by John Collee
Kingsley's Touch
John Collee
DeWinter Snow Publishing
All rights reserved.
To my father, Gerry Collee, 1929 – 2013
Chapter 1
It was the kind of street to which all the ragged derelicts of the town eventually descended. Few people therefore paid much attention to the gaunt, wild-eyed Indian who barged between them. And Acharya Dhangi, sunken-cheeked with exhaustion, was in turn too preoccupied to notice. There was something about this street . . . a strange familiarity.
The one o'clock hooter sounded from the docks and a verse from the shruti sprang to his mind:
Thus you will know Nigambodh Ghat
The black waters lick at its steps
Black with the blood of the sons of Pandu
Of Subhadra and the sons of Draupadi
And the great conch Pandra smites the heavens.
Strangers seemed to clog the pavement in front of him and the tired leather suitcase became more frequently ensnared between them. But even as he wrenched it free their protests went unheeded. So intent was he on making headway that the Douglas Calder, set back as it was from the shop-fronts, took him by surprise.
Dhangi stopped. At first he thought it was not the place, just another old Victorian hospital in black stone, the forecourt cluttered with recent extensions, to the right the X-ray department, to the left the outpatients. And yet, on closer inspection, he realized that this hospital had its past lives like any man. The original building had been quite symmetrical: four storeys with a tower at each corner.
Still clutching his suitcase, Dhangi broke into an awkward run along the front of the hospital. He could not remember the last time he had eaten and this burst of extra effort seemed to drain the strength from his legs. His feet fell heavily on the cobbles as he turned down Causeway Lane. Now he could see the harbour in front of him.
. . . the black waters lick at its steps
Black with the blood of the sons of Pandu . . .
A covey of gulls left the discarded chip packet they had been scavenging and took to the air in front of him, hoisting their white bodies skywards to disappear, crying, over the blank side wall of the hospital.
Dhangi turned another corner. An expanse of cobbles separated the back of the hospital from the water's edge, but access to it was barred by an iron gate. Dhangi tried to force his head between the railings but could not get a satisfactory view. Breathing heavily he flung the suitcase over in front of him and scaled the low wall. A spike penetrated the worn sole of one shoe as he clambered over the railings but Dhangi did not feel it. With a supreme effort he hauled his emaciated body to the top and jumped to the ground, landing heavily on the other side. As he rose to his feet his heart was leaping in his throat, a great roar sounding in his ears. He retrieved his suitcase and stumbled backwards to the waterfront. As he did so the massive black façade of Nigambodh Ghat unfolded before him, the grey storm-clouds piled above it. Dhangi filled his lungs and let out a long, keening cry of victory.
Cranley wheezed, ground out a cigarette and unlocked the door with the dour concentration he applied to all his work. Above him, in the wedge of darkening sky between anaesthetics and the mortuary, the dockland gulls wheeled and called. Cranley stopped and squinted northwards. The vanguard of the storm was already sweeping over the Firth of Forth. Sheets of distant rain draped the sky behind the harbour wall. But he was looking at a figure in the foreground, a dark man in a white shirt sitting near the harbour's edge with his back to the hospital. Now, above the abrasive cries of the gulls, Cranley could discern a new sound: the man's voice. Chanting.
Cranley left the mortuary door unlocked and backed down the steps. He cleared his sinuses and spat against the hospital wall. The cobbled wharf was hospital property and Cranley made it his business to find out about anyone trespassing there. As he approached, the chanting became more distinct. It was a foreign language which Cranley did not recognize. Cranley emerged on to the courtyard. His irregular stride quickened in tempo.
'Hoy!' he shouted.
Dhangi's eyes were closed but his mind was filled with a vibrating light of searing intensity. Kundalini the serpent braced the six chakras of his spine. From somewhere beyond the massive grey sky above the Firth of Forth, energy rushed through him, was focused beyond him. His jacket lay by his side but he felt no cold. Divine grace flowed through his limbs like honey. He was Brahman. He was one with the universe.
Cranley came closer. In front of the cross-legged Indian a few dried flower petals flapped like trapped butterflies from the surface of the bollard, sticking to something that looked suspiciously like blood.
'Hoy,' he shouted again.
A dark flaw appeared in the crystal of Dhangi's consciousness and flared outwards. The light flickered and dimmed. Kundalini stirred in his spine. Dhangi's eyes opened.
'What the hell are you up to?'
It took some time after achieving samadhi for his mind to accommodate language. Dhangi turned, still cross-legged, and looked upwards. The old mortuary assistant towered over him, his face a landscape of disgust and incredulity. Dhangi groped for an English word of dismissal and failed to encounter one. He remained silent and felt for his suitcase. As he did so it landed on his lap and he was yanked upwards by his collar. 'Take your hands off me.' The words came from some previously shuttered part of Dhangi's brain and he had shouted them before consciously formulating the phrase. Now he was on his feet, the case in his hand, trembling with cold and emotion.
Cranley had taken a pace back, momentarily shocked by the violence of the stranger's reaction. He rallied quickly. 'Come on. Hop it!'
Dhangi bent stiffly and picked up his jacket. The religious ecstasy was sliding from his mind, leaving behind great scars of resentment. Cranley jerked his head towards the hospital and Dhangi followed him in that direction. When they reached the mortuary Cranley hobbled up the steps and opened the door. Dhangi paused and looked up, taking in the tiled white anteroom with its regiment of boots and aprons. Cranley stepped deliberately sideways, blocking his line of vision.
'I am a doctor,' Dhangi volunteered.
Cranley cleared his sinuses and looked the stranger over, assessing at a glance the soiled shirt, the frayed cuffs and the crumpled black shoes. In twenty years at the Douglas Calder he'd seen vagrants of just about every description. This one was further gone than most.
'You're no doctor, pal,' he said.
'I hope to be taking up a position here.'
Cranley snorted. 'I'll tell you the position you'll get - flat on your back, outside these gates. Got it?'
A brief look of intense hatred flickered across Dhangi's hollowed face, then he turned and moved off down the alleyway and into the hospital's front car park. Cranley watched him go, then stepped into the mortuary and snibbed the door behind him. The first angry gusts of wind were rattling the skylight as he took off the black gaberdine and hung it on a peg. Before removing his shoes he performed a neat manoeuvre with the back of his tongue, dislodging his false teeth and pushing them to the front of his mouth. Then he took out a handkerchief and began to polish the ivories, grimly delighted with his own rhetorical inventiveness.
Chapter 2
The storm was almost upon them now. From the hospital's second floor Alistair Kingsley looked down critically on the fantastic mismatch of the Douglas Calder: smoke-blackened stone, slate and turret, lodged like a decaying tooth in the dockland's commercial centre.
The Indian was still there.
'What do you think he's up to?'
McReady squeezed up alongside. There wasn't much room in the nursing station and Sister McReady's displacement was considerable.
'Who?'
'That coloured chap bes
ide the statue.'
'Don't know,' said Sister McReady. 'We didn't get clairvoyance when I was at nursing school. Probably someone's boyfriend.'
'Glad he's not mine,' said Kingsley.
'Well, I wouldn't worry yourself about him.' Sister McReady squeezed past again and straightened her pleats. 'Some boozer – he's not doing any harm.'
She was right: Leith was full of oddballs.
'Where's the Spears girl?' he asked.
Whenever he entered the ward all heads would turn towards him in supplication. Days like today he felt swamped. He was a consultant surgeon, not the Pope. Halfway down the ward Sandra Spears was sitting up in bed. She lowered her magazine. Kingsley smiled at her and McReady pulled the screens around them both. He looked out of the window. From behind the hospital, like some celestial demolition, came the first distant peal of thunder.
'Just take that off, will you?'
Sandra Spears lifted the nightgown over her head and shook her hair. Her breasts fell forwards, fat and firm skinned. A flush began at the base of her neck and crept down her cleavage. Sister McReady stood sentry with her jaw on one side. Kingsley surveyed the curve of his patient's bosom, his voice was level, pragmatic, reassuring.
'Pop your hands on your head.'
With the flat of his fingers he touched her right breast.
'How old are you?'
'Thirty-two,' she said.
'Do you work?'
'No.'
'Your husband.'
'Yes . . . I mean, he's a journalist.' She shivered. 'Sorry, is my hand cold?' he asked.
Kingsley was working around the breast, his long fingers in the soft tissue. The first drops of rain slapped against the window. Outside, the bus queue bunched under the shelter like some sensitive crustacean.
'You noticed it two weeks ago.'
'Yes. In the bath.'
'Do you get painful breasts with your periods?'
'No, well sometimes.'
'What did Mr Jennings tell you?'
'He said it might be . . . it might be . . .'
Kingsley glanced at her face. Her lips were compressed, her eyes damp. He moved to the left side. He could feel, below his exploring hand, the bounding of her heartbeat. McReady lumbered round to be next to her. McReady must have been a great mother - a formidable wife but a great mother.
'How many children do you have, Sandra?'
'Three,' his patient told him.
'How big's the eldest?'
'Ah . . . ten.'
Over the top of his spectacles, Kingsley awarded her one of his rare smiles. He remembered Sheila at this age. Then found it - a hard mass in the axillary tail. The size of a marble.
'Can you put your hands on your hips?'
Sandra Spears looked at his face.
He rolled the mass. His fingers compressed, coaxed it. Above the noise of the rain on the skylight there came another muttering of thunder. Closer now.
He avoided the question in her gaze. The lump was not attached to muscle, but it did have the craggy feel of a cancer. Something else: where he touched it there was a feeling of heat which was outside his normal experience. He took his hand away, looked at the skin, then placed his hand on the mass. The same thing, warmth. Kingsley put his hand on his own cheek. It worried him that his senses might be deceiving him. He relied on sight and touch, above all touch. He frowned.
'Mr Kingsley?' Sandra Spears's voice was thin with apprehension. She read his expression. It said cancer. Kingsley had been her last hope. She began to cry, silently at first, then she drew up her knees and pressed her fingers in her eyes, elbows covering her naked, vulnerable breasts. Kingsley patted her knee.
'Hey, come on,' he said, 'it's wet enough already.'
Outside, the rain had increased in intensity. It fell on the Co-op, the cobbles, the muddy, wheezing buses. It fell on the hospital roofs, overflowing the ancient runnels and glossing the tiles. A notice on the railings had said 'Save the Douglas Calder'. It was now illegible. Kingsley's voice continued, rational, cajoling.
'. . . no need to fear the worst. I won't tell you it's not cancer. You're the right age . . . but an early first pregnancy is a point in your favour . . .
‘. . . might be a cyst . . . a piece of dead fat . . .'
Still her shoulders juddered. McReady gave her a tissue.
'You know the plan,' said Kingsley. 'Friday we remove the lump. If it's malignant we go on and take the breast as well.' She looked at him. 'Gives you the best chance of a cure,' he said.
She nodded. Kingsley patted her shoulder. They left her with the screens still round, protection against the emotional pawnbrokers on the ward.
Back in the office McReady was getting stroppy. 'You're not putting her on Friday.'
'I am.'
'What – with Niven and the two others? You'll be wanting to work on the Sabbath next.'
'Yes,' said Kingsley. 'Unfortunately it's impossible to get theatre staff.'
'You'll be working yourself to an early grave, Mr Kingsley.'
'I thought they didn't teach you clairvoyance.'
McReady's mouth set like a vice. Kingsley put an arm around her shoulder. 'I've a waiting list as long as your belt. If I could get through them all working a thirty-hour week, I'd be a happy man.'
'Fiddlesticks.' McReady put her fists in her pockets. 'You'd be out there canvassing for more patients. '
'I'm told it's my Presbyterian sense of duty.'
'Duty's got nothing to do with it - you just like operating.'
'That's true as well,' said Kingsley. He couldn't argue with McReady. He'd known her too long.
He wandered through the Barton ward with his chin on his chest and his hands in his pockets. It would be less harrowing with Mr Niven.
'You see that statue?' he commented as the patient dropped his pyjama trousers. 'Douglas Calder. He founded this place. Campaigned all his life against disease and immorality. Died of syphilis. Pop up on the bed, would you?'
Niven was already familiar with the routine for examination. He lay on his side and brought his knees up to his chest. Kingsley slipped on a glove.
'I'm just going to feel up your back passage.'
Jennings had been right about Niven too. Almost filling the rectum there was an ugly granular mass.
The light was already beginning to fail. Kingsley cast his eyes around the car park below. At first he thought the stranger had gone.
'OK, Mr Niven, you can roll back now.' But as Kingsley was straightening, something through the swimming, rattling window caught his eye. A figure had moved in the doorway of X-ray below him. Hands in his jacket pockets. The Indian stranger. Waiting.
As he finally closed his office the great mahogany clock was striking six. Visiting hour had made an aviary of the entrance hall. These were the inhabitants of Edinburgh's dockland - swaddled in wool, hauling kids, rattling the coffee dispenser. On the last chime they began to swarm up the stairs. Kingsley walked towards the door and they parted before him. William was on duty at the door, hair sprouting from his ears and nose like stuffing, a blue mammal in a glass case.
Outside Kingsley raised his brolly. Halfway across the car park he became aware of the footsteps. He ignored them, headed for his car, rattled the keys in the door, threw his suitcase in the back and switched on the headlights.
Then he looked up.
The stranger stood in front of the bonnet, his face illuminated from below like an actor in some Victorian burlesque. He walked around the car. Kingsley hesitated, cursed and rolled down the window. Some rain came in.
'Mr Kingsley.'
'Yes.'
'I am Dr Dhangi.'
Had they ever met before? Kingsley had no recollection of the face that bent towards him, the dark brows, the crudely chopped hair and inflamed eyes. Rationally he should have felt repelled by the stranger; a strong, damp smell was emanating from his clothes and his breath reeked of betel. But for one unguarded moment Kingsley was aware of an uncanny surge of k
inship – a forcing in the chest which he could only relate to the sensation he experienced on meeting Sheila after long separations. The sensation disturbed him and he retreated into formality. 'Do I know you?'
Dhangi was staring at him with feverish intensity. 'You do.'
'I think you're mistaken.' Kingsley made to roll up the window.
'No. Please. You must listen.' There was a peculiar authority to the Indian's quick, nervous speech. Almost involuntarily Kingsley released the window handle.
Dhangi faltered. 'I have prayed for this moment.'
The confession restored Kingsley's powers of resistance. 'Look,' he said, 'I don't know what you're talking about. Is there something you want?'
'We must talk.'
'I really don't think that's . . .'
'You must give me a job . . .' the Indian interjected. '. . . A job,' he repeated, desperately rummaging in the inside pocket of his jacket. 'I am a doctor, a pathologist. I must enter your employment. I have a number of references from my university . . .'
In the twilight Kingsley saw Dhangi produce what looked like a thick brown envelope which he now attempted to push into the car. The address of Jalore University Medical School was stamped on one corner. Kingsley refused to take it. He was back in familiar territory. 'Please, Dr Dhangi,' he remonstrated, 'I appreciate your enthusiasm but quite frankly this is neither the time nor the place for a job interview. I've had a very tiring day and I'm keen to get home and put my feet up. If you want to make an appointment you can contact my secretary.'
'Your secretary,' Dhangi repeated blankly.
'Yes. Goodbye now.' Kingsley looked pointedly at Dhangi' s free hand which was still resting on the car window.
Dhangi hesitated, standing half bent in the pouring rain in an embarrassing limbo of indecision. Then, decided, he said, 'Yes . . . till later then,' and offered his hand to shake.
Kingsley twisted sideways and raised his own, but the Indian did not grasp it. Instead he ran one finger lightly along one side of the palm, uttering as he did so a strangled gasp of recognition. Kingsley recoiled and briskly wound up the window. He took his foot off the clutch and the car lurched forwards. The jolt helped him regain his composure. Kingsley nosed out of the hospital car park, turning right into the glut of traffic. When he glanced in the rear-view mirror the Indian was nowhere to be seen. Dhangi had prostrated himself on the soaking, filthy hospital quadrangle. Now, inaudible and unnoticed, he raised his head from the ground, extending his red-stained palms to the heavens: