Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  John was just about to say something to her when the doorbell chimed. Barney immediately sprang to his feet and ran into the hallway, wuffling, and Katie said, ‘That’ll be Bridie now.’

  She opened the door and Bridie was standing outside in her raincoat, a wide-hipped round-faced girl with crimson cheeks and crimson lips, which gave her the appearance of a life-sized matryoshka doll. She was carrying a heavy blue satchel over her shoulder and three bulging carrier bags.

  ‘Good morning, ma’am. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m a little late. The traffic’s desperate through the tunnel.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Katie. ‘Come inside and meet John.’

  Bridie stepped in and put down her bags and hung up her raincoat. Underneath she was wearing a navy cardigan and a pale blue nurse’s overall, which emphasised to Katie that John was now an invalid, and how much care he was going to need. She hated herself for feeling so negative about him, and so depressed. If he hadn’t been kidnapped by a criminal gang in order to put pressure on her, and if they hadn’t bolted his feet to a bed to keep him from escaping, so that they became septic, he would never have lost his legs. But was it really her fault, and did she really owe him a lifetime of nursing?

  ‘Hallo, John!’ said Bridie, brightly. ‘I’m Bridie Mulligan and I’m going to be supporting you from now on. Now, I don’t want you to be afraid to ask me for any help that you require, and by that I mean any help at all – washing, dressing, going to the toilet. That’s what I’m here for.’

  John whispered, ‘Thank you, Bridie,’ and then cleared his throat and repeated it, louder. ‘Thank you, Bridie. I’ll try not to be too demanding.’

  ‘No, John, you can be as demanding as you like. If you feel like a cup of tea in your hand, all you have to do is say so. If you need to water the horses, don’t be embarrassed and leave it till it’s too late. I’ve seen it all before, like, do you know what I mean, and it doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve changed more old gentlemen’s nappies than you’ve had hot dinners.’

  Katie showed Bridie around the house. She took her into the kitchen so that she knew where the tea and the coffee were, and how to work the heating.

  Bridie said, ‘That’s all grand. If I have any trouble at all, I have your number, and I’ll text you.’

  She paused, and then she said, very quietly, ‘You’re pure distressed by this, ma’am, I can see that.’

  Katie nodded. ‘It hasn’t been easy. Well, to tell you the truth, it’s turned out to be much harder than I imagined. And – please – you can call me Katie.’

  ‘There’s homes you know, where people like John can be taken care of. It’s not his fault, I imagine, losing his legs, but he’s going to be a fierce burden to you, and you can’t escape that.’

  ‘How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ said Katie.

  ‘Twenty-seven, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, you’re very wise for twenty-seven, Bridie. I wish I’d had half your perspicacity at your age.’

  Bridie gave her an uneasy smile, because it was obvious that she didn’t know what ‘perspicacity’ was.

  ‘Insight,’ said Katie, and now Bridie nodded.

  ‘I’ve had a rake of experience, ma’am – I mean, Katie – and some of the patients I’ve taken care of, they’ve been a sight worse than your John, like. Blind, some of them, as well as disabled. That makes it so much worse.’

  Katie went back into the living-room.

  ‘I’m off now, John. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Okay,’ said John.

  Katie gave him a quick kiss on the forehead again, but as she went to the door, John said, without looking at her, ‘I love you, Katie Maguire.’

  4

  Siobhán opened her eyes and at first she thought she was lying out in the open air somewhere, because her spine and her pelvis felt numb with cold, and she could see nothing but a pearl-grey fog. Her head was throbbing so painfully that she had to close her eyes again.

  Oh, dear God, she thought. Surely I didn’t get as mouldy as all that last night. She remembered dancing in the Eclipse, and she remembered screaming at Tadgh, and going back to the bar and tossing back at least three Jägerbombs. She couldn’t remember anything more after that. Surely she hadn’t staggered into the Peace Park and fallen asleep on the ground.

  She tried opening her eyes a second time. The fog was gradually dissolving now, and she was beginning to make out shapes and outlines, and she realised that she wasn’t lying outside at all, but in a brightly lit room with grey-painted walls. She could see a window, with a dark grey pelmet and curtains, and a cream-coloured blind drawn right down to the windowsill. She could see a door, and a white-painted chest-of-drawers, and a framed black-and-white engraving of a saint kneeling in front of a descending archangel.

  Above her head, and off to her left, a large cream surgical lamp was suspended, the kind of lamp that she had seen at the dentist’s. There was a strong smell of antiseptic in the room, too, just like the dentist’s. What was she doing at the dentist’s? And why did her head hurt so much? She closed her eyes yet again. She must be dreaming this. She must be at home, in bed, but she was so hungover that she was having a nightmare.

  She remembered coming out of the club and trying to call Hailo for a taxi. A taxi must have arrived and taken her home. All she had to do now was wake up. Count to ten, she thought, and then open your eyes, and you’ll be awake.

  She had only counted to five, though, before she heard the door open. She opened her eyes and she was still in the same brightly lit room, so it wasn’t a nightmare. She was really here, wherever this was. And her head really hurt, and she still felt paralysed with cold.

  A middle-aged woman with a pale freckly face and wild coppery hair leaned over her. She was wearing a green cowl-neck sweater and she reminded Siobhán of her bunscoil teacher, Mrs O’Leary. She stared down at Siobhán, frowning, and then she called out, ‘She’s conscious, doctor!’

  From outside the room, a man’s deep voice said, ‘Thank you, Grainne. I’ll be with you in just a minute.’ He sounded calm and educated, with a Dublin accent.

  ‘Where am I?’ asked Siobhán. Her mouth was so dry that she could only croak.

  ‘You’re safe enough,’ said the woman. ‘You’ve had yourself a bit of an accident, that’s all. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be grand.’

  Siobhán tried to sit up but her back felt frozen stiff, and she had no leverage. She dropped her head back down on to the pillow and said, ‘What do you mean, accident? What accident?’

  ‘You don’t remember? You were hit by a car, dear. Both of your legs are broken.’

  ‘What? Where? Is this a hospital?’

  ‘It’s a kind of a hospital, yes. It’s a nursing home for people like yourself, with debilitating injuries.’

  ‘Where’s my phone? I need to call my mother.’

  ‘I haven’t seen any phone, dear. Sorry.’

  Siobhán tried again to sit up, but she simply couldn’t feel her lower back. She reached down and felt a honeycomb blanket over her legs, of the kind they always used in hospitals, and underneath it she could feel her left thigh with her hand, but there was no sensation at all in the thigh itself. It might just as well have been made of wood.

  She saw that her arm was bare, and she realised then that she was wearing a short-sleeved nightgown, white with small blue dots on it, so she must be in hospital.

  ‘I have to call my mother. She’ll be sick with worry. What time is it?’

  ‘Half-past two.’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? She’ll have probably called the guards by now. If I’m late at all, I always have to ring her and tell her where I am. Are you sure it’s not in my bag?’

  ‘What bag was that, dear?’

  ‘My orange Hallowe’en bag. It has like a pumpkin stitched on to it. Don’t tell me I’ve lost it.’

  The gingery-haired woman raised one eyebrow, as if she couldn’t even be bothered t
o think about Siobhán’s bag, let alone go and look for it.

  Siobhán said, ‘Do you have a phone that I could lend a borrow of? I have to call her and tell her where I am.’

  ‘I’ll have to talk to the doctor. He wouldn’t want you upsetting yourself unduly. And I’m not at all sure that you’re allowed any visitors yet.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why not? What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Like I said, dear, it’s your legs. You stepped out into the road without looking. I’m making no judgements at all, but from your blood analysis this morning, I’d say you were probably langers. You stepped out into the road and a car ran over you. The trouble is, it looks like you may have some spinal injury, too, and so we can’t risk anybody coming to see you and bringing in some infection. You know what it’s like this time of year, everybody coughing and sneezing, like. You don’t want to end up paralysed for the rest of your life, now do you?’

  ‘But I only want to ring her and tell her what’s happened, and where I am.’

  Siobhán’s eyes were crowded with tears now, and she was beginning to feel that she was in some kind of a madhouse. She sounded logical, this woman, but she wasn’t really making any sense.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Just lend me a borrow of your phone. I’ll only be making the one call.’

  ‘Let me speak to the doctor.’

  ‘Can’t I speak to the doctor? I want to know how bad I’ve been hurt.’

  ‘Of course you can speak to the doctor,’ said the man’s deep voice. ‘I’m right here, miss. How are you feeling?’

  Siobhán craned her head up as much as she could, and saw a very tall man standing on the opposite side of the room, wearing a pale green surgical cap and a full-length surgical gown. The lower half of his face was covered by a surgical mask, so that she could see only his eyes. They were glittery and almost black, his eyes, and his eyebrows were thick and black with a few stray wisps of white.

  ‘I need to ring my mother,’ said Siobhán. ‘I need to tell her what’s happened.’

  ‘You can of course,’ said the doctor, approaching the bed and standing close beside her. ‘But before you do that, I have to perform at least one more urgent procedure.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘The reason you can’t remember what happened to you is that when you were struck by the car you suffered a vasovagal syncope. This simply means that either your ulnar nerve or your peroneal nerve was struck very hard, causing you to faint.’

  ‘I don’t – What does that mean?’ said Siobhán. ‘I mean, what? Is that serious, like?’

  ‘It’s not at all unusual,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s sometimes called a vasodepressor response, but it’s a physical reaction that not too many people are aware of.’

  Siobhán wished that he would lower his mask, because it muffled his voice and apart from that she couldn’t clearly follow what he was trying to tell her, and it would have helped if she could have seen the expression on his face. Although he was standing so close to her, he wasn’t looking at her directly. His eyes kept darting from side to side as if he were simply reciting this explanation and wasn’t particularly interested in her reaction to it.

  ‘Your ulnar nerve is what we commonly call your funny bone, in your elbow. Your peroneal nerve is in your knee. If either of these nerves are struck very hard, it triggers an immediate response. Your body immediately sends a large amount of blood flooding into your legs. This pulls blood away from your major organs like your brain and your heart, and so you lose consciousness.

  ‘That’s not too serious if you’re sitting down, of course, because all you’ll do is slowly slump over. If you’re standing up, however, you’ll fall over flat, without making any attempt at all to protect yourself, and you can do yourself some serious injury. In your case it appears that one car struck you in the knee, which caused you to faint and fall into the path of another car, which ran over your legs. At the same time, you suffered a very nasty crack on the head, probably from hitting the kerb.

  ‘I’ve given you morphine to suppress the pain, but I urgently have to check your brain to make sure that you have no internal bleeding. If there is, it could be very debilitating, or even fatal. I also need to look at your legs in case there’s still some subcutaneous bleeding there, and to remove any bone fragments, if any. You don’t want any impairment of your mental faculties, do you? And you want to be able to walk again, I’d say. You don’t want to be some helpless vegetable for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Can I ring my mother, though? I have to ring my mother.’

  ‘You can’t do it from this room, I’m afraid, because it’s shielded for X-rays and there’s no reception. You’re not in any condition to be moved yet, either. Quite apart from that, I need to get started on your brain scan as soon as I can.’

  Siobhán’s mouth turned down and tears slid from both of her eyes. The doctor laid his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘There, now, don’t be getting yourself all upset. If you give Grainne here your mother’s name and number, she’ll call her for you and tell her what’s happened to you and where you are, and how soon she can come and visit you. How about that?’

  Siobhán was still feeling too weak and confused to argue. ‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘But you won’t go frightening her, will you? Her name’s Mrs Patricia Kilmore, and it’s four-three-nine eighty-four eighty-five.’

  ‘And your name is?’

  ‘Siobhán. Siobhán O’Donohue.’ She paused to lick her lips, because her mouth was so dry. ‘That’s on account of my father died and my mother got married again but he went off and left her. Michael Kilmore, I mean.’

  ‘Thanks a million, Siobhán,’ said the doctor. ‘Grainne, will you go and do that right away?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Grainne. ‘I won’t be long. And I won’t alarm her, don’t worry.’

  As soon as she had left the room, the doctor turned back to Siobhán. ‘Now then, I’m going to give you another little injection to put you out for a while. You’d find it unbearable otherwise, the pain. I need to investigate what damage has been done to your legs, to see what I can do to set you right, and unfortunately that means I’ll have to do a fair bit of poking around. But don’t you worry. We’ll soon have you dancing again. It’s going to be “eat your heart out, Jean Butler”.’

  Siobhán looked into the doctor’s eyes. They were fixed on her now, very intently, as if he were calculating exactly what he was going to do to her. Because of his mask, though, she still couldn’t work out what he was feeling. Pity? Anxiety? Or was it something else altogether? His mask was sucked in and out as he breathed, and she noticed that he was breathing much quicker now, which strangely reminded her of Tadgh when they were in bed together, and he was close to his vinegar stroke. Surely he wasn’t excited?

  He disappeared from her view, but he returned a few moments later pushing a small metal trolley with bottles tinkling together and a metal kidney bowl. He lifted the sleeve of her nightgown and wiped her upper arm with a cold medicated tissue. Then he pierced one of the bottles with the needle of a hypodermic syringe, held it up to the light, and tapped it.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Only a little sting, nothing worse than a gnat-bite, and you’ll be in dreamland. When you wake up, Siobhán, I can promise you this, my dear, you won’t know yourself.’

  5

  As she drove through the drizzle into the city, Katie’s iPhone pinged every few seconds with messages and emails, and when she reached her office she found a stack of messages and files waiting for her on her desk. The red light on her phone was flashing.

  She was still shaking out her wet raincoat when Detective Dooley knocked at her door. He was looking exceptionally smart this afternoon, in a tight navy-blue suit. He had trimmed his beard and his hair was brushed flat, too, instead of vertical, as it usually was. Most of the time he wore skinny jeans and sloppy Aran sweaters and could easily be taken for a college student. That was why Katie frequently sent him to
Cork’s dance clubs and discos to check up on the peddlers of MDMA and other recreational drugs.

  ‘I’m in court this afternoon,’ he told her, before she could even ask him. ‘That Shalom Park rape.’

  ‘Serious?’ said Katie. ‘I didn’t think they were hearing that until the middle of next month.’

  ‘It’s only a preliminary hearing. One of the defendants changed his plea to guilty last night and he’s prepared to shop the other three. I did text you about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve had a rake of messages this morning and I haven’t had a chance to check them all yet. Well, that’s good news. I thought it was going to be touch-and-go, getting a conviction for that one. Which defendant was it?’

  ‘Bryan Neeley, the youngest. The GAA player.’

  ‘What changed his mind, do you know?’

  ‘It’s only hearsay, like, but I think the girl’s father might have got a message through to him. Something along the lines of, “If the court doesn’t punish you, then me and my friends will, some dark night when you least expect it, and I don’t suppose you want to be spending the rest of your life singing like a Bee Gee.”’

  ‘I’ve gone deaf all of a sudden and I didn’t hear that,’ said Katie. ‘But fingers crossed for a good result, anyhow. Was there something else you wanted to see me about?’

  ‘Oh, yes. This shooting at Ballinroe East. Detective Sergeant Begley went down there again this morning, like, to see how the Bandon cops are getting on with it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They let the kennel owner go home about lunchtime, but he’s given them an inventory of all his dogs that were taken. I’ve already circulated all of the pet shops and all of the breeders I know of. I’ve also passed a copy to Inspector O’Rourke, so that he can contact all of the Travellers he’s pally with, in case any of the dogs get offered for racing. I’ve been in touch with C and E at Ringaskiddy, too, warning them to keep an eye out for any dogs being exported. I know it’s too early to expect any kind of response, but you know what these Spaniel Snatchers are like. Once they’ve lifted a dog, it’s spirited away before you can say Brandy Traditional Meat Loaf.’