impressions by his bedside. The twenty-one-year-old wore a second-hand Bay City Rollers T-shirt. Beneath each Roller’s nose she’d marker penned a Hitler moustache. Fresh Faced Roller had two. Bad Hair Day Roller had three; one for his nose, one in place of each eyebrow. Roller Who’s Name No one Remembers had no moustache; Lucy’s pen had run out by then.
Explaining to Danny who the Rollers were, she’d once named them as, Uncle Bulgaria, Orinoco, ‘A couple of others,’ and Madam Choulet. They wandered around Wimbledon Fortnight tidying things up when no one had asked them to, and were therefore like your mother. Danny’d always felt she’d got it wrong somewhere.
She flicked a peanut in the air, mouth catching it, head stationary, her tongue clicking on contact. Cold, forward gazing eyes – and lower jaw jutting to catch each nut – gave the killer fish effect. But it was how he’d always seen her.
‘Fancy a peanut?’ she asked, not tipping her giant-size bag his way.
‘I’m allergic to peanuts,’ he said, still weak.
‘Oh, yeah.’ She chewed. ‘So you are. You’d’ve thought I’d have considered that before buying them you.’ She sounded as though she had.
‘Where am I?’ he asked.
‘Looks like a chip shop to me.’ Flick. Click.
Groggy, he looked around at jade coloured walls, at doctors, nurses, trolleys, opened screens, closed screens and beds. A machine by his side blipped. A clear plastic tube fed purple liquid into his arm. This isn’t the hospital they usually take me to.’
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘This was your first calamity in the north west of town, so they brought you here. Congratulations, you’ve now had life or death surgery in each of Wheatley’s four big hospitals. How does it feel?’
‘Wheatley General?’ Again he looked around, this time seeing danger everywhere; behind those screens, in those beds, in that adjacent corridor which had no door to separate it from this recklessly open ward.
‘Yup.’ Lucy confirmed the location.
‘But this is Boggy Bill territory.’
‘Yeah,’ she snorted, the ring through her pointy nose glinting. ‘The laughs I’ve had over that video on those Sad but True shows.’
‘But what if he knows I’m here?’ Heart thumping, he sat up, throwing back the sheets. He looked at the floor for his shoes. His clothes, where had they put his clothes? ‘I’ve got to get out of here before …’
‘Lie down.’ She pushed him back down onto the bed then held him there, ‘You’re going nowhere till the doctor’s seen you.’
‘But …’ Again he tried to rise.
And again she stopped him, either not understanding or not caring about the situation’s urgency. Hard grey eyes stared into his. She gave her, ‘Don’t argue with me, Daniel,’ look.
He stopped resisting, and she reclaimed her seat, pulling it closer to his bed. It scraped over tiles, making a noise like a braking lorry. The ward’s other occupants looked at her then returned to their own concerns. She ignored them, retrieving the peanut bag from the floor, where she’d dropped it. And she asked, ‘Why would he come for you? I’m sorry to break the news to you but I’m sure there’s better people in this place to bump off.’
‘Like who?’
‘Like the Financial Director. If I was Boggy Bill, he’d be the first to go. Jesus, I’m not even Boggy Bill and I want to punch that bloke’s lights out. And is the Financial Director dead? No. He’s in the car park, walking his Dougal dog.’
‘But you’d like to punch everyone,’ said Danny. ‘Boggy Bill picks his targets with surgical precision, planning for months ahead, biding his time, awaiting the right moment to burst from the trees and grab you.’
She frowned. ‘Boggy Bill does?’
‘All the time.’
‘The Wheatley Bigfoot?’
‘The Wheatley Bigfoot.’
‘A creature with only one word in its vocabulary?’
‘Yes,’ he tried to make dwindling conviction sound like growing conviction.
‘And that word is …?’
‘We don’t need to go into that.’
‘Yes we do, Daniel.’
He shuffled slightly in his bed, turning red, finally saying the words, ‘Tamba-lulu.’
‘Tamba-lulu. And what does that mean, Daniel?’
‘No one knows.’
‘Do you think Boggy Bill knows?’ she asked cynically.
‘No one knows.’
‘And that’s a cunning planner of revenges, is it?’
‘Don’t mistake a lack of formal education for stupidity.’
‘Are we talking him or you?’ Shaking the bag, she emptied a handful of nuts into her palm then swallowed them. ‘Do you reckon Boggy Bill’s cross-eyed? He sounds the type of monster who would be.’
‘He’s no laughing matter for some of us, Lucy.’
‘So why would he choose you as his prime target?’
‘Because of my brother.’
‘And how would he know who your brother is?’
‘He’d know.’ He glanced round meaningfully, as though the thing was about to leap out from behind a closed screen or appear in the doorway, cunningly disguised as a nurse come to administer his bed bath. His blood froze solid at the realization that he’d been lying there for God knew how long, and at any time. Bill could have walked right in and torn his head off, giving its blood curdling cry of, ‘Tamba-lulu?’ which could be frightening, if uttered while your head was being bashed against a wall.
‘Danny, you’ve been here all this time. If he was coming for you, he’d have done it by now. I refuse to believe he’s blessed with patience, even if he did exist, which he doesn’t.’
‘He exists alright. Brian assured me.’
‘And if your brother said the world was hollow and inhabited by a secret sect of Aztec rabbits?’
‘He did.’
‘He did?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When?’
‘In a letter yester … I mean the day before my “accident”. He felt someone should know the truth, in case the rabbits came for him with their obsidian blades.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Not necessarily,’ he conceded grudgingly. ‘Brian may have a tendency to fantasize. But I like to keep an open mind. And let’s face it, if anyone’d know the world was hollow, he would. Brian’s been everywhere.’
‘Everywhere except the planet Earth.’ Flick. Click.
Danny scanned the walls for a calendar. There wasn’t one. A clock on the far wall told him it was 2:30 in the afternoon but not which afternoon. ‘How long have I been here? I was in the–’
‘Six months.’ She consumed half the peanuts in one go.
‘Six months?’ he said in disbelief.
‘Pretty cool, huh?’ Munch munch munch. ‘I never knew anyone who’d been in a coma before – least, not for six months.’ Swallow. ‘Course, my flatmate before you – Keith – he was dead. But who could tell? But you, Danny, you’ve gone for it big time. Me, I’m proud of you. I may not look it but I am.’
‘Six