Flash Fiction (Dec 09)

Barbara Stanwyck is already dead. Fred MacMurray is dying. He has staggered back to his office to dictate his last report. The shadow of Edward G. Robinson falls over him. That little man inside, the one that played hell with Edward G’s stomach, has finally alerted him to the truth. MacMurray begs for an hour’s grace to help him make Mexico.

“Walter, you won’t even make the elevator. You’re all washed up.”

One last time Robinson lights a cigarette for his old friend, flicking the match with his thumbnail. The end of Double Indemnity. The lights go on in NFT1. The man sits in the near empty afternoon cinema gathering his thoughts. His cap has remained on his head throughout the performance.

He walks slowly away from the National Film Theatre, along the South Bank. A bag is slung over his shoulder. He takes little notice of the lit-up carousel or the mansize Arctic wolf that stands stock still nearby. Those who most take his attention are those who walk alone. He veers off the embankment into the sprawl of estates and old streets that lurk behind. He is threading his way east down to the Borough. He finds an old pub, one of those that got left behind when the tower blocks went up.

He nurses a pint in his hands. A word or two pass between him and the barmaid, smiles and friendliness. He is surprised that such gestures still come readily to him. For a while he sits on the steps outside smoking. He has tried to light a match on his thumbnail; as usual he fails. Maybe because they are safety matches.

He leaves the pub and makes his way to the spare little B n B behind the hospital. For him its just a B, no breakfast. The hospital needs him at seven in the morning with an empty stomach. All those months of chemo that destroyed his hair and made him a baseball cap wearer and now this.

He sleeps surprisingly well but needs to force himself out of bed in the dark morning. Half an hour later he is in the hospital where the lights seem so bright. He becomes the centre of attention for these kindly hardened professional folk. Now he is on the fringes of the operating theatre. The surgeon speaks.

“We’ll do the best we can”.