The Pages of Time

by Damian Knight

  Tears began rolling down his cheeks. He coughed and wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. There was only one thing for it: he was getting out of this place. If Dr Saltano wouldn’t discharge him, Sam would just have to do it on his own.

  He pulled back the sheet, shuffled to the side of the bed and carefully lowered one leg at a time, trying his best to block out the memory of how painful it had been the last time he’d tried to stand. The chair that Chrissie had occupied a few minutes earlier was in front of him, but frustratingly just out of reach. If he could use it for support, he might then be able to make it to the door.

  Sam inched forward until both feet were flat on the floor and, before he could change his mind, lunged towards the chair with his arms outstretched. He caught the armrest with his left hand, but only succeeded in pulling the chair down on top of himself as he crashed to the floor. Lying face down, he made no attempt to move. After a moment he felt wetness on his cheek and thought he’d cut himself until he spotted the paper cup Dr Saltano had dropped and realised he was lying in spilled coffee.

  What had he been thinking? He couldn’t even walk two steps, let alone the distance to the lift outside the ward, and from that to the entrance on the ground floor. Besides, what was he planning to do if he even made it that far? He had no money and no clothes other than his hospital gown. How would he get home?

  Like it or not, he was stuck at St Benedict’s and would miss his dad’s funeral. To top it all off, he didn’t even have the strength to pick himself up and climb back into bed. Assuming that nobody had heard him fall, Sam now faced the choice of either calling for help or waiting until someone happened to come into his room and find him, and neither option was particularly tempting.

  He rolled onto his back and stared up at the polystyrene squares on the ceiling. The pointlessness of his situation reared up and slammed down on him like a wave. There was nothing he could do to keep from crying. He didn’t even bother trying to stop it but just lay where he was, sniffling like a baby as tears and snot streamed down his face.

  Suddenly Sam smelled burning caramel. The room shimmered and throbbed. Each ceiling tile ballooned to twice its original size, then snapped back into position like stretched elastic. He tried to call for help, but his mouth wouldn’t open.

  It was happening again.

  His body rolled itself over, his muscles moving of their own accord until he was lying face down in cold coffee once more. A minute or two passed and then he was propelled backwards into the air, as if fired from a cannon, landing on his feet with his backside resting against the bed at the same moment as the chair miraculously righted itself. Next, his body shuffled back and drew the sheet over his legs. After a bit the door opened and Chrissie walked in backwards.

  Sam wanted to close his eyes and shut it all out, but there was nothing he could do. His sister began lecturing him, her mouth flapping soundlessly up and down, her face angry and red. All of a sudden she seemed to calm down and laid her hand across his legs, palm up. Sam watched his own hand move to link with hers. Chrissie’s mouth kept moving faster and faster. At intervals she would pause to look at him, as if listening, and Sam could feel his own jaw wagging up and down in response. Then his head plunged back onto the pillow and his eyelids closed themselves.

  A minute ago this was what he’d wanted – to black it all out – but now lying here in darkness, unable to move or open his eyes, was a form of torture.

  It was hard to tell how long Sam stayed trapped in his own sleeping body, but eventually his eyes opened and he saw Dr Saltano walk in, also backwards. Dr Saltano shook his head, a stuttering movement, and began to speak. Like Chrissie he stopped every now and then, at which point Sam could feel his own mouth moving as they took turns in a silent, backwards conversation. Suddenly Dr Saltano’s face creased with annoyance. He took a dirty handkerchief from his pocket and patted his trouser legs. A paper cup rolled across the floor to his feet, as if carried by the wind. The stains faded from his trousers, forming drops of coffee that fell to the floor and dribbled together into a larger puddle. The puddle poured itself into the cup, which when full flew up into Dr Saltano’s outstretched hand.

  Slowly the images ground to a halt until the doctor stood frozen, holding the paper cup from which a motionless spiral of steam curled. Sam blinked and let out a whimper, his muscles finally answering his commands.

  Dr Saltano started to speak again. His voice was deep and slurred like one of Sam’s dad’s old vinyl records played at the wrong setting, but steadily it rose to normal pitch and speed. ‘Therrrre maaay beee profound side effects, but then again you may be able to live a relatively normal life. I’m afraid there really is no way of telling at this stage. All we can do is wait and see.’

  Sam stared at him, mesmerised. Slowly Dr Saltano lifted the paper cup to his mouth.

  ‘Careful,’ Sam said, ‘it’s hot.’

  Dr Saltano hesitated and then blew into his coffee. ‘Thanks. It always is from that machine. They really should do something about it. Anyway, Sam, your recovery has been extraordinarily rapid, and I’m pleased to say that there’s no need for you to remain here much longer. You’ve made great progress over the last couple of weeks. We’ll continue to monitor you closely, of course, which will mean regular check-ups and continued physiotherapy but, short of any unforeseen complications, I’m happy to discharge you. The best place for you to continue your rehabilitation is at home. How does that sound?’

  ‘Like the best news I’ve had in ages,’ Sam said.

  Chapter III

  The Funeral

  1

  April 1969

  Lara descended the steps of her building and emerged into another beautiful spring morning. The sun was gaining height and shortened her shadow to a dark, crisp outline. She unbuttoned her denim jacket, noticing the increased density of freckles that dappled the fair skin of her forearms. Up ahead, a group of girls were playing skip rope, singing and clapping as they jumped. Lara stopped to watch the game, absorbing their joy for a minute before unlocking her car. She had the feeling that it was going to be a good day.

  A cluster of grubby, longhaired protesters had formed just outside the gates of Stribe Lyndhurst Military Hospital. Lara honked her horn as she approached, scattering all but a few. A young woman in a floppy hat and Indian beads stood her ground until Lara drove directly at her. The woman glowered and thumped her placard against the windshield as she sidestepped out of the way at the very last moment. Make Love Not War, the sign read, although the O of ‘love’ had been crossed with a vertical line and inverted V to form a CND symbol.

  Lara left her car in the car park and strolled up the path, spinning her keys in her hand. On either side flowerbeds bloomed with colour, perfuming the air. She tried to bury the unpleasant incident with the protester to the depths of her mind and not let it ruin her mood. Tensions in the city had grown palpable in recent weeks as public opinion swayed ever further against the war, but, aside from when directly confronted by it, Lara preferred to stay out of the politics. The circumstances by which her patients arrived were not her business; her job was to help them get better.

  She passed through the glass doors and entered the hospital’s granite-clad lobby. Unlike many of its decrepit British counterparts, Stribe Lyndhurst was state-of-the-art and pristinely maintained. Built a quarter of a century ago to accommodate wounded from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, it now performed the same function for those returning injured from the jungles of Southeast Asia.

  Looking into the mirrored rear panel of the lift as she rode her way up, Lara dabbed her lipstick with a tissue and felt pleased at her appearance. Throughout her childhood and adolescence in rural Scotland, her mother had taken frequent pleasure in reminding Lara that she was a bright but plain girl, and she had passed into adulthood rarely bothering with make-up and other adornments, her confidence scarred by that small but recurrent slight. San Francisco had changed all that, freeing her from the constrain
ts of her mother’s puritanical put-downs, and in the last six months Lara had found herself thinking, feeling and doing things that she’d never previously imagined possible.

  She stepped out on the sixth floor, signed in at the main desk and prepared to start her rounds. The Lincoln Ward stretched over three long corridors that spanned the entire rear half of the sixth floor. It specialised in the treatment of service personnel suffering from a range of stress-related disorders. Each patient had his own room. Those on the first corridor were short-term patients, many of whom would soon be discharged in the expectation that they would be able to return to a relatively normal way of life. The second corridor was reserved for longer-term patients suffering from more acute disorders. Often these men had seen the worst of the fighting and bore proportional physical injuries to boot. The final corridor housed the secure unit, where patients deemed a danger to themselves or others were accommodated. The rooms here were referred to as ‘cells’.

  After visiting her patients along the first corridor, Lara pushed open the swing doors to the second. Isaac Barclay was leaning against the wall halfway down, talking to Betty Mclean, the new nurse on the ward.

  Lara’s pulse immediately quickened. Isaac was handsome, charming and one of the leading neurosurgeons in California before his thirtieth birthday. Betty appeared to have noticed that too, and was flirtatiously twisting a lock of long, bottle-blonde hair while staring into Isaac’s hazel eyes with a gooey look on her face.

  Lara sighed and glanced at the rota to check whom she was supposed to see next. Betty looked like what she imagined most men would want in a woman: tall and voluptuous, with a sun-kissed body that she seemed eager to show off.

  ‘Dr McHayden!’

  Isaac stepped away from Betty and waved to Lara as he approached. Betty pouted and shot Lara arrows of hate with her eyes, to which she smiled back sweetly.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Barclay,’ Lara said. ‘Just coming off nights?’

  ‘It shows that bad?’

  Checking that Betty was still watching, Lara laughed and laid a hand on his arm. One thing Betty didn’t have on her side, when it came to Isaac at least, was an equal intellectual footing.

  ‘It’s been a long shift,’ he said and moved a little closer. ‘You should check in on Michael soon as you can. He’s kept the whole ward up most of the night.’

  Michael Humboldt was Lara’s patient. At nineteen years old, he was little more than a fortnight off the plane in Vietnam when wounded. He’d been caught in a grenade blast during an attack on his camp and had lost an eye, his right arm below the elbow and had received sixty percent burns over the right side of his body. Amazingly, that wasn’t the worst of it. In the explosion a shard of shrapnel had penetrated Michael’s skull and become lodged in the base of his brain. The field doctor who’d operated to remove it had, understandably, given him a minimal chance of making it through the night. But somehow Michael had survived, and a week later was flown back to the US to begin treatment at Stribe Lyndhurst. The brain injury had left him with epilepsy. He was also morbidly delusional and convinced he could see into the future.

  ‘Please don’t tell me he’s actually done it this time,’ Lara said. In the month since Michael had arrived at Stribe Lyndhurst, he had already tried to kill himself three times, twice in the first week alone.

  ‘He took a penknife from Joe’s pocket and tried to sever his carotid artery,’ Isaac told her.

  ‘Jesus wept! He didn’t manage it, did he?’

  ‘Almost. Joe knocked him to the ground and wrestled it back from him before he could get the blade out. And you know what Joe said when I asked what he was doing with a goddam knife on the ward? Said he didn’t know how it’d gotten there. I had to suspend him, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ Lara let her hand slip from his wrist. ‘I’ll check in on Michael right away.’

  ‘Lara?’ Isaac said as she turned to leave.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I hope you don’t think it too forward of me but,’ he looked down at the toes of his shoes like a nervous schoolboy, ‘do you have plans Saturday evening?’

  ‘Saturday?’ She paused just long enough to create the impression she was actually considering it. ‘No, I don’t believe so.’

  He looked up again and smiled. ‘They’re still showing Space Odyssey at the Balboa. I thought we could catch a showing. If you haven’t seen it already, that is.’

  Lara felt her heart flutter in her chest. ‘Not yet,’ she said, although she’d seen it twice. ‘Pick me up around…’

  ‘Eight o’clock?’

  ‘Eight it is.’

  This time Lara really did leave, but before entering the secure unit she stopped by the gate to return Betty’s frosty stare with another sunny smile.

  * * * * *

  Lara found Michael in his cell, gripping the bars on the window with his remaining hand as he stared out. Some of the bandages around his head had been removed, revealing patches of charred flesh. He didn’t move until Lara called his name, and then turned with a vacant look in his only eye.

  ‘Dr McHayden, hello.’

  ‘Good morning, Michael.’ She noticed there were fresh scratch marks on the side of his neck. ‘I hear there was an incident last night.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that.’ He frowned and then winced as the muscles in his face stretched unhealed skin. ‘Say sorry to Joe for me, would you?’

  ‘Will do. How’re you holding up?’

  ‘It hurts.’

  ‘The burns will do for a while yet. I’ll look into getting you some stronger cream.’

  ‘Not that.’ He jabbed the side of his head with his finger. ‘In here.’

  Michael was on enough painkillers to sedate a horse, and Lara didn’t want to up his dose again unless she had to. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, I’ll prescribe something to help you sleep.’

  ‘Nooooo! I don’t want to sleep. Not when there’s so much to see.’

  ‘You need to, Michael. To help speed your recovery. By the way, they’re going to fit your prosthetic next week. That’s good news, isn’t it?’

  Michael fingered the bandaged stump of his right forearm. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone soon enough.’

  Lara hadn’t seen him this bad since that first week. She stepped forwards and rested a hand on his good shoulder. ‘Don’t talk like that, Michael, please. I know you’re in pain, but your recovery has been quite exceptional so far. Besides, you’ve got a lot to live for. You need to look to the future―’

  ‘The future? Oh, but I do.’ Suddenly Michael had grabbed her by the neck. ‘The future is all I think about, Dr McHayden.’

  Lara gasped as his fingers dug deeper into the skin of her throat, crushing her windpipe. She should never have allowed herself to get this close, should never have allowed sympathy to cloud her professional judgment.

  ‘Michael, let go,’ she croaked, scrabbling at his fingers in vain. ‘Please, you’re hurting me.’

  Lara was beginning to feel faint now. In a few more seconds she would black out. She tried to speak again, but there was no air left in her lungs with which to do so. Michael tightened his grip. Pops of light exploded before her eyes like flashbulbs. She didn’t have much time left.

  A wave of comprehension suddenly passed over Michael’s face, his eye widening in shock. He released her and took a step back. At that moment the door flew open and Thomas, the orderly, ran in.

  Lara crumpled to the floor, her lungs spasming as she sucked sharp gulps of air. Michael collapsed beside her a second later, thrashing and squirming as pinkish-white foam dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

  Isaac burst in as well, nearly knocking Thomas over, then stood and gaped.

  Lara clambered to her feet.

  ‘You could’ve been killed,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Lara, what happened?’ Isaac asked. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, not lifting her gaze from Michael. Her hand went to
her neck, where she could still feel the bite of his fingernails. ‘It was nothing I couldn’t handle.’

  As Michael’s fit subsided, Isaac and Thomas lifted him to the bed and secured leather straps to his arms and legs.

  ‘I’m sedating him,’ Isaac said, filling a syringe.

  Lara staggered over. Michael’s single eye fluttered open and focused on her as she looked down on him. Slowly his lips began to move, the words too quiet to be heard.

  ‘What’s that?’ Lara asked, bending closer.

  But Michael was already unconscious.

  2

  Present Day

  Lewis shivered and pulled his hood over his head. The sky was a miserable blanket of grey and nonstop rain over the last forty-eight hours had left puddles the size of small lakes on the pavement. He wasn’t looking where he was going and stepped in one at the end of Sam’s road. Swearing under his breath, he squelched the rest of the way there, his left trainer soaked through to the sock.

  The FOR SALE sign still stood by the fence, but otherwise the house looked the same as ever. Lewis opened the creaking gate and began up the oh-so familiar path. Over the last ten years he’d probably spent more time at Sam’s house than he had at his own, and it felt weird to be back here; a place that, until recently, he’d never believed he would visit again.

  Lewis had started sixth-form college in September, going along with the plan Sam and he had devised in his friend’s absence. News of the plane crash broke a few weeks later and Lewis’s world had been smashed to bits. Not only had he lost his best friend (or so it seemed at the time), but also his surrogate family. Was it really only two and a half months?

  He banged on the front door three times and peered through the frosted glass panel until he saw blurred movement on the other side. The person who opened the door closely resembled Chrissie, although minus most of the piercings from her ears and face. Instead of her usual military boots, she wore a pair of fluffy pink slippers. Her hair, which over the last five years had been dyed every colour of the rainbow, was now a mousy blonde. She gasped when she saw him and threw her arms around his neck. The real Chrissie had never shown Lewis the slightest affection in all the years they’d known one another, and he felt distinctly awkward returning her hug.