“And of course you didn’t call a doctor.” Shaz was already dialling. “You just sat there, dithering. Right?” “No,” I retorted, “no, you know what he’s like, you know he hates doctors! I need to get him home, is all. I need a lift, Shaz. Please.” She looked up. “That’s the stupidest—” “Sharon!” Teresa was curt. “Tick-tock.” “Please, Shaz!” “I think he’s, like, breathing,” added Izzy. “Oh, Christ! Fine!” Shaz tossed her phone, with some force, into the footwell. “All right! Go on, then! Get him in the back!” Teresa said, “Sharon!” “Well, I’m sorry, Terry,” Shaz snapped, “but what am I supposed to do? Leave him on the side of the street like a pancaked fucking hedgehog?” She turned to Izzy. “Do something, will you?” “Ugh,” said Izzy, but she vaulted over the wall with enviable ease. She nodded at me. “Can you, like, get that end?” I waddled obediently towards the head, my own body an excruciating aggregation of woe, stress, and exhaustion. My chest cavity was flooding with cold anxiety; I was thinking, Emily, Eddie, Emily— We levered him up; I hooked his armpits so that his skull pressed against my torso and his chin tilted down onto his breastbone. He looked fatter, slacker and sadder than ever. A soft pouch of lard, a sheaf of brittle twigs. It took an age to shuffle around to the garden gate and then back to the van, Izzy grunting with exasperation at my geriatric pace, at Eddie’s flaccid, sagging immensity. I felt more and more depressed. He could be bleeding internally for all I knew, he could be on his way out. However fed-up Emily was, however badly he’d treated her, she’d not want him to suffer death in the back of a hired transit van, and she’d not thank me for enabling it. “Dear God,” said Teresa, “he’s like a barbequed potato.” She banged on the partition between the van’s cab and the cargo hold. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
A QUICK FIASCO | 103