Six

 

Harold Pierce brushed away an imaginary speck of dust from the sleeve of his white overall and swallowed hard. He was staring at the floor of the lift as it descended, listening to the steady drone as it headed for the next floor. On the other side of the cramped enclosure stood Winston Greaves. He glanced across at Harold, his eyes straying to the disfiguring scar which covered half of his companion’s face. He looked at the burn with the same hypnotic fascination as a child stares at something unusual and he felt all the more self-conscious because of this. He tried to look away but couldn’t. Only when Harold raised his head to smile sheepishly did Greaves suddenly find the ability to avert his eyes.

Harold knew that the other porter was looking at him. Just as he had felt the stares and sometimes heard the jibes of others, so many times before. He could understand their fascination, even revulsion, with his own disfigurement but their prolonged stares nevertheless still made him feel awkward.

For his own part, Greaves had only succeeded by a monumental effort of will from openly expressing his horror at the sight of Harold’s face. He told himself that, in time, he would come to accept it but, at the moment, he still found his attention drawn to the red and black mess. His eyes fastened like magnets to the vision of tissue destruction. And yet, he had been a hospital porter for over fifteen years, he had seen many appalling sights during his working life. The road crash victims (one of whom, he remembered, had been brought in DOA after taking a dive through his wind-screen – when Greaves and another man had lifted the body from the gurney on which it lay, the head had dropped off, so bad were the lacerations to the man’s neck), the injured children, other burn victims, casualties of modern day living such as the victims of muggings. The youth who had staggered into casualty trying to push his intestines back through a knife wound which he’d sustained in a gang fight. The woman who had been so badly beaten by her husband that, not only had her skull been fractured, part of her brain had been exposed. The child with the severed hand, a legacy of playing near farm machinery. The old lady with a cut on her hip which had been left unattended for so long there were actually maggots writhing in the wound.

The list was endless.

Small wonder then that Greaves’s black, wiry hair was shot through with streaks of grey. They looked all the more incongruous against his black skin. He was a small man with large forearms and huge hands which seemed quite disproportionate to the size of his body. He was a hard worker and good at his job which was probably the reason, he thought, why he’d been saddled with the task of showing Harold the ropes.

For the first week, until he became accustomed to hospital procedure and proficient in his duties, Harold was to be under almost constant supervision by Greaves. Now he looked across at his black companion and smiled again, conscious of his scar but trying not to hide it. Greaves smiled back at him and it reminded Harold of a piano keyboard. The black man’s teeth were dazzling. It looked as if someone had stuck several lumps of porcelain into his mouth. His eyes however, were rheumy and bloodshot but nevertheless there was a warmth in that smile and in those sad eyes which Harold responded to.

He had arrived at Fairvale Hospital just the day before. Phil Coot had driven him there from the asylum and helped him unpack his meagre belongings, moving them into the small hut-like dwelling which was to be his new home. The small building stood close by the perimeter fence which surrounded the hospital grounds, about 400 yards from the central block, sheltered by clumps of beech and elder.

Fairvale itself consisted of three main buildings. The central block contained most of the twelve wards and rose more than eighty feet into the air, each storey bore an A and B ward, both able to maintain over sixty patients. The children’s wing was attached to the ground floor part of the hospital and connected to it by a long corridor, thus it was effectively classified as a thirteenth ward. Also separate from the main building was an occupational therapy unit where a small but dedicated staff helped the older patients, and those recovering from debilitating illnesses, to regain some of the basic skills which they had possessed before being admitted. It was here that the previously simple task of making a cup of tea now seemed like the twelfth labour of Hercules. Also attached to this wing was a small gymnasium where patients with heart complaints were encouraged to undergo mild exercise and those with broken legs or arms underwent rigorous tests to regain the proper use of their damaged limbs. Also separate from the main building, accessible only by a brief walk across the car park, were the red brick buildings of the nurses’ quarters.

Fairvale, standing as it did about a mile from the centre of Exham, served an area of about thirty square miles. It was the only hospital within that radius to offer emergency care and its turnover of patients was large. It also boasted a dazzling array of medical paraphernalia, including a cancer scanner and many other modern devices. Its X-Ray, EEG, ECG, and Pathology departments ensured that the turnover of out-patients matched, if not exceeded, the number of those confined. But the Pathology department which the out-patients saw was the one which took blood samples and urine samples. The real work of Fairvale’s team of pathologists took place in the basement of the main building. Here, in four separate labs, each containing three stainless steel slabs and a work-top, bodies were examined and dissected. Pieces of tissue were pored over. Moles, growths, even skin-tags were examined and put through the same rigorous tests. There were no secrets to be kept in the pathology labs, detailed notes were made on each specimen be it a full scale post-mortem or the examination of a lump of benign cells. The filing cabinets which held this information stretched the full length of two of the large rooms. Each one was more than twenty feet wide, double that in length. Inside the labs, cold white light poured down from the banks of fluorescents set into the ceilings but, outside, in the wide corridor which led from the lift to the labs, it seemed to be forbiddingly dark. A perpetual twilight of dim lights which reflected a dull yellow glow off the polished floor and walls.

Harold looked up as the lift came to a halt and saw that the line of numbers and letters above the lift entrance were now dark. Just the “B” flared in the gloom. Winston Greaves ushered him out into the corridor which led towards the pathology labs and Harold felt a curious chill run through him. He shivered.

“It’s always cold down here,” Greaves told him. “The labs are kept at fifty-five degrees. Otherwise, things start to smell.” He smiled, his teeth looking yellow in the dim light.

Harold nodded and walked along beside him, his skin rising into goose-pimples as they neared the door of the nearest lab. A sign greeted them defiantly:

 

NO ENTRY BY UNAUTHORISED STAFF

 

“That includes you at the moment,” said Greaves, smiling at Harold. He told him to wait then he himself knocked and, after a moment or two, heard a voice telling him to enter which he duly did, closing the door behind him. Harold was left alone. He stood still for long moments, wrinkling his nose at the odour which came from inside the lab. It wasn’t the familiar antiseptic smell to which he’d become accustomed, it was something more pungent, more unpleasant. It was in fact, formaldehyde. He dug his hands into the pockets of his overall and began pacing up and down before the door, looking around him. The labs seemed to be silent, if anyone was working inside there, they certainly weren’t making any noise. Harold walked past the door of first one then two. He came to a bend in the corridor.

Straight ahead of him, another twenty feet further down a shorter corridor, was a plain wooden door. Harold advanced towards it and stood silently before the entry way. There were no signs on this door telling him to keep out and, as he stood there, he could hear no sound coming from inside. Except. . .

He took a step closer.

There was a low rumbling sound coming from inside the room, punctuated every now and then by what sounded like extremely loud asthmatic breathing.

He put his hand on the knob and turned it.

The door was unlocked and Harold walked inside.

The heat hit him in a palpable wave and he recoiled. For long seconds he struggled to adjust to his new surroundings; then, as he looked around he saw just how large the room really was. It must have been a good forty feet square, the ceiling rising high above him. The paintwork which had once been white, was dirty and blackened in places and, directly ahead of him, over a bare floor, lay a huge metal boiler. A chimney thrust up from it, disappearing through the ceiling. It was the boiler that was rumbling but now Harold noticed another sound. A loud humming and, turning to his left he saw what he took to be a generator. It was covered by a profusion of dials, switches and gauges but Harold’s attention was quickly diverted away from the generator back to the boiler and its adjacent furnace. The heavy iron door was firmly closed and the metal looked rusty. The wall above it was blackened and scorched and there was a faint odour of burning material in the air. Harold shuddered, felt his hands beginning to shake, his body trembling slightly. He sucked in a slow breath which rattled in his throat and when he tried to swallow he found it difficult.

There were half a dozen trolleys in one corner of the room, each piled high with linen and as Harold took a step closer towards the strange bundles he coughed at the vile stench which emanated from them. He recognized them as sheets; some soiled with excrement, some stained dark with dried blood or vomit.

A bead of perspiration formed on his forehead and he wiped it away with a shaking hand as he moved closer towards the door of the furnace, the heat growing more powerful as he did so. He saw a pair of thick gloves lying on a ledge close to the tightly sealed door, beside them a set of long tongs and a wrench. Coal was piled in countless buckets nearby, some of it having spilled over onto the floor, its black dust swirling in the hot air.

Harold was trembling uncontrollably now and, as he strained his ears, he could actually hear the sound of the roaring flames from within.

A nightmare vision of his mother flashed into his mind. She was on fire, the skin peeling from her face and arms as the flames devoured her and she was holding something in those blazing arms. It was Harold’s baby brother. The child was little more than a ball of flame, one stubby, blackened arm reaching out from the searing fire-ball which consumed it.

Harold closed his eyes fight, trying to force the image from his mind. He took a step back, away from the furnace.

“Harold.”

He almost shouted aloud when he heard the voice behind him. He spun round, his face flushed, his breath coming in short gasps.

Winston Greaves stood in the doorway looking at him.

“Are you all right?” he asked, seeing his companion’s obvious distress.

Harold nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wandered off. I found this room.”

Greaves nodded.

“The furnace,” he said. “The boiler heats some parts of the hospital and that,” he motioned to the generator, “that’s for auxiliary power, in case we get any power failures or anything, the system is wired so that the emergency generator switches on straight away.”

“What about those?” said Harold, motioning to the piles of reeking laundry.

“Some of it is kept here until the laundry department can take it away,” Greaves told him. “Some of it is so bad, we just have to burn it.” The black man turned and motioned Harold out of the room, closing the door behind him. They made their way back down the corridor, back to the lift. “I would have showed you that room anyway,” said Greaves. “That was what I came down here for in the first place. You and I have got some work to do in there this afternoon.”

Harold swallowed hard but didn’t speak. He gently, almost unconciously, touched the scarred side of his face and remembered the awful cloying heat inside the furnace room, the terrifying vision of his mother and brother flashing briefly into his mind once more. Greaves had told him they had work to do in there. What sort of work? His mind was spinning.

As they waited for the lift to descend, Harold felt the perspiration clinging to his back.

For some unfathomable reason he felt terribly afraid.

 

For the remainder of that first morning, Greaves took Harold on a conducted tour of the hospital, telling him what his duties would be, showing him where things were kept, introducing him to other members of staff all but a couple of whom managed to disguise their revulsion at the sight of Harold’s scarred face. Greaves chattered good-naturedly about all sorts of things, the weather, hospital work, football, politics, and Harold listened to him. Or at least he gave the impression that he was listening. His mind was elsewhere, more specifically on just what he and Greaves had to do in the furnace room that coming afternoon.

The two of them went along to the hospital canteen at about one fifteen and ate lunch. Harold managed a couple of sausages but merely prodded the rest of his dinner with his knife and fork. Greaves, on the other hand, between mouthfuls of fish and chips continued to babble happily to his new companion. But, gradually, the extent of Harold’s worry filtered through to the other porter.

“What’s wrong, Harold?” he asked, sipping at a large mug of tea.

Harold shrugged and looked around him. The canteen was full of people, nurses, porters, doctors, all sitting around tables eating and chatting. The steady drone of conversation reminded him of the hum of the generator.

“Is it about the furnace?” Greaves asked, cautiously.

“I’m frightened of fire,” said Harold, flatly.

Greaves studied his companion over the lip of his mug.

“I’m sorry to ask but. . .” He struggled to find the words. “Your face. Was that . . . is it a burn?”

Harold nodded.

“I’ve had it since I was fourteen,” he said but didn’t continue. The rest was knowledge for him alone. He tried to smile and, indeed, his tone lightened somewhat. “I suppose I’ll get over my fear sooner or later.”

Greaves nodded, benignly and took another hefty swallow of tea. The two men sat and talked and, this time Harold found himself contributing to the conversation instead of merely acting as listener. The images of the morning began to recede somewhat. He relaxed, telling himself that he was tense. After all, it was his first day at work. His first ever day at work. Greaves asked him, coyly, about the asylum but Harold answered his questions candidly not wishing to hide anything. He felt no shame about having spent over thirty-five years in a mental home. No, his shame was reserved for that particular subject which Greaves had touched on briefly just moments before. Fortunately the coloured porter didn’t ask how Harold had come to be in a mental home since he was fourteen and he himself certainly didn’t volunteer the information.

Greaves finally finished his meal and pushed the plate away from him, downing what was left in his mug as well. He patted his stomach appreciatively and smiled at Harold who returned the gesture with more assurance. He looked around him and saw a group of nurses sitting nearby. They were all in their early twenties, pretty girls tending towards plumpness as is the habit of their profession. Harold found himself captivated. One of them, the youngest of the group, her brown hair tucked up beneath her white cap, noticed his obvious interest and smiled at him. Harold smiled, lowering his gaze, one hand reaching up to cover the scarred side of his face in a gesture which had become all too familiar for him. He coloured and turn back to face Greaves who was smiling.

“Are you married?” Harold asked him.

“Yes,” his colleague told him.

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Linda. We’ve been married for twenty years.”

Harold nodded. He wondered what it was like to be married. What was it like to have someone who cared for you, who needed you? To be wanted, loved – it must be a wonderful feeling. He had loved his mother but it had been so long ago he’d forgotten what the emotion felt like. All that was left inside him now was a hole. A kind of emotional dustbin filled only with guilt and want. He needed someone but was equally resigned to the fact that he would end his life alone, dying with only his memories and his shame for company. He swallowed hard.

Greaves got to his feet and tapped the table top.

“Well, we’d better get on,” he said. “I think it’s about time you and I did some work.”

Harold nodded and followed his companion out of the canteen, leaving the sounds of joyful chatter behind, moving out once more into the hushed corridors of the hospital.

 

He worked hard that afternoon. On the third floor landing between Wards 3A and 3B, Harold swept and polished the lino until it shone. He muttered to himself when visitors walked over his handiwork in their muddy shoes, for it was raining outside, but no sooner had they passed than he was scrubbing away again.

It was approaching 3.15 p.m. when Winston Greaves arrived. Harold stopped what he was doing, put the cleaning materials away neatly in the cupboard indicated by Greaves then followed his coloured companion into the lift. The senior porter punched a button and the car began its descent towards the basement.

Harold felt a chill filling him, an unexplainable foreboding which seemed to intensify as they drew nearer the basement.

The lift bumped to a halt and the doors slid open. Both men walked out, immediately assailed by the cold. They walked to the end of the corridor to one of the labs, outside which stood a gurney. Whatever was on the trolley was hidden beneath a white plastic sheet. Hanging from one corner were two aprons. Greaves handed one to Harold and told him to put it on which he did, repeating the procedure with a pair of thin rubber gloves that the porter handed him. Suitably decked out for their task, the two men headed left, pushing the gurney towards the room which housed the furnace.

As he opened the door, Harold once again felt the heat, smelled the cloying stench of the coal dust. He saw the black particles swirling in the warm air. The piles of filthy linen had been disturbed, one or two of them removed.

“We’ll have to burn what’s left as well,” said Greaves, indicating the reeking material. He pushed the trolley close to the furnace and, as Harold watched, he slipped on the pair of thick gloves which lay on the ledge before the rumbling boiler, pulling them over his rubber ones. That done, he reached for the wrench and used it to knock the latch on the furnace door up. Immediately the rusty iron door swung open. A blast of searing air swept out, causing the men to gasp for breath. Harold stood transfixed, gazing into the blazing maw. White and yellow flames danced frenziedly inside the furnace which yawned open like the mouth of a dragon. Like the entrance to hell, thought Harold.

“Fetch those sheets,” said Greaves. “We’ll do those first.”

Harold paused before the roaring flames, seemingly hypnotized by the patterns they weaved as they fluttered before him. A low roar issued forth from the blazing hole. Even standing six feet away, the heat stung him and he took a step back.

“Harold,” said Greaves, more forcefully. “The sheets.”

He seemed to come out of his trance, nodded and crossed to the corner of the room, gathering up as many of the soiled sheets as he could carry. The stench was appalling and his head swam. A piece of rotted excrement squashed against his apron and he winced, trying to hold his breath as he struggled back to the waiting furnace. Greaves took them from him and began pushing them into the flames on the end of a large poker. The ferocity of the fire hardly diminished and even sheets damp with urine and blood were quickly engulfed by the furious fire. Dark smoke billowed momentarily from the gaping mouth of the furnace, bringing with it acrid fumes which made both men cough.

“I hate this job,” gasped Greaves, pushing more of the filthy material into the fire.

Harold returned with the last of the faecal linen and together they shoved it into the furnace, watching as it was consumed.

“We’ll clean those trolleys up later,” said Greaves, motioning to the reeking gurneys in the corner of the room.

Harold nodded blankly, his eyes now turning to the trolley before them and its blanketed offerings. He watched as Greaves took hold of the blanket and pulled it free, exposing what lay beneath.

Harold moaned aloud and stepped back, eyes rivetted to the trolley. His one good eye bulged in its socket, the glass one regarded all proceedings impassively. He clenched his teeth together, felt the hot bile gushing up from his stomach, fought to control the spasms which racked his insides. The veins at either temple throbbed wildly and his body shook.

The foetus was in a receiver, dark liquid puddled around it. It was a little over six inches long, its head bulbous, its eyes black and sightless. It had been cleaned up a little after coming from pathology but not enough to disguise the damage done to it. The umbilicus was little more than a purple knot, gouts of thick yellowish fluid mingling with the blood that oozed from it. Its tiny mouth was open. There was more blood around the head which looked soft, the fontanelles not having sealed yet. The entire organism looked jellied, shrunken, threatening to dissolve when touched.

Harold backed off another step watched by Greaves.

“Not a pretty sight is it?” he said, apparently unperturbed. But then why should he be? He’d done this sort of thing often enough before. Harold gagged, put both hands on the trolley to steady himself and stared down at the foetus, his heart thudding madly against his ribs. He watched as Greaves picked up a pair of forceps, large stainless steel ones, from the trolley beside the receiver. Then, he picked the occupant of the tray up by the head, having to readjust his grip when the body nearly fell out. A foul-smelling mixture of blood, pus and chemicals dripped from the tiny body and Greaves wrinkled his nose slightly. Then, almost with disgust, he cast the foetus into the furnace. Immediately the body was consumed and there were a series of loud pops and hisses as the tiny shape was devoured by the flames.

Harold watched, mesmerized.

“Gordon,” he whispered, watching the tiny foetus disappear, reduced in seconds to ashes.

He thought of his brother.

“Gordon,” he whimpered again.

But, this time there was no screaming. His mother didn’t dash in and try to drag the small creature from the roaring inferno. There was nothing this time. Just the terrible feeling inside himself. A cold shiver, as if someone had gently run a carving knife into his genitals and torn it upward to his breastbone. He felt as if he’d been gutted.

Greaves pushed the furnace door shut and hammered the latch back into place with the wrench then he turned to look at Harold who was still swaying uncertainly. For a moment, the senior porter thought his companion was going to faint.

“Are you all right?” he said.

Harold gripped the edge of the gurney and nodded almost imperceptibly.

“You’ll get used to it,” Greaves told him, trying to inject some compassion into his voice.

Harold was confused. He looked imploringly at Greaves as if wanting him to elaborate on the statement.

 “That’s how all the abortions are disposed of,” the coloured porter told him. “We get through above five a month.”

“Will I have to do this?” said Harold.

“Eventually.”

The two of them stood there for long moments, neither one speaking, only the roaring of the flames from inside the furnace and the persistent hum of the generator interrupting the silence.

Harold drew a shaking hand through his hair. His face was bathed in perspiration and he was finding it difficult to swallow, as if the furnace had sucked in all the air from the room. He was suddenly anxious to be out of this place, back into the chill of the corridors. Away from the furnace. Away from the dragon’s mouth that devoured children. Away from the memories. But he knew that they were one thing that would always pursue him. No matter where he ran or hid they would always find him because they were always inside him and now, as he thought about that tiny body being incinerated, his mind flashed back to another body burning, to another time. To 1946. To Gordon.

He turned and blundered out of the room, leaning against the wall, panting as he waited for Greaves to join him. The black man closed the door behind them, sealing off the sounds of the generator and the furnace.

He touched Harold gently on the shoulder, urging him to follow.

“Come on,” he said, softly and Harold walked beside him, brushing one solitary tear from the corner of his eye.

And Greaves’s words echoed in his mind:

“You’ll get used to it.”