The Enemy Within, page 13
The hospital was right next door to the station, a great Gothic pile of a building, all columns and arches. ‘Here we go then,’ said Liam encouragingly.
‘Yep.’ I was making no move towards the entrance.
‘Did you want us to bring something?’ he said, misunderstanding. ‘We can nip over the road. Look, there’s a little shop there.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ I muttered. I could see the reception desk through the glass in the door. The woman behind it was on the phone.
‘D’you want me to ask for you? I don’t mind. What’s Clarrie’s surname?’
‘No, no, I’ll do it myself. Thanks.’ I took a deep breath, forced a smile in Liam’s direction, and pushed through the double doors.
It felt weird giving Clarrie’s real name. I’d never once called her Charles: she wouldn’t let me.
‘That’s infectious diseases,’ the woman said, looking up from her list. ‘There are special precautions for visitors up there. I’ll phone and let them know you’re on your way.’
I opened my mouth to say thank you but no sound came out. Liam provided the words for me. Thank God he listened to the directions she gave us too, because I was in no state to take them in.
We rattled up several floors in an oversized hospital lift built for carrying trolleys. In my time as a porter I’d become expert at manoeuvring them in and out without bashing the patients against the sides of the doors. Pushed quite a few with zipped-up bags on too, where you don’t have to worry about disturbing the occupants.
Infectious diseases was a locked ward: you had to ring a bell for admittance. We waited the best part of a minute before a nurse appeared at the far end of the corridor beyond and made her unhurried way up to the door.
‘Yes?’ she said without smiling. She must have known we were coming, because we’d seen the woman on reception make the call.
‘We’re here to visit Charles Jackson,’ I repeated.
‘Are you family?’
‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘He’s my uncle.’ The woman seemed like a right jobsworth. I was sure she would use any excuse she could not to let us in.
‘And him?’
‘He’s a friend. Of the family.’ He was coming in with me, I was suddenly sure about that.
Still not smiling, she stood aside. ‘All right. I’ll want some details from you. We haven’t got a next-of-kin for the forms.’ She banged the door shut behind us and barely drew breath before continuing: ‘Scrub up in here please. Hands, arms, all the way up to the elbows, then gloves, gown and facemask. And you’ll need a hair cover too,’ she added to Liam, eyeing his freshly-washed barnet as she pointed the way into a side room with a big square sink and rack after rack of plastic-wrapped protective clothing. ‘I’ll be at the nurse’s station.’
‘There’s one that never finished charm school,’ said Liam when he was sure she had gone. Rolling up his sleeves, he reached for the long handle on the tap before I stopped him and demonstrated how to do it with your elbow.
‘I used to work in a hospital,’ I explained.
‘You’re full of surprises, Tommy. You were never a nurse, were you?’
‘Just a porter. But I still had a better bedside manner than that cow.’
It took me a couple of attempts to get my gloves on, because it turned out my hands were shaking. The gown, facemask and hair cover rendered Liam almost unrecognisable, were it not for those big, brown long-lashed eyes.
It wasn’t the open ward I had been expecting, but a series of individual rooms, their doors all firmly closed. I did my best not to look through the glass panels in them as we made our way down to the far end of the corridor where the nurse was standing behind a counter.
‘Right, the patient may be highly infectious so no touching, no hugging, no kissing, no contact at all,’ she rattled off as she led us back up the corridor. ‘There is a chair in the room, please don’t try to move it any closer to the bed, just leave it where it is.’ A disdainful glance in Liam’s direction. ‘One of you will have to stand.’
‘How is she?’
‘She?’ she said sharply
‘Sorry, how’s he?’ I don’t know who I hated more for that sorry, her or myself.
‘See for yourself.’ And with that she leaned over and clicked the handle of one of the doors, pushing it open with her arm and holding it for us without crossing the threshold herself.
With a deep breath that sucked the mask uncomfortably back against my face, I stepped into the room and looked at the figure lying in the bed. I was conscious of Liam coming in and the door clicking closed behind us, but I only had eyes for the head lolling back on the piled-up pillows. An oxygen mask covered much of the face, and a large brown blotch on one cheek disfigured it further, but I could still see enough to be sure.
‘Oh God.’ I groped behind me and found Liam’s gloved hand. He clutched it strongly enough to keep me upright: for a moment the room swam and I thought I was going to faint.
‘It’s not her Liam. It’s not Clarrie. That’s somebody else.’
EIGHTEEN
It was a little old man lying in the bed. He must be seventy or eighty if he was a day: he was covered in liverspots, his cheeks sunken, his neck a scraggy wattle. Only a few lank strands of hair trailed down from an almost-bald head.
‘This is the wrong room. She’s made a mistake.’ Feeling slightly firmer on my feet now, I turned to face Liam.
‘Ach, for christ’s sake.’
‘Come on.’ I reached out for the doorhandle, trying to make as little noise as possible so as not to disturb the man in the bed. It was too late though: there was a muffled noise as he tried to speak through the oxygen mask.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, turning back. ‘We didn’t mean to disturb you, we’ve come into the wrong room.’
A bony hand groped its way out from under the sheets to try to pull aside the oxygen mask. It looked as if it took some effort.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, starting forward towards the bed, trying to prevent what was happening, but horribly aware I couldn’t actually intervene. ‘Please, don’t worry, we…’
‘Tommy?’
He’d managed to extract himself from the mask’s clutches. Now the whole of the face was visible, my eyes could confirm what my brain still didn’t want to believe.
‘Oh God. Clarrie?’
Her voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘Don’t ogle me, duckie, I’m in such a state.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I moved over to the bed, ignoring the chair that was firmly placed several feet away. ‘I’m sorry, Clarrie, I didn’t know you were ill. I only found out last night.’
‘Oh, nanti that, it’s just bona to vada…’ she trailed off into a dry cough, which had me starting backwards.
‘D’you want some water? Here.’ There was a plastic jug with a hinged cover and a glass over on a cabinet, well out of her reach. I poured some out and offered it, holding the glass by the brim between two fingers so she could take it without making contact. She reached for it with both hands and held it up to cracked lips while Liam and I exchanged a loaded glance.
I surveyed the rest of the room. ‘What’s all this?’ There were two trays piled up on the floor just inside the door: the top one had a plate with a bit of toast long gone cold on it, butter and jam sachets untouched, and a cup of tea with a thick skin on the top. I glanced at my watch. It was quarter past two in the afternoon.
‘Oh, that’s my room service.’ She gave a sad smile.
‘They leave it here?’ I picked up the tray, and the plate cover on the one underneath it, revealing a stone-cold congealed mess that had once been some kind of meat stew and mashed potato. It too was untouched.
‘Oh, it’s all right. I’m right off my carnish anyway.’ What was clearly meant to be an airy wave of the hand looked more like a spasm.
‘That’s disgusting. It’s outrageous. How are you supposed to get better if you don’t eat?’
There was a moment where all three of us considered what I had just said. I tried desperately to fill it with more words. ‘I’m going to complain. They can’t treat you like this. I’ll find a doctor and…’
‘Nanti that, Tommy,’ Clarrie said quietly. ‘No bitching. Please. It’s bad enough.’
‘No. Sorry.’ I sank down into the chair, reflexively trying to pull it closer. It wouldn’t shift. The legs were actually bolted to the floor.
‘Look,’ said Liam, taking charge of the awful silence. ‘There’s these at least; they’re still good.’ He extracted two plastic-wrapped fingers of shortbread and a carton of orange juice from the lower tray. ‘Would you like…?’ He punctured the juice box with the straw and, after only the slightest hesitation, held it out towards Clarrie in his fingertips.
‘Ta very much,’ she said, and suddenly in the way she eyed him I could see the old Clarrie as clear as day.
‘Who’s your fortuni friend, Tom?’ she asked me after a couple of ruminative sucks. ‘Lovely set of opals he’s got on him.’
‘This is Liam.’ He was giving her one of his most disarming smiles – one that showed even beyond the confines of his facemask. ‘We’re…at college together.’ I hadn’t quite got my head around what else we were together, so it seemed best to stick to the definite facts.
Clarrie, it seemed, thought otherwise. ‘Fabulosa. Like to see all my little omi-palones married off before I go.’ Her breathing was becoming ragged, and she slipped the oxygen mask back over her face as if to make clear this was her final word on the matter and closed her eyes.
We waited for a while, but she seemed to have gone to sleep. She was still breathing, at least: you could tell from the sparrow flutter of her chest beneath her nylon gown and the way the plastic of the mask fogged and cleared, fogged and cleared.
Liam moved over to the chair to put a comforting hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t even realised I was crying. ‘I’m fine,’ I insisted. ‘I’m fine. It’s just… It’s not fair. They shouldn’t be treating her like this. I have to say something. I have to.’ I raised a hand to wipe away my tears, remembered just in time it was still swaddled in latex, and awkwardly twisted my head to brush my cheek on my shoulder instead, rucking up my facemask. ‘I’m going to talk to that nurse.’
‘D’you want me to?’
‘No, you stay here. Keep an eye on her. If you wouldn’t mind. Try to get her to eat those if she wakes up.’
‘Sure.’ I tangled slightly with the doorhandle with all the gear I had on, but made it out into the corridor. I could hear the sound of Radio 1 coming from the nurse’s station; I stomped grimly towards it. The nurse had her head down going through paperwork. She looked up as I approached and I was surprised but not displeased to see a look of panic spread across her broad face.
‘Scrubs off! Scrubs off!’ she practically shrieked, scuttling her chair backwards as fast as its castors would take her. ‘In the yellow bin! All of them!’
I took my time peeling the gloves off, unhooking the facemask and gown and bundling the whole mass of plastic into the bin she was frantically pointing at. It had a sinister black logo on it and a shouty label: DANGER – CLINICAL WASTE FOR INCINERATION ONLY. Once the lid had clanged shut I pointedly moved over and stood as close to the counter as I could.
‘I want to know exactly what’s wrong with Clarrie. Yes, that’s what we call him; it’s what you should call him too. And I want to know why his meals have been left by the door, and why it doesn’t look as if he’s had any lunch at all delivered today.’
‘That’s nothing to do with me – that’s the domestic staff,’ she spluttered defensively.
‘And you couldn’t go in and give him a hand? Have you even been in that room today?’
‘Of course I have!’ Her face was flushed. ‘But we’re very short-staffed. There’s only two of us covering this whole ward today. And we’re full up.’ She gestured at a whiteboard on the wall to the side of the counter; its carefully taped-out rows and columns were all filled in.
‘So are you letting the other patients starve, too?’ Clarrie had asked me not to make a scene, but I didn’t care; it was such a relief to let out some of the anger I was feeling in someone else’s direction.
She looked as furious as I felt. ‘No one is starving on my watch. But we do have to make decisions about which patients need our help the most.’
‘Need, or deserve?’ I demanded.
She was bright red now. ‘Excuse me! I’ve got a kiddy with TB in that room up there, just ten years old. His mum and dad beside themselves wondering if he’s going to pull through. And all week long your uncle has had doctors trailing in and out of that room, wanting to check out this fascinating case, this extraordinary new illness, taking samples of his blood and talking about what amazing papers they’re going to write about it, while the rest of us just get on with trying to look after everyone. So don’t start talking to me about special treatment.’
That left me momentarily speechless, and she used the opportunity to swipe up a cardboard file from the desktop beneath the counter and thunk it down between us, opening it to riffle through the pages. ‘You want to know what’s wrong with Mr Jackson? He’s got pneumocystis pneumonia. That’s mostly what we’re treating him for right now. But he’s got Kaposi’s sarcoma, too; that’s what the mark on his face is. It’s a form of cancer. And the doctors think he’s got some kind of viral infection in his gut too, probably a form of herpes, it says here. Oh, and an anal ulcer too.’ She pursed her lips and looked at me defiantly.
I felt like I’d just taken a physical kicking, but I forced myself to stand steady and get my voice under control before I spoke. ‘When can I talk to his doctor?’
She clapped the file shut and started knocking it on the top of the counter more vigorously than was needed to straighten the papers inside. ‘His consultant won’t be back in until Monday.’
‘Right. I’ll be here again then on Monday then. To speak to him personally.’
‘You have the right to do that, of course. As next of kin.’ She wasn’t even trying to hide the sarcasm in her voice any more. She extracted a form and pen and slapped them down on the counter between us.
I felt like ripping my plastic gloves back out of the bin, vaulting the counter and rubbing them all over her smug face. But instead I retreated to a row of plastic chairs on the opposite side of the corridor, managing to sit down before I fell down. I was pleased that it at least kept her in my line of sight, because it meant she had to keep on pretending to be busy with stuff at the back of the nurses’ station to avoid catching my eye.
When my hands were finally steady and my eyes clear enough to write, I filled out the form scrupulously with my real name, address and phone number. And then I waited a bit more, because I could see how uncomfortable it was making her, before getting up and putting the paper neatly back on the countertop.
‘Clarrie’s got quite a lot of nephews, as it happens,’ I addressed her wide back. ‘Godsons, too. And I should think a lot of them will want to come in and visit, and make sure she’s being properly looked after. So you can look forward to seeing a lot more of us.’
And I walked off back up the ward to my friend.
NINETEEN
It was a good line to exit on. But it turned out to be a bit of an overstatement. I spent most of that evening on the phone tracking down various friends, acquaintances and former habitués of the Up Your Bum, but the number of people who suddenly found they had prior appointments, or would do their best but couldn’t commit, or turned out to have never really known Clarrie that well actually after all, was alarmingly high.
In a way I couldn’t blame them. Hadn’t I been forcing myself through the same mental contortions that very day? That’s what the shadow of death does to you. Just because I had already fast-forwarded through denial and anger in the space of an afternoon didn’t mean everyone else was going to be ready for my bargaining. Most of the guys I spoke to were getting ready for a big Saturday night, already on the booze and preparing to go out and have fun. Then in I swooped in my black cowl, waving the memento mori most of us had been refusing to look at for months now.
I got a few takers. Ivan, from Icebreakers, said yes straight away; he was due at St Mary’s for his latest blood test on Monday lunchtime anyway, so he would go straight up to the ward afterwards. Paolo, it turned out, had gone home – his parents had taken him back to Italy a few weeks before – so, as Ivan sadly said, ‘I’ve got time on my hands now.’ Olly and Lee, a couple of other friends from the old days, said they would definitely try to look in. Eve, it turned out, was already planning to go in on Sunday. Most surprisingly Gary and Brian, old friends from Dilly days who now lived down in Brighton, and who I had only called as an afterthought, said they would jump on the first train they could on Gary’s next day off, which was Tuesday. So that was the next few days sorted, at least. Plus, I planned to make myself a fixture on the ward; I might have failed Clarrie these past few months but I was damned if I was going to fail her now.
Liam insisted he wanted to do his bit, too, but I felt he had already done more than enough: he had sat with Clarrie that afternoon while I went out to find her something proper to eat. I had had to settle for a McDonalds, the only hot food I reckoned I could easily smuggle back into the hospital. It was pretty lukewarm by the time I had got back and struggled into all the protective gear again, but it was worth it: she was delighted, said she’d never had one before. She only managed about half of the burger, but she particularly liked the fries. ‘I have to be gardy. Everything whooshes straight through me as bowl brandy, and my dish is like a ripped-out fireplace,’ she confided, which was at least a more poetic way of putting it than the nurse had managed.
