For The Death Of Me

by Jardine, Quintin

  I nodded and leaned back in my seat, staring out of the window at the coast as we headed west, doing my best not to think the worst, and failing abysmally, until I summoned a picture of Susie’s optimistic smile into my mind. That helped, a little.

  7

  It wasn’t hard to find them: Conrad and I walked into the main concourse and there they were, in the cafeteria, each with her hands clasped round a mug of coffee. It was hard to say who looked the more exhausted, Ellen, or Mary, my step-mother. They didn’t see me as I approached, trying to read their faces for any signs that might be there.

  When I was three or four yards away, Ellie looked up. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open; she stood and met me half-way, wrapping me in the sort of hug she used to give me when we were kids. ‘God, brother, am I glad to see you,’ she exclaimed, as she released me. ‘Harvey said you’d be lucky to get here by lunchtime tomorrow. I told him that he can’t know you all that well yet. How long did it take you?’

  I glanced at my watch: it showed eleven thirty, but it was still on Central European Time, an hour ahead. ‘We left Monaco three hours ago,’ I told her. ‘We were lucky; they kept Dundee airport open for us because it was an emergency.’ I gazed around; the place wasn’t busy but there were a few people at other tables, most of them looking tired or sombre, in the same situation as us, I guessed.

  ‘What’s the score?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s still under assessment; they haven’t really told us anything.’

  ‘Time they did, then. Who’s in charge?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Usually it’s Ellie who’s in charge, but this time she was just another helpless terrified relative, sitting on the sidelines of a loved one’s peril.

  ‘Time we found out, then. Where was he admitted?’

  ‘Accident and Emergency.’

  ‘Take me there.’ I looked at my assistant. ‘Conrad, stay here with Mary for now, and keep an eye out for media. It won’t take long for someone to tip the word that I’m here.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Normally Conrad and I are informal with each other, first-name terms both ways, but he’s ex-military and in what he sometimes refers to as ‘operational situations’ he tends to revert to type.

  ‘Why are you waiting here anyway?’ I asked Mary. ‘This is hardly private.’

  She looked at me, red-eyed. ‘There didn’t seem to be anywhere else. I tried the chapel, but it’s closed.’

  Ninewells is a big place; I’d been there before, but I wasn’t all that familiar with the layout. Ellie was, though, and she led me through a series of corridors until we spotted a sign announcing the A&E unit. Happily, things were quiet; I dare say it would have been different at the weekend, even in a douce city like Dundee, but whatever Wednesday-evening rush there had been seemed to be over.

  In a thing that looked like a command unit, we saw a nurse in a dark blue uniform with a tag that gave her name as Sister Kermack. ‘She was on duty earlier,’ Ellie murmured.

  I approached her. ‘Are you in charge?’ I asked her.

  She frowned at me, appraising me, but said nothing.

  ‘Will I speak up a bit?’ I snapped. ‘Are you in charge here?’

  ‘I’m the senior nurse on duty,’ she replied evenly. There might have been a hint of a challenge in her tone: ‘and what do you want to make of it?’

  ‘Whatever I have to,’ was my unspoken answer. ‘Good,’ I breezed on. ‘We’re making progress. My father was admitted here earlier this evening. His name’s Macintosh Blackstone.’

  ‘Yes, and he was dealt with,’ Sister Kermack responded. ‘He was sent to the cardio ward.’

  She’d probably had a hard day too: no, not probably, certainly. But I’d left my consideration, and my normal good humour, back in Monaco. ‘Look,’ I said heavily, ‘I know I’m being peremptory here, but I want the following, and you’re the person best placed to deliver it, or set me on the right track. I’d like to speak to someone who can give me full information on my dad’s condition, and I need someone to show me to a place where my step-mother, my sister and I can wait in private, for as long as I have to. I’d also like to speak to your press officer. I don’t expect you to do all that stuff yourself, only to direct me to someone who can.’

  She looked at me and I could tell that the name had finally clicked. ‘You’re Oz Blackstone, aren’t you?’ I nodded, unable to summon up the usual accompanying smile. ‘And Mr Blackstone’s your father?’

  ‘He always has been.’

  ‘Give me a minute. I’ll phone the surgical wards and find out which one he’s been referred to, then I’ll get the most senior doctor there to talk to you.’ She pointed to a door marked ‘Staff’. ‘That’s our quiet room. You can wait in there, if you like.’

  ‘That’s okay, you just do what you have to, as quickly as you can.’

  We watched her as she turned her back to us and picked up a phone. As she spoke, I couldn’t help noticing the back of her neck go pink, then red, then redder. Finally, she hung up and turned back to face us. ‘Someone’s on his way to speak to you, Mr Blackstone,’ she said. I could tell from her face that he would not be bearing good news. So could Ellie: she hugged me, as if for support.

  ‘Is he gone?’ I asked her quietly.

  ‘Please,’ she begged us, ‘wait in the staff room.’

  I took pity on her and did as she said. There was a coffee machine, the kind that takes sachets. It’s not my favourite, but I switched it on and set it to make a double espresso.

  I had just handed the end product to Ellie when the door opened and a man in a white coat, with the inevitable stethoscope hanging from his neck, stepped into the room. He looked no more than twenty-five, and he was holding a clip-board as if it was a comforter. Maybe it was. ‘Mr Blackstone?’ he began. ‘I’m Dr Oliphant, senior house officer in the cardio unit.’

  I shook his clammy hand. ‘This is my sister, Mrs January,’ I told him. ‘I’ve just arrived but she and my step-mother have been here for over three hours. What do you have to tell us about our father? Is he in surgery?’

  ‘Well,’ the young doctor began. No, he had not brought good news, and he wasn’t looking forward to breaking it. ‘The thing is . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ My patience was totally gone.

  ‘The thing is, he’s not here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s been transferred to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. We don’t do the sort of surgery here that he requires.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Ellie gasped. I laid a hand on her shoulder to stop her going into orbit.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry that nobody advised you of this, Mrs January, but my colleagues said they couldn’t find you. They thought you’d gone home.’

  ‘They thought . . .’ She sounded like a volcano, starting to erupt. The lad was in deep trouble, until I decided to rescue him from my sister’s wrath.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s not get into a blaming situation. Someone fucked up and that’s it. What’s our dad’s condition? That’s all we really care about.’

  ‘He’s critical: he’s suffered a massive failure of the aortic valve, and he needs replacement surgery or he won’t survive.’

  ‘What brought it on?’

  ‘Nothing. We think it’s a congenital thing, a defect; the consultant who saw him described it as a time-bomb that could have gone off years ago.’

  ‘When was he transferred?’

  ‘Two hours ago. He could be in surgery in Edinburgh already.’

  ‘How long will the procedure take?’

  ‘Four hours, minimum. At least, that’s what I recall from medical-school lectures. I’ve never seen one done.’

  I ruffled Ellie’s hair and gave her a hug. He was critical, but he was alive, and they don’t make them tougher than Mac Blackstone. ‘Come on, sis,’ I murmured. ‘Let’s get down there. We’ll get him some bacon rolls on the way; if I know him he’ll be hungry when he wakes up.’

  8

 
; We didn’t burn any rubber on the road to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; there was no need for we knew he’d be in theatre longer than it would take us to drive there. Before we left, Dr Oliphant phoned and found a colleague there, advising her that we were on our way. She promised to contact her media-relations people. It was necessary: when we rejoined Conrad and Mary we discovered that a Grampian Television crew was camped outside.

  We gave them the slip . . . I’m an expert at that, when I want to be . . . and headed off in Ellie’s Peugeot towards Perth and the M90.

  Conrad drove, with my sister navigating: I chose to sit in the back with Mary.

  ‘I should have known,’ she muttered, as we cruised along the A914. ‘I should have seen the warning signs.’

  I looked at her in profile. It was night, but in Scotland there’s always a lighter blue glow in the north at that time of year, so I could see her clearly. ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ I reassured her, ‘because there weren’t any warning signs. The boy Oliphant said that a consultant cardiologist wouldn’t have spotted this before it happened, unless Dad had been hooked up to an ECG machine.’

  ‘I should still have known. I’m his wife.’

  ‘And Ellie’s his daughter: she saw him last weekend and she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Mary,’ I said firmly, ‘stop blaming yourself. There might have been things in life you should have dealt with better, but not this.’

  I don’t know what made me say that. Stress, I suppose: it can make your tongue do things you don’t mean it to, and I sure as hell didn’t want to get into that, not there, not then. I saw her frown, her profile sharp in the gloaming that passes for night in high-summer Scotland, and I looked forward. ‘See if you can find some local radio, Ellie,’ I called out quickly. ‘If someone at the hospital tipped off the telly, they could have it too.’

  We had missed the eleven o’clock bulletin on Kingdom Radio by about ten minutes, but we caught up with Radio Forth at midnight as we drove along the Edinburgh bypass. Sure enough, there was a piece at the top of the news, read by a harsh-voiced woman, about ‘Scots movie star Oz Blackstone in mercy dash to the bedside of his sick father’.

  They were waiting for us at the entrance to the hospital, three television crews, three radio reporters, and the rest of the pack, more than I cared to count. Conrad and I flanked Mary and Ellie, shielding them as best we could. They were reasonably polite and I knew that they were only doing their jobs. It was my fault that they were there, nobody else’s. There’s a price of fame, but it’s not just the famous who have to pay it. Ask the wee boys Beckham if you doubt me.

  ‘How is he, Oz?’ one of them called out.

  ‘That’s what we’re going to find out. I called ahead ten minutes ago and they said that he’s still in theatre.’ We reached the hospital doors. ‘Keep in touch with the PR people,’ I told them. ‘I’ll talk to you again when I have something positive to say, but don’t look for it to be tonight.’

  The hospital press officer, who introduced herself as Sydney Wavell, met us as soon as we stepped inside: no doubt the poor woman had been summoned from a peaceful evening at home. She took charge of us and led us through several corridors into a small sitting room in what appeared to be the hospital’s office area, where we were given coffee and chocolate biscuits. At first I was embarrassed: genuinely, I never feel like a celebrity in Scotland, especially not in Edinburgh, and I try to avoid acting the part, yet here I was getting the full treatment. Still, Ellie and Mary were reaping the benefit, and that was good.

  When we were settled in, Ms Wavell left us, returning a few minutes with a doctor. His name was Singh, and he exuded competence and reassurance. He didn’t give us any soft soap, but his approach was informed and up-beat. He told us he had just checked with the theatre and that although the operation was in its early stages, Dad was stable and his signs were good. He offered to talk us through the procedure, but I reckoned that was the last thing the girls needed to hear; I didn’t fancy it much myself.

  We settled to our vigil. Conrad decided that he was going to sit in the corridor outside to guard the door, in case an over-zealous reporter sneaked inside in search of an exclusive. I thought he was suffering from an excess of zeal, until I realised something. He knew my dad, he had played golf with the two of us, and he liked him. He was anxious too, and was simply looking for something to take his mind off it, for a job on which he could focus. So I let him do as he wished.

  Behind the closed and guarded door, Ellie curled up in an armchair and took refuge in sleep. She’s always been able to do that in a crisis. When our mother was in her last illness, I’d often go into her room at the hospice and find her awake and reading, or listening to music through her headphones, with Ellen counting Zs in a chair by her bedside. Indeed, when I broke my arm as a kid, and they put me under to set it, the first sight I remember as I came to was the top of my sister’s head slumped forward on her chest, and the first thing I heard was gentle snoring.

  Mary and I aren’t blessed in that way. We sat side by side on a small sofa in the glow of the only table-lamp we had left on, staring out of the window towards the city, watching it as it settled down for the night. We sat in silence, and yet both of us knew that there was something occupying the space between us.

  I tried to doze off, but there was no hope of that. Instead I tried to occupy myself by thinking of the day that had ended; it had begun as just another summer sunrise, but it had ended with my life changed, profoundly. Mike Dylan’s return from his secret exile might have been seen as a shock, but no more than that. I had certainly tried to play it that way, but I couldn’t kid myself.

  Susie and I had got together in the aftermath of his supposed death; she’d been the emotional equivalent of a sack full of psychotic monkeys, consumed by a cocktail of bereavement, loneliness and betrayal. Me, I’d been easy pickings; in truth, I’d always fancied her and, to be honest, Jan’s death had fucked my head up far, far more than I’ve ever admitted, even to you. Susie might have made the first move, but I made the second, no question about that.

  All that apart, though, our relationship, the burgeoning thing we discovered to be love, and finally our marriage had been founded on the premise, in Susie’s mind at least, that Dylan was a goner, and that he had indeed died in that shooting in Amsterdam. Now she knew different; she knew what I had known since just after Janet’s birth, the truth I had kept from her. We still had to deal with that aspect of it between the two of us: she’d made nothing of it earlier, but I knew it would fester.

  Beyond that?

  You know me, and you know that if there is one thing the man Oz doesn’t suffer from, it’s a lack of self-belief. And yet when I thought of the way things had been with Susie and Dylan, how strong and vibrant their relationship had seemed, I found myself worrying about how she’d react to his return, in the longer term, whether she’d look at me differently, whether what she felt would change. There, in the dark, Alanis Morrisette’s blistering line came into my head: ‘Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?’ It stayed there for a while, too, because it touched a nerve and made me face up to another inner truth: after all the years that had gone, sometimes, when I’m with Susie, I think of Jan.

  And then there was Primavera. If you really turned up the voltage I’d have to admit that sometimes I think of her too. What she and I had wasn’t love, not in the conventional sense: it was pure animal attraction, backed up by two minds that were very far from the norm, and by two generously proportioned egos. When you add mutual self-indulgence to that list, you’ve got the whole picture of the two of us together. Dylan once said to me that he really belonged with Prim and Susie with me, because they were basically bent, in the non-sexual sense of the word, and we were basically straight. He was right about Susie, but . . .

  Now Primavera was back, rehabilitated, evidently remorseful for what she had tried to do to me the previous year, and with a legitimate excuse t
o claim a permanent role in my life. I wasn’t in any doubt that I’d be able to keep her at arm’s length, yet she could still throw my switches. It might have seemed weird to you when I told you about the three of us, my wife, my ex-wife and me in the swimming-pool, all of us almost naked, but that didn’t do anything to me, especially with the kids around. Yet when I’d seen her earlier, in the Columbus, changed from the more formal dress into her casuals, almost exactly the way she was dressed the first time we ever met, I will admit now that it gave me an instant boner . . . and she had known it.

  My dad would live. The longer we sat there the more confident of that I became, the more my faith in Mac Blackstone’s immortality restored itself. I had a feeling that I might need him too, most of all for the moral kick up the arse which only he can give me.

  I smiled at the thought, and at all the day’s drama and ironies. I smiled too because what should have been righteous anger at Dylan’s deception and return had been muted by the fact that I actually liked the guy; I’d missed him too.

  There were all those things going through my head, but there was something else, something much bigger, something that had been with me for a year. Part of me wanted to let it lie dormant, to push it out of my mind and get on with my life. The trouble was that, however hard I pushed, it wouldn’t go away. Maybe I wouldn’t have confronted it, but that wasn’t my decision alone.

  After a while, quite a long while, I glanced at my watch. Being rich, I have a few, but my favourite is a titanium Breitling Aerospace, very light and with a black face and hands and numbers so luminous that they can glow even in daylight. It showed ten past three.

  Ellie was still snoozing, slightly audibly, in her chair. I glanced at Mary, just at the moment she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. ‘It’s taking a long time,’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s bound to,’ I told her. ‘They explained all that. This sort of surgery is usually planned, but Dad’s in a critical condition. If it takes all night and all day, so be it, as long as it’s effective.’