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hot piss.
    ‘Fancy a trip up to intensive care, then?’ Billy waved his phone at her. ‘I’m under instruction from the office to interview Samantha. Just in case it makes a story.’
    ‘The paper would run a story on its own obit writer trying to kill himself?’
    Billy shook his head and blew on his coffee. ‘Not normally, but the gun is an interesting angle. Anything involving guns makes punters pick up the paper. We like to believe we’re living in downtown Detroit.’
    ‘That’s a bit cynical.’
    Billy made a goofy face. ‘I thought you wanted to be a news reporter?’
    ‘I do.’
    ‘Then start acting like one and maybe we won’t be stuck writing about dead people for the rest of our lives.’

10
    Billy crumpled his coffee cup into a bin and headed for the reception desk of the intensive care ward. Martha tagged along behind.
    ‘Look upset and follow my lead,’ Billy said.
    He furrowed his brow and spoke to the nurse. This one was in her thirties, short hair, lip stud and Arabic tattoos.
    ‘We’re here to see our dad,’ Billy said. ‘I think he’s just been brought up from surgery. Gordon Harris. Our mum should be here already.’
    ‘She just went through,’ the woman said. She was immediately mothering him. She checked her screen. ‘He’s in room six, I’ll buzz you through.’
    ‘Thank you.’ Billy’s voice was earnest, troubled.
    The security door clicked and he pulled it open.
    So easy.
    At the other side of the door, Billy shook his head. ‘Security in this place is terrible.’
    They found room six.
    Gordon didn’t look much different from earlier in the ambulance. Laid out on a bed, connected to various machines, bandages around his head, an oxygen mask over an opening at his mouth.
    Samantha sat crying next to him, holding his limp hand. They stood watching her from the doorway. She let go of his hand, which fell to the bed. Then she slapped it.
    ‘You idiot,’ she said. ‘I hate you for this.’
    She slapped his hand again, twice.
    Martha stage-coughed. Samantha turned slowly, unashamed.
    ‘What are you doing here?’
    ‘Just wanted to see how Gordon was doing,’ Martha said.
    She introduced Billy. She could see him switching on a small MP3 recorder in his pocket, the green light winking. He sat next to Samantha with the recorder nearest to her and put his hand on top of hers.
    Billy spoke quietly to her and she replied in stops and starts, angry and confused and distressed. He comforted her. Martha watched them in a daze. This was what it meant to be a news reporter, secretly recording a conversation with a woman as she sat weeping next to her husband in a coma. Martha had spent three years studying the theories and skills of journalism, but never once pictured a scenario like this. Maybe she was just naïve. She felt a tremble in her stomach as Billy and Samantha whispered to each other.
    She came round to the other side of the bed and stood next to the heart-rate monitor. She could smell antiseptic and that adhesive you get on plasters. Here was a man who had destroyed his own head trying to end it all, and he smelt like a kid with a grazed knee. She breathed deeply, wanted to get a scent of death or destruction into her lungs, but there was nothing. She closed her eyes. Pictured Gordon sitting up, casually unwrapping the bandages from his head. She realised she didn’t even know what he looked like when he had all his face. All she could picture was the raw, bloody flesh where his nose should be, the empty eye socket, red and angry and accusing.
    She opened her eyes.
    Billy patted Samantha’s hand and gave her a business card.
    ‘If you need anything, Samantha, anything at all, just get in touch. Please. Gordon is a good friend.’
     She nodded and sniffed as Billy got up, angling his head for them to leave.

11
    ‘Let’s hear it, then.’
    Martha was in McNeil’s office, a large glass box at the back of the building overlooking the Crags. She didn’t know his