A Lovely Way to Burn (7 page)

The Underground train dashed to a halt and the robot voice announced:
Westminster
. Stevie squeezed from the carriage, joining the stream of bodies making their way along the platform and into the corridors that led to the escalators. The station was a hundred or so years old, but the original interior had vanished beneath a monumental steel-and-concrete façade designed to remind travellers that this was a feat of engineering, a miracle to rival flesh and blood.

Stevie stepped on to one of the upward-bound escalators, aware of other bodies being ferried upwards and downwards in the vast hallway. The whoosh and rattle of the trains was still audible beyond the hum of the escalators, but otherwise the station was surprisingly quiet, as if this was a place where machines held sway and men and women held their tongues.

She imagined the noise that would fill the station if all of their thoughts became words, the racket of it. The idea felt like a hangover from her fever. Stevie gripped the moving bannister and looked up towards the exit. The angle of the stairwell was dizzying.

Then, suddenly, the hum of the machine world was fractured by shouting. Stevie looked across the rows of escalators and saw a man tumbling down the metal steps, limp-limbed and flailing. Somewhere, someone must have hit the emergency button because the staircase stalled. People reached towards him, trying to stop his progress, but the man’s body had gathered momentum. He crashed into a woman on the stairs below; she fell too, and then it seemed that a shoal of people were falling.

A couple of youths managed to leap on to the bannisters, but gravity was faster than even gym-fit commuters and other people were caught in the descent. Stevie had watched countless movie villains tumble to their deaths, but cinema hadn’t prepared her for the chaos of it, or the sound of bone on metal that seemed to rise above the shouting. Her escalator juddered to a halt and she stood, frozen, unsure of what to do. The screaming died into sobs and agitated chatter, and she heard a train rush into the station. Down below, people were gathering. Someone was crying. Someone else shouted for a doctor. And then slowly, unbelievably, the queue of people on the stairway ahead of Stevie started to move, and she moved with them, climbing out of the Underground towards the light.

She overheard a passing teenager, who might have been Italian, say, ‘He was swaying and then he fell. I saw him. It was too quick to do anything. What could I do? I was on the other staircase.’

A cockney voice answered, ‘Nah, mate, he was pushed. I saw it with my own eyes. A white man pushed him down the steps.’

‘He’s got the sickness,’ said an elderly lady. ‘That’s how it hits you. One moment you’re okay, the next you’re dead.’

‘It was gravity got him,’ the cockney youth said. ‘It never lets up for a moment.’

Then they were outside, embraced by the ever-present rumble of traffic and the stale city air that not even the river could freshen. For an instant the commuters, newly released from the world below, were distinct from the pedestrians aboveground, as if their mortality had risen to the surface with them and left its mark. Then they dispersed, and were absorbed into London’s careless anonymity, taking the memory of the falling man with them.

Stevie wove her way between the tourists who crammed the streets around Westminster, viewing the sites through the lenses of their cameras. The satchel containing the laptop banged against her thigh. An ambulance was trying to force its way through the traffic towards the Underground station, its sirens screaming. It was agonising, the sound of the sirens, its thwarted progress. She looked away, at the Thames and the looming Houses of Parliament. They seemed unreal, like a backdrop rolled out for a budget movie that needed a quick establishing shot. This was what tourists imagined when they thought of the city: Big Ben and red buses, the London Eye and bobbies with silly helmets. And it was all there waiting for them.

But did they see the rest? Stevie wondered. The rough sleepers and kettled demos, the cheap chicken fryers whose sleeping bags lay bundled in the back of the shop, the men and women hanging around King’s Cross with a kind word and the offer of a bed for the night to runaways they would soon put to work?

Maybe the tourists did see, and felt as helpless as she did. It was a globalised world after all, and there was no reason to imagine that their capital cities were any different. The screams of the people falling were still in her mind. Stevie felt a sudden urge to go back, but didn’t break her stride as she crossed Westminster Bridge. Simon had trusted her to deliver the laptop. It was the only service she could do for him now.

Ten

St Thomas’s Hospital was grey and dirty against the blue sky. The filth of the city clung to its once white façade as if drawn there by the sickness within. Stevie felt a familiar sense of dread, but she walked through the automatic doors and into the foyer.

Inside, St Thomas’s looked more like a small mall than a hospital. A queue ran all the way from the tills in the Marks & Spencer’s concession to the bunches of two-for-five-pounds roses and serviceable carnations stationed in buckets at its door. The entrance hall was busy with workers on their lunch breaks but Stevie caught glimpses of the building’s real purpose amongst the crowd.

A thin man with a stethoscope draped around his neck stood by the lifts, talking on his mobile phone. Two women in green scrubs chatted as they walked towards the exit. A policeman shook his head and laughed at something an ambulance driver had just told him. Stevie thought she could spot some relatives of patients too. Tired-looking low-wattage ghosts of themselves, hoarding their energy for those moments when they needed to dredge up a healing smile or their heart’s blood.

Stevie went to the reception desk and explained that she was looking for Mr Reah. ‘I think he’ll be in one of the children’s wards.’

The receptionist consulted her computer. Stevie stared at a poster on the wall behind the desk.

COUGHING

VOMITING

DIARRHOEA

RASH

SWOLLEN GLANDS

If you experience a combination of three

or more of these symptoms, avoid sharing

them with your friends and family.

OBSERVE GOOD HYGIENE

CATCH COUGHS IN A DISPOSABLE TISSUE

DO NOT PREPARE FOOD FOR OTHERS

WASH YOUR HANDS FREQUENTLY

STAY AT HOME

CALL 0800 669 9961

The receptionist looked up at her.

‘You’re in the wrong building. You want the private part of the hospital.’

Stevie thought she sensed disapproval in the other woman’s voice, but perhaps she was just hearing an echo of her own surprise. Simon had never mentioned that he did private work. Stevie had imagined him tending sick children regardless of their parents’ means. She covered her disappointment with a smile and asked if it would be possible to visit Joan Caniparoli.

‘I was told she was in intensive care.’ Stevie’s voice was salesgirl-bright. ‘But I think there’s a good chance she’ll be out of there by now.’

The receptionist asked her to spell Joanie’s second name and rattled it into the computer keyboard.

Her eyes met Stevie’s. ‘Are you a relative?’

‘A friend.’

‘I’m afraid Mrs Caniparoli is still in intensive care.’ This time there was sympathy in the woman’s voice. ‘That means only close relatives are allowed to visit.’

Stevie wanted to tell the woman that she saw more of Joanie than any of her relatives did, but the reception telephone buzzed. The receptionist answered it and returned her attention to her computer screen, looking for whatever the person on the other end of the line needed to know.

Stevie followed the directions to the private wing. There was a flutter of apprehension in her stomach, a quickening of the feeling she still got just before the studio clock hit the hour and they went on air. She glanced at her mobile phone and then switched it off. It was 2.45 p.m. so she should be in good time for the end of Mr Reah’s rounds. Stevie straightened her back, trying to assume the air of someone who had a right to prowl hospital corridors. If anyone asked her what she was up to, she would tell them the truth. She was delivering a laptop from the recently deceased Dr Simon Sharkey to Mr Reah. What could be more reasonable? After that she would go to intensive care and tell whatever lies she needed to, the same way Joanie would if Stevie was lying alone in a hospital bed.

She shifted her bag, transferring the weight of the computer to her other shoulder, and wondered how Joanie would look. The thought conjured a memory of Julia Sharkey’s gaunt cheekbones, the wry smile in the skull face.

‘We doctors have a way with death.’

Stevie hoped, for Joanie’s sake, that they had a way with life too.

Eleven

Stevie washed her hands with the antibacterial gel from the dispenser in the corridor and pulled at the door to the children’s ward. It refused to open. She tried pushing and then pulled again, but it stood firm against her.

‘What did you expect me to do, Simon?’ she muttered beneath her breath. ‘Use a battering ram?’

There was a security pad on the wall, similar to the one she swiped her identity card on at the television station. She thought again of Simon’s letter, his appeal to her ingenuity. But she was powerless against locks and electronic alarms.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor behind her. Stevie could tell it was a man by the confident length of his stride and the flat sound his shoes made against the floor. She took a step backwards, fished out the small handbag she had slipped into her satchel with the laptop and started rummaging in it. When the stranger was almost upon her, she tipped the bag’s contents, a jumble of receipts, pens, card wallet, purse and cosmetics, on to the floor.

‘Damn.’ The case of an Yves Saint Laurent lipstick had cracked when it hit the ground, and her curse wasn’t entirely an act. Stevie crouched and started gathering up the muddle of stuff. ‘I’m sorry.’ She had hoped the newcomer might bend and help her pick up the spilled contents, but she could feel him standing behind her. Stevie glanced up and saw a tall, broad-shouldered man in a white coat staring down at her. His brown eyes were shielded by glasses, but his stiff posture was as impatient as a clicking finger.

‘I’m sorry.’ She got to her feet, apologising again. ‘You’re in a hurry.’ Stevie read the name card pinned to his lapel as she stood up:
Dr Ahumibe
. The doctor’s expression was stern, but his eyes did a quick flit, down, then up her body. Stevie smiled, forcing herself not to show too many teeth. Face-to-face selling required more subtlety than the brash, late-night TV pitches she was used to giving. ‘Can you tell me where to find Mr Reah, please? I was meant to meet him after his rounds, but I seem to have lost my bearings.’

Dr Ahumibe closed his eyes for a second. His expression was tight, like that of a man who knew he was reaching the end of his tether, but was determined to stay in control.

‘I’m sorry,’ Stevie said again. ‘It’s a big hospital, easy to get lost.’

The doctor opened his eyes. He swiped the door and ushered her into the ward.

‘Are you a close colleague of Mr Reah?’ His voice was deep and upper class, touched with a hint of an accent she couldn’t quite identify.

‘No.’ The question startled her.

‘A friend?’

‘We haven’t met before.’

‘That’s good.’ He took off his glasses and dragged a hand across his face. Stevie’s calves felt tight, the way they did after a long run, and some instinct told her to turn around and walk away, but she stayed where she was. The doctor replaced his glasses. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mr Reah is dead.’

‘Dead?’ Stevie repeated the word, as if saying it would make death more real. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday.’

The edges of the ward seemed to sharpen. She saw the grey floor, the doors to the private patients’ rooms, the nurses’ station midway down the corridor, everything sure and distinct.

‘Was it an accident?’

‘No, it wasn’t an accident. But it was sudden.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll appreciate we’re working at full capacity. The ward is two doctors down and the hospital as a whole is facing a massive challenge. Perhaps I can point you towards someone else who can help you?’

Stevie took a step backwards. The smell of the hospital was in her nostrils; the scent of her illness filtered through a chemical wash, harsh and sweet.

‘No, it’s fine, thanks.’

She turned to go but there must have been something furtive about the way she moved, because the doctor gripped her by the wrist, keeping her there.

‘Are you a journalist?’

Stevie wondered why the presence of a journalist would spook him. She forced another smile. ‘No.’ There was a move she had learnt in self-defence classes when she was a student – a chop to the attacker’s forearm, designed to hit a nerve and release his grasp – but force was always the last resort. She lowered her voice and whispered, ‘Let go of my arm. You’re hurting me.’

‘It’s not acceptable for people like you to go wandering around in search of an angle or a scoop, or whatever it is you call it.’ The doctor kept his voice low, but his words were like bullets. ‘This is a hospital. The children on this ward are extremely sick. Some of them are dying. Is that a big enough story for you?’