Ordinary Thunderstorms

44

THE PURPLY-TAUPE, ALL–IN-ONE, ZIP-UP ‘action suits’, as they were known in St Bot’s, were a great improvement on the 1980^s-style commissionaire look of the epaulettes and matching ties of Bethnal & Bow, Adam considered. In his action suit Adam felt like a paramedic, someone empowered, who might have sprung from a hovering helicopter or a skidding 4×4, ready to administer first aid, give help, rescue, save a life. The fact that he was going up to the de Vere Wing to pick up a file of invoices to deliver to the medical secretaries in Accounting didn’t diminish his vague sense of himself as a significant, albeit minor, cog in the great machine — the medical Leviathan — that was St Botolph’s. All the staff secretly liked their funky jumpsuits, whatever shade they were. The design guru who had come up with the scheme clearly understood human psychology better than most psychologists. Even the cleaners took more pride in their work, thanks to their acid-green overalls, as they fought the good fight, the unending battle, against MRSA, C. difficile and other bacterial infections.

As the lift approached the de Vere Wing’s floor, Adam told himself to concentrate. This was his sixth or seventh visit to de Vere in the two weeks he’d been at St Bot’s — Philip Wang’s domain — and he was beginning to be recognised by the staff and develop the bantering relationship with them of a familiar, even though there were over a hundred porters at St Bot’s — theatre, departmental and outpatient — on duty at any one time. “Hey, Primo,” people were starting to say; “Prime’s here.” He’d been offered a cup of tea on his last visit. The aim was to become a routine presence, part of the transient furniture, someone that no one was surprised to see.

The transfer from Bethnal & Bow had been surprisingly easy to effect. Rizal, one of the senior porters, had a brother, Jejomar, who worked at St Bot’s. It was one of the facts of British medical life that all hospital portering services were understaffed, hence the reliance on agencies to make up the shortfall. Primo Belem had been warmly welcomed: as a trained porter with good references and a CRB clearance he had already benefited from a marginal salary rise (another £200 per annum) and hints had been dropped by management that there was a clear promotional route available to him, should he wish to pursue it. A few evening courses to follow, some basic administrative training in human resources and he could move up several levels with ease — the portering world was his oyster.

There was an unusual and noticeable excitement on the de Vere Wing when he arrived to pick up the documents — nurses chatting loudly, laughing, showing magazines to each other. One was scissoring out a page which was then stuck on the wing’s notice board along with the ‘get well’ cards, the health and safety warning notices and the holiday snaps and postcards from grateful former patients.

“Hi, Corazon,” he said to a nurse he knew. “What’s going on?”

She showed him a two-page advertorial in Nursing Monthly, headlined ‘A CURE FOR ASTHMA?’ And followed by a vague impassioned mission statement about a search for a drug to end this modern curse on the lives of so many.

“We are running the clinical trials here,” Corazon said, emotionally. “For three years. Finally we are there.”

“What clinical trials?”

“For Zembla-4.”

She pointed out the references in the advertorial.

“Here? Zembla-4? Congratulations,” Adam said, disingenuously. “Amazing. My niece has terrible asthma. Sometimes she can hardly breathe.”

“This drug can helping her,” Corazon said with real sincerity. “I have seen it working. Incredible. Tell her to ask her doctor.”

“Maybe she could even come here,” Adam said. He knew the wing well now: twenty comfortable rooms with en suite bathrooms off a wide carpeted corridor, a bright toy-crammed playroom at one end.

Corazon shrugged ruefully, as if to say — don’t get your hopes up. “Is private, you know. Expensive.”

“You mean all these are rich kids in this wing?”

“No, no,” Corazon said. “They ordinary kids — the de Vere Trust pay for everything. But they choose. If you niece very sick maybe she can get in.” She lowered her voice, confidentially. “You go to doctor, you say you niece very, very sick with asthma. You say, what about St Bot’s? He send you here, to de Vere Wing — for free.”

“Free?”

“Yes. The doctors they send us the sick children. It’s a wonderful thing. They getting Zembla-4. Only here.”

“Yeah, amazing. Maybe I’ll try…Who runs this wing, anyway?”

“We have many doctors. Dr Zeigler is the last. He’s in USA now. For PDA submission.”

“Of course. So he must work for Calenture-Deutz.”

“Yes. All our doctors are paid by Calenture-Deutz. We all get bonus from Calenture-Deutz. That’s why we so happy.”

Adam left with his file of clinical records and invoices and duly delivered them to Accounting in the Main Building, third floor.

Back off duty in the porters’ restroom Adam took out the document with Wang’s list. He had had several copies made and had replaced the precious original back in its buried safety deposit box in the triangle by Chelsea Bridge. There were five names listed under St Botolph’s: Lee Moore, Charles Vandela, Latifah Gray, Brianna Dumont-Cole and Erin Kosteckova. Five children who had been in the Felicity de Vere Wing in the three years before Philip Wang’s death.

He went to the payphone in the corridor, slotted in his coins and dialled Administration.

“Hello,” he said, when the phone was eventually answered, “I wonder if you can help me. I’ve just got back from South Africa. My god-daughter is a patient in the hospital. I want to find out what ward she’s in. She’s—” he read a name off the list—“Brianna Dumont-Cole.”

“One moment, please.”

There was a longish pause. He was asked to repeat the name. In the background he could hear the dry bony click of a computer keyboard.

“There seems to be some mistake, sir.”

“No, no, I just want to pay her a surprise visit. I’ve been out of the country for months. I haven’t seen her for nearly a year…Hello?”

“Brianna passed away, sir. That was four months ago. I’m terribly sorry. Her family will know all the details.”

Adam hung up without saying anything.

♦

It took him two days and many pound coins to work through the names on Wang’s list, calling the four hospitals around the country: Aberdeen, Manchester, Southampton and St Botolph’s. It turned out that all the names on Philip Wang’s list were those of dead children. After he had logged the first five he changed tack — when he telephoned he now let it be known from the outset that he was aware the child was deceased. He had a variety of excuses ready in his search for information — a memorial garden was being planned, or a headstone, a charity auction, a celebration of the child’s short life at her primary school. Can you confirm the date and time of day? No problem. We want to donate money to a charity of the hospital’s choice. Thank you so much. My uncle would like to speak to the doctor in charge at the time. I’m afraid that will not be possible, sir. Whatever the excuse, the pretext, the sentimental lie he proffered, the answers he received all confirmed that the fourteen names Philip Wang had noted down on his list were those that had died in Felicity de Vere wings in four hospitals in the British Isles where expensive and thorough clinical trials were being undergone over several years to test the efficacy of a new anti-asthma drug, Zembla-4.

Zembla-4…

Adam went to an internet café. He typed ‘Zembla-4’ into a search engine and all the other relevant information came up, swiftly, obligingly, on the screen. Zembla-4. Calenture-Deutz pic. The Calenture-Deutz website had not yet been updated — there was a photograph of a beaming Philip Wang, Head of Research and Development, with no news or date of his sudden demise. Adam looked at the picture feeling very strange, thinking of their last encounter. There too was an image of the Chairman and CEO of Calenture-Deutz, one Ingram Fryzer, even-featured, grey-haired, above a tendentious declaration on behalf of the board and the team detailing his company’s ambitions and overall integrity. There was a list of other board members and a series of high-minded texts — with modern graphics superimposed (test tubes, computers, clean-cut men in white coats, laughing children in meadows) and mood music over — a major-key electronic ostinato

— about the high ideals espoused by Calenture-Deutz as they searched for ever more efficient pharmaceutical products.

Adam exited the site theoretically wiser, he supposed, initially

— but, really, after some reflection, none the wiser. He decided to concentrate on the five deaths at St Botolph’s. What he needed now was access to some of the hospital’s computers.

♦

He walked into the pub in Battersea, The White Duchess, and saw Rita sitting at the bar with a bottle of beer in her hand. He kissed her on the cheek — they could kiss each other on the cheek now, having ended their first date (after a Chinese meal) with this polite embrace. She was wearing jeans and, seemingly, three loose T — shirts one on top of the other and her hair was tied casually back in a pony-tail. Out of uniform she seemed to dress with studied unconcern — almost like one of his students on the McVay campus, Adam thought. Adam found the style alluring — he did not think anyone would guess that she was a policewoman.

In the corner a small band were setting up for their next session — this was the ‘LIVE MUSIC’ advertised on the pub windows.

“Been to a meeting?” she said. “Very smart.” Adam was wearing his other suit. He only had two suits, he realised, he would have to vary his wardrobe now he was seeing Rita.

“They want to promote me,” he said. “I’m resisting.”

What was the difference about a second date? Adam asked himself. The difference was that all bets were off, he supposed…The first date was always exploratory, cautious, uncertain — however much you might seem to be enjoying yourself that was its essential purpose: exit doors were left ajar at every turn in case some terrible miscalculation had been made. On their first date they had talked vaguely about their jobs. Adam had alluded to a period of mental instability, a sustained period of hospitalisation, in order to explain his current lowly status in the medical food-chain. “Finding himself,” he said. Rita had been equally vague about her own background, skilfully avoiding certain questions — Adam had no idea where she lived, for example. But, once the second date had been mooted (by Adam) and agreed upon, all the prudence and tentativeness fell away. Now as they sat at the bar talking, listening to the jazz trio strike up, Adam could sense the change in mood, palpably. The subtext was clear to them both: full-on sexual attraction. As he ordered more drinks, swivelling to gain the attention of the barman, his knee connected with her thigh and stayed there. They clinked their bottles of beer.

“Primo,” she said. “I like that name. But you don’t have an Italian accent.”

“Because I was born and brought up in Bristol,” he said. “I can’t speak a word of Italian. OK — I can speak a word or two.” He shrugged. “I’m a third-generation immigrant.”

“So where are your family originally from, then?” she asked, and Adam thought — this had better be the last question about my background, for both our sakes.

“Brescia,” he said, plucking the name from the map of Italy in his head. “And before you ask, I’ve never been there.”

“Do you want to eat something?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m starving.”

♦

They stepped out of the pub into the soft night — it was dark, but not dark, some lingering luminescence in the sky making everything strangely though nebulously visible.

“Hang on a sec,” Rita said, and rummaged in her bag for her mobile phone, on which, once retrieved, she quickly sent a text. Adam stepped away, listening to the band finish their set with a roll of drums and a shivering bash of cymbals. He felt slightly drunk, but was aware of another layer of light-headedness, of excitement, that had more to do with emotion than alcohol — he sensed the evening had longer to run.

“Do you want to come home and have a coffee or something?” she said.

“That would be great.”

“I live two minutes away,” she said. “Which is why I lured you to sunny Battersea.”

Adam said nothing.

“We go along here,” she said, gesturing down river, and they headed off. After a few paces she slipped her hand in his.

“That was nice,” she said.

“It was.”

“Better than our Chinese.”

“That’s the problem with a first date, you see — too much at stake, too many unknowns. Everything changes on the second…At least that’s my experience — my theory.”

She glanced at him. “You must tell me about your theory some time.”

He wondered if this was the moment to kiss her, but she was leading him across the road towards the river.

“I live on a houseboat,” she said.

“Amazing,” Adam said, now acknowledging that he was definitely drunkish and thinking: a houseboat, sex on a houseboat.

“I live on a houseboat with my dad.”

Adam said nothing.

“He said nothing.”

“No, good. I think that…You know, cool.”

“I’d like you to meet him, which was why I texted him.”

“Ah-ha. Excellent.”

She unlocked a metal gate and they walked down a sloping metal bridge to a substantial mooring area. There seemed many different types of vessel berthed here in the dark, some with lights shining from their windows, and Adam supposed this was a sort of floating village. They walked along shifting metal gangplanks between the boats.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Nine Elms Pier,” she said. “Apparently there used to be a row of nine elms round about here in the middle of the seventeenth century.”

“Really? Amazing…”

“Hence the name.”

“I think I got that.”

“Not just a pretty face, then.”

Adam said nothing. He could tell she was a bit tense.

They were heading towards a small inlet at the end where some larger vessels were berthed. He saw what looked like a deep-sea trawler and a modified barge and, at the end, what appeared to be a reconditioned naval vessel, still with its battleship-grey paint.

“Here we are,” she said, stopping in front of it. “The good ship Bellerophon. Home sweet home.”

She unlocked another gate and they climbed some steep metal steps on to the deck. Sizeable, Adam thought, looking around him, some sort of minesweeper or large patrol boat, perhaps. Rita opened a bulkhead door and light streamed out. Steep stairs led down.

“Go down backwards,” she said. “The Navy way.”

Adam did as he was told and heard a deep voice saying, “Welcome aboard, matey.”

He found himself in a dark sitting room, with a few low lights burning, narrow with low ceilings but fitted out with an assortment of armchairs on a shaggy dark-brown carpet. One wall was all bookshelves. There was a lingering smell of joss sticks and in one corner was a TV set, the sound turned down.

A gaunt-faced man in his sixties with long, thinning grey hair tied back in a pony-tail heaved himself out of his seat and reached for an arm-crutch before coming over to greet them. Adam noticed there was a wheelchair in the corner of the room. The man moved towards them with obvious difficulty, almost as if he were walking on artificial limbs.

“Dad, this is Primo. Primo, this is my dad, Jeff Nashe.”

“Good to meet you, Primo,” he said, extending and twisting round his left hand in greeting. Adam gripped it and shook it briefly and awkwardly, but Nashe held on to it. “First question: you’re not a fucking copper, are you?”

“I’m a hospital porter.”

Jeff Nashe turned incredulously to his daughter. “Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“At last,” Nashe said. “One with a proper job.”

Adam decided Nashe was a bit stoned as he finally let go of Adam’s hand. He was a strong-faced man with high cheekbones and a sharp, hooked nose, but wasted — he had bags under his eyes, his hair was thin and grizzled in its summer-of-love 19605 pony-tail. But Adam could see from whom Rita derived her bone structure.

“Coffee, tea or a glass of wine?” Rita asked.

“I wouldn’t mind a glass of wine, actually,” Adam said.

“Same here,” Nashe said. “Bring the bottle, darling.”

They settled themselves on chairs in front of the mute TV — a twenty-four-hour news channel, Adam noticed — Nashe kept glancing at it as he rolled himself a cigarette, as if he were waiting for a specific item to come up. He offered Adam his tobacco pouch and roll-up papers. Adam said no thanks.

“You can see I’m semi-crippled,” Nashe said. “Victim of an industrial accident. Seventeen years of litigation.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“No, you’re not. You don’t give a toss.”

He hauled himself out of the chair again and, not picking up the arm-crutch, crossed the room to the bookcase, at a fair pace, Adam thought, and returned with a book that he dropped in Adam’s lap.

“That was me before the accident,” he said.

Adam looked at the book, a large softback with the title Civic Culture in Late Modernity: the Latin American Challenge, and the author’s name, Jeff Nashe.

“Fascinating,” Adam said.

“Forty-two universities, polytechnics and colleges had that book on their reading lists in the 19705.”

Rita came through at this point with the bottle of wine and three glasses. She switched off the TV and replaced the book in the bookshelf.

“Sorry,” she said. “He always does that.”

“Because it’s important to me,” Nashe said petulantly. “I know he thinks I’m some kind of saddo, has-been loser. I don’t want your boyfriend’s pity.”

“He’s not my boyfriend and he doesn’t pity you,” Rita said with some heat. “OK? So sit down and have a glass of wine.”

He complied and Rita poured the wine. They all had a sip and Rita topped them up.

“So, Primo,” Nashe said. “Who did you vote for at the last election?”

♦

Up on deck there was a breeze coming down the river from the west. The leaves in Rita’s deck-garden stirred and rustled, the palms clattering drily, clicking like knitting needles. Rita and Adam were sitting in the middle of this makeshift shrubbery, up by the forward gun-emplacement, smoking a joint. The tide was rising and below him Adam could feel the Bellerophon beginning to heave herself off the mud.

“I don’t usually smoke,” Rita said. “And I shouldn’t let him wind me up like that. But I wanted you to meet him — just to let you know, put you in the picture. He was behaving fairly badly tonight — a bit too bloody pleased with himself — mostly he’s much easier with guests.” She inhaled and passed the joint to Adam, who puffed dutifully at it and handed it back. He couldn’t tell if it was having any effect.

“Sometimes I just need to get out of my head for a few minutes.” She exhaled and looked over at him. “Lovely evening.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Adam said. “Don’t worry, officer.”

“Thank you, kind sir.” She smiled at him and inclined her head in a little bow of acknowledgement.

“What happened to your father?” he asked.

“He was a lecturer in Latin American studies at East Battersea Polytechnic,” she paused. “And one night he fell down the stairs to the library and badly hurt his back.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. He sued, they appealed, he won. He hasn’t worked since. That was the industrial accident.” She took a big hit on her joint.

“Latin American studies. So that’s why your brother’s called Ernes to.”

“Ernesto Guevara Nashe. I’m called after one ‘Margarita Camilo’—she was in the Sierra Maestra mountains with Castro’s rebel army. Margarita Camilo Nashe at your service.”

“Right,” Adam was thinking. So it’s Margarita…“So there’s a strong Spanish, Latin American connection in the Nashe family.”

“No, no, he’s never been to either Central or South America.”

“But he taught Latin American studies. And the book.”

“Let’s say there was an opening in academic life in the late sixties. A career opportunity. He was a historian who couldn’t find employment anywhere. They set up a Latin American studies department at East Battersea and they offered him a job…” She shrugged. “Suddenly he became a Latin American expert. To be fair he loved it — he was a kind of virtual revolutionary until he fell down the stairs.”

“Does he speak Spanish?”

“Do you?” She laughed loudly at the idea. “Habla espanol, amigo!” she said. The drug was beginning to work its narcotic magic. Adam was beginning to understand why Rita became a policewoman.

“I’d better go,” Adam said and stood up — and staggered as the Bellerophon heaved herself free from the Thames mud and was buoyant. Rita caught him.

Their kiss was, for Adam, a great, heady release — of pleasure, of desire for Rita. He felt a kind of fizzing through his gut and loins as her tongue searched deep into his mouth and he held her to him strongly. But at the same time as he was thinking this is wonderful — another part of his brain was saying: this is a bit sudden, all a bit rushed.

They broke apart.

“This is all a bit sudden, a bit rushed,” Rita said. “But I’m not complaining.”

“I was sort of thinking the same.”

“You could come back down below,” she said. “I’m a big girl — do have my own room.”

“Maybe not tonight, I think.”

“That is sensible, Primo Belem, wise man. Thank you. Yes.” She was high.

She walked him back through the marina along the gangways to the shore, holding on to his arm with both hands, her head on his shoulder. They kissed again, with more deliberateness, a more conscious savouring of their lips and tongues in contact. What was it about kissing? Adam thought. How could it seem so important, this meeting of four lips, two mouths, two tongues? Sometimes those first kisses can turn your head, Adam realised, recognising the absurd weakness in himself that made him want to have his head turned, to say something declarative to her, to register the emotion he was feeling. After two kisses? — ridiculous, he thought. He resisted.