I sat up with difficulty, Zara helping with an arm around my back, then turned and looked out of the window. The room was light and airy, with large windows giving views of a nearby clump of silver birch. Their leaves were turning brown. Brown?
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Almost six months. You’ve been in a coma until recently.’
While I absorbed that, another suit coughed. ‘The police want to interview you about the fire, when you’re ready.’
I grinned wryly at him, conscious of the bizarre impression I must make, an alien nightmare come to life. ‘Oh, I suppose I’m ready; do you think they are?’
Looking back, I am impressed with the speed of my recovery, and even more by the calm acceptance that I seemed to feel. By rights I should have been losing my mind, crazed with horror at what had happened to me, but I felt a strange sense of detachment, as if it was all happening to someone else and I was merely an interested observer. How and why it had happened was a problem my mind was still only prepared to skirt around, cautiously.
The muscular itch became a burning need to exercise, fuelled by an equally burning hunger. But not for just any food; the first solid meal presented to me – a traditional hospital meat and two veg – made me feel sick just to smell it and I could not bring myself to pick up the knife and fork. Puzzled, Zara went hunting for alternative foods, and came back with a selection. After some experimentation, I discovered that I could eat only fresh fruit and raw nuts. I was even more appalled to find that I could drink only water: alcohol was definitely out.
My one remaining consolation from my former life was jazz. After a remote tussle with my bank – I could hardly turn up in person to prove my identity – I got access to my account. Zara managed to secure an internet-linked computer for me, plus an MP3 player, and I spent hours downloading and listening to as much as I could. I went through all the classics like a voyage of rediscovery, and have the shades of Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington and many others to thank for my continued sanity.
The itch in my muscles refused to go away. I cajoled Zara into arranging some exercise equipment in my room, and pounded it with ever-increasing energy and determination. As I seemed to need little sleep, I exercised a lot and my wasted muscles gradually filled out. One day, I complained to Zara that a machine had broken. She looked at it in puzzlement, then returned with some complicated device of springs and levers, and asked me to push and pull it in various ways, as hard as I could, while she took measurements. I obliged, banging the grips against their stops until the metal frame bent. She looked at it in silence for a moment. ‘Do me a favour will you? Just be careful how you handle things. And especially people.’
Handling people. Now there was an interesting problem. After they had recovered from the initial shock of my appearance, it was evident that the hospital hierarchy was flummoxed about how to handle me, or to be precise how to handle others dealing with me. To their credit, they were primarily concerned with my welfare, most anxious to delay subjecting me to the kind of attention which would inevitably occur as soon as news of this weird changeling leaked out.
For the police interview (which achieved as little as I expected), I was dressed in an all-covering robe, my face was wrapped in bandages and I was given dark glasses to wear.
Access to my room was severely restricted, those in the know sworn to silence. Brian, usually accompanied by other doctors, came to see me on most days to check on my progress. I had the impression that he was rather proud of me; his private freak show, brought out to amaze trusted visitors. But inevitably, rumours spread. Zara had become my friend as well as my nurse, my link to the outside world, filling me in with the human details of life in the hospital to supplement the impersonality of the news media, which were frequently filled with the usual gloom about impending environmental disasters.
‘The word going round is that there’s a monster in this room. So I’ve been telling them that you’re just horribly deformed by the fire, and desperate not to be looked at.’
‘Close enough.’
‘Not really. You know, you’re quite beautiful, in a strange sort of way.’
I looked at her in astonishment. ‘Zara, you’ve been doing this job far too long. It’s seriously distorting your judgement.’
She laughed, and went out of the room to return a few minutes later wheeling a full-length mirror. ‘Just look at yourself!’
I looked. As usual, I was wearing only shorts; my new skin seemed oblivious to outside temperatures and I felt comfortable however cold or hot it became. I saw a figure from the cover of a fantasy paperback, gold eyes glaring from a rugged, scaled face, the low crest prominent over my scalp. My body was lean but powerfully muscled, very different from the rather flabby middle age I had been sliding into in consequence of an over-fondness for food and alcohol and a general avoidance of exercise. My skin was in fact not all the same colour; it was more greenish over my chest, and a darker purple on my back. When I moved it shone, iridescent in the light. As I looked at it, the colour seemed to shift. Puzzled, I concentrated on it and heard Zara gasp. My chest slowly changed from greenish purple to pure green. More concentration, and it shaded into red. After a few seconds, I got the hang of it and was able to shift up and down the spectrum, changing colour at will. More effort enabled me to produce crude patterns of varied colours across my body.
Zara laughed. ‘A chameleon! Is there no end to your talents?’
‘Probably not. By the way, you should see a dentist – that toothache won’t go away by itself.’
She looked at me strangely. ‘How do you know about that? I haven’t told anyone.’
I shrugged. ‘The same way that I know when you’re close, that I know when the doctor is coming, and who’s coming with him. I just pick it up, somehow.’
She looked thoughtful and went away. Shortly afterwards, the usual “Consultation” of doctors and other specialists arrived, trailing behind Brian like a comet’s tail, and eager as always to try new tests and take new measurements while they tried to work out what had happened to me and what I had become. They had examined and X-rayed my new teeth (flawless), measured the performance of my new eyes (considerably improved in all respects: I no longer needed the glasses I had recently had to start wearing), assessed my strength (very impressive) and speed of reaction (even more so). I had a suspicion that several articles for the medical journals plus a couple of doctoral theses were being worked on. I did my chameleon trick to excited murmurs, concluding with plans for yet more tests.
I gathered that they were now in something of a dilemma, prizing their exclusive access to such an oddity while recognising that there was no medical reason to keep me in hospital any longer. Sooner or later, I would have to face the public. However, they first wanted to pin down this sensitivity to people which I claimed to have. They ran some tests, hovering outside the door in various combinations while I identified who was there. They were fascinated by my claimed ability to detect when something was wrong with someone, and debated how to test that. After a while, they conceived a plan to take me secretly around a children’s ward in the middle of the night, when they would all be asleep.
I walked around with my little posse, scarcely needing to pause as I passed the end of each bed. I was initially uncertain how to link what I sensed with the medical terms for their ailments, so described the symptoms for the doctors to translate, murmured voices in counterpoint.
‘Something badly inflamed, down in the digestive tract below the stomach.’