Strangers, page 13
Martin went and lay down on their double bed. He dozed fitfully, waking up constantly because he thought he heard the telephone ringing.
In the morning he went straight back to the hospital. On the telephone before he set out the sister told him that Annie was rather poorly. The doctor was with her now.
Martin’s car was still in the little mews near the wrecked store where he had left it yesterday. He went to the hospital by tube. All the people travelling to work held up their newspapers, and the pictures of the bombed store and the outraged tabloid headlines danced in front of his eyes. Martin turned his head and stared through the black window, thinking, Annie, Annie.
In a bleak little room beside the double doors of the intensive care unit, Martin saw the doctor. Annie’s surgeon had gone home to sleep, and this man introduced himself as a renal specialist.
Martin listened numbly. In the early hours of the morning Annie’s kidneys had begun to fail, and they had put her on a dialysis machine. Her blood pressure had fallen further, but they had stabilized it now.
‘It’s a question of waiting, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said.
‘She won’t die, will she?’ Martin repeated. He saw the muscle twitch under the doctor’s well-shaven cheek, and he thought, He must hear this all the time, people asking, Will my wife die? Will my husband die? Suddenly the enormity of what had happened struck him, and the random horror of it. Why did it have to be Annie?
‘Your wife is young and healthy. I think her chances are good. But we won’t know for a day or two.’
‘Can I see her now?’
‘Sister will take you.’
They gave him a white gown to wear, and plastic covers to pull over his shoes.
Martin followed the sister’s blue dress and starched cap through the double doors. He had a brief impression of a long room, brightly lit, partitioned into cubicles. As he passed he saw, in each bed, an inert shape fed by tubes and guarded by machines. Then the sister stopped. He looked past her and saw Annie. He knew it was Annie because of the colour of her hair on the pillow. But her face seemed to have shrunk, and her cheeks and the skin under her eyes looked bruised. There was a tube in her mouth and another in her nose, there were tubes taped to her wrists and another to her ankle. She was wearing a white cotton hospital gown and through the open front of it Martin could see a line fixed into her chest. Her bed was hemmed in by the square, hostile shapes of machines and a bag of dark red blood hung over her head, trailing its colour down into her arm. Under the gown her shoulder was strapped with white tape, and there was another taped dressing over her stomach. Looking down at her Martin felt how cruel it was that she should be so reduced. Her body looked so dispossessed, as if the machines had taken it and Annie herself had gone away somewhere, a long way off.
There was a male nurse in a white coat watching the three monitor screens at the bedhead. Martin looked away from the flickering dots that read Annie’s life out second by second.
The nurse nodded at a chair a little to one side of the bed.
‘Would you like to sit with her for a while?’ he asked cheerfully. He was Irish, Martin noted automatically. The unit was full of quiet, deftly moving people. It seemed strange that they should have individual characteristics like an Irish voice or a dark skin, and yet be part of these machines and their winking eyes.
‘It’s a pity you weren’t a minute earlier. She was awake for a little while, there,’ the nurse told him. ‘She’s dropped off again now.’
Martin sat down beside her. He reached out to take her hand, but he was afraid of dislodging the tubes. He just touched his fingertips to hers.
Martin sat with her for an hour, but Annie didn’t move. He thought of her as she had been at home, moving briskly around the kitchen or running up the garden with the boys whooping ahead of her, and he shifted on the uncomfortable chair to contain his anger. He was angry with the people who had done this to her, and he was shocked to recognize that he was angry with Annie, too, because she had gone away and he couldn’t reach her. Martin looked at the machines as if they were rivals, cutting him off from her.
‘What are they for?’ he asked, nodding at the monitor screens.
‘Pulse, blood pressure and ECG,’ the nurse said. ‘This scale monitors her central venous pressure through the line in her chest. These shunt tubes are for the dialysis machine.’
And so they held her, keeping her alive, a long way away.
After an hour he stood up stiffly and said goodbye to the nurse. Benjy and Tom were waiting at home. Martin went away down the ward without looking left or right.
‘How is she?’ Steve asked.
‘She’s holding her own,’ they told him. ‘Her husband’s with her.’
Steve had been thinking about the hours that they had lived through together. The darkness of them was still almost more real to him than his curtained segment of the bright ward. He could hear the nurses going to and fro beyond the curtains, but he could hear Annie’s whispering voice just as clearly. It was Annie he wanted to see, and talk to, now that the darkness had gone. Annie and he knew each other. In the long hours she had become his friends, his family, and he knew that he had become hers. But Annie was lying upstairs in the intensive care unit, and her husband was waiting beside her.
By the time the evening came Steve had recovered from the anaesthetic. He knew he had, because although the memory of yesterday hadn’t loosened its claw-hold, he could distinguish quite clearly between the memory and the reality of now, in the hospital ward. As if to confirm it a nurse with a little starched frill pinned to the top of her head came and pushed the curtains back, smiling at him.
‘There now. We’ll give you a bit of a view, now that you’ve woken up properly.’
Steve saw four beds opposite, and the occupants peering across at him. The table in the middle of the ward was banked with a great mound of flowers. He lay against the pillows looking at them, hypnotized by the generosity of the colours.
Annie woke up again, and she saw that the bright rectangles overhead had been dimmed. They were lights, she understood, and if they had been turned down it must be night-time now. How many nights had gone? She swallowed on the tube that stuck into her mouth, and felt the nausea rising behind it again.
Another nurse was looking down at her. This one was a woman, and Annie saw with intense clarity the contrast between the black skin of her face and the whiteness of the cap that covered her hair.
‘Hello, dear,’ the nurse said. ‘Your husband has been here all evening, but he’s just gone off home. He told me to tell you that everything is all right. Tom and Benjy send their love, and you’re not to worry about anything. So you won’t, will you?’
The nurse smiled at her, and Annie looked at the warm, reassuring contrast of light and dark again. She tried to say, Martin, but the tube gagged her. She realized all over again that she couldn’t talk or move, and the pain that had attacked her down in the darkness was even more intense here. She knew that she must be safe here under these lights. The nurse’s smile was so wide and white and confident. But still the fear came back and clawed at her. Where had Steve gone? She couldn’t even turn her head to look for him. Steve would understand what was happening. He had been there with her, every minute. She could hear quite clearly what he had said to her. She could even see through his eyes his Nan’s hunched figure shuffling to and fro in her cramped flat, Steve’s own flat with its big, abstract paintings on the white walls. Why wasn’t he here then?
She tried to speak again, this time to call his name as she had done in the terrible darkness. But he didn’t answer now, and the black nurse put her warm hand on Annie’s arm.
‘Lie nice and still, there’s a good girl. You don’t want to upset all my machines, do you?’
Annie tried to think, What machines? The answer hovered somewhere beyond the edge of her understanding, like the outer edge of one of the lights overhead that lay out of her field of vision. Its elusiveness seemed more unbearable than the pain, and Annie felt the tears gather behind her eyes and then roll out at the corners.
The nurse bent over her and dabbed them away.
‘Oh dear, now,’ Annie heard her murmur. ‘There’s no need for this. You’re doing just fine.’
Early in the morning two officers from the anti-terrorist squad came to see Steve. They sat stiffly beside his bed with their notebooks, sympathetic but persistent.
‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said. ‘There was nothing. I just held open the door for the girl, and then the bomb went off. I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t aware of anyone else.’
It happened, he thought wearily. It happened and Annie and I were there, that’s all. Annie and I and the others. The two of us were lucky. We’re still alive. Annie, are you still there?
But he had no sense of luck, yet. He felt numb, and he simply remembered the two of them lying side by side in the darkness, without being able to think any further. The officers had thanked him, folded up their notepads and creaked away again.
Steve’s next visitor was Bob Jefferies.
At the beginning, in the accident unit with the pain fogging everything, they had asked Steve for the name of his next of kin.
Cass? he had thought. No, not Cass.
‘Or just someone we can contact to let them know where you are,’ they had reassured him. In the end he gave them Bob Jefferies’ name, more because Bob was his business partner than because he was a closer friend than any of a dozen others.
And now Bob came down the wards towards him, bulky in his expensive overcoat, carrying one of Steve’s Italian suitcases. He stopped at the end of the bed and looked at the dome of blankets propped over Steve’s leg, at the dressings covering his hands and chest, and then at his face.
‘Jesus, Steve,’ he said at last. ‘Was the prospect of the staff Christmas party as bad as all that?’
Steve let his head rest against his pillows and, with a part of himself, he laughed. But the laughter jarred his bones, and it died quickly.
Bob looked at his grey face. ‘Is it bad?’ he asked.
Steve said, ‘No. Painful, but no lasting damage.’ The orthopaedic surgeon who had come in to see him earlier had told him that the compound fracture of his femur had been pinned. In time, new bone formation would begin, and he should be able to move quite normally. ‘I won’t be able to walk on the leg for a bit. Months, perhaps.’
Bob hoisted the suitcase on to the end of the bed. ‘Mmm. What about getting it over?’
Steve didn’t risk laughter this time.
‘I didn’t ask about that.’
‘No kidding?’
They were uncomfortable together, Steve thought, because Bob’s awkward urge to extend unobtrusive sympathy and his own determination not to need it had shaken their arm’s-length, flippant intimacy out of true.
Bob busied himself with unpacking the suitcase. Steve saw that he had brought in his bathrobe, pyjamas, sponge-bag. It was odd to see Bob handling them.
‘Sorry to land you with this,’ Steve said.
‘Wish there was more I could do.’ Bob wasn’t looking at him now. ‘I couldn’t find your electric razor.’
‘Not much of a next-of-kin, are you? Don’t you know I wet-shave?’
‘You apply that frayed bunch of animal hair that’s crouching in your bathroom cupboard to your chin? Well, don’t worry. I’m sure you can get one of these lovely girls to shave you.’
Suddenly Steve wanted to close his eyes. The effort of trying to be the person that Bob knew was too tiring, and there was nothing else he knew how to reveal to him.
Bob saw the weariness, and rapidly unpacked the last things. There were books, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label.
‘Can I have some of that?’ Steve asked. Bob emptied the water out of the glass on his bedside table and poured two inches of whisky into it. Steve drank some and the familiar, worldly taste of it seemed to link him back to Bob again.
‘That’s better. Thanks.’
Bob stood back a little, holding the empty suitcase.
‘They wouldn’t let anyone in except me, and they’re only allowing me ten minutes. But they all send their love. Everyone, you know.’
Steve knew. He meant all the people they worked with, colleagues, the business. He could imagine how the news would have travelled.
‘And Marian, of course. If there’s anything we can do, Steve …’
Marian was Bob’s wife. Steve nodded.
‘Thanks. Thanks very much.’
‘D’you want me to get in touch with anyone? Anyone in particular?’
Steve thought for a numb moment. ‘Well, Cass, I suppose. And Vicky Shaw. Numbers are in the book on my desk, Jenny’ll find them. Tell them I’m all right.’
‘Yeah. Okay. Look, can’t we fix you up with a private room, at least? Somewhere with a TV and a phone?’
Steve looked round at the ward with its half-drawn curtains. He hadn’t spoken to any of the occupants of the other beds, but he liked the feeling of their company. And the glory of the flowers massed in the middle of the room had come to matter as much as anything.
‘I’m fine here. Bob, I was supposed to meet Aaron Jacobs yesterday about the fruit-juice commercials …’
‘Don’t worry about the damned business, Steve. Don’t worry about anything.’
Bob was a kind man, Steve realized. They had worked together for years, spent countless hours and eaten numerous meals together, but the thought had never occurred to him before. He saw him now, fussing with his coat as he got ready to leave, wanting to do something helpful or say something comforting.
‘There is one thing you could do,’ Steve said. Bob turned at once, pleased and relieved.
‘There was a girl. Her name’s Annie. We were down there together, all that time. We talked to one another. We could just touch hands. It would have been … terrible, without her.’
‘Yes. There was a bit about it in the news. Not very much.’
‘She’s here, somewhere. They brought her in before me. I’ve asked, but they won’t tell me anything much. Will you find out how she is? How she really is?’
‘Leave it to me.’
Bob would do as he asked, Steve was sure of that. He only had to wait, now, until he came back with the news of her.
They said goodbye then, and Bob went away and left him to himself again.
Annie was very ill.
After the emergency operation she had developed pneumonia. The surgeons had taken the ventilator tube out of her mouth and cut a hole for it directly into her windpipe. The machine breathed smoothly for her, and they pumped antibiotics into her veins to counter the lung infection. Her kidneys had failed completely, but the dialysis machine at her bedside did their work. For another day she lay inert, knowing nothing. Then, as if her body had no strength left even to start the struggle to heal itself, Annie began to bleed. She bled from her operation wound, from her cuts and grazes, and from the holes where the tubes and drips punctured her skin.
Martin sat by her bedside watching her face. He couldn’t even hold her hand because the lightest touch brought up big purple bruises under her skin. Her face was so dark with bruising that she looked as if she had been beaten over and over again. He sat and waited, almost in despair.
The doctor in charge of the intensive care unit had told him that Annie’s blood had lost all its ability to clot and stop her wounds from oozing. From their battery of tubes and plastic packs they were filling her with all the things that her own blood couldn’t produce. Martin watched the packs emptying themselves into her bruised body. Even her hair seemed to have lost its colour, spreading in grey strands against the flat pillow. Her lips were colourless, and leaden circles like big dark coins hid her eyes.
Steve waited too. Bob’s determined enquiries had led him to Annie’s surgeon, and the surgeon had come down himself to talk to Steve.
‘How is she?’ Steve asked.
The other man had looked at him speculatively, as if he was trying to gauge how much he should be told.
‘I held her hand for six hours,’ Steve said. ‘I want to know what’s happening to her.’
‘She has pneumonia and kidney failure. She is also suffering from disseminated intravascular clotting. That is in addition to the usual post-operative effects and her other, more minor injuries.’
‘Will she live?’ Steve watched the doctor’s face. But he didn’t see any flicker of concealment, and after a moment the man told him, ‘I think her chances are about fifty-fifty. The next two or three days will tell.’
‘Thank you,’ Steve said.
Two days went by.
The third was Christmas Eve, and the hospital hummed with the sad, determined gaiety of all hospitals at Christmas time. The staff nurse on Steve’s ward wore a tinsel circlet over her cap, paper streamers were pinned from corner to corner, and Steve could see a big Christmas tree in the day room that linked the ward to the women’s ward across the corridor.
The double row of beds with their flowered curtains and the narrow view through the doors at the end had become perfectly familiar. It struck Steve that he already knew the other occupants as well as he knew Bob Jefferies or any of his other friends outside the walls of the ward.
On the day of the bombing the eight-bedded ward and its women’s counterpart had been cleared to receive the victims. They had been brought in one by one, and they had found that their experience was a stronger bond than years of acquaintanceship. By unspoken agreement, they almost never mentioned the bombing itself. But there was a wry, grumbling kind of determination to overcome its effects that linked the newspaper seller, whose pitch outside the store had been covered with falling rubble and glass, the teenage store messenger, the five other Christmas shoppers, and Steve himself. In the handful of days that they had been enclosed in the ward, Steve had unwittingly become a kind of hero. It was only partly because he was the most seriously hurt, and because he had been trapped for so long. The real reason was the tide of presents that flowed into the ward for him. Flowers and cards and gifts arrived for all of them, every day. It was Christmas. The world felt guilty sympathy for them, and the loaded table in the middle of the ward clearly showed it.
