The Quick - Laura Spinney

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know why the scandal hadn’t come to light. Nestor snickered. There were many things he could tell me about this hospital, he said. Nothing was quite as it seemed. For instance, had I heard about the geriatric ward that had been closed off due to a superbug infection? Ten beds decommissioned because two of the ‘inmates’, as he called them, had died. One of them only after he had been discharged and welcomed back into the bosom of his family. The rest of the occupants had been put into quarantine, since the infection, once contracted, did not respond to antibiotics. Naturally the administration wanted to avoid a panic. Nestor had seen for himself the locked door and discreet notice barring entrance to the ward. He could show me if I liked. I told him that wouldn’t be necessary, and he turned down the corners of his mouth, as if to say, ‘Please yourself.’

      We came to a door marked ‘W.E. Nestor. No Unauthorised Entry.’ He pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked it, switching on the light inside. More electronic and mechanical equipment was stacked around the walls of the small, windowless room, and directly ahead of me, as I stood in the doorway, was a wooden chair in front of a folding card table. Above the card table, which was covered in green baize, torn in places, a small wooden cross was tacked to the wall. Grey boxes identical to the ones I had seen in Mezzanotte’s office were arranged on the table around a computer monitor, and hanging over one corner of the chair was a sort of outsized, rose-coloured swimming cap with a tail of wires sprouting from it. A sinister-looking object, like some instrument of psychic torture.

      Nestor was telling me that he had adapted and improved the device; put some ‘finishing touches’ to it. The electrodes were now woven into this soft, plastic helmet so that you no longer had to attach the pads one by one. He nodded in the direction of the table, indicating that I should sit down, and I did so. Then he picked up the helmet and without further ado, levered it first over the plates at the top of my skull, then the jutting bones at the base of it, sending a shudder down my spine. I gritted my teeth as he adjusted the cap on the forehead and tucked the hair deftly beneath it at the nape. Gathering the tail of wires he swept it over my shoulder so that it lay heavily against my back and didn’t impede my movements. Then he stepped back, folded his arms over his chest and said, ‘There!’

      ‘Can we get on with it?’ I said, crossly, and with an injured look he leaned forward to switch on the computer monitor. As the screen resolved itself, I saw that the layout was still the same. At the top was an apple, at the bottom a pear. Equidistant between the two undulated a horizontal line. He switched off the lights and melted into the darkness behind me. Closing my eyes I conjured up a ringmaster, faceless, resplendent in red, the polish high on his leather belt and boots. Idly twirling the whip at his hip, so that it stirred up flurries of sawdust, he waited for the lions to settle. Against my closed eyelids, one of the beasts yawned and looked round, as if preparing to climb down off its box. The ringmaster raised his whip arm high above his head and, ‘Yah!’, cracked it in the air… The lion stared at him, frozen in flesh and time. I opened my eyes. The line flowed on, unperturbed. I repeated the exercise three or four times and the same thing happened each time, until in exasperation I turned to Nestor.

      ‘It doesn’t work.’

      He had been sitting quietly at the side of the room. I could just see him, his chair tipped back against the wall, lovingly fingering his rolled-up cigarette. Now he stuck it back behind his ear and brought his chair down with a clack. I had to remember that the machine had not been designed with me in mind, he said. It was supposed to be used by someone who was desperate to communicate, and for whom it provided the only means of doing so.

      ‘You mean I’m not trying hard enough?’

      He shrugged. That was part of it, he said, and then there were the lions. ‘They don’t do it for me.’

      I asked him how he had made it work, but he didn’t want to say. I cajoled him a bit and he hung his head coyly. I pleaded with him until at last, with some excited shifting in his seat, he came out with it. ‘I’m riding an old Enfield through a deserted city. I come to a red light where another bike is waiting. The rider revs his engine, he glances across at me. I recognise the head porter. Well, between you and me, I hate the head porter. I turn back to the lights, I watch them like a hawk. Red changes to red and amber, I tighten my grip. Green! I release the clutch, leap the junction and land on two wheels, leaving him trailing in the dust…’

      He had been talking eagerly from the edge of his seat. But now he slid back into the shadows and I turned once again to face the computer monitor. It seemed to me that he had hit on a good device. There was a certain elastic tension in that sequence: red, red and amber, green. I frowned hard at the undulating line. But however hard I concentrated, I couldn’t interrupt it. Finally, I let out the breath I had been holding.

      ‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘it won’t budge.’

      For a moment there was silence, and then out of the darkness behind me came a voice.

      ‘It’s got to mean something to you,’ it said softly. ‘You’ve really got to want it.’

      I sat staring disconsolately at the screen, raising a finger at one point to scratch an itch at my temple, just under the rim of the cap. But I had no ideas. And then I did have an idea. It came to me out of the blue. Thankfully it was dark in the room and my face was turned away from Nestor, so he couldn’t see how I blushed. Once again I pictured the ringmaster, dashing in jodhpurs and a red tunic pulled in at the waist by a thick leather belt. This time, however, he wore an ivory cravat and a shock of white hair rose from his high forehead. Taking a step towards the lions he planted the soles of his riding boots wide apart in the sawdust, cracked his whip and fixed them with his burning, soulful gaze. I stared at the undulating line and to my amazement it lurched drunkenly towards the pear, missing it by a hair’s breadth.

      Suddenly the room was a blaze of electric light, and I spun round in time to see Nestor bring his hand down from the wall switch. His body was rigid in the chair against the wall. He was staring sulkily at his cigarette and a muscle was flickering in his cheek. What’s the matter with him? I thought. Is he annoyed that someone else besides him has made his precious machine work? I peeled off the pink swimming cap, draped it over a corner of the chair and stood up. Nestor remained sitting, his head bowed. Just as I reached the door, a thought struck me.

      ‘Have you seen the patient?’ I asked. He raised his head slowly and I noticed that the eye around which there were traces of bruising was also bloodshot.

      ‘Should I have?’

      There was menace in his voice, and I was taken aback. I told him it was an innocent question. He slammed the two front legs of his chair against the floor, standing up as he did so and clenching his fists. He had no reason to go snooping around up on the fifth floor, he said, and he’d like to know who’d seen him there. Furiously he kicked at a screwed-up ball of paper, sending it flying into the corner. Then he seemed to calm down again, and scuffed the toe of his boot sheepishly against the floor. I asked him why the other technicians had refused to work with the professor. He shrugged. I pressed him and he told me that Mezzanotte was in the habit of ringing up at midnight to discuss a problem. Sometimes he wanted the technician to meet him straight away, at the lab, and the poor fellow might not get away before dawn. It was hard on a man. But it was no skin off his nose.

      I raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t need to sleep?’

      He frowned, irritated. He needed to sleep as much as the next man, but he had to take pills to bring it on, and these days the pills didn’t seem to work as well as they used to. So he was often awake in the early hours. He didn’t approve of the professor’s working habits, but as it happened they suited him. He was the man for the job, and Mezzanotte would have saved a lot of time if he had come straight to him, rather than letting his mind be poisoned by ‘filthy lies’.

      I looked at him. So he was an insomniac. That explained a few things, and yet it didn’t arouse any sympathy in me. ‘Good evening, Mr Nestor,’ I said, and stepped out into the corridor.

      Back in my rooms everything was in order. My assistants had left for the night, and a note on my desk assured me that the afternoon had passed off well, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Two or three

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