A Delicate Truth A Novel

lay dying for a while before making a grab for the springs, then hooking a finger round them and pulling himself up with his left hand, while his right hand – which was numb and probably broken – raked around for the burner, found it and clutched it against his chest, at the same moment as his left hand let go and he thumped back on to the floor.
    After that it was only a matter of pressing green and saying ‘Hi’ with all the brightness he could muster. And when nothing came back and his patience ran out, or his energy did, he said:
    ‘I’m fine, Emily. A bit knackered, that’s all. Just don’t come round. Please. I’m toxic’ – by which he meant broadly that he was ashamed of himself; Shorty had been a washout; he had achieved nothing except the beating of a lifetime; he’d fucked up just like her father; and for all he knew the house was undersurveillance and he was the last person on earth that she should be visiting, whether in her capacity as a doctor or anything else.
    Then as he rang off he realized that she couldn’t come anyway, because she didn’t know where he lived, he’d never mentioned it apart from saying Islington, and Islington covered quite a few square miles of dense real estate, so he was safe. And so was she, whether she liked it or not. He could switch the bloody thing off and doze, which he did, only to be woken again, not by the burner but by a thunderous hammering on the front door – done, he suspected, not by human hand but a heavy instrument – which stopped only to allow for Emily’s raised voice, sounding very like her mother’s.
    ‘I’m standing at your front door, Toby,’ she was saying, quite unnecessarily, for the second or third time now. ‘And if you don’t open it soon, I’m going to ask your downstairs neighbour to help me break into your flat. He knows I’m a doctor and he heard heavy thuds coming through the ceiling. Are you hearing me, Toby? I’m pressing the bell, but it’s not ringing so far as I can hear.’
    She was right. All the bell was emitting was a graceless burp.
    ‘Toby, can you please come to the door? Just answer, Toby. I really don’t want to break in.’ Pause. ‘Or have you got somebody with you?’
    It was the last of these questions that was too much for him, so he said ‘Coming’ and made sure the zip of his fly was closed before rolling off the bed again and half shuffling, half crawling down the passage on his left side, which was the relatively comfortable one.
    Reaching the door, he pulled himself into a semi-kneeling position long enough to get his key out of his pocket and into the lock and double-turn it with his left hand.
     
    *
     
    In the kitchen, a stern silence reigned. The bed sheets were turning quietly in the washing machine. Toby was sitting nearly upright in his dressing gown and Emily with her back to him was heating a tin of chicken soup she had fetched, along with her own prescriptions from the chemist.
    She had stripped him and bathed his naked body with professional detachment, noting without comment his grossly swollen genitals. She had listened to his heart, taken his pulse, run her hands over his abdomen, checked him for fractures and damaged ligaments, paused at the chequered lacerations round his neck where they had thought to strangle him and then thought better of it, put ice packs on his bruises and given him Paracetamol for his pain, and helped him limp along the corridor while she held his left arm round her neck and over her shoulder and with her right arm clutched his right hip.
    But until now, the only words they’d exchanged had been in the order of ‘Do please try to keep still, Toby’ or ‘This may hurt a bit’ and, more recently, ‘Give me your door key and stay exactly where you are till I come back.’
    Now she was asking the tough questions.
    ‘Who did this to you?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Do you know why they did it to you?’
    For appetizers, he thought. To warn me off. To punish me for being nosy and stop me being nosy in future. But it was all too woolly, and too much to say, so he said nothing.
    ‘Well, whoever did it must have used a knuckleduster,’ she pronounced, when she had got tired of waiting.
    ‘Maybe just rings on his fingers,’ he suggested, remembering Elliot’s hands on the steering wheel.
    ‘I shall need your permission before I call the police. Can I call them?’
    ‘No point.’
    ‘Why no point?’
    Because the police aren’t the