Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham Read Free Book Online Page B

make distinctions now.
    I stare at them.
    Janet stares back at me. She’s not saying anything just yet. Still getting used to being dead. April can’t look, but she does smile at me. I don’t think being dead is going to be too hard for her. Life was tough. Death should be a cinch in comparison.
    We smile at each other for a while, just enjoying each other’s company. I bend down to Janet’s hair. Smell it, touch it, comb it through with my fingers. The combing releases both a smell of antiseptic and a smell of shampoo. Apple, or something like it.
    I stand with my fingers in Janet’s hair, trying to trace the root of the impulse that brought me here. Janet’s scalp feels surprisingly delicate under my fingertips. I can feel little April smiling beside me.
    Something in our interaction seems incomplete, but I don’t know what’s needed to complete it.
    “Good night, little April,” I say. “Good night, Janet.”
    It’s the right thing to say, but the incompleteness is still there. I pause a few seconds more, but to no avail. The thing that was left hanging a few moments before is still hanging now, and I don’t think I’m going to find it by waiting.
    I don’t want Jackson and Price to think I’m a freak, so I “find” my pen, cover the girls, and go rustling out of the suite, brandishing the pen with a dumb look of triumph. The guys don’t care. They’re moving through to their changing area anyway.
    I get changed slowly. Rubber boots in one bin. Oversize gown in another. The door to the cleaning cupboard stands next to the entrance of the women’s changing room. Nice touch that. Don’t frighten the men by letting them see mops and buckets. I swing open the door and stare inside. It’s a big, roomy cupboard—a small room, really—with cleaning equipment. I don’t know why I’m staring, so go out into the lobby beyond.
    The men still aren’t done. I don’t see why I should wait for them, so I yell, “Thank you, Dr. Price. See you tomorrow, sir.” I push the door to leave and can’t budge it. It doesn’t pull open either. I’m trying to work out if these are unusually heavy doors and I’m just being wimpish when Price comes out to help.
    “I’ve got to buzz you out,” he explains. “It’s a secure area.”
    “Oh.”
    Everything’s a secure area these days. What do they think? That the corpses will escape? We say good night—him automatically, me woodenly—and he buzzes me out.
    Because I’m feeling a bit odd, I manage to get lost and end up tramping up and down some of those endless hospital corridors, looking for the way out. Pale yellow vinyl tiles that squeak underfoot and reflect too much fluorescent light. My head is full of hospital words. Pediatrics. Orthopedics. Radiotherapy. Phlobotomy. I don’t do well with the light or the words, and I end up walking around at random. Taking lifts, up or down according to which way they were going at the time. Getting on and off when anyone else does.
    Hematology. Diagnostic imaging. Gastroenterology.
    At one point a nurse stops me and asks me if I’m all right. I say, “Yes. Quite all right,” but I say it too loudly, and I go squeaking off down the yellow vinyl to show how all right I am.
    Eventually, I realize it is the hospital itself which is making me feel weird. I need to get out. I find myself at a T-junction in the corridor, wondering how to find the exit, then realize I’m staring directly at a large black-on-metal sign which says WAY OUT ⇒. I treat this as a clue and pursue it all the way to the main exit, where I find fresh air and a swell of wind. Cardiff air smells of grass or salt, depending on which way the wind blows. Or so they say. Mostly it smells of car fumes, the same as anywhere.
    I stand in the entrance for a while, letting people push past me, feeling myself return.
    I’m trying to remember where I parked my car when my phone chirps the arrival of a text. Brydon nudging me about the drink. The drink I’d