Gemma's Journey

by Beryl Kingston

  Her mother pulled her jacket straight. ‘Yes darling. Yes I know,’ she murmured. ‘But it’ll be all right.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about your future,’ Billie told her. ‘It’s no good talking about the past. We’ve got to think about the future. You must come home with me and let me look after you. That’s all there is to it.’ And as Gemma was glaring at her, she tried to persuade. ‘It’ll all be for the best, darling, you’ll see. After all, I know your ways, don’t I? And there’s no one to beat your mother when you’re not well.’

  Gemma was as close to beating her mother as she’d ever been. ‘You’re not listening to me,’ she said angrily. ‘I don’t want to come home with you. I don’t want to be looked after. Not by you. Not by anyone. I want to stand on my own feet.’

  Anger triggered annoyance. ‘You don’t face facts, Gemma. That’s always been your trouble,’ Billie said. ‘You never have. You’re too self-willed. You always have to know best. Well it’ll have to stop now. You’ll have to be looked after whether you like it or not.’

  ‘No,’ Gemma insisted. ‘I won’t. I’m going to get better and I’m going to look after myself. And while we’re on the subject, I’m not going to be a model. Not. N O T. I’m going to be an actress.’

  Billie’s face was wrinkled with distress. ‘Oh my poor darling,’ she said. ‘You’ll never get an acting job now. Not with your face in this state. And all your lovely hair gone.’

  Until that moment, Gemma hadn’t thought about any other part of her body except her missing leg. ‘What?’ she said, putting up her hand to touch her hair. Lumps. Spikes. Nasty tacky …

  ‘They haven’t shown you.’ Billie understood. ‘You haven’t seen.’ She was fishing in her handbag for her powder compact, flicking it open, dusting the powder from the surface of the mirror. ‘They should have let you see. I mean to say, it’s not fair to keep it from you.’

  Gemma didn’t want to look but it was already too late. The mirror gleamed before her and the image in it was unavoidable. There was her forehead scored with red scars and pitted with black spots as if she’d been peppered with shot, her eyes, not brown and shining as she knew them but small and bloodshot, the left one half closed by swollen flesh and purple bruises. But above her face – and far, far worse – were the roughly cropped remains of her hair, spiky with blood and grease, standing on end, grotesque as a clown’s wig, and running through it from the left side of her forehead and round behind her ear, a long hideous wound. It was sutured together with great black stitches like a strip of barbed wire and all the hair on either side of it had been shaved away. The shock of such a terrible change of image was so shattering it ripped away the last of her control. She hurled the mirror from her mother’s hand and began to scream.

  ‘It isn’t me! It isn’t! It isn’t! I don’t look like that. I won’t!’ Then she burst into passionate weeping, unable to bear it a second longer, because she did look like that, she was changed for ever, wrecked, ruined, finished. ‘What did you have to go and do that for?’

  Billie was shattered. She hadn’t meant to upset her poor daughter. Not like this. She hadn’t thought … If only she’d … Faced with such a terrible reaction, she didn’t know what to do or say. She dithered, patted Gemma’s arm and was thrown off violently, took two paces into the ward, called for the nurse, returned to the bedside, her face taut with concern, tried to defend herself. ‘You had to see sooner or later, darling. I mean to say … They couldn’t keep it from you for ever.’

  Gemma went on weeping, hiding her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. ‘Oh, don’t cry, darling,’ Billie pleaded. ‘Please don’t cry. You’ll make yourself ill. Please, please don’t cry. It’s not as bad as all that. I mean, scars fade, don’t they, in time. And your hair’ll grow back. You think how quickly it grows. There’s always a bright side. Every cloud has a silver lining. You’ll get enormous damages.’

  That made matters worse. ‘Go away!’ Gemma shouted. ‘I can’t stand this. Go away! Do you hear?’ The entire ward could hear but she was too far gone to care. ‘I can’t bear to see you. I can’t bear to see …’

  A nurse had arrived at the foot of the bed. ‘Oh, nurse,’ Billie tried to explain. ‘She’s had a bit of an upset.’

  ‘Yes,’ the nurse said. ‘I can see.’ And she drew the curtains round her patient. ‘If you wouldn’t mind leaving us for a moment, Mrs Goodeve,’ she suggested. ‘It’s time for Gemma’s medication. She was in theatre a very long time.’

  Now that her tears had begun, Gemma lay back on her pillows and wept with abandon, crying out Thursday’s terror and pain, her friends’ rejection, her stupid, stupid weakness, her utter revulsion at what she had become. She took the proffered pills still weeping, heard the nurse’s commiserations still weeping, closed her eyes still weeping. It was a very long time before she slipped into the relief of sleep.

  She woke to a changed world. Even before she opened her eyes she could feel the change. It was so peaceful – quiet and soothing and contained. It made her feel secure, as though she were tucked in a cradle. And it smelt heavenly. She opened her good eye, saw that the curtains were opened too and peeped sideways at the ward. It was empty of everything except beds and patients and so quiet that she could hear the slip-slop of footsteps slummocking away along the corridor and the clatter of cutlery from the central table where the rest of the patients were eating their supper, talking to one another in gentle easy voices. The blue daylight of the morning had softened, deepening the colour of the curtains and veiling the walls with lilac shadow, and the square of sky in the window opposite was peach pink and suffused with soft light. It was afternoon.

  Then she noticed the flowers.

  They were heaped on every surface all round her bed, two glass vases full of roses and gypsophila on the cabinet and vases and baskets and pots of every kind filling the table at the foot of the bed. She’d never seen such a display except in a florist’s. She sat up carefully and smiled at the women sitting round the table.

  ‘Better?’ one of them called.

  She agreed that she was. ‘I’m sorry I made such a fuss.’

  ‘You go ahead, duck,’ the woman said. She was a comfortable woman in a pink dressing gown and a large neck brace. ‘Make as much fuss as you like. If you can’t, I don’t know who can.’

  ‘Why have they put all those flowers on my table?’ Gemma asked.

  One of the other women got up and strolled across the ward to Gemma’s bed. ‘They’re yours,’ she said. ‘Been coming in all afternoon.’

  ‘Good heavens! Who from?’

  ‘Well-wishers,’ the woman said. ‘Sister Foster was telling us. You been in the papers. You’re a heroine. We been reading about you.’

  Gemma leant across the bed and picked up the card attached to the nearest vase of roses. Get well soon, it said, dear brave girl, from Mrs Elliott and the girls at Ivymount Engineering.

  Surprise gave way to pleasure. The sense of being cared for brought an unexpected feeling of well-being. All these flowers, she thought. All these people I’ve never met taking the time and trouble to send me flowers. She picked up the second card. That said much the same thing as the first: We hope you soon get better, from Rainbow class. ‘How kind!’

  ‘People are,’ the woman told her. ‘Given half a chance. You got a lotta cards too. They’re in your drawer. I’m Patsy, by the way. I was in the crash an’ all. Broken collarbone and concussion. There’s five of us from the crash in here.’

  Gemma looked round the ward at her fellow sufferers, who nodded and smiled. Seeing them made her feel ashamed of herself for making a fuss like that when she was surrounded by so many other people who’d been hurt in the accident too. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked Patsy.

  ‘Yes,’ Patsy said shortly. ‘Well I’m better now anyway. All right if I take the painkillers. Mustn’t grumble. We’re the lucky ones. There was twenty-seven killed. We been reading about it
in the papers. Would you like to see them?’

  Gemma took the papers and read them one after the other. The pictures gave her a shock even though she knew how serious the accident had been but the text was worse. Twenty-seven dead. It was horrific. It should never have happened. And reading about it brought it all back to her.

  ‘There was a little boy,’ she remembered, as she opened the third paper in the pile. ‘He was in the carriage with me. I wonder what happened to him.’

  And there he was, in the first picture on the centre pages, wrapped in a blanket and being carried away by an ambulance woman. ‘Miraculous escaped,’ she read. ‘Little Jack Turner pulled from the wreckage alive after being trapped for nearly an hour, escaped with cuts and bruises, despite fears for his life. Sadly his mother, Maureen, was one of the fatalities.’

  The news crushed Gemma with sadness. ‘That’s awful,’ she said. ‘She was telling him off when we crashed.’ She remembered it too clearly. ‘He was drinking Coke and it was all slopping out of the can. And she told him off. It must have been the last thing she did. Oh poor woman!’ It was so awful it made her cry.

  ‘It was a bad business,’ Patsy agreed.

  I mustn’t make any more fuss, Gemma thought, stanching her tears. And trying to be positive, she turned her attention to the flowers. ‘We ought to put these all round the ward,’ she said. ‘They’re as much for you as for me. We were all in it together.’ It was suddenly important to her to share her good fortune.

  ‘They was sent to you,’ Patsy pointed out.

  ‘Only because I was in the paper and they knew who I was,’ Gemma said. ‘If you’d been in the paper they’d have come to you. Let’s spread them around. They’d look better spread around.’

  So the flowers were borne away to every cabinet, the cards were read and hung on strings above the bed and, having recovered enough to find an appetite, Gemma was given some supper.

  ‘That’s better,’ the woman in the pink dressing gown said. ‘That’s put some colour in your cheeks. That’ll please our Doctor Quennell.’

  Gemma was enjoying the sight of her roses. She wasn’t particularly interested in doctors at that moment. But to make conversation she asked who he was.

  ‘He’s our doctor,’ Patsy said. ‘You’d have seen him yesterday if you hadn’t been asleep all the time. He was in and out all day. Ever so kind. Couldn’t do enough for us. You’ll see him tomorrow when he does his rounds. You’ll love him. He’s gorgeous.’

  Chapter 5

  When Dr Nicholas Quennell eased himself out of bed on Saturday morning he was far from gorgeous. After two very bad nights, he felt as though he hadn’t slept for a fortnight and one wince at the wall mirror revealed that he looked as though he hadn’t either. But that was par for the course in this job and there was too much pride in him to complain.

  As the much-loved, youngest child in an almost entirely medical family, he’d never had the slightest doubt about the direction his life would take nor the success he would make of it – to Dulwich College, where his father and older brother had been scholars before him, then to King’s – College and Hospital – where they had trained, then on to the wards in one of the London hospitals. Medicine was the right profession for him. It was familiar, it suited his idealistic nature, and it gave him the daily opportunity to help and cure. When he told Gemma Goodeve he never allowed his patients to die, he was simply stating what he believed. Death was his enemy and he fought it with all the high-tech he could command. Nothing was sweeter to him than the knowledge that he had pulled another patient through. His sister Susan teased him for ‘playing God’ but that was just the sort of thing she would say and could be easily ignored. Inside his personality he’d always been secure and certain of himself.

  But now, and without warning, the crash had brought him face to face with two brutal, inevitable facts – that all life is limited and that no doctor can work miracles, however talented he might be. Having to certify the death of so many terribly mangled bodies had been an appalling thing for him to do, hence the bad nights.

  And it was a miserable morning. As he made his way between the tall buildings of the hospital towards the main entrance and the café where he usually had breakfast with his friends, it was threatening rain and a chill wind was blowing. He lengthened his stride. The sooner he got to the café, the sooner he would cheer up.

  He liked the main entrance. It gave him a sense of importance every time he saw it, with its triangular glass roof and the foyer beneath it full of people all cheerfully milling about. Despite the statues that flanked the automatic doors – Florence Nightingale carved in green stone on one side and the boy king, Edward VI, equally verdant and angelic on the other – it looked more like a shopping mall than a hospital. Some people complained about it, saying it was part of the general commercialisation of medicine, but it seemed right to him, like a cosmopolitan bridge between the wards and the outside world, where staff and patients and visitors could mingle on equal terms, buying sweets and papers in Menzies, flowers at the florist’s, using the NatWest, eating at the café or the restaurant, taking their clothes to the dry cleaner’s. Its cheerfulness marked the start of his morning routine. He couldn’t wait to get inside.

  But that Saturday there was a gauntlet to run. Since the crash, the hospital had sent out a spokesman night and morning in order to keep the press informed. Now, early though it was, there were already half a dozen reporters lurking on the walkway, blue jeans sagging, cameras and microphones at the ready. As he approached, one of them left the group and began to stride towards him. He was a thickset man with a solid beer-belly and a determined expression, and he plainly meant business. Damn, Nick thought. He’s not after me, is he? But he was.

  ‘Excuse me, Doctor!’ he called. ‘Just a minute! Excuse me!’

  Now what shall I do? Nick thought. If I press on he’ll follow me into the café and I shall never get rid of him. I’d better backtrack. He turned on his heel and began to stride back the way he’d come, his shoulders hunched with annoyance. If he walked quickly he could get in through one of the side doors and give him the slip.

  The reporter was quicker than he was – and insistent. He was alongside in a dozen paces. ‘Don’t I recognise you?’ he said.

  Nick walked on, barely glancing at him. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘You were at the crash.’

  That had to be admitted, grudgingly.

  ‘You were the guy who cut our Gemma Goodeve out of the wreckage. Can you tell me how she is?’

  I’ll have to stop and say something, Nick thought. I can’t just go on walking away. ‘The hospital spokesman will be giving another press statement at ten o’clock this morning,’ he said stiffly, giving the official response. ‘As you obviously know. That’s who you’re waiting for isn’t it? He will answer all your questions.’

  ‘How was she the last time you saw her?’

  ‘The hospital spokesman …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah! We know all that,’ the reporter grinned and quoted the clichéd phrases, his voice mocking, ‘As well as can be expected. Stable condition. Making good progress. But how is she? That’s what our readers want to know. Right? How’s she coping, poor kid? It must have been quite a shock.’ He was standing right in front of Nick now, blocking the way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nick said, looking at him aggressively but keeping his voice massively polite. ‘I can’t discuss my patients. Doctors don’t. It’s against our code. You’ll have to ask the spokesman.’ And he walked on.

  ‘Doctors don’t!’ the reporter mocked, striding beside him. ‘What a load of crap. That old feller on the news told us all sorts.’

  Bloody nerve, Nick thought angrily. That old feller. That’s my father you’re talking about. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, pushing past the man’s bulk. ‘I’ve got work to do.’ And he squeezed through the nearest side entrance as quickly as he could. So quickly that the edge of his white coat was caught between the two doors as they swun
g back and he had to stop, red-faced with annoyance and embarrassment, to disentangle himself.

  ‘A quick quote!’ the reporter suggested, looming before him.

  Fury and mortification got the better of good sense. ‘Bugger off!’

  The reporter was delighted. ‘Naughty, naughty!’ he said, waving an admonitory finger.

  Bloody hacks, Nick thought as he charged down the corridor. They make monkeys of us. We ought to do something about them. Calling my father that old feller. But as his long stride took him further away from trouble and he began to cool down, he had to admit that his father had asked for it. He had given the interview. And everybody knew that doctors don’t give interviews, especially to television and straight off the cuff. The BMA handle that sort of thing, or an official spokesman, never the doctor on the case.

  His two friends Rick and Abdul were halfway through their breakfast. Abdul was sprinkled with crumbs. ‘What kept you?’ he said, brushing at his coat.

  ‘Hacks.’

  ‘What did they want?’

  ‘Gemma Goodeve, basically.’

  ‘Who?’ Rick wanted to know.

  ‘The crash girl.’

  ‘They say she’s beautiful,’ Abdul observed. ‘An actress or something. Is that right?’

  Nick had started his breakfast. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I was too busy to notice.’

  ‘Aren’t you doing old Barnaby’s rounds today?’ Rick asked, stretching his long legs out beyond the table.

  ‘Yes,’ Nick admitted, grimacing. ‘For my sins.’

  ‘Then you can ask her.’

  Nick didn’t think much of that for an idea. Although he was cool in theatre and something of a whiz-kid when it came to diagnosis, he found ward rounds difficult. Patients had a tendency to emotional outbursts once they were back on the ward, and as grief and anger were a little too hard for him to handle, he was careful not to provoke them. ‘I shall do no such thing,’ he said.

  But when he walked into Page Ward later that morning, everybody in the office was talking about his famous patient, and the place was full of flowers. He’d never seen so many in a ward. He was used to the odd vase here and there but not this sort of abundance: roses, lilies, dahlias, chrysanthemums, there was no end to them, their massed colours dazzling after the grey light of the morning, their scent overpowering. He stood for a moment just inside the swing doors, breathing it in.