“Nurse!” he barks at Rhoda.
She gasps and she begins to step forward, then remembers that her shift is over. Technically, she shouldn’t even be here. She holds back a moment, watching the doctor’s hopeless attempts to pacify her patient. “Sir?” he says. “Sir, I’m going to need you to calm down please. Sir!”
Rhoda takes a breath and makes a decision. She pushes her way back to the gurney, leans over to look down at the struggling man’s face. Then, carefully, she places both hands on either side of his head, a hand on each cheek. Seeing her, he stops struggling.
“Easy now. Easy now,” she croons. She slips his oxygen mask back over his mouth and nose.
It’s just the two of them. The rest of the scene disappears. The whoosh of air in his oxygen mask. His heartbeat thundering in his ears.
The patient lets his body relax back into the thin mattress beneath him. He breathes. He looks up into Rhoda’s warm brown eyes and blinks.
“Look,” the doctor says, “I know it’s not your department and I know your shift’s over, but this will all be so much easier with you here. It just will. I don’t know how we’re going to get him in the scanner otherwise. We’d need another two members of staff just to hold him down. If I ring down to Triage and let them know what’s happening, will you stay for the scan?”
Rhoda peers over the doctor’s shoulder. The clock on the wall behind him reads 8:37. She’s missed the handover in Triage anyway. And Annie will figure out what’s happened if she’s a couple of hours late to pick up Coco. It should be fine.
Rhoda stays.
The man lies quietly in the creamy bulk of the CT scanner as it swirls around him. He breathes as Rhoda told him to. He tries to remain calm. He thinks of Rhoda’s face looking down at him earlier. He knows she’s not the one, not the one he’s looking for, but she’s all he has right now. He lies motionless as the machine accelerates around him, the sound of an airplane pounding down the runway seconds from catching the air and taking flight. A sound memory that seems to have no source as he interrogates it further. He squeezes his eyes shut tighter and tries not to think about everything else he can’t remember. He tries to clear his mind.
The man is retracted from the machine by a whir of mechanisms. Rhoda lifts his head from the plastic frame and gently removes his earplugs. With the help of a female radiology nurse they transfer him back to his trolley.
Behind the glass of the suite the radiologist stares down at the images loading up onto his screen. The shadowy slopes and ridges of the patient’s brain tissue mapping out digitally before him. His eyes trip quickly, darting over the images as he looks for diffusion, patches of nebulous white, which could be signs of a stroke. Or a cranial bleed. Either could explain the patient’s erratic behavior after a head wound.
No diffusion, no bleeds.
But there. A tiny flare of white. Something. Maybe.
A neurologist is summoned. This man is older, his movements slower as he leans in and studies the scan.
“Ah, interesting,” he says. But he does not sound interested. “I think we should call Dr. Carver, actually,” he says, removing his glasses. “This is more his sort of thing. Carver will have a better idea. Best page him.” He smiles a placatory smile and leaves.
The man on the gurney is moved onto a temporary open ward with five other patients. Rhoda makes him as comfortable as she can. He looks across at her sitting next to his bed, the ward bustling around them, patients in various stages of illness and recovery going about their bedbound days.
Rhoda gives her patient a quiet smile; he smiles back. And that is when the man three beds down starts to shout.
And what happens next happens very quickly.
12
DR. EMMA LEWIS
DAY 7—IN THE DARK
The winter light starts to fade outside Cuckoo Lodge.
I perch on the front garden bench watching as the sun dips beneath the densely packed treetops. Smears of pinks and peaches streak the sky and the forest is full of evening birdsong. I check my watch: four-thirty, much earlier than I would have expected sunset to be, but then, it’s been a while since I’ve seen an actual sunset. At this time of day, I’m usually stuck deep within the bleached white bowels of an overlit hospital. The cold from the flagstones underfoot is beginning to seep up through the wool of my fisherman socks. A shiver runs through me. I wrap the cashmere blanket I brought out tighter around me. I suppose I’d better go inside. I gather my things and start to head in. I throw a glance out into the close-packed forest, the tangle of branches just visible between trees, the murk beyond. A Rorschach test in the woods.
It got dark so quick. And no one wants to be alone in the forest, in the dark, that’s for damn sure.
* * *
—
Time to turn on some lights. I lock the door and flit from one room to the next, flicking on lights, their warm glow creating company of sorts.
Next I set about getting a fire going. The woodstove in the living room is beautifully stacked and ready to be lit, the handiwork of some poor assistant, no doubt, along with the fully stocked fridge. I needn’t have worried about running short of supplies out here. I’m basically a bear ready to settle in for winter.
And for some reason I’ve also been supplied with my own brand-new wellies. I found them box-fresh waiting by the back door. God knows how they knew my size. Actually, now that I come to think of it, they probably got that information from the hospital, which has my scrub sizes. Someone has really thought of everything. Peter and whoever. I suppose, as far as Peter’s concerned, the less reason I have to leave the house, the better.
The fire crackles to life, leaping from paper to lighter brick to kindling. I close the woodstove’s door, then go in search of Peter’s “Welcome” half-bottle of wine in the kitchen. Just to warm me. Just to settle those first-night nerves and send me off to sleep at a sensible hour. Because, God knows, tomorrow is going to be one hell of a first day at work.
I curl up on the Persian rug in front of the flames, glass in hand, and sip my wine, the patient’s medical records spread out all around me.
There’s a lot to go through, yet as I sit there surrounded by the sea of papers, the case feels more manageable somehow, like a puzzle that I might actually be able to solve, piece by piece, a thousand-piece jigsaw that just needs time and focus. My patient a tangled knot to be gently loosened. Peter was right, I do prefer working with hard copies. I like being able to see what I have.
I pore over the test results again, eyes flicking from the patient’s CT scans and the newer MRI scans on my laptop, to printouts of blood tests, cerebrospinal fluid analysis, virology reports, and hormone levels.