Saturday (32 page)

In a bliss of sex and graduate poverty, taking turns with baby Daisy as together they sleeplessly raced through a law

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degree and first law job, and the early years of neurosurgery. He remembers himself after a thirty-hour shift, carrying his bicycle four floors up a cement stairwell towards the insomniac wail of a teething infant. And in that one-bedroom flat in Archway, folding the ironing board away in order to fuck late at night on the living-room floor by the gas fire. Rosalind may have intended such recollections to mollify him. He appreciates the attempt, but he's troubled. What's to become of Daisy Perowne, the poet? He and Rosalind meshed their timetables and worked hard at sharing the domestic load. Italian men, on the other hand, are pncri acternac, who expect their wives to replace their mothers, and iron their shirts and fret about their underwear. This feckless Giulio could destroy his daughter's hopes.

Henry discovers he's clenching a fist. He relaxes it and says untruthfully, 'I can't think about it now.'

That's right. None of us can.'

'I better go.'

They kiss again, unerotically this time, with all the restraint of a farewell.

As he opens the door she says, 'I'm still worried about you going in like this. I mean, in this mood. Promise me, nothing foolish.'

He touches her arm. The promise.'

As the door closes behind him and he steps away from the house, he feels a clarifying pleasure in the cold, wet night air, in his purposeful stride and, he can admit it, in being briefly alone. If only the hospital were further away. Irresponsibly, he prolongs his walk by half a minute by going across the square, rather than down Warren Street. The few fine snowflakes he saw earlier have vanished, and during the evening it has rained; the square's paving stones and cobbled gutters shine cleanly in the white street light. Low smoky cloud grazes the top of the Post Office Tower. The square is deserted, which also pleases him. As he hurries along the

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eastern side, near the high railings of the gardens, under the bare plane trees stirring and creaking, the empty square is reduced to its vastness and the simplicity of architectural lines and solemn white forms.

He's trying not to think about Giulio. He thinks instead about Rome, where he attended a neurosurgery symposium two years ago, in rooms overlooking the Campo dei Fiori. It was the mayor himself, Walter Veltroni, a quiet, civilised man with a passion for jazz, who opened the proceedings. The following day, in honour of the guests, Nero's palace, the Domus Aurea, much of it still closed to the public, was made available, and Veltroni along with various curators gave the surgeons a private tour. Perowne, knowing nothing about Roman antiquity, was disappointed that the site appeared to be underground, entered by a gated hole in a hillside. This was not what he understood by a palace. They were led down a tunnel smelling of earth and lit by bare bulbs. Off to the sides were dim chambers where restoration work was in progress on fragments of wall tiles. A curator explained three hundred rooms of white marble, frescos, intricately patterned mosaic, pools, fountains and ivory finish, but no kitchens, bathrooms or lavatories. At last the surgeons entered a scene of wonders - painted corridors of birds and flowers and complicated repeating designs. They saw rooms where frescos were just appearing from under a sludge of grime and fungus. The palace lay undiscovered for five hundred years under rubble until the early Renaissance. For the past twenty years it had been closed for restoration, and its partial opening had been part of Rome's millennial celebration. A curator pointed out a jagged hole far above them in an immense domed ceiling. This was where fifteenth-century robbers dug through to steal gold leaf. Later Raphael and Michelangelo had themselves lowered down on ropes; marvelling, they copied the designs and paintings their smoking torches revealed. Their own work was profoundly influenced by these incursions. Through his translator, Signor Veltroni

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offered an image he thought might appeal to his guests; the artists had drilled through this skull of brick to discover the mind of ancient Rome.

Perowne leaves the square and heads east, crosses the Tottenham Court Road and walks towards Gower Street. If only the mayor was right, that penetrating the skull brings into view not the brain but the mind. Then within the hour he, Perowne, might understand a lot more about Baxter; and after a lifetime's routine procedures would be among the wisest men on earth. Wise enough to understand Daisy? He's not able to avoid the subject. Henry refuses to accept that she might have chosen to be pregnant. But for her sake he needs to be positive and generous. This Roman Giulio may be just like the admirable boiler-suited types he saw in the gloomy chambers of the Domus Aurea, dabbing away at mosaic tiles with their toothbrushes - archaeology is an honourable profession. It's his duty, Henry supposes, to try to like the father of his grandchild. The despoiler of his daughter. When he condescends at last to visit, young Giulio will need to exert much native charm.

On Gower Street the sanitary teams are still at work, cleaning up after the demonstration. Perhaps they've only just begun. From noisy trucks, generator-powered arc lights illuminate mounds of food, plastic wrappings and discarded placards which men in yellow and orange jackets are pushing forward with wide brooms. Others are shovelling the piles onto the lorries. The state's embrace is ample, ready for war, ready to clean up behind the dissenters. And the debris has a certain archaeological interest - a Not in My Name with a broken stalk lies among polystyrene cups and abandoned hamburgers and pristine fliers for the British Association of Muslims. On a pile he steps round are a slab of pizza with pineapple slices, beer cans in a tartan motif, a denim jacket, empty milk cartons and three unopened tins of sweetcorn. The details are oppressive to him, objects look too bright edged and tight, ready to burst from the packaging. He must

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be in a lingering state of shock. He recognises one of the sweepers as the man he saw this morning cleaning the pavements in Warren Street: a whole day behind the broom, and now, courtesy of untidy world events, some serious overtime.

Around the hospital's front entrance there's the usual late night Saturday gathering, and two security guards standing between the double sets of doors. Typically, people emerge, though not completely, from a drunken dream and remember they last saw a friend being lifted into the back of an ambulance. They find the hospital, often the wrong one, and emphatically demand to see this friend. The guards' job is to keep out the troublemakers, the abusive or incapable, the ones likely to throw up on the waiting-room floor, or take a swing at authority, at a light-boned Filipino nurse or some tired junior doctor in the final hours of her shift. They're also obliged to keep out the rough sleepers who want a bench or piece of floor in the institutional warmth. The sample of the public that makes it to a hospital late on a weekend night is not always polite, kind or appreciative. As Henry recalls, working in Accident and Emergency is a lesson in misanthropy. They used to be tolerated, the assaults as well as the dossers, who even had their own little corner in A and E. But these last few years what's now called the culture has changed. The medical staff have had enough. They want protection. The drunks and loudmouths are thrown out onto the pavement by men who've worked as bouncers and know their business. It's another American import, and not a bad one - zero tolerance. But there's always a danger of chucking out a genuine patient; head injuries, as well as cases of sepsis or hypoglycaemia can present as drunkenness.

Perowne pushes a way through the small knot of people. When he reaches the first door the guards, Mitch and Tony, both West Indian, recognise him and let him through.

'How's it going?'

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Tony, whose wife died of breast cancer last year and who's thinking of training as a paramedic, says, 'Quiet, you know, relative like.'

'Yeah/ Mitch says. 'We just got the quiet riot tonight.'

Both men chuckle and Mitch adds, 'Now Mr Perowne, all the wise surgeons got the flu.'

'I'm truly unwise/ Henry says. There's an extradural.'

'We seen him.'

'Yeah. You better get up there, Mr Perowne.'

But instead of going straight ahead to the main lifts, he makes a quick detour through the waiting area towards the treatment rooms, just in case Jay or Rodney while waiting have come down for another case. The public benches are quiet, but the long room has a battered, exhausted look, as though at the end of a successful party. The air is humid and sweet. There are drinks cans on the floor, and someone's sock among the chocolate bar wrappers from the vending machines. A girl has an arm round her boyfriend who's slumped forward, head between his knees. An old lady wearing a fixed, faint smile waits patiently with her crutches resting on her lap. There are one or two others staring at the floor, and someone stretched out full length, asleep on a bench, head covered by a coat. Perowne walks past the treatment cubicles to the crash room where a team is working on a man who's bleeding heavily from his neck. Outside, in the majors' area, by the staff base, he sees Fares, the on-duty A and E registrar whom he spoke to on the phone.

As Perowne approaches, Fares says, 'Oh right. That friend you phoned about. We've cleared cervical-spine. The CT scan showed a bilateral extradural with a probable depressed fracture. He dropped a couple of points so we called in a crash induction. They took him upstairs half an hour ago.'

An X-ray of the neck - the first investigative measure suggests there'll be no complications with Baxter's breathing. His level of consciousness as measured by the Glasgow Coma Score has fallen - not a good sign. An anaesthetist - probably

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Jay's registrar - was called down to prepare him for emergency surgery which will have involved, among other things, emptying Baxter's stomach. 'What's his score now?'

'Eleven down from thirteen when he came in.' Someone calls Fares's name from the crash room, and by way of excusing himself he says as he leaves, 'Bottle fight in a bus queue. And oh yeah. Mr Perowne. Two policemen went up with your friend.'

Pcrowne takes the lift up to the third floor. As soon as he steps out into the broad area that gives onto the double doors of the neurosurgical suite, he feels better. Home from home. Though things sometimes go wrong, he can control outcomes here, he has resources, controlled conditions. The doors are locked. Peering through the glass he can see no one about. Rather than ring the bell, he takes a long route down a corridor that will bring him through intensive care. He likes it here late at night - the muted light, the expansive, vigilant silence, the solemn calm of the few night staff. He goes down the wide space between the beds, among winking lights and the steady bleeps of the monitors. None of these patients is his. Now that Andrea Chapman has been moved out, all the people on yesterday's list are back in their wards. That's satisfying. In the marshalling area outside the ICU, the space looks unnaturally empty. The usual clutter of trolleys has been removed - tomorrow they'll be back, and all the bustle, the constantly ringing phones, the minor irritation with the porters. Rather than call Rodney or Jay out of the theatre, and to save time, he goes straight to the changing room.

He taps a code in the number lock, and steps into a cramped and homely squalor, a particularly masculine kind of pigsty suggestive of several dozen delinquent boys far from home. He uses a key to open his locker and starts to undress hurriedly. Lily Perowne would have been horrified - scattered

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across the floor are discarded scrubs, some clean, some used, along with the plastic bags they came in, and trainers, a towel, an old sweater, a pair of jeans; on the tops of the lockers, empty Coke cans, an ancient tennis-racket press, two unrelated sections of a fly-fishing rod that have been lying there for months. On the wall a peevish computer-printed notice asks, Is it possible to discard towels and greens in the appropriate manner? Some wag has written 'no' underneath. Another more official sign advises, Don't take risks with your valuables. There used to be a sign on the lavatory door saying, Please Raise the Seat. Now there's one saving, in resignation. To complain about the state of the lavatory dial extension 4040. A prospective surgical patient would not feel reassured by the racks of white clogs, stained with yellow, red and brown, with dried hard little friezes of gore, and the faded, clumsily inscribed Biro names or initials. It can be vexing, to be in a hurry and not find a matching pair. Henry keeps his own in his locker. He takes his scrubs, tops and bottoms, from the Targe' pile and pulls them on, and makes a point of binning the plastic bag. Despite the chaos around him, these actions calm him, like mental exercises before a chess game. At the door he takes a disposable surgical cap from a pile and secures it behind his head as he goes along the empty corridor.

He enters the theatre by way of the anaesthetic room. Waiting for him, sitting by their machine, are Jay Strauss and his registrar, Gita Syal. Round the table are Emily, the scrub nurse, Joan, the runner, and Rodney - looking like a man about to be tortured. Perowne knows from experience how wretched a registrar feels when his consultant has to come out, even when it's an obvious necessity. In this case it hasn't even been Rodney's decision. Jay Strauss has pulled rank. Rodney's bound to feel that Jay has grassed him up. On the table, obscured by surgical drapes, is Baxter, lying face down. All that's visible of him is the wide area of his head shaved to the rear of the vertex, the crown. Once a patient is draped

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up, the sense of a personality, an individual in the theatre, disappears. Such is the power of the visual sense. All that remains is the little patch of head, the field of operation.

There's an air in the room of boredom, of small talk exhausted. Or perhaps Jay has been holding forth on the necessity of the coming war. Rodney will have been reluctant to voice his pacifist views for fear of being taken apart.