Good question. I check my watch. I’m not due at the police station until three and I’m in the process of tapping out a longish reply when I hear what I can only describe as a commotion next door in Pavel’s room. Moments later, Ndeye’s face appears around the door.
‘Venez.’ I can hear the panic in her voice. ‘Urgence.’
Some kind of emergency? Has Pavel somehow fallen out of bed? I get to my feet and hurry next door. To my relief, Pavel seems intact, the same face on the same pillow, but then I take a closer look, aware of Ndeye beside me.
‘Une attaque.’ She taps her head. A stroke.
‘How do you know?’
‘I was reading to him. We were talking about Paris. Then he suddenly stopped as if there was something in his throat, and his eyes went, and he started to choke. I’ve seen it before. A horrible noise. An animal noise. From way down here.’ She pats her chest.
‘Is he breathing?’
‘Just. Not much, but just.’
‘Pulse?’
‘Very light. Here.’ She has Pavel’s hand. I take it, trying to find the slightest flutter on the inside of his wrist. She’s right. He’s barely alive.
I phone 999 on my mobile and ask for an ambulance. I give my name and the address and postcode of the apartment. Then comes a change of voice and I’m talking to a man with a to-do checklist. An ambulance will be with us as soon as possible, he assures me. In the meantime, it will help to make the patient as comfortable as possible. Are his or her airways clear? Am I familiar with the recovery position? Has he or she been eating recently?
‘He,’ I say helplessly. ‘He’s a he.’
‘Has he complained of pains anywhere?’
‘He’s paralysed.’
‘Are his eyes open?’
‘He’s blind.’
‘Can he hear you?’
‘I don’t think so. Not so far. I’ll try again.’
The phone still pressed to my ear, I kneel beside Pavel. ‘Can you hear me? It’s OK. It’s Enora. Just move your head, open your eyes, any bloody thing.’ I glance up at Ndeye. She’s staring at Pavel the way you might look at a ghost, disbelief spiked with something close to fear. I try again, and then a third time, my lips to Pavel’s ear.
Nothing. Not the slightest hint of a reaction.
‘Is he still breathing?’ asks the voice on the phone.
‘Just.’
‘Do you have access to a defib?’
‘No.’
‘CPR?’
I look at Ndeye again.
‘Cardio resus?’ I mime the actions with my hand. Mercifully, she nods.
I pass on the good news to the voice on my phone. Should we get Pavel out of bed? Lie him on the floor? Try and work on him?
‘He’s in bed already?’
‘Yes. At nursing height.’
‘Perfect. Start with light pressure. Keep his pulse going. If it fails completely, ramp it up to max. And you are …?’
I give him my name. He already has the address for the ambulance. He says he’ll keep the line open in case I need any more help.
‘Paralysed and blind? Have I got that right?’
‘You have.’
‘Good luck, Ms Andressen. The paramedics will take over as soon as they arrive.’
‘Thank you.’
Ndeye has already exposed Pavel’s upper body. Now she’s standing over him, her arms out straight, applying little jolts of pressure to his pitifully thin chest. After a minute or so, his breathing seems to pick up and watching him fight like this I feel a fierce gust of what I can only describe as pride. Hang in there. Do it. Don’t let the darkness steal you away.
The ambulance is with us minutes later. I hear the wail of the siren first. By now I’ve left Ndeye with Pavel and I’ve gone out in the rain to intercept the paramedics. They park on the hardstanding behind the apartment block. One of them grabs a resus bag and follows me into the building. The other slides a wheeled stretcher out of the back of the ambulance and follows. The lift, mercifully, is still open. The three of us ascend to the top floor while I do my best to explain what awaits them. Male. Mid-fifties. Blind. Paralysed after a C3 break. And now, it seems, felled by a stroke.
The older of the two paramedics hasn’t taken his eyes off me. As the lift whispers to a halt, he reaches out and gives my shoulder a little squeeze.
‘Excuse my French,’ he mutters. ‘But shit happens.’
I follow them into the apartment. Ndeye is still at Pavel’s bedside. She’s stopped the CPR and for a moment I fear the worst but then I catch the smile on her face.
‘His breathing is much stronger,’ she says. ‘His pulse is good, too.’
The paramedics circle the bed and try to get a response from Pavel. Sheer willpower may have dragged him back from the brink but he’s clearly in no mood for conversation. Ndeye has already removed Pavel’s glasses. Now the older paramedic gently parts his eyelid and shines a light into his eyeball.
I want to ask what he expects to find in there, but I don’t. He shakes his head, checks his watch and looks across at his colleague.
‘Wonford,’ he says. ‘ETA fifteen minutes. Query TIA.’
The younger paramedic has a radio. He transmits the details, then helps transfer Pavel on to the stretcher.
‘You’re taking him to hospital?’
‘Wonford, my lovely. You want to come?’
I say yes at once and follow them out to the lift, leaving Ndeye to clear up. Only when we leave the block, with me doing my best to shield Pavel’s face from the rain, do I realize that I’ve left my mobile in the apartment. My helpful friend from ambulance control, I think, may still be on the open line. Bless him.
Wonford is the main site for the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, a sprawl of buildings to the south of the city. We roar through every red light en route from Exmouth and seem to spend most of the journey on the wrong side of the road. Pavel is breathing oxygen now and I’m perched beside him, bracing myself against the tighter corners, trying to offer some kind of physical comfort. His flesh is cold to the touch and I can feel the bones in his hand beneath my fingertips. I’m used to the deadness below his neck but now is somehow different. Please God, don’t let him go.
The A&E unit is at the rear of the hospital. The paramedics ease the laden stretcher carefully out of the back of the ambulance and wheel him into the fast-track channel reserved for acute emergencies. Pavel is still breathing but his face behind the oxygen mask is the colour of thin, grey parchment. I’m still walking beside the stretcher, still holding his hand, when a nurse in blue scrubs intercepts me. I give her my name and she steers me into a side cubicle and takes Pavel’s details. The news that he’s blind as well as paralysed produces just a hint of surprise.
‘Remarkable.’ She clips her pen back in her pocket. ‘Are you the lead carer?’
‘In some ways, yes.’
‘His wife, perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘Partner?’
‘No. Just a good friend.’
The moment she leaves me in the cubicle, promising to return when she has any news, I feel an overwhelming sensation of self-disgust. A good friend? Is that all I am? After everything Pavel and I have been through? Before he had the accident, and afterwards? I shake my head and do my best to settle in the moulded plastic chair, my head tipped back against the tiled wall, my eyes closed.
Sudden crises like this, unannounced, unfathomable, can shake you to the core. I had a similar feeling when my consultant confirmed that my brain tumour, that little knot of rogue cells, might well kill me. You follow the prognosis, and nod, and try to be brave, but your normal defences are useless. You can make no sense of anything. Maybe I should be talking to H, I think. Or perhaps Malo. But I know deep down that even if I had a phone, I’d never make the calls. The paramedic was right. There’s nothing to be said. Shit happens. Deal with it.
A little later, the nurse returns. She says that Pavel is undergoing a series of tests
and will certainly be staying in the hospital for a while. His condition appears to have stabilized and his vital signs are remarkably good. When I ask whether he’s back with us – whether he’s talking, listening, being difficult – she shakes her head. The word she uses is ‘coma’, which I find a bit chilling. Is this something temporary? Or will he grow out of it?
I apologize at once for the latter phrase. My own brain, I tell her, keeps letting me down. She smiles and tells me where to find a cup of tea. It comes from a machine but it’s not too bad. In the meantime, she’ll try and persuade the registrar to come and have a word with me. She’s about to leave the cubicle when, all too late, I remember my appointment at the police station. I have no watch, no mobile, nothing.
‘Do you have the time, by any chance?’
The nurse checks her watch. Nearly half past three. I close my eyes and rock slowly back and forth on the chair. I must look a picture because the nurse squats beside me.
‘Everything OK?’
I start to explain about my mobile and about an appointment I’ve missed, but when she offers to make a call on my behalf I shake my head.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I tell her. ‘Everything will have to wait.’
It’s gone six when I finally get the first proper news about Pavel. At first I assume the slight figure who’s just slipped into the cubicle and closed the curtain behind him is the registrar but he turns out to be the A&E duty consultant.
‘You look far too young,’ I tell him. ‘And that’s a compliment.’
He has a sheepish smile, which is nice, and what’s also unusual is the way he tries to soften bad news. I’ve met dozens of medical luminaries over the last couple of years, most of them oncologists, and some of them have an occasionally brutal habit of offering unvarnished truths. Not this infant.
‘Your friend will be a challenge, whatever happens,’ he says. ‘We’ve taken a good look at him and we don’t think he’s going to die. He’s still unconscious at the moment but there’s every chance that he may come round within the next twenty-four hours or so. That’s not a promise, but we think it’s very likely. What’s also more than possible is what little he may have left. In my experience, episodes are very unpredictable. They’ll know more on the Stroke Unit and I’d feel more comfortable if you had a longer conversation with them.’
I thank him for his tact, and I tell him I understand his reluctance to go any further. The phrase that haunts me is ‘what little he may have left’.
‘Will he be able to talk?’
‘Possibly not.’
‘Hear anything?’
‘That, too, may have been compromised.’
Compromised? I shut my eyes again, determined not to cry. My poor bloody man. Paralysed. Blind. Mute. And maybe even deaf. Why would God waste a minute, a second, keeping him alive? Why would anyone?
I feel a hand on my shoulder, the lightest touch.
‘It may not be as bad as you fear,’ he says. ‘Let’s hope your friend makes a full recovery.’
A full recovery? I’m sitting on the top deck of the bus, going back to the penthouse. Pavel will never make a full recovery because most of him is dead already. Then I remember those precious moments at his bedside when we’re discussing a favourite movie, or the dream script he’s still hoping to write, or the madness of the Brexiteers, or any of the countless other moments in our time together that spark laughter and a sense of kinship I can only describe as unique. Pavel and I have been marching in lockstep for the best part of a couple of years. We’ve always agreed that the world is going mad, clinically insane, and that there’s precious little that either of us can do about it except compare notes and watch out for each other. That, in a way, is loving the man and now, I tell myself, is not the time to stop. I want him, need him, back. With whatever the medics have been able to salvage.
It’s a five-minute walk from the bus stop to the marina. Mercifully the rain has stopped. I skirt the tidal basin and pause on the walkway at the foot of the apartment block. Rags of cloud are racing across the distant swell of the Haldon Hills and the sunset, in a phrase Pavel would have used, promises to be operatic. I linger a moment longer, watching a lone curlew pecking at the mud flats, and then take the lift up to the apartment.
Ndeye, it seems, has gone. Felip meets me as the lift door slides open. He’s desperate for news of Pavel and I tell him as much as I can. He wants, very badly, to know that Pavel will come back mended and I do my best to tell him that this happy outcome is more than possible. Then, almost as an afterthought, he nods towards the lounge.
‘A friend of yours,’ he says. ‘Mr Deko?’
TWENTY-TWO
Pavel has gone. I’ve no desire to spend the night in the apartment without him, and so I’m very happy to accompany Deko back to the Beacon. He says that Felip has told him about Pavel’s stroke, and when he puts his arms round me and gives me a long hug, I’m deeply grateful.
‘This is becoming a habit,’ I tell him. ‘You’re good at this. I’m running out of friends, but you could start a business.’ When he wants to know whether that’s some kind of joke, I can only nod. ‘In very bad taste,’ I admit. ‘All you have to do is forgive me.’
We leave the apartment. En route back to the Beacon, Deko suggests a detour to a pub called the Grapevine. When I ask why, he says there’s someone I ought to meet.
Ought?
I’ve never been in the Grapevine. It lies just off the town’s main square and according to Carrie it has been vastly improved in recent years and has become the must-visit pub for monied drinkers with a passion for craft ales. She gave me the impression that it attracts a certain demographic – youngish hipsters drawn from the professional classes – and on first sight it seems she’s right. Early evening, three guys are joshing at the bar, while a quartet of women at a nearby table are doing serious damage to a couple of bottles of Sauvignon nesting in buckets of ice.
Deko is making for a table by the window where a lone drinker with a glass of something fizzy at his elbow is reading yesterday’s house copy of The Times.
‘Boysie.’ Deko stands aside and gestures in my direction. ‘Enora.’
Boysie must be younger than Deko, but not much. He’s wearing a pair of pink chinos and an exquisitely ironed open white shirt. He’s heavily tanned and the lick of hair falling over his forehead appears to be genuinely blond. The third nail on his left hand is painted an eye-catching scarlet and when his head turns towards me, I glimpse a silver ear stud in the shape of a dove.
A man like this, I think at once, belongs in one of those sultry period movies set in the White Highlands. Without even opening his mouth, he exudes a slightly louche arrogance. Colonial Kenya before the locals took over? Perfect.
He gets to his feet. The handshake is warm, immediately intimate, and the moment we all sit down, I sense that these two – Deko and Boysie – are brothers-in-arms. They must also be Grapevine regulars because drinks arrive at the table without anyone appearing to have ordered. A beer for Deko, a glass of Merlot for me.
‘They make this stuff in a microbrewery round the back.’ Deko raises his pale ale. ‘Here’s to crime.’
The pair of them pick up the threads of some recent conversation, and I gladly tune out. I’m trying to imagine the Stroke Unit where Pavel must be lying by now. How will the nurses cope with his many other needs? Might he be showing signs of life by now? Is there any chance he might even recognize me when I roll up tomorrow morning? I sit back in the spill of late sunshine through the window, toying with my glass, telling myself there’s absolutely nothing – for the time being – I can do. My precious Pavel is in good hands. Just relax.
Impossible. I realize Boysie is studying me with some interest. Deko’s big hand settles briefly on my arm.
‘You owe this man a thank you,’ he says.
‘For what?’
‘For that ride the other night. Out to the boat.’
I nod. Dinner à deux aboard Amen seems a life
time ago.
‘That was your speedboat? The one in the marina?’ I’m looking at Boysie.
‘We call it a RIB, but yes. My pleasure. Any time, eh?’
Deko tells him to behave, and then turns back to me. Boysie, he says, is a man on a mission. Lately, local opportunities for fine dining have brightened no end. A newly opened hotel down by the river offers Michelin-standard cuisine. Topsham is awash with top-end eateries. But Boysie, bless him, is determined to raise the bar even higher.
I’m not quite following this. Is the figure across the table some kind of super chef?
‘Christ, no.’ Boysie has an infectious laugh. ‘Money buys all that. I just provide the setting.’
‘You mean a restaurant?’
‘A hotel.’
‘Here? In Exmouth?’
‘Up towards the Common. The place goes way back. Once it was a rectory. Then a manor house. Now we’re talking seventeen rooms, a decent menu, six acres of woodland, and views across the river you won’t believe.’
‘And a casino.’ It’s Deko’s turn to laugh. ‘For Exmouth’s high rollers.’
Boysie gets to his feet and checks his watch before telling Deko to drink up.
‘We’re off?’ I’ve barely touched my wine.
‘Afraid so.’ Boysie shoots me that same smile. ‘In our game, seeing is believing.’
He has a big Audi parked outside the pub. We leave Exmouth at some speed, making our way through a maze of country lanes that climb away from the river valley. Acres of trees finally part to offer a pair of impressive wrought-iron gates, with glimpses of a drive beyond. Inlaid on a huge chunk of granite beside the gates is the name of our destination: Hotel Zuma.
‘Zuma?’ I ask.
Boysie is driving. I can see his eyes in the rear-view mirror.
Off Script Page 17