The Various Haunts of Men Read Free

sudden bolster of muffling, dense, clammy fog.

Two
    Sunday morning at a quarter past five and a gale blowing. Cat Deerbon lifted the phone on the second ring.
    ‘Dr Deerbon here.’
    ‘Oh dear …’ an elderly woman’s voice faltered. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t like disturbing you in the middle of the night, Doctor, I am sorry …’
    ‘It’s what I’m here for. Who is it?’
    ‘Iris Chater, Doctor. It’s Harry – I heard him. I came down and he was making such a funnynoise with his breathing. And he looks … you know … he isn’t right, Doctor.’
    ‘I’ll come.’
    The call was not unexpected. Harry Chater was eighty. He had had two severe strokes, was diabetic with a poor heart, and recently Cat had diagnosed a slow-growing carcinoma in the bowel. He should probably have been in hospital but he and his wife had insisted that he would be better at home. Which, shethought, letting herself quietly out of the house, he almost certainly was. He wasalso happier in the bed they had arranged for him downstairs in the front room with his two budgerigars for company.
    She reversed the car out into the lane. The trees around the paddock were tossing wildly, caught for a moment in her headlamps, but the horses were safely stabled, her family sound asleep.
    Not manypeople kept budgerigars now, apart from the competitive bird-fanciers. Caged birds were out of fashion, like poodles. She tried to remember, swerving slightly to avoid a fallen branch, when she had last seen anyone with a poodle, clipped to look like the woolly pompons Sam and Hannah had made in their playgroup days. What other handmade things had they brought so proudly home? She began to makea mental list. It was eight miles from the village of Atch Sedby into Lafferton, it was pitch dark and raining and there was no one else on the road; for years, to exercise her brain and keep herself awake on these night calls, Cat had forced herself to recite poems aloud – the ones she had learned by heart at school … ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, ‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes’, ‘I had asilver penny and an apricot tree’, and, from the exam years, choruses from
Henry V
and soliloquies from
Hamlet
, the set plays. Listening to the car radio seemed to make her more sleepy, but poetry, or chemical formulae, or mental arithmetic kept her going. Or lists. Woolly pompons, she thought, and pasta pictures, and binoculars made out of the insides of toilet rolls; Mother’s Day cards withyellow-tissue daffodils, crooked coil pots, papier mâché animals, mosaics from little slivers of coloured sticky paper.
    The moon came out from behind the fast-scuddingclouds just as she turned into Lafferton and saw the cathedral rising up ahead, the great tower silvered, the windows mysteriously gleaming.
    ‘Slowly, silently now the moon
    Walks the night in her silver shoon …’
    She struggledto remember what came next.
    Nelson Street was one of a grid of twelve terraces known as The Apostles. At 37, two-thirds of the way down, the lights were on.
    Harry Chater was going to die, probably within the next hour. Cat knew that as she walked into the stuffy, crowded little front room, where the gas fire was turned to high and the smell was the half-antiseptic, half-fetid one of illness.He was a man who had been heavy but who was now shrunken and slipped down pathetically into himself, all his strength and much of his life force gone.
    Iris Chater went back to the chair beside his bed and took his hand, chafing it gently between her own, her eyes flicking from his crumpled, grey face to Cat’s, full of fear.
    ‘Come on now, perk up, Harry, here’s Dr Deerbon to see you, Dr Cat …you’ll be pleased it’s her.’
    Cat knelt beside the low bed and felt the heat from the gas fire burning into her back. The budgerigar cage was covered in a gold velour cloth with a fringe and the little birds were silent.
    There was not a great deal she could do for Harry Chater, but what