Pulse

by Felix Francis

  That was reassuring.

  ‘I will send you all the details straight away. Usual email address?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  He disconnected.

  I sat calmly at the kitchen table and drank my coffee. Was this another example of my life returning to some degree of normality?

  I sincerely hoped so.

  Going into Wotton Lawn the previous November had been a nightmare but, in truth, it was only an extension to the nightmare that my life had already become.

  Deep down inside I knew that hospital was the best place for me, but that didn’t stop me fighting against it.

  I was angry and I took out my frustration on everything and everyone.

  I shouted. I screamed. I even tried to run away.

  I threatened to kill myself and was placed on a 24-hour suicide watch.

  They locked me in my room and tried to force me to eat three meals a day. Then they watched me like hawks to ensure I didn’t nip off to the bathroom to throw the food back up again.

  About the only thing they didn’t do was truss me up in a straitjacket.

  And I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had.

  I was what was known as a difficult patient.

  I refused to attend the group therapy sessions and the first person I would speak to was Stephen Butler when he came to see me on the third day.

  I quite expected him to tell me off for being so bloody tiresome but he didn’t. Instead, as usual, he just listened tolerantly as I prattled on for ten minutes or more about how awful it was in there and how nasty the staff were to me.

  ‘But what is the alternative?’ he asked when I finally ran out of steam. ‘You claim you will kill yourself but do you really want to die? Do you want Grant and the boys to have to go on living without you? Do you think they would ever forgive you for being so selfish?’

  That shut me up.

  Maybe he was telling me off after all.

  The trouble was that I felt like I was split in two. Half of me wanted to get better and put an end to this misery, but the other half was in control, trapping me in this horrendous existence, dictating my dreadful thoughts and actions.

  I needed to break out – to be me again – but here I was fighting against the very people who were trying to help me.

  Stephen came to see me every day for the next week – way beyond what would normally be expected within the health service. He was my friend – my lifeline to which I clung with all my strength.

  Grant came too, but somehow we couldn’t communicate.

  I was terrified he was getting so pissed off that he’d leave me and, the more frightened I became, the less I was able to speak to him. Crazily, I was not even pleased to see him when he did come to see me. It was as if I was only waiting for the inevitable and preparing myself for the pain to come.

  ‘What have you told the boys?’ I asked him when he again arrived alone.

  ‘The truth,’ he said. ‘I told them that their mum wasn’t well and that she would be staying in hospital for a while to get better.’

  ‘How are they doing? Are you feeding them?’

  ‘Your mother is doing that,’ Grant said without any hint of emotion. ‘She turned up yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘My mother! Oh God, does she know I’m in hospital?’

  He nodded. ‘The boys told her. They needed to talk to someone.’

  Tears flowed freely down my cheeks. My poor boys.

  ‘Will you please bring them in to see me?’ I asked.

  ‘Is that wise?’ he replied. ‘Do you really want them to see you like this?’

  ‘But I miss them,’ I shouted at him.

  ‘They miss you too. And, if you start eating, you’ll be home with them very soon.’

  I wondered if he was punishing me by keeping them away.

  If so, I deserved it.

  Gradually, during the first two weeks in hospital, the anger in me had subsided and I’d stopped shouting. The screaming had stopped too, at least on the outside.

  But it had left me feeling somewhat vacant, almost numb.

  It was as if the eating disorder had somehow taken control of my emotions – both the good and the bad. It had become a protective cloak around me, making me immune from worry and fear, but also rendering me unresponsive to love and kindness.

  I suddenly seemed not to care about anything any more, although I had started eating, albeit on a very limited basis and under duress. However, it had been simple curiosity that took me to my first therapy session, rather than any great urge to participate.

  But that session was the start of my long journey to getting well again.

  Not that I had realised it at the time.

  Stephen had told me that there was another woman patient in her forties in the group and I wondered if she possessed the same feelings of hopelessness and guilt that plagued me, and there was only one way to find out.

  I had initially only intended to listen – to sit there in silence – but it was like staring into a mirror of my own emotions.

  Beth was the woman’s name, and I found myself warming to her, verbally agreeing when she spoke of her fear of letting people down, especially her mother and father. Like me, she’d had parents who were very ambitious for their daughter and their expectations had far exceeded her ability to fulfil them.

  It forced me to think back to my own early life.

  Fortunately, in my case, I had found my schoolwork relatively easy and had always been at or near the top of my class. Not that my parents ever gave me any praise for it. I presumed they believed it was my rightful place and they regularly criticised me for not doing even better.

  Looking back, I realised that the lack of praise then was the beginning of the emotional chasm that still existed between my mother and me.

  Even as a small girl, I had never been particularly close to either parent and my childhood home was not one I remembered as being filled with love and happiness.

  My parents had both been serious academics. My father had been a lecturer in medieval archaeology at Oxford University and my mother had been a PhD student in the same department.

  There had been an age gap of almost twenty years between them and, I now supposed, there must have been a touch of scandal at the time, but it was never spoken about. Flower power and free love were just about hanging on into the early 1970s, and people were perhaps more tolerant then of sexual peccadilloes between staff and students. Ten years earlier and the two of them would have undoubtedly been hounded out of the city. Ten years later and I would almost certainly have been aborted.

  An aged aunt had told me stiffly and without elaboration at my father’s funeral that he had always chosen the honourable path in his life. His marrying of my mother due to honour rather than for love had obviously been my misfortune.

  Consequently, I had been an only child and I’d spent most of my life convinced that my arrival had been a mistake, perhaps the result of a momentary sexual indiscretion at a departmental Christmas party that had ended up with my mother becoming pregnant. The date would fit.

  Not that I ever believed that my parents had been purposefully unkind or cruel to me as a child. There had been no abuse, but precious little love either. They lived for their work and both were infinitely more interested in the long dead than in the living, and that included each other and their offspring.

  Still, it had been listening to Beth and the realisation of how the emotional wilderness of her youth had so clearly impacted on her present state of mind that made me begin to understand who I was too.

  It became the foundation of my climb back up to normality.

  However, there were to be a few major hiccups on the way.

  At the end of my second week in the hospital an assistant to the County Coroner had come to see me.

  ‘I’m not dead yet,’ I said to him as we shook hands in the ward kitchen.

  He smiled wanly. It was clearly not the first time he’d heard
that little joke.

  ‘No,’ he said, sitting down at the table and opening his briefcase. ‘I have come to ask you about a man who died at Cheltenham General nearly three weeks ago.’

  ‘The man found in the Gents at the racecourse?’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘Have the police found out who he was?’

  ‘No, they haven’t.’ He made it sound like they couldn’t have been trying hard enough. ‘That is our problem. The coroner opened an inquest last week and then adjourned it without establishing the identity of the deceased. Most unusual.’

  From his tone of voice it was obvious that he considered it a major failing.

  ‘So how can I help?’ I asked. ‘I have no idea who the man was.’

  ‘Did he not say anything to you at all before he died?’ He was almost pleading for me to say yes. ‘Perhaps something you may have thought was not relevant at the time?’

  I shook my head. ‘The man was unconscious when he arrived at the hospital and he never woke up.’

  The assistant coroner sucked his teeth in annoyance. ‘I’ve never had this happen to me before. It’s very unsatisfactory.’ He made it sound more like poor service in a restaurant rather than the delicate matter of an anonymous corpse stretched out in a storage freezer at the county mortuary.

  ‘Did the police have no luck with his clothes? I was told that they weren’t available in this country.’

  ‘Both his suit and his shirt were made by a tailor in Singapore. His coat was from Hong Kong, and his shoes were handmade in Dubai.’

  ‘Won’t the Singapore tailor have records?’ I said. ‘Or the shoemaker?’

  ‘Enquiries are continuing along those lines.’

  ‘How about his underwear?’ I asked.

  ‘Calvin Klein boxer shorts,’ the assistant coroner replied. ‘They could have been purchased anywhere.’

  Yes, I thought, but not cheaply. Add the handmade shoes, tailored suit and shirt – our dead friend had clearly not been short of a bob or two. Was that because he was a cocaine smuggler, ultimately undone by his own illegal shipment?

  ‘What about the whisky bottle?’ I asked. ‘Did it contain any cocaine residue?’

  ‘You seem very well informed, Dr Rankin.’ He made it sound suspicious.

  ‘I’m just interested,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s not often that a well-dressed, respectable-looking man with handmade shoes dies of cocaine poisoning whilst in my care.’

  But, if the truth were known, I was more than just interested – I was becoming seriously obsessed by the unnamed man, and why he had died. The obsession had been building in me ever since he had first arrived at the hospital, further fuelled by the complaint against me and the strangeness of his passing.

  The assistant coroner closed his briefcase and began to stand up. As far as he was concerned the meeting was over.

  ‘So did it?’ I asked.

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Did the whisky contain the cocaine?’

  ‘We are still waiting for all the forensic toxicology test results. That one included.’

  I had the strong impression that he wouldn’t have told me even if he knew, as if his own position of importance would have somehow been diminished if he couldn’t withhold some snippet of crucial information from those he considered to be lesser mortals.

  I shrugged as if I didn’t care.

  How I had moved on in only a couple of weeks.

  Only ten days previously I would have shouted and screamed at the silly man and probably found myself being sedated by the hospital staff with a jab in the backside.

  Was I really getting better?

  An examination of the complaint against my medical competence took place three weeks and two days after my admission and, as a courtesy to my situation, had been held in the dining hall of Wotton Lawn.

  I protested that, as a hospital inpatient, I obviously wasn’t well enough to defend myself against the charges and I’d had insufficient time to brief a lawyer to act as my counsel.

  However, I was advised privately by the Medical Director to let the proceedings go ahead as the complaint against me was to be dismissed as being without foundation, and it would not be considered as a disciplinary hearing.

  ‘How come?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘The nurse is now saying that she would have likely done the same thing as you in similar circumstances and her support makes all the difference.’

  ‘But wasn’t it her who complained about me in the first place?’

  ‘No. It was a junior doctor. It appears that he didn’t like getting shouted at by you in front of everyone so he complained about your competence. He has now been persuaded of his error.’

  Little shit, I thought. He’d been responsible for everything.

  But had he?

  This disaster had been brewing for some considerable time. If it hadn’t been his complaint that had tipped me over the edge, something else would have done.

  The hearing took just a few minutes to complete and neither the nurse nor the junior doctor was present. The Medical Director acted as the chairman of the panel of three, and he was the only one who spoke.

  ‘After further consideration of the events surrounding the death of an unknown man at Cheltenham General Hospital, this panel finds that there is no case for Dr Christine Rankin to answer in relation to a complaint made against her. Hence, this panel hereby lifts the suspension from duty previously imposed on Dr Rankin, and no report of the circumstances relating to this matter shall be forwarded to the General Medical Council.’

  The Medical Director may have lifted my official suspension but he made it perfectly clear that I was, instead, placed on long-term sick leave and it would need his personal approval for me to go back to work at Cheltenham General.

  So I was not suspended, but I was.

  I still couldn’t do my job.

  Did it make a whole heap of difference why?

  It seems it did to the horseracing authorities.

  9

  In all, I had spent five and a half weeks in Wotton Lawn, coming out just before Christmas.

  My official status had improved from being ‘dangerously ill’ to ‘stable’ and I had even managed to put on a few pounds. Not that I necessarily felt better for it.

  Grant had collected me in the late afternoon and drove me home across the Golden Valley and through the centre of Cheltenham.

  I’d been struck by the beauty of the Christmas lights.

  Everything in the hospital had been designed as being functional rather than aesthetically pleasing. And functional also meant that it could not be used to assist a suicide – shower heads were built right into the wall, towel rails were held up by magnets and, in the wardrobe, there wasn’t a proper clothes rail, just a solid ledge for hooking hangers over. There had to be nothing from which patients might be able to hang themselves. Even the meagre curtains were held in place by Velcro, ready to give way if a human body weight was applied.

  The twins had made a huge banner for my arrival at the house, hung between two of the upstairs front windows, with Welcome Home Mum emblazoned across it in big black letters.

  I suppose they did it out of love but I couldn’t help thinking that advertising to the neighbours that I’d been away in a psychiatric hospital was not something to shout about.

  And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen the boys.

  Grant had steadfastly refused to bring them into the hospital but, for the last two weeks of my stay I had been allowed out on accompanied visits to a local café and I had seen them there.

  My mother had also been waiting for me at home, standing at the front door as we’d pulled into the drive.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ she’d said, giving me a peck on the cheek, as she always did. There had been no hug, no grasp to her bosom, no tears of happiness, no joy. Had I expected there to be? I now saw all too clearly how such lack of affection had damaged me.

  I would not do the same to my own chil
dren.

  I had hugged them both, together and separately, and thanked them effusively for the banner.

  ‘It was Dad’s idea,’ they said.

  So I’d hugged him too. The first time in months.

  Not that coming home had been all sweetness and light.

  It never ceases to amaze me how quickly patients become institutionalised by a stay in hospital and the same had clearly happened to me.

  All the while I’d been away, I had wanted so much to go home and be with my family but, with my wish finally granted, I’d hated it and longed to be back surrounded by the safe cocoon of routine and procedure. And what made it worse was that everyone else had been so pleased to have me there. Their delight had only seemed to add to my despair and isolation.

  That first night, I’d cried myself to sleep.

  I turned DS Merryweather’s business card over and over in my hands. I had found it tucked behind the bread bin in the kitchen, where I’d placed it after his visit on the day Grant had driven me home from Bristol in November.

  Should I call him?

  The unnamed man was increasingly invading my consciousness.

  Almost three months had passed since the assistant coroner had been to see me. Surely the toxicology results would be back by now? And how about his clothes? Had the Singapore tailor come forward with a name?

  Something inside me had to know.

  I rang the number.

  ‘DS Merryweather,’ said the voice that answered.

  ‘Ah, yes, hello,’ I said hesitantly, ‘this is Dr Rankin. I was wondering if you had any news about the date of the inquest for the dead man from the racecourse Gents, because I’m busy during all four days of the racing festival next week.’

  It was the best excuse for calling that I could think of.

  ‘As far as I am aware, no date has yet been set,’ the policeman replied very formally. ‘I am sure someone will let you know in due course, Dr Rankin, that is if you are required to attend. In any case, it certainly won’t be next week. You would get more notice than that. But thank you for letting us know.’

  ‘Have you found out who he was?’ I asked hurriedly before he had a chance to hang up.