Fullalove (17 page)

He checks the time on his watch against the time on the dashboard clock and puts something that looks like a prayer shawl around his neck to conceal his cameras. The video camera begins a silent oscillation and, at the signal from the fat man, who has reappeared, we make a crouched run for it down the yard, keeping our heads below the beam of the motion detector, like visiting firemen in one of the world’s trouble-spots, weaving to avoid sniper fire from rebel groups in the mountains. ‘This is Charlie,’ Heath says when we are in and the fat man has secured the door behind us. ‘Charlie will give you some good shit. Charlie will fill up your notebook big-time.’

Because it is a new hospital (new, that is, in terms of the fabric: a hospital has stood on this site since the early nineteenth century), the security at St Saviour’s is considered state of the art. The incidence of mad axe-men and maternity-ward prowlers and syringe-wielding orderlies, of bogus doctors performing high-risk peritonology, heroic neurosurgery, splashy angioplasties, has meant that security at all hospitals in the last few years has had to be stepped up.

And then of course there are the people like us – people like Heath and me. It used to be easy-peasy; a piece of pure piss: a pair of overalls and a pot of paint, or a Black and Decker and a Woodbine behind the ear and, bingo, you were in. A couple of stunts have been pulled since Scott McGovern was laid low: somebody posing as a junior doctor and demanding to see his notes; somebody else having flowers delivered to another patient on McGovern’s floor, with the number of his newsdesk and some money concealed. But these were gestures that owed more to a nostalgia for the old ways than any real expectation of a result.

Now that we have crashed it, I have a vivid sense of us as migratory tumours or parasite invaders, unwelcome boarders being scanned by the hospital surveillance apparatus in the way advanced imaging techniques hunt down a pocket of pus or a locus of inflammation in the body’s dark halls and caves. Hawkins thinks we will simply be carried from the point of
ingress to our eventual destination like cellular debris riding the rapids of the lymph channel before passing poisonously into the flowing stream. Put it down to the amounts of substances consumed.

Like Clit Carson, the part of the hospital where we presently find ourselves doesn’t officially exist. According to the plan which is available for public consumption, the area that makes up Charlie’s night-time kingdom consists of a lecture theatre, administration offices, and storage. This leaves about a half of the square-footage unaccounted for, a blank on the chart, where you will in fact find the morgue and the post-mortem room, a sluice room, a furnace room, a number of side-rooms filled with the honest brightness of clamps, scalpels, kidney-shaped bowls, hydraulic corpse technology. This is the place where death is – the incipient organic decay, the mephitic odours; the place where the bodies come.

It is also where Heath comes, when word reaches him that they have got something good in. In the way certain waiters at certain restaurants, and certain doormen at certain hotels, get on the blower to the paparazzi when they’ve ‘trapped’, so Hawkins has established a small network of morgue minders and corpse handlers who bell him when they have anything noteworthy in the way of physical peculiarities or deformities, interesting examples of scarification, mutilation, post-mortem carnivore chewing, branding, tattoos. Tattooing – stigmataphilia – is Heath’s current area of special interest, combining, as he believes it does, secret ritual, traditional art, physical pain and sensual pleasure. St Saviour’s in recent months has produced a man with a life-size portrait of himself apotheosised as an angel in multicoloured inks on his back, and another man whose back was completely covered with a tattoo version of the poster of a ball-fondling, bare-buttocked woman in a tennis dress, popular among chem-eng students in the nineteen-seventies.

This sequestered place is actually on the ground level of the building, although the absence of windows gives it an airless, basement feel. Visitors go up a curved ramp to the main first-
floor entrance at the front of the hospital – currently home to the McGovern faithful. The walls are battleship grey, the ceilings low and pipe-lined, dull bulkheads. There are stainless steel anti-scuff panels at waist-height that hardly show any sign of wear. The composition floor is embedded with a kind of silver-gold microglitter whose dancing liveliness seems inappropriate in such a place, like giggling in church.

We file in and follow Charlie down a shallow, rubber-covered incline. A bad smell drifts back from Charlie – formalin? ether? whisky? the smell that comes from prolonged exposure to evisceration and dismemberment? Flesh lies in folds at the back of his neck, and judders at every jarring footfall. Flesh billows around the armpits of the hospital-issue uniform, sagging and moving like breasts.

We keep following Charlie past a room piled with used bandages and dressings, an alcove lined with
boudins
and cutlets in bottles, and have just passed a scullery area containing rigid white plastic aprons and calf-length rubber boots when Heath suddenly stops. ‘Can you hear that?’ He is standing under the metal panel of an air intake or ventilation duct. ‘Here. Cop a listen. Pretty nutso, what d’you think? But you
must
hear,’ he says, when I tell him all I’m hearing is the sound of liquid draining into metal pans. ‘You don’t hear them? The murmuring souls? The howls of the unburied? The souls condemned to wander unhappily until their mortal remains have been laid to rest? That weird wilderness sound? Well, there it is, Normsky, there it is.’

We turn left into a concrete hall, and catch up with Charlie who is standing by a central refrigerator containing sixty drawers. A red digital readout flickers as the temperature rises and falls: 35 degrees, 36, 35. The walls are tiled in swimming-pool blue, and dim grids of fluorescent light hang from the ceiling. I don’t notice it at first, but one of the drawers is open on the second tier, and inside it is a woman’s leg lying on white gauze, flaccid, marbled, slightly bent at the knee. It immediately reminds me of the party shop near where I live, and the row of inflated legs doing a jerky can-can in the window twenty-four hours a
day, round the clock, non-stop. No doubt it reminds Hawkins of something else: of Khe San and Qui Nhon and Hue, body parts in the branches of trees, dead Vietnamese with lighted cigarettes and worse pushed into the slots of their mouths.

There is a blackening red stain on the gauze where bone and marbled muscle tissue protrude from the thigh. Charlie says the leg was found in a London canal and will be given its own funeral – buried so that it can be exhumed if necessary, in a coffin, with a priest present. Hawkins, who doesn’t judge it to be worth even a frame, propels the drawer shut with his knee. ‘I think,’ he says to Charlie, ‘that we’re looking for something off your top shelf.’

Charlie goes to fetch a trolley, and Hawkins drifts over to some lift doors wide enough to accommodate entire life-support systems; beds complete with IV tubes, heart monitors, traction counterweights, none of which, being surplus to requirements, ever get as far as this floor. He seems convinced that the shaft is also a conduit for whatever it was he thought he was hearing a few minutes ago. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t hear this,’ he says. ‘It sounds like some deep-space receiver picking up fragments of communication flows from Earth. Sobbing whispers heard deep in the jungle at night, howls carried on the wind, trees and plants moaning in awful harmony. Tribal people calling to each other through the manioc leaves in the jungle of screaming souls.’

Charlie has wheeled the cadaver into the post-mortem room, where you get a better light. Slipping his hands under the back and knees, he log-rolls it onto a ribbed dissecting table made of stainless-steel, not caring whether he minimises the degree of bounce or not. He peels back the sheet to reveal a face in sublime repose; in a state of almost seraphic innocence which belies its owner’s reputation as one of the major hate figures of the day. We all know the background, but Charlie proceeds to run us through it anyway, determined to give value, like a tour guide at a cash-strapped stately home, or somebody on television describing the chesterfield sofa that is the day’s star prize.

What we have in front of us is a bozo who got his kicks from
preying on elderly people living alone. He was wanted on charges of burglary, vicious assault, sodomy and rape when his stepmother, certain he was the man that police were seeking, went into his bedroom while he was sleeping and stabbed him once, expertly through the heart.

Hawkins has wandered off halfway through Charlie’s recital, and has been standing with an ear pressed against the gap in the lift doors. ‘It was a small town in the forest with a lake and a fishing fleet and many ox wagons and rickshaws and bicycles. Most of the houses had walls made from long, braided leaves of a reed that grew by the river, and roofs woven from palm fronds,’ he begins once Charlie has finished. ‘Through lanes among the houses ran children and stubby-legged short-haired dogs. Profuse schools of fish arrived in the river during high water. As the river withdrew, they were confined to ponds in the fields; the villagers caught them in buckets. The days were always hot, and in the air was the damp fertile smell of the river.’

He picks up a wooden block with a half-circle cut out of it and brings it to where we are standing in the light, either side of the dissection table. ‘Our world is networked together using small mouth noises, which are speech, or symbols for small mouth noises,’ Heath says. ‘This is not a wide band for communication, this small mouth-noise thing.’

He slips the block under the dead man’s heavy head, and crouches low over him with his Leica, bionic taped hands and taped camera working together like a single piece of integrated machinery. Rimed in coke sweat, elbows planted either side of the body, Heath goes in tight on the words that are banner-printed across the forehead, tattooed an inch above the eyes: ‘Made in England 1965’.

A blob of perspiration rolls off his chin and quickly spreads to a button-size stain on the shroud. He stands, works his shoulders until they crack loudly, mops his face with the corner of the teatowel-like keffiyeh. ‘And so,’ he says with an exaggerated autocutie leer. ‘We come to the main award of the evening.’

The door to the service stairs, activated by Charlie with his
card-key, had opened with a depressurised suck or pop which started a tonal pulse that rapidly increased in volume and didn’t stop until the door had been secured behind us. Except it didn’t exactly seem to stop so much as fade into a loop of related, repetitive electronic sounds. These have been combined with tribal music – reed flutes, chimes and gourds – and overlaid with the sound of rainwater dripping and trickling off ferns, birds chirping, insects buzzing, what could easily have been the amplified heartbeats of tiny animals; plaintive yodels and chants. ‘The sound of sad, open spaces. Weird echoes. The mantle of the warm jungle,’ Heath says. ‘They shot the water buffaloes, the pigs and the chickens. They threw the dead animals into the wells to poison the water. Dinks, slopes, slants, gooks.’

Charlie and I have reached the level of the main reception area. Heath is squatting on a stone landing one flight down, doing another couple of lines. One of the original oratories at St Saviour’s has been retained in the new design, the domed lead roof replaced with glass, and a rain forest environment of fan palms, pincer vines and monkey grass created in interlocking raised beds in the space underneath it. The yellow double-arch of a McDonald’s dominates the figure-eight-shaped concourse that has resulted: there is the neon doodle of a ‘Knickerbox’, the sign of the black horse illuminated over an automatic-teller machine, and all the usual high-street franchises and concessions – sited here not so much for reasons of customer convenience, I imagine, than as a loss-leading therapeutic strategy, a business-caring-for-you distraction from the nearness and inevitability of personal death.

We are witness to all this through the kind of candy-stripe, one-way mirror that induces reflexive guilty behaviour (Heath’s point) in customs halls and baggage reclaim areas. Two Indian women are steering wide-headed squeegee mops past the streamers of toilet paper that have been laid over a broken trail of vomit, their fuchsia and lime-green saris flowering exotically from the knee-length stems of nylon overalls. A yellow-faced man with a woollen cellular blanket safety-pinned at his chest
waves goodbye to a visitor and begins wheeling himself back to his ward. A man comes in carrying a boxed pizza on the flat of his hand and paces in front of the lifts. A boy surreptitiously gouges a hole with a penknife in a moulded plastic seat.

There are plastic surfaces dressed in the appearances of other materials: quarried stone and endangered hardwoods; Dolomitic rock. The ‘architected’ rain forest muzak leaks from here to every part of the building via shafts and trunking and ducts. There is a perspex cube mounted on a pedestal nearby containing ropes of Mardi Gras beads, a comb, golf tees, toy wheels, a piece of rope, balloons, a plastic toothpaste cap, bag-gies, a plastic flower – the contents, Charlie says, of the stomach of a twelve-pound sea turtle that crawled onto a beach in Honolulu and died.

Now even as we are watching, the lighting dims, rises a few points, then stabilises at around the balming level expected in restaurants and wine-bars at this time of night. Scott McGovern’s face is reversed and back-lit on the posters taped against the windows; the low sandbagged figures of the women keeping their vigil on the ramp swim into focus. It is as if they have stepped out of their lives; surrendered themselves to an event for which none of the rules and experiences of their previous existence has prepared them. They are dead to the mundane, to real-world commitments and affiliations, and seem poised for an experience of transcendence or revelation.