At first the national tabloids had ‘monstered’ the story – sending their best reporters and snatch photographers out to the Fens to provide a string of ‘Clyde Circus star fights for life’ exclusives. Dryden had felt ambivalent about the group of dishevelled characters who set up a temporary camp outside the Tower’s main gates; he vaguely knew some of them, but had drunk with them all. In bad weather they ran a rota with one snapper on duty to catch celebrity visitors while the rest fortified themselves in the Rifleman, a pub half a mile out of town.
Dryden met them there by agreement and read them brief bulletins on Laura’s progress, letting out snippets of newsworthy trivia: the letter of support from the rival cast of Coronation Street, the personal visit from the leading lady of Clyde Circus who was reported to be Laura’s arch-rival, and the personal get-well message from the director-general of the BBC. They loved it and thanked him, organizing whip-rounds to buy Laura flowers. But he knew it wasn’t enough.
The inevitable request for a picture, made a month after the accident, caused a wave of nausea and a hot spit of self-loathing for his trade. But he knew the pressures: news editors were tired of Laura’s fight for life and bored with the reality of a colourless and featureless coma. The story was changing from hope to tragedy and the lifeless picture exclusive was the next inexorable step. If he refused he knew the consequences: the super-telephoto lenses, the bribes to hospital staff, the invasion of his own privacy, the unpeeling of their lives. And, despite Laura’s deepening coma, he felt a bond with the hacks out in the cold. He had been there too, on Fleet Street, desperate for the story.
When the picture of Laura finally appeared he was stupidly thankful that they had all chosen the most lifelike and appealing of the set he had provided. Laura’s parents, on the first of several flying visits from retirement in Umbria, asked for a copy: a request which strangely disturbed him – perhaps with its hint of family surrender – so that he sank his face into Laura’s pillow and cried for the first and only time at what the accident had done to him.
The newspapers dropped the story relatively quickly after that. Laura had been written out of Clyde Circus with ease; her character, GP’s-nurse-turned-drug-addict Jane Corby, flew without notice to Australia in answer to a telegram from her long-lost father Bill. With each episode, postcards, read to the locals at the Palm Tree, told of suburban happiness with Bill’s family and lurid tales of romance on Bondi Beach. It was increasingly clear that Jane would not be returning home and that if she did few would remember what she had looked like when she left.
Medical interest in the case was more enduring. The newly diagnosed condition of ‘locked-in syndrome’, or LIS, was attracting large private sector and government research funding. LIS had a brief but spectacular history. First diagnosed in a Cape Town road traffic victim in 1985 it had quickly become verified by a string of similar cases from around the world. A conference at Berkeley in 1992 had set down the basic criteria for clinical diagnosis: the trauma which triggered the condition had to be both physical and mental – a combination of severe physical shock and intense stress. The Cape Town road traffic victim had been trapped in the back of a burning minibus, unable to break the windows or brave the flames which had engulfed the engine. The clinical symptoms were simple: the patient became comatose physically while all basic bodily functions operated as normal. The crucial difference between LIS and other comas was a high level of brain activity, a symptom only traceable with modern equipment. The victims remained aware of their surroundings, in some degree, throughout the ‘coma’. The result was what Second World War submariners would have called ‘silent running’ – vital systems only, vigilance, but otherwise no signs of life.
The number of cases was still small enough to secure Laura a kind of minor medical celebrity. Doctors came, professed themselves fascinated, made their examinations, took their readings, and left. Their professional objectivity led them to visit the illness rather than the patient, and they offered increasingly perfunctory sympathies for the victim. Dryden had negotiated anonymity through the British Medical Association and Laura appeared only as Case X – a device which protected her privacy but relegated her to the status of a forensic exhibit, pickled in a theoretical jar. The doctors who bothered to talk to Dryden rarely met his eye: in the thirty-four cases of LIS so far officially diagnosed only four had returned to normal life. All had said they recalled varying forms of consciousness while in the coma, ranging from almost total recall to a surreal remembrance of passing dreams.
Dryden had his doubts. He suspected he’d lost Laura for ever on the night of the accident. The nurses at the Tower preserved a professional optimism. They threw open the windows on fine days, used Laura’s room to chat and work in, and encouraged him to surround her with stimulating reminders of the life her mind continued to reject.
There was little doubt exactly what Laura’s mind was seeking to evade: the memory of the crash in Harrimere Drain. Three hours trapped in a car beneath the black water of the ditch. Three hours in which she could have had no choice but to blame him, as she struggled to understand why he wasn’t there, slowly retreating into a coma which denied the unacceptable reality that she had been abandoned to die. He had driven the car but escaped without her: as a bald statement of guilt it was as seemingly inescapable as the black water through which he had swum towards the moonlight.
He wanted her back so that he could tell her what really happened. What he didn’t want was a recovery which was incomplete. She was the perfect patient as she was: he wanted her back as she had been. What he feared most was a lifetime spent caring for someone who hated him, or worse despised him secretly. He had to be able to tell Laura exactly what happened that night at Harrimere Drain – and know that she believed him.
She had to know that it wasn’t his fear of water that stopped him going back.
Scared of water, or just scared? Cowardice born in the single image of the criss-cross pattern of his skates in ice seen above his drowning ten-year-old head.
Meanwhile the insurance company went on paying the bills – an unavoidable act of grace after Dryden had dropped the good name of the Mid-Anglian Mutual into every interview he had given in the months following Laura’s accident. One day they would resort to the small print on the policy and withdraw the funding, or at least take it to the courts. But he was prepared to move on to their savings, such as they were, and Laura’s parents had offered as well, willing to see their dreams of retirement modified, then abandoned. But the alternative was unspeakable – or at least unspoken. A steel bedstead in some tucked away ante-room in a hospital which would resent her consumption of scarce resources. Or worse, doctors willing to end it without pain.
Dryden began his ritual visit.
He threw the black greatcoat over a chair and unpacked the fresh food he had brought. Laura’s parents had owned a small Italian café in north London. He had used it as home when he was on the News. From the street it had looked like a sandwich bar but down a long dim corridor was a small dining room, lit by coloured Victorian skylights, with red-checked tablecloths on a dozen tables. Laura had introduced herself by spilling a plate of fresh tortellini into his lap. Clearing it up had been oddly erotic.
Laura was short, compact, and olive brown. Her eyes were liquid brown and huge, her mouth was full – largely with gleaming teeth. Her hair was that particular coppery brown reserved for the Mediterranean. Laura projected a sense of humour, and a slight cast to one eye added a sexy nonconformism. She had the personality to fill a room and overwhelmed Dryden in the time it took to reorder the tortellini. In many ways she was his opposite: sensual, emotional, and a natural actor. She sprang from a family which had never failed to support her, which had never withheld its love, and she placed complete trust in those she loved as a result. Within a month Dryden had slipped effortlessly into this group assuming, unawares, a terrible responsibility.