stopped, she realized, her eyes sliding to her own wristwatch. It was six-forty-five.

  Then she felt a deep unease. Three o’clock. She remembered now; it was coming back. She remembered what grief had made her forget earlier. Three o’clock. She had glanced at her watch to imprint it on her mind. Information the doctor might want to know: her mother had died at three o’clock precisely.

  A tiny coil of fear spiralled inside her. The clock had been her mother’s wedding present to them. Stark, institutional, rather Teutonic, it dominated the small hall, stared her in the face each time she came in the house as if either to remind her it was time to call her mother or to reproach her for forgetting. Tony disliked it, but he had been trying, in those early days, to make friends with her mother. Thus the clock had stayed and had been given pride of place. He had taken to joking that there was no need to have a portrait of her mother in the house – the clock was a near perfect likeness of her.

  Sandra turned and walked into the kitchen. As she went in, a blast of cold air greeted her, making her shiver. Startled, she wondered if the freezer door was open. The daylight seeping through the blinds was grey and flat, and the only sound was the rattling hum of the fridge. Then, as she reached for the light switch, something brushed past and she felt a rustle of fabric. She stood, absolutely rigid, goose pimples breaking out all over her body.

  Her mother had come into the room.

  Sandra stared at her in disbelief and terror. The old woman was standing, in her pink dressing gown, angrily tapping her watch. ‘Where’s my tea? What kind of a daughter are you that you forget to bring your dying mother her cup of tea?’

  ‘M-M-Mummy!’ she stammered finally. ‘You . . . you died . . . dead . . . you . . .’

  The room was getting colder and the light was dimming perceptibly. Yet her mother seemed brighter, more vibrant, more alive in contrast with it. Relief momentarily flooded through Sandra’s confusion. ‘Mummy . . . you’re OK. I . . . I . . .’ her vo
ice tailed off. Her eyes told her that her mother was standing in front of her, but her brain told her that was impossible. She reminded herself that only a few hours ago there had been no pulse, her mother had been turning cold, rigor mortis had begun to set in.

  ‘You and Tony can’t wait for me to go so you can be rid of me, can you?’

  ‘Mummy, th–that’s not true. It isn’t . . . I . . .’

  Her mother stepped towards her, with her hand raised in the air. ‘You bitch! You slut! You tramp!’ She swiped her hand ferociously and Sandra flinched, stepping back out of her way with a startled cry.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  Sandra turned. Tony, bleary-eyed, wrapped in his towelling dressing gown, stood behind her in the doorway. When she looked back, her mother had vanished. Her heart was hammering and she was gulping air in shock. ‘Mummy,’ she blurted. ‘I–I . . .’ She pushed past him, ran stumbling upstairs and threw open the door of the spare room.

  Her mother lay there, exactly as she had left her. Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, Sandra walked across and touched her cheek. Her flesh was cold, like putty. Her eyes were still closed and there was the faintest hint of a rictus grin that lent her a smugness even in death, as if she were enjoying some final private joke.

  Shaking with fear and confusion, Sandra hurled herself into the arms of Tony who had followed her. He held her tightly, and she pressed her face against the soft towelling and began to sob.

  ‘She’s cold,’ Tony said quietly and baldly. ‘She must have gone in her sleep.’

  *

  The following morning Sandra sat bolt upright in bed, wide awake. The bedside clock said six-fifteen. Fifteen minutes! She hurried downstairs, spooned tea into the pot and, while the kettle boiled, set her mother’s cup and saucer on the tray.

  As she was pouring the water into the pot, she stopped.