Читать книгу The Quick - Laura Spinney - Страница 6

4

It was dark when I stepped out into the street, but this time with nightfall. It must only recently have stopped snowing, though, because the snow had settled in an even layer over the pavement and was almost undisturbed by footprints. The night was cold, and a three-quarter moon shone crisply over the city. The people in the streets were uniformly muffled in coats and scarves.

I made my way back to the hospital, deep in thought over the professor’s new project, and it was only when I stood in the large entrance hall that I became fully aware of my surroundings. It was deserted just then, though echoing footsteps receded down one of the long corridors. And it was dark; it occurred to me that a couple of light bulbs must have blown. The globe lamps on the walls had been switched on, but they seemed to shine rather weakly and hardly to penetrate the polished black slate floor. The gloom deepened towards the centre of the space, where the signpost stood. But the signpost itself was bathed in the moonlight whose shafts entered via glass panels in the ceiling. All in all, it was a ghostly scene.

The clock above the corridor that led to the north wing showed six o’clock. I had intended to go straight up to the fifth floor and introduce myself, if that’s the right expression, to Patient DL. I hesitated. They would soon be serving supper on the wards. DL wouldn’t be eating, of course, since she received her nutrients through a tube that fed through her nose, down her oesophagus and into her stomach. But there would be activity on the ward, and perhaps the general commotion would distract someone with a potentially tenuous grip on reality. Better to go in the morning, I decided, when it was quiet and she had a good night’s sleep behind her. After ten years, one more night wouldn’t make any difference.

At that moment, a figure stepped out from behind the signpost and moved in a wide semicircle towards me. It seemed to walk on the balls of its feet, in a strange sort of dance, and I recognised Nestor. He often loitered around the entrance hall. He was employed by the university as a technician, though most people still thought of him as a porter, because that had been his job for many years. He had the porter’s inside knowledge of the hospital, and more. He knew every cracked pipe, every broken window latch, as well as which nurses were sleeping together and who among the registrars had played angel of death on the wards. People who worked there were afraid of him. Everyone knew that he liked his drink. But sometimes he disappeared for days at a time, and although people whispered about his absences, and his rumoured forays on to the upper floors at night, nobody dared question him openly.

The latest rumour was that he had been barred from the paediatric wing. I had no idea if it was true, but here was Nestor in front of me, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, asking if I would like to accompany him down to his room. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I asked, amused. He raised a hand to touch the rolled-up cigarette that was tucked behind his ear, smirked and said he was surprised Mezzanotte hadn’t explained. He had agreed to operate the Mind-Reading Device. The latest version of it was downstairs in his room, and he was under instructions to show it to me at my earliest convenience.

‘You?’ I asked, surprised. Puffing out his chest, he tapped it with a tar-stained forefinger. Perhaps I was still looking at him sceptically, because he glanced quickly over his shoulder, then brought his round, slightly greasy face close to mine and muttered that all the other technicians had refused. He wore his grey, wispy hair long on his neck. He was dressed neatly in grey flannels and a brown pullover, with a knitted green tie. It was hard to put an age on him, somewhere between forty and sixty, but there was something of the overgrown schoolboy about him. He wore a gold stud in his left ear, and around his right eye there were traces of a bruise. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

He danced off with the same bizarre gait, his bony rump high in the air, as if he were walking on hot coals. I followed him through an unmarked door that opened off the entrance hall, just to the right of the corridor that led to the north wing. We descended a flight of concrete steps and passed along a corridor lit by a single neon tube.

It was the first time I had been down to the basement. Stacked up on the floor along both sides of the corridor were hundreds of derelict computers, models five or six years old, some covered in old sheets, others in a thick layer of dust. Their keyboards had been thrown down haphazardly between them, and fraying wires stuck out in places. Some of the screens were shattered, as if someone had deliberately put a boot through them. Nestor mumbled something about skeletons. When I asked him what he had said, he stopped, turned to face the phalanx of defunct hardware, and announced that I was walking through the graveyard of a computer system that had once been installed in the hospital.

The idea, apparently, had been to transfer all the patients’ records on to an electronic database. Ours was to be the first paperless hospital in the country, and if it worked, others would follow. But the computer hard disks turned out to have a flaw in them. Records were irretrievably lost, referrals sent to the wrong department. There were actually empty beds in the hospital for the first time, a fact that was trumpeted in the newspapers until it became clear that the sick were still waiting to fill them, their names had merely been wiped from the computer’s memory. There were stories of patients dying of treatable tumours that had been diagnosed twelve months earlier, because their notes had gone astray.

I listened to all this in amazement. I wanted to know why the scandal hadn’t come to light. Nestor snickered. There were many things he could tell me about this hospital, he said. Nothing was quite as it seemed. For instance, had I heard about the geriatric ward that had been closed off due to a superbug infection? Ten beds decommissioned because two of the ‘inmates’, as he called them, had died. One of them only after he had been discharged and welcomed back into the bosom of his family. The rest of the occupants had been put into quarantine, since the infection, once contracted, did not respond to antibiotics. Naturally the administration wanted to avoid a panic. Nestor had seen for himself the locked door and discreet notice barring entrance to the ward. He could show me if I liked. I told him that wouldn’t be necessary, and he turned down the corners of his mouth, as if to say, ‘Please yourself.’

We came to a door marked ‘W.E. Nestor. No Unauthorised Entry.’ He pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked it, switching on the light inside. More electronic and mechanical equipment was stacked around the walls of the small, windowless room, and directly ahead of me, as I stood in the doorway, was a wooden chair in front of a folding card table. Above the card table, which was covered in green baize, torn in places, a small wooden cross was tacked to the wall. Grey boxes identical to the ones I had seen in Mezzanotte’s office were arranged on the table around a computer monitor, and hanging over one corner of the chair was a sort of outsized, rose-coloured swimming cap with a tail of wires sprouting from it. A sinister-looking object, like some instrument of psychic torture.

Nestor was telling me that he had adapted and improved the device; put some ‘finishing touches’ to it. The electrodes were now woven into this soft, plastic helmet so that you no longer had to attach the pads one by one. He nodded in the direction of the table, indicating that I should sit down, and I did so. Then he picked up the helmet and without further ado, levered it first over the plates at the top of my skull, then the jutting bones at the base of it, sending a shudder down my spine. I gritted my teeth as he adjusted the cap on the forehead and tucked the hair deftly beneath it at the nape. Gathering the tail of wires he swept it over my shoulder so that it lay heavily against my back and didn’t impede my movements. Then he stepped back, folded his arms over his chest and said, ‘There!’

‘Can we get on with it?’ I said, crossly, and with an injured look he leaned forward to switch on the computer monitor. As the screen resolved itself, I saw that the layout was still the same. At the top was an apple, at the bottom a pear. Equidistant between the two undulated a horizontal line. He switched off the lights and melted into the darkness behind me. Closing my eyes I conjured up a ringmaster, faceless, resplendent in red, the polish high on his leather belt and boots. Idly twirling the whip at his hip, so that it stirred up flurries of sawdust, he waited for the lions to settle. Against my closed eyelids, one of the beasts yawned and looked round, as if preparing to climb down off its box. The ringmaster raised his whip arm high above his head and, ‘Yah!’, cracked it in the air… The lion stared at him, frozen in flesh and time. I opened my eyes. The line flowed on, unperturbed. I repeated the exercise three or four times and the same thing happened each time, until in exasperation I turned to Nestor.

‘It doesn’t work.’

He had been sitting quietly at the side of the room. I could just see him, his chair tipped back against the wall, lovingly fingering his rolled-up cigarette. Now he stuck it back behind his ear and brought his chair down with a clack. I had to remember that the machine had not been designed with me in mind, he said. It was supposed to be used by someone who was desperate to communicate, and for whom it provided the only means of doing so.

‘You mean I’m not trying hard enough?’

He shrugged. That was part of it, he said, and then there were the lions. ‘They don’t do it for me.’

I asked him how he had made it work, but he didn’t want to say. I cajoled him a bit and he hung his head coyly. I pleaded with him until at last, with some excited shifting in his seat, he came out with it. ‘I’m riding an old Enfield through a deserted city. I come to a red light where another bike is waiting. The rider revs his engine, he glances across at me. I recognise the head porter. Well, between you and me, I hate the head porter. I turn back to the lights, I watch them like a hawk. Red changes to red and amber, I tighten my grip. Green! I release the clutch, leap the junction and land on two wheels, leaving him trailing in the dust…’

He had been talking eagerly from the edge of his seat. But now he slid back into the shadows and I turned once again to face the computer monitor. It seemed to me that he had hit on a good device. There was a certain elastic tension in that sequence: red, red and amber, green. I frowned hard at the undulating line. But however hard I concentrated, I couldn’t interrupt it. Finally, I let out the breath I had been holding.

‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘it won’t budge.’

For a moment there was silence, and then out of the darkness behind me came a voice.

‘It’s got to mean something to you,’ it said softly. ‘You’ve really got to want it.’

I sat staring disconsolately at the screen, raising a finger at one point to scratch an itch at my temple, just under the rim of the cap. But I had no ideas. And then I did have an idea. It came to me out of the blue. Thankfully it was dark in the room and my face was turned away from Nestor, so he couldn’t see how I blushed. Once again I pictured the ringmaster, dashing in jodhpurs and a red tunic pulled in at the waist by a thick leather belt. This time, however, he wore an ivory cravat and a shock of white hair rose from his high forehead. Taking a step towards the lions he planted the soles of his riding boots wide apart in the sawdust, cracked his whip and fixed them with his burning, soulful gaze. I stared at the undulating line and to my amazement it lurched drunkenly towards the pear, missing it by a hair’s breadth.

Suddenly the room was a blaze of electric light, and I spun round in time to see Nestor bring his hand down from the wall switch. His body was rigid in the chair against the wall. He was staring sulkily at his cigarette and a muscle was flickering in his cheek. What’s the matter with him? I thought. Is he annoyed that someone else besides him has made his precious machine work? I peeled off the pink swimming cap, draped it over a corner of the chair and stood up. Nestor remained sitting, his head bowed. Just as I reached the door, a thought struck me.

‘Have you seen the patient?’ I asked. He raised his head slowly and I noticed that the eye around which there were traces of bruising was also bloodshot.

‘Should I have?’

There was menace in his voice, and I was taken aback. I told him it was an innocent question. He slammed the two front legs of his chair against the floor, standing up as he did so and clenching his fists. He had no reason to go snooping around up on the fifth floor, he said, and he’d like to know who’d seen him there. Furiously he kicked at a screwed-up ball of paper, sending it flying into the corner. Then he seemed to calm down again, and scuffed the toe of his boot sheepishly against the floor. I asked him why the other technicians had refused to work with the professor. He shrugged. I pressed him and he told me that Mezzanotte was in the habit of ringing up at midnight to discuss a problem. Sometimes he wanted the technician to meet him straight away, at the lab, and the poor fellow might not get away before dawn. It was hard on a man. But it was no skin off his nose.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t need to sleep?’

He frowned, irritated. He needed to sleep as much as the next man, but he had to take pills to bring it on, and these days the pills didn’t seem to work as well as they used to. So he was often awake in the early hours. He didn’t approve of the professor’s working habits, but as it happened they suited him. He was the man for the job, and Mezzanotte would have saved a lot of time if he had come straight to him, rather than letting his mind be poisoned by ‘filthy lies’.

I looked at him. So he was an insomniac. That explained a few things, and yet it didn’t arouse any sympathy in me. ‘Good evening, Mr Nestor,’ I said, and stepped out into the corridor.

Back in my rooms everything was in order. My assistants had left for the night, and a note on my desk assured me that the afternoon had passed off well, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Two or three files had been placed over that of the Welsh lawyer’s: new cases awaiting my attention. I hesitated, wondering whether to sit down and make a start on them. Just then a wave of fatigue came over me and I raised my eyes to the window.

My own face was reflected against the night: a pale moon with two dark ovals for eyes, framed by short, thick, reddishgold hair. Beyond my reflection, or rather through it, were the lighted windows of the operating theatres. I knew that at this hour it could only be the cleaners at work up there, but the sight still had a soothing effect on me, for the reasons I’ve explained. Then suddenly it didn’t. The hospital seemed to crowd in on the axis of our two sets of windows, upsetting that precious symmetry. Three floors above me, Patient DL lay on her back as she had done for a decade, beyond the reach of medicine. Down in the basement, hundreds of obsolete hard disks harboured the records of patients who would never recover. In their midst, Nestor tinkered with his new toy, awaiting the hour when, if the rumour was true, he would set off on his nightly tour of the hospital. He would throw the switch on his way out, so that the only source of light in the room would be the greenish glow of the computer screen: that snakelike waveform I had managed at last to displace – though not, perhaps, in the way Mezzanotte had intended. Hurriedly I turned my back on my own reflection, crossed the room and locked the door behind me.