She tucked the straps of her rucksack inside the bag, then, carrying it like a holdall, she crossed the busy street and entered the front of the Royal Sussex County Hospital. From the little shop in the foyer she bought a small bunch of carnations wrapped in cellophane. Despite the terrible nervousness she felt, she tried to look nonchalant, to blend in, to be just another visitor coming to see a patient and bringing a few belongings for them.
She hovered for some moments near the information desk, looking for a plan of the place. There were plenty of people around to ask, but she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself, so she just carried on walking, trying to appear confident, as if she knew where she was going, whilst silently and invisibly asking God for guidance.
She went up an incline and came to a junction of corridors. There were signs here. X-RAY. CARDIOLOGY. OUTPATIENTS. HISTOPATHOLOGY. RENAL UNIT. MATERNITY. PHARMACY. NEUROSURGERY.
She climbed three flights of stairs, then walked along another corridor. She strolled past medics, orderlies, nurses, visitors. She passed an elderly man in a dressing gown and slippers, inching his way on a Zimmer frame with grim determination, and a gurney on which another old man lay, mouth open, toothless, bewildered, as if someone had abandoned him out here.
Up another flight of stairs. Another corridor. Past a staff rest room. Peering through the window, she could see five female nurses in there. Lara understood the rhythms and beats and logistics of hospitals. She understood the chaos of shifts, the constant ebb and flow of strange faces, the impossibility in a large hospital of everyone being familiar with everyone else, or even recognizing everyone else.
When she was eighteen, her parents had her admitted to the psychiatric ward of a general hospital in Chicago. She had spent much of that time wandering the corridors, chatting to staff, generally hanging out with anyone who would talk to her, trying to find a little corner of the massive place where she could belong. She made friends with the kitchen staff and for a while belonged there; then she made friends with the laundry staff, and for a while belonged in the laundry. Then with the team at one of the nursing stations.
It was her sweet, gentle Master, Harald Gatward, who had broken the terrible news to her yesterday about her own beloved Disciple. The Master explained that this was a test from God of her love for Timon Cort and of her love for all the Disciples. There would never be a bigger test for her than this. After this she would truly belong for ever.
She walked on, saw the sign NEUROSURGERY right ahead of her now, and stopped.
Reality check.
She took a breath, said a small, silent prayer for strength and courage.
Timon was close. He was still alive, she knew that; she’d phoned the ward sister an hour ago, pretending to be a newspaper reporter, and she had confirmed that he was alive still, but she would say no more.
Inching forward now, one step at a time, pretending to be making an adjustment to the flowers every time someone came by, she reached an intersection. An arrow marked NEUROSURGERY pointed to her right. And she could see at the end of the corridor a nursing station and what looked like a reception area.
She walked down, and in the bustle of activity as she approached the station no one paid her the slightest attention. Then she froze.
To her left was a short corridor down to the double doors of a ward. But before those doors was another door, on the right. A uniformed policeman sat on a chair outside it, staring at a newspaper, looking bored out of his tree.
Her heart skipped.
Timon was in there!
Then she turned abruptly away before the policeman noticed her, and walked around to the far side of the island station. Thinking hard for some moments, she made a decision, began retracing her steps back to the stairs, and went down to the next floor, then on down, floor after floor, until she finally reached the basement.
The lighting was dingy and she heard the rumble of a furnace. There was a smell of boiled cabbage and fuel oil. Massive pipes ran along above her. Ahead she could see steam billowing through an open door.
‘Has anyone given you tea?’ she said aloud, to herself, in what she was hoping sounded like an English accent. She said it again. And again. ‘Hez ennyone given yew tee?’
And one more time, as she dumped the flowers on the floor and set off in search of the laundry storage area.
‘Hez ennyone given yew tee?’
Most of the doors off the corridors down here were marked, and it took her less than five minutes to find the one marked STAFF UNIFORM STORES.
Putting down the holdall, she went through the door into a cavernous room that seemed out of another century. On one side were shelves stacked with every kind of hospital uniform, and accessories. On the other, a long work bench, at which about a dozen Oriental male and female staff were busily pressing and folding clothes. No one had even noticed that she’d come in.
She went over to the work bench and addressed an elderly Chinese woman. ‘Hi, I’m an auxiliary nurse – doing an emergency locum in Maternity. They told me to come down here to get a uniform.’
The woman raised her hands. ‘You go uniform have Personnel make request.’
In response to Lara’s blank stare, the woman drew a rectangle with her hands. ‘Form! You go request form Personnel. Upstairs. Seggon floor.’
‘I’ll take the uniform, bring the form down later!’ Lara said. ‘Emergency!’
The woman shrugged, muttered angrily and turned back to her labours.
Lara swiftly took a nursing uniform and blouse, but could see no shoes anywhere. Her trainers would have to do. Plenty of the nurses here were wearing what looked like plimsolls. Hiding everything inside her bulky anorak, she picked up her bag, hurried back up to the ground floor, then made her way to the first toilet she could find, locked herself in a cubicle and changed.
She carried her bag out of the hospital and over to the parking lot, locked it in the boot of her car, then returned to the hospital. She walked briskly, like any nurse who might be late for her shift, in through a side door this time, and made her way back up to the Neurosurgery ward.
So easy, she thought. Nothing to it, just look confident!
As she passed the nursing station, she pulled out of her pocket a hypodermic syringe and a vial, and now held both of these openly. The policeman was still reading his newspaper, and barely even glanced at her as she approached.
‘Hez ennyone given yew tee?’ she asked breezily.
His face brightened. ‘Not for a while, I’d appreciate a cuppa.’
Giving him a special smile, she said, ‘Two minutes!’ then went into the room, closing the door behind her.
Then stood still.
Stared at him.
At the man she had thought about and prayed for every day and every night for the past three years. Timon. Sweet, sweet Timon, with his gentle voice and his soft touch. Stared at his swollen, distorted face; at the clear plastic breathing tubes in his nostrils. At the array of drip lines running up from his wrist, and at the battery of wires running from electrode pads on his head into a large machine with about ten different digital displays on it.
She stepped over to the bed, looking at the strip of white gauze on his forehead, and at his closed eyes. She touched his free hand, squeezed it. Timon,’ she whispered. ‘Listen, I have to be quick, I don’t have much time. It’s me, Lara. Can you hear me?’
To her joy, she felt her hand being squeezed, as if in response.
Then his eyes opened.
‘Timon!’ she said. ‘Timon, my sweet love!’
His eyes rolled, as if he were trying to focus, but no longer had the motor functions to do so.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There is something you need to know. You have a son, a beautiful boy called Saul. Our son.’ A tear trickled down her cheek. ‘He’s nearly two and a half years old now. He’s going to be so proud of you.’