THE ESSENCE

  DAVE HUTCHINSON

  NewCon Press

  England

  First edition, published in the UK December 2025

  by NewCon Press

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF, UK

  NCP355 (hardback)

  NCP356 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Essence © 2025 by Dave Hutchinson

  Cover Art © 2025 by Ben Baldwin

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  No part of this publication may be used to train, inform, or provide source learning data for any chatbot or other form of artificial neural network without the written consent of the copyright holders.

  ISBN: 978-1-917735-13-1 (hardback)

  978-1-917735-14-8 (softback)

  Cover Art by Ben Baldwin

  Front cover graphics by Ben Baldwin

  Editing and typesetting by Ian Whates

  Back cover layout by Ian Whates

  A Man Walks Into A Bar

  One

  The hospital was not, strictly speaking, a hospital. It was more of a rest home for fuddled gentlefolk. It occupied a big house in several acres of grounds tucked away at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac on the edge of Mill Hill, just far enough from the M1 for the double glazing to reduce the sound of the motorway to a low, reassuring rumble, but close enough to the main railway line out of St Pancras that, when the wind was in the right direction, it sounded as if intercity trains were passing through the gardens. It had been there long enough that its neighbours, a handful of similar large houses all shyly hiding their faces behind high walls, had long ceased to notice the private ambulances that came and went at odd times of the day and night.

  Entering via the front gates, which presented as antique wrought iron but were actually of a far more durable alloy and controlled electronically from the security office, one was first confronted by a small landscape of neat lawns and flower beds and rockeries, about which a gravel driveway looped, sufficiently wide to accommodate a single vehicle.

  Beyond that stood the house, a full-throated Mock Tudor monstrosity complete with half-timbering and herringbone brickwork, built in the 1920s for a minor dynasty of Home Counties brewers, now long extinct. To one side stood a vaguely Arts & Crafts structure known as ‘The Stables’, which now housed the Hydrotherapy Department – a fancy term for a swimming pool – where those residents who had demonstrated some innate talent for buoyancy could doggy-paddle for an hour at a time.

  At the other side of the house a paved path curved through a short avenue of trees and out to the formal gardens at the rear, planted with more shrubberies and rockeries and lawns, all centred on a single massive oak. The oak, said to be several hundred years old, had been here before the house was built; a remnant of a far older landscape. If you walked past the tree – quite a distance, the size of the gardens was always a bit of a surprise – you came to the high brick wall which surrounded the house. There was a kind of tide mark, at a little more than head height, where the original brickwork had been built up decades ago, until the wall was almost twenty feet high. You could still see periodic marks, near the top, where brackets had once supported closed-circuit television cameras, but these days surveillance was almost too small to see.

  Inside, the house smelled strongly of furniture polish, undercut by a faint, disquieting layer of disinfectant and sweat and boiled cabbage. There were noticeboards and a reception desk in the entrance hall, and worn institutional furniture. The staff all wore smart-casual clothes and identity badges clipped to their shirts, except when they ventured into the wing where the Acute residents were kept, when they suited up in full PPE as if they were entering the hot zone of a fever clinic.

  Michael had spent some time in the Acute wing. Logically, he supposed, it had been his first port of call on arriving at the hospital, although he had no memory of it, no memory of being attended to by gowned and masked figures. His first memory was of sitting in the Television Room, as if he had just woken from a long, restful sleep, watching a quiz show whose name he knew but couldn’t quite call to mind at that moment.

  Apparently, he had subsequently taken a bit of a turn and been returned to the Acute wing for a while, and he sometimes became confused as to whether his awakening in the Television Room had come after his first stay there or his second. Sometimes, the distinction seemed to matter.

  It was hard to work out how many residents – never ‘patients’ – there were. There seemed to be a discreet churn; new faces arrived without fanfare, became familiar, and then one day were simply not there any more. Michael thought there were perhaps a dozen or so at any one time, if one didn’t include the Acutes, who nobody ever saw until they were released into the general population blinking as if they had just spent a long period underground.

  “You know, I have no idea,” Bob, his therapist, said one day while they were taking a walk in the garden. “I’ve never done a head count.”

  “Someone must know,” Michael mused.

  “Oh, no doubt.” Bob thought about it. “Aggie would know; you could ask her. Is it important?”

  At the time, Michael had been having difficulty separating the important from the trivial, and he had been gently warned to be aware of incipient obsessions, so he just shrugged.

  Aggie was the Director’s secretary, a kindly Home Counties woman of a certain age who was most often seen bustling down the corridors with a bundle of files clasped to her bosom. The Director himself was not so often seen, although Michael thought they must have met because he had a memory of a small tweedy man in late middle age with watery eyes and a spiderweb of broken capillaries on his cheeks.

  Even more rarely seen was the Medical Director, a tall, slender woman named Reese, whose occasional appearances in public had the aspects of Royal visits. At the head of a little group of doctors, she would breeze into the big room where half a dozen residents were taking part in occupational therapy, always with a few words for everyone, congratulating them on their paintings or clay sculptures, and then breeze out again, not to manifest again for another week or so.

  The doctors were all young – Michael didn’t think any of them was over thirty – and relentlessly upbeat to a degree that he, not always inclined to be upbeat, sometimes found oppressive. They all had the same sheen of efficient anonymity, and he never learned any of their names. Similarly the nurses, who all had the stocky build and flatfooted centre of gravity of prison warders; and the security staff who amiably patrolled the grounds and kept everyone safe and had the look – to Michael’s eye – of people who had taken early retirement from the Met after a period with Special Branch. They’d nod hello if you bumped into them while you were taking a bit of a constitutional, but they weren’t inclined to conversation.

  As to why he was there, well, that was a bit foggy. He didn’t remember being unwell particularly, although he thought there had been a time when he had been very tired, and none of the doctors ever actually bothered to tell him.

  “What am I doing here?” he asked one of them one day.

  The doctor, who had been filling in a form on a clipboard, looked at him as if he’d enquired about her sexuality. “You’re here to get better,” she told him, forcing cheerfulness.

  “Better from what?”

  She finished the form and stood up. “You’re doing very well,” she said, and walked away.

  Still, he supposed it was nice that he was doing very well.

  Even so, he found there were days which he had edited from his memory. All the days in the hospital were roughly the same and tended to run together into a single ur-day and it was easy to lose track of where you were in the week, but there were blanks, days when literally nothing had happened. Either he had briefly relapsed, or the doctors were fiddling about with his meds; he didn’t know, and again no one seemed inclined to tell him.

  In the early days, his meds had come in the form of a bewildering variety of pills, some large, some small; round and oval, white and beige and red and blue and salmon-pink, never the same combination two days in a row. As the weeks and months passed the combination settled down, and then tablets began to disappear one by one, until he was left with a red one and a blue one every day.

  “This is like The Matrix,” he told the nurse who brought his medication.

  “I wish,” the nurse said, noting down the time and dosage on his iPad. “I could use a nice new leather coat.”

  He’d grown accustomed to the morning knock at the door which announced the arrival of his meds and, therefore, the beginning of his day. This was followed by breakfast, which seemed designed to be as forgettable as possible. Then the rest of the day was his own. Every resident was given a laminated card which detailed the various activities available to them on different days, and there was a big calendar in Reception for those who found it difficult to keep track of where they were in the week. None of the activities was mandatory, but Bob was keen that Michael should take part in at least one every day, so some days he spent time in Occupational Therapy, and others he spent swimming laps in Hydrotherapy. Mostly, though, he sat reading in a corner of the Day Room, the long double-glazed gallery which had been built onto the back of the house at some point during the country’s last boom in conservatories. He was currently enjoying, in a slightly baffled way, a novel called The Heart of the Maze, about a private detective in 1930s Los Angeles becoming involved in some kind of satanic conspiracy. He thought h
e might have embarked on it more than once, his reading interrupted by one or more stays in the Acute wing, because some passages seemed familiar to him.

  In between, there were daily sessions with Bob. Bob was in his forties and favoured corduroy and seemed ever so slightly unmoored from the modern world, as if he lived most of the time in a little village out in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside without broadband or reliable television reception. Their conversations mostly revolved around the weather and cricket. Michael hated cricket, but he thought it was polite to make an effort.

  From what he could gather, Bob was something of a fundamentalist when it came to cricket. He poured scorn on the limited-over forms of the game, spoke darkly of something he called ‘Bazball’, and described the colourful uniforms worn by players in the modern game as ‘clown costumes’.

  “First-class cricket – three days at least,” he said one day. “That’s the purest expression of the game, Michael.”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “I agree.”

  Bob regarded him genially. “You don’t sound so sure, old son.”

  “I’m not really an avid follower of cricket, Bob, to be honest.”

  “Do you have an interest in any sports? I forgot to ask.”

  Michael thought about it. Did he? He had no idea. “Is it relevant?”

  “No, of course not,” Bob said, taking a pencil from the desk in front of him and tapping the end of his nose with the eraser end. “I’m just making conversation. Are you a rugby man? Football? Snooker?”

  It occurred to Michael to say yes to one of these, just to move the conversation away from the subject, because for no reason he could put into words he sensed danger here, but he knew if he did that rugby or football or snooker would turn out to be Bob’s second-favourite sport and he’d be stuck with having to talk about it, so he said, “Not really, no.”

  Bob put the pencil down. “That’s quite unusual, you know.”

  “Is it?”

  “Most people will pay attention to some sport, even if it’s just now and again. Wimbledon? The Olympics? The Grand National?”

  The issue of sport was a blank spot in his memory, but he wasn’t about to admit it. “It’s just stuff that’s on television,” he said. “I might watch the Wimbledon finals, if I’m not doing anything else.”

  “So you’re a tennis fan?”

  “No.”

  “Can you name a tennis player?”

  “Bjorn Borg.”

  “A recent one.”

  “Roger Federer.”

  Bob shook his head. “No, a recent one.”

  Michael thought about it, but he came up blank. He shrugged. “I told you, I’m not a fan.”

  Bob looked at him with an expression of mild exasperation. “Did you do sport at school?”

  “The usual stuff. Rugby, football. Cricket. Without any great distinction, I’m afraid.”

  “And none of it stuck?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Extraordinary.” Bob shook his head. He reached out and tapped the face of his phone to wake it up and look at the clock. “Well, it’s lunchtime. See you tomorrow?”

  The more rehabilitated residents were allowed to take meals in their rooms, but everyone was encouraged to eat in the dining room, tucking into a menu of meat and two veg which was occasionally enlivened by a mild curry. The atmosphere in the dining room was very English, very quiet and polite and reserved, like a scene from Brief Encounter, but now and again there were distractions, like the day when one chap began to complain loudly and with much profanity that they had been served roast beef two days in a row and had to be wrestled out of the room and upstairs to Acute by three nurses. Some time afterwards, Michael couldn’t be sure if that hadn’t been him. Quite a lot of what he understood about the world at that point in his rehabilitation seemed to come to him with a bit of a time-lag.

  As a rule, the residents tended to keep themselves to themselves, even when eating or taking part in association time. The eldest was an old Foreign Office type with an unruly fringe of white hair, who spent most of his time sitting quietly in front of the television, and the rest in Occupational Therapy creating huge apocalyptic oil paintings. The youngest, a small, birdlike girl, faced the world through a permanent, brittle smile which seemed to take all her energy to maintain. Michael tried to engage some of them in conversation, without much success, and eventually he gave up.

  He presumed that all the staff of the hospital were either Service or ex-Service brought back from retirement. Certainly they would have to be vetted and cleared to a high level, as residents could occasionally, in extreme moments, be indiscreet. It occurred to him that Bob, as one of the therapists, probably had a higher clearance than he did, although they had never once discussed his work. And after that, it occurred to him to wonder what he was supposed to do if one of the other residents confided to him something that he was absolutely never meant to know. And then he started to obsess over the possibility that this had already happened during one of his blank periods and he was now, without realising it, in possession of information vital to national security. And shortly after that he started to feel tired all the time, and when he next paid attention to the calendar in Reception almost a week had passed and he had a vague memory of somebody shouting.

  Still, as the weeks passed and his good days began to outnumber his bad ones, he was allowed to walk the mile or so into Mill Hill, accompanied by one of the nurses, for what was termed Acclimat-isation. This initially involved buying small items in shops, using an allowance doled out to him by Aggie and which he had to sign for and return any change. The first time he tried this, he felt an almost physical wave of apprehension as he stepped out of the gates. The cul-de-sac beyond, with its neat grass verges and plane trees, seemed a landscape full of threat, and he had to force himself to walk along it to the junction with a side-road, and then to the main road, and then into Mill Hill. Here, visiting a newsagents’ to buy a tin of Coke and a bar of chocolate, he was so discomfited that he entirely forgot the function of money and had to be gently helped by the nurse. The woman behind the counter must have been used to residents coming into her shop, because she didn’t bat an eyelid.

  Subsequent ventures into the outside world went better, bit by bit and day by day, and eventually Michael and his minder graduated to having a coffee in a branch of Starbucks, and then to lunch, usually in an Italian restaurant on the Broadway. In the course of a monologue on the shortcomings of the Middlesex Cricket Club, Bob told him that these excursions were intended to allow residents to reengage with other people and the many small systems and rituals of society. It didn’t work for everyone. The birdlike girl went out for a solo Acclimatisation one day and never came back. She was glimpsed one more time, in the form of an almost unrecognisably sulky photo, in a police appeal for information on the news. One of the nurses hurried to change the channel, but she was too late to stop everyone in the television room hearing that the girl’s name was Bethany.

  Michael assumed that Bethany’s bid for freedom would put a crimp in the Acclimatisations, but they went on without pause. He was allowed to go into Central London several times with a nurse, and then one day Aggie was issuing him with his allowance and she said, “You know, there’s nobody available to go with you today, Michael. Why don’t you go alone?” and he gaped at her for so long that she had to remind him to sign for the cash and to bring back any receipts.

  He walked down to Mill Hill Broadway station and sat on a bench on the platform, convinced this was some kind of trap. Other passengers arrived in ones and twos, but no one paid him any attention. A southbound train came in and they all got on, and when it left Michael was still sitting on the bench, staring across the tracks at the northbound platform.

  A little behind him, on the other side of a wall, the traffic roared by on the M1. In short order, two intercity trains went by on a concussion of displaced air. More passengers arrived. Another southbound train came in. The passengers got on. Michael did not.