up into the sky and float him away from this terrible scene. As he doubled over, Jeff hit him again full in the face, catching him in the right eye, but Harvey hardly felt this second blow. Everything in him was trying to remember how to breathe. As he crashed to earth, the grass tickled his nose and he was momentarily back on the roadside near Bleeder's house, he had put bloody fingers on the comic and the comic had vanished. How do things vanish? Like this perhaps . . . In the bubble he was drifting on the air, the ground felt pillowy soft, as if he might sink down into it. Perhaps the bubble would go down not up, sucked and swallowed by the world. He knew that he had been kicked and that after that, perhaps spurred by the thought that two murders were too many for one reunion, the other partygoers had been galvanised into action and had dragged Jeff away. Distantly, he could hear her saying 'I hate you, it's over . . .', stuff like that. For a moment, he wondered if she was talking to him and then he knew she wasn't and felt glad.
Chapter Thirteen
Steve's spare bedroom had an alien cleanliness that Harvey found restful. There were white built-in wardrobes with gold knobs. There was a matching dressing table with fancy ornamentation around the legs, which Harvey characterised, after a moment's thought, as Barbie-style. The walls were of pale peach and enlivened with pastel artworks involving mice in Victorian clothing. One of the old crowd, Jessica, who had married Bob from Bristol who was in property and couldn't hold his drink, had trained as a nurse. She was kind and gentle and tenderly put her hands on his face, on his belly, and on his side where he'd been kicked. Harvey got a partial erection despite himself and hoped it didn't show. Then she left him alone for a while and he lay on his back looking at the pale pink ceiling. It occurred to him that perhaps this was how people coped in wartime: so many troubling things happened to them in such a short space of time that their brains began to blend one into the next. The mind sort of stopped bothering to process them and just let things happen. That was how he felt: as if he had passed some watershed beyond which nothing really mattered, a place of Zen peace. The last thing Nurse Jessica asked him as she left was 'Are you all right?' and he murmured some non-committal acknowledgement. But in truth he wasn't at all sure if he was all right or not. The feeling of being in a bubble and floating had remained after he got his breath back. He had a sense of potential pain. At some point his eye, his belly and his side were really really going to hurt. But for now he was becalmed, drifting in a pink and peach sea, and he floated into a deep and untroubled sleep.
It was Steve that woke him after about two hours. 'All right, H?' He was standing by the bed looking worried and Harvey wondered for a moment what the cause of his concern was. Perhaps it was something to do with that God-awful drilling that his dad had been doing under the bed, which seemed to have cut him open from the side. Then the dream lifted and he raised himself up and yelped. Shit. Three quite distinct reasons for extreme concern flew simultaneously into his brain, driving out the dream entirely.
'Shit. Steve, where the fuck is Bleeder?'
'Eh?'
'Shit. I mean, where the fuck is Maisie?'
'She's gone. She left after the fight. Jeff went too. I think they were breaking up.' Steve sat on the edge of the bed. 'I hope this doesn't mean you won't come down again, H. I hope this hasn't spoiled our parties for you. We look forward to them, really do . . .'
'What? Look, Steve, when did she go? Where did she go? I should have . . . done something.'
'What, like get yourself even more kicked?' Steve chuckled vaguely. 'Don't worry, Maisie can look after herself. They'll have gone home to thrash it out. How are you feeling?'
'Me? Oh peachy.' Harvey took a line through the wallpaper. 'Really pinky peachy, Steve. How are you, mate?'
'Oh, I'm all right. But you are a stupid cunt.'
'Eh?'
'Trying to get off with Jeff Cooper's bird? You must be