The Coldest Blood

8

Dryden slept happily in Humph’s Capri, his dreams refusing to take flight thanks to the ballast provided by six pints of Isle of Ely Ale and a four-star curry which had given him hiccoughs. The session in The Fenman bar had been particularly lively, culminating in Garry’s ill-fated attempt to dance a Highland reel in anticipation of New Year.

When Dryden finally awoke the moon was up and ice covered the Capri’s bonnet. He stretched, aware that a hangover hovered, and cleared a porthole in the condensation of the window. Outside, against the stars, the black outline of The Tower Hospital loomed like an exam.

Humph was listening to one of his Estonian language tapes, repeating with care a long list of pastry delicacies available only in Tallinn, while flicking through his bilingual dictionary, unnaturally excited by the section devoted to pies. Each year he applied himself to some obscure language, in the almost certain knowledge there was little danger he would ever need to speak it in Ely. Then each Christmas he would flee the unspeakable horrors of the festive season by flying out to some forsaken European capital for a few days to try out his new vocabulary. He had just returned from Zagreb, having spent the previous year mastering Serbo-Croat menus.

He flipped open the glove compartment to extract a miniature bottle of Croatian hooch he’d bought at the airport. It was purple and tasted of lighter fuel.

Dryden peered out again at the lit foyer of The Tower. A former workhouse, the building had become a lunatic asylum throughout Victoria’s reign. It boasted a single turret, complete with an interior-lit clock and fake battlements, the whole encircled by grounds full of institutional trees.

Laura Dryden, thanks to the continued support of the Mid-Anglian Mutual Insurance Company, was one of fifty paying ‘guests’ in the private hospital. It was a situation Dryden knew could not last for ever. One day the insurers would politely point out that their responsibilities were close to an end, and suggest a less expensive regimen of care involving what they called ‘home’ – a concept with which Dryden would have struggled if he had allowed himself to think about it at all.

He pushed open the cab door before he had time to reconsider his decision to begin his ritual daily visit. The rust in the hinges screeched, as he knew it would, and he slammed the door closed without saying a word.

Inside, beyond the overheated and over-lit reception, the carpeted corridors muffled his steps. There was an expensive silence, in which high-technology machinery hummed, spoilt by a solitary cry from a patient’s dream.

Dryden knocked on Laura’s door, a little ceremony which marked out her right to privacy despite the certainty that she would not answer, would almost certainly never answer. He had not heard his wife’s voice for six years: since the night their car had been forced off a wintry Fen road by the oncoming headlights of a drunk driver, and down into the black water of Harrimere Drain. Dryden had escaped but Laura, trapped on the back seat, had been left in a diminishing pocket of air for three hours: three hours in which she must have struggled with the fact of her abandonment, three hours in which the horror of reality had forced her to retreat into a protective coma, a retreat from which she was only painfully emerging. For this was no ordinary coma. Fate had reserved another twist of the knife.

Locked In Syndrome (LIS) was still a little-understood condition, but medical experts were at least now agreed that it existed. Victims usually entered the coma under extreme trauma; however, the peculiarities of LIS were connected not to the outward symptoms, but to the inward realities. Sufferers exhibited no signs of mental or physical activity, but those who had emerged from LIS reported varying degrees of consciousness – from fleeting dreamlike visions to a state very close to normality. Those able to move a finger – or more often an eyelid – were able to communicate using the latest technology. After three years of immobility Laura had managed to move the small finger on her right hand and had learnt to communicate using a machine – the COMPASS – which had been installed by her bed. It constantly displayed a grid of letters and by flicking a switch placed in the palm of her hand Laura was able to select them. As her slow recovery continued she had mastered the COMPASS using a suck-and-blow pipe which could be placed between her lips. Her messages were often fluent and rational, but interspersed with prolonged periods of either silence or a dreamlike surrealism.

Dryden entered the room, turning the dial on the dimmer to illuminate the figure on the bed draped in a single white sheet.

The COMPASS jumped instantly into life, a spool of paper trickling out of a printer like ticker-tape.

One of the refinements Laura had learnt was to prepare a sentence on screen and then activate the print key as her husband entered the room.

HI. LOVE YOU.

It was a ritualistic greeting, but welcome none the less. Dryden’s spirits rose, and he edged on to the bed, insinuated an arm under Laura’s neck, and raised her head higher on the pillows. Her hair was an exuberant pile of auburn, which he noted had been freshly brushed. The nurses, who maintained an optimism about their patient which Dryden struggled to match, often applied some make-up as well, adding colour to the Latin tan which had paled so visibly over the years.

Laura’s eyes, a liquid brown, swam slightly as she fought to focus on his face. He felt a surge of optimism and clutched her tighter. The year had been marked by a steady improvement in her health, and the first spasmodic movements of muscles in her right arm and foot. They’d been enthusiastic about the suggestion from the consultant that she might leave The Tower – a brief excursion into the outside world, a weekend perhaps, or more, but somewhere close to medical care if her condition caused alarm.

Dryden turned her head gently towards the window. ‘It’s so warm in here,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea. Outside it’s minus 10 or something. The river’s freezing up by the Maltings, the boat’s locked in.’

While he held her there was no way she could operate the COMPASS, an enforced silence he knew Laura enjoyed. He spilled out news of the rest of the day, making sure he included the kind of details she loved: Humph’s diet, the minutiae of The Crow’s eccentric personalities, and – most difficult of all – how he felt.

But more often he escaped by telling her what he’d done.

‘I got the splash again,’ he said. It was one of their jokes. On Fleet Street, on the News, he’d fought every day to get the lead story. Once, perhaps twice, a month he’d land the honour. On The Crow it was his by default.

‘Guy, in his late thirties, froze to death in his armchair at home. Twelfth floor of a block of council flats, with all the windows open. I guess he didn’t care if he lived or died but I can think of easier ways to end it.’

He stopped, sensing he’d strayed on to forbidden territory, and tried to fill the silence by uncorking the wine bottle he’d opened the night before. This was one of their small ceremonies: the shared glass of wine. As Laura’s condition had improved she was able to take liquids through a drinking funnel.

‘Anyway. Police have it down to suicide. Bloke had a history: depression, self-harm, the usual gloomy litany. But there’s something more there – perhaps he did do it, but I still don’t understand. He had plenty of cash, and he’d been drinking – and not alone. He’s got this mate called Joe, so perhaps they hit the bottle together.

‘I took Garry down to the allotments by the flats where the dead guy used to hang out in the summer. There’s this kind of little club there, and they meet in this shed with a stove. There was something really… exclusive about it. It wasn’t the Garrick or anything, but it was odd, like they were all there for some other reason… They wouldn’t tell me where Joe was, either, even though it was obvious they all knew him; said they’d pass on a message, but I bet they don’t. People never do.’

Dryden laughed at himself and shook his head, holding the funnel so that he could let Laura sip the wine.

‘Then I went out to Lane End again – to St Vincent’s.’ Laura was the daughter of a north London Italian Catholic family who’d run a small café. He’d shared the whole long-running saga of the orphanage with her, knowing she understood his deep-seated reservations about such institutions, and the imposition of fear and guilt which held them together.

‘The priest in charge – Father Martin – took me round the place. He’s the only one left of all the priests there in the eighties. He actually made me feel sorry for him, which is a bit of a bloody miracle in itself. Anyway, two more kids have been found so the inquiry has enough evidence to move to court. His head will roll – but I doubt he cares now; he may not even live that long. Social services will probably get the real drubbing, and the police.’

He brushed her hair then, having slipped a CD into the player attached to the COMPASS – II Trovatore.

Outside he could see grainy snow falling in the super-cooled air. The drop in temperature with nightfall reduced the flakes to pellets of lightweight hail, blown with the wind.

‘It’s too cold to snow properly,’ he said. ‘But the water-meadows have got plenty of ice on them so they may race this weekend – or sooner. Remember when we skated at Burnt Fen?’

He always paused for an answer, keeping alive the hope that one day there would be one.

‘I’ll dig the skates out just in case. I could run into town on the river – give Humph a day off. God knows what he’d do with it, mind. Probably drive round in circles.’

He switched the brush to his left hand, trying not to think, trying to concentrate on the details of his day that didn’t matter, but the central faultline of his life was inescapable. After Laura’s accident he had been able to hope that one day they would be as they had been before that winter’s night. That he would go back to his job on Fleet Street, that she could return to her career as an actress – at that point a very promising career. Childishly he had held on to this dream longer than his wife. By contrast her hopes were a compromise, a deliberate attempt to lower expectations, to hope only for the next improvement, the tiny, almost unnoticeable triumphs which made her life worth living.

Triumphs he had begun to despise. He suspected now that ‘recovery’ was a relative term, that he would never have his life back, never have his wife back, that the best they could hope for was an extended convalescence, a lifetime spent waiting beside a wheelchair or a hospital bed. And he despised himself for finding that that was not enough.

She had sensed the change as well, despite being immersed in her battle to make her brain re-establish contact with her body. He could only imagine the hours she spent dwelling on her predicament, and on theirs. One evening earlier that winter he had found a message on the COMPASS screen. He wondered how long it had taken her to compose, for it was free of the literals and errors which marked her usual attempts to operate the machine.

I CAN’T ASK YOU TO STAY FOREVER. THIS IS MY LIFE NOW. GO IF IT’S BEST. I’LL LOVE YOU ALWAYS.

He’d held her that night, crying freely at the thought she had doubted him, promising that he would always be there. And she’d been honest about her life, admitting that the long periods of silence, sometimes stretching out over days, were not always lost in a dreamlike coma. Depression, as debilitating as the coma itself, sometimes made it impossible to think, or write.

She’d asked him, then, about the life she often found unbearable:

IF I WANT YOU TO END IT PROMISE THAT YOU WILL.

He’d promised too quickly, as if to a child.

One day, when the black depression had been with her for a week, she’d told him something else.

I DONT WANT TO DIE HERE.

Which begged the question, where did she want to die?