A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  Stevie saw an old man, his feet bare, his soles pink and vulnerable, his mouth agape. She saw a girl with tomato-red hair whose roots were showing. She saw a Rastaman with grey dreads and a black dready beard. She saw a girl with plaits that were secured by hair bobbles shaped like daisies. She saw an elderly woman whose wig had slid sideways, exposing the bald skull beneath. She saw a child of no more than three years old. She saw a fat man with cheeks like slabs of boiled ham. She saw a man with a hennaed beard, bushy and piratical. She saw a girl with a Vidal Sassoon bob and almond eyes. She saw a youth in a yellow Space Invaders T-shirt. She saw a large man with his hair pulled back in a ponytail. She saw a girl in a summer dress and green sandals. She saw an elderly man wearing an easyJet-orange-coloured turban. She saw a skinny white boy with tattooed sleeves. She saw a soldier whose arms were tucked tight by his sides, as if he had died on parade. She saw a middle-aged woman in a red-and-gold sari. She saw a bald man with a sunburnt head. She saw a nurse wearing stained scrubs.

  She saw.

  She saw.

  She saw.

  There was a whine louder than the droning flies, a sinking mechanical moan. Stevie knew what it was, but the sight of the bodies had driven everything else from her head and its name escaped her.

  She had never grasped the miracle of distinctness so clearly before, had never truly understood death’s vastness. Each hanging limb and lolling head had belonged to a person. Each one of them had felt the approach of death and feared it. And now they were gone, leaving a husk of flesh behind. Nothing connected the dead except their deaths. They were lost to themselves, and to the living.

  Stevie felt a horrible sudden urge to laugh. She clamped a hand over her mouth, shaking her head, as if denying what was in front of her could make it go away.

  The machine hum was building. Its vibrations touched Stevie and she realised that it was the sound of a lift descending from the floors above. She clicked off her torch and ran for the stairs. The lift doors breathed open just as she reached the landing. A hospital trolley rattled in the corridor below as someone pushed it, slow and weary, towards the makeshift morgue.

  Thirty-Eight

  Stevie’s sneakers scuffed against the stairs leading to Dr Ahumibe’s ward. The hospital’s fluorescent lights seared into her brain. She paused and pressed her knuckles to her eyes, wondering if this was the return of the sweats, the blessed bout that would carry her off.

  A scrabbling sound that was all movement made her look up. A rat was scurrying down the stairs towards her, fat and sleek, busy as a working mum in her lunch hour. Stevie’s kick made contact. The rat gave a high scream as it skidded across the step, paws splayed seeking for purchase, then it tumbled, tail twisting, rump over belly, into the stairwell and landed somewhere below.

  She tried to erase the memory of what she had seen in the basement, but reminders lined the walls of the hospital’s wards and corridors. People in white coats and green scrubs lay amongst the dead and the doctors and nurses still on their feet had a tranquillised look. None of the medics challenged her, but a man slumped on a chair reached out a hand and caught Stevie by the sleeve.

  ‘You don’t have it, do you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I did have, but I recovered.’

  He gripped her wrist tight, his fingers digging into her flesh, bruising it. Stevie tried to pull away but the stranger held on tight, with a hand that felt all bone.

  ‘They should be experimenting on you.’ The man lifted his head and shouted, ‘This girl has the answer.’ It was as if one of the corpses from the basement had risen up and started to talk. He was sick, his face glossy with sweat, skin that might have once been a rich copper now sunk to khaki. She could see death on him, but the man raised his voice loud enough to turn some heads. ‘The antidote is in her blood.’

  Stevie chopped at the sensitive part of his wrist with the edge of her hand and pulled free.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can save us,’ the man whispered.

  ‘No, you’re wrong.’

  Stevie could see the stairs to Dr Ahumibe’s ward up ahead. She broke into a run.

  ‘Stop her,’ the man shouted. ‘She’s the antidote.’

  But his voice was weaker than his grip, and if anyone heard him they paid no attention. After that, the quiet of the stairway came as a relief.

  Stevie heard the sound of sobbing. A woman of about her own age sat hunched on a landing, her face buried in her hands. Stevie touched the woman’s hair as she passed, but she didn’t stop. There was nothing to say.

  Dr John Ahumibe was in the small office where they had first talked. He was sitting at the desk, his head slumped across its surface. For a moment Stevie thought that he was dead, then she heard the sound of his breaths and saw the matching rise and fall of his ribs, and realised he was asleep. She took a chair from the other side of the desk, shut the door, set the chair against it, sat down and closed her eyes.

  Stevie woke with a start, unsure of where she was. Dr Ahumibe’s head was still resting against the desk, but his eyes were open. He blinked and said, ‘You’re still alive.’

  ‘You were right. I’m a survivor.’

  The doctor didn’t bother to lift his head.

  ‘I killed them all.’

  ‘Simon, Frei and Hope?’

  The doctor rolled his head from side to side. His pupils were magnified, his eyes almost all black, and she wondered what he had taken.

  ‘The children. I killed them.’

  There was no one there to hear her, but Stevie’s voice was a whisper. ‘Do you mean Joy Summers?’

  ‘No.’ The doctor rolled his head against the table again awkwardly, as if some mechanism had broken inside. ‘The children. It was my job to make sure that they were okay, and so I took care of them, one by one.’

  Stevie got to her feet and looked through the small window in the door, out into the ward beyond. The lights were low, but she could see the closed doors of the side wards. She imagined the drawn sheets and the motionless swell beneath each one.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All that hadn’t been collected by their parents, or already died, yes.’

  Stevie touched the glass. She felt an urge to open the doors and draw back the sheets, but stayed where she was.

  ‘Couldn’t you have taken them somewhere?’

  ‘Where?’

  She turned to look at him.

  ‘I don’t know. The countryside?’

  ‘It would only have extended their deaths. It was better this way.’ The doctor sat up, dragging a hand across his face. His complexion had turned the grey of a riverbed after long months of drought. Stevie saw his features properly for the first time, and recognised the signs of the sweats on him. He asked, ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I want to know what happened.’

  ‘No one knows.’ He yawned, and Stevie saw his teeth, the wet tongue and soft inside of his throat. ‘Sometimes viruses just appear.’ The doctor’s voice was cracked with grief and tiredness. There was a bottle of water on the table beside him. He poured a measure into a glass and took a small sip, as if he was unsure whether he would be able to hold it down. ‘I heard a theory, way back in the beginning when we had only just started to get seriously worried. An astrophysicist suggested that the virus might have been caused by space dust, brought in on a fallen asteroid. For some reason that still appeals to me. Outer space gave us life, now it brings us death.’

  Falling stars and children dead beneath their sheets, the bodies laid together in the basement. For a moment the images in Stevie’s head threatened to overwhelm her. She gripped the armrest of the chair.

  ‘I want to know why Simon died.’

  ‘Why Simon died.’ Dr Ahumibe repeated her words as if they were in a foreign language he was in the early stages of learning. ‘There was no reason. It was just one of those things. Sad at the time … devastating … but now I think, lucky bastard, “to die upon the midnight with no pain�
��, and miss all of this.’

  ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here? Because you think someone killed Simon?’ The doctor opened a drawer and took out a clutch of white paper boxes. His hands were shaking but he stacked the boxes patiently on the desk, one on top of the other, concentrating on the task as if it was important to get their edges straight, their corners aligned. ‘Everyone liked Simon. No one would want to murder him.’ He looked up and met her eyes for the first time. ‘You must have loved him a lot, to still care.’

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘I told you, I think he was lucky to go when he did. Simon always was lucky.’

  ‘According to Alexander Buchanan he wasn’t lucky at cards.’

  ‘Xander told you about that?’ Dr Ahumibe gave a sad, vague smile. ‘It seemed like a big deal at the time, thousands of pounds owing, criminal types creeping into the hospital in search of Dr Sharkey.’ He shook his head. ‘Simon used to say, “What’s life without a little danger?” It made me angry, but now I realise he was the only one of us who really knew how to live.’ He flicked a finger at the tower of boxes, toppling them across the desk. ‘A short life, but a merry one.’

  From somewhere inside the hospital came the sound of screaming and running feet. Dr Ahumibe reached into his trouser pocket, took out a set of keys and pushed them to the edge of the desk.

  ‘Lock the door and turn out the light. People may be looking for drugs.’ He pulled off his white coat, his movements slow and awkward, as if the pockets had been weighted with stones. ‘It’s best no one knows I’m a doctor.’ He shoved the coat under his chair. ‘I can’t help them any more, and there are better ways to go than being beaten to death.’

  Stevie turned the key and clicked off the room’s fluorescent light. The dusk was coming in, another day drawing to its close, with no clue of what tomorrow would bring. She wondered fleetingly where she would sleep that night. The sound of pounding footsteps built until they passed the office door and faded down the corridor. She waited until she was sure they were gone and then said, ‘I think Simon died because the revolutionary treatment you were peddling was a con.’

  ‘We never set out to deceive anyone.’ Dr Ahumibe shook his head. ‘All I ever wanted to be was a good doctor.’

  He started to stack the boxes back into their neat piles.

  Stevie said, ‘Tell me what happened.’

  The doctor’s voice was Mogadon-calm. ‘It doesn’t matter any more. Nothing does.’

  Stevie wanted to hurt him. To get a knife, cut through his bristled cheek and hear him scream. She got to her feet and swept a hand across his desk, knocking the boxes of pills to the floor.

  ‘All of these people, the ones who caught the sweats, they didn’t want to die, but no one could help them, no matter how hard they tried.

  ‘There were too few of us left to keep the children alive. I gave those who could drink a glass of orange juice, the others I injected, and then I walked from bed to bed and watched them fall asleep.’ He looked up at her, his eyes tunnel-black. ‘It was peaceful.’

  ‘If Simon had been here he might have helped to keep them alive.’ She wouldn’t think of the children, the bodies in the basement. ‘Simon’s death could have been avoided. Okay, he might have caught the sweats, but at least he would have had a chance, and who knows? He might have been immune like me.’ Stevie could feel all the emotion she had tamped down beginning to rise, treacherous, in her throat. ‘He might have been here now.’

  Dr Ahumibe bent and calmly began to pick up the scattered pill packets. His movements were slow, like a pearl fisher diving deep against the tide.

  ‘When did you speak to Buchanan?’

  Stevie sank back into the seat. The silk scarf she had wrapped around her face, in an attempt to mask the stink of the basement, was still strung around her neck. Even so, Stevie supposed the air smelt bad, but she had grown used to it. She slid off the scarf and wiped her eyes with it.

  ‘I don’t know. A few hours ago.’

  ‘I phoned him but he didn’t pick up. I thought maybe …’ Ahumibe shook his head. ‘Was he still uninfected?’

  She blew her nose on the scarf’s hem.

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  The doctor’s eyes met hers. ‘Some people live for up to three days, others go within hours. I should take these soon.’ Ahumibe glanced at the packs of pills. ‘Once the vomiting starts they’re less reliable.’

  Stevie watched his trembling fingers, the tower of boxes growing.

  ‘The package I was to deliver to Mr Reah was a laptop. It contained data that proved your research was flawed.’

  ‘I know.’ Dr Ahumibe put the final box on the top of the pile. It looked like a miniature version of Simon’s apartment block, white and modernist. ‘Simon told me.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  The doctor stared at the tower he had made and then retrieved the topmost box, opened it and slid out a blister pack. He dropped the empty box in the wastepaper basket, as if it was still important to be neat, and laid the slim pack on the desk.

  ‘Simon died of natural causes.’

  ‘Buchanan attended the autopsy. He said that he found evidence Simon had been injected with something shortly before his death.’

  Dr Ahumibe looked up. Sweat prickled his brow but his eyes looked less drugged, sharper than before.

  ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

  ‘Maybe not on its own, but Simon was about to give Mr Reah data that proved the treatment you had collaborated on was worthless. You and Buchanan both had a vested interest in stopping him.’

  The chemist had insisted that the treatment was effective, but Dr Ahumibe didn’t bother to contradict her. He said, ‘Simon had as big a stake in the business as we did.’

  ‘Did he know that it was worthless?’

  ‘It wasn’t worthless. There was a glitch, a temporary glitch.’

  ‘A glitch.’ Stevie remembered the photograph of Joy Summers, the big box-office smile framed by the wheelchair headrest. ‘Did Simon know?’

  ‘Not at first. None of us did.’

  ‘Whose fault was it?’

  ‘We were a team. We were all equally responsible.’

  Ahumibe glanced away. It was the kind of feint that lost you the sale and Stevie knew that even though Death had both hands on his shoulders, ready to push him into a grave, the doctor was dissembling. She scooped the packets of pills from the table, shoved them into her satchel, took the gun from her pocket and pointed it at him.

  The doctor looked at the gun, unmoved. ‘You’d be doing me a favour.’

  ‘Not if I shot you in the legs and left you to bleed to death.’

  She wondered if she would be able to do it and decided that perhaps she could.

  ‘Go ahead. If there was an easy way out, I’ve already bypassed it.’

  ‘I could still make it harder for you.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ The doctor held her gaze. ‘Put the gun down.’ He brushed the air in front of him with his hand, as if trying to flap something away. ‘Killing people makes you feel bad.’

  ‘I told you. I’m not threatening to kill you.’ Stevie slipped her finger from the trigger and rested the gun on her lap, her hand still tight around the grip. ‘The person who analysed the data on Simon’s laptop said he thought there had been a genuine mathematical mistake.’

  Dr Ahumibe sighed. ‘We were all responsible,’ he repeated.

  ‘We don’t have time to waste on some Spartacus routine. Someone made the initial error. Who was it?’

  The doctor rested his head on the desk again.

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

  ‘Tell me and I’ll leave you alone. Otherwise I’m here till the bitter end, and believe me, I will make it as bitter as possible.’

  Ahumibe muttered something she couldn’t make out.

  Stevie said, ‘I won’t give your pills back until you tell me.’

>   ‘Buchanan.’ He raised his head and spat out the name. ‘Buchanan made the initial error, but Simon and I should have spotted it. Medicine is like the law: ignorance is no defence. We were all equally to blame.’

  ‘When did you realise?’

  ‘I spent the most time with the children.’ The doctor closed his eyes for a moment. His skin looked solid, as if it was made of wax or resin, some other substance than flesh. A bead of perspiration trickled down his brow and Stevie saw that the sweats were gaining ground. He said, ‘They weren’t responding as I’d expected. People think of science as being exact. In reality there are too many factors to predict results precisely, but nevertheless the general level of improvement amongst the children we treated wasn’t anywhere near as good as it should have been.’

  ‘Didn’t Simon notice?’

  ‘Simon was a good surgeon, but medicine wasn’t his life. He left most of the aftercare to me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just stop operating?’

  ‘That was my first instinct. I called a meeting of the three of us. Buchanan turned up, Simon sent his apologies.’ A howl echoed along the hospital corridor. It sounded both animal and human; crazy in its abandon. Dr Ahumibe sipped his water and gave a small shudder. ‘There’s no point in going over any of this. It’s getting dark. We’ve had armed guards on the doors for the last few days but it sounds like they’ve surrendered us to the fates. You should leave.’

  ‘I promise I’ll go, as soon as you tell me what happened.’

  The doctor leant back in his chair and closed his eyes. For a moment Stevie thought she might be losing him, but then he said, ‘At first Buchanan denied that there was anything wrong, but when I hit him with the cold facts, he was forced to admit that he already suspected something was awry.’ Dr Ahumibe opened his eyes and fixed his stare on her. ‘That was the word he used, awry, as if we were talking about a squint necktie or a badly hung picture.’

  ‘But you could have pulled the plug on the whole business. Why didn’t you?’