style="font-size:15px;"> ‘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.
5
The next morning I returned to the hospital. As the lift rose past the second floor, then the third, I prepared myself mentally for the meeting to come. I had never yet dealt with a patient whose injuries were so severe, or whose diagnosis was as uncertain as that of Patient DL’s. I told myself that she was no different from the rest, only a little further along the spectrum, the scale of handicap, and that therefore I should treat her no differently. Even if she appeared not to respond to my attempts to communicate with her, I should continue to address her in the belief that she understood. I repeated the mantra over and over in my head: she’s no different, she’s no different. But I couldn’t quite drown out the small voice that said, there is something quite unusual about this patient and you know it. The upshot of this internal wrangling was that I was nervous, and several times as the lift rose, wiped the sweaty palms of my hands on the seat of my trousers.
When the doors opened at the fifth floor the first thing that struck me was the silence. It was thick, almost palpable, and when I glanced towards a window, and saw beyond it an overcast sky punctured by a few high-rise buildings, I realised with a shock that I had never set foot on this floor before. I had dealt with patients in hospitals on the other side of the world, but this was the first time I had ventured on to the fifth floor of my own. The fourth floor was where I had conducted most of my business, where the patients were, generally speaking, responsive. The silence was like a challenge to me: is there really anything you can do here? it seemed to say. Aren’t you out of your depth?
I presented myself at the charge nurse’s desk. She gave me a friendly smile and when she spoke her voice seemed to ring out too loudly, though in fact, I realised afterwards, she spoke at a normal volume. She checked her list and informed me that the patient had no visitors at the moment. It was still only eight thirty. Her first visitor of the day would arrive at nine. ‘And who will that be?’ I asked.
‘Her father,’ she replied. ‘He comes every morning and sits with her for an hour. A nice old gentleman. Quiet as a mouse.’
She pointed towards the mouth of a long corridor whose walls had been painted dark green up to waist height and cream above, with a long, narrow, black line separating the two. These were the colours that indicated the public areas of the hospital, though public and private lost their significance on this ward, where the patients were so ill they required round-the-clock care to keep them alive. In keeping with the hospital code, though, there was also blue linoleum underfoot, rather than carpet. The only thing that set this ostensibly public ward apart from the real public wards lower down was that each patient had his or her own room – on lower floors, and along with carpet, the exclusive privilege of private patients who paid for their care.
The corridor stretched off into the further reaches of the wing. I followed it and turned right where it formed a ninetydegree angle, and left where it formed a second. As I moved further away from the nurse’s station and, as it seemed to me, the living heart of the ward, the silence grew thicker still. I’ve never been to a morgue, but I suspect that if I had it would sound something like that. The notices occasionally taped up by the doors might not be worded so differently either. One read: ‘Do not enter without gloves or apron’, another: ‘Latex allergy’. Slowly my ear grew attuned, and I began to detect the sounds of frail, struggling life: the hum and occasional click of life-support machinery. The rhythmic expansion and contraction of twenty diaphragms. The faint, almost inaudible breathing of creatures trapped between life and death.
I found myself making efforts to walk soundlessly, not to let my shoes squeak on the linoleum. Eventually I came to the last room on the corridor. It had no notice pinned up outside it, but the door was open and glancing inside I was struck by the sight of a shiny balloon floating in a yellow haze. A child’s birthday balloon, filled with helium. Semi-deflated now, with the words ‘Happy Birthday!’ looping across it, it bobbed at half mast and a low voice seemed to emanate from it. As I stepped over the threshold, I realised that the voice actually came from a TV suspended on the wall above and behind me. I naturally turned to look at the woman lying in the bed, whose line of vision I had broken, and that’s when I got the fright of my life. Her brown eyes were fixed on me, and in them was a steady gleam of contempt, as if the liquid of her iris had crystallised that way. I froze, and in the instant that our eyes met I half expected her to rear up and point an imperious finger out into the corridor. But her gaze merely slid away from me and became liquid again.
Feeling like a clumsy intruder, my heart hammering against my ribs, I lifted the clipboard out of its slot at the foot of the bed and pretended to peruse the drug chart. My hands were trembling, but I forced myself to focus on the words printed before my eyes. Name: Diane Levy. Date of birth: so-and-so. I peeped over the board. Her head lay in the same place on the pillow, but her gaze was vacant now, and dull. A thread of saliva ran from the corner of her mouth, down over her slack jaw. Breathing a sigh of relief,
