‘Johnny, can you hear me?’
‘Fugoff.’
‘I think he’s trying to tell you to fuck off,’ Anna said as she joined him.
‘Now that’s a language I can speak.’
Tomek leant across and continued to slap him lightly on the cheeks, alternating each time Johnny rolled his head to the other side. Nearly a minute later, Johnny’s eyelids opened, revealing a set of eyes the colour of his sister’s angel wings. The man looked as though he’d been on a five-day bender and wasn’t even through the worst of it yet. His hair was dishevelled and greasy, and his skin was equally oily and clammy, alcohol and guilt seeping through his pores. His breath was so strong it forced Tomek to hold his own while he waited for the man to become cogent, and a thin river of snot had run down his nose and into his mouth. The man was in a state, and in desperate need of sobering up.
Anna handed Tomek a glass of water. Tomek took it from her and held it to Johnny’s lips. But it was pointless. His face was so slack it was impossible to part his lips wide enough for the rim of the glass to fit, and Tomek wasn’t keen on becoming his carer. At least, not without the aid of a glove.
‘It’s like feeding a child,’ Anna commented.
‘A fat and ugly one.’
‘They’re all fat and ugly at some point.’
This was ridiculous. Right now, Johnny Whitaker was just existing. He had no faculties about him, no sense of where he was; he was in no fit state to do anything, let alone answer questions about the lies and secrets that had torn his marriage and family apart. He needed to get to a hospital. Tomek pulled out his phone and called an ambulance. It arrived over twenty minutes later, after struggling to navigate the narrow country lanes and small, almost unusable pub car park. A few minutes after its arrival, Johnny Whitaker was in the back of the van, and on the way to Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford. Tomek and Anna stayed with him every step of the way, like they were his loved ones, concerned and worried for his welfare, even though Tomek had no sympathy for the man at all; the pain and suffering he was currently enduring had all been self-inflicted.
After nearly two hours of sitting in a hospital bed, hooked up to a drip, having wasted the NHS’s time and resources, Johnny Whitaker was finally ready to answer some questions.
As soon as Tomek was given the all-clear, he wasted no time in getting the man’s attention.
‘Johnny, my good man!’ he yelled on purpose. The man winced and recoiled in the bed at the sudden burst to the eardrums. ‘How are you feeling? Better?’
‘Why… why are you shouting?’ the man said as he fought against the still slightly slurred speech.
‘Just making sure you can hear me, mate. You were pretty fucking out of it back at the pub.’
‘The… the pub?’
‘You don’t even remember being at the pub?’
The man shook his head so slowly it was almost like he was a sloth.
‘Oh dear, you have been drinking a while, haven’t you? What can you remember from the last few days?’
Johnny’s gaze gradually moved from Tomek to the blanket, slowly, almost robotically, as though his buttons had been switched off. Either that or he was malfunctioning.
‘I just… Rose… I remember—’
‘Fighting with Rose? Tell us about that.’
‘You… you know already?’
Tomek patted the man’s thigh patronisingly. ‘I do, yes. But I want to hear your version of events. What do you have to say for yourself?’
Somewhere, somewhere deep inside Johnny’s brain, the switches turned back on and the cogs began working again, because he slowly lifted his gaze back up to Tomek, his eyes a little clearer, more focused this time.
‘She’s a cunt,’ he spat.
Tomek placed a hand on his breast pocket. ‘You want that on the record or…?’
‘She’s a cunt.’
‘And why’s that, Johnny?’
‘Because… because she is. I swear to God, the next time I see her…’
‘The next time you see her, what?’
‘Nothing. She’s a cunt.’
Tomek could tell this was going to be an even longer process than he’d anticipated.
‘And why would that be, Johnny? How did she find out that you’ve been secretly performing as a drag act in Southend for the past eighteen months? How do you think she felt? Because it seems to me like you were the one lying to her. Not the other way round. So doesn’t that make you the cunt, Johnny?’
The man muttered something unintelligible.
‘How did you react when she confronted you with it, Johnny? Did you hit Rose, Johnny?’
The man shook his head.
‘What would have happened if it was the other way round? What would have happened if you’d found out she was having an affair, or that she was dressing up as a man? Would you have hit her then, Johnny?’
Another shake.
‘Who else knew about this, Johnny? Who else knew you’d been lying to your entire family, lying to yourself? Angelica? Did she know?’
