Page 32 of Watching You
Body Four of Eight
Vic ‘The Belt’ Campbell had been occupying half of a double room at St Columba Hospital on a high-dependency ward.
He’d been dropped off three weeks earlier at the entrance to A&E, literally pushed out of a car that barely stopped moving by a mate with whom he’d done some meth then chased it with some cocaine while sharing a bottle of home-brewed vodka.
When he’d started foaming at the mouth, his friend had responded by taking a video of it.
Then Vic had started fitting, and that was less entertaining.
His friend, a fellow gang member, had started calling round for advice, and the consensus had been to get him to the hospital but to get the fuck out of there as fast as possible without drawing too much attention.
He’d drifted in and out of consciousness, tried to focus when they’d slapped his face, been vaguely aware that some brighter member of his crew had grabbed a handful of dirt on the way out and obscured both number plates, then they’d squashed and squeezed him onto the back seat and, in the words of the man in the front passenger seat, driven like fuck.
CCTV avoidance necessitated hoods up as they’d tried to push him out onto the pavement, and by then Vic was so out of it that he hadn’t heard the car as its wheels screeched on exit.
Most of his new brothers were wanted for something or other.
There was always a violence charge or a drugs investigation, a theft, housebreaking or failure to pay a bloody fine.
The place where they lived was as anonymous as they came and owned by the sort of landlord who only wanted cash, nothing in writing, and who had his own unpleasant way of dealing with people who didn’t deliver on time.
Vic was all in with the gang. They were the family he’d never had. Coming from a failing care system, he’d needed some people he could rely on. And if sometimes he had to do some crappy things to pay his dues, then that was life. No one else had ever been there for him.
He’d been found outside the hospital almost immediately, taken inside on a stretcher, and from that moment on, he had no memory.
Later, he’d been told that he had actually died at one point but the resuscitation team had worked their medical wonders and brought him back.
Then he’d been hooked up to various anti-opiates, had his system flushed out, and left in a semi-comatose state for his body to either mend or give up the ghost.
A week later, he’d come round. There’d been a visit from a police officer, a social worker, a counsellor and a drug rehabilitation worker.
For the first day, he was too weak to get up to use the bathroom.
If nothing else could persuade him that he should never touch drugs again, the humiliation of having a young, beautiful female nurse turn her head from the stench as she wiped him after he’d crapped in a cardboard bowl was a powerful argument for abstinence.
The same nurse had held up a mirror up in front of his face as s he’d cleaned his teeth and washed his face, and he’d finally seen the damage – the toll – his life choices were taking.
His skin was a mess, but that didn’t matter because he had enough face tattoos that you couldn’t really see much else.
His regularly shaved hair was growing back in rough patches, and several of the piercings in his ear had ripped as he’d hit the pavement, causing additional infections.
He was also, apparently, substantially underweight.
Scotland’s gangs, he’d thought but not said, weren’t known for the nutritional value of their catering.
You probably had to go to Italy or Mexico for a gang with those skills.
The police had decided, in the circumstances, not to charge him, and there was nothing anyone could do if he declined to engage with drug rehab, which was how the day had come when he could finally walk out, with the help of crutches anyway, to meet his mates in a pub a few streets away.
The hospital desk had let him make the call to arrange it given that he’d been dropped off with literally nothing.
The clothes he’d been found in – jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt – had long since been consigned to the hospital incinerator.
Instead, Vic had been gifted some porter scrubs in a dull shade of grey, and they were remarkably comfortable on areas where he’d been tubed, prodded and poked for so long.
Also donated had been a pair of plastic sliders.
No one seemed to know where his trainers had ended up, and in the grand scheme of things, Vic wasn’t going to make a fuss about that.
His favourite nurse, the one he had something of a crush on in spite of the fact that he’d seen how she looked at one of the junior doctors, brought him his discharge papers.
‘There’s a rehab meeting here on a Wednesday night,’ she said. ‘It’s free. All sorts of people go. No judgements. Why don’t you give it a go?’
‘I’m not an addict,’ he said, as he signed three different pieces of paper and accepted a bag of the drugs he was going to need for the next month given the mess he’d made of his stomach lining.
‘You don’t need to label yourself to understand that it would be good to get help,’ she said. ‘Next time, we might not be able to save you, and if we do, you might not like what’s left of your body.’
‘Because I’m so gorgeous now?’ He grinned and was painfully aware of the two teeth he was missing.
‘Because we all have only one body and one life, and the people here who’ve looked after you care very much that you don’t waste it. Will you at least think about it? If you’re not ready now, maybe in six months.’
Vic wanted to say something clever or glib but all he managed was, ‘Yeah, sure. Thanks.’
The nurse turned to leave. ‘You’ll be okay then? Someone’s going to look after you, I hope. Life’ll be tough for a while yet.’
She was kind and genuine, and it brought a lump to his throat that he’d thought he was past feeling. Vic nodded. He wasn’t quite sure how his voice would sound if he tried to answer.
‘Well then, I’ll leave you to it. Remember, call the nurses’ desk if you’re worried about anything, and you have a follow-up appointment in a fortnight that you really must keep. Swing by the ward, why don’t you, so we can see how you’re getting on?’
She left, and he wished he’d been able to say something – anything – in reply.
He shuffled out of the room, still getting used to the sliders on his feet, taking it slow with the crutches.
Just outside his door, he paused. The one thing he could do was walk off the ward with his head held high, looking like a man.
Perhaps it was because he resembled someone with a responsible job in the porter scrubs, or maybe it was three weeks without drugs and with regular meals, but he felt like a different man, or at least as if he had the potential to become a different man.
He exited the ward, took a deep breath, balanced the crutches in a corner where they could be found and returned to the store, then slowly made his way to the lifts.
‘Excuse me, can you tell me the way to the café?’ an elderly lady asked him.
She thought he worked there, he realised. He smiled and pointed to the far end of the corridor. ‘It’s that way, through the double doors and across the courtyard.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ she said.
He watched her go, feeling an odd pressure under his diaphragm, a sort of fizzing.
It was happiness, it hit him, natural rather than drug-induced, and it had come from the sense that someone saw him as responsible, helpful.
Human. Someone had needed him, even if it was only to answer one little question.
She hadn’t even been scared of how he looked.
The scrubs, it seemed, had erased all the other shit – his past misdemeanours, his drug abuse and his failure to look after his body.
An idea occurred to him, silly no doubt, a pipe-dream maybe, but was there just a chance that he could pull something good from the wreckage of his pointless existence?
He stepped into the empty lift that had just arrived with a ghost of a smile on his lips, unaware of the person directly behind him who slipped a needle into his neck before he could move and exited again before he could react.
By the time the lift had been summoned to the ground floor, Vic Campbell’s late-come dream of turning things around and becoming a hospital porter was no longer viable.