Starting Over. Tony Parsons

said.

      Keith wiped away tears of mirth. ‘So do you think we can rule out al-Qaeda?’

      We stood up. Keith handed the pellet to the uniformed inspector. ‘A souvenir of your first shoot-out,’ he said. We began walking towards the derelict house. ‘Come out with your hands up,’ I shouted, as though I was not a canteen cowboy. ‘Or I’ll stuff that pop-gun right up your rectal passage.’

      A bearded man appeared in the doorway of the house, gripping an air rifle by its stock. There were a few steps leading up to the front door and he stopped there, staring down at us. His hair was wild and matted and he was wearing an old trenchcoat. We stopped.

      ‘Rainbow Ron,’ said Keith. ‘Probably an alias. Drop your water pistol, sonny.’

      He could have been a vagrant or a runaway from a funny farm. Either way, he looked like someone with hardly anything to lose. Then, just as I started to feel the fear in my breathing, he threw the air rifle down the stairs. Keith stooped to pick it up. I kept my eyes on Rainbow Ron, and saw his gaze sweep down the street and fix on something. I turned to see what he was looking at. It was some old dear coming slowly down the street, on her way to the supermarket to blow her pension on two cans of cat food. Rainbow Ron started down the steps. I took a quick look over my shoulder; the uniforms were still behind their motor, peeking out at the action. The old woman kept coming, muttering away to herself. I held up my hand. She didn’t see me. She was getting closer. I held my hand up higher and shouted a warning. She must have had the volume on her deaf-aid turned down low, because she didn’t stop. Rainbow Ron reached the bottom of the steps as Keith straightened up, looking at the air rifle in his hand, and the old lady shuffled between us. I saw Rainbow Ron slip one of his dirty paws inside his trenchcoat.

      And I thought – knife?

      ‘Ah, that’s not a gun,’ Keith said, smiling affectionately at the air rifle and looking up to see what I saw at exactly the same moment – the snub-nosed handgun that Rainbow Ron had magically produced from somewhere inside his coat. ‘But stone me,’ Keith added, diving sideways. ‘That is.’

      Then Rainbow Ron had the old lady by her fake-fur collar and he was screaming at us to stay back, waving his black handgun in her face, and Keith and I had our hands above our heads and we were shouting at him to just calm down, calm down, and behind us I could hear the uniformed inspector calling for backup on his radio and in the distance the hundred-yard hero was going hysterical.

      I looked at the eyes of Rainbow Ron blazing like the winner of a Charles Manson lookalike contest from behind his greasy fringe.

      He looked stuffed and cuffed, jail no bail, going down for sure, and that made him dangerous. I took a step back. And then he flung the old lady forward, sending her sprawling, and I felt my blood surge to boiling point.

      Then he was off. Back up the steps and into the house. We gave chase. He went up the stairs and he kept going. We followed. But by the time we reached the second floor, Keith was dropping behind, clutching his ribs and gasping for breath.

      ‘I need a cigarette,’ I heard him say, and so then I was on my own. Rainbow Ron certainly ran fast for a raving lunatic. I followed him all the way to the top of the house. A skylight was open. I stepped out on to the roof, the city buzzing far below, and he whirled round to confront me with the gun in his hand pointing right at my face.

      And the anger was gone. All gone. All I could feel was the fear. I did not want to die on this roof. And when I tried to speak, almost cross-eyed from looking down the short black barrel of the terrible thing in his hand, nothing came out.

      It looked like a toy. A cruel, ugly toy. The cheap shoddy banality of the thing. That’s what I noticed. A toy from hell. It was just a stubby right angle of black metal held in a redraw, sweating fist. And it looked like the end of the world.

      Pointing at my face.

      Rainbow Ron came forward, sure of himself now, seeing my terror, encouraged by it, as if it proved he was making all the smart moves, and he pressed the barrel against the bridge of my nose. It looked like a toy, but somehow I knew it was real.

      He squeezed off the trigger and I felt it at the same terrible moment – the shock of pain in my chest.

      It was a dam-break of pain, obliterating everything, surging in the centre of my chest and spreading out, claiming me, a new and unexpected kind of pain, a pain to rob you of your senses.

      It felt like everything was being squeezed. The pressure was unbelievable, dumbfounding, and increasing by the second as the pain consolidated its ownership of me and my chest felt like it was being held in a giant vice, as though the life was being forced out of me, as though the pain itself intended to kill me, and I knew that this was it, the end of all things.

      I blacked out.

      When I awoke, eager hands were lifting me on to a gurney. Rainbow Ron was flat on his face and the female constable was cuffing his hands behind his back. Then we were moving. Through the skylight and down the stairs. The squeezing in my chest was still there, but the fear was stronger than the pain.

      I thought of my wife. I thought of my son and daughter. They needed me. I didn’t want to die. Tears stung my eyes as we clanged into the back of an ambulance and immediately pulled away. And through the blurry veil of tears I saw Keith’s face.

      ‘It’s a replica,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me, George? It’s just a fake. It was never going to work. You understand what I’m saying?’

      Not really.

      Keith was talking about the gun.

      But I thought he was talking about my heart.

       three

      Think of death as the ultimate lie-in. Think of death that way. A lazy Sunday morning that goes on for all eternity, with you just dozing away until the end of days. That’s not such a bad way to think of death. Come on – it’s not all bad.

      What stops us thinking of death that way? I opened my eyes and I knew.

      My family were there at the stations of the hospital bed. It felt like a lot of time had gone by, and that they had not slept, or had any sleep worthy of the name, and that things had got worse. My wife, our boy, our girl.

      The great gawky Rufus, who had grown so extravagantly and yet still had so much growing to do. And Ruby, my darling girl, her face perfectly and incredibly poised between the child she had been and the woman she would become. And Lara, my wife, who I was planning to grow old with, because why would I ever want to be anywhere else? And now I never would, and now I never could.

      Those three were what stopped me from thinking of death as a Sunday morning that I would never wake from. Lara, Rufus, Ruby. The ones I would leave behind. They changed everything and made it impossible to let go, and made me want to weep, for them and for myself, because I loved them with all of my clogged-up, thoroughly knackered, pathetic excuse for a heart.

      A doctor came and fiddled about. Glancing at charts, squinting at me over the top of his reading glasses. And when I paid a bit more attention, I saw that there was an entire herd of doctors with him. Baby doctors, learning their trade, looking at him as though he were the font of all medical wisdom, and me as though I was a specimen in a jar.

      ‘Male, forty-seven, history of heart disease, had a myocardial infarction – let’s see – three days ago.’

      Three days? Was it already three days? The doctor held up a floppy black picture and pointed at some ghostly images. The baby doctors leaned forward with excitement.

      ‘See that? The coronary artery was already damaged by atheroma. Can you all see? Blood will not clot on healthy lining. Looks rather like the fur in a kettle, doesn’t it?’ The baby doctors eagerly agreed. ‘That’s what caused the thrombus – the blood clot – which blocked the artery, depriving a segment of the heart muscle of oxygen,