The Quick - Laura Spinney

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and her face lit up with a joyous smile. Her lips parted and I saw her small, wet tongue lolling inside. I sucked in my breath. At that moment, as if she had achieved the desired effect, the light went out, and once again her dull gaze slid past me.

      It’s a reflex, I told myself, a simple reflex. But what if it wasn’t? On an impulse, I leaned forward and squeezed her bony fist where it lay, immobile on the sheet, to let her know I had seen. It was cool, a little rough to the touch. I saw myself do it; from a point on the ceiling I observed my own rather secretive gesture, and I immediately felt foolish. As I straightened up and let go of her hand, I caught a whiff of something. Not the usual smell of the chronically ill, but something sugary, cloyingly sweet. A wave of nausea rose to my stomach, so powerful it pushed me up to my feet and away from the bed. Mumbling something about another appointment, promising to return soon, I backed out of the room and sped away along the corridor.

      6

      What was that smell? At the first turn in the corridor I slowed to a walk and racked my brains to identify it. It was almost as if she were preserved in something, infused with a very weak syrup: a living cadaver. I shuddered and walked faster. Ahead of me I heard murmuring voices, two women, one of them I recognised as belonging to the charge nurse, the other deeper, more mellifluous. I emerged from the corridor, and the two women standing by the nurse’s desk turned to look at me: Sister and Fleur Bartholomew, a neurologist I had worked with in the past and knew well.

      ‘Well,’ Fleur said, ‘did she turn a nice somersault for you?’ The nurse laughed, a mocking laugh, and when I looked at her she lowered her eyes to her chart. Fleur was regarding me steadily, but in a good-humoured way. She wore an emeraldgreen tunic and a towering green turban. Heavy ropes of amber beads hung around her neck, and her teeth when she smiled were like a slash of white in her polished, black face.

      ‘She smiled at me,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know it wasn’t… but it really seemed as if she smiled.’

      I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. Fleur laughed, a deep booming laugh like a train rumbling underground, and opened her eyes to show the yellowish whites. ‘Voodoo, is it?’

      I glanced at the nurse, who was smirking under her blonde eyelashes, and I asked Fleur if I could talk to her privately.

      We took the lift to the third floor. The hospital lifts were old and slow, we descended with rattles and jolts. I leaned in the corner and chewed my lip, watching Fleur as she adjusted her turban in front of the mirror that covered the back wall, but without, so to speak, really seeing her. My mind was still occupied with my recent encounter. I was surprised and annoyed at myself for having been put so easily off my stride. It was as if no time had passed since my immersion in the strange world of insomnia, as if I had learned nothing from that episode and all the patients who had passed through my consulting room since. This patient had plucked emotions from me as effortlessly as if she were picking daisies, and the nurse and Fleur had seen it written on my face.

      The lift stopped at the fourth floor but the doors didn’t open. It remained stationary for a minute or two, as if confused. Fleur hummed a bit, and rustled inside her silk sheath as she swung her hips out to left and right. Then, as if she had been reading my mind, she threw me a sidelong glance and told me not to tie myself up in knots. As soon as she said it, I realised how tensely I had been holding myself. Her drawing attention to it seemed to release something inside me, and in the small, enclosed space of the lift, where nobody could hear us, I told her everything I had seen; my chaotic impressions of that first meeting. I explained that the two looks Diane had given me, the one of contempt and the other of joy, had seemed somehow directed at me. I had reminded myself that her facial expressions were nothing but muscular tics, I wasn’t as easily led as all that, nevertheless it was uncanny. Even though I had only been in the room a few minutes, I had felt very strongly the presence of another intelligence.

      Fleur waited until I had finished, then smiled. It was natural to feel that way the first time one met Diane, she said, because as a human being one identified with the most meagre spark of humanity in another living creature. I mustn’t underestimate the power of wishful thinking, of willing her to understand. Even as a professional, it was hard not to be led astray, down the path of hope. As a professional, though, one also had to remember that there was a simpler explanation. There was almost always a simpler explanation. ‘I know, I know,’ I said, and slumped in the corner.

      With a jolt the lift started to descend again. Fleur laughed and shook her head. Everyone went through the same storm of emotions the first time they met Diane, she said. After that, you had to come to terms with her in your own way. The way she had come to think of it was that looking at Diane was a bit like ‘looking at the sea’. Everybody had their own idea about what was lurking in the depths, but they all saw the same thing: clouds reflected in the surface. I thought about this. It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to say so, but Fleur had already turned back to the mirror, and raising a hand to the back of her magnificent turban, was twisting this way and that, smiling at her reflection. A moment later, the doors opened on the third floor.

      A long corridor opened up before us, and I remembered that her office was at the end of it. That meant we had to walk past the operating suites on our right. One of the doors to these suites stood ajar, and when I looked through it I saw that the room was bare. All the equipment had been stripped out, including the operating table. There was just a solitary roll of bandage on the floor, partially unravelled. I stopped and stared at it. Fleur explained that the theatres were closed for repairs. All surgery had been moved to the paediatric wing on a temporary basis. Hadn’t I read the memo? No, I murmured in dismay. Somehow memos passed me by; I never found time to read them. We walked on and entered her office, which was similar to mine, except that where I had hung my framed certificates, she had photographs. In all of the pictures two children were laughing, a boy and a girl, and their smiles were identical to hers. I remarked how happy they looked and she smiled a proud, maternal smile.

      We sat down in two stiff-backed armchairs covered in tartan plaid. Fleur crossed her legs and clasped her hands on her knee. Her red-lacquered nails stuck out in all directions, like the blades of a Swiss army knife. The conversation in the lift was forgotten. Now I could see from her erect posture, the way she held her head and the flash in her intelligent eyes, that she had assumed her professional hat. She explained in a matter-of-fact way that Diane’s smile was nothing more than a reflex triggered by stimulation of the retina: a shape flitting across the light-sensitive surface at the back of the eye. It might be that the shape had to be human, but no one could be sure about that. ‘A dog might get the same warm welcome,’ she said, and laughter welled up from deep in her thorax.

      ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ashamed, and I asked her about the sickly smell. But that was easily explained too, she said. Diane’s mother assiduously massaged her with creams and lotions, to keep her skin from drying out and cracking. She was the bestoiled patient in the place; a glistening advertisement for royal jelly.

      I laughed and settled back in my chair. I was feeling better now. I even said, ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ but Fleur waved her hand languidly in the air as if to say, ‘Don’t give it another thought.’ Then she continued to regard me with her smiling, questioning face, as if she were waiting to find out why I had come. Eventually I reminded her of what she must already know: that I was going to be working with the patient and Mezzanotte’s machine, so I needed to know everything there was to know about her; every detail of her medical history. At that, she arched a pencilled eyebrow. ‘He’s serious, then?’

      I asked her why she should doubt it, and she looked at me thoughtfully. It was two months since the professor had paid her a visit, she said, and described how he proposed to help her patient. He had asked her opinion, and she had given it: the diagnosis was uncertain, the family was split. There were certainly more suitable candidates out there. But she agreed it was an interesting case, and that if she hadn’t been so busy herself, she would have liked to spend more time getting to the bottom of it. So she wouldn’t stand in his way.

      Since then she had assumed that he had abandoned his plans, having come to the conclusion himself, perhaps, that they were too ambitious. The odds against it working, in the case of this particular patient,

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