I’ll go first to warm you up, he says and he tells her about the Pepsi and the gastrostomy.
         That was Hannah from ICU, she says. Just about everyone’s heard that one. So you’re the Bagbuster. Lucky me.
         Bill assumes that Hannah from ICU is not the girl with the purse, but this isn’t made clear and he doesn’t ask. He isn’t sure in which version he’d have come off worst. The purse looked expensive and he supposes he should have offered to pay but now he feels a little buzz, having achieved infamy in this way. He tells the pretty nurse to go ahead, it’s her turn, and she puts her head on one side, ducking it to the left shoulder and then the right while she thinks. It isn’t hard to see this is the method by which she has won over men all her life, how she has made her father pay her phone bill or allow her to stay out late.
         Okay, she says, finally. This isn’t made up. But it is a good story. Are you ready?
         She tells him that a girl was killed in one of the nurses’ houses. It was her boyfriend who did it, she says.
         It’s always the boyfriend, Bill says.
         So they say.
         One of the Sisters turns an interested circle through the bay and the pretty young nurse draws the curtains with such expertise that Bill knows that at some point in her life she has lived opposite a boy and that he was probably about two years older than her and attractive. The nurse’s voice lowers.
         Her name was Mariella. They found her naked on the living room floor. I heard she’d been stabbed fifty times. I mean, that’s anger.
         I knew someone who got stabbed once, Bill says, but the pretty nurse gives him a look that sucks the words he is about the say right back into a place where language doesn’t exist and the only vessels for communication are hands, eyes, invisible gestures that are picked up like radar. The look suggests she suspects him of inventing a stabbed friend just to poach back centre stage. She tells him how the police came and talked to everyone in the murdered girl’s block.I heard it from an agency girl, she says. No word of a lie, there was this one detective and he actually said, “There’s been a murder,” you know like on TV. There’s been a murder. I can’t do the accent.

8

  

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