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“I had to do something radical to wake you up, Matt. I’ve got a client meeting me for a house viewing at ten.”
Phil sat straighter and closed the newspaper he’d been perusing. He tipped his head from side to side, ironing out the kinks.
Surgery to untangle the spaghetti of sliced tendons, nerves, and blood vessels in my wrists had taken several hours. Instead of surfacing sluggishly, bathed in strong painkillers and anaesthetic gases, my brain had woken with a zing to the fucking awful warbling of Coldplay.
“You shouldn’t have bothered. Turn that crap off.”
Its job done; the radio was silenced. Phil loathed Chris Martin’s middle-class, navel-gazing angst almost as much as I did.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“How do you think?” Bloody stupid question.
“I dunno.” He shrugged. “Happy to be in my devastating company? Glad to be alive? Full of gratitude someone phoned for an ambulance? Again?”
“They should feel free to walk on by next time.”
I attempted to shuffle myself further up the pillows; a tricky manoeuvre with one bandaged arm suspended from a drip stand and the other swaddled in even more dressings. “Shit, that hurts.”
“I’m not surprised,” Phil observed. “You did a right proper job on yourself this time.”
I inhaled deeply and winced. Even breathing made my arms hurt.
“That was kind of the fucking point.”
“Yeah, ‘cos Brenner would have really wanted you to try and top yourself on the anniversary of his birthday.”
“Anyone ever told you your bedside manner needs some work, Phil?”
As did my attitude. Shutting my eyes, I turned my head to face the blank wall. The deep-seated pain clawing just under my rib cage had nothing to do with my self-induced injuries. Brenner would have been twenty-eight today. No fucking age at all. Perhaps if I asked the nurses for some morphine, I’d drift off to sleep again. Manage to blank out reality for a little longer.
“Do you remember my maths friend, Alex?” I’d said his name out loud. Achieving that minor feat had taken years.
I heard Phil sigh. “Alex was a little bit more than your maths friend. Yeah, of course I remember him. You nearly destroyed the poor kid.”
I laughed softly. “He’ll have got over it. I’m surprised he searched for me as long as he did.”
“Me too, mate. You’re not that fucking special.”
If I hadn’t been so bloody miserable, I might have smiled at that. Part of my depressed brain found Phil amusing, even though an appropriate witty comeback hid just out of reach.
“He’ll be a doctor somewhere by now. At a hospital in Nottingham, probably.”
“Yep, probably.”
“Married, too.”
My words felt thick in my mouth. Maybe four hours of surgery had caught up with me after all, if I was confessing this crap to Phil. That, or the blood loss had messed with my self-preservation. Talking to anyone—even to Phil, left me so fucking exhausted.
“Sometimes, I have this…I don’t know…little fantasy game I play with myself.”
“If it’s kinky gay shit, Matt, then I don’t want to know.”
I ignored him. In Phil’s vanilla world, gay and kinky were the same thing. Until recently, he’d thought LGBT was shorthand for lettuce, bacon, and tomato sandwiches with added gherkins. I suspected a day didn’t go by when he didn’t shake his head in wonder at how he’d managed to saddle himself with a suicidal queer best mate.
“I imagine lying on a trolley in A&E, you know, after I’ve cut myself. Or with a burst appendix or something. I’m waiting for a doctor to appear around the curtain, and when he does, I imagine it’s Dr Alex Valentine.”
“And then the pervy gay stuff happens.” Phil laughed. “You’re dafter than I thought.”
