by Henry Porter
But how far was he prepared to pursue that line? After all, what was the point? Griswald was dead. Tomas lay in hospital unlikely ever to speak or move again. Others had been killed or crippled. Was it time to drop the whole business? For a full minute he thought of throwing the discs from the train window.
It wasn’t that simple, though. The discs weren’t the cause of the deaths and maimings, and getting rid of them wouldn’t quiet Vigo, settle scores with Viktor Lipnik or bring Tomas out of his coma. The pictures existed as an ineluctable fact. He turned and caught sight of his reflection in the train window. A haggard, middle-aged man stared back at him. He thought of his younger self – the first-class degree, the fond expressions of tutors who recognised promise, the absolute confidence, the ease of entry. The memory of himself for some reason brought back the image of Tomas on the mountainside in army fatigues, shrinking from the edge of the gorge – or was it perhaps a hurriedly excavated burial pit? If that image was a record of a massacre it meant that Tomas was a witness and that would certainly explain why he had been tracked down by a team of killers.
‘Or would it?’ Harland asked aloud to the empty carriage.
Tomas knew that he was alive. He had known that for some time. There were things that came to him from the world outside him – smells, noises and the lights and shadows which passed across his closed eyelids. But the pain inside his head and the clamour of discomfort from distant sites all over his body was too much for him and he had retreated back down the stairway. It was strange how he thought of it as a stairway. He could see it and feel it and as he got closer to the top there were certain things that he noticed about the stairway. The walls were cold to the touch and there was rope fixed to the side which he clung on to for dear life. He was never quite sure how he went back down again, whether he took it carefully, minding not to fall, or whether he just somehow arrived at the bottom where there was no light, no feeling – just dreams. He was content down there, though he only knew this once he had begun the journey up again and realised what he was leaving and what lay at the top. That was why he could never quite bring himself to leave the stairway for good. At the top he knew he would find himself, which was to say his body and his mind would be joined again and become aware of each other. Then Tomas Rath would live and act and do as other people did, but he didn’t want that yet.
The clarity of these thoughts surprised him because he had been aware of a certain fogginess of late, quite separate from the pain that periodically surged in his centre and blotted everything out. He was thinking better and he’d quite consciously recognised that once he reached the top there were decisions to be taken. The nature of these evaded him for the moment, but he understood that they were there and that they would crowd in on him very soon.
He heard a woman’s voice and he decided he would open his eyes and see who it was. He felt little pain at the moment – a hot, sticky feeling on his back and buttocks, tenderness in his neck and shoulders and a gentle throb in his head. But nothing he couldn’t deal with.
He waited as the voice got louder. Someone was talking to him because they were using his name – Tomas. And they were speaking in English. That was inconvenient, but he’d handle it. He began to open his eyes and noticed only one was opening, and that it was pretty much blinded by the light. He blinked a few times so that gradually he became accustomed to the glare. Just then, it struck him that he was having terrible difficulty in breathing. There was a hissing noise in his ear and his heart was pounding as if he had just taken some exercise. The real pain now was in his throat. Not the agony of before, but a raw, scorched dryness like a very bad infection. He also had the sense that something was obstructing his airway. It was thirst. He had never known thirst which hurt. He tried to swallow to get some saliva down there but his throat wouldn’t allow it.
He realised that a new note had entered the voice to his left and that the woman was probably speaking to someone else. But he couldn’t listen because he was concentrating very hard on trying to move his head. He’d never had to think about how to do this before and now, quite inexplicably, he’d forgotten. But he did need to remember because he wanted water and he would have to get up and find that water or at least tell the woman, who was now talking to him in an odd, soothing manner, that he needed water above all else. Above all else, do you hear? He knew he was speaking. He was sure of it, but he could not hear the words. And then he understood that there were so many things in his mouth that he couldn’t possibly speak. He would have to take them out in order to speak and to drink the water.
So he told his hand to grapple with the things they had shoved in his mouth and were causing him to experience that raspy, parched feeling at the back of his throat. Which hand he used didn’t much matter – either would do. But nothing happened. He wanted to look to see if he still had hands. He thought he could feel them. But when you can’t look down and they don’t respond to your command, it’s not easy to know whether you still have them.
Suddenly his other eye opened, and, although it took some time to get used to the light and he had to blink a bit, he was soon able to look ahead of him. There was a light on the ceiling and at the end of his bed he saw a man and two women. He was in a hospital. He looked down to see where his hands had got to but found that they weren’t quite in his field of vision. He would move his head and check on them. That would be simple now he was fully awake. He moved, or rather gave the instruction to move his head but nothing happened. Again he wondered how he’d forgotten something so basic. Maybe they’d given him some drugs to keep him still.
He looked up ahead of him and a thought came to him that a preferable existence was to be had down the stairway, where at least he wouldn’t experience this raging thirst and his limbs would move according to his wishes. But the man was saying something to him. He must be a doctor. He spoke very slowly and very insistently, as if he was stupid. Just because he was temporarily unable to move, it didn’t mean he was a moron.
‘Tomas,’ he said, ‘Tomas. That’s your name, isn’t it? We’re pleased to have you with us again. You’ve been unconscious for nearly a week. You’ve been in a coma.’
‘Is he responding?’ asked another woman’s voice. ‘His eyelids may just be fluttering as part of the aftershock.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Claire,’ said the doctor, sotto voce. It was impossible to miss the impatience. ‘If you haven’t got anything better to say, do please shut up.’
Tomas could see the woman. She wore glasses. Straight black hair. Pretty but severe face. Quite sexy. He hoped he wasn’t making a fool of himself in front of her. He must look absurd lying there.
‘Your head probably hurts a bit,’ continued the doctor, ‘and that’s because we took a bullet out of it on Christmas Day. You probably don’t remember much of what happened, but you were shot and the bullet went up through your throat into the bottom of your head. Still, we managed to get it out pretty cleanly and you’re healing very well. In fact, you’re making excellent progress, Tomas.’
He drew breath heavily and came closer. ‘The thing is, Tomas, you’re going to feel a bit unwell for some time yet. Part of the effects of an operation like this is to render you paralysed.’ He paused to let the words of this sentence sink in. All Tomas knew was that he was translating everything into Czech. The word parolyzovany repeated itself in his mind.
‘You won’t be able to move much for a while. That’s a good thing in a way because it gives your injuries a chance to heal, but in other ways it’s going to be very inconvenient and frustrating for you. But you can rest assured that we will be working very hard for you, pulling together to make things a bit more comfortable for you.’ He paused again and put his face directly in front of Tomas’s. It was difficult for Tomas to focus so close because his eyes now seemed to be bobbing up and down. He wanted to move his head back just to get a proper look at the man.
‘I believe you’re all there, Tomas. That’s terribly good news. Really, I coul
dn’t be more pleased. Well done, you.’
Well done, me? thought Tomas. How very English to say that. All I’ve done is walk up a stairway.
The woman came round to the doctor’s side of the bed. Tomas saw a nametag on her breast and he could smell her scent.
‘I’m not sure,’ said the woman. ‘He doesn’t look as if he has taken in much of what you’ve been saying.’ She appeared to be a doctor too.
‘Oh yes he has,’ said the man confidently. ‘I know it.’ He gave Tomas’s hand a tiny squeeze. ‘And I know he can feel that too. You’re fully aware of what’s going on around you, aren’t you, old thing?’ He paused again. ‘So I thought I would tell you a little about what we’re going to do. For quite a while we will be feeding you through these tubes here and helping you breathe with this machine which you can probably hear to your left. For that reason we’ve made a very small hole in the front of your throat to allow the air to pass into your body without something getting in the way. That may feel a bit uncomfortable and a bit strange until you get used to it.’
Now Tomas was registering what he had been saying, not the stuff about tubes, but about guesswork. Did they mean that he wasn’t going to be able to communicate the smallest wish to them and that they would therefore have to guess his needs? How would they know that his throat was parched and his arse was sore and his side ached with a mysterious dull pain which reminded him of acute constipation? How could they possibly know these things? And how long would this state of total dependence last? When was he going to get better? He wanted to know the answer to that question most of all. There was an open-ended quality to the doctor’s statements that made him uneasy. If he was going to be like this for months, he wished they would tell him.
He tuned again into what the doctor was saying.
‘At the moment our first priority is to establish a way that you can use to communicate your needs. We want to be able to ask you questions such as – Would you like a different channel on your TV? And for you to be able to give us the answer yes or no. That can be done with your eyelids, which I’m optimistic that you’ll be able to control.
‘Now … I understand that you are a Czech speaker, but that you also speak English pretty well. Mr Harland, who you know, has told me that he will visit the Czech Republic at the earliest possible opportunity to contact your mother. He will bring her here and you’ll be able to hear your native language. Of course, I have every hope that we will be able to work out this code in English. That’ll make it much easier for us to get through the next three months or so.’
Three months, thought Tomas. He could just do three months – as long as there was going to be an end and he’d be able to move. Then he thought of his mother. Her lovely, dark, elliptical face came to him. The eyes that smiled and said nothing; the gaiety that defied confrontation; the conversation that left so many infuriating gaps – how would she cope with this? How would he?
His mind clouded with despair. He no longer had a choice in these things: if she came, he couldn’t very well walk away.
God, he wished he could remember what had happened. He remembered he had been with Harland and that they were by a river. For some reason he was feeling optimistic. Harland had said something conciliatory to him. He had accepted him. Tomas was aware of his mind stalling in certain areas. Yes, he had been shot. The doctor said so, though he couldn’t remember when it had actually happened. Was it after they’d been at the river? He remembered Flick. Flick was dead. He saw her bedroom and her body curled up on the bed. Had he imagined that? No, he hadn’t because that’s why he’d run and found himself in that little hotel room doing the final work. He noticed that his mind was vibrating so that it was difficult to hold on to a single thought: he would be thinking of Flick then his mother would come to mind; he would remember what Harland had said to him and then a big house full of people would appear.
He stopped scurrying between these images. Someone was laughing. He listened. Incredibly the noise seemed to be coming from his own mouth. The mouth which could not speak or drink or breathe by itself was now laughing. But there was nothing funny: he wasn’t responding to a joke made by the doctor and he certainly hadn’t been thinking of anything humorous. Yet his belly pulsated, his eyes were closing and the noise struggled past the tubes and hole in his throat to fill the room with a desperate, mirthless gurgle. Suddenly it stopped and Tomas realised – or rather suspected – that his face was frozen in a terrifying rictus because the doctor peered at him and he saw the horror and the pity in his eyes.
The female doctor asked her colleague something quietly. Tomas heard him pooh-pooh her suggestion, then he picked up the phrase ‘involuntary motor activity’, whose meaning he couldn’t quite pin down because he was having trouble with words.
A terrible thought began to creep into his mind, a suggestion that this paralysis was not the side effect of drugs but was a permanent condition. Perhaps he would never again walk over to a basin and get himself a glass of water, never feel the weather on his face, touch a woman’s breast, make himself heard, take a piss without someone holding his dick or plugging him with a tube. For some time now he’d been aware of the smell in the room and now he realised that it was his own smell. Would he have to live with that? With the leaking of catheters and bags? With the heat and accumulating sweat of his own body?
Panic flooded his head. He could hear his heart beating very fast and something had happened to his breathing. First there was a total cessation so that he was fighting to get air into his lungs, then he could feel himself take tiny short gasps of air. He heard the doctors say something and the next thing he knew was that he was looking at his arms and legs, which had reared up in front of him and, in the case of his arms, were moving up and down as though he were conducting a very slow piece of music. The cramp at the back of his calves and in the top of his thighs was excruciating. But the one thought at the back of Tomas’s mind was that he still possessed movement. This sudden reflex was evidence that he would eventually be able to tell his body what to do.
He felt the jab of the needle in his buttock and then saw his limbs fall back to the bed. The nurse who had administered the injection gave his legs some help by easing them down and placing the cover over them. But he didn’t want that. He was too hot and he wanted to tell her to leave him alone and let him make his own decision about the cover.
The shot had an immediate effect. He was calmer and the doctor was talking again, but not to him. He was explaining something to the woman whose scent he longed for. He waited, wondering what would happen next. It occurred to him that he wasn’t just a prisoner of his body but that it had declared a kind of independence and it was going to do anything it pleased, except serve its master. Was this the future? He had a superstitious sense that he had been occupied by a being that was going to force him to laugh and cry and gesticulate at inappropriate moments simply for the cruel pleasure of it.
He felt drowsy and began to slip towards sleep, knowing that he would never find himself at the bottom of the stairway again.
Harland arrived at Harriet’s house, too weary to care much about who might be watching his movements. Near the end of the train journey from Oxford it had occurred to him that Tomas’s presence in one of the pictures had prevented him from seeing them for their true worth. Far from being a kind of curse, they endowed their keeper with a certain power.
He installed himself in Harriet’s office at the top of the house and fed the disc into her computer. He looked at the picture of the mountainside first, isolating and enlarging the portion that contained Tomas. There was no doubt about it. Tomas was standing there with an oddly vacant expression, one foot lifting to the right, in the process of turning away. As far as Harland could tell, he was not armed.
He began to trawl the rest of the image for clues and information. He had been right about the date. It appeared over a patch of white rock that made it easy to miss. The events recorded had taken place at 2.15 p.m. on 15.7.95. Th
at was probably all he needed to elicit the satellite pictures from Professor Reeve. He noted down the date and time, momentarily wondering whether the type of rock in the foreground was limestone. That might be a clue to the place. He moved over to the other side of the picture, framed the dark area at the bottom left-hand corner and instructed the computer to fill the screen with it. His first impression was of a detail in one of those mediaeval studies of the Day of Judgement – the souls of the damned cast into hell. There were five or six bodies lying there in the shadows. All of them appeared to be men. A glint of machinery caught his eye also, a crescent of metal, possibly the blade of a piece of earth-moving equipment.
Time and place were obviously important to Griswald’s investigation and he realised that the mountains at the top of the screen might establish an approximate position. He flipped back to the whole image. There was a V-shaped nick in the furthest range which consisted of one fairly prominent peak. That might be identified if the direction of the camera was known. Yes, because a clue to this lay in the time that the image was made – a little over two hours past midday. That time seemed to tally with the amount of light in the picture and the shortness of the shadows. More crucial, however, was his observation that the shadows ran away from the lens, which meant that whoever had been filming the scene had his back directly to the sun.
