Dead Simple

from a sleepless night, in a sharp suit and immaculate black Gucci loafers, he walked up to her, put his arms around her, and held her tight. He stared at a vending machine, a drinking water fountain, and a payphone in a perspex dome. Hospitals always gave him the heebie-jeebies. Ever since he’d come to visit his dad after his near fatal heart attack and saw this man who had once been so strong now looking so frail, so damned pathetic and useless – and scared. He squeezed Ashley as much for himself as for her. Close to her head, a cursor blinked on a green computer screen.
    She clung to him as if he were a lone spar in a storm-tossed ocean. ‘Oh, Christ, Mark, thank God you’re here.’
    One nurse was busy on the phone; it sounded like she was talking to a relative of someone in the unit, the other one behind the counter, close to them, was tapping out something on a keyboard.
    ‘This is terrible,’ Mark said. ‘Unbelievable.’
    Ashley nodded, swallowing hard. ‘If it wasn’t for your meeting, you would have been—’
    ‘I know. I can’t stop thinking about it. How’s Josh?’
    Ashley’s hair smelled freshly washed, and there was a trace of garlic on her breath, which he barely noticed. The girls had had a hen party last night, arranged in some Italian restaurant.
    ‘Not good. Zoe’s with him.’ She pointed and Mark followed the line of her finger, across several beds, across the hiss-clunk of ventilators, and the blinking of digital displays, to the far end of the ward, where he could see Josh’s wife sitting on a chair. She was dressed in a white T-shirt, tracksuit top and baggy trousers, body stooped, her straggly blonde ringlets covering her face.
    ‘Michael still hasn’t turned up. Where is he, Mark? Surely to God you must know?’
    As the nurse finished her call, the phone beeped and she started talking again.
    ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
    She looked at him hard. ‘But you guys have been planning this for weeks – Lucy said you were going to get even with Michael for all the practical jokes he played on the others before they got married.’ As she took a step back from him, tossing hair from her forehead, Mark could see her mascara had run. She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.
    ‘Maybe the guys had a last-minute change of mind,’ he said. ‘Sure, they’d come up with all kinds of ideas, like lacing his drink and putting him on a plane to some place, but I managed to talk them out of it – at least I thought I had.’
    She gave a wan smile of appreciation.
    He shrugged. ‘I knew how worried you were, you know, that we’d do something dumb.’
    ‘I was, desperately worried.’ She glanced at the nurse, then sniffed. ‘So where is he?’
    ‘He definitely wasn’t in the car?’
    ‘Absolutely not. I’ve rung the police – they say that – they say – they—’ She began sobbing.
    ‘What did they say?’
    In a burst of anger she blurted, ‘They won’t do anything.’
    She sobbed some more, struggling to contain herself. ‘They say they’ve checked all around at the scene of the accident and there’s no sign of him, and that he’s probably just sleeping off a mighty hangover somewhere.’
    Mark waited for her to calm down, but she carried on crying. ‘Maybe that’s true.’
    She shook her head. ‘He promised me he wasn’t going to get drunk.’ Mark gave her a look. After a moment, she nodded. ‘It was his stag night, right? That’s what you guys do on stag nights, isn’t it? You get smashed.’
    Mark stared down at grey carpet tiles. ‘Let’s go and see Zoe,’ he said.
    Ashley followed him across the ward, trailing a few yards behind him. Zoe was a slender beauty, and today she seemed even more slender to Mark, as he laid his hand on her shoulder, feeling the hard bone beneath the soft fabric of her designer tracksuit top.
    ‘Jeez, Zoe, I’m sorry.’
    She acknowledged him with a faint shrug.
    ‘How is he?’ Mark hoped the anxiety in his voice sounded genuine.
    Zoe turned her head and looked up at him, her eyes raw, her cheeks, almost translucent without make-up, tracked with tears. ‘They can’t do anything,’ she said. ‘They operated on him, now we just have to wait.’
    He was hooked up to two IVAC infusion pumps, three syringe drivers and a ventilator, which made a steady, soft, eerie hissing sound. A range of data and waveform lines changed constantly on the machine’s monitor.
    The exit tube from