Sixteen

The neurologist came to see Lin at ten o’clock; he brought six students with him. Lin was lying on her side, with a single pillow under her head, staring at the same space outside the window where the people had congregated during the night to look in at her. As it got lighter, she had realized that her room was on the third or fourth floor, level with the roof of some lower block. There were two trees beyond that: two tall, elegantly thin limes. She had been watching their untiring movement for some time.

‘Good morning,’ said a man’s voice.

She thought it better to say nothing at all. She waited for him to come round her side of the bed, to look in her face.

He was young—perhaps not forty—and was very neat and clean. Brown hair with grey, precise-looking hands, a very charming smile.

‘My name is Mark Werth,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing along this crowd of dissolutes. I’m afraid you’re a curiosity.’

He drew up a chair and sat down.

She would have liked very much to be able to move. Instead of which, a smothering shroud of fatigue forced her to lie still. There was no conceivable way that she could lift her hand, or roll her body to another side. She was tired of the view of the trees.

‘How are you feeling?’ Werth asked.

‘Like a two-headed dog,’ she murmured.

They all laughed politely.

‘Can you tell me what day it is?’

She looked carefully at his face, wondering how many times he would come and see her and introduce himself, and ask that same question. Over and over—like those people out in the corridor, endlessly moving from room to room, searching in continual circles for the selves they had left behind.

‘The first?’ she murmured.

He crossed his legs slowly, then placed his hands, crossed also, on top of his leg. ‘The first of what?’

‘The first day. Just the first.’

‘And the month?’

She looked back to yesterday, which hung like a stone weight in her head. ‘It was April.’

He smiled. ‘That’s right. It’s still April. Do you feel that a long time has passed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me your address?’

There was a pause. ‘Ruth’s house,’ she whispered.

‘I see. Mrs Gallagher, when were you born?’

‘I was born in a thunderstorm. The lights went out.’ A small, sighing laugh escaped her. ‘My mother told me that.’

‘Do you mind if I examine you?’ Werth stood up.

Lin closed her eyes, exasperated. It was a three-dimensional puzzle of the most complicated kind, trying to find which sensation belonged to which finger, which patch of skin.

Very gently he lifted the sheet and blanket.

‘I’ve got a pin in my hand,’ he said. ‘I just want you to tell me when you feel me touch you.’

She felt the pin.

‘Good, good,’ he murmured. He came back to his previous position, and lifted her nearest hand. ‘And this?’

‘Yes,’ she responded.

‘That’s fine. And your eyes …’

He shone a light into her eyes. It was like an almost solid thing: she felt it probing on her retina. The white sheet below her hand lit up with a fretwork of blood vessels. When he had finished, he sat down again, and put his hand over hers.

‘What do you think might be wrong with you?’

She tried to understand. She felt like laughing. What might be wrong with her?

‘I’m a pain in the neck,’ she said.

‘You have a pain in your neck?’

‘No, no …’

Werth sat back, frowning.

‘Who are those people?’ she murmured.

He watched her for another second, then turned away. The ward sister came to his side; he said something to her. They both looked back at her.

‘Do you remember feeling ill this morning?’ he asked.

She said nothing.

‘Do you remember any unusual tastes, smells … sounds, perhaps, before you felt ill? Did you feel afraid, for instance?’

Lin shook her head. She raised her hand at last on its own, and was amazed to see its infinite complexity. The operation of nerve, muscle, cartilage and bone; the compacted messages leaping from one synapse to another. Her hand, and everything beyond it, including the neurologist’s face, and the faces of those alongside and behind him, were similarly detailed.

‘Do you remember any unusual tastes or sounds, Mrs Gallagher?’

As she lowered her hand, still watching its movement, she saw that it left a short-lived trail of luminescence.

‘If I’m not dead,’ she said, ‘are you?’

She closed her eyes after Werth had gone.

For a very long time she felt as if she were travelling slowly along a soft, smooth tunnel whose walls hummed with subdued light, and whose colours altered continually. Time ceased to have any significance.

She woke from this dream with a start, a sense of coldness, to see Kieran looking down at her.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ she murmured.

He looked around critically at the sparse room.

‘You look very tired,’ she said. ‘What time did your flight get in?’

He glanced down to her. ‘It doesn’t matter about me,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

To her chagrin, Lin immediately started to cry. ‘I want to go home,’ she whispered.

He smiled, bringing a chair next to her bed, and taking her hand into the clasp of his own. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he replied, as he sat down.

‘There are strange people here,’ she continued, sobbing now. ‘Strange things are happening.’

‘What kind of strange things?’

‘People coming in the middle of the night—ordinary people, not nurses—and talking to me … Then they vanish …’

‘Coming in here, into this room?’ he echoed, frowning. ‘But this is a private ward.’

‘And I keep hearing and seeing …’ Her voice trailed away. He saw that her gaze was now fixed on their linked hands, and an expression of horror was dawning in her face.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

The horror became fully fledged, vivid and all-encompassing, as he continued to watch Lin’s expression. Her mouth dropped open a little, her eyes rounded in shock; what little colour had been in her face rapidly drained from it. Kieran squeezed her hand harder by way of reassurance. Her look flew from their hands up to his face—where her eyes ranged over him as if she were reading some terrible message in his features. Then, she pulled her hand away with a little moan of despair.

‘What is it?’ he repeated. ‘What?’

‘My God,’ she murmured. ‘No, no …’ She squeezed her eyes shut, and tears edged from under her lids and ran down her face.

‘Lin,’ he said, genuinely disturbed now. ‘Lin, talk to me.’ Kieran leaned forward in an instinctive reaction, to kiss her face, but her response was sudden and violent. She opened her eyes and turned her head away and, with a fumbling struggle, pushed her hands under the sheet.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t touch me.’

He sat back as if he had been stung. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

She looked in misery away from him, to the far wall.

‘Because I don’t want to hear how you feel,’ she whispered.