by John Collee
Dhangi checked himself, as if on the brink of some obscure litany. The stripper, naked now, was running her hands over her gyrating hips. Kingsley prised Dhangi's fingers from his arm. It was time to leave. 'A palefaced one,' he repeated.
'A British person,' said Dhangi, 'like yourself.'
'Like myself, eh? And how is he described?'
'He will be a man of infertile seed, born with a sixth finger on his right hand.'
It struck Kingsley that Dhangi was certainly adept at his job. The fine scar on the edge of Kingsley' s fifth finger was almost invisible, but Dhangi could have noticed it when they shook hands before in the car park. Again, to an unscrupulous member of the profession, hospital records were no secret.
'You claim to be a doctor,' he said.
'Oh yes.'
'You've worked in other hospitals round here.'
'Briefly . . . in Glasgow.'
So that was it then. Dhangi had some background on him, he'd found out about the business with the pathology slides, had done a bit of checking up off his own bat and was using the combination of established facts and gleaned information to perpetrate some kind of pseudo-mystical con. Kingsley rose stiffly to his feet as the music stopped, suddenly acutely aware of the choking atmosphere and the passage of time. He would have to catch Sheila at the theatre. God only knew how he'd allowed this bedraggled stranger to take up so much of his evening. 'I’m sorry,' he said to Dhangi. 'I’m-not convinced.'
'But it is written,' Dhangi was desperate, 'it is written, it is the Word,' he said, 'the Word which is first-born mother of the Vedas . . .'
'So you say,' said Kingsley. He tried to move away but Dhangi's bony hand was hanging onto the hem of his jacket. 'For God's sake,' said Kingsley, 'what do you want from me?'
'Give me a job in the mortuary. That is enough. There I will perform the necessary pujas. I will be your priest and you will become an avatar, an embodiment of God.'
Kingsley was finally convinced. Con-man or not, Dhangi was definitely mad. 'Let me go,' he bellowed.
The men at adjoining tables fell silent again, anticipating a fight.
'Listen here,' Kingsley lowered his voice. 'I wouldn't dream of employing you even if I could. We already have a pathologist – a Dr Mukesh. There's no vacancy.'
Dhangi spat on the floor, his saliva was stained crimson with betel juice. 'That candal. You are contaminated by his shadow. You have no need of him.'
Kingsley wrenched himself free. 'Well, I certainly have no need of you.'
'You will,' said Dhangi. 'Here, take this.'
But Kingsley did not stop to examine what Dhangi had pressed into his hand. He was already pushing past, shoving Dhangi and his chair to one side then barging through the close-packed chairs and tables towards the bar. Momentarily disorientated, he looked around for the door then flailed towards it like a tired swimmer, sweeping men from his path, fighting through the thick broth of sweat and tobacco smoke. At the door he turned. Dhangi had followed him part of the way; now, stranded, he shouted something over the hubbub but only the silent movements of his betel-stained mouth reached Kingsley who, turning, pushed outside. The door swung to behind him and he breathed deeply. Only then did he look at what Dhangi had given him, a scrap of brown paper on which there was scrawled, in pencil, an Edinburgh address. Kingsley tore it in quarter, then tore it again and scattered it into the night. Then he set out towards the bridge. Over the water the hospital glowed in the twilight, like the candle-bedecked façade of Nigambodh Ghat.
Rhona caught the ball against her heaving chest. Now her serve arched high over Richard Short's racket and into the back corner. Short flicked it out against the sidewall. She ran forwards and caught it before the bounce, smashing it back to the opposite corner. Richard Short thundered across the back of the court and missed it completely.
'Nine all,' he said, breathing heavily. She had tied her hair back in a ponytail and her legs were glossy with perspiration. He returned her next serve with a scorching low smash which she couldn't return. 'I'm sorry. Very ungentlemanly.'
'I’m not sure gentlemen play squash with ladies in the first place.'
They swapped sides. Richard Short once more resisting the impulse to reach out and squeeze her bottom en passant.
'These shorts are a perfect fit.'
'Don't be crude.' She glanced up at the gallery to check that no one had overheard.
'I'm surprised you never got married, Rhona.'
She served an ace. 'Ten-nine, Richard.'
'I wasn't ready,' he complained.
'That was my problem too,' said Rhona '– just keeping you on your toes.' She crossed court again and won the last point easily.
Richard Short wasn't concentrating.
'Actually there was a chap once,' she said as she retrieved her cardigan from the far comer, 'but in the end he wasn't my type.'
Short held the door open for her. 'What was wrong with him?'
Rhona dropped her shoulder and slipped through. 'No style,' she said, 'all hands.'
'Know what you mean. See you in the foyer.'
Sheila Kingsley sat in her beige coat, one hand draped over the arm of the sofa. Her black hair was a dense mane of newly formed curls; a teardrop diamond earring hung from either ear. She rang the hospital again. They confirmed that Alistair had left half an hour previously. She checked her watch, stood up, inspected herself in the mirror. Underneath the coat she wore her dark blue gown. She toyed with the diamond at her neck – she had overdressed on purpose – then she dialled for a taxi. He'd probably dropped in at the Royal on business. She had come to accept the health service's continual poaching on their marriage.
The curtain had just risen when Kingsley sidled along to the empty seat. He sat down. Her hand sought the reassuring fold of fat above his waistline.
'Where have you been,' she whispered, 'laying the secretary?'
'No,' said Kingsley, 'laying a ghost.' He sat down, straightening the creases of his trousers, and focused on the performance.
Sheila sniffed his jacket. 'You've been in a bar.'
'I'll tell you later.' Her arm sneaked through his and he relaxed into the upholstery.
At first he was glad of the dark. He looked down at his hands in the semi-darkness, cracked his knuckles. Then the anger subsided and he could allow himself to be absorbed by the fictional horrors on stage . . . 'Discomfort swells, mark King of Scotland, mark.'
At the interval he bought her a gin, remembered to compliment her on her hair and made an excuse for his lateness. Dhangi's crazy meandering vanished from his mind. The chandelier of the theatre bar scintillated like the bright, idle chatter round them and Kingsley, normally scathing about the trivial sham of Sheila's theatrical friends, felt elevated, purged, restored.
The meeting with Dhangi had taken him no further forward. But in some ways, Kingsley reflected, it had given him valuable insight into his own present state of mind. It amazed him now that he had ever linked this Dhangi character with the more complex worry about the pathology results. He was obviously getting that whole issue out of proportion, festooning and obscuring it with smaller, trivial anxieties. He looked forward now to presenting the cases at the forthcoming clinical meeting. It was obviously high time they were assessed more objectively.
Chapter 8
Like a bear in a pit, Kingsley paced the floor of the steep wooden amphitheatre, concentrating on his feet. For the third time he checked the remote control for the slide projector. He attended these meetings every week, but normally declined to present the material. It smacked of showmanship and, quite apart from his natural shyness, Kingsley disapproved of showmen. Working where he did, Sheila had accused him of reclusiveness. But for all their squalor, Leith docks still fostered the anonymous toil which had paid for the Douglas Calder.
These meetings took place in the Infirmary, slap in the middle of town – a vast rambling mausoleum with all the furniture of the new medicine in the architecture of the old. And if Kingsl
ey remained apart from it he knew its citizens: white-haired fathers of the profession, uncombed medical registrars, groomed young surgeons and knots of students with loose-leaf binders.
They filed in slowly at a rate determined by the women serving coffee. As the lecture theatre filled, Kingsley continued to pace his semi-circular confine. He carried a pointer and occasionally he tapped this lightly on the floorboards. Since his meeting with Dr Dhangi the previous week there had been no further sign of the dishevelled Indian around the hospital. And, happily, over the past week the ambiguous pathology results had ceased to relay back from Chandra Mukesh. The previous cases remained a mystery. Kingsley planned now to expose these to scientific inquiry. There remained a niggling doubt that he was somehow playing along with a drunken vagrant's joke.
Richard Short edged into his seat. He polished his glasses and adjusted the distance by which his Van Heusen cuffs emerged from the Jaeger suit. He was here out of loyalty. He rarely attended these meetings, the intellectual atmosphere being usually too rarefied for his tastes. Now he looked around for someone to talk to. He was sitting next to a man he didn't recognize, a thick-set young man with vibrant red hair who was sucking a pen and studying the assembled audience with a critical, if not hostile eye.
'I don't think we've met?'
'I don't think we have,' said Roland Spears.
'Richard Short,' said Short, extending his hand.
'Hello,' said Spears, shaking it.
'What do you do here?'
'I don't do anything here.'
'What do you do then?'
'I’m a journalist.'
'I see,' he persevered. 'What brings you to a medical meeting?'
Spears turned again. 'I'm interested in one of Mr Kingsley's cases.'
'Anyone in particular?'
'My wife,' said Spears. His expression discouraged further inquiry. Short gave up and turned to speak to someone else. Then the lights went off.
There was a whirring of a small fan as a projector came on, then the single thick shaft of light. Kingsley shielded his eyes and stepped to one side. He addressed himself to the stacked, silent darkness.
The slides came up and Kingsley began to talk, at first rather more quickly than he had intended. Then, gradually, his awareness of the audience melted. They became a coughing, rustling wall to his dark confessional. His speech was a catharsis. He told them about Sandra Spears, the pretty young woman whose breast he had removed. He admitted that the other operations had not been straightforward. One of the prostates was having difficulty with urinary continence and Niven's colostomy was tending to prolapse.
'Side effects which are acceptable only if the operations were absolutely necessary.'
Richard Short looked downwards on Kingsley, a lone figure by the light of the projector. Beside him the journalist was scribbling noisily. Kingsley looked upwards into the crowd.
'With this in mind I'd like you to judge the following pathology specimens for me. It's a surgeon's nightmare,' he said. 'I just don't know what to make of them.'
Mukesh came forward. Kingsley handed him the pointer. In the penumbra he smiled at the younger man. They had made their peace; he had apologized to Mukesh for his initial insults. But the damage was already done. There was no real remedy for the loss of respect between them.
The first pathology slide came up, painting Mukesh's white coat with the whorled pink and purple designs of the tissue sections. Mukesh's presentation was lucid and rehearsed. He explained the malignant features evident in the cells, then pointed out the anomalies, the apparent halt to invasion, the areas of necrosis, of encapsulation.
'The pathology suggests, impossible as it is, that had we not operated, these cancers might eventually have resolved . . .'
The 'we' was a gesture of professionalism and generosity. Another uncomfortable truth: he had totally misjudged Chandra Mukesh.
Kingsley took the lectern again for the discussion period. The lights came up in the auditorium as he asked for comments. By convention the first pronouncement belonged to the professor of pathology. Knowing this, the professor allowed a few moments to pass before he hoisted himself to his feet. He had white hair and small pink eyes, a red button of a nose and far below, in the centre of the acreage of cheeks and chin, a small pink mouth. He spoke with a high breathy voice of which most students could manage some form of imitation.
'Most interesting cases, Alistair, most interesting, and I'm sure we all fully appreciate the delicacy of your recent decisions.'
He dabbed with a finger at one eye. 'I for one would entirely endorse the diagnoses – these slides show cancer.'
At the lectern Kingsley fought to suppress a great smile of relief. Beside Short, Spears stopped writing.
The professor continued '. . . but there has been some kind of reaction. The features are allergic. Can we have the last slide – yes, fine – now there you see cancer cells as Dr Mukesh so rightly pointed out. I can't understand the profusion of eosinophils – these white cells here.' The shadow of his pudgy finger appeared in the projector beam, obscuring the critical portion of the picture.
'But there you have it. As I say, I would favour an allergic explanation.' He stroked his white hair. 'But God knows what allergen would elicit a parallel reaction in such different forms of tumour.'
With that the professor sat down. Kingsley opened his mouth to speak but his words were pre-empted by a buzz of excited conversation. The professor, however flamboyant, was not noted for his flights of wild conjecture. But what he had suggested was totally unprecedented.
The chaos showed no signs of abating. Kingsley rapped on the lectern for order.
'You're suggesting,' he said, 'that over a short period certain cancer sufferers in Leith may somehow have been immunised against their disease.' It was the rather sensationalist explanation that Short had proposed during their golf match, and Kingsley was surprised that the professor espoused it so readily.
'Exactly,' he announced, 'identify the causative agent and . . . my word . . . this could be an accidental discovery of colossal importance. Rivalling penicillin – greater.'
The lecture hall erupted once more and the professor sank back in his seat with a small smile of satisfaction. Gradually Kingsley, as chairman, took some control over the controversy. From the boiling auditorium explanations and suggestions were thrown up and exploded with the speed and violence of a clay pigeon shoot.
But Kingsley was happy simply now to have placed himself behind the firing line. It was agreed he had operated on cancer. As for the present discussion, Mukesh would get a research project out of it, but Kingsley doubted his investigations would prove fruitful. He had watched this kind of speculative enthusiasm burn itself out on more than one occasion. After the initial flurry of interest, a paper here and there, a series of letters to the B. M. J. The initial findings would accumulate critical re-appraisal, like weed around a propeller till finally they drifted back into the mainstream of scientific thought. His universe was in order. Until Henley spoke.
Henley was a neurology registrar. He had remained silent for the duration of the meeting, sitting five rows back with his arms folded across his chest.
Now, parting his white coat, he rose to his feet and wedged two fingers into the lower pockets of his waistcoat. Henley dressed, spoke and practised medicine with the elegant precision of a prosecuting counsel.
'I must say,' he began, 'a lot of the more esoteric immunology which has been bandied about goes quite above my head.'
Laughter. As the golden boy of his generation Henley could afford this kind of self-deprecation. 'I wonder if we could all look at the fourth slide. There are a few features that most people seem to have missed.'
The projectionist located the slide. It appeared on the screen. It was a plain photo of the cancerous testicle.
'I’m intrigued,' said Henley, 'by the distribution of the necrotic areas of this tumour. These strange oval markings – like . . . like fingerprints . . .'
Kingsley wheeled on the projector screen. Henley was right! Looking at it now, what had at first seemed to be random areas of inflammation actually corresponded to a pattern of overlapping fingerprints. Worse, they were clustered at the lower pole of the tumour – the area accessible to examination.
'And the sixth slide,' said Henley.
The same. With the eye of faith, distinct 'fingerprints' at the lower pole.
For most of his audience, the simile was not an emotive one. 'Fingerprinting' was, as Henley was quick to point out, simply an imperfect description of the patchy inflammatory response observed, for example, in ulcerative colitis. But Kingsley, eyes still transfixed to the screen, found little reassurance in this. From somewhere in his memory there came the chilling echo of Dhangi's voice, through the brown flux of cigarette smoke and darkness in the Carriage Bar – the healing touch?
'Another thing,' Henley continued relentlessly, 'is that most of these cancers resolve asymmetrically. Starting superficially, the curative process proceeds inwards. Something has come in contact with these tumours inducing a local, not a generalized, response.'
Henley swept back his perfectly pressed white coat and lowered his hands to his trouser pockets.
Kingsley's neck prickled. He shot, in the half-light, a guilt stricken glance round the auditorium, but they were not looking at him. They were looking behind him at the screen. In the rapt silence Henley spoke again.
'A third observation: we have seen cancers at several stages of resolution. The first breast lump was just beginning to resolve. The second cancer exhibited very few remaining cancerous cells . . . whatever the curative agent, if the rate of response is constant, it must have been applied to the malignancies at different intervals before operation . . .' Henley paused '. . . I don't have any explanations for this, but I throw in the observations for what they're worth. Arguably they only serve to obscure the whole issue.'
But in Kingsley's mind it had all become transparent and delicate as ice. Yes, he had examined Sandra Spears two days before her operation. The subsequent breast cancer patient he had examined ten days before operating. The others took their places in that spectrum, their degree of resolution proportionate to the interval between his touch and the eventual operation. The healing touch? It was absurd, impossible, he could not believe it . . . or would not?