Cold Fusion (28 page)

Uniformed staff passed us both ways in the corridors, even the ones overtaking us at a jog-trot silent in their urgency. I imagined the clatter and fuss of an open NHS ward, and was glad at least one of my promises had been kept for me—no chaos would touch Viv here, overwhelming his filters and freaking him out. He’d probably like the place. Order and routine suffused the very air, and this long corridor, with the soothing offset symmetry of its doors on either side…

The doctor stopped outside one of them. I sailed past her shoulder, and she reeled me in by my sleeve. “Mr. Mallory.”

“Sorry. Yes.”

“Watching a loved one with Drescher’s is distressing. Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“If this is your first time visiting someone on life support, you’ll find that difficult too. Try to remember that he’s not in any pain.”

“All right.”

“Oh, he…” She patted the pockets of her spotless white coat. “He was conscious for a couple of minutes when we first brought him in. He was anxious that you have these papers. And this little piece of…shell, is it? Or glass?”

I took the papers and the fragment from her. “It’s a scale from a mermaid’s tail.”

“Right. You know, if you’re finding all of this overwhelming, I can send a counsellor to talk with you.”

I couldn’t reply. I walked past her into the room. If she’d sent a whole army of psychiatrists to my aid at that point, they couldn’t have made any difference. I’d seen Viv laid out among the machines.

It was like finding a sea god beached on the shore, or some other free, graceful thing downed and bound and fettered. He’d been scrupulously taken care of. Someone had washed his hair, and it was drying in thick curls on the flat pillow. All the marks of our night had been cleaned away. His shoulders and chest were bare, the skin pale to translucency under a constellation of electrode pads, a blanket crisply folded. Beneath it he was just a fucking skeleton, the way I’d seen him at the cottage when he’d thought I wasn’t watching, when his bright presence wasn’t distracting me, fleshing him out. I could almost count his ribs. His hips and his long leg bones were like silent, haunting music, drawing up a sob from under my gut. I swallowed it hard. “Is he being fed?”

“Yes, of course. These drips are feeding him.” The doctor came and stood on the far side of the bed. I noticed from her ID badge that she was called Erskine, a nice old Scottish name that suited her hair and her gift of adapting her demeanour to struggling idiots. She pointed to the relevant tubes as if I’d been three years old. “These are providing him with liquids, and we’re delivering medication via this port in his arm. These wires link to the heart monitor, and that’s linked to the nurses’ station, which is constantly attended. We’ll know about any changes in his condition straightaway.”

“Right. And this tube here, the one coming out under the bed…”

“That’s his catheter. I’m sorry. I know it’s not nice to see these things.”

It was fine. It was nothing by comparison with the huge white valve holding his mouth open, the mechanised hissing that was filling his lungs and stealing the air out of mine. Something bumped the backs of my knees, and I subsided into the chair which Erskine had pushed under me. I folded up and rested my brow on the edge of the mattress. “Oh, shit. Christ.”

Her tap on my shoulder was brusque but not without sympathy. “Yes. Watch your language, though—partly for me and my staff, and partly for him. If he has any awareness at all, it’ll be of sounds, the voices of people he loves.”

“What am I meant to say to him?”

“I don’t know. You’re his friend, not me. Tell him stories.”

I sat up, found a tissue and blew my nose. “Do we
want
him to be aware? Isn’t it best that he just sleeps through…” I gestured at the wires and drips, “…through all this?”

“There’s no chance of him waking up in any real sense of the word. But I want you to help keep him near us, because until we’ve exhausted our options—including that thirty percent—I am going to throw every resource this hospital has into saving him.” She made a rapid check of the readouts and wires. “Now, I also understand from Macready that there’s a security concern with regard to Vivian. Of course we have our own in-house staff, but the old man said he’d provide some people too. So if you see aged gamekeepers stalking the corridors, don’t be surprised.”

She was trying to hearten me. I had to let her see that it had worked. I tried for a responsive smile. “All right. Thanks.”

“Tidy yourself up. There’s a shower room you can use at the end of this corridor, and I’m told your mum dropped off a holdall of your clothes at reception. I have to go now, but there’ll be someone along regularly to monitor Vivian. Will you be all right?”

“Yes. I’m just gonna stay here. With him.”

“Good. And remember—talk to him.”

I knew lots of stories, as it turned out. You don’t grow up around fishermen without picking up a tale or two, and once I started dipping into my stock of them—things I’d heard aboard a pitching trawler when a yarn from an old deckhand helped drag you through the night, or on the harbourside afterwards in the cold dawn light, waiting for the truck to come to bear off our night’s catch to the local shops and markets—I found a rich store.

I told him the one about the god-fearing Methodist who went to church every Sunday and sang in the sweetest of voices, and the mysterious lady who sat veiled in the back pew to hear him, and how one Sunday she wasn’t there, but a glorious music rose up from the foot of the cliffs, and the god-fearing man left the church to follow it and was never seen again. That was a mermaid’s tale, and I tucked the piece of glass into Viv’s hand so that he might feel the cool of the ocean. I knew another one, stoutly attested to by an off-duty policeman who’d taken his boat out one fine afternoon and seen a young man swimming, all on his own and miles out from shore. He’d drawn his boat alongside the lad, of course, and offered help. But the boy had looked at him with the strangest sea-green eyes, thanked him politely and swum away, showing at the last second before he dived the splash of a whale’s-tail fluke.

I thought Viv’s hand moved at the end of that story. But it was just the ceramic scale, falling passively out of his grasp. I gently retrieved it and set it on the bedside table. I put my pages of scribbled poetry beside it, and lastly I set down the blue-glazed shell from my coat’s inner pocket. I didn’t believe in God. I had no cross, no pentacle, no Star of David. These were our holy things, the talismans of our time together. Having created this small altar, I sat on the edge of the bed. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I made sure I wasn’t disturbing any of the drips or wires. I took his hand, the one whose fine-boned structure wasn’t pierced and bruised to the wrist by a cannula. From here I could do that and reach to stroke his hair.

I’d never sung a song to anyone in my life. I sounded like what I was—a Kerra sailor, until recently a hard-drinking one. So I kept it very quiet, but I gave it a shot. A few off-colour sea shanties, smoothing his hair on the big seventh wave that came with the punch line or chorus. The last thing I’d heard on the radio, and then, keeping some semblance of the tune from that, I sang him my poem. I could remember every word. It was the story of our journey, shore to mountain, strangers to conjoined flesh and spirit by the fire. I started to cry as I sang it, and I’d never meant to disgrace myself so, but I kept my voice steady. Erskine had said the voice was the important thing.

When I finished, Alfred Macready was sitting on the far side of the bed. He was one of those hale old Highlanders whose age you couldn’t guess past seventy, who would remain unaltered to the grave unless some mortal blow fell upon them. I knew at once that he’d encountered his stroke. I wiped my face, at once embarrassed to be found like this and far, far past caring. “We should talk outside. The doctor says he might still be able to hear.”

There were a couple of seats in an alcove of the corridor. Neither of us wanted to abandon our post as far as the visitors’ lounge. The sweet-faced girl who’d put her head around the door of Viv’s room every hour or so reappeared, and I asked her please to bring Alfred tea and biscuits. The old man and I sat down.

“What is it?” I asked quietly. “Won’t they come?”

“It’s worse than that. They’ve moved on from the last address we had for them, and nobody knows where they’ve gone. I’ve spent all night on the phone to the lawyers, friends, anyone who would give me a number. I’ve even tried Interpol, but they’re no’ interested, since—according to the laws of man—Constanza’s done no wrong. They’ve disappeared.” He got up and went to stand in the doorway of Viv’s room. He removed his tweed cap and pressed it to his chest. “God forgive me, my young laird. God forgive me for bringing you here.”

He sounded absolutely broken. I stood behind him. I didn’t have much experience of good or kindly adults, and scarcely knew how to treat one in distress. “I brought him here too.”

“You’re a child. You never saw what happened to his father.”

His voice was tight and harsh. He didn’t want me to witness his grief, so I slipped past him and went to stare out of the window again. There were the trees and the kids. The Westie had gone, but the squirrels—greys, the whole lot of them, the delicate reds long since wiped out by disease—were still romping around in the branches. I tried counting them, lost track of their movements and started watching easier targets, the men and women going about their business in the hospital forecourt.

What I saw there made me jolt upright, drawing in a scalding breath. “Mr. Macready,” I said, turning round. “I have to go out for a few minutes. Can you stay here?”

“I’ll no’ leave his side.”

“Good. Right.” I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair. “Talk to him. The doctor said we should.”

“What the devil am I meant to talk to him about?”

“Anything. You must have stories. Anything at all.”

Chapter Seventeen

I’d arrived by helicopter, and finding my way out on foot through the labyrinth took a hair-tearing three or four minutes—hitting the buzzer by the ICU doors until someone came frowning to open them, running for the lifts and trying not to jostle old ladies on Zimmer frames aside. I stood in the stainless-steel box, biting my lip to hold back a cry of impatience. Should have taken the damn stairs, but the box would apparently let me out in reception, and reception meant the exit, and the exit meant I could run out and find the man I’d seen sitting on a bench, calmly feeding the pigeons.

He noticed me when I was about ten yards away from him. He must have read murder in my eyes because he leapt up, scattering the pigeons in a rustling crowd. He’d always been athletic. He cleared the back of the bench in one and ran for the road.

I followed him across. A taxi grazed my hip, and a symphony of horns broke out around us. I tried to push a bus aside, used the bonnet of a Mini as a vaulting horse to carry me off the tarmac and onto the pavement. He was ploughing through the bushes that lined the park. Once he reached open ground I would lose him. His rucksack caught on a branch. He’d freed himself in a second, but that was all the time it took for me to close the gap between us. I launched a flying dive. I was no rugby player, but I hit hard and low enough to floor him.

We landed at the feet of a lady walking her dog. “Oh,” she said quite calmly, as if this were Glasgow and such things happened to her every time she went out. “I’ll call the police, shall I?”

I had no words. I’d landed on top, and I fetched Alan Frost the sweetest, hardest roundhouse punch I’d ever delivered in my life. He grunted and grabbed my wrist, and waved his free hand soothingly at the lady. “No, ma’am. It’s quite all right.”

“It’s not bloody all right!” I tore my arm free and seized him by the neck of his jumper. “Aye, call the police now!”

“Mallory, Mallory…” He choked faintly and flashed me a bloodstained smile. “Sorry about all this,” he said to the lady. “He’s on day release from a local…facility. He’s just a wee bit upset. Really, the police would only make it worse.”

He sounded so bloody plausible. He always had. “Oh, all right,” she said, gathering up her dog’s lead and walking away. “Good luck with him, then.”

I hauled him to his feet. I thought about knocking him down again, but there were things I needed to say and do, and in order to avoid further public affray, I shoved him in the direction of the trees. He offered no resistance, cheerily raising his hands. If he thought I was incapable of throttling him, he was sorely mistaken.

I turned him round by the shoulder and backed him up against a horse chestnut whose last leaves and conker shells were scattered on the ground around us. “Right. Who the bloody hell are you? Not a wealthy Dorset farmer, I take it.”

He was still grinning. “Nah. Just needed a cover to explain why I could pour all that cash into the
Sea Hawk
. Take her wherever I needed her to go. Don’t you
know
who I am, Mal?”

“The Norway police said you were some kind of agent. Christ, Alan—why?”

“Beats gutting fish for a living, like you. Or chasing bloody pheasants for dear old Laird Toffee-Nose all my life, like old Alf Macready. Or…” His eyes glimmered. “I tell you what—I wouldn’t have minded changing places with your Viv. Cold fusion! He’d have been more famous than Steve Jobs and Stephen Hawking put together.”

“He still will be.” Fury like fresh lava surged up in my gut. “What are you doing here? Were you gonna creep into the hospital and finish him off?”

“You’d never have known it if I had. Hospital rent-a-cops… I’d have had more trouble with Macready’s cronies from the Royal Scots.”

“You know Alfred?”

“I have to know everybody when I’m on a case. If you want to ease that chokehold off me, I’ll explain.”

I tightened the chokehold instead. His cruel, handsome face was going a bit blue, but I reckoned he could take it. “What do you imagine you could possibly
explain
to me?”

“I said explain, not…” He broke off, coughing. “Not exonerate. Fuck’s sake, Mal—don’t you wanna know?”

“Not really. You blew up the
Sea Hawk
launch and killed my friends. You tried to murder Viv at Spindrift, to take away the last little bit of life he had left in him. Did you know he was dying?”

“Do you think I’d have gone to all this trouble if I had?” He prised my grip off his neck. “Jesus. Yeah, I did all those things. Dreadful actions for a Peace Warrior, but…” He rubbed at his throat. “Perfectly natural for someone employed by the oil companies to infiltrate and discredit your cause. I’m an agent, as you say.”

“I don’t get it. You were the one who tried hardest to stop me from going out on that boat.”

“Ah, Mal, you’re easy to manipulate. All I had to do was tell you not to launch that RIB to make you want it even more.”

Shame hit me hard. That was true. That was exactly how I’d been all my life. I was gay to my back teeth, but finding out I was meant to be straight hadn’t half given flavour to the forbidden fruit. I’d started drinking, not because my dad had set me the example but because I’d known deep down it was the very last thing I should do. I’d been obstinate as a bloody bull, so much more like my drowned father than I’d ever dared believe.

“I’m not like that now,” I said, trying to prove it by letting go of his jumper. “It was because of me that you came after Viv, wasn’t it? I gave the game away.”

“Like an excited puppy. Yeah, you did. When you phoned PW about your lad and his experiments, everything I’d been doing to try and shut down that shop of sorry little whale-huggers turned to peanuts. When I told my bosses someone had hit the target with cold fusion, they gave me carte blanche to get rid of him.”

“Why are you telling me this now, Alan?”

“Because I never did get rid of him, did I? Somebody kept getting in my way. Even the lads who tracked you down to Glencathadh screwed it up.”

“They came from you?”

“That’s right. So now I’m in the shit, my friend. It’s high-risk, high-reward with the guys I work for, and I’m gonna have to make myself scarce for a while. I’ve come to say goodbye.”

He was a murdering bastard. If I clouted him with a rock and left him for dead, that would be the least he deserved. My head spun with the double vision. He looked exactly like my friend, my pushy lover, from the
Sea Hawk
.

“I don’t understand you,” I rasped. “Why would you bother to come here? Why the
fuck
did you take time out to screw me back at Spindrift?”

He chuckled. “Do you want the easy answer or the true one? Although, come to think of it, they’re both true. I needed time on my own in the labs to set the charges, and what better way to send you to sleep than give you a good seeing-to? Worked like magic. As for the rest of it—well, I still fancied you. I never meant to kill you, you know. Just Viv. Only you would go running back in there after him.”

“You absolute piece of shit.”

“Granted. Don’t take it personally, Mal. The two of you were just a job.” He shielded his eyes and squinted at the hospital’s upper floors. “How’s he doing, then—up in room twenty-three of the ICU?”

He was looking at the exact window. I could see Alfred’s bulk looming there, looking back. I grabbed his jaw and snapped his face back round. “You don’t get to know. You don’t get to look or even fucking
think
about him, if I can help it.”

“Dying, then. I’m aware I owe you one. That’s why I came—to ask if there was anything you wanted.”

“You have got to be bloody joking.”

“Serious. Fired from my job, at a bit of a loose end. Any last requests?”

“The only thing you can do for me is fuck off out of my sight and never come back. It
is
personal, you dick. He’s a good man. I love him.”

“Yeah. I saw that the second I clapped eyes on the pair of you at Spindrift. God help you, Mal—you don’t half pick ’em.” He hoisted his rucksack onto his shoulder. “You’re not gonna kill me here, no matter how much you’d like to, so you’d better let me go.”

I did. I stood paralysed for almost thirty seconds, watching his retreat through the trees. Then I grabbed a huge breath, like a diver on a board, and I plunged after him. “Alan!”

He came to a halt on the edge of the playing field. I waited for his smug grin but it never came, as if his wickedness really had been just a job, and now it was over, he truly was sorry. He only raised an eyebrow at me. “Thought of something?”

“Yes.” I swallowed, struggling to sound clear and normal, and not as if my last hope depended on his answer. “You’re some kind of agent. Okay. You must have…resources.”

“I know a man who knows a man or two, if that’s what you mean.”

“And money. And a gift for tracking people down.”

“I like to think so.” He was beginning to catch on, a genuine smile taking some of the blank distance from his eyes. “And they paid me well, yeah. Who do you want, Mallory?”

“A woman named Constanza Calder. She left here nearly twenty years ago and went to live in Rome. She was—”

“The old laird’s wife. Vivian’s mother.”

“You know her?”

“No. I told you, I background check my targets.”

He really was a professional assassin. I was asking a hit man for favours. “Fine. I want her daughter as well, Vivian’s sister.”

“You want them knocked off, or—”

“Christ, no! I just want you to find them and get them to contact Alfred, or to phone the hospital here. Can you do it?”

“A woman who left here two decades ago and might have changed her name half a dozen times since then?” He shrugged, stuck out a hand to me. “Shouldn’t be too much of a problem, no.”

* * * * *

I told Alfred what I’d done. I didn’t want to give him false hope, but without our thirty-percent chance, I was far from sure that his sense of his ancestral duties wouldn’t extend to snipping Viv’s wires.

He listened attentively, upright in his chair beside the bed. “Very well,” he said. “Now, d’ye want to sit down? I was in the middle of a story.”

Alfred’s stories beat mine hollow. He featured in them personally, unlike me with my mermaid tales, and apparently he’d had the devil of a life of it in South Arabia with his buddies from the Royal Scots during the sixties, doing running battle with Egyptian and Yemeni guerrillas. He was a grand storyteller, too, marshalling his facts, his grasp of names and dates undiminished. Occasionally during these narratives I would see a gentleman of around his age, smartly dressed and not looking quite like your average hospital visitor, hesitate outside the door. Too polite to peer in, of course, but nodding his approval… I kept close track of these proceedings. I needed to listen to Alfred, because my listening would in some mystical way support Viv’s, and help keep him near, as Dr. Erskine had asked me to do. I had to watch the corridor. I had to follow the beep and the steadily spiking line of the heart monitor, and most of all I had to retain my hold on Viv’s hand, whose abandoned stillness in mine made me think of derelict buildings, exquisite temples deserted and left to fall apart unseen in distant jungles. I could scarcely afford to blink, let alone close my eyes.

I slid off my chair, and Alfred and a nurse grabbed me by one armpit each before I could hit the floor. Someone had brought an armchair into the room—I protested vaguely as they deposited me into it, but I was past done, sleepless nights and strange days overwhelming me. I toed off my shoes and curled up. “Don’t let him be alone, Alfred.”

“Mr. Macready to you. Have I not sworn?”

And despite everything, I slept. I must have thought life support worked like some kind of cold storage—that, properly set up, it would maintain a human body in its chilly embrace forever. I’d known that Viv was desperately ill by the time we’d got him to Braidwood, but my fears had been snagged in that same safety net of tubes and wires that had stopped his further deterioration. We’d caught him in time. I’d listened to Erskine, about the dangers he faced, but on some level I’d put faith in the machines. In Alfred too, his stories and his stouthearted presence.

I woke in hell, sprawling, trying to lurch out of my seat. Alfred shoved me back. “No,” he barked. “Let them do their jobs.”

I couldn’t even think who
they
might be. But the room was full of them—pale blue uniforms, a fence of them around Viv’s bed. The air was crowded too, with voices and a dreadful single tone that had the potential to end my world. I jerked forward again, and this time the old man grabbed me by the scruff and hauled me bodily out of the room. “Did you not hear me?”

“But…that’s the flatline. That sound.”

“I know. His heart stopped.”

“I’ve got to be with him.”

“You’ve got to stop out of the way and let them work. Can’t you be that much of a man?”

I hated all that shit. My dad’s favourite response, when I’d failed at some physical task, hauling in a net three times my own weight or lashing the rope to a capstan fast enough in a howling gale—
come on, you wee puppy! What kind of man are you?
But Alfred’s pale eyes seared into mine, and I understood that his standards of manhood were different. That I had to behave well, for my own sake and the sake of those around me.

I choked down my terror. “All right. Can I at least see him?”

“Easier for you not to. Ah, you don’t want what’s easier, do you? Here, in the doorway. Off to the side.”

And so I got to see my lover stripped down, more brusquely than Alfred would have skinned a rabbit, his pale chest exposed. In flashes between the medics’ moving bodies, I saw the defibrillation paddles being raised—held steady for the moment it took to ensure everybody clear—heard them go down with a snap. Viv’s body arched and jolted as it had done when I’d wrung some last burst of pleasure from him on the edge of sleep. I saw this process repeated six times, the doctors beginning to look at one another. Then, on the seventh round—I thought about the seventh wave again, the surge that brings the half-drowned back to shore—the deadly flatline tone interrupted itself. Dropped silent and turned to a beep. Another, another. A kind of collective whoosh left the group round the bed, less an exhalation than the sudden exit of prayers.