Verismo Bliss - Chapter 20

20.

Harry had been worried that extra security would be in place at Raf-Med, due to all the publicity, but it appeared quiet; he figured most of the media attention would be in The Covent Garden area and Falsham’s home in Epping. Oh, and on the new hero of the hour, of course. But he was probably using his need found fame to open up some legs.
Harry smiled. He really had to stop being so bitter.
They sat in the car park. Above the Raf-Med building the Yorkshire sky was a strawberry-ripple colour. There was a freshness to the day already; a cool relief from the summer’s humidity. Harry liked autumn. Just as he did spring. But now wasn’t the time to be thinking of seasons.
People came and went from the building. It was busy. That was good.
‘What are we waiting for? What’s the plan?’ she asked.
Harry stared. ‘We were waiting for that,’ he said, nodding towards the building. Ramona looked. The security staff were changing shifts. ‘Follow my lead. Don’t look anyone in the eye, but don’t avoid their gaze either. We are going to walk in as if we do it every day. We are going to be taking about the new report from France which indicates another drop in male fertility rates. Can you do that?’
She nodded. He went to open his door but she reached out and held his arm. ‘You haven’t said anything…about Carr. What I told you. Or about the paper.’
Harry looked at her. Then he looked away. He stared at the dashboard of numbers and dials. Some things were easily measured, he thought. ‘There’s nothing to say.’ He gently pulled away from her and got out of the car. She joined him and they strode across the car park.
‘Did you see that new report from France in the paper this morning?’ he asked her as they neared the entrance.
‘The new fertility figures?’
The doors slid open. The blue toothed up security barely glanced at them. The foyer was warm. The receptionists were busy signing visitors in.
‘It’s a worrying downward trend,’ Harry said.
‘Indeed,’ Ramona replied, ‘but they haven’t been confirmed yet.’
Harry was glad he had been there before. It meant he could confidently walk up to the security door and wave Cannon’s proximity card over the reader. There was a second of concern. Had Adam Cannon’s body been identified, and his cards cancelled? The green light came on. They stepped through the door. They were in.
Harry stepped up to the large electronic map to his left. He slotted in Cannon’s ID and typed in Ward 81 on the screen. A red line snaked from the ‘You are here’ arrow to Ward 81. A flashing sign said downloading, two seconds later he was told to remove the card. He slipped the card into his smart and the map appeared on the screen, complete with directions.
They walked without speaking now. The place was busy, with new shifts taking over from the graveyard. Most of them were voraciously reading their newspapers, or watching the news on their smarts. Harry heard Oliver’s name all over the place but only in hushed tones and everybody stopped talking as he and Ramona approached. They were unknown. Harry felt like a Gestapo officer walking the streets of Berlin in 1942, whilst those around him hid White Rose leaflets.
Harry wondered what Falsham knew about the death of Oliver. Did he believe the lie woven by Carr? Could he know that Harry had been there? Cannon had said that Falsham knew nothing about Oliver being the Ripper; he had sent Cannon off to check up on his wayward son, that was all. So it could play: Falsham tells Cannon to watch Oliver, Oliver is the Ripper, he kills Cannon, the cops kill Oliver. As far as Falsham was concerned, Harry was sitting at home with a whisky listening to Miles Davies. Off the radar.
They found Ward 81 easily, directed by a machine which was guided by a satellite circling the earth. They went through the sanitising room together, the hot blasts of air doing more to refresh them than the insipid coffee of the service station (though now they were in Raf-Med their adrenaline levels were high enough to wake up a hibernating grizzly bear), and as Ramona’s hair blew about in the anti-bacterial air he couldn’t help thinking they must look like a couple of extras from an ‘80’s pop video.
Ward 81 was completely different in the daytime. There was a white freshness to the ward, and fresh flowers, that Harry hadn’t noticed before, brightening up the plainness and helping to dampen the hospital smell of scrubbed cleanliness. Nurses in blue and white uniforms moved about dispensing tablets, taking temperatures or marking charts. Harry wondered if they were real nurses or just employees in uniform. That’s all it took really, a uniform. Put somebody in a doctor’s outfit and have him say we are going to die in six months and we’d believe him, even if he were actually just a plumber. Nobody approached Harry or Ramona to ask what they were doing there. People were less suspicious in the daytime. Besides, it was busier and hey, they had got through security doors to get there. Of the twenty beds in the ward 12 were now occupied and 3 were curtained off.
Harry and Ramona paused for a moment and looked around. Harry looked to his immediate left and saw a woman cradling a baby in her arms. The woman had long blond hair that was tied back with a ribbon. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and she looked tired, but her face glowed with delight as she gazed at her baby.
‘See if you can find Gwen,’ Harry said, ‘I just want to talk to that woman.’
Ramona started to protest that she didn’t want to be left alone but Harry had already left her side.
‘Hi,’ he said to the woman.
She looked up and smiled. He had been right, he did recognise her.
‘Hi,’ she said, her voice crackly with emotional tiredness.
‘How’s he doing?’
‘Oh he’s so beautiful,’ she said, shaking her head at him and making him gurgle with bewilderment.
Harry leaned over. The baby was red-skinned, like it had been ripped raw from the ground and needed time to ripen. He had never understood why people said that babies were beautiful, he couldn’t see it himself, but then he’d never been a mother or a father.
‘I’m just doing some checks on the ward,’ Harry explained. ‘Making sure that all correct procedures are followed and if any of our patients have any complaints.’
‘Oh, no, no, everybody has been wonderful. You know they don’t normally let the mothers spend time with their babies, but I insisted. I wanted to see him before he began his new life. They warned me that I might bond and it would make it harder…’ She paused and a tear ran down her face. ‘They were right.’
Harry reached out and put his hand on hers. He could feel the warmth of the baby through its wrappings. He smiled, his eyes flashing for a moment.
‘How long?’ Harry asked.
‘They’ll be here to take him soon. I know it’s the right thing. He’ll have a better life in America. What could I offer him? I’m either on benefits or self-employed. That’s no life to show a kid. And I did sign a contract. It was all legal. If I backed out now…no, it’s the best thing. I just didn’t know…just didn’t know it would be so hard. Who’d’ve thought it?’
Harry smiled. ‘If the kid could talk he’d thank you for the decision.’
She smiled, her eyes wet. ‘Thank you,’ she mouthed, barely able to speak with the emotions choking her. Harry took his hand away. She frowned and found her voice. ‘Do I know you? You look familiar.’
Harry remembered a woman with a belly like a medicine ball, creamy briefs, and long hair that reminded him of Lady Godiva. He remembered reaching out and touching her drum tight belly and the feeling of a child kicking at his hand, touching him through the skin. He’d known it would be a boy. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
He walked down the ward and saw Ramona sitting by a bed. It was Gwen, though the name on the chart at the end of the bed said Rachel Stacey. The bump in the bed announced that Gwendolyn Falsham was still awaiting her time. Bizarrely, Harry thought, considering what they had been through, the two women were discussing pregnancy.
‘Of course I’m nervous but, even though my father is shit at being a father, I can’t think of a better place to be looked after.’
Gwen paused as she saw Harry approaching.
‘I take it nobody here knows who you really are?’ Harry asked.
She shook her head. ‘My father isn’t big on inviting employees to family events. Not that he had many family events.’
She was looking a picture of health, the added weight of the child had given her already healthy body an added voluptuousness, and her light blue eyes dazzled like the forgotten summer of youth.
‘You seen the news?’ he asked.
She nodded and looked away from him.
‘I guess you’re surprised to see us both alive.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted. ‘Really. Oliver…he wasn’t like that. Not before. It was Bliss that turned him. There was no reasoning with him on Bliss and no keeping it from him. I couldn’t have helped you.’
‘You could have called the police.’
Her face darkened. ‘He was family, after all.’
‘Did you love him?’
She looked at him, her face defiant. ‘Yes, but as a brother. The sex thing…well, I did it more to get at my father. Every time I fucked Oliver I enjoyed what my father would do if he found out. How it would hurt him.’
‘Is that why you took the pictures?’
She nodded. ‘There were other ones too, where you could see me clearly. I imagined leaving them lying around for him to find.’
‘But Oliver loved you more than as a sister.’
‘Yeah. Men are more stupid when it comes to that stuff.’
Ramona nodded, but said, her voice hard, ‘Yeah men are dopes, but it doesn’t mean they deserve to die. You don’t seem too cut up about your brother.’
‘What I’m feeling is none of your business. From an early age I was taught not to show my emotions. Emotions were for the weak. My father taught me that every situation, every event, can be boiled down to a cold profit or a loss.’
‘And what was my father? You remember my father? If he is in the loss column what will you balance against his life?’
‘Luz was…,’ Gwen started to say, then stopped.
‘What?’
‘What’s the point? Anything I say doesn’t matter, does it? You blame me for his death.’
‘Yes, I do. If it hadn’t been for you…’ Ramona suddenly stood up, her face contorted with anger. ‘I just…I want him back.’ She raised her fists and Harry thought for a moment she was going to attack Gwen, but she began to beat the bed, in a tattoo of primitive grief. Harry went to her, conscious that she might attract attention. He grabbed one of her fists, which seemed like a tiny ball of fury in his hand, but, instead of pulling away or fighting him as he expected, she turned to him and held onto him, sobs jerking her body like a puppet and sounds coming from her chest like those old animal voice makers that you tipped upside down. Harry put his arms around her and held on. He looked at Gwen. She looked at him but her expression told him nothing.
Slowly, Ramona took control of herself. She pulled back a little from Harry and looked up at him, her eyes a melancholic brown, brimming with wetness and her lips full and with a pout that Harry longed to devour. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pulling out a handkerchief and blowing her nose. ‘It’s not the time or place to be acting like this. I’ll just go freshen up.’
Harry let her go to find the washroom. He knew she wanted to be alone for a while, to compose her thoughts. He sat down by the bed. Gwen was staring straight ahead, both of them a little embarrassed but for different reasons.
Suddenly, Harry reached out and took her hand that rested limp and pale on top of the covers. She looked at him, a little alarmed, but didn’t move her hand away.
‘When is it due?’ he asked.
‘Anytime now. The nurse said if I haven’t had it by the weekend they will consider inducing me.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘What? No, why? That is…’
He felt her hand tighten under his.
‘I mean, who wouldn’t be afraid? The first time. Everything’s a little scary the first time. You don’t know, do you? You don’t know what to expect, so you think about the best and the worst. But I think I’m afraid of just being alone, do you know what I mean? I mean, obviously there will be the nurses and doctors and stuff, but I don’t know them. I’ll miss having someone there with me. Holding my hand, you know? Is that sad?’
He squeezed her hand and shook his head.
‘I sort of thought that Barry would be with me. I do feel so bad about Barry. I miss him. He was so gentle. He was like a mouse. I don’t know who would have wanted to hurt him; Oliver swore it wasn’t him, and I believe him.’
‘It wasn’t Oliver. It was Cannon.’
‘Adam?’ Gwen said, obviously shocked. ‘But why?’
‘I don’t know. I got the impression your father ordered it.’
Gwen sank down into the pillars. She turned her hand over and gripped Harry’s.
‘I let him sleep with me one time. I knew he wanted to so much, even though he had never asked. He stuck by me, no matter what. He listened to me talking about having sex with Oliver, giving me advice, and listened to me laughing about the johns who had paid for my time. Shit, it must have been like swallowing razor blades for him, listening to my sex tales when he was so in love with me. But he never showed it. He never once tried it on. We often slept in the same bed. I felt so safe with him. Then one night, a few days after being in the Garden, he came to see me and we went out and nicked a bottle of Vodka Kick. We got wasted. He told me he loved me; at first I just thought nothing of it, we were always saying we loved each other, but then he told me he wanted to make love to me. I almost laughed, thank God I didn’t – who says ‘make love’ anymore? But then I felt betrayed. He was the one man who, I felt, had offered me love and friendship without asking for anything in return, and then here he was, just like the rest, wanting a fuck. We rowed and he went off into the night.
‘When I woke up the next morning I felt like every drop of water had been drained from my body, but do you know what felt worse? For the first time in my life I was actually worried about someone. Where was Barry? He’d gone out into the city, into the Garden, in the middle of the night, pissed out of his face. What if he’d thrown himself into the Thames, because of me? I called his smart again and again. He didn’t answer and I got more and more frantic. I was just getting ready to go out and try and find him, although fuck knows where I would’ve looked for him, when he turned up at the door. He looked worse than I felt. He blurted out that he was sorry and then just started crying.
‘We made up, not so much with words but just with smiles and my gratitude that he was still alive. I let him have what he wanted then. I gave it freely. Not because I wanted it, but because he did. That might actually be the only selfless act I’ve ever done. But I knew it was just a one off deal. He wasn’t very good, but there was something special about it. It was like being made love to by a summer breeze; so gentle, soft and almost nothing, but, just like a fleeting memory of something…something other. I’m not explaining it very well,’ she said, frustrated at the impotence of words.
‘I think I know what you mean.’
‘And now he’s dead. And you know the other thing I worry about? That I might not want to give the baby up, even though the idea of being responsible for another human being fills me with utter panic. Listen, this might be stupid, but, maybe, could you?’
Harry frowned.
‘I mean, would you be there with me? When I give birth? I know, I know, it’s a lot to ask. You hardly know me, after all. But, it would be nice, to have someone there that I know and I don’t have anyone else.’
Harry took a pen and notepad off the bedside cabinet and wrote down a number. ‘That’s my smart. Call me. If I can be there, I will.’
Harry heard the sound of a woman sobbing. He turned, half expecting to see Ramona, but it was the Lady Godiva Bump Banger. They were taking her baby off her. The baby started crying as it was taken by a nurse and placed carefully into an incubator like container and wheeled slowly away.
‘Listen, I have to go. When Ramona comes back tell her to wait here for me. And no fighting.’
She smiled. As he moved to the end of the bed, she said, ‘Harry. Thank you.’
He nodded and followed the nurse out of the ward.
‘Excuse me, Nurse…,’ Harry said. The nurse turned and he looked at her name tag. ‘Moore. Nurse Moore. I’m doing some checks on procedures for Mr Falsham. Just checking that all the wheels are running smoothly, so to speak, eh?’ He affected what he imagined was a superior/business like voice, then wished he hadn’t as he imagined it came out sounding like Cary Grant on helium. ‘As part of that I am following a baby from birth, through all the different processes.’
Nurse Moore was in her forties with grey hair where only red used to be and lines that even Babskin couldn’t erase. ‘Do you have your ID?’
She took it off him and slipped it into her reader – a shark 20, the very best on the market – and scanned the readout. She whistled. ‘Thank you, Mr Cannon - that’s a high security clearance, guess I better be on my best behaviour.’
Harry was relieved. She hadn’t bothered looking at the picture of Cannon, just his security clearance. He couldn’t even claim a passing similarity to Adam Cannon.
‘Would you like to follow me?’ she said, her face open but not smiling.
‘I noticed that the mother was allowed time with the baby - is that normal?’ Harry asked as they walked.
‘We do our best to discourage it. It makes things harder. But some have a clause in their contract that they can see the child before it’s taken away, and Miss Henderson had such a clause.’
‘So where are you taking him now? Straight to his new parents?’
‘Nope, this little feller goes to the doctor first for his shots. Look at him, all smiles now – if only he knew he was about to have a needle in him.’
She smiled down at the baby, who was indeed smiling, then yawning, then smiling. He had seemingly forgotten his mother already.
‘Shots? I didn’t realise they had them straight away. Is that safe?’
She let out a short laugh. ‘Oh yes. These days we can give shots for HepB, DTaP, PCV, Hib, Polio and RV virtually as soon as they are out of the womb,’ she said, counting off the immunisations on her fingers. ‘Perfectly safe. They have the shots, then a quick check-up, and then off to start their new life.’
They had walked to the end of a corridor and turned left. ‘Here we go,’ she said, entering a medium sized consulting room that had one examination table and three cabinets holding oddly shaped medical equipment. Behind a small desk sat a harassed looking doctor. He was about fifty with small tufts of hair clinging on to the edges of his head, like a deforestation zone. One hand was pressed against his head and the other was ticking boxes on a form. He glanced up as the nurse and Harry came in. Then did a double take at Harry.
‘This is Mr Cannon, Doctor Lynex,’ Nurse Moore said, ‘he’s doing a study of our practices for the boss.’
‘What clearance level?’ he said, standing up and moving around the table.
‘Oh, I’ve checked his ID, he’s a top gun.’
‘Better let me see,’ he said, holding out his hand.
Harry passed him the ID. The doctor turned his back to him and slipped the card into his reader. The nurse began to unwrap the baby from his blankets. He gurgled. ‘There, there, now. It’ll all be over soon. Just a little nick on your bottom…’
Harry watched the back of the doctor. Did he have an alarm on the desk? Was he pressing it now? Harry clenched his fists. He wasn’t going to give up this time without a fight.
‘That’s fine,’ the doctor said, turning and handing back the card, his voice had changed from suspicion to obsequiousness in an instant. ‘Anything I can do to help, just say. Any questions, just ask. Thank you, Nurse Moore - I can take it from here.’
She smiled at Harry as she left the room and he thanked her for her help. When she closed the door there was an awkward silence. The doctor fussed over the needle. The baby gurgled. Harry grimaced a little. He didn’t like injections.
‘So how come the boss is checking up on us?’ Lynex asked, loading the hypodermic with a clear liquid.
‘You know Falsham, he likes to know the operation is running smoothly.’
The doctor bent over the baby and then paused, looking up at Harry. ‘The rumour is that this part of the operation is going to be closed down – do you know anything?’
Harry shook his head and folded his arms. ‘Not me, pal.’
‘Sure,’ Lynex muttered, ‘with clearance like yours you don’t know anything?’ He bent down and Harry looked away as the needle went into the new flesh of the baby. ‘Can’t say I’ll be sorry if they do close it down. Money’s bloody good though.’
The baby was bawling, its body shaking and little hands rolled up in balls, his toothless mouth twisted in a grimace and shock.
‘What’s your objection to it?’
The doctor raised his hands and shook his head. ‘No, no, don’t get me wrong. No objection. I know it’s all for the greater good.’ He put the hypodermic back in its container and pushed a green button on the wall, next to a pair of large doors. ‘Don’t, you know, say anything to Mr Falsham. I mean, I’m not criticising – not at all. Great pay. Great bonuses and pension. I mean, who gives a good pension these days?’
Harry decided that the man’s whining was harder to listen to than the crying baby.
An orderly in a green smock came through the doors. He had a clip board in his hand. Cold air followed him through the doors. The doctor took the clipboard and signed something. ‘This is Mr Cannon, he is watching the procedure from beginning to end. His security clearance is max. Understand?’
The orderly grunted. The man reminded Harry of Igor from the old James Whale Frankenstein flick. He had a stoop and the same imbecilic look in his eyes. Harry followed him. As they walked through the doors, the baby abruptly stopped crying, and there was a noise like a child’s rattle, being shaken just once, then muffled quickly. He looked down into the incubator. The baby was shock still, its eyes half closed. Harry looked up to say something to Igor, but stopped as he took in his surroundings.
He was in a long room that was as cold as a meat locker. Along each wall were rows of incubators, maybe twenty along each wall. Most were empty, but around seven held babies; none of them were moving, they all had a grey pallor to the skin.
The doors closed behind Harry. He felt sick, and, despite the intense coldness, he felt a hotness raging inside him.
The orderly stopped about half way down the line. He opened one of the incubators. He took out the baby – holding him as casually as if he was picking up a sack of potatoes - and placed him in the incubator. He closed the lid and checked the temperature gauge on the side to make sure it was set correctly. Cold breath came out of his mouth, making him look like a snorting bull for a moment. He looked up at Harry, shrugged and then nodded, as though satisfied he had passed the test, that he had done his job well under supervision, and exited at the far end of the room.
Harry stood silently, surrounded by cold, grey babies. They were all naked. They were all boys. Slowly, he moved down the line, to where the newest admission had been put.
He unclipped the incubator and flipped off the lid. He reached down and touched the body, already it was cold and a grey pallor was tingeing the lips. He put his hand on the bare chest and no beat returned his touch. The eyes were still half open. His finger, which looked huge against the baby’s tiny face, gently reached down and closed the eyelids. He took off his jacket and wrapped it around the baby, covering his face and wrapping the sleeves round and over the top, then tying them in a knot. When he had finished he was reminded of the package that the storks carried in the nursery books. Stories that these babies would never hear. Harry placed the bundle back in the incubator and put the lid back on.
Harry felt colder without his jacket. But that was good. The numbness, the pain of the cold, helped him keep focus.
He moved to the end of the room and went through the doors that Igor had gone through. The warmth hit him immediately. He was in what looked like a mortuary. There were four metal tables, 8 foot by three foot, that had holes in each corner, like a snooker table, but Harry figured it wasn’t for collecting reds. Around the tables were instruments of dissection and a hose to wash down the tables. At the far end of the room were two gurneys, one of the gurneys had a white sheet covering two bumps. Harry went over and lifted the sheet. Underneath were two male babies. Both had been opened up from the groin to the throat and then stitched back up. They didn’t look real. They looked like something you bought from a Halloween shop to scare your gran.
Harry dropped the sheet back over them. He looked around. He saw body parts hovering in jars full of a viscous liquid. The low lighting illuminated them like some distant universe captured in 3D by the Hubble telescope; the whorls and shadows of a world that was dead by the time the light reached us.
Harry strode back into the meat locker room, his breath like London fog pouring out around him. As he passed the babies he mumbled something to them, nodding his head from side to side, looking at each body. But the words were intelligible, disappearing like the fog of his breath in the cold. He went back into the doctor’s room.
‘I hope you found everything satis…’ the doctor began, turning away from a cabinet where he was taking a folder from, but stopped as he saw Harry advancing on him. There must have been something in Harry’s face, because Doctor Lynex immediately raised the heavy Manila folder to protect himself.
Harry threw a punch and the folder skittered across the room, sending loose documents fluttering like leaves on the air. Harry punched the doctor in the head, who raised his hands to protect himself. Harry hit him again and the doctor’s glasses flew off his face and landed in the corner of the room.
‘Please, please, stop,’ Lynex said, crumpling to the floor like an unravelling origami figure. He began to feel with his hands for his glasses. A lump was forming on the side of his head. ‘I can’t see without my glasses.’
Harry kicked him in the abdomen and Lynex doubled up, retching with the shock. Harry picked up the glasses and bent over him. He put them back on the doctor’s face.
‘I’m sorry. Whatever it was I did wrong. I’m sorry. Tell Mr Falsham we can make it good.’
Harry stood up. He had never liked violence, but somehow he felt this was necessary, like putting mustard on a hot dog. If the guy was hitting back, maybe it would be different, but he lay on the floor, a killer, a realist, a look-at-the-wider-picture man, a bought man, a coward, a pension man, a mortgage mind, a credit and debit man, and Harry just didn’t have the bollocks to hit him anymore. He gathered up the papers from the floor. Each file was a patient. Each patient had a number. Each number had a D/O/B. Each number had a D/O/D a few hours after the D/O/B. Each number had details of the time of an injection. Each injection was 3 grams of sodium thiopental. Each number had an autopsy report and items removed for further study.
Harry bundled the papers back into the folder and hurried out of the room.
He walked down the corridor.
It was like he was walking down a long, black tunnel with lights that dazzled and disorientated him. His body felt as cold as when he had been in the meat locker. The meat locker, that’s all it was.
He walked passed people without registering them, but suddenly, as he reached Ward 81 a woman with tied back long blonde hair, and a face as wet as mountain slates in Wales, stepped in front of him.
‘I can’t let him go,’ she spluttered, her fists kneading into Harry’s chest. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
Harry stood there, letting her fists make indentations in the skin under his shirt. The pain was the sort of pain that verged on the pleasurable.
‘Where is he? Don’t let them take him. I saw you go out with him. Where is he?!’
She began to punch and slap him now. He stood there, not looking at her, afraid that looking at her face would be more painful than the slaps to the face he was getting. Two male nurses appeared and pulled her away. She was screaming now. They injected her and soon her body flopped about like a dying fish in a trawler’s net.
‘Sorry about that, sir,’ one of the nurses said. ‘She didn’t hurt you did she?’
Harry walked past them and into the ward. He had to get Gwen and Ramona out of there. Gwen’s bed had been curtained off. That was a good idea, attract less attention. Everything looked normal. Smiling nurses. Pregnant women. Maybe he should warn them all. Maybe he should shout and scream. He pulled the screen back. The bed was empty. Sitting on the edge of the bed was Martin Falsham.
‘Looking for Little Red Riding Hood? Just the Big Bad Wolf, I’m afraid.’