Snowleg (22 page)

On their last night together, she put on a cantata composed by Bach in 1727 of which only this recording existed. She had bought it at considerable effort and expense from a collector in Wedding. She was convinced that this was the piece he was looking for. He shook his head.

In the morning she unhooked her duffel coat for the short walk to the rehearsal room. She did up the fake bone buttons and picked her violin case off the floor. Then she turned off the light and waited for him in the doorway. “I'm tired of this. Time to go. Now.”

He had been on his trip. Now he had to unpack his bags.

“There's no-one,” he told Bettina. Which had the virtue, by then, of being true. But after his experience with the musician he had sobered up. He needed to be accountable. His final exams were in a few months and he was scared.

He got out of bed and walked over to the window and looked down at Sierichstraße. It was midday and the traffic was thinning, about to change direction.

“Peter?” said Bettina, chewing on the word as if her head were still in his groin. Pericles, hearing her tone, cocked his head. “Please answer me this. It's all I want to know.” She took a pillbox from her pocket, her face hardening, her Omen jacket the colour of the car seat where Kirsten had spread her long and Lycra'd legs for him. “Why have you drifted away? You weren't like that at the start, when I asked you back to my room for a whisky and you recited that poem about the Death of Arthur. I'd have followed you to the end of the earth. The last cliff. And then you became distracted. Why?”

She wanted to know. Genuinely.

“I don't know,” he said, very tired. His chin pointing down to the street.

She arranged the pills for her attention-deficit syndrome and swallowed one. “Down, Pericles.” Then, because he stood at the window and stared at a girl in a samphire-green coat with a fur trim, “Are you sure you'd rather not be with someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Here, come with me.”

She put on her man's paisley dressing gown and led the way up the spiral staircase.

At last the sculpture was ready. She needed his opinion.

He said nothing, not wishing to hurt her feelings. Initially, he had been amused by her work because of its novelty. On fentanyl he could play the role and provide a suitable reaction. Sober, he found to his dismay that he had nothing to say.

“It's absolutely wonderful.”

She looked at him sharp-eyed. He had seen her give critics the same expression. “That is the most vacuous reaction I've ever heard. That's just English rubbish.”

“Let me get you a coffee.”

But she was on to him. “‘It's wonderful, it's riveting.' Come on, what do you really think?”

With great reluctance, his eyes settled on the naked figure sculpted from used bandages and already sold to a medical institution in Berlin for a substantial sum. “Listen, I can't do art criticism to order. It's hard enough to transplant a liver.”

“What did you say to me? ‘I want to be able to talk and endure with you.'”

“I can't handle this now.”

“What does that mean? Will you be able to handle it tomorrow? I thought you'd signed on for a lifetime of handling it.”

“Stop this, Bettina. I have to walk Gus.”

Her hand slipped into his pocket. But she wasn't after his penis. “You're not walking anywhere,” grabbing his key ring, “until you tell me what you really think of it.”

More than the traffic had changed. Suddenly, she was no longer confrontational. “I need to know, Peter,” in a surprising soft voice.

He told her and her eyes reddened. She smiled wanly as if crushed and then looked away to her sculpture. But it was a wound that passed. He saw before his eyes the blood dry, the clot form, the white skin unblemished. From the moment of impact to the healing, no more than a few seconds.

“Here,” giving back his keys.

“Let me make that coffee,” he said.

She accepted the cup and stared down at the Alster.

“You're like my uncle,” she blurted suddenly, between hot sips, “who would weep tears of love and then hit me.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

H
E WAS SOBER FOR
another two weeks and then a 10-year-old girl died on him.

It was a sweltering afternoon in June. All day he was booked to see children in the clinic. “For Christ's sake, you're a medical student,” the registrar would say afterwards in his defence. “You were being pulled in twenty different directions. You were busy, busy. And you were interrupted. That's why most people hate paeds. Ninety-nine per cent of the time it's clear coasting. But that 1 per cent when they do get sick, it's panic-button terror.”

In the lunch interval, he went to pour himself a cup of water and a woman bustled in with her daughter.

“She's having difficulty swallowing,” said the mother, who wore a silver trouser suit with lavender cuffs and a matching lavender scarf. “I just brought her in because she's prone to strep and I wanted to get a prescription now.”

The girl's name was Hannelore. He sat her down. She had a pale round face and thin braids of dark hair hanging to her waist. There was a hesitancy about her when he looked into her throat. An anxious expression in her eyes.

The mother sat observing. She was flustered and distracted and fanned herself in the heat. She was throwing a dinner party and was impatient to take the prescription and leave. She still had to buy ice and flowers and was running late for a hair appointment.

He couldn't see much. “I think it's just a viral pharyngitis. But we'll take a throat swab.”

He had examined hundreds of sore throats and yet this little girl touched him. Was it something she said? The way she opened her mouth? The vaguely worried look on her face?

“I'll give you a prescription for antibiotics anyway,” he told the mother. “Don't fill it in till we get a call from the lab. If she gets worse, please bring her back.”

He wrote out the prescription and looked again at Hannelore. There was an undercurrent to her hair. Something about it familiar.

The nurse interrupted. “The ward sister's trying to reach you. She's doing a dressing and wants you to look at it.”

“I'll be there directly.”

As Peter walked out of the room he heard Hannelore make a croupy cough like a barking dog and the thought flickered through his head, God, could it be haemophilus influenza? But already the ward sister was dragging him away and his mind was filling with the next task.

Hannelore's image pursued him through the afternoon. He remembered the chokey cough when he left at night. He was aware that he shouldn't have sent her home. Her colour wasn't good, he thought, she was a bit too silent. I didn't follow up in the way I meant to. Uneasy, he stopped the car and from a telephone kiosk contacted the hospital for her address and telephone number.

He rang Hannelore's home. No answer. He knew the address – he sometimes bought fish in the same street – and drove there. “Doctors don't usually do that. And a medical student never,” the registrar would say. “Really, you have nothing to blame yourself for. As I always say, we're more lucky than good.”

In the leopard light of a summer dusk he turned into a smart drive in Eimsbüttel. Cars on the gravel. The evening humid. The curtains still drawn. He loosened his tie and crunched towards the house. The mother, in a green organdy dress and holding a plate, flitted between tall open windows. The guests stood around. A bald man in a dark blue suit accepted one of her cocktail dainties.

He thought, pressing the brass buzzer: This is why she had to hurry Hannelore away.

After a while the door opened. She didn't recognise him at first.

“How's Hannelore doing?” he asked.

“She's in her room. Why?”

He rushed upstairs.

She was sitting forward on her bed, drooling, scared, trying to breathe. She couldn't swallow her saliva. Couldn't call for help. Hungry for air, she fixed him with round widened eyes. Her hair tangled. The colour wiped from her face. From her mouth a fluttering moan.

Right away he could picture it. A swollen red ball like a large cherry blocking her trachea. But he couldn't take out his spatula and look down her throat – it might kill her instantly. There was a Biro on the bedside table and it raced through his head to slit her throat and stick the Biro through to allow in air. But he was too junior. Too scared. This wasn't the moment to perform his first trach.

He carried her, lamblike, downstairs and into the drawing room.

He heard the intake of breath. Was aware of the mother running towards him. His sharp voice warning: “Don't touch her!” He ordered the mother to open the front door and then the door of his car. “I want you to put this child carefully on your lap and hold her.”

He drove to the hospital, the girl sucking the air beside him in deep stridorous gasps.

They paged Anaesthesia as soon as they saw her. They called Ear, Nose and Throat and senior people took over. He followed her into the resuscitation room. He was allowed to watch because he had to learn.

The nurse calmed her and speedily and gingerly attached a heart monitor. The doctor tried to intubate her, but the swelling of her larynx obstructed the airway and he couldn't get the tube past. He yanked back her pigtails and palpated her neck and made an incision. Jelly-like clots of blood welled up as he stuck in the tube. The nurse noted that the girl's lips had gone purple. “I can't find a pulse.”

Afterwards, the doctor cursed the heat. A colder night would have constricted the blood vessels, he said. Her epiglottis would have shrunk just enough so she could breathe. Peter, half-listening, looked at Hannelore and thought, Why didn't I do the trach in the bedroom?

The doctor had another call. He started to tell the nurse to go and inform the mother.

“That's your job, I'm afraid,” said the nurse.

“I'll go,” said Peter.

He tightened his tie and washed his face and walked down the grey speckled floor to face the woman in her green party dress. Seeing Hannelore on the table, the blackberry undercurrent to her hair, the innocent face, he realised of whom she reminded him.

Remorse. The bird that never settles.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

H
ANNELORE'S DEATH AFFECTED HIM
like no other patient's.

He told Bettina: “I keep thinking of what the doctor said. ‘Had it been cold outside, she'd be alive.'”

“Want some of this? It will help.” Bettina nodded at her handheld mirror. A gunpowder trail of white.

“No, no, no.”

In the following weeks he existed as a sleepwalker. He couldn't have accounted for his chronology. All he knew was that he attended her funeral in Nienstedtener Friedhof and several times visited her grave. On the bell-shaped headstone her mother had had inscribed a verse from the Book of Kings. “Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well with the child.”

In his sleep he convulsed with the spasms of the dying girl, waking from dreams in which she stood by his bed. Dark braids to her waist. Accusing eyes on his naked physique as if he were a drawing Rodney had rejected.

“Why didn't you do a trach at home?” she asked, raising a braid to expose her neck. “Or were you again too embarrassed to spoil a dinner party?” She had Snowleg's face.

“I could have made the error myself,” said his registrar, going out of his way to reassure Peter. “Concentrate on your exams. That's the best way. I expect you to pass with the highest distinction.”

For the next three weeks, as he had learned to do at St Cross, Peter submerged himself in routine. He spent his evenings, Monday to Friday, in the library. On Saturday mornings after their walk he would lock Gus in his room and bicycle to Bettina's studio.

She was working hard to complete the catalogue for her forthcoming exhibition. While she wrote, he studied. But his music that had filled her studio since January was forbidden. She was anxious to hear the news from East Germany, not his Bach CDs.

“It's incredible,” letting him in one day.

“What is?”

“What's happening in Leipzig.”

On her radio, reports spoke of protesters filling the streets of East Germany's second city and bursting into song, any song that came into their heads – before troops and trucks arrived to arrest them.

“Apparently, the Trade Fair was the incentive,” she said. “They wanted the television cameras to see them.”

In the second week of September Hungary opened its borders and Bettina summoned Peter to dinner.

It was a Thursday and he was reluctant to drag himself from his books. In a fortnight, if all went well, he would have achieved his father's ambition. But there was another reason he didn't want to accept her invitation. Bettina's demands had become so persistent of late that she sucked the air out of him. He could no longer provide her with what she most needed, which was why, he had no doubt, she turned to whatever it was she swallowed or inhaled.

“I don't think I can risk it. I have exams in four days.”

“Sweet, I insist,” said Bettina. “I really do insist.”

They got drunk and when he woke up he couldn't recall whether they had made love or not.

At 8 a.m., he put on his jersey and went to close the window. Outside, a discoloured sky, the air colder and the traffic louder. She was running late for something and he heard her rummaging through the bathroom for a contact lens. “Christ, Peter, your stuff is everywhere.”

She came out of the bathroom and flung his boxer shorts at him. “You're wearing the same underpants you were wearing last week. Surely your patients can smell this? Surely the children comment on your smell?” She said with contempt: “Don't you look at yourself in the mirror ever? Don't you have any pride at all?”