Nymphaea

Chapter 17: Territorial pissings

A week later, back in Edinburgh, Stephen left a pub to fetch the car after a nice evening amongst men. Paul remained behind, finishing his last beer.

Stephen went down an old cobbled street that was framed by man-sized walls on either side. It was around one o’clock in the night (they’d been in a pub with the licence to stay opened beyond the usual limit of 11p.m.) and he was alone, except for another pair of footsteps echoing a few metres behind him. The wind carried the scent of a strange sort of tobacco to his nostrils. Sweet somehow, like cherry flavour. He didn’t pay any further attention to it.

Suddenly the steps approached him speedily and before he managed to turn and see what this was about, he was pushed against the nearest wall, a hard grip in his neck, a knee on his back pressing him flatly to the bricks.

“What do you want?” Stephen asked, trying to keep a level head, despite his racing heart.

The only sound audible was the sucking of his attacker at his cigarette. He blew the smoke into Stephen’s face. Then the attacker threw it away.

The man sniffed at him.

Stephen was jerked around. Before he could see the face of the other man, he felt a tearing pain. He saw himself fall, his body unable to support itself in the shock of the pain. His blood spattered the pavement. Stephen panicked.

Suddenly, everything went black.

*

Paul left the pub with a few other guests that went off to the left as the innkeeper shut the door behind them. Paul slowly trudged to the right, down the narrow street, pulling out his cell phone to call Stephen as he was still not back.

Suddenly he heard a distant ring ahead. He frowned. “Stephen? Is something wrong with your car?” After all, that thing was ten years old now. Paul always wondered why Stephen didn’t buy a new one. There was still quite a bit of money left on his bank accounts from his snooker career after all.

There was no answer.

When he turned around the bend of the street, he saw someone kneeling on the pavement at the far end. Wasn’t their a body lying next to him?

Paul hurried to reach them. Maybe something was wrong and they needed help.

When he came close, he saw red streams running down the street, trickling away in the gaps between the cobblestone. A man was bent over a lifeless body, soaked in blood, pressing a cloth to its neck. Paul wanted to ask what was happened here when he recognized Stephen’s cell phone lying next to the man on the street. It dawned on him that the man lying there was indeed… No! This couldn’t…!

The man that bent over him turned to face the redhead. “The ambulance should arrive any moment,” he said with a cool, strong voice that tried to say ‘everything is under control’.

He knew that guy, that was the one from China, Stephen’s secret lover, wasn’t it? What did he do here?

“Please go up the street and show them where we are, Mr McCourt.” His tone was more like a command. Probably quite what Paul needed to rid himself of the shock. How did he know Paul’s name anyway?

The man ran up the street just in time to show the driver where to go. The ambulance men jumped out of the vehicle and took over the black haired man’s place who stepped back, shaking his hands in a vain attempt to get rid of the blood that was splattered all over his body and face. He warned them that the aorta had been hit, as he had sad during the emergency call already.

Paul came running back and stopped, staring in disbelief at his friend and then the tall man beside him.

“How long did it take you to stop the bleeding?” one of the paramedics asked, whilst the other told him that the pulse was weak.

“I reached him a few seconds after it must have happened and took his shirt off immediately to press it to the spot. I think he might have been without help for half a minute. There might be other injuries as the attacker kicked him as he lay on the floor.”

“Did you see the attacker?” asked a police men who had just joined the scene. Of course the police had been informed by the hospital after that emergency call. Paul was eager to hear how it had happened.

“I saw him running off as I approached. But it was dark and I was concentrated on helping Stephen,” the blood soaked man replied.

The ambulance men carried Stephen into the vehicle, meaning to go to the hospital quickly. Paul looked at the dark haired rescuer. He motioned for Paul to go with Stephen. He did not wait to be asked twice.

*

Paul paced up and down the hospital corridor. He had called Anne and told her what had happened and that he wouldn’t come home.

It took two hours until the doctor came out of the operating theatre. When Paul asked him about Stephen, he first refused to give him an answer as he was unrelated to him but Paul was quick to mention that this man’s little daughter who had lost her mother already was sitting in the kitchen with Paul’s wife anxiously awaiting any news. Of course she wasn’t, she was clueless sleeping in her bed. But these rules were ridiculous and he would not wait any longer to hear how his best friend was.

He was told that it had been a close miss; that Stephen had lost a lot of blood. “If it hadn’t been for your intervention,” the physician admitted, “we would not have been able to help him.”

“That wasn’t me,” Paul interposed.

“Anyway. Mr Donaghy is still weak but we have stabilised him, supplied him with new blood and seen to his other injuries – several ribs are broken and his right arm was dislocated. It will take a few weeks’ time for him to fully recover but then he’ll be fine.”

“So can his daughter visit him tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

Paul was relieved. He took a taxi to get home although he wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to catch any sleep.

*

After breakfast the next morning, they went to the hospital with the whole bunch of children. They had broken the news that her daddy had been hurt to Lissy very carefully, hastily adding that he was fine. Luckily, Melissa had been too small when her mother had died so she had no bad memories left of that and therefore did not worry too much.

She ran ahead into the entrance hall of the hospital when Paul and Anne were still busy with the boys and a little get-well-present for Stephen.

*

Lissy ran up to the great front doors made of glass, stopped in front of them and waited for them to slide open, then she slowly went in. She looked around curiously, as she didn’t know the way to her dad. To her right was the broad reception with a nurse leaning on it, writing something. To her left there were seats and a few plants. A wide corridor opened before her and branched to the right at the end of the reception.

She saw a man standing in a corner, reading the labels on a vending machine in silence. She went up to him and said ‘hello’. He turned slightly to look down on her. He was taller than daddy. For a moment his face looked very serious. He didn’t look very nice as he stood there with his arms crossed. But then his face softened.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said kindly.

She loved his dark, calm voice. She had liked him immediately when she had seen him the first time. Lissy noticed that he was different from daddy’s other friends. He treated her like a little lady. There wasn’t that ‘I’m an adult and you are a little inexperienced child’ attitude when he talked to her (though she would not have been able to voice it like that). He wasn’t the goofy type that tried to make her laugh either. He was just himself.

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Are you here to see my dad?” the blond girl asked.

The tall man nodded.

Lissy admired the man’s long tail of straight black hair. She’d have liked that, too. Her hair was all curly. Her daddy had said that she had inherited that from her grandma. But she had never met her.

“Do you want something to drink, too?” the man offered.

She smiled. “What do they have?”

“What about cocoa?”

She nodded.

The man put his left hand into his trouser pocket and got a few coins out, putting one into the slit of the machine. Lissy heard the coin fall. He pressed a button and with a few loud noises a plastic cup fell out of the machine and was filled with her drink.

She said ‘thanks’ as the man gave it to her, her eyes glued to the beautiful ring on his hand for a few seconds.

He smiled back and helped himself to a drink.

Aunt Anne came through the sliding glass doors looking for her, carrying the flowers they had bought on the way to the hospital. She spotted her and was quickly approaching the girl to tell her that she shouldn’t run off all the time. She was always saying that. Daddy never said such things.

She spotted the drink in Lissy’s hands and her eyes wandered towards the man standing a few steps away from her as the girl could hardly have supplied herself with that. She smiled at him insecurely, apparently not sure what to think of him. He paid no particular interest in her. Anne decided to act politely, whatever intentions a stranger might have when he bought a drink for an unknown child. She thanked him, saying that would not have been necessary, asked Melissa whether she had thanked him properly and then told her to come along.

Lissy was quite pleased with herself to see the surprise in Aunt Anne’s face. She knew someone that Aunt Anne didn’t know. She loved it when she turned back to look at the man and he winked, smiling, as if they shared a secret.

They waited for Uncle Paul and the twins at the reception, asked for her dad’s room number then and went to find him.

*

Paul sat down on one of the uncomfortable chairs in the clinical corridor, next to his wife. The police was just interrogating Stephen, so they had to wait. The boys were running around and they had to tell them to be quiet every few minutes. Melissa on the other hand sat silently on her chair, letting her legs dangle and sipping her cocoa. She was always like that, she was no wild child.

After a few minutes, Stephen’s beau – as Paul called him silently - was walking up the corridor. He gave him a nod as he passed Paul by, carrying a plastic cup of coffee. Anne turned to Paul behind the man’s back, mouthing ‘you know him?’ taken aback. Paul explained that he was a friend of Stephen’s and the one who had probably saved his life the last night, leaving out the information that he also probably had shared bed with Stephen at some point. Anne still had no clue that Stephen had this certain notion.

“The police is questioning him,” Paul informed the other man who had leaned against the window sill, gesturing towards the door of Stephen’s room.

The man nodded slightly, indicating he knew already.

“You don’t suppose they have a lead this soon?”

The other man found the inside of his plastic cup deeply fascinating. “I don’t expect them to catch the perpetrator. There were no traces,” he answered indifferently. “That’s bad,” Paul said weakly.

He tried to find something else to say. “Stephen’s never mentioned your name…”

The other man was still occupied with his cup of coffee. “It’s Ayve,” he answered in a polite, but rather bored voice, pronouncing the name with a strange sound in the beginning. The Spanish name ‘Julio’ (like that singer Julio Iglesias) had that sound, too, Paul remembered.

He introduced himself and his wife, although this ‘Ayve’ apparently was informed about them, as he had called Paul by his name the previous night.

“Oh,” he added, “and that is Stephen’s daughter, Lissy.” He motioned towards the small girl.

“We had the pleasure of meeting already,” the man answered with a little more affection in his voice, toasting to the young lady who giggled, enjoying her moment of triumph of being ahead of the adults in her connections.

The door opened and the police men left the room, greeting them as they passed. The couple rose from their seats, calling their boys. Ayve remained unmoved.

“Don’t you wanna join us?”

Ayve shook his head. “I need to talk to him in private.”

*

Stephen had not been able to tell the officers much. He had not seen the perpetrator. He had not even known what had happened until the doctor had told him in what way he had been injured exactly. All he could remember was a stabbing pain and the gush of blood that had poured out of him suddenly. Not a memory he liked to dwell in.

He put that thought aside hastily as Lissy and the appendant folk entered his room.

Anne gave him a look of sympathy and worry, clearly she had feared for Lissy to lose her second parent as well. The girl carried no such fears.

Anne was busy finding a vase for the flowers she’d brought and gave him a package of cake she had gotten at the bakery’s (baking was not her favourite thing to do) whereas Paul told him the latest news in the snooker world, about the new sponsor that had been found for one of the tournaments (since advertising for tobacco and alcohol had been prohibited, the sport had run short of money). They were clearly here to take his mind off the events of the night.

But something else distracted Stephen more. A feeling he hadn’t had for quite a while.

“He’s here somewhere, isn’t he?” he asked in the middle of Paul’s story.

Paul was caught off guard. “Who? Oh, you mean him…” His voice had that strange suggestive undertone. “Yeah, he waits outside. Says he’s got something to discuss with you in private.” A raised eyebrow gave Stephen a pretty good idea what Paul thought that was about.

So, had that just been a coincidence? Or had Stephen been right all the time? He had asked whether Ayve was here because he had had this… oppressive or tense feeling again… this feeling of something lurking, watching him but without intimidating him, somehow. He couldn’t describe it. That impression had not been there a week ago when he had last seen Ayve. Stephen had felt nothing then. But he had felt it on several occasions before: in tournament matches when he was still playing snooker as if Ayve had been sitting in the audience mostly. It had never been menacing, only dark, somehow, silently observing him… goodness, he couldn’t grab it.

But it was here. Stephen had never been able to say why but he had always associated this feeling with Ayve. There was a longing in it, a suffocating need… Maybe he was just imagining things. Probably Stephen was just projecting his feelings onto Ayve, desperately hoping that Ayve would finally… He would have to stop that. Stephen had thought he had left Ayve behind, gotten rid of the affection he carried for him – and now he was dwelling in it again.

And yet: he was here. Why? Ayve had sad it was over. What had led him here now, exactly when Stephen was lying in the hospital? If it was over, why should Ayve care whether he was hurt or something? He hadn’t voiced something like ‘let’s stay friends’ (that thought alone was worth a laugh; Ayve really didn’t seem the type for that). The fact that he apparently had talked to Paul was confusing Stephen already. Ayve had always been isolated from his other friends. To ‘share’ him now, was… odd.

The McCourts prepared to leave after half an hour. Anne had to go to work and Paul would take the children to the beach as they had originally planed to do together. Paul would be busy from the next week on so they had to use the time given.

Stephen’s heart beat faster as they left and he waited for Ayve to step through the door. His chest hurt a little despite the tranquilizer he had been given when he took a few deep breaths.

*

Ayve did not hasten to get to Stephen when his other visitors left the room. He was down in the entrance hall again, getting a second cup of coffee. He cursed himself once more for letting things come this far. He was such a fool. Control was what he wanted and when he loosened the rules for himself to see whether he might have been wrong with all his precautions and whether another way might be better, he provoked chaos. He longed to hurt himself. But this was not about him. He had dwelled in self pity long enough. Ayve had sworn never to fall back to that habit again. He had duties.

*

Paul saw the tall, slender man in his dark suit sit in one of the chairs in the entrance hall as they left. He looked forlorn somehow. His lower arms rested on his knees, his head drooped from his shoulders. Paul was reminded somehow of that day when Stephen had received this ‘Ayve’s’ note in Shanghai and the man had stood outside in the rain, watching Stephen read the note, completely soaked. He recalled the picture of the man standing entirely calm and messed with blood next to Stephen last night. Something was wrong with this guy.

*

Stephen nearly jumped when the door opened and Ayve came in.

“Sorry to let you wait,” the tall man said softly. His face was gloomy as he seized a chair, put it next to Stephen’s bed - just far enough apart from the bed that Stephen had no chance of reaching over to him - and sat down.

“How do you feel?” Ayve asked composedly.

Stephen was perplexed to be asked such a question. Ayve never asked such things. Probably because he could read Stephen’s mind anyway. What was behind his coming?

“I’ll be alright, I was lucky.” What else could he say?

Ayve looked down to his hands that rested on his lap. “No, you weren’t.”

“What do you mean?” Stephen had a dark sense of foreboding.

“You died last night, Stephen.” Ayve’s voice was not more than a whisper.

Stephen looked at him incredulously. What was he talking? “How would you know? The doctor said I was close but I made it.”

Ayve shook his head.

“I lied to him. I told the ambulance men that you had been helped immediately. That was wrong. I was inattentive. I didn’t watch you as I should have after our little tête à tête.”

Stephen frowned. “Ayve, what are you trying to tell me?”

“I am telling you that you were killed last night by someone who did not quite fancy the idea of us sharing bed with each other. Of me sharing bed with a human. I was aware of his attitude and still I was fool enough to think he wouldn’t dare to touch you. He did.”

Ayve lifted his gaze and looked right into Stephen’s face.

“The only thing he did not consider is that you are strong minded and would hold on to life the way you did. So… welcome to our world.” Ayve’s voice carried no welcoming warmth, only bitterness and exhaustion.

Stephen’s mind was blank in disbelief. He stared at Ayve who was visibly uncomfortable in this room, in this situation.

“You…” Stephen tried to make sense of what Ayve had just said. “Are you telling me that I… I am…” Well, what was he?

“That you have died or rather were in a situation when you would have died had you not had the strength to repel death for the sake of your daughter’s well-being or the hopes and dreams you have for your own future. You have stopped living a natural life and started a life that is granted to you only by your own will to breathe and see and hear and smell and taste and love and care or whatever it is that you want. You decide now, that’s what I’m here to tell you. Most people don’t know and waste their chances therefore, merely leading the life they thought was appropriate or natural and then they die. You can do better than that. Use what you have given to yourself. If you make sure to always have a goal, a passion in life, you can surpass your once ‘natural’ life span by centuries. It’s up to you.”

Stephen’s mind was still blank. He was shocked. He didn’t know how to react. This was surreal. How could he know that this was true? He did not feel any difference.

To Stephen’s bewilderment, Ayve raised himself from his seat and put it back to its old place.

“Wait,” Stephen called helplessly. “Don’t leave me now…!”

Ayve stopped at the foot of the bed. “How do you think I can help you in this, Stephen?” His voice sounded exhausted, powerless.

“Stay with me,” Stephen pleaded.

Ayve let his gaze drop to the floor and shook his head. “I told you I am not the man to lean on. You can go on with your work. Nobody knows that you have changed sides. If you need help, just ask Seya. He likes you. He’ll have an advice for you.”

Ayve went to the door. Before he shut it behind him, he turned to throw a last glance at Stephen. There was pain in his face. He couldn’t hide it.

*

It took three weeks until Stephen was released from the hospital. As Paul was not yet back from a tournament, he had declined Anne’s offer to fetch him. She had enough trouble with the small ones. The first thing Stephen did was visiting a hairdresser. His hairstyle had bothered him for quite a while. It made him look way too young. He had hardly changed since his early twenties. Some of his female acquaintances had mocked him for his boyish appearance. Now that he had involuntarily stepped into yet another phase of his life and this marked indeed a significant change, he wanted to see that change as well when he looked into the mirror. The strands of golden hair that had accompanied him ever since the start of his snooker career had to go.

And with them, he would let go of something else: the last bit of insecurity left in him. Stephen could not afford it. That last impression of Ayve’s pained face had left him with an unbreakable determination.

***