Читать книгу The Papers of Tony Veitch - William McIlvanney - Страница 10

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From Simshill in Cathcart, where Laidlaw lived, to the Royal Infirmary in Cathedral Street was a short trip but a big distance. Fortunately, the architecture changed in stages, like decompression chambers, so that you didn’t get the bends.

One half of the first gate was open yet and he drove in. A lot of cars were in the parking area but there was plenty of room. Locking the car, he was struck again by the size of the place, three huge linked units, each with its own imposing dome. It seemed to him a castle of black stone. It made illness appear not a leveller but an accolade that admitted you to a Gothic aristocracy.

Across the courtyard was the single-storey casualty department like a gatehouse where they examined your credentials. He went in. It was after eleven.

The hallway was the parking place for the blue leather invalid-chairs, maybe thirty of them. On one of them a boy of twenty or so was sitting. But he wasn’t an invalid. He looked ill enough to chew railings. The slight skinning on his right cheek only accentuated his appearance of hardness. He was nursing a light jacket the shoulders of which were black with blood, like the patch on a Wimpey reefer. He was waiting for someone.

‘Hey, you,’ he said as Laidlaw came in. ‘Gonny give us a fag?’

Laidlaw looked over curiously. He recognised drink but not drunkenness and the residual aggression from a fight not lost, the adrenalin spin-off that could be captioned ‘Who’s next?’ Laidlaw turned towards the doorway to casualty.

‘Hey, you! Big man. Ah’m talkin’ to you. Gi’es a fag!’ Laidlaw went over.

‘Here, son,’ he said. ‘So far you’ve only managed mild abrasions. Is this you trying for intensive care?’

The boy looked momentarily blank at the medical references but the tone was Esperanto.

The boy said, ‘Come on. Ah asked a wee favour.’

‘So don’t make it sound like a threat.’

Laidlaw gave him a cigarette.

‘You put the tipped end in your mouth. Then you light the other bit.’

The boy was smiling. Laidlaw turned to the casualty room. It is a single, long, arched place, both basic and ornate, like a Victorian nissen hut. Laidlaw entered it like a time-warp.

The first things he noticed were a couple of ghosts of his youth, two constables whose faces were fresh-laid eggs. Near them stood a group wearing doctors’ white coats. Laidlaw hoped they were students. All of them, policemen and doctors, looked young enough to have been given their uniforms for Christmas. Suddenly, Laidlaw was Rip Van Winkle.

He checked the treatment room on the right. While two nurses looked on, a doctor was remonstrating with a boy who was stripped to the waist. From hairline to belt, the boy was blood. The red made the place look like a dressing-room for one of the more preposterous Elizabethan tragedies, say Titus Andronicus.

‘No problem!’ the boy was saying.

Physically, he seemed to be alright. Laidlaw could see a long cut on the back of his neck and nothing else. He was obviously enjoying that taste of the heroic your own spilled blood can give you. Probably the worst thing they could do for him would be to wash him clean. Then he would have to settle for himself again. Laidlaw didn’t know him but perhaps he would.

Starting opposite the treatment room is a row of cubicles. They presented Laidlaw, as he went, with a succession of tableaux that might have come from a contemporary mystery play. A girl whose eyes were still in shock was holding a bloodstained bedspread, waiting for someone or something. There was a young man with a left eye like a piece of bad fruit. He was protesting hysterically about injustice while a doctor attended him. A woman was crying while her arm was being bandaged. ‘He gives me some awfu’ kickings,’ she was saying. A middle-aged man was explaining to a nurse, ‘It’s a kinda shifting pain,’ while two young policemen looked on. Laidlaw recognised a familiar art, that of postponing arrest by young policemen through the contraction of sudden, mysterious maladies.

Cubicle E, the one Laidlaw knew to be used for delousing, was empty but showed signs of recent use. He recognised nobody, except perhaps the two plain-clothesmen who had just come in. He didn’t know them as individuals but he knew that style of moving on tramlines of professional preoccupation. They merged with the rest of the scene as subtly as Mormons.

Looking back along the room, Laidlaw found nothing specific to him, only the city processing its Friday night pain. The place was a confessional. You came here to admit to frailty, brittle bones, thin skin, frangible organs – the pathetic, haphazard machinery we make bear the weight of our pretensions.

Most of all, you came to admit to blood. It was everywhere here, on the people, the swabs, the floor, the coats of the doctors. Like a betrayal, it leaked out of the spurious certainties we make of our natures. Like honesty, it was difficult to look at.

Laidlaw felt here more strongly what he had against that other room he had just come from, where Ena and Donald and Ria were still sitting. It told lies. This one tried to do the same, no doubt, but it at least was compelled to unavoidable admissions of its common humanity. That other room was simply exclusive. It was based on inaccurate assumptions about what people are like. Laidlaw remembered that one of the things he hated most was élitism. We share in everyone else or forego ourselves.

‘Hullo there, captain.’

He was an elderly man, slightly cut at the edge of his eye and more than slightly drunk. Laidlaw had noticed him wandering along the room accosting people vaguely, an ancient mariner short of a wedding guest.

‘You a doctor then, sir? It’s ma eye here. Played at headers wi’ the pavement. Ye know? Pavement beat me wan-nothin’. Ah would’ve won if ah hadny been drunk.’

Laidlaw smiled and shrugged.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m a stranger here myself.’

The man went on past the partition at the end of the room. Beyond that lay the legendary Room 9, resuscitation room at the Royal, a place that has seen a lot of what there is to see in the way of physical calamity. The man was ushered out again at once by a doctor who directed him back along the casualty room.

‘Excuse me,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I’m looking for someone.’

Laidlaw showed his identification-card. The doctor looked at it, his tongue resting on his front teeth, and nodded, showing nothing. He couldn’t have been older than late twenties, bespectacled and shaggy-haired, but already he looked the type who might raise his eyebrows at an earthquake. His coat was speckled brown with the statutory bloodstains.

‘A heavy night,’ Laidlaw suggested.

‘No. This is a quiet one. Although a couple of R.T.A.’s and an M.I. through here.’ He nodded towards Room 9. ‘So who are you looking for?’

‘I don’t know,’ Laidlaw said.

The doctor didn’t show surprise or amusement or interest. He just waited. He was checking the progress of the elderly man along the room. Laidlaw knew that an R.T.A. was a Road Traffic Accident. He thought he’d better not ask about the M.I. The doctor didn’t look in the mood to stand in for a medical dictionary.

‘I’ve been told somebody was brought in here asking for me. Asking for Jack Laidlaw. An old bloke. Unshaven. Probably well bevvied.’

The elderly man had found the haven of a nurse. The doctor’s eyes came to rest on the floor. He looked up at Laidlaw, as if measuring him for an improbable connection.

‘You mean the old wino?’

‘I might.’

‘Yes. That was the name, I think. Kept repeating it. I thought maybe it was his own. Could get nothing else out of him. Having trouble with his airways. They had him in E. God, he was filthy. Didn’t know whether to dialyse or cauterise. A walking Bubonic.’

‘So what happened?’

‘He just got worse. Seemed to use the last of himself just getting here. Cleaned him up. They had him in the Lavage Room. Alcohol and Belair were about all they got, I think.’

‘So what’s wrong?’

The doctor shook his head.

‘How about everything?’ His eyes were moving around the room again. ‘The nearest they got to a diagnosis was imminent death. The respiratory problem was getting worse. Rather than intubate him here, they took him straight to Intensive Care. He’s just gone.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Surgical block. That’s—’

‘I know.’

‘But they’ll probably not welcome you.’

‘They don’t have to,’ Laidlaw said.

On the way out, he threw a cigarette to the young man on the invalid chair. Placate the gods.