By Light Alone (17 page)

‘Agreed.’

Everything seemed possible. The agency sent three possible carers within a quarter hour, and Marie had chosen one before Leah woke up – a short young man called Wilson. Even the alliterative coincidence of their carers’ two names seemed to George freighted with a larger truth. That evening, Wharton washed a laughing, thrashing Ezra at one end of the bath, and Wilson carefully soaped Leah’s new hair, almost strand by strand it seemed, at the other. Leah sat in the water wide-eyed, staring as if in incomprehension at the people in the bathroom: at the teenager attending her; at her parents standing behind, watching this first ritual performance of the restored family almost greedily. To end her day, Leah was tucked into bed with one of her favourite books. She fixed her eyes on the screen with a familiar avidity that gladdened George’s heart.

The following day Dr Baldwin called, and gave Leah a comprehensive physical examination. George watched: Leah was so shellshocked that she could not properly respond to gently uttered medical instruction to raise her arms, to breathe in or to lie down on the settee. An enormous tenderness blossomed in George’s heart at the sight. Leah stared into space as if only emptiness interested her any more. Light instead of food, the abstracted aerial existence that had been forced upon her. She was so thin! Eventually, it occurred to George, a little belatedly, that his presence might be some kind of impediment to the interaction of patient and medic. He left Baldwin to it.

When the consultation was finished, Marie came through with a hair-sculptor; or (since that term hardly does her justice) with
Seylon
herself, the medal-winning hair-sculptor. As she sat her subject in a chair, preparatory to removing the vulgar long longhair tresses, Leah showed emotion for the first time since her arrival back in New York. She widened her eyes and emitted a series of yelping little sobs; and Marie had to hold her, and reassure her over and over, just to permit Seylon to crop away the hair.

As this was going on, Dr Baldwin touched George’s arm. ‘Through here?’

The two men withdrew into an adjacent room.

‘She’s physically fine. Weak, which is of course what we’d expect. But fine.’

‘Thank goodness,’ said George. He could hear the hum of the haircutting through the wall, and he could hear little gulping sounds as well, that could have been Leah sobbing. Or perhaps were something else.

The doctor’s bland voice continued. ‘Reintroducing her to food should be unproblematic.’

‘Good,’ said George. ‘Good.’

‘There’s been some work on it – research, I mean. Reintroducing photophages to – to the business of eating hard food, I mean. Another thing. Her hymen is intact.’

‘It – what?’

‘You will, I do not doubt, be relieved to hear it.’

George looked at the medic. ‘Of course.’

‘Now, she
may
be suffering from the effects of psychological trauma,’ murmured Baldwin. ‘Now—’ he added. ‘To be clear. What I mean is: she is not responsive in the ways you would expect an eleven-year-old to be. Responsive to verbal instruction, say.’

‘She’s been through a lot,’ said George.

‘Of course she has. That’s what I’m talking about. Children are often more resilient in the face of, eh, massive trauma, than, eh. Adults. You’ll have arranged for a psychological specialist, of course. But I’ll note that she has learnt to speak some of the local language.’

‘She was over there for eleven months,’ George said. ‘It’s to be expected.’

‘Naturally. Now, Mr Denoone, eh, I’ve no desire to anticipate what your psychological specialist will say. But this sort of trauma—’ Baldwin didn’t so much break off his speech at this point as slide it from spoken words into a big beamy smile. He held this grin for some seconds, and then added the umlauts to the U by flashing his eyes wide open. George was a little startled, until, nudged by the persistence of the doctor’s smile, he returned it.

‘Let me put it this way,’ said Baldwin. ‘I have been your family’s doctor for some years.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m grateful, Mr Denoone. Grateful for your trust, and, eh, employment. Of course I am compelled by the terms of the contract I signed to secure my medical school place to – I don’t mean to bore you, George.’ (Oh, but there was something
jarring
in this new intimacy of ‘George’.) ‘Law’s law, and of course I’m compelled to take a percentage of patients who pay me little or nothing, sometimes through no fault of theirs – sometimes for mortal causes. What I’m saying, what I’m trying in my
very clumsy
way to say is that, is that I’m grateful to you—’ And he broke off again, this time in order to laugh a squealy little laugh. George’s puzzlement suddenly resolved, in the way an optic-illusory picture can magically cohere as sense, into the comprehension that Baldwin was nervous. It hadn’t occurred to him to think it, because he had never known this smooth and professionally accomplished man even had the
capacity
for nerves. But here he was.

Trying to reassure him, more to remove the awkwardness of the man’s embarrassment and so relieve his own discomfort, George said: ‘It’s all right, Ball,’ (searching his memory for a first name and not finding it) ‘Baldwin, Dr Baldwin.’

‘Never talk money to the rich,’ laughed Baldwin, as if reciting some celebrated proverb. ‘It’s a grubby business, I know. And no human, rich or otherwise, wants to think that the respect of others is mediated
only
by money.’

‘I don’t see,’ said George. ‘You sound like you’re talking your way round to something—’

Baldwin waited several saggy seconds before picking up the hint. ‘Talking my way, you mean,
out
of my medical purview? Well, George, if I
may
call you George, I suppose I am – I am, I mean, delighted at your good fortune. Delighted you’ve got your daughter back! Not as somebody financially beholden to you, but as one human to another. At this fortunate turn up. I mean, the return of. The return.’

‘Well thank you,’ George put in, positively pained now by the man’s embarrassment and wanting the interview to stop.

‘You have brought me in today, you have paid me to perform a medical examination on the girl,’ said Baldwin. ‘You want to hear my medical opinion. You want, in fact, to hear me tell you that
your daughter
is in sound health, good health, as good as can be expected.’

‘I do,’ confirmed George. He could not fathom why Baldwin had spun the conversation in this peculiar manner.

‘That’s what – anyway. And I’m very happy to be able to confirm.’ He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger, as if selecting legally precise phraseology. ‘Physically speaking, and considering the circumstances, she is healthy and well.’

There was a pause. The hum of the haircutting was no longer audible from the next room. Presumably it was finished. The light coming through the main window threw a Z-shaped area of brightness across an edge of table and the adjacent patch of carpet.

‘Good,’ said George.

That word seemed to free Baldwin from his odd behaviour. ‘Excellent,’ he said, in a brisk return of his usual manner. ‘I’ve passed dietary requirements, a comprehensive calendar, to the girl’s carer, copying you in of course. Soups to start, but within a week she’ll be eating like any other eleven-year-old. I’ve taken genomic samples. There’s always the possibility of unusual viruses, but we have machines to combat pretty much anything nowadays. Even exotic bugs.’

Now that his manner had returned to normal, George felt some obscure gush of relief inside him, as if the impending catastrophic asteroid strike had been luckily averted. But none of it made sense, not his feelings, nor the doctor’s manner. It was good to put the oddity behind him.

The two men went back through to find Leah, with decently short-cropped hair now, sucking on a flavoured stick and staring into space. The great Seylon was gathering her things and preparing to go.

Baldwin, stopping in the doorway and turning back to them, suggested as a parting shot that they employ somebody to check Leah’s level of in-system Whites. ‘They’re designed to be self-sustaining,’ he said, ‘but it’s possible they’ve been . . .’ and he considered the right word for a long moment: ‘depleted,’ he concluded, ‘by her experiences.’ So George called a consultant from G
ē
nUp. She was, when she came, a smile-faced young woman, her features possessing that slightly
too
symmetrical over-perfection that cheaper treatments can give you. She had some trouble getting Leah to sit still whilst she took a sample; but then, as she crouched over her equipment, the smile withered away and her face became something it had not been designed to be – chill, unfriendly, a mask. ‘I must apologize in the most humble terms,’ she said, stiffly, to George. ‘My equipment is malfunctioning. A G
ē
nUp technician will be here within the quarter hour with a replacement—’

George was not in the least incommoded by this news. But then he felt a familiar creeping anxiety that, judging by her grovelling reaction, he
ought
to be incommoded. Ought, perhaps, to have raged and spouted. But he tried to live his life by one of the core assertivist tenets – being assertive was not the same thing as being aggressive, angry or bullying. So he wagged his head in a deliberately vague way, and left her to it.

The technician came with the replacement equipment in five minutes, not fifteen; and the consultant repeated the test. But now her face looked not blank with professional embarrassment but, rather, puzzled. Odd-looking creases twanged into existence, like impressions from guitar strings, from below her ear to the corners of her eyes. ‘I don’t understand. She seems to have nothing in her blood
at all
.’

‘Check your records?’ George offered, vaguely.

‘But the records aren’t . . . there’s no problem in the records. I understand, Mr Denoone, that she has experienced an unfortunate, ah, event. But to lose
all
her coverage! It’s unprecedented.’ Her eyes looked in all four corners of the room as she (George assumed) calculated the relative professional risks of a lawsuit, a countersuit, the balance of contractual responsibilities. ‘This is a very serious situation,’ she said, pulling herself to her full height. ‘She has been medically examined?’

‘Fully,’ said George. ‘By her regular physician. There’s nothing –
wrong
with her,’ he added, ‘according to our professional medical advice.’ He meant, in his awkwardly expressed way, to reassure the woman that, whatever lapses there might have been in her company’s coverage, Leah was not actually ill. But the technician looked much more sourly at this news than George might have expected her to.

‘I assure you,’ she said, ‘this state is unprecedented in the professional administration of G
ē
nUp antipathogens. Now, now. Provided it be understood that doing so in no way constitutes a legal admission of any kind, G
ē
nUp will provide a full complement of basic antipathogen coverage.’

‘Premier coverage,’ said George; not aggressively, but simply because that was what Leah had had in her system before her kidnapping.

‘Basic coverage Mr Denoone,’ said the consultant, ‘in the first instance. Future upgrades to be negotiated as and when – but we cannot load her system with the premier package straight off the pitch. No gWhites in her system
at all
.’

‘But,’ George insisted with a stubbornness born of indolence and unimagination, rather than negotiatory canniness. ‘She had the full premier coverage eleven months ago.’

‘These things cannot be dumped into the body all at once, Mr Denoone.’

‘I’m telling you she carried that load for
years
. Years and years – until, that is, eleven months ago.’

‘In that case,’ the consultant said, warily, ‘she
ought
to be able to assimilate the premier load. But Mr Denoone: my caution proceeds from the knowledge that to load the full complement into a person with no somatic history of Whites would be medically very dangerous.’

Irritated that things weren’t being sorted out with the frictionless efficiency to which he was used, George raised his podgy right hand and flapped it. ‘Look, I’m happy with your professional judgement. The regular load if you think that more advisable.’

The expression of relief on the consultant’s taut little face seemed to George disproportionate. She proposed a complicated step-up package of regular loading, stepping up over a year to premier coverage. When she left, George felt unaccountably exhausted.

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