Someone to Watch Over Me

CHAPTER 8 Friday, 8 January 2010

The meeting with the lawyer had gone worse than Glódís could have imagined. In truth, before their encounter she had given little thought to what they might discuss; had thought that it would be smooth and easy work to convince this Thóra of Jakob’s guilt, and subsequently to persuade her not to dig any further into the case. To her mind there was no doubt about his part in the horrific deed, so this should have been a piece of cake for Glódís, but she hadn’t reckoned on the woman being so well prepared and their conversation taking such an unexpected turn. How could she have known that the lawyer had access to all of the court documents on the case? Glódís had assumed they would have been locked up after the sentence was pronounced. In retrospect, she had no idea why she had thought this to be the case, but she’d been dead wrong. This was a bloody mess. She couldn’t afford for this case to be reopened. She’d suffered enough because of it in her career, and only now was the fall-out from it finally starting to dissipate. Glódís had lost count of all the meetings she’d been called to because of everything that had come up during the investigation and the trial. That whole time she’d felt like an outsider in her workplace; no one spoke to her voluntarily for fear that her unpopularity with the higher-ups was infectious. She didn’t know how she’d get through it if it happened all over again.

A familiar feeling of depression washed over her. How could it all have gone so wrong? It had always seemed like a good idea to her, no matter what anybody said afterwards. Overnight she’d become a kind of rising star within the organization. Before she’d suggested a unified community residence, disabled housing issues were like matching socks after doing the washing. The blind over here, the paralysed there, and autistic people somewhere else. Oops, one with severe dementia – oh well, he’s the only one, can’t do anything for him. In the end her proposal had been welcomed eagerly and was implemented with great speed: Iceland was experiencing a boom, people were enthusiastic, and there was plenty of money. If the experiment worked, more of these kinds of centres would be built when budgetary resources allowed. When she was then informed that she was being considered to run this innovative unit, it seemed fate was smiling on her, especially after she’d been an assistant director for ten years and obliged to take on all the most tiresome and difficult cases by a boss who took only the agreeable ones for himself. Now it was Glódís’s chance to allow herself that luxury. But her bliss had been short-lived.

Jakob, that damn Jakob. If only she hadn’t pushed so hard to have him admitted, right now she would be in her little office in the nice new residence, casually tallying up receipts with supermarket bills or taking a bit of time out to browse sunny places to visit for her summer holiday. But no. Now she was sitting at the Regional Office for the Disabled, answering phone calls from family members whose only role in life appeared to be to irritate her. When will a space become available? The wheelchair’s got too small. Isn’t it possible to extend my daughter’s day-care hours? Endless demands that she could hardly ever meet, with very little thanks for her trouble. Now, since they’d been preaching bloody cutbacks and savings, it looked as though the few positive conversations that she’d had with the agency’s clients or their relatives had become a thing of the past. It had given her monotonous days some colour to be able to fulfil people’s wishes from time to time. Yes, her life had undergone a complete transformation. All because of Jakob.

She felt a painful throb in the small of her back, which ran up her spine and stopped at her neck. Glódís moaned softly and reached behind her head to rub the sore area. It did little good, as she’d known it wouldn’t. She still hadn’t managed to rub away her headache. The doctor had informed her that it was a consequence of injuries she’d received when she’d been struck heavily with a broom on her lower back. Two vertebrae had been pressed together and there was little that could be done about it apart from a major operation that had no guaranteed outcome of success. Again, all Jakob’s fault. He had attacked her from behind, completely unprovoked, and the blow had sent her crashing into a wheelchair in the corridor. The blow had been so hard that she hadn’t felt the initial impact at all; the fear of being paralysed had overwhelmed everything else and she’d wept with relief when she realized that her legs hurt. Luckily other workers had happened to come along and had removed Jakob, because otherwise he would probably have continued to hammer her with the broom. In any case, he was standing over her when she opened her eyes, staring at her with his familiar sheepish expression. And then this idiot lawyer thinks the man is innocent. She’d change her opinion pretty sharpish if she got hit like that herself. Glódís found herself hoping that that would happen.

‘There’s a quick meeting in ten minutes. We’re going to continue discussing the cuts.’ The fact that the woman in the doorway had come to notify her of this meeting was one more sign that the business about the fire was slipping into the coma of oblivion. If it were just allowed to be left to rest, like Sleeping Beauty, everything would be good again.

‘Thanks. I’m coming.’ Glódís put on her most pitiful expression and continued to rub her neck. ‘I’m dying of pain. This is never going to go away.’

‘Take a painkiller.’ The woman vanished from the doorway without showing any sign of empathy. Glódís had further to go than she had hoped, particularly if this lawyer started raking everything up again. Glódís had to ensure that this wouldn’t happen; she was afraid she would just be fired. Cuts inevitably meant a reduction in staff and she would probably be among the first to go. And what then? There were few jobs available in the recession and unemployment benefits were low and didn’t last long. She knew the requirements for disability benefits well enough to be able to take advantage of her back injury and receive them, but they were next to nothing. She did have a few contingency plans, though; for example, knuckle down and perform so well that she made herself irreplaceable, contact the union and get them on her side, or play the trump card she was saving until all other avenues appeared closed. That time could very well be approaching.

For the moment, however, she had to make an urgent decision. Should she tell her superiors about the lawyer’s visit and the possible reopening of the case, or keep quiet? It would of course be worse if they found out about it later, worse still if they discovered she had kept it secret from them. On the other hand, any hope that this could turn out to be a flash in the pan would be gone if she opened her mouth. Glódís had trouble concentrating due to the pain in her neck. She let her head roll onto her shoulder and shut her eyes. With a concentrated effort she emptied her mind of worries. This self-consolation didn’t help much, however, since it merely cleared the way for other more troubling thoughts and memories. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. This repeated itself continuously until she opened her eyes.

Glódís wiped away a tear that had slowly formed. It made a tiny wet spot on the back of her hand, which disappeared quickly but left behind a grey mascara streak that would have been almost invisible if she weren’t aware of it. This reminded her uncomfortably of her job as the centre’s director: it had lasted only a short time, but had managed to leave behind a black smudge on her soul. She straightened up and went to the meeting.

The nurse knew he was forgetting something, but couldn’t think what it was for the life of him. His shift was ending and this wasn’t the first time that he’d had this nagging feeling at the end of the day. His job was hectic and it was impossible for him to finish everything; more often than not he had to put off visiting patients and spending quiet time speaking with them, as he would have preferred to do. The strictly necessary tasks had to take precedence, and in recent days the lack of staff had meant that these were divided between fewer pairs of hands. He wasn’t actually worried that he’d forgotten something important; he’d administered all the necessary medications and those who’d been scheduled for examinations or x-rays had gone and returned. No, this was something different.

‘How’s your stomach?’ He bent down to an old man hunched in a wheelchair at the edge of the corridor. The man had obviously embarked on too long a journey and not made it to his destination, wherever that was.

‘What time is it?’ His pink gums shone. His dentures lay in his lap. Every word was accompanied by a wet smack.

‘It’s almost four o’clock, my friend.’

‘Are you the doctor?’ More wet smacking, and the final word was such an effort that a tiny bit of saliva ran down the man’s chin.

‘No, I’m the nurse, remember? I took your blood pressure earlier.’ He positioned himself behind the wheelchair. ‘Shouldn’t I help you back into the lounge? Then you can watch TV before dinner or enjoy the view outside.’

The old man’s sinewy neck cracked when he attempted to turn his head around to look at the nurse, but he could only move it far enough for one eye to briefly meet his gaze. His expression was one of doubt and mistrust, but the young man had long grown used to this from very elderly patients. These people were from a different time when nurses had all been female. In any case, his number was diminishing, and the nurse had never been offended by their suspicion or let it get on his nerves. Sometime in the distant future he would probably be sitting in an advanced version of the same wheelchair, looking with yellowed eyes at new, changed times that he didn’t understand. He rolled the man’s chair into the lounge and positioned him so that he could choose between watching television or gazing at the life that passed by outside without him.

The duty room was in order, so it wasn’t the tidying or finishing up of paperwork that had been bothering him. A medical record rested on the table and he picked it up to put it back in its place. No one could say that he left his work behind for the next shift. The file fell open and a piece of paper slipped out. He grabbed it as it fell and at the same time as he noticed the female handwriting he realized what he had forgotten; he didn’t need to read what was written there to remember it. He had forgotten to call a developmental therapist to speak to the poor young girl in Room 7, as his colleague Svava on the evening shift had requested. He hurriedly dialled the internal number, but there was no answer. That was not a good sign. It was almost four o’clock and developmental therapists didn’t provide round-the-clock service. Damn it.

There was nothing for it but to pay the girl a visit and see whether he could do anything himself. As far as he knew, no doctor was expected until after his shift ended and in any case there was no guarantee that a doctor would be able to accomplish any more than he could. He would at least have to try to communicate with the girl so that he could mention this at the shift change later – if in fact there really was a problem. The note had mentioned a rapid heart rate and anxiety that might have been due to a nightmare, but it was necessary to find out whether something preventable was troubling the girl. It was extremely tricky to deal with patients who communicated with difficulty or not at all; only they could describe the majority of their symptoms, which made any diagnosis a thousand times more difficult than usual, if not impossible. This girl was the worst example of this problem that he had ever encountered, and the department was not properly equipped to handle these kinds of cases. So he couldn’t rely on previous experience to communicate with her, and he had to admit to himself that he’d spent as little time with her as he could get away with. There was something about her complete lack of mobility that disturbed him. He hoped for her sake that he was alone in feeling this way, but deep down he knew that this wasn’t the case.

Inside the room a faint beeping sounded from the EKG machine, which the girl had been hooked up to after the incident yesterday evening. The day’s readings had already been collected for the doctor, who would look in on her after dinner. Someone else would have to go over the information that was currently trickling out, but for the moment he was grateful for the monitor because the diligent needle that moved continuously across the paper showed that there was still life in the girl. There was hardly any other evidence to confirm this; her slender body lay virtually motionless beneath the blanket and you had to concentrate to notice the feeble movement of her chest, which barely moved when she breathed. The girl stared up at the ceiling and appeared not to have noticed his arrival, though he knew that she could hear perfectly well.

‘Hi, Ragna, how are you doing?’ He walked up to her and took her pale, bony hand. A needle had been inserted into a cannula in the back of it and he suspected that half the weight that now rested in his palm belonged to its pink plastic casing and the large bandage that held it in place. The bandage must have been bound round the cannula as automatic procedure, because there was no risk of the girl bumping her hand or knocking the needle against things that she touched. Her hand didn’t move unless it was moved. He stroked her hand carefully around the edge of the plastic, knowing that she had full feeling. What an awful, awful existence.

The girl’s eyes moved and she blinked. He leaned closer to her and smiled. ‘I have a confession to make: I forgot to ask for a therapist to come and speak to you today. But I promise I won’t forget again, and you can tell me off if he doesn’t come and see you tomorrow. First thing in the morning.’ He smiled again, overcome by how unreal she seemed. A life-size, living doll that couldn’t move. He continued to smile but now his smile was sad, even though it was meant to cheer her up. Of course, the girl couldn’t return the smile, and instead just stared at him with her big, frightened eyes. He wasn’t sure why he felt that her eyes were fearful; maybe because her gaze reminded him of a sick kitten that he’d once cradled in a feeble attempt to play veterinarian at the request of the middle-aged woman in the next-door apartment. She’d come to him because she knew that he worked at a hospital and asked him to take a look at the little scrap, which was sickly and hot. He had protested and explained that he knew nothing about animals, but to little avail. Still, it hadn’t been the opinion of his neighbour that had bothered him, but the eyes of the kitten, staring at him as its heart beat erratically in its tiny breast. The poor thing had realized that it depended entirely on the man who had it in his grasp; he could throw the creature down, crush it or cuddle it – as he did, of course. The girl was in the same situation; she was so helpless that her entire existence depended on others. If they didn’t nourish her, give her water, care, and everything else that a person needed, her days would be numbered. It must have been a terrible feeling, especially in a new place where she knew no one.

‘Are you expecting any visitors this evening? Your mother or father?’ They at least could make contact with the girl, even if most of the staff couldn’t do so. She blinked twice and he knew that meant no. They hadn’t been taught more than yes and no, any more than they’d been taught sign language when a deaf person was admitted.

‘I’ll let the evening shift know that they should ask you how you feel, whether you’re in any pain. Okay?’ She blinked once. ‘Are you in pain?’ She blinked twice but he was no nearer to knowing how she really felt. Her parents would have to get more information out of her, preferably about exactly what was wrong. He got goose bumps on his arms as once again he couldn’t help thinking about how it would feel to live only in your mind, your body a lifeless shell.

To prevent her from noticing how uncomfortable he suddenly felt in her presence, he quickly turned his back to her and pretended to be checking the IV drip. ‘Maybe you want to watch TV? There are movies until six on the hospital channel and I’m sure there’d be something you’d enjoy.’ He bent down to tilt her up in bed slightly, then fastened her securely beneath her arms with a specially designed harness, to prevent her from slipping back down. He pulled the television closer, turned it on and switched to the movie channel. On the screen appeared two American actors he recognized, although he didn’t know their names. He didn’t know which movie it was and could only hope she would like it. ‘There you are. My shift is almost finished, but I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

He turned in the doorway to look back at her. Up until then he had avoided her gaze, and he was startled to see that she was now following him with her eyes and blinking at him over and over. ‘See you tomorrow.’ He went into the corridor, half ashamed for not going back in. She probably had something on her mind but he felt so uncomfortable in her presence that he didn’t trust himself to try to ask her what it was. What was left of his shift would be put to better use writing a note to her parents. They could speak to her and find out what was bothering her. Once he had decided on this, he felt a bit better.

How was he to know that no one ever visited her?