The Hollow Men: A Novel

by Rob McCarthy

  It was that early part of the night shift when Harry felt he was waiting for someone’s life to fall apart. There he sat, in his scrubs and running shoes, hunched over in a chair, elbow on his knees. He hated the doctors’ mess at night, hated the nine or ten body clocks restlessly fidgeting around on uncomfortable sofas, none of them in time with each other. Which was why he was sitting in a side room on Tennyson instead, the bleep on his belt, the box of manila folders on the floor next to the chair.

  He had started to truly grieve for James Lahiri, for a man he had hated for most of the last year of his existence, who had given his life to helping others. At least his death had been swift, and he hadn’t suffered the ignominy of knowing that he was dying alone. There had to be others like Charlie Ambrose and George Traubert, Harry thought, whose lives were so solitary that even in crisis there was no one to provide a comforting hand, just an empty room.

  There could be one right here, Harry thought as he looked at the girl. At Zara. Noble’s words, her offers of a date, still stung his ears. Chasing ghosts and victims. It was a fairly true, if accidental, summary of his life. And after the previous weeks, there were even more ghosts for him to add to the list.

  When she’d come in her hair had been shocking pink, the colour of fuchsias or bougainvillea, but as the autumn had progressed it had faded with the leaves. Her natural hair colour was that of straw, and in the months of her coma it had grown to past her shoulders, until Harry had suggested recolouring it that September. He had always thought that somewhere there must be a family who’d had a cavern struck into their lives, a vacuum that Zara had once filled. With every passing week, every on-call spent keeping her company, that possibility waned. It was like his relationship with alcohol or amphetamines, in the way that the precipice there hung over a chasm of addiction, but here over one of obsession.

  He’d come to one decision in the five minutes he’d been in the chair. Fairweather and his loaded words aside, he had no other choice but to keep on working with the Met, be a thorn in their side until they either kicked him out or uncovered the identity of the girl in front of him. Noble seemed willing to help, which was a start.

  Zara was not Marie Rachel Kinsella, who had been reported missing from her parents’ house in West Lothian in July 2011 following an argument. The report listed the usual factors: familial strife, drug problems. A confirmed runaway, she had spent five days at a hostel in Soho before disappearing. Her last sighting was CCTV footage of her walking with her bags, somewhere near King’s Cross, heading towards Farringdon, on 18 July. The photograph was old and the age would have fitted, but on the third page of the report was the detail. At the age of nine, Marie Kinsella had come off her bike and fractured her skull.

  Harry hadn’t even realised that he knew Zara’s medical history by heart, but he didn’t need to check any of her X-rays, CT scans or MRIs to know that there were no sutures in the skull, nor any previous fractures.

  It was as he folded the file and put it to the bottom of the box that he saw it. The tremor wasn’t massive, but her head twisted slowly, her face coming up towards Harry, and then back down again, like someone nodding on a jerky camera.

  He was out of the chair, shouting. ‘Hello? Hello?’

  Vital signs stable, no increase in heart rate. He tried squeezing her hand. No response. He reached across to her wrist and pinched the muscle, willing her to react.

  ‘Do that again, go on. Nod your head.’

  He looked down at her quiet, pale face, willing it to move. Nodded slowly, just as she had, in case she couldn’t understand him.

  ‘Go on, do it again. If you did it on purpose, eyes right.’

  Her eyes moved to the right, sluggishly, then left, then right again. Harry burst from the room and ran to the nurses’ office, instructing them to call the neurology registrar, immediately.

  The registrar arrived, tired looking and unimpressed. Harry had seen her around the ward before, working with Professor Niebaum, so he knew he didn’t need to explain Zara’s story.

  ‘She moved?’ the registrar asked. ‘This is a patient in a minimally conscious state, you know that, right?’

  ‘She nodded,’ Harry said. ‘Like she was trying to speak. She moved, alright! She moved!’

  The registrar walked in calmly and began her examination. The girl was still minimally conscious, and when the neurologist repeated the tests Harry had done in more detail the hand remained motionless. Zara’s eyes flickered from one side to the next in response to the usual set of questions, but she didn’t respond to anything she hadn’t responded to before. The registrar turned around, her expression showing nothing but pity.

  ‘There’s been no change in her condition,’ she said.

  ‘But she moved!’

  ‘Probably just a myoclonic jerk.’

  ‘It could have been voluntary. Means that she’s recovered some cortical function?’

  ‘It’s a jerk. People in MCS jerk just as much as people who are asleep. As I said, there’s been no change. I’ll write in the notes, and we’ll have Prof review it on Monday.’

  A pager sounded, and Harry checked his belt before realising it was the neurologist’s. She strolled calmly out of the room, leaving the door swinging. Harry stood for a while before returning to his chair. Slowly, he reached into the box and retrieved the next folder.

  He opened it and began to read.

  Acknowledgements

  First, some disclaimers. The events of this book are entirely fictional. Organisations such as the Saviour Project do indeed exist, in South London and elsewhere, working in hospital A&E departments, schools and general practices. Often staffed by volunteers, these charities do fantastic and under-recognised work to reduce the impact of gang-related violence on the individuals and communities it affects. The more creative approaches mentioned in this story are entirely the product of my imagination.

  There are three women without whom this book would not be in your hands: Jane Gregory, who has guided me through unfamiliar territory with a steady hand and a sharp wit, and my ever-patient editors Ruth Tross and Stephanie Glencross, who have both read this story, and its previous iterations, enough times to drive them crazy. I also thank those friends and family along the years who read, advised, critiqued and listened – they know who they are.

  And finally, my everlasting gratitude to J.J.F. for his unlimited moral support.

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