by John Collee
The Courier did investigate. A tall, pimply youth appeared on Barton ward. But before he had taken more than three paces into the ward, Sister McReady had burst from her office like some fat, blue butterfly emerging from pupation. 'I'm sorry, are you a visitor?'
The reporter took two steps back. 'No,' he told her. 'I'm a reporter.'
'Aha,' McReady adopted her fighting stance, hands on hips. 'And I suppose you're responsible for that article in the Courier.'
'Not directly.'
'Well, listen, Mr Not Directly. If it's unethical experiments you're looking for there's none here. And never have been, not as long as I've been on the ward.'
The reporter fingered his tie. Spears had warned him to steer clear of Alistair Kingsley. He hadn't warned him about this Charybdis. 'I just thought I'd have a word with a few of the patients.'
'You'll do no such thing, they're all resting. You can come back at visiting hours.'
'Well maybe you can answer a few questions for me, sister.'
'Answer a few questions is it? I like that fine. I've been answering a few questions from most of these patients' relatives for the last twenty-four hours: "Sister McReady, is it true that cancer experiments are being performed on my grandfather?" "Sister McReady, where can we find out about the new treatment?" Two of my patients have been refusing their drugs. On your account, Mr Not Directly. And I've got quite enough to do already without having to persuade folk we're not poisoning them.'
'What are you giving them?'
'You can come back at visiting hours and see for yourself. It's all charted at the ends of their beds. But I'll tell you this for nothing. There's nothing there that folk haven't been getting for the last three years. The breast patients get analgesics only. All the bowel resections get Kefzol and Metronidazole. I wouldn't bother writing that, they're just antibiotics.'
'What's in those drips?'
'Water.'
'And what's that you're holding?'
'It's an enema,' said Sister McReady threateningly.
She watched his retreating figure with a snort of satisfaction. She felt she had gone some way towards nipping the problem in the bud.
In reality it had already blossomed.
Chapter 18
Richard Short, legs astride on the roof of the Douglas Calder, took a great swing with his number three wood. The golf ball soared over the ambulance sheds, over the meths drinkers opposite the social security, and landed, a pinprick of white, in the harbour water. Rhona pulled her coat tighter and looked at her watch.
'Nice up here, isn't it?'
Rhona traced a finger over the skylight and inspected it for dirt.
'It's filthy.'
'That's your objection to all my best ideas.'
'You know what I wish, Richard? I wish you were half as stimulating in conversation as you keep telling me you are in bed.'
Short laughed. 'That reminds me. I've decided what I want for Christmas.'
He placed the golf club over his own shoulder and his free arm over Rhona. She gazed out to sea with the Giaconda smile on her lips. It was a long request. His moustache was tickling her ear. He was still speaking when she said 'No'.
'Wouldn't cost you anything.'
'It's not a matter of cost,' she said.
'So what's the problem?'
'Do I really have to tell you? It just sounds inelegant and uncomfortable.'
'You mean they advised you against it at Mary Erskine's.'
She smiled. 'The desks weren't big enough at Mary Erskine's, and it's an all-girl school.'
'It was just a little fantasy I had.'
'It doesn't even rise to the level of fantasy. It's rather a sordid cliché.'
Short hit the last ball. It rose off the roof of the hospital heading towards the warehouses. Then he lost it against the sky. She put a hand on the back of his neck.
'Think of something else I can give you, something conventional.' Richard Short upturned the empty bag.
'New balls,' he said throatily.
She didn't laugh. 'You're incredible, Richard, you really are incredible. You're supposed to be a highly-trained, intelligent, middle-aged man. There's poor old Alistair Kingsley, working like a devil eight till six, sometimes more, trying to run the hospital single-handed, keep up with his waiting list and fob off lunatics after a cancer cure. All you're interested in is golf and fornication.'
'Not in that order.'
'There is no order – it seems to be a continuous cycle.'
'They're two things I happen to enjoy,' said Short. 'You see, Rhona, I made this decision before I took up a speciality like anaesthetics. Medicine's not just a vocation, it's potentially an obsession. You either subscribe your whole life to it, like Kingsley does, or you allow it only discrete parts of yourself. If you take Kingsley's path you have to be one hundred per cent into what you're doing. The great reward of being a doctor is that you're in constant demand. The problem is that you're in constant demand. And I mean constant. Alistair thinks the harder he works, the more human suffering he alleviates. That's crap. People have a need to be ill. If you fix their gall bladder they'll come back with marriage problems, or flu, or arthritis, or God-knows-what. Give your life to helping them and they'll take it, then look round for the next sucker. You think I enjoy watching Alistair destroy himself? It started a long time before Sheila got sick. He was born with this ridiculous sense of vocation and it'll probably kill him. That's why this cancer cure stuff is nonsense. If Alistair could really cure cancer he'd be doing it till he dropped.'
'Well, I admire Alistair Kingsley.'
'I admire him myself, but not for working himself to death.'
'It's called a sense of responsibility.'
'Fuck responsibility.'
'I suppose you do. You can't play golf with it.'
As she picked her way down the fire-escape to avoid catching her stockings on the metal, she wondered why she continued to consort with him. He treated her with none of the extravagant chivalry she had evoked in previous men friends. But then maybe she needed someone like Short to scratch her carefully manicured exterior. She thought about his Christmas present and smiled to herself. Rhona unbuttoned her coat, then checked her heels and stepped off the fire escape into the corridor outside Barton ward. One of the porters wolf-whistled as she passed the lift. She descended two flights of stairs and crossed the great hall. She was back in the office when Kingsley returned from his meeting, opening the mail and stacking it in the wire tray.
'Anything I need to see?' he asked.
'Well, there's this – your invitation to the hospital Christmas party.'
'Can I miss it?'
'You're the guest of honour.'
'Am I? When is it?'
'Week after next, the nineteenth.'
'God. What else?'
'Just all this.'
'What's that?'
'Jesus mail,' she said.
'What?'
'Jesus mail – people wanting you to cure them.'
Kingsley considered the pile of letters. 'You've got to be joking.' He began to sift through them – typed letters, hand-written letters, letters on pricey notepaper and emotional notes scribbled on the pages of cheap, lined pads, some formal, some hysterical; the basic content was the same. Kingsley riffled through the last half dozen like a fugitive spy. Outside, the traffic bayed like bloodhounds.
Rhona spoke.
He turned towards her, vacant-eyed.
'What was that?'
'I said it's just the tip of the iceberg, Mr Kingsley – you should see the outpatient clinic requests.'
She fished for a smile. He seemed to be taking the whole thing rather seriously. He handed her the letters.
'What shall I do with them?'
'I don't know.'
'Shall I put them in the bin?' she asked.
'Yes, put them in the bin.'
'Maybe you can sue,' said Rhona.
Kingsley looked at her, as if trying to recognize som
eone at a great distance.
'Sue whom?'
'The Courier, for misinforming the public.'
'Yes . . . yes, maybe I can.'
'What will you do about the clinic?'
Kingsley grimaced. 'I think I'll go into hiding.'
'Will you ring your wife before you do?'
'Sheila rang? From school?'
'From home – it's her half-day – she sounded a bit upset.'
'Did she?' said Kingsley. 'Try and get me Dhangi on the phone.'
Kingsley went through to his office and dialled home. It was engaged. Dhangi was not available either. The man had an uncanny knack of avoiding him. Kingsley left the office door open and rushed up to the theatre. As he changed he rang home again. It was still engaged, or off the hook. Through the communicating window he could see the patient, already laid out and anaesthetized, feet raised in the stirrups. Jennings was slipping sterile, green sacks over the legs.
Between each prostatectomy he rang Dhangi. There was no reply. He sent a nurse down to look for him but she reported the mortuary was locked and the labs empty. Kingsley continued with his list, trying to lose himself in the operation, peering down the long silver tube, through the patient's penis and into his bladder, watching the slim wire probe as he curetted out prostatic tissue. His mind wandered, and in the swirling flux of water and blood he saw Causeway Lane crammed with the dying, screaming for his touch. He saw his home besieged by television men and camera crews, and each time he came back to Dhangi's gaunt, furtive face.
It was six o'clock when he finished. He checked the last irrigation set and left theatre. He walked through to the dressing room, showered the sweat off his body and rang Dhangi again without success. He changed into his suit and left, head down, mind full of black thoughts. A figure projected itself from the opposite wall. He collided with it.
'Sheila!' he studied his wife's face – the strained watchfulness of all refugees. 'What are you doing here?'
She started to speak and was swamped by the avalanche of words.
'I had to come. There was a man outside the house when I got home. I let him in. Then he said he had skin cancer. He had to see you. He hung around for hours and wouldn't go. I got the police. Then a woman turned up with her son. I told her there was nothing you could do. But they're still there. Sitting on the garden wall waiting. And the phone's been ringing all day. And every time someone knocks on the door. I think . . . I think . . .' Her mouth corrugated and she started to cry. Kingsley caught her to his chest.
'Come on,' he said. 'Let's go back.'
'Not home,' she said frantically. 'I couldn't face it. Somewhere else. I want to talk to you.'
He ushered her out of the front door. William said, 'Oh, Mr Kingsley, there's a couple of folk have been trying to get hold of you.'
'What kind of folk?'
'Well, ordinary people. I couldn't say exactly, sir. I thought they were probably patients of yours.'
'I'm not available.'
There were two or three people angling for him in the car park. He hurried Sheila into the car and they converged on him. Kingsley screeched away. Voices pursued them as they left.
He skirted Princes Street, negotiating the tiered Georgian terraces of the West End. They emerged at the foot of the Royal Mile, swept round the palace gates and out into Queens Park. The road lamps hung in a fragile chain round St Mary's loch. Behind it the vast bulk of the city's volcanic crag blotted out the sky.
Kingsley slipped out from the commuter traffic and took the thin perimeter road, upwards into the hill. Sheila said nothing. Now she reached out and took his hand off the gear stick. She peeled off the leather glove and switched on the light above the dash. Kingsley removed his hand several times to change gear, to negotiate hairpins. Each time she retrieved his hand. She examined the tips of his fingers, rubbed the minute, whorled print with the ball of her own thumb, ran her own hand down the flat palmar surface, then stretched it flat and traced the creases with one fingernail. She examined the fleshy mound at the base of his thumb and inspected the tiny, tortuous veins which coursed over it. She turned the hand over. She looked at the clipped white crescents of his nails and pinched the loose, thick skin over his knuckles. She pressed the veins on the back of his hands, emptied them of blood and allowed them to refill.
They had reached the higher loch. A single pair of headlights swept round its perimeter towards them, groping round the valley like the soft, yellow feelers of some ponderous sea creature. It passed. There were two cars parked without lights – city men with their lovers. Kingsley pulled off the road and stopped. 'What are you doing?' he asked her.
She replaced the glove and milked the leather over his fingers.
'Tell me why Tony didn't operate on me.'
The dash-light had gone off with the ignition. Kingsley turned towards her.
'Your tumour responded to chemotherapy.'
'I don't believe that. I don't think Tony believes that either.' Kingsley considered this.
'Do you want to take a walk?'
'Yes, all right.'
They left the car and crossed the road. Sheila took his arm.
'When I went back for the check-up I had a long chat with Tony Cullen. He took some more X-rays. He said he'd never seen anything like it before, that it was impossible. Then he spent a long time asking if you'd given me anything; if you injected me with anything, or slipped me any pills. I couldn't be sure. I was doped up most of the time.'
'I didn't give you anything.'
Sheila pulled her collar against the cold. 'All I could remember was your coming and saying you could heal cancer by touch. Tony said I must have been hallucinating.'
'That's logical.'
Sheila was facing downhill, towards the loch.
'You forget – I don't have the dreadful encumbrance of a scientific education.'
Kingsley said nothing. They started to climb again.
'Maybe you did say it,' said Sheila, 'Maybe it's true.'
'I don't know.'
'What do you think?'
'I've stopped trying to think. There's no sense in it. But yes, I've cured cancer. I cured yours. I don't know how it happens.'
He paused, but Sheila remained silent '. . . I'd seen the evidence before we went to Denholm last. At first I refused to believe it. Then, because of you, I had to.'
'Who have you told?'
'No one.'
'But if you think you have the healing touch! . . .'
'Just now it seems I have the healing touch. It's a fantastically emotive notion. You've seen what it'll do to our private life. But that's just a fraction of the problem. I'm worried about what it could do to the whole structure of medicine. I get built up into some hideous guru figure – a vehicle for some agent nobody understands. I can't cope with the demand myself. Every charlatan in the country jumps on the bandwagon and the popular image of medicine is dragged back into the Middle Ages; ignorance and superstition.'
'But in your case it works.'
'That's not the point. Once something like this fires the public imagination they're capable of destroying me and half the medical profession to get at it. We're going to lose it in a sea of hysteria before we discover the mechanism.'
'So pretend for just now that it doesn't have any effect.'
'How do I do that?'
'Put me back on the drugs.'
Wind whistled through the rocks. Beneath them the city burned in orange sodium. And Kingsley realized fully, perhaps for the first time in twenty years of marriage, the extent to which his wife was prepared to make sacrifices for him. Indeed, he had hitherto barely acknowledged the sacrifices she had already made – art college, Malta, their plan to adopt kids – each subjugated to her love for Kingsley, and that to Kingsley's love for his profession.
Kingsley took her hand and they stood silent for a moment, in the howling darkness. Sheila reached for a strand of hair which was spidering across her face.
'Anyway,' she said, 'di
dn't Dr Mukesh's research help you?'
'Help me what?'
'Understand this thing you have – this ability to cure.'
'Mukesh's research never really got started,' said Kingsley, not that he had, on reflection, ever really believed it would lead anywhere. He had used it as a screen behind which he could hide what he suspected all along to be the truth. 'I never believed in Mukesh's research,' he admitted. 'I let him get on with it to divert attention from Dhangi.'
'From whom?'
'Look,' Kingsley sat on a rock and helped Sheila down beside him, 'I know this all sounds totally fantastic but I'll tell you the whole story. Three months ago a chap came to the hospital. He's called Dr Dhangi. Somehow he can control the thing. When he came to the hospital it all started. When he left the cures stopped. He came back and I regained the power – or so it seems. I don't know how he does it. The effects on my touch are absolutely genuine. I'm sure of that now. I have very little contact with the man. But he has . . . he has an effect on me.'
Kingsley broke off. 'I can sense his presence – does that sound ridiculous?'
'Carry on,' said Sheila.
'If he was to climb this hill I'd know he was here. I'd know when he was a hundred yards away.'
'What's he doing in the hospital?'
'He came as a pathologist. I've checked that. He qualified in Jalore in '63, but after that he seems to have given up medicine to become a holy man. He came over here a few months ago having specialized in pathology. He began to take short-term jobs, first in the South of England, then gradually moving northwards, combing the country, concentrating on large towns near water. Finally he ended up here. He'd found what he was looking for.'
