Jean’s personal favourite was Mark Strickland, who crashed his car as a drunken lout, and emerged from his coma six weeks later quoting a Bible he’d never read, and humbly asking the Lord for help as he sweated through the agony of physiotherapy.
Miracles all, in Jean’s eyes.
Then there were the murders.
Jean couldn’t help thinking of them that way, even though she knew they were not malicious. She would have preferred to think of them as ‘mercy killings’, but in her heart she knew that God didn’t agree with her.
Of course, just as the miracles were never official, neither were the murders.
Just a few months after she’d first started work on the ward, a boy named Gavin Richards had come in after being mugged. He had been hit so hard in the head that the shape of the claw hammer was clearly outlined in his shaven skull.
At first his family hoped for a miracle. They all did; it was only natural. But, as the days started to pass into weeks, and the weeks into months, it became apparent to everyone that seventeen-year-old Gavin was never going to make it. Everyone except his mother, that is. Gavin’s mother came in every day and spent hours holding his hand, clipping his nails, putting cream on his raw bottom, and singing childhood songs to him in a gentle, quavery voice barely above a whisper, while her other children – a boy of nine and a girl of fourteen – suffered the twin loss of a brother and a mother. Tragedy upon tragedy.
Despite the best care, Gavin slid slowly downhill towards death. Soon the doctors would start to speak to his family about withdrawing life support and allowing him to slip away.
But then, one terrible day, Gavin inexplicably opened his eyes and said, ‘Mummy.’
Immediately he’d sunk back into the hinterland of unconsciousness, but the damage was done. His mother redoubled her efforts – and her neglect. She started to bring in a sleeping roll and spend nights under his bed. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she told Jean as she crawled out every shivery morning. ‘I just want to be here when he wakes up.’
But Gavin was never going to wake up. That was the trouble. And even if he did, so much of his brain had been pulverized that his future held nothing but animal needs in a shell of a human body. But however often the doctors showed her the scans and explained the extent of the horrible damage the single hammer blow had caused, Mrs Richards would have no truck with the idea that he might not come back to her just the way he’d left on that fateful night. Mummy had been an aberration, a false dawn, a cruel neurological hiccup that would hold Gavin’s family captive forever unless something was done.
And so a senior consultant did something.
He suggested that Gavin was ready to go home.
Gavin’s mother cried with joy; Gavin’s father cried because he understood what that really meant.
With a bravery Jean was humbled to witness, the family made preparations for young Gavin’s homecoming. They altered their home with ramps and rails. They bought medical equipment and an optimistic wheelchair. They hired nurses. And they were not rich people.
Gavin left hospital with his mother alongside the trolley, beaming and waving as though she were leading in the Derby winner.
Five days later, Gavin was dead from the expected complications, and his family was reunited in grief – as they should have been months earlier.
Jean had received the news with a sudden welling of tears, but they were of relief – and of guilt. If he had not gone home, Gavin would still be alive.
In a manner of speaking.
And there was the rub. She’d hated the consultant for making a decision she would never have been able to make herself. She still had sleepless nights about it. Nights when she would sit up in bed and read trashy novels by the dim circle of a booklight, to avoid waking Roger.
The second murder – just last year – was more straightforward. An elderly woman, hospitalized after a massive stroke, who was being kept alive by means of a ventilator.
Her large, sweet-natured family had trooped in and out of the ward twice a day to suffer the slow, heartbreaking erosion of everything they had loved, while the nurses struggled to keep her alive when it was plain she would be better off dead.
Once more, it was left to a doctor to make the decision – this time a young man only recently qualified, but with a kind heart and a caring way with people.
On the fifth night of their vigil, he had suggested that the family might like to take a break in the coffee shop downstairs.
‘You’re exhausted,’ he said. ‘It’s important that you remain strong.’
They had been reluctant, but had finally nodded and left.
‘You look as if you could do with a coffee too, Jean.’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she’d smiled.
‘I’m not,’ he’d said. ‘I’d love one. Would you mind? I’ll hold the fort here.’
He’d insisted on giving her two pounds, and she’d left. It was only when she’d been halfway down in the lift that she’d wondered why he hadn’t simply asked one of the family to bring him a coffee.
Jean had returned to the ward just as he’d switched the ventilator back on.
Her heart had jumped so hard that she’d slopped the coffee on her hand. She’d heard of this before but never seen it – this kind of simple, final intervention that was undoubtedly in the best interests of the patient, and just as undoubtedly murder.
In a manner of speaking.
Jean had swallowed her heart and her shout, and backed away from the door of the ward. With shaking hands, she’d mopped up the spilled coffee and wiped down the half-full cup. Then, in a moment that would define her for ever, she’d re-entered and handed it to the doctor, along with his two pounds.
‘Mrs Loddon has passed away,’ he’d said, and Jean had noticed that he was holding the old lady’s hand.
‘Oh dear,’ she’d replied. And then, ‘Shall I go and get her family?’
‘No. Let them have their break.’
Jean had nodded and they had sat there together in silence in the semi-darkness until Mrs Loddon’s family had come back, refreshed.
There had been deaths since then, but deaths were expected on a ward like this, where patients prevaricated between living and dying, and frequently did one or the other against medical expectation.
Jean had not seen anything she could call murder since – but then, she no longer looked too hard. When Mr Attridge died last March she was relieved enough for all of them not to question it. When Mr Galen died just a few months later it had been more unexpected, but the pneumonia had not cleared entirely from his lungs, and it might only have taken some panic over a bit of phlegm to cause the heart attack that had killed him.
At the end of the day, it was almost always a merciful release for patient and family, and that sense pervaded all who worked on the neurological ward.
So, after all the good and bad she had seen, Tracy Evans was nothing to Jean. Her type had come and quickly gone over the years. Only the really good ones stayed. Angie had been here for three years, but Monica would be gone by summer, Jean would bet her housekeeping on it.
The only sad thing about Tracy leaving was that Mr Deal’s visits became shorter and less frequent. Jean had no indication of whether Mrs Deal had ever been aware of her husband’s presence, but the idea that she might suddenly be aware of his absence pained her. She tried her best to spend a little more quality time with Mrs Deal, telling her world news and ward gossip, but knew Angie was picking up her slack on meds and bedpans, and finally just had to give up and suffer the guilt.
Then, five months after Tracy had left, Jean made a last-ditch effort on behalf of Mrs Deal. She put an index card on the noticeboard: WANTED: KIND, RELIABLE PERSON TO READ TO PATIENT.