Another Life

by Peter Anghelides

  Gwen found her phone by their chest of drawers. It was plugged into the wall socket, recharging but still switched on. The display told her who was calling: ‘Torchwood’.

  ‘Ianto?’ Gwen said. ‘Hi. Oh God, look at the time. Yeah, sorry. What is it?’

  ‘Problem,’ Ianto told her. ‘You’re needed back here now.’

  ‘On my way.’ Gwen flipped the phone shut. She turned around, and Rhys was already sat up in bed, glowering myopically at her.

  ‘I thought you had this morning off,’ he told her. ‘I thought we both had this morning off. I promised you breakfast. Mushrooms. Sausages. I was in the mood for eggy bread.’

  ‘What an incentive. But honestly, I have to go in.’ She pulled her nightie over her head, and started rummaging around for knickers. ‘And don’t give me that look. We haven’t got time.’

  ‘You haven’t got time,’ Rhys rebuked her. He closed his eyes and slunk back under the sheets. ‘We don’t even eat together much any more, Gwen. I’m starting to think you prefer your works canteen.’

  ‘That’s Gaz again.’

  ‘Maybe he’s got a point,’ mumbled Rhys from within the bedclothes. ‘I’ve seen more of him these past few weeks than I have of you, even with him on the road this past fortnight. And I bet he wouldn’t turn down my mushrooms.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve got a polite answer for that.’

  She was dressed in only a few minutes. When she went to give him a kiss before she left, Gwen discovered that Rhys was clutching his pillow, already back asleep.

  Toshiko leaned against the island unit in the middle of her kitchen and gazed out through the window. Rain bounced off the sill and splashed back up against the glass. In the downpour outside, next door’s cat – Tinkle? Winkle? one of the Teletubbies anyway – made a run for cover across the street and vanished under the neighbour’s car. Toshiko peered through her window, out into the torrent of rain, and smiled at the prospect of following a languorous breakfast with a warm bath.

  She’d eaten only two spoonfuls of muesli before Ianto called her. ‘Yeah, it’s always a problem,’ she told him. ‘I’m on my way. And tell Jack that he is the guy who put the “lie” into “you can have a lie-in tomorrow, Tosh”.’

  Jack was stretched out across a chair in the Boardroom when Ianto found him. He had his boots up on the conference table, and his eyes were closed. Ianto knew better than to assume he was sleeping. ‘Owen’s not answering,’ he told Jack.

  Jack cracked open one eye. ‘Location?’

  ‘His mobile must be inactive. No signal.’

  The eye closed again. ‘Remind me to bang his head when he gets in.’

  A thin-faced man tapped Owen twice on his shoulder, an imperious signal of authority. ‘You can’t use that thing in here.’ He used the same finger to point at a plastic sign on the wall that stated: ‘Please switch off mobile phones while in the Emergency Department. They can interfere with sensitive medical equipment.’

  Owen held up his mobile, which was showing no lights. ‘Switched it off as soon as I arrived.’ He slipped it into the pocket of his white doctor’s coat, and smiled ingratiatingly.

  The man before him was mid-fifties, greying hair. His face was lightly pock-marked, like ravaged sandstone. Dark eyes peered over tortoiseshell frames, appraising Owen. The good-quality shirt and silk tie, the well-polished patent leather brogues and the easy authority marked him out as the man in charge, rather than another angry patient complaining about the four-hour waiting time. ‘Who are you and what are you doing in my department?’

  Megan appeared at Owen’s side. ‘Ah, hello. Haven’t had chance to introduce you both yet.’

  ‘A friend of yours?’ the man asked her sharply.

  Megan nodded. ‘Mr Majunath, I’m sorry, I didn’t have the chance to introduce you earlier. This is Dr Owen Harper. He’s a former… um… colleague of mine. We were students together…’

  ‘Another from St George’s?’ interrupted Majunath, his expansive tone a complete contrast to his previous suspicion. ‘That makes, what, three in the department at the moment?’ He stuck out his arm, and gave Owen a brief, firm handshake. ‘Amit Majunath, senior consultant. Barts man myself. Worked there for fifteen years, until they lost A&E. Wasn’t expecting you here, Dr Harper. All hands to the pumps tonight, though. Literally,’ he added, looking around them at the corridor floor, which seemed to be covered in muddy puddles and footprints. He intercepted a nurse as she tried to bustle past on her way out to reception. Owen noticed that Majunath was doing his staring-over-the-specs business on her, too. ‘Can we have one of the HCAs get this cleaned up. Now?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Majunath,’ replied the nurse, completely unfazed. She was obviously used to being seized and stared at in the corridor by senior staff. ‘I’ll have Cerys sort it out. With this awful weather, people have been traipsing mud in all day. The auxiliaries seem to spend all their time with mops and buckets.’ She disengaged her elbow from Majunath’s grasp, and disappeared around the corner.

  ‘Insurance nightmare,’ muttered Majunath, squinting at the muddy floor. ‘Lucky that we don’t have the management skulking around tonight. Tucked up in bed with their spreadsheets for company, we can but hope. Onwards, eh?’ He bestowed a big smile on Megan, as though it was a personal favour. ‘We have a jumper about to arrive. Only this one chose to throw herself at one of our ambulances, on its way in with a suspected MI. Nearly gave the driver a heart attack, too!’ Having delivered this special news with such relish, he stalked off towards cubicles.

  Owen grinned at Megan. ‘He’s worse than you told me!’

  Megan shushed him, but giggled too. ‘He has spider-sense. He’ll hear you. I think he’s a bit on edge tonight because we’re still waiting for them to appoint a Clinical Director for the ED. Majunath is the hot favourite, though he thinks they’re going to hold it against him because he can’t speak Welsh. Seven other languages, but not Welsh. The Board was supposed to meet yesterday, all hush-hush. But I’m not sure they all got in because of this rotten weather.’

  ‘You know how it is,’ Owen told her. ‘The first sign will be when white smoke starts coming out of the hospital incinerator.’ He stepped aside as a health care assistant appeared and started to mop the mess up around them.

  Even this far into the hospital building, the storm outside was making its presence felt. The bass notes of thunder rumbled in the distance. Since he’d arrived, at the start of Megan’s night shift, all the patients that Owen had seen had been soaked. The nursing staff had cut the outer clothing off a teenage boy, brought in with a suspected wrenched ligament after a fall at home, and he’d been soaked to the skin, even though he’d been in reception for two hours after triage. The emergency patients, trolleyed straight through to cubicles or resus by paramedics, were all drenched, even dripping as they were prepared for immediate treatment.

  Megan stood back to allow the HCA more room, and leaned against the wall next to Owen. ‘You must have switched off your mobile pretty quickly when Majunath caught you using it.’

  Owen shook his head. ‘My phone’s been switched off since we left your place. He saw me using something else.’

  ‘What?’

  Owen slipped his hand from his white coat, and held out the Bekaran device for Megan to take from him. ‘I palmed it for my mobile. Wouldn’t do for him to get his hands on this scanner. You, on the other hand…’

  Megan turned the device over in her hands, wondering. She checked to see that no one else was looking at them. The HCA was squeezing his mop into a bucket at the far end of the corridor. Megan stammered: ‘I’m not sure that…’

  ‘Why not?’ Owen ushered her back towards the cubicles. ‘Come on, it’s been a long shift. You’ve seen the crowd out in reception, it’s not getting any smaller. And besides, how do you think I spotted that emphysema case so quickly? The one brought in from the RTA? The one your colleague thought was an obvious pneumothorax?’

  ‘Owen!’ she hissed
at him.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t by waiting for the portable X-ray,’ said Owen, ‘or getting him in the ever-growing queue for MRI.’ He indicated the device with a movement of his head.

  ‘You’re not even supposed to be working here,’ persisted Megan. ‘You know the hospital’s not insured for you. And even if it was, well, using this… alien thing…’ She thrust it back at him.

  Owen didn’t accept it. He could see from the way her eyes moved that she was worried someone else would see the device. He waited. She tried to stick it in his coat pocket, but he shoved his own hands in them to prevent her. ‘Come on, Megan. Isn’t that why you let me come here? We could have met up afterwards. Or you could have made your own way to Torchwood. We’ll go there later. I want you to see it.’

  She relaxed her arm, and Owen moved in to hold her shoulders. ‘Try it.’

  ‘How can I explain it?’ she protested. ‘To Majunath? To any of them?’

  ‘You don’t have to. And if anyone asks, you can say it’s a new pervasive device that you’re trialling for me.’

  They went into resus. Majunath and another doctor were attending to one of the other patients from the RTA, and waved away Megan’s offer of assistance. ‘Thank you, but no,’ Majunath said. ‘I think we may be on the final cycle here, anyway. One more, I think, Doctor Wilkins.’

  Owen nudged Megan. On the opposite side of the room was the body of another road traffic accident victim, waiting to be portered away to the morgue. A blood-stained white sheet had been drawn up over the face. Megan was about to pull it away, but Owen indicated that she should leave it. He helped her position the scanner to one side of the corpse, and the photorealistic image of the sheet slowly melted away to reveal the hairy skin of the victim. ‘Through the epidermis to the dermis.’ Owen narrated the scan like a medical lecture. ‘Look at that, you can make out the individual blood vessels, the nerves… he’s a bit of a bear, isn’t he, so look at those hair follicles… and through the subcutaneous adipose layer… and now that we’re through the basement membrane, we can see the muscle and bone…

  ‘Look there!’ Megan pointed excitedly, trying to keep her voice down and avoid alerting the doctors working on the other side of the room. ‘The sternal end of the fifth rib is split.’

  ‘Sternum bifidum, very good,’ breathed Owen. ‘That’s quite a rare neuroskeletal anomaly. If this poor bloke was still alive, we might be able to explain why he sometimes got respiratory difficulty. Bit late for him now.’ He studied her reaction. ‘Not too late for some of the others.’

  ‘I think we should stop, if everyone agrees?’ Across the room, Majunath had abandoned the resuscitation. ‘Time of death, 8.46 a.m. Thank you everyone.’

  Outside resus, a young nurse hurried up to Megan. She was a short, thin girl, and her neatly pressed uniform and eager manner marked her out as a new starter, late teens at most. Her badge told Owen she was Roberta Nottingham. ‘Can you come through to eight, Megan? Mrs Boothe is a bit distressed.’

  ‘OK, Bobbie, I’m right with you.’ She moved off after her, explaining to Owen as they walked: ‘Pregnant woman, mid-twenties, also in that RTA. Date of confinement is next Thursday.’ She paused before Owen pulled back the curtain, and whispered to him: ‘That was the driver we just saw in resus. Her husband.’

  In cubicle eight, a small woman in a blue surgical smock watched them with frightened eyes. ‘I can’t feel him moving, doctor. Is he going to be all right?’ Her fingers splayed out protectively over her pregnant bump.

  ‘OK, Leanne.’ Megan moved across to hold her hand and smooth the hair from her pasty white forehead. ‘We’ll see. They’re going to have a bed for you in maternity really, really soon.’ From Megan’s expression, a pleading look at Nottingham over the top of the pregnant woman’s head, Owen could tell this was unlikely to be true. Nurse Nottingham frowned discouragingly, with the smallest of head shakes.

  ‘Non-stress test?’ Owen asked.

  ‘This is Dr Harper, Leanne. He’s come to offer a second opinion.’

  Nurse Nottingham said to Owen: ‘Excellent foetal heart rate. Two accelerations in twenty minutes, both at least fifteen beats above the baseline heart rate, and both lasted for least fifteen seconds.’

  Leanne looked panicked. ‘What’s wrong? Was the baby hurt in the accident? And where’s Barry? What’s happened to my husband?’

  ‘The ultrasound showed no sign of any problems with the baby, Leanne. Let’s concentrate on you and the baby for the moment. Don’t worry, try to stay calm.’

  Owen said to the nurse: ‘Can you go and check on that maternity bed please, Bobbie? Thanks.’

  The nurse stepped out of the cubicle, pulling the curtain back into place as she left.

  Owen took the Bekaran device from Megan’s pocket. He ran it over the pregnant woman, without removing or lifting her smock. He indicated to Megan that she should study the scanner image. The blue-patterned smock material vanished, then the mother’s skin, muscle, and suddenly the baby was visible.

  By adjusting the resolution, Owen was able to show the position of the baby’s limbs, the head, the placenta, the mother’s bones. He gave the mother a running commentary of reassurance as he did so, while all the time checking for Megan’s reaction to what he was showing her.

  ‘That’s just amazing.’

  ‘I’ve been so worried,’ Leanne told them, unable to see the image on the scanner. ‘I could hardly go in a car since the last accident, and now I’ve gone and got in another one.’

  ‘The last accident?’ asked Megan. ‘When was that?’

  Leanne heaved a great sniff, and then an equally large sigh. ‘About ten years ago. I was only about thirteen or fourteen. My mum’s car got rearended on the M4.’

  ‘That’s a long time ago, Leanne. Were you or your mum hurt?’

  ‘She was all right. I was in the back, where the truck smacked into us. Broke my pelvis. I was off school for a month.’

  Owen indicated the scanner image. ‘There’s where the pelvic fracture was, can you see? It’s healed completely. And now look at the baby’s head…’

  He stood up, and gestured to Megan to come with him. ‘Should be fine, Leanne,’ he said as they stepped through the curtain. ‘Back in a minute.’

  The staff-room was empty. Owen sat down at the coffee table, and played back the scan images on the Bekaran device. ‘Can you see the distortion in the pelvic bones? Not something you might have picked up before the birth.’

  Megan stared. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Cephalo-pelvic disproportion,’ said Owen. ‘I don’t think her pelvis is big enough to let the baby through the birth canal.’ He switched off the image. ‘As if she hasn’t got enough to cope with, after losing her husband tonight.’

  Megan took the Bekaran device from him. ‘This is just astonishing.’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘This could speed up diagnosis for the whole department. Owen, they’re stacked up in rows out there in reception, a night like this. We could get them through twice as fast. No, faster, I bet! Just by having these for triage. And the whole idea of waiting forever to get an MRI or an X-ray…’

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ sighed Owen. She looked at him, baffled, and he continued: ‘It’s not this technology that’s important. It’s where it comes from. What it implies about other alien tech. This is the good stuff, right? This is what can make things better. Us having this is like a group of chimpanzees having a digital camera. If they work out what the buttons do, even by accident, well they can take nice pictures and look at them. They might not be David Bailey, but it’s better than scratching shapes in the dirt with a stick. Thing is, it’s not going to do them any harm if all they want to do with this thing they’ve found is to wipe their arses on it.’

  He could see from Megan’s widening eyes that she was beginning to understand. She’d stood up and walked to the window now.

  ‘What if the chimps found a hand grenade?’ she said.

>   Owen nodded. ‘What if they found a grenade launcher? What if they found a flamethrower? What if they were given a box full of anthrax spores?’ He leaned forward. ‘And what if they weren’t just chimps?’

  Megan shivered, as though there was a draught at the window.

  ‘Torchwood’s not just about potential benefits,’ said Owen. ‘It’s about real and present danger.’

  Megan stared out of the staff-room window, into the storm. After a very long pause, she faced him again. ‘I want to see the rest.’

  Owen didn’t have time to reply. The staff-room door opened, and in walked Nurse Nottingham. ‘There’s a bed on maternity, Megan.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Megan replied, shooing her from the room as she followed her out. ‘Keep it, even if you have to get in it yourself. I’ll write up the notes, but tell them it’s CPD and they should prepare for a Caesarean. Don’t mess her about with a trial of labour, she’s been through enough already. They can explain to her. But someone’s going to have to tell her about her husband.’

  They were at the registration board now. Megan started to write up notes in Leanne’s file, explaining to Mr Majunath about a ‘suspected CPD’, so that she didn’t have to oversell her diagnostic brilliance. Owen, however, had seen something on the whiteboard, scribbled in blue marker pen against cubicle six.

  ‘Sandra Applegate,’ said Owen.

  Majunath looked up. ‘Yes. She’s the jumper I mentioned earlier. Threw herself in front of one of our ambulances.’ The senior consultant shook his head slowly in disbelief at the madness of the world. He picked up the phone with one hand, and his other hand raced down a list of numbers pinned to the wall. ‘At least, we assume she jumped. She has had a fall, obviously. But she appears also to have a gunshot wound. We’re going to have to inform the police…’

  Owen had already peeled off his white doctor’s coat, and dropped it on a nearby trolley. He reached into his jacket pocket, and brandished his Torchwood ID at the astonished senior consultant.

  ‘Don’t bother with that phone call,’ he told Majunath. ‘I am the police.’