by Manda Scott
‘Oh God, Eric …’ I wrapped my arm round his waist and I hugged him. Because I still was not thinking. Because I had forgotten that, in front of Marjorie Crawford, JP, one refers to Dr Dalziel by his professional title and one does not display excessive physical affection. ‘When did you take her off?’
‘About four o’clock.’
‘Has she said anything yet? Has she been conscious?’
‘Not yet. But she’s coming up. Prof was right.’
‘You could perhaps, explain?’ There was frost, now, on the vermilion of her voice. Neatly dusted frost, tastefully done, but frost all the same. It froze the beginnings of dangerous euphoria.
I sat down quickly on the other side of the bed. Looped my fingers through Nina’s. Left Eric to melt the frost.
‘Professor Russell considered it likely that Dr Crawford would begin to regain consciousness around now. The capacity to breathe is one of the first signs of recovery. We should, shortly, be able to assess her neurological function.’ Dr Dalziel can be impeccably professional when he chooses.
‘And then you will know if the brain damage is permanent?’
‘We will.’
‘Thank you.’ She turned to me. ‘Apparently, Dr Stewart, my daughter may have succeeded in—Matthew!’
I never heard him. I never saw him. Just felt his hand, hard and tight on my shoulder.
‘Mother.’ He leaned in across me and kissed her on the cheek. A solid, filial kiss.
‘Matthew. It’s absolutely wonderful to see you.’ She was glowing. Warm above the cold of her scarf. Her voice became velvet. Soft, vermilion velvet. ‘It’s very good of you to come.’
‘You couldn’t keep me away.’ He wasn’t looking at her. Wasn’t interested. He had his hand tight on my shoulder, crushing into the scars of an old-mended collar bone, as if all of the grief had moved down to his fingers and had nowhere else to go.
‘I called your mobile,’ he said. ‘It was switched off.’
Oh, hell. ‘Matt, I’m sorry, I forgot you were …’
‘So I called the Dean.’ His eyes were dry. It was his voice that wept. ‘He said it happened last night.’
‘Yes, I know. But …’ His fingers ground tighter; bone on bone. Something deep down registered the pain and complained. I shut up.
‘You promised me you wouldn’t let her down,’ he said.
‘And she promised me she wouldn’t do this.’ It was a long time ago. But she still promised.
‘You believed her?’ He sounded too tired to be truly surprised. Just a faint, weary incredulity. ‘You should have been there, to take care of her.’
His hand moved, finally. Relaxed its grip and fell to his side. A slow throbbing heat filled the place where it had been. I flexed my arm and found, oddly, that it still worked.
‘She’s a grown woman, Matt. I can’t watch over her twenty-four hours a day.’
‘Then you should have left her with me,’ he said, ‘because I could.’
He was more exhausted than anything. As if the drive down from Arisaig had taken all his energy and left him drained, like a husk.
And then, as if his mind was very slightly out of synch with the rest of him, he asked: ‘What brain damage?’
‘It is possible that Dr Crawford may have suffered some damage—’ Eric can read people, but he doesn’t know their history.
‘She was apnoeic when we found her,’ I cut across him. Matt Hendon the ex-partner might have wanted the pap but Matt Hendon the clinician needed the unsanitised version. ‘She had cerebral oedema on admission, Matt. They don’t know how much function has been lost.’
And now, with practice, I can say it with less feeling than even the neurologist.
Matt Hendon moved blindly to the end of the bed. There was a dullness to his eyes. A man looking, but not quite seeing. We sat still, all of us, and let him work his way to the truth.
‘My God,’ he said, and he said it so very quietly. ‘What have you done?’ and because he was looking at me and I was sitting very close to Nina, it is conceivable that Marjorie Crawford may have believed he was asking it of her daughter.
The woman stood up, offered him her seat. When he accepted, she stood behind him with her hands on his shoulder and watched as he looped his fingers through her daughter’s, as I had done.
‘I’m so sorry, Matthew,’ she said. ‘I wish it didn’t have to be like this.’ And then to Eric, who hadn’t quite caught up. ‘He was going to marry her, you see.’ She smiled, a smile of pure vermilion regret. Marjorie Crawford, a woman in control, who understands that those who control the present control the past.
Which Matt Hendon does not.
‘I don’t think so. Not really. Not even then.’ He shook his head, slowly, his mind caught somewhere in the shared memories of their past. ‘All you had to do was let her give up work, Kellen. It shouldn’t have been that hard …’
A random bleep from the ECG brought him back to the present. His eyes came back to mine, held them across the bed. ‘You haven’t told her, have you?’ he asked, softly.
If Matt Hendon knows, then by tomorrow, the whole world could know.
Or simply her mother. Which would be enough.
Suddenly it is hard to breathe.
‘It’s not up to me to tell anyone, Matt. It’s up to Nina.’
Eric stood behind me. Put his hand on my shoulder. A bear standing over its cub.
‘Tell me what, Matthew?’ There is steel in the flawless voice. This woman doesn’t like being a side-show in someone else’s drama.
Somewhere, in the background, the young house officer returned. Spoke to Eric, showed him a sheet of paper. He tapped my shoulder, twice, and left.
So now I am alone, sitting opposite Matt Hendon, who is watching me and slowly shaking his head.
‘Matt, think. She may never come round.’ Even in the vacuum, there is hope. ‘Is it worth it?’
He is two feet away from me, across the bed. Unreachable.
The world is a tunnel of pressing darkness.
The world lives in Matt Hendon’s eyes.
‘Matthew? What is it? If it’s about Nina, I need to know.’ She is a Justice of the Peace and she is not stupid. If we give her enough time, she will come to this on her own. Unless he stops her.
He is not unintelligent and he knows her mother, probably better than I do. There are limits, there must be limits, to the damage he needs to inflict.
‘Matt. Please? For Nina?’ There have to be limits.
There may have been limits. I think there were limits. But then Nina Crawford, who has a sense of timing all her own, moved her head and coughed into the pillow.
‘Nina!’
Three of us. One voice.
Her hands clenched tight. In mine. In his. Her head turned. Her eyes flickered. She breathed in, a series of gasping, gagging breaths and then she coughed again, harder, through the tube in her throat.
‘Matthew, take that out, she’ll hurt herself.’ Her mother, a woman in control. ‘Nina, sweetheart, we were so worried …’
It all happened very fast, then.
Matt stood up, to do as he was bid and pull the tube from her throat. Not, strictly speaking, his prerogative at a human hospital but I would have done it if he hadn’t. For Nina. Not for her mother.
Marjorie Crawford, the picture of the grieving parent, leaned forward in that moment, to wrap her arms around her daughter.
You can’t fit two people in the same place at the same time.
Matt Hendon lost. He spun sideways, off balance. Grabbed for the nearest thing that could hold him up and found the fluid pump, standing free by the bed. They’re not the most stable of things, fluid pumps. Top heavy. Ungainly. It rocked backward, teetering on the brink of a fall. He swore, violently. No Morningside at all. Caught the stand and spun further with the momentum. Jerked it to a stop that tugged, too hard, on the fluid line in her arm. Swore again when he saw what he had done. And then over his, the sound of her mother�
�s voice, raw and ragged and stripped of all colour:
‘Nina! No! … Oh God, no. Matthew … do something!’
Because, suddenly there is blood on the sheet. Heavy, venous blood. Leaking from the open end of an eighteen-gauge catheter in a broad, spreading stain. Crimson on the white of the sheet. A dark, sticky dampness on the pink of the blanket. And her mother is white, shocked white, in a way you wouldn’t expect from a Justice of the Peace with this much steel in her. And so, perhaps, after all, she does care. Perhaps, after all, she has her own nightmares. Because the last time, the third time, after the death-wish cocktail and the injection of air, and with her hands strapped by Velcro ties to the bed, when she was still desperate to die, Nina Crawford leaned forward and pulled out a fluid line with her teeth and then she lay back on the pillows and watched herself bleed steadily out through the catheter on to the sheets.
And her mother was there when they found her.
Matt was closest. He spun full circle, pulling the drip stand back on its feet and sticking his thumb over the catheter, to block the flow. He fumbled out with the other hand, reaching for the free end of the drip. His eyes caught mine and held them, all anger gone. The eyes of an anaesthetist in a clinical emergency. The eyes of the man who saved the life of my foal. ‘Kellen. Get that woman out of here. And get the medic. Now.’
Just once in a while, I can do as I’m told.
People gathered in the ward. The air prickled with the scent of peppermints. White-coated clinicians circled the bed. A dim light shone on the woman propped up on the pillows. Nina; paler than the rose of her sheets. But her eyes were open.
One of the white coats leaned forward.
‘Dr Crawford. What was your mother’s maiden name?’
‘Morrison …’ A whisper. Dull with the aftereffects of pentobarbitone and hoarse from the tube. ‘… I think it was Morrison.’
‘Yes, it was Morrison.’ Matt. He knows these things.
‘Thank you.’
Almost everyone was there. Me. Matt. Eric. Professor Russell. The Aberdonian neurologist. The registrar. The SHO. The house officer. The nurses.
Peacefully, Marjorie Crawford had left. Gone because Eric and Matt between them committed elaborate clinical perjury and convinced her that a full neuro test was no place for the immediate relatives. Matt lent her his mobile phone and promised to call her with the results. She left with well-voiced reluctance and promised, three times, to return at first light. No one particularly believed her.
‘And can you tell me what day it is today?’
‘No idea … doesn’t matter …’ She smiled, lopsided, turned her head on one side, squeezed my finger. ‘Kellen … tell them I never know what day it is.’
Which was hardly the point. But I was too full with the fact that she could talk. That she knew my name. That she remembered.
I shrugged and nodded.
‘Well, do you know what day it was yesterday?’ Neurologist’s have a particularly linear sense of reality. And no sense of humour at all.
‘No … I think … it must have been Monday. Because … we found Killer on Sunday …’ She drifted off, half asleep. The neurologist tested some peripheral reflexes, tapped her elbow, her forearm, lifted the covers on his side and tapped her long patellar ligament. She opened her eyes. ‘Do I work?’
‘All except your head.’ He flashed dimmed laser eyes. ‘Is the pain still there?’
‘Huge. Like a migraine, only worse.’
‘We could give you some—’
‘No. It’s not that bad. I don’t want any more drugs.’
‘Do you remember what drugs you did have?’
‘No.’ Desperation and something close to panic drew her voice above the whisper. ‘I didn’t do it. Kellen …’ She faded away on the end of the word. ‘I didn’t. I promised I wouldn’t.’ Her fingers squeezed again, tightly.
I squeezed back, more gently; reached over and smoothed away the hair that was catching the corner of her eye. ‘I know. Don’t worry about it.’
Eyes met above the bed. The clinical group retired quietly to the staff area at the end of the room. I followed, with Matt.
‘Well?’ It seemed easiest to let him ask the questions.
For Matt, the Aberdonian broadened his accent. ‘Clearly there’s a degree of short-term amnesia. I doubt she’ll ever get yesterday back which is maybe just as well. Otherwise, I would say she’s pretty normal for someone on their way up from barbiturate overdose. Would you agree, Eric?’
‘I think so. She looks safe enough. I’d say we can get rid of most of the monitors.’ He nodded to the house officer, who made notes in the clinical record. ‘Keep the ECG. Keep the urinary catheter until she’s ambulatory. Pull the arterial line and the CVP. Maintenance fluids until she’s eating. Basic monitoring from now until she’s discharged unless anything else happens.’
‘What about the headache?’ I asked it. Someone had to. Matt didn’t seem moved to volunteer.
‘If you had your brain trying to squeeze out of your ears for the best part of a day, you’d have a sore head too, Dr Stewart.’ Professors can be so excruciatingly patronising when they try. ‘She can have an aspirin if it gets bad. I wouldn’t advise anything more potent.’ He smiled winningly at his team. ‘Maybe next time she’ll try the Samaritans. I gather they leave less pressing results.’
Only the house surgeon was so junior that she had to laugh.
The team moved on.
16
It was dark in the ward. Her headache was less painful without the lights. The amber flicker of the ECG played across her face, drawing angled shadows and then smoothing them out again. She slept, mostly, when the pain let her. In between, she lay awake, her fingers relaxed in mine, her face turned from the light of the monitors. We talked, on and off; long, disjointed rambles through the pathways of her mind. We talked of her mother and what she could tell her; of work and how she could ease off the pressure without destroying her career; of the fire and the farm and the dog and the horses and whether the cat would let Steff live in the cottage if Nina ever chose to move into the farm. We talked of life and relationship and the fear of failure, and in the spaces between the talking, when she slept and the colour eased its way back to her skin, I thought of Bridget and wanted her to know.
Eric stood in the dark on the far side of the bed beyond the reach of the amber lacework. ‘Can I have a word?’
‘Sure.’ I squeezed a hand that didn’t squeeze back and followed him to the staff room at the end of the ward. ‘You don’t look so good. What’s up?’
‘This.’ He lifted a laboratory printout from the case folder. ‘I didn’t throw it into ward round. Thought I’d have a word with you first.’
‘What is it?’
‘The tox. report on the contents of her drip bag.’ He waved me to a chair. I sat down. Waited. Picked a softening digestive off the plate on the table. Nibbled at the edges. Half asleep.
‘So?’ I said eventually. ‘Ketamine and pentobarbitone. Anything we didn’t know about?’
‘No.’ He smoothed the paper on the table. Undipped his pen from his top pocket and circled one line, halfway down the page. Turned it so that I could see it. ‘Forget the rest, Kellen. Just read that one.’
I read it. Ketamine in saline: 00.00mg/ml.
That’s not possible. There was ketamine in her blood. She has to have got it from somewhere.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Maybe they didn’t run the assay. It’s hardly on the usual list.’
‘I’m sure. I got them to check it again. They stayed in late to run it through after the last batch. I just had a call with the results. There was absolutely no ketamine in the bag.’
‘So then she must have slammed it in before she started the drip.’
‘Maybe.’ He doodled in the bottom corner of the report. A heart with a spiralling series of pipes flowing out of it, like a small radiant sun. Very decorative. ‘I spoke to the anaesthetists,’ he said. ‘We did
some basic maths. Worked back from what she had in her blood on admission to what she must have started off with.’
There was a pause. He drew a cross through the heart.
‘So?’ I asked.
‘So, if you were trying to kill yourself, Kellen, would you piss about with half of the anaesthetic dose?’
I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. ‘She put two grammes in it last time.’
‘Right. That’s more like it. That’s twenty times the induction dose. This time, if she put it in just before the drip went up, then she used somewhere around fifty milligrams. That’s half a ml. You’d barely notice it.’
‘Would you get any analgesia?’
‘I don’t know. Not much. I’d need to go and check. You’d get a fair tachycardia and I think you’d still get pretty spectacular hallucinations. But I can’t think why you’d want to see things just before you were going to die. Not the kind of things she was seeing, anyway.’
No. I can’t think why either.
‘So then why, Eric?’ An echo of earlier.
He shrugged. Big and expansive. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. But he said it so that both of us knew that there were things he wasn’t saying. Things he thought I wasn’t ready to hear.
I laid my head on my arms. Stared at the white melamine of the table. Turned sideways and stared at the sterile white of the wall. ‘Eric. She’s not stupid. She had access to a library full of pharmacology texts and she’d read most of them. She knew everything there was to know about ketamine. She hated the stuff. She wouldn’t piss about with it at all. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I know. That’s why I didn’t bring it up at rounds.’
I sat up. ‘I guess we need to talk to Nina.’
‘We do. Later.’ He stood up and laid his hand over mine, his voice quieter. ‘Just now, you have a visitor.’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’ That’s all we need. ‘Don’t tell me it’s her mother.’
