Diary of a Lone Twin

by David Loftus

  This year Ange grabbed a day off and we drove down to Mother’s. She was quiet and frail but on good form; there’s an inherent sadness that envelopes the day, it never goes away. Ange and I had breakfasted at Colbert on scrambled eggs and hugs, and The Wolseley had baked me a beautiful scripted birthday cake so we shared some rich, chocolatey slices. I topped up Mother’s bird feeders and opened her present of a book; she always gives me books, which I love.

  It was also a day of sweet messages on text, card and Instagram. Ange cooked a lovely dinner as a surprise, with a few chums including Andy, Nick and Rosie, Pascale dressed up for a Halloween party later, Paros with a gorgeous new girlfriend on his arm. We toasted to Johnny and to absent friends. I missed Tim’s presence.

  Thursday 1 November

  This day in 1983 John was poorly but brighter, making the odd tentative walk to the bathroom, and the neuro-doctors decided that tomorrow, despite his frailness, he should be readmitted to Oncology. They were worried it had been a while since radiotherapy had been administered to blast the tiny particles left post-operation, which now seemed like an eternity ago. John’s bed was surrounded by flowers and cards, some even from the oncology nurses who missed his gentle smiley face.

  * * *

  Today Jamie and I started the process of shooting our new book, exploring not just recipe ideas and culinary direction, but props, backgrounds, lighting and technique. Our Italy book is still top of the charts, the previous two books still in the charts, but this one will need to be different from Italy and it’s always the aim to make the new one our best yet.

  After our shoot Jamie and I dined at Cornerstone in wildest Hackney, their chef Tom Brown is the hottest foodie ticket in town. We ate crumpets with shrimps, lemon sole in chicken sauce, scallops and mackerel pâté with treacle buns washed down with funky organic wines.

  His message to me yesterday read, ‘Happy birthday mate, a bitter sweet day today I know. But I wish you a truly wonderful day, look forward to tomorrow, it’s a chilled day, then a birthday treat dinner and some giggles and a cheers to Johnny boy who sadly and regrettably I never knew. Shame, such a shame, anyway fella have a great day with Ange. xxx’

  Friday 2 November

  Shooting at the Mews

  On the morning of Monday 2 November 1987 John was taken by ambulance from the neurology unit and, although very frail, was readmitted to the care of the oncology unit. Weak as he was, he was happy to be going back to get on with his treatment and to restart his physiotherapy. Before he left Neurology, he was given an intrathecal injection of gentamicin into the small reservoir in his head. Mother was very anxious at the thought of the injection being given in the oncology unit and she had asked the neurology staff to make sure that the oncology staff knew what to do and how to do it.

  I was astonished to learn, in the afternoon, that John had been administered his first dose of radiotherapy in some time. He was too weak to walk and was carried to and from the radiotherapy department. Douglas and all of John’s favourite nurses were all there for him and welcomed him back with genuine love and care.

  Mother was with him during the afternoon and she asked who would administer the intrathecal antibiotics into the reservoir. When she was told that it was going to be Dr S, Mother told them that she lacked confidence in him, that we all did. The answer was that the hospital were aware of our concerns.

  On the same afternoon Samantha spoke to Mother at the hospital, worried sick that she was having to monitor every moment of John’s time in Oncology, to make sure he received the right care. It was an awful situation for her to be in and so wrong that between the three of us we were having to watch his every waking moment. Earlier in the day she had stopped a nurse from giving him an injection incorrectly. John had already received an intravenous injection earlier in the morning and was not due another until later in the evening. She’d also noticed that a doctor had removed John from the steroids he was on and it was vital that he remained on them while undergoing radiotherapy. When Mother spoke to the nurse in charge he assured her that he would see to it that John would be rewritten up for the drug immediately. No reason was given for either, other than that they were mistakes and they would be rectified. Our confidence in the doctors was at an all-time low.

  Friday 2 and Saturday 3 November

  Tick-tock. Saturday at home at the Mews

  A quiet day at home on what would have been our father’s birthday. He was forty-nine years old when he met our mother at that party in Knightsbridge, twenty years older than our mother. Eric John Loftus, buried with John, born 3 November 1910, dying on our parents’ wedding anniversary in 1984, breaking the hearts of John, me, Jean-Marian and Ian. We missed him terribly, and still do.

  I sat quietly with Ange, not allowing her to drift more than a few feet from my side while I try to summon the courage, the words to accurately explain the events of 3 November 1987, the day the world that we knew came crashing down, changing us all for ever.

  As I sat at my desk she made what seemed the oddest suggestion.

  She handed me a square box with the Eiffel Tower on its face, a small glass of rosé, and the words ‘Just take a little break and build this.’ Hundreds of tiny pieces of beautifully modelled and designed LEGO; we spent an hour and a half sorting, snapping together La Tour Eiffel, a structure we both adored, in awe of the complicated joints and hinges. We had so much LEGO as children, John and I, that we never fought over it, it was a game always shared, if still competitive. ‘How tall can you build a skyscraper before it falls?’ ‘Can you build Thunderbird 4 only using yellow bricks?’ ‘Can you build a vehicle with sixteen wheels that can survive a tumble down the stairs?’

  La Tour Eiffel is now on my desk, next to a small red and white rocket, the one from Tintin’s On a Marché sur la Lune. The rocket was the last of the gifts from Ange that I opened on our birthday this year, Ange unaware that it was also the last present that John opened sitting on his hospital bed, 3 November 1987. It was a present from one of his two best friends, Tim L-S and Nick H-H, I forget which one, oh the small coincidences of life.

  * * *

  Mother arrived in the early morning of the third and John was sitting in his bed having breakfast, better and brighter than he had been for a while, glad to be restarting his treatment and his recovery. Mother brought him his post from The Beeches, letters and birthday cards, even his payslip from Nucleus, and he opened them with her as they sipped their morning teas. Some more parcels had arrived but he wanted to wait until I arrived to open them together.

  When I arrived, Mother left to attend to her surgery in Sutton. John was sitting upright, smiley and positive, excited about opening presents together. I joked that they seemed to be all for him and he admitted that one of the few positives of the situation we found ourselves in was that he’d really upped the ante in the gift-giving-and-receiving stakes. He was surrounded by cards and flowers and teddies, artworks and notes, the nurses fussed over him unlike the other patients, there was genuine care and love and a sense of positivity. We talked again of Venice, the Orient Express, Concorde and staying at the Cipriani, and he kept asking me, ‘Have you really, really booked it for us?’

  What happened in the next twenty minutes is etched so vividly upon my brain.

  I was sitting on John’s bed, gently helping him unwrap his presents. We had decided to go from the biggest to the smallest and I arranged them that way. It was like being children again, and he was genuinely excited. There was a Tintin-esque theme going on between his chums and we chuckled about Papa sitting on the bog watching our socks-inverted cricket ball whizzing past the door as he read his Tintins and Asterixes. The largest present was the rocket, an enormous wooden red and white Explorers on the Moon rocket that Tintin, Haddock, Snowy, Calculus and the stowaway Thompson twins travelled to the moon in. He was delighted and he made me stick the card with the present to remind himself who to write the thank-you letter to.

  John had asked me again about the reser
voir in the top of his head and I reiterated that it didn’t look nearly as bad as it sounded. He told me that he couldn’t really feel it, but then at that time his headache was almost constant, just slightly less intense now the gentamicin was doing its job. I placed the rocket on his bedside table and sat in the chair next to him, and as I passed him the next present to open, Dr S walked into the room to administer John’s intrathecal injection.

  The nurses were around, but not in the room at that moment and I said to Dr S that I believed that someone else was to give the injection, to which he replied that he was the only one that could. Normal practice, if a nurse prepares an intrathecal injection of gentamicin, is for another nurse to check it. Dr S had prepared the injection himself, without informing the nurses and there was no ‘routine’ to follow, apparently. Dr S was cold, unfriendly and sheepish, but this was what we had come to know and expect. He said he knew what he was doing and he sat beside John to inject the drug into the reservoir via a tiny valve that I had earlier hidden by gently combing his wispy hair around it.

  Mother said later, in her statement via the lawyers, when she was pressurized to get things down in writing, that she believed that I wasn’t there when the injection was given. I was. As the last of the drug was administered any normal doctor, one would hope, would check to make sure the patient was okay. Particularly when that drug had just been administered to a reservoir with access to the central recesses of the brain. But Dr S stood immediately and walked out of the room. And I knew straightaway that something was wrong. I called Dr S, but he had disappeared. I called the nurses. John’s eyes were wandering and he told me he felt nauseous and that his head was spinning. I knew, without a doubt, immediately, that something had gone terribly wrong with the injection. John vomited everywhere, vomited like nothing I’ve ever seen before or since. I told him to breathe deeply, I remember saying that if you are breathing it’s impossible to vomit, but it was no good, he vomited all over the birthday wrapping paper, over me. I held his head, screaming to the nurses to help me. Two rushed in. I had a potty from under the bed, they helped me with a bucket, he was looking up at me, gazing at me, but the vomit was awful, it just kept coming. All John could say was,

  ‘I’m so, so sorry, David.

  I’m so sorry,

  So, so sorry, David.

  I’m sorry, David.’

  Again and again, his face as close to mine as I could hold him, the nurses running around in a panic, calling for Dr S, again and again. The nurses later attended the inquest; they wanted, all of them, to give their experiences of that moment, but they were not ‘required’. One of the senior nurses eased John from my grip and he closed his eyes. As the nurses started to clean him up I was very aware that no one knew what to do, and that John was now losing consciousness. As I looked through the open door to the corridor outside I could, to my horror, see Dr S at a desk, doing nothing. I asked him if he’d done something wrong. He said ‘No.’

  I knew I had to get Mother. I ran out into the corridor, telling everyone to get into the room to help John, white coats, blue coats, anyone, just please, please help. I could see S, unmoving at his desk. I knew then that he knew what he had done. He was looking at something, a phial or a box or something small, his head was in his other hand. If I knew, he knew. The first huge mistake was giving the injection, the second mistake was what the hospital did afterwards. But I had no time to spare, I ran to the phone.

  I got Mother immediately on the phone, I told her that I believed something had gone terribly wrong, that John had become violently sick and that he was losing consciousness. I was in full panic mode by then, Mother knew immediately that this was really bad and she dropped the phone and ran to her car. I raced back past the still stationary S into John’s room to find him just awake but breathing very weakly, he again said, ‘I’m sorry, David.’ I ran to Dr S and told him that John’s breathing was getting incredibly weak and that he needed to see him, I then ran down the ward looking for anyone that I could find. No one was there. All I had was Dr S, who had no intention of helping, he wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence. I’ve relived the slow-motion nightmare of what was unfolding again and again; what more could I have done at that moment? I ran back down the corridor towards John’s room and as I drew level Dr S had, at last, risen from his desk and wandered in to examine John. At the same time Mother turned the corner and ran past me to see him.

  I sat in a chair, my heart pounding. Holding my head in my hands, I could just see into the room but there still seemed to be little activity around John. Mother was talking to the charge nurse and was visibly upset and worried that John was unconscious. I told Mother that it was the moment the injection was given, that Dr S had refused to help, and, that I had seen him looking at something on his desk. I believe that the phial and box were never found.

  As Mother was with John and I was outside the room Dr S walked in and administered another injection, not into the reservoir, but his arm. Mother asked him to clarify what he was giving him and he told her it was a steroid, to ‘ease his condition’. Mother asked him about the intrathecal injection and he told her that he had given John the ‘correct amount, 2 millilitres’. Mother didn’t leave John’s room. Again and again she expressed concern at his condition. She was told by the charge nurse that the registrar had been sent for, but was at another hospital. Mother was by now so alarmed at John’s condition that she called the neurology unit from the ward telephone.

  The registrar eventually arrived and contact between the two units was promised to monitor his condition. There was no mention of the injection that had been given, other than between me and Mother and the nurses. Several were in tears. Later in the day the unconscious John was seen by the consultant, still surrounded by our half-unwrapped presents, Tintin’s rocket, Strawbod and his scarf. The consultant decided, at last, to move John to a high-dependency unit. Still there was little sign of Dr S, and no talk of the injection. The consultant suggested that John’s brain should be scanned, but the oncology unit’s scanner was out of action, so they gave him an MRI scan. Mother was told that John had ‘probably had another brain haemorrhage’ and that the timing with him receiving the injection was ‘pure coincidence’. Mother then asked him if we, as a family, could have confidence that the injection was the correct drug, correctly given, at the correct dose, and he assured her that it was the first thing that they had thought about.

  By this time Samantha and her parents had been called, and I was beyond consolation. Mother was talking to the doctors and holding John’s hand in Intensive Care. It was suggested that I go home to The Beeches and call Ian and Jean-Marian. I can still recall the cold wind off Banstead Downs as I walked up the hill and then down again towards Carshalton Beeches. They were still clearing the fallen trees, the ground was thick with rain-sodden pine needles. I saw Liz Piper’s house, the road up to the Oaks park where we played as children, the old oak that gave its name to the place now also fallen and being shredded into firewood. Past Mr Frank’s house, its heavy oak door that John and I would bash and bash with our ‘Mr Frank’ stick. Past Jayne’s house, my first-ever girlfriend. The old Victorian pillarbox and home to The Beeches, to a tearful Molly, squeezing my cheeks and holding me tight for an eternity.

  I sat at the piano, vaguely tinkering, the dining room cold and dark and I wept and wept and wept for John. His music, Moonlight Sonata Third Movement by Beethoven, was laid out to play. God, I was cold. That was the moment when the crashing, thundering realization came to me with absolute clarity: that I could have stopped him. Why hadn’t I? Because John didn’t want to make a fuss and, as a result, neither did I. I ran to the hall and called the ward, but no one answered, so I called the Intensive Care unit and spoke to Mother. There was no change and she would call me if she had any news. I went to my bedroom, lay on my futon on the floor and cried for as long as I can remember.

  That night John was transferred, seriously ill again, still unconscious, to the high-dependency war
d in the neurology unit. He would not return to Oncology. They were still maintaining that John had suffered some sort of haemorrhage, which I, as the only witness to what had happened, knew was complete bullshit.

  Sunday 4 November

  A quiet day at the Mews. Ange barely left my side, I hugged her for over an hour at one point. I briefly dozed in the autumn sun.

  * * *

  4 November 1987 was grey and bleak. We were back at the Intensive Care unit, which was a dark and sombre shrine to high dependency, high tech, deliberately dark, the most seriously sick, brain-injured or brain-damaged patients. All men, mostly the result of high-impact trauma to the head, except John, in the second bed from the end, tubes and monitors, drips and catheters.

  During the day John was operated on by a neurosurgeon and a cerebral shunt was inserted into his brain to try to relieve the pressure of cerebrospinal fluid in his brain. During the afternoon our hopes were raised as John showed a slight improvement and could just about open his eyes and recognize us by his bedside. These moments were but minutes long but at least gave us the belief that the worst might be over. I had taken to using lemon-flavoured moisturized cotton buds to gently anoint his chapped lips and even at one point got a little smile, though I think he may have been dreaming.

  Monday 5 and Tuesday 6 November

  Two-day shoot with the Sunday Times, prepping for a big shoot with Jamie this week. Lovely FaceTime chat with Tim in America. Planning has started for the next Niklas Ekstedt adventure in Sweden, and Marrakech is booked for New Year, the Lake District with Ange next week and several other new adventures have gone into the diary.

  * * *

  John continued to respond to my gentle stimulation of his lips, and he could feel if I stroked the inside of his arm, something we both liked. I was told by the nurse that this, though reassuring for me, didn’t mean he definitely knew that I was doing it, but didn’t stop me believing that he could feel every stroke. During the fifth and the sixth Mother phoned the oncology unit several times, speaking to several people and again and again about the injection. They continued to say that it had been the correct dose and had been administered by Dr S correctly. Mother asked the registrar to check the drug on the ward and the neurology unit asked them to do the same.