‘Do you think he could have drifted in the currents from a designated burial-at-sea area?’ Grace asked Tania.
‘It’s possible,’ she said, breathing in through her mouth, trying to ignore the stench. ‘But those weights are pretty heavy, and we’ve had mild weather conditions recently. I can get you a plot done, showing where it might have come from with lesser weights on, if that would be helpful.’
‘It might be. Could it be a burial at sea where they got the position wrong?’
‘A possibility,’ she said. ‘But I’ve checked with the
Arco Dee
. They found him fifteen nautical miles east of the designated Brighton and Hove burial-at-sea site. It would be a pretty big error.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking too,’ he said. ‘We have a fairly precise position where he was brought up from, right?’
‘Very accurate,’ the Sergeant said. ‘To within a couple of hundred yards or so.’
‘I think we should take a look at what else might be down there, as quickly as possible,’ Grace said. ‘Do you have time to start today?’
Tania looked at the clock on the wall and then, as if mistrusting it, at her chunky diver’s watch. Next she glanced at the window. ‘Sunset is about four o’clock today,’ she said. ‘Ten miles out in the Channel, the sea’s going to be quite choppy – we’d need to rent a bigger dive boat than our inflatable for working out there. We have about three hours of daylight left. What I suggest is we get a dive boat sorted for first light in the morning – this time of year there are a few deep-sea fishing charter boats that don’t have many customers. We can start at dawn. But in the meantime, we can get out to the area in the inflatable and buoy it off, to make sure the dredgers don’t disturb anything else down there.’
‘Brilliant!’ he said.
‘That’s what we’re here for!’ she said, feeling a lot more cheerful than when she had arrived. She could get all that organized and still make it home in time to prepare the meal.
Turning to Glenn Branson, Grace said, ‘You look a bit peaky.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah. Does it to me every time, this place.’
‘You know what you need?’
‘What?’
‘A spot of sea air! A nice cruise.’
‘Yeah. A cruise would be very nice.’
‘Good!’ Grace gave him a pat on the back. ‘You’re going on one tomorrow morning with Tania.’
Branson screwed up his face and pointed at the window. ‘Shit, man, the forecast’s crap! I thought you meant the Caribbean or something!’
‘Start with the Channel. It’s a good place to get your sea legs.’
‘I haven’t even got any yachting gear!’ he moaned.
‘You won’t need any, you’ll be larging it on the first-class deck!’
Tania eyed Glenn dubiously. ‘The forecast’s not great. Are you a good sailor?’
‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘Believe me!’
27
There had been no deterioration in Nat’s condition overnight, which was one blessing, Susan thought, trying to find positive things as she sat on her long vigil beside his bed. But there had been no improvement either. He continued to be a silent stranger, propped up at his thirty-degree angle, wired and plumbed into the almost bewildering array of life-support and monitoring apparatus.
The round institutional clock on the wall said ten to one. Nearly lunchtime, which would not mean much to Nat, or to most of his fellow patients here in the ITU. The nutrients entered his body all day and night through a constant trickle down the nasogastric tube. And suddenly, despite her tiredness, Susan smiled at a thought. She was always chiding Nat for being late for meals. His hours as a medic at the hospital were utterly erratic and often, with no prior warning, he had to stay on late into the night. But even when he was at home, he always had
just one more email to check, darling!
whenever she called out to him that lunch or dinner was on the table.
Well, at least you are not late for your meals in here, she thought, and smiled again wistfully. Then she sniffed, pulled a tissue from the pocket of her jacket and dabbed away tears that were rolling down her cheeks.
Shit. This cannot be how it ends. Surely not?
As if in agreement, or to give her reassurance, the baby kicked inside her.
‘Thank you, Bump,’ she whispered.
Since the consultant, dressed in an open-necked shirt and grey trousers, accompanied by a group of gowned medics, had finished his round half an hour or so ago, the ITU seemed eerily quiet. Almost the only sounds were the alarms going off every few minutes, sounds that were increasingly getting on Susan’s nerves. There were alarms on the vital-signs monitors of each of the patients.
Despite the fact that there was one nurse on duty for every patient in here, the place seemed deserted. There was some activity going on behind the drawn blue curtains of the bed opposite, and Susan could see a woman polishing the floor, a yellow warning sign saying CLEANING IN PROGRESS set out near her. A couple of beds along, a physiotherapist was massaging the legs of an elderly, wired and intubated man. All the patients were silent, some sleeping, some staring vacantly. Susan had seen several visitors come and go, but at the moment she was the only one on the ward itself.
She heard again the almost musical
beep-beep-bong
of an alarm, like the chimes on an aircraft from an irritated passenger trying to summon a stewardess. It was coming from somewhere out of sight, over on the far side of the ward.
Nat was in Bed 14. The beds in here were numbered from 1 to 17. But, in fact, there were only sixteen beds in this unit. Because of superstition, there was no Bed 13. So Bed 14 was actually Bed 13.
Nat was a good doctor. He thought about everything, analysed everything, rationalized everything. He had no truck with superstition of any kind. Whereas Susan had always been very superstitious. She didn’t like to see a single magpie without spotting a second one, or to stare at a new moon through glass, and she would never, ever, knowingly walk under a ladder. She was not at all happy that he was in this particular bed. But the ward was full, so she could hardly ask for him to be swapped with someone else.
She stood up, stifling a yawn, and walked a couple of paces to the end of the bed, where the nurse’s laptop sat on a trolley. Yesterday had been a long day. She’d stayed here until close on midnight, then had driven home and tried to sleep, but after a few fitful hours, she’d given up. Instead she had showered, made herself a strong coffee, collected some of Nat’s Eagles and Snow Patrol CDs and his wash things, as the nurse had suggested, and driven back.
The iPod headset had been plugged into his ears for several hours now, but so far he had shown no response. Usually, even seated in his den, he swayed, nodded his head, rolled his shoulders, waved his arms around in slow motion whenever he played his music. He was a great dancer on the occasions when he let his hair down. She remembered being mesmerized by his timing when he’d rock ’n’ rolled with her the first time they’d danced together, at a nurse’s birthday party.
Now she stared at him. At the ribbed, see-through endotracheal tube in his mouth. At the tiny probe in his skull, taped in place, that measured his intracranial pressure. At all the other stuff taped to him and cannulated into him. At the hump from the cage raising the weight of his bedclothes off his broken legs. She looked at the main monitoring screen, at the spikes and waveforms indicating the state of his vital signs.
Nat’s heart rate was currently 77, which was OK. His blood pressure, 160 over 90, was OK too. His oxygen saturation levels were fine. The ICP moved between 15 and 20. In a normal person it should be below 10. Above 25 would be a concern.
‘Hello, Nat, darling,’ she said, and touched his right arm, above the identity tag and the plasters holding the drip lines in place. Then she gently removed the iPod earpieces and put her mouth close to his right ear, trying to sound as cheerful and positive as she could. ‘I’m here with you, my darling. I love you. Bump’s been kicking quite a bit. Can you hear me? How are you feeling? You’re doing OK, you know! You are hanging in there. You are doing fine! You are going to be absolutely fine!’
She waited some moments, then replaced the earpieces again and walked around the white swivel hoist which held several pieces of apparatus, including the syringe pumps that supplied the drugs keeping him stable and sedated, and his blood pressure up. She continued along the blue linoleum floor, past the blue curtains on the rail behind the bed and up to the window, with its blue venetian blinds. Then she stared down to her left, at a long line of traffic queuing for the car park. Directly below her was a modern, paved courtyard, with benches and picnic tables, and a tall, smooth sculpture that she found creepy, because it looked like a ghost.
She was crying again. Then, as she dabbed her eyes, she heard that damn alarm again. But much louder than before.
BEEP-BEEP-BONG.
She turned. Stared at the waveforms on the monitor, feeling a sudden, terrible panic. ‘Nurse!’ she called, looking around, bewildered, then running towards the nursing station. ‘Nurse! Nurse!’
The volume of the alarm was increasing every second, deafening her.
Then she saw the big, cheery, bald male nurse, who had come on duty at half past seven that morning, sprinting past her towards Nat, his face a mask of anxiety.
28
The baby had been quiet for several hours and now it was Simona who was crying. She lay, holding Gogu tight to her face, curled up beside the heating pipe. She sobbed, slept a little, then woke and sobbed again.
All the others, except for Valeria and the baby, were out. On the crackly music system, Tracy Chapman was singing ‘Fast Car’. Valeria often played Tracy Chapman; the baby seemed to like her music and went quiet, as if the songs were lullabies. Outside, up on the road above them, it was a cold, wet day, rain on the verge of sleet, and an icy draught blew in down here. The flames of the candles, jammed on to stalagmites of melted wax on the concrete floor, guttered, making the shadows jump.
They had no electricity, so candles provided the only light and they used them sparingly. Sometimes they bought them with money they got from selling stuff they stole, or with the cash from picking pockets and snatching handbags, but mostly they shoplifted them from mini-markets.
On occasions when they were desperate – although Simona really did not like doing this – they stole candles from Orthodox churches. Working with Romeo, distracting onlookers, they would cram their pockets full of the thin, brown candles, the ones bereaved people paid for and lit for their loved ones, placing them in large three-sided metal boxes; one box for the living and the other for the dead.
But she was always scared that God would punish them for this. And as she lay sobbing now, she wondered if that had been God’s punishment last night.
She had never been to church, and no one had ever taught her how to pray, but the carer at the home she had been in had told her about God, that he watched her all the time and would punish her for every bad thing that she did.
Beyond the yellow glow of the flames, where the shadows never moved, darkness stretched away into the distance, until the tunnel housing the pipe ended at the point where the pipe surfaced and then ran overground across the suburb of Crângaşi. There were whole communities of street people there, she had seen, who lived in shanty villages, in makeshift huts built against the pipe. Simona had lived in one for a while herself, but inside it was small and cramped, and the roof let the rain in.
She preferred to be here. There was more space and it was dry. Although she never liked to be here entirely alone – she had always been afraid of that darkness beyond the candles, and the mice and rats and spiders it contained. And something else, far worse.
Romeo used to explore the darkness, but he never found anything, other than skeletons of rodents and, once, a broken supermarket basket. Then, one day, Valeria had brought a man back here. She regularly had men here, screwing noisily and openly, not caring who saw. But this particular man spooked them all. He had a ponytail, a silver cross hanging from his neck, and he carried a Bible. He did not want to sleep with her, he told her. He wanted to talk to them all about God and the devil. He told them that the devil lived in the darkness beyond the candles, because, like them, the devil needed the warmth of the pipes.
And he told them that the devil was watching them all, and they were damned because of their sins, and they should be careful when they slept, in case he crawled out of that darkness and snatched one of them.
Simona called out suddenly, ‘Valeria, is God punishing me?’
Valeria left the baby asleep, on a bed made from a quilted jacket, and walked across to Simona, crouching to avoid hitting her head on the rivets that protruded from the cross-girders supporting the road above them. She was dressed in the same clothes as always, emerald puffa over her gaudy-coloured jogging suit, her lank brown hair hanging as straight as laces either side of her haunted face. Then she put an arm around Simona.
‘No, that was not God punishing you. It was a bad person, just a bad person, that’s all.’
‘I don’t want this life any more. I want to go away from here.’
‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked.
Simona shrugged helplessly, then began sobbing again.
‘I want to go to England,’ Valeria said. She smiled wistfully, and her face suddenly came alive. She nodded. ‘England. We are in the EU now. We can go.’
Simona continued to sob for some minutes, then she stopped. ‘What is the EU?’
‘It’s a thing. It means Romanian people can go to England.’
‘Would it be better in England?’
‘I met some people a while ago who were going. They had jobs as erotic dancers. Big money. Maybe you and I could be erotic dancers.’
Simona sniffed. ‘I don’t know how to dance.’