Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  ‘Sit down, Kellen.’ Her voice came calm and stable. Her eyes held mine, not stable at all. ‘One of us has to make the decisions.’

  ‘Lee, I’m not—’

  ‘You are. Trust me. The safety’s on. Just pick the thing up and try not to use it until you have to.’

  Trust me.

  ‘No.’ I have never held a handgun in my life and I am not about to start now. I turned, hooked my toe under the dark metal of the barrel and flicked it, in one looping motion, off the ledge. For a second or two, the ugly, lethal shape of it spun up against the blue of the sky before it dropped out of sight. A long, long time later, we heard it hit the sea. Then I sat down.

  ‘That was … not wise, Stewart.’ The words came with effort, over-careful, like a drunk’s. ‘You’re not safe here without … protection.’

  ‘It’s a sight safer than it was with you playing—’

  ‘It’s not, you know, Kellen.’ The words made their own silence, careful and clear and decisive where ours were not. She had come closer, slowly and with an eye to her shadow, until she stood at my side, an arm’s length away. Not quite close enough to touch.

  ‘Dee?’ Even now, this close, I didn’t fully understand.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kellen. I didn’t mean this for you.’ Behind me, I saw the flicker of steel from an uncapped needle, the flash of glass from a vial. ‘I think you should go now.’ She finished loading the syringe. ‘Lee and I have some things we need to discuss.’

  ‘Suxamethonium?’ Lee sat, quite still, her fingers white on her forearms. Her eyes were fixed on the needle; her voice, no longer slurred, held an edge I’ve never heard before. I could be invisible now.

  ‘No. I wouldn’t do that to you.’ The needle sparkled in the sunlight, a row of diamonds on a finger. ‘It’s morphine. You gave her morphine. I would do the same for you.’

  It came as an offer. A gift. And was received as such. She breathed, long and deep. Colour flowed back where it belonged.

  ‘Thank you.’ The relief. You can feel the relief. ‘Enough for two?’

  ‘Of course.’ She turned to me. The smile was open, careless almost, the smile of a child at the promise of a pebble; beneath it lay all the warmth and patience of the parent. ‘Go on, Kellen.’ Her keys chimed on the rock beside me. ‘You can take the car. I won’t be needing it after this.’

  And Lee, calm now, almost peaceful. She is smiling. Dear God, she is smiling. ‘Do as she says, Kells. There is nothing you can do now.’

  Oh but I can. Sleep or no sleep, shock or no shock, I am not without resource. I stood, scooping up the keys, and turned to go, kept turning and let the momentum of the spin carry me round full circle. She was there, Dee, standing right behind me, watching Lee, watching the needle. Neither of them was watching me. Bone impacted on yielding flesh as the point of my elbow sank deep in her solar plexus. The balled fist of my other hand, the one with the keys, smashed down on her thumb, her fingers, the smooth cylinder of the syringe. It followed her down and down as she dropped, crushing the bones, the flesh, the brittle plastic on to the punishing rock of the ledge.

  She fell almost without noise, a shocked rush of exhaling air and then the wide-mouthed sobbing of a diaphragm in spasm. The needle made more sound, a rolling clatter of metal and plastic overlaid by the scuff of my foot on the rock and then the long, empty silence of the fall. We never heard it hit the water. I jammed the keys in my pocket and turned back to the figure sitting still against the rock. ‘Christ, Lee, what the hell are you trying to—?’

  Her gaze went past me, still as if I wasn’t there. ‘Dee … ?’

  I spun back to face the sea. She lay where she had fallen on the flat rock of the ledge, fingers crabbed, outstretched, clawing for traction more than air. Her body writhed, straining closer to the edge. Two feet away and closing. Three hundred feet from oblivion.

  ‘Dee. No.’

  She didn’t hear me. She chose not to hear me. I kicked her then. I have never in my life kicked a living being but I had nothing else I could do. I kicked her once and then again, hammering what was left of the air from her lungs. She would have screamed but she hadn’t the air to breathe it. Her eyes made the noise. Wave after wave of pain. I turned my head from that, took my eyes and gave them other things to hear, took hold of her arms and dragged her away from the edge, as far as she could go. I laid her out along the rising wall of rock, neck extended, chin up, and I held her like that while she fought the long battle to breathe.

  ‘She won’t thank you for that.’ Lee, grey-skinned and whispering. Fighting her own battles and not, obviously, winning. ‘She’s come to the end, Kellen. She’s got nowhere left to go.’

  ‘And you? Have you nowhere left to go?’ I am so very scared. It comes out as anger, desperate, vicious anger. ‘Have you really no reason to live?’

  ‘No … yes …’ She shook her head, fighting to hold on to thought. Her hands pulled her knee tight to her chest as if holding it there kept the life in. Long, raked fragments of skin peeled off at her wrists where her nails bit deep, clinging on to awareness. Each word cost dear; another nail-mark, another breath, another inch away from life. ‘Not the point. She’s right … How else to make … them think?’

  ‘Christ, woman, you can’t believe …’

  ‘No.’ Dee, lifting her head from my knees, pulling breath at last. ‘Not to think … to stop. That was all … Whatever it takes to make them stop …’ She rolled over and sat up, her head tipped back against the rock, her face turned to the open sky. She put both hands to the bridge of her nose. Her voice, when she found the breath for it, spoke defeat. ‘What do you do when the promise is over, Kellen?’

  ‘I told you.’ God, I am so scared. ‘You let go and you get on with living your own life.’

  ‘At Her Majesty’s pleasure?’ Her lips twisted, bitter at the taste of it. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No … go back.’ Lee, from the uncharted depths of her chasm, far away and moving farther. ‘Go back to … who you were.’

  ‘She’s dead.’ Flat, toneless denial. ‘She died with Beth.’

  ‘No. Only on paper … Your choice … could … bring her back.’ And then, dry, sardonic, on the last breath before the darkness closed in, ‘One lemming is … quite enough.’ Her fingers lost their hold on her arms and she slid sideways, without grace, on to the ledge.

  Stillness. Perfect stillness. Four hundred feet away, the Atlantic smashed a lifetime’s mirrors on to stone. Closer than that, an infant gull screamed hell in the mouth of a feeding parent. Above us, the rising tenor of the wind raked the branches of the rowan, lifted the grasses, drew in the wind from the sea to the land. On the ledge, there was only stillness. Dee Fitzpatrick sat like stone between me and the pale, slumped form. She kept her back to the rock, elbows on knees, her palms still covering her eyes.

  ‘Check her, Kellen, she’s losing blood.’

  ‘Dee, if she’s dead, so help me I’ll—’

  ‘She’s not dead. God knows how far she fell but she’s not dead.’

  I leant forward, laid my fingers to a wrist and felt the pulse as a knotted thread far below the surface. Eyelids fluttered to a touch. With a hand pressed to her ribs, there was movement. I dragged my mobile from my belt and held it out at arm’s length, beyond the shelter of the overhang.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Calling the helicopter. We need to get her off here, get her back to the Western to someone who can do something useful.’ I keyed the number on the pad. Lost the line and tried again.

  ‘The reception’s better up top.’ An observation, no longer muffled. When I turned, her eyes held mine. She looked ill.

  ‘Fine. I’ll just run up to the rowan, spend five minutes on the phone and trot back down again. That gives you, what—twenty minutes clear time to take the two of you over the edge? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’ll come up with you if it makes the difference.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don
’t trust me?’

  ‘I don’t trust either of you.’

  The Rescue answered. The phone whistled and crackled and dropped the line a second time but they got the message. The call-back confirmed a helicopter within the half-hour, complete with paramedics, a ventilator and eight units of O-negative blood. I dropped the phone in Lee’s climbing sack and dragged the first-aid pack out from under the rest of the gear. Useless. A whole pharmacopoeia of tablets, way too few bandages. Then, under the tight length of her leggings, I found she had already done what she could: three compact layers of dressing, spiral-wound, ran down from knee to ankle and back again. I rolled the leggings back into place, laid her legs together, folded her spare T-shirts in the space between as padding and then bound them tight, right on to left, as splinting.

  Dee came to kneel by my side, probing gently at the mass of bruising along the curving rib line. ‘She’s right about the ribs. She needs a body bandage.’

  ‘Maybe, but if she’s ruptured her spleen, I’m not messing with any of it. She’ll be fine as long as she doesn’t come round while they’re moving her.’ The pain will be unimaginable if she does. She won’t stay conscious for long.

  ‘I’ve still got some morphine.’

  ‘What?’ I looked up. She looked serious. The anaesthetist offering the analgesic. Her hand moved to her waist. ‘No.’ I grabbed the wrist, crashed it down on the rock, felt her wince and draw back. I held the hand in place and twisted hard against the angle of her elbow. ‘Give it to me. Now.’

  ‘Kellen … you can’t …’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘I can’t reach it, you’re—’

  ‘Which pocket?’

  ‘The waist pack.’ She gestured with her head. I reached inside with my free hand, found the vials, the needles and the spare syringe. Enough for two. At the very least. I threw them all, one at a time, over the edge. Her wrist, when I let it go, held the imprint of my fingers.

  Dee stood up and walked to the edge to look down at the crashing sea. Four hundred feet to oblivion. If she had stepped off then, I would have let her go. She didn’t; she turned, put her hands in her pockets and came back towards the overhang. Her eyes were flat, like the stone.

  ‘Kellen, I’m not … I was trying to help, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  I finished the splint, tied off the knots and slid her back into the shade and laid one hand on her forehead, a sensor, feeling for movement, for a return from the dark.

  Peace settled back on the ledge, but it was a bleak, harrowed peace, ghost-filled and begging questions. I don’t want to know the answers. The ghosts can beg. There will be answers enough at the trial. If they can keep her alive for the trial. Not my problem. None of these is my problem. Except for the shape sitting quiet at the edges, broad-shouldered, smiling, asking nothing. For that one, alone, I need answers.

  ‘Eric.’ I called it out to the back of her head. ‘What happened to Eric?’

  She was facing out to sea, lost in her own world, communing with her own ghosts. The wind caught the words and carried them back to the rock. ‘He fell.’

  ‘You didn’t pull him?’

  ‘No. I didn’t have to. He was climbing right at his limits. He came off twice lower down and I held him … The third time I just … let go.’ She turned round to face the cliff. Her eyes drifted up the line of the route, past the overhang and on up and up to the rest on a fine-angled crack, set apart from the main line of the route. ‘He was a long way up.’ She bit her lip and took her eyes back to the sea. ‘He wasn’t ever going to go all the way to the top, he just wanted to check out the moves so he could tell Lee all about it on Saturday. He was going to meet you both after you’d finished your climb and then see if she wanted to come back to the ledge and try the second route up. An E1 with an E5 finish, both on the same day. It would have been good.’

  So it would. ‘But you had to stop it?’

  She turned back from the sea. ‘I didn’t plan this one, Kellen. The others, yes—afterwards, once he’d gone—but not this. I couldn’t. Eric was special, you know that. But then, he was there, a third time, falling …’ Her eyes moved back up to the rock. ‘All I did was let go.’

  ‘Why?’ I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t want to talk. But he’s still there, crowding the space, benign, good-humoured, smiling. And dead. I need, now, to know why he is dead. ‘Why did it have to be Eric?’

  ‘He was the first. He was her primary care clinician. He booked her in. He put her forwards for the trial. Without him, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘Beth. We’re talking about Beth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was the one who cost Lee her job?’

  ‘Or Lee was the one who cost Beth her life. I’d prefer if we looked at it that way. Yes.’ She spun full round then, eyes wide, the fine edge of control cracking at last. ‘It wasn’t just here, Kellen. There were twenty-four others with her. Twenty-five women and each one died the way Claire Hendon would have died. Beth was the only one who got the morphine at the end.’

  ‘And you hold Eric responsible?’

  ‘Totally.’

  I don’t believe this. ‘You’ve spent the last ten years a medic, woman. You know better than that. Claire would have died whatever we did. The surgery didn’t help but it didn’t make that much of a difference. If she’d never come near us—if she’d gone off to Orkney and lived in a tent—she would still have died. It would still have been every bit as bad at the end. Worse, probably. You can’t blame anyone else for that.’

  ‘Claire had grade-four pathology, Kellen, she was riddled with mets. Beth had nothing close. Not a single secondary mass. She had a handful of cells changed on the smear, nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. All she needed, all she would have had, was a routine D&C, but no, they had a clinical trial going and she was the right age group with the right kind of meaningless pathology and so instead they implanted radioactive iridium in her cervix for no better reason than Hillary Murdoch said that it might be the start of a revolution in cancer management.’

  And so now, finally, we can see the anger. The boiling, seething, volcanic anger, laid bare on the surface, without the masks. She is so like Lee. Fierce, consuming passion hidden beneath the faceless masks of irony. But not now. Not any more. The masks have slipped.

  She rounded on me, carried on her own tide of memories. ‘Think of it, Kellen. Think of Nina. Think of Lee. Think of either one of them coming home one day with a note from the GP saying they need to go in for another smear because the first one wasn’t quite right. You don’t panic. Of course you don’t. These things happen. Everyone knows someone who’s had a bit of a dodgy smear. So you trust them and you do it and when they say you need to go on up and see the consultant at the hospital, you still trust them and you still do it. And when the wonderful, kind, funny, friendly doctor says that there are only a few cells that have changed, nothing to worry about, but that you’ve been selected for a new treatment, a pilot study, you thank him and you feel special and well looked after and you do whatever he tells you and you ask no questions.’

  She turned away, paced the width of the ledge, out to the edge and back again, eyes, soul, mind all in the other world. She stopped then, feet spaced wide, facing out across the sea. The wind blew in off the water and ruffled the unbrushed mess of her hair.

  ‘What did they do?’ I asked it gently, not to break into the past.

  ‘They put in a rod, a radioactive rod. More like a wire. Not too big, nicely shaped to fit. You’d barely know it was there between one period and the next. She wore it for a month. Just a month. And then the nice man with the big smile said the next smear was clear.’

  ‘And wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, it probably was. It was nearly six months before things started to go wrong. But then they went so badly wrong. They were two orders of magnitude wrong on the dose range. Can you imagine that? Imagine lying under an X-ray tube and letting someon
e blast your guts with one hundred times the normal dose of X-rays every hour of every day for a month. And they knew, Kellen, they knew. Not at first, perhaps, but by the time they picked Beth, they did. She was nineteenth on the list. Eighteen other women before her. The first ones were coming back with massive, massive cervical pathology before they ever picked Beth out for the trial. They knew. And still they went ahead.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that.’

  ‘I’m sure. I have the case records. All of them.’

  ‘Eric wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘He didn’t. Nor did Lee. They didn’t know until a long way down the line. Too late to do anything. But Randolph Duncan knew. And Martin Coutts with his double-blind randomised statistics, desperate to get enough numbers to fit into the sums. And Hillary bloody Murdoch working out her beautiful new grading systems up there in the lab so she could sit at her microscope looking at the cellular pathology and predict to within the nearest twenty-four hours how much longer the woman in bed fourteen hasn’t got to live …’

  The words ran out. For both of us, they ran out. She stood there in front of me, breathless, shuddering, broken. Fifteen years of stored pain flayed open and bare to the world.

  However much I wanted to see beneath the surface, I didn’t want to see this.

  ‘Dee, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’