Alchemist (9 page)

Alan Johnson stood watching his wife stretched out on the metal table in the cramped Casualty resuscitation room, surrounded by emergency paraphernalia and figures in green surgical scrubs – attaching lines, hooking up tubes, adjusting monitors.

He had married relatively late, at thirty-seven, largely due to his shyness with the opposite sex. A slightly built man of old-fashioned
values, he worked as a junior accountant in an engineering firm and had met Sarah at Bible study at their local church. She was a quiet, gentle girl, who had worked as a book-keeper with a pharmaceutical research laboratory until five months into her pregnancy when she'd become too unwell. She had a straight bob of light brown hair which she normally kept immaculately neat, and which was in keeping with her shy demeanour. Her screams were as out of character as the tangled hair matted and plastered to her face. His heart heaved as he watched a nurse standing over her, holding an oxygen mask to her face; they had tried to get an endotracheal tube down but all her muscles had gone into spasm, rejecting everything, as if her body was trying with every ounce of remaining strength to expel the baby.

He squeezed his wife's cold, sticky hand, but there was no response. He tried again, looked pleadingly at her eyes for some sign but they were closed. He stared wildly around the room: at the anaesthetist who was busy changing a bag on to a drip stand; at the obstetrician who was bleary-eyed from being dragged out of bed at three in the morning.

‘Is she going to be all right?'

Experienced grey eyes stared back at him from above the mask. The voice was deep and soft, with a reassuring tone to it, but could offer little to go on now. A finger pointed to the jagged orange graph-line on the foetal heart-trace monitor. ‘Mr Johnson, that's showing us the baby is hyperactive, with prolonged episodes of bradycardia. The heart rate is consistently below eighty, and the baby is suffering severe foetal distress.' A hesitation. ‘We're going to have to do a Caesarean if we want to try to save the baby, but there's a real possibility your wife might not survive the anaesthetic; she's extremely weak. I'm afraid you are going to have to make the decision.'

‘Decision?' Alan Johnson echoed, barely comprehending. He questioned the obstetrician's calm eyes, and his voice began trembling. ‘Wh-what d-do you – you advise?'

The obstetrician broke it to him as gently as he could. ‘Mr Johnson, I don't think your wife has any chance of surviving unless we operate; the baby will kill her if this goes on. There is
a chance if we operate that she will live – and that the baby will also.'

Alan Johnson wrung his hands. Slowly he nodded. ‘Go ahead, please, you'd better go ahead.'

They allowed him into the operating theatre and he stood at the rear, in a gown, mask and white clogs, beside the anaesthetics machine, his eyes switching from his wife's motionless face to the dials of the monitors. He was thinking of the cot in the small upstairs room of their home, with the yellow walls and blue skirting board that he'd painted himself, and the paper frieze of nursery rhymes that he and Sarah had put up together … the pram, and the toys and clothes they had bought although they had not known whether it would be a boy or a girl.

Until the past few months their marriage had been utter bliss. He had never felt so happy in all his life. He should have realized, he knew, that there was a price to pay. God never gave without asking for something in return, although sometimes it was hard to understand the reasons behind His requests. But God was always right, and they knew that whatever pain He put them through, He loved them both as dearly as they did Him.

God had tested them for the first three years of their marriage by not permitting Sarah to get pregnant, in spite of their regular and passionate love-making. They understood the value of this test was to make them realize that human life could not be taken for granted, nor could the right to create it. Dr Humphreys had prescribed a course of a fertility drug called Maternox, and within three months of starting to take it, Sarah had fallen pregnant.

Alan could remember the joy as they had sat together in Dr Humphreys' small surgery and he had confirmed the news that she was indeed expecting a baby. He thought back with tears in his eyes to those early days of her pregnancy. Apart from the small growing bump, Sarah had hardly seemed affected. None of the symptoms you read about, like morning sickness or strange food crazes. Then she had lost colour from her face and suddenly started feeling very tired, drained of energy. Anaemia, the doctor had told them, nothing to worry
about; he had prescribed a course of vitamin supplements and for a while afterwards she had seemed fine.

Fine until she had learned the company she was working for was being taken over and rumours were rife that there would be redundancies. A week later the first attack of the rash had struck. Just a small, localized reaction on the right-hand side of her chest and over the top of her shoulder, which Dr Humphreys had diagnosed as shingles, brought on by the stress of fearing about her job. But even he had been surprised how quickly it had faded.

It was a few weeks later that she had complained of the first headache; he remembered her lying in bed, clamping her skull between her hands and fighting back tears. Then the nausea and the vomiting. Dr Humphreys had become alarmed. For a month she had been able to hold down very little food and he had suggested she should be admitted to hospital. But Sarah was an independent creature and had not wanted that.

So Alan had taken time off work to look after her, nursing her night and day, exhausting himself, applying ointment and damp towels to the painful rash that had returned with a vengeance in the past month. And which now lay, like burn blisters, in large swathes across her body. Dr Humphreys had had Sarah examined by a dermatologist, who suspected a virulent form of psoriasis, and had taken a biopsy for laboratory analysis. But the rash matched no known strain of psoriasis. The dermatologist's final diagnosis was that it was a symptom of an unidentified virus that had infected her. He explained that such viruses attacked at random, and there was no other cure than medical supervision, and time.

‘I've never seen a viral rash like this,' the obstetrician said quietly to Alan. ‘Have you been abroad somewhere?'

‘No one's identified it yet,' Alan Johnson said. ‘The Centre for Tropical Diseases thin –'

His voice was cut short as his wife's belly seemed suddenly to stretch in three different directions at once; for an instant the bare skin looked like molten lava bubbling in a volcano. The obstetrician stepped back to her side and the team of medics closed in around Alan's wife, blocking his view.

He still stood at the back of the small theatre, fearfully
scanning the readouts on the digital gauges. He identified the pulse monitor, watched with sickening despair as the orange waves and troughs seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. He pressed his hands together and closed his eyes, whispering quietly: ‘Please God, don't let her die, don't let my darling Sarah die, let her live, please let her live.'

Then he said the Lord's Prayer, followed by more prayers, then the Lord's Prayer again. Prayer sustained him during the next few minutes, then he swayed giddily, and had to steady himself against a tiled wall.
Can't pass out
,
not
now
,
can't
.

There was a sudden flurry around the operating table. Two orderlies had wheeled in a large box of apparatus on wheels. He heard the sharp hiss of compressed air. Then again, then a silence. He opened his eyes and the room slid past him as if he were viewing it through a train window. A hand took his arm, he heard the obstetrician's voice, gentle but weary.

‘I'm sorry, Mr Johnson.'

He looked down at his wife through tear-filled eyes. One of the nurses was already turning off the drips that had been sustaining her. Another was disconnecting the wires from a monitor. Her belly still thrashed wildly and Alan found himself having to comprehend in a single moment that his wife was dead but that their child was still alive inside her.

Then the surgeon made an incision down Sarah's navel. A band of blood followed the blade's path.

‘I –' Alan mouthed. ‘I – she's – she's –?' His voice trailed and no one noticed that he had spoken; they were all concentrating now, two nurses clamping back the cut skin, the surgeon pushing his gloved hands inside the opening, a third nurse swabbing. His view became blocked.

Then a surgically gloved hand raised into the air a tiny, wriggling creature trailing a long white cord.

Alan Johnson's spirits lifted a fraction. The creature was moving. Sarah's baby!
Their
baby. Their baby was born! God had made this bit go right!

He pushed his way through the forest of green gowns, barely registering the sudden eerie silence, not seeing the frowns above the masks.

Then he froze. Stared in disbelieving horror. At the creature. The child. His and Sarah's child.

No. Oh God, please
no
.

The tiny human shape coated in wet blood and vernix was thrashing like a hooked fish. He made himself study the head, where the face should be except there was no face; just a mass of hideously twisted and misshapen flesh; blank skin; no nose, no mouth; just one eye at an odd angle in the centre of what might be the forehead.

‘Jesus,' someone behind him said.

‘It's alive,' someone else said. ‘It's alive.'

‘Male.'

Alan stood transfixed; a cowl. He had read somewhere that babies were sometimes born with one; they would take the cowl off in a moment and it would be fine.
He
would be fine;
their son
would be fine.

The surgeon turned the baby round; its back was dark. As Alan looked closer he realized the skin of the baby's back was covered in thick matted hair.

He let out a moan. Someone caught him as his legs buckled. Two nurses helped him towards the door. He tried to walk but his legs would no longer support him. They helped him sit on a chair in the corridor. He saw a fire extinguisher and a hose reel on the wall, felt a cold draught blow on his face. A moment late the obstetrician with bloody gloved hands was standing in front of him, addressing him in a lowered voice.

‘I'm afraid the baby is terribly deformed. The little chap doesn't have a face at all. It's a version of a rare malformation caused either by an extra chromosome or possibly the deletion of a small chromosome segment. We don't have sufficient knowledge of DNA to understand the exact cause yet.' He paused for a moment. ‘It's called Cyclopism, or Cyclops Syndrome.'

‘Just a cowl. Isn't it just a cowl? Can't you remove it?'

The obstetrician shook his head slowly. ‘I'm afraid it's not a cowl. I wish it was. Cyclopism happens very occasionally and we can't pick it up from the scans. He's alive now but once we sever the umbilical cord he'll be unable to sustain himself. I
think it would be kinder to let him die rather than put him on to life support.'

Alan Johnson shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘Can't you do anything? Plastic surgery – can't you –' He was rambling, he knew, clutching at straws.

‘It would be best not to do anything,' the obstetrician said quietly but firmly.

Alan sank his face into his hands. He tried to imagine what Sarah would have wanted if she were still – still – he pictured the baby turn in the gloved hand, saw the vernix, the blood, the thick hairs on its back. A tremor shook him, then another. He looked at the surgeon helplessly pleading, beginning to weep, silently at first, then with deep gulping sobs.

London
.
Tuesday 25 October
,
1994

At eight in the morning beneath a flinty sky Conor Molloy, harassed after getting lost and taking longer than anticipated, turned his small new BMW across the traffic flow along the Euston Road. He joined one of the lines of cars crawling through the metal security gates alongside the Bendix Building, and showed his ID card to the guard who nodded him through into the car park. In spite of the early hour, it was almost full.

He climbed out of the car, casting a cursory eye over the immaculate grey paintwork. It would be several days before he needed to worry about getting it washed, he thought, mindful of the penalty that Charley Rowley had warned him about.

Rules and regulations. This place had more rules than an institution, and it seemed like every few minutes he discovered another one. He had spent most of his first day at work, yesterday, encountering and learning them whilst getting to know the geography of the building under Charley Rowley's guidance. He had not appreciated when Rowley had met him
at the airport that he was the Sectional Manager of Genetics, rather than just a mere colleague. But after only one day with him, Rowley felt even more like a colleague than a boss, and Conor fully intended to cultivate their budding friendship.

He had learnt that Bendix Schere was organized into five directorates: Production, Marketing, Research and Development (R & D), Finance and Secretariat (F & S), and Security – with a maze of sub-divisions within each. Leisure facilities consisted of a luxurious staff canteen, and a very impressively equipped health hydro in the basement, complete with personal training programmes, squash and tennis courts, and an Olympic-size pool.

Rowley had taken him to almost every floor, except for the top three which were off-limits: the forty-ninth was the Directors' enclave, and the two below, which Rowley called the Pentagon, housed the global command centre of security for the entire Bendix Schere Foundation.

Conor had been introduced to a number of heads of department, and he had privately assessed each one as to whether he thought they were loyal company people, or potential rebels like Charley Rowley. To his disappointment almost all of them struck him as zealously dedicated to the Bendix Schere ethos. With a few exceptions within his own department, Group Patents and Agreements, almost all the employees he'd met seemed to be sharply dressed males and females who greeted him with power handshakes accompanied by piercing eyeball contact, and glib phrases of welcome delivered like a foreign language learned by rote.