Rope of Sand

by C F Dunn

  “Can you tell the court why it is, then, that in your second report you conclude, and I quote: ‘The patient shows no signs of sociopathic tendencies or personality disorder that constitutes a psychological problem or a danger to himself or to those around him’, end quote. Dr Lynes, why did you change your mind so radically?”

  Maggie half-lifted herself out of the chair and then sat back down again. A small spot of blood formed on her bottom lip, glistening red, where she had bitten hard. She touched it, surprise in her eyes as she looked at her finger.

  Duffy could obviously sense she was breaking. “Dr Lynes?”

  Maggie licked at her lip with the tip of her tongue, her eyes flicking first to Matthew, then to Monica, as if trying to make a decision. Staahl slid to the edge of his chair, leaning forward as far as he could, an expression of deep concentration frozen on his face. Not a whisper lifted the tension of the room.

  The judge’s forehead became a series of horizontal creases that matched the line of her spectacles. “Dr Lynes, you must answer counsel.”

  Maggie stuttered back to life. “It… it is accepted that in the case of a sadomasochistic relationship, as long as it is consensual, it is not deemed to be a psychological problem…”

  I heard a low sound behind me. Turning, I saw Matthew glaring at Maggie with an intensity that made me shudder. She looked nervously towards him, then back at Duffy, caught between the interrogative onslaught of them both.

  “You haven’t answered my question, Dr Lynes. Why did you change your mind? Did you change it, or was it changed for you? Did you perhaps make a wrong assessment in the first place? Are you incompetent, Dr Lynes, or have you chosen not to tell the truth?” Duffy had found Maggie’s weakness and she would exploit it to its natural conclusion, wringing every last drop of mental reserve from her. I realized that this was going to push Maggie over the edge into goodness only knew what chasm, and take Matthew with her. She had to be brought back before the gulf opened too far and it was too late.

  The forgotten coffee reeked on the floor next to me, still and rank and bitter. Something Matthew had said when we were in Duffy’s office came back to me with all the resounding force of a blow.

  Throwing a cautious look at the judge, in a movement so quick I hardly knew what I was doing until I did it, I leaned down, picked up the cup of espresso, and drained it in one continuous stream. I nearly gagged. The empty cup fell with an accusingly hollow tok on the scuffed wooden boards, and I waited, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Nobody had seen me.

  Nothing happened.

  Maggie still struggled to maintain her composure, but she was losing control fast and the wretched coffee wasn’t working. Sure, I felt the stuff hit my stomach like a cannonball, making me curl up on my chair with my arms clasped around me momentarily until the spasm passed, but I had no clarity of thought, no inspiration, no insight.

  Duffy’s voice carved through the hushed suspense in the room. “Incompetent or liar, Dr Lynes? The court is waiting…”

  “I… wh… when I spoke to Professor Staahl, he said that she consented to the act and that she… invited him to… meet her.” Maggie’s speech became halting and a muscle in her temple began to twitch. She put up a shaking hand to stop it.

  My fingers were beginning to tingle and my tongue had gone numb. It was a reaction of sorts, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on Maggie. Nothing. No connection. Damn it, work.

  I opened my eyes again as my pulse became increasingly erratic, the blood pounding insistently in my ears, hammering away at my consciousness. I tried again, not entirely certain what I looked for. I found it so much easier with Matthew, and even Monica had made her presence palpable with her malevolence; but Maggie was surrounded by so many confusing signals and conflicting information that I couldn’t gain a clear picture of her emotional state even if I had known what I was doing. Cold sweat forced beads of moisture to sit uncomfortably on my brow. I scrubbed at them and attempted to concentrate.

  Duffy upped the pressure. “And when you refer to ‘she’, do you mean Professor D’Eresby?”

  “Yes,” Maggie almost spat the word out in a demonstration bordering on contempt.

  “Let me get this straight, Dr Lynes. On the basis of what the defendant told you, you changed the conclusion of your report?” Duffy made no attempt to hide her disbelief.

  Maggie said something else, but I didn’t hear as a sudden rush of feelings crowded my senses, almost overpowering me with their unexpected intensity. I gasped. The door opened and closed at the back of the room and high up, a bird flew into the glass of the window, its soft impact ricocheting inside my head. I lost sight of Maggie and searched desperately for her again amid the encroaching anarchy of sensory overload. In all the maelstrom, I had to find her – fast.

  Maggie began to panic, her voice rising with hysteria. “No! No – you don’t understand, it was her…” She jabbed a vicious finger in Monica’s direction and heads turned to stare at the old woman. “She did it! She made me do it. She wanted to destroy my grandfather – she wanted to destroy him!” She swivelled in her chair and pointed wildly in Matthew’s direction. The room erupted into frenzy.

  “No, Maggie, STOP!” I yelled inside my head, still fumbling blindly for her in a sea of sensations in which I rapidly drowned. Lights dazzled and Duffy moved with exaggerated jerks on the dais, and the stench of cheap washing powder clashed with an expensive perfume from somewhere behind me. I felt sick again, and my collar rubbed raw against my neck. I used my hand to ease the fabric from my skin but I couldn’t feel my fingers any more. My pulse raced to escape my body.

  And then everything slowed and came to a standstill as if someone had put their foot on the brake. Although still acutely aware of every sound and smell and taste, each stretched into a tangible and continuous stream of consciousness so that if I reached out I could touch them, and take each one within my hand and change it.

  Time dawdled like a film divided into individual frames, and I could move between each one at will. The frames dissolved into a movement of colour – all shades – dark and light, fat and thin, dense and so fragile that I could push myself through their luminosity. People became colours. I could no longer see their faces and their arms and legs, but their emotions – pulsating, vibrating – changing colour constantly, all clamouring to be heard, all wanting my attention, barely aware that I fought for each breath I took, nor of the tightening band in my chest.

  The press of emotion was becoming too much, and I felt myself slipping away into the mass of them, beleaguered by their hopes and joys and spite and grief. But I found Maggie there too. She stood on the precipice of a pit of darkness, a writhing, coiling mass of blacks and deepest purples that were drawing her closer and closer to the edge of despair.

  “Maggie!” I called in desperation. “No, don’t go, not that way!”

  She couldn’t hear me. The darkness was defeating her and I couldn’t fight against it, she had to do it herself. “Maggie, come back to the light. I know you can hear me. Come back to your family, Maggie, don’t leave them, don’t go.” With supreme effort, I gathered all my emotional strength and flung it towards her across the void like a rope to a man as he sinks beneath the surface.

  Several things happened at once. I distinctly heard Matthew swear behind me at the same time as I opened my eyes and saw Maggie staring at me with her mouth slack in astonishment. She had heard me. I smiled at her.

  The room became very still, and the only sound I could hear in it was a slowing, ragged thump, thump, thump like the faltering mechanism of a clockwork toy as it unwinds. And then it, too, stopped.

  Matthew caught me as I fell forward, the table crashing against the dais as he kicked it away. “Emma!” he called and I tried to answer but the voices of the emotions kept pulling at me, greedy for my attention, weaving in and out and around me like spectres in a mist. “Emma!” Matthew’s desperate voice called me back through the clamour. H
e looked up. “Harry…”

  The light current of air he stirred as Harry moved towards us sent a spasm of shivers through me, but increasingly I was losing touch with my body and I soon stopped shaking.

  “I’ve called 911, Matthew; what do you need?”

  So much doubt and fear within the colours, all vying with each other for some part of me – plucking at me, feeding – but I had nothing more to give them. “What do you want?” I cried out, although no sound left my lips.

  “I’m not getting a pulse.” I felt Henry’s growing apprehension through all the others. “It’s happening again; did she drink coffee?”

  I turned against the surge of people to reach Matthew but it was like swimming against a torrent and I couldn’t make headway, and the effort it took drew on my rapidly ebbing reserves.

  Henry counted beneath his breath. “It’s been two minutes, Matthew.”

  “Epinephrine – now, Harry,” Matthew said, and the boy moved rapidly beyond my sight. I sensed his urgency, felt the rising panic he fought to control.

  Somewhere, further into the courtroom, I heard a call to clear the court. My detachment grew as the crowd began to thin, as if they were taking away some part of me.

  Close by, frantic and frightened, Dad barked, “What’s wrong? Do something!”

  I wanted to tell him that there was nothing to be afraid of as colours – so beautiful that they sparkled like sun on flowing water – held me in suspension between two worlds, and I wanted to run with them.

  “Emma…” Next to me, so close he was in my head, Matthew wound himself into my heart, calling to me, pulling me back towards him, not letting me follow, not letting me go. “… Emma, don’t leave me.” And in silent despair, I can’t face time without you.

  I clung to the bright light of his life as he drove all the ravenous colours away until only he surrounded me, keeping them at bay. He reached inside me, but it hurt where he touched my heart and I wanted him to stop.

  Henry’s voice hovered close, more pressing now. “Pupils not responding. We’re up to four minutes, Matthew; she’s at risk of hypoxia. Joel, keep them back, we need room!”

  I heard the sound of shouting and people pushing and running feet, but the world felt remote and nothing made sense. I thought my chest hurt because it felt so heavy, although I couldn’t be sure any more, and I drifted, sliding away, my colours almost gone behind dark shutters as they closed. Don’t take my colours away.

  Cold air touched my neck, my breast. Matthew’s voice cried out in my head again. “Emma, I’ve just buried my wife and I’m not going to lose you as well. Damn it, Emma, fight!”

  Why did his voice hurt so much? There’s too much pain in it. I can’t bear to feel his pain.

  “We’re losing her, Matthew – there’s no response.”

  “No, I’m damn well not!”

  “Matthew, we’re over six minutes…”

  Running feet again. Someone cursed as they were knocked to one side and Harry’s voice carried across the room. “Matthew! Here – catch.”

  A small sound, tiny, the tip of a top being flicked off and then… oh, agony!

  The pain in my chest bore into me, shattering the remnants of my colours into a million tiny shards and scattering them into oblivion. The pain went on and on, building into an excruciating peak, and then it stopped as a searing sensation replaced it. Starting around my heart it built and spread and seeped into my arteries like the encroaching tide over flat sand. I gasped and flailed, powerless in the face of such relentlessness. Someone had wound up the toy – thump, thump, thump – soft and tired at first, then louder and stronger, and beside me, Matthew’s quiet and steady voice, warm and comforting, reaching through the drumbeat. “I’ve got you, Emma; I have you, my love.”

  “OK, we have a pulse.” Relief drenched Henry’s voice.

  In the near-empty courtroom, a dense, dark shape – confused and colourless – remained. Separate from the rest of the hues that surrounded it, I thought it was lost. I tried to see it more clearly, its significance uncertain, and I pushed out towards it beyond the spectrum of shades around me. It recoiled.

  I recognized Staahl at once. His shape writhed and struggled to escape from me, in torment because he knew no colour, had no body of emotion. I had all colour and he had none, and there was no fear for me any more. I was free of him. I was triumphant.

  I reached out and trapped him in my gaze. I searched his heart and found nothing but an empty hole that life and hope had once filled. He had sold his soul a long time ago.

  “I see you and you are nothing to me,” I told him. His hollow image shank before me.

  Voices rang out with alarm. “Watch out!” “What’s wrong with him?” Chairs clattered as they tumbled against the floor, and somewhere close by, a glass smashed.

  Over the other voices, the judicial marshal bellowed, “Restrain him! Get him out of here!” They were taking Staahl away; I could sense him no longer; he was gone.

  I heard Harry call out from some way across the room near the door, “Paramedics are here.”

  Joel answered close by me, his tone deeper than his brother’s. “They took their bloody time. Geesh, we could have got her there quicker if we’d walked.”

  “Said they couldn’t get through the traffic and the crowd.” Harry had moved next to his brother, but their colours faded into translucence and then I could no longer see, so I opened my eyes.

  Matthew leaned so close that his face filled my vision and I couldn’t look anywhere else but into the depths in which I could find peace.

  “Hello again,” he said softly.

  I hurt. “Ow.”

  He smiled.

  Someone put something heavy and scratchy over me and I recognized my father’s coat from his aftershave. I remembered I had a body and that my body was cold. Through the opening doors, harsh, metallic rattling and new voices infiltrated the room, but I couldn’t look at anything or anyone else.

  “Will she be all right?” Dad’s voice shook.

  “Dad?” I whispered, as a different sort of reality imposed itself on my perception as I was drawn inexorably back into the world. I could feel Matthew’s hand resting between my breasts beneath the coat.

  “Henry will look after him, Emma; I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  Confused, my shrunken voice sounded alien to my ears. “Why?”

  Matthew removed his hand briefly, and a swell of pain took me by surprise. He replaced his hand and the pain became mere discomfort again, and he kept it there as I was wheeled towards the door. The cold was becoming intolerable, but shock-induced sleep invited unconsciousness and, rocked by the motion of the gurney, I resisted it no longer.

  CHAPTER

  21

  And Spring Shall Come Again

  My eyes were still heavy, so I kept them shut while I accommodated all the sounds around me. The intrusive bleep of a machine hammered my ears, insistent and repetitive but strangely comforting, and beneath it, matching stroke for stroke, the low, slow beat of my heart. A humming, so soft as to be almost not there, resonated within the metal frame of the bed, lulling me back into sleep but for the voices that held my attention. They came with colours, but not like before. These hues were weaker, almost transparent, but they carried the same tenor of emotions that I could read as easily as words. And sometimes the words used did not chime with the emotion that bore them.

  Henry was explaining something to my father. His tone might have been tranquil, but he did not feel it.

  “It’s not straightforward, Hugh. There can be complications associated with the administration of adrenaline, including tachycardia, hypertension, arrhythmia – a bad headache would be the least we could expect. I think you need to be prepared – it’s possible that Emma could suffer a further heart attack.” Silence, broken only by the pulse of the machine.

  Dad choked. “Are you saying she could still die?”

  “It is a possibility, yes.” Henry paused and I could
sense his uncertainty. “Look, there is one other complication of which I think you should be aware.” Dad’s colour flowed from brown to black and back again. “Emma’s heart failed to beat for over seven – nearly eight minutes, resulting in a lack of oxygen to her brain during that time…”

  “But she spoke afterwards, I heard her,” Dad interrupted in desperation.

  I wanted to say something but my mouth felt like glue and the muscles refused to work in conjunction with my brain. I knew they were discussing me but somehow it seemed like someone else, and I couldn’t make what they were saying real.

  Henry continued. “It’s too early to tell. If she survives the next twenty-four hours we’ll run scans to measure the extent of the damage and, with therapy, some of it might be reversed in time.”

  I heard my father slump into a chair. “What am I going to tell her mother?” I had never heard him defeated like this, not even when his own parents died. His entire being became enveloped in a suffocating film of black.

  I strove to speak again but my mouth would have none of it. I tried my eyes instead and they opened a fraction, but not enough to see.

  “You’re going to tell her mother that she’ll be fine.” Matthew shifted slightly as he turned to speak from where he stood at the end of my hospital bed. I read no darkness in him at all, his colours bright and vital. “There’s nothing wrong with either her heart or her brain, except for her stubbornness, and that, I’m afraid, is incurable. You should have beaten her more as a child, colonel.”

  My mouth twitched involuntarily. I watched from behind my eyelids as hope coursed through my father. “Are you saying she is going to be all right? But surely, from what your father said a moment ago…”

  As confused as Dad, Henry said, “Matthew?”

  “Have a look at the readout, Henry.” I heard footsteps cross the floor. “No arrhythmia, no palpitations, no indication of any electrical or mechanical disturbance or cardiac irritability at all. Perfectly steady and regular and strong.”