The Distant Home (6 page)

Bobby was heading along the corridor, pushing the trolley with Sally on it.

‘Where are we going, Bobby?’ she said.

‘Out of here!’ he yelled as they went around a corner.

‘Do you have a plan?’ Sally knew that usually Bobby acted first and thought later.

‘That’s my plan. Get out of here.’

Sally sighed. She was going to have to think for both of them. ‘Bobby, we’ve got to get off this level. This is where they’ll look for us first. Find an elevator.’

‘Stop!’ Chambers’s voice echoed down the corridor.

Bobby looked back and saw Chambers, Rosen, the nursing sister and the radiologist chasing them. Bobby put on speed, saw a corner coming up, and slewed into it, almost spilling Sally onto the floor in the process. Sally just saved herself by hanging onto the sides of the trolley, and now they were accelerating again.

‘Do you know where we’re going?’ she yelled at him.

‘No,’ he answered, taking a quick peek behind. ‘Do you?’

‘That’s the point I’m making!’ she said.

He waved back at the pursuing figures. ‘You want to stop and discuss it with them?’

Two nurses stood in the corridor talking. Suddenly they realized that the trolley coming toward them was not going to slow or stop, and they leapt aside, and stood staring after Bobby and Sally, only to be swept aside once more by the charge of Chambers and his party.

Sally, her head up so she could see where they were going, saw more than she wanted to. There was a T-junction coming up and Bobby’s pace showed no sign of slackening. At the last corner she had almost gone off the trolley. Unless they slowed, she knew that this time he would surely lose her. ‘Slow down, Bobby!’

He did, realizing as Sally did that there was no option. This meant that Chambers and his party gained on them as they cornered, but Bobby was meaning to pick up speed immediately he was around the corner.

He had no chance to do so. As they rounded the corner, they ran slap bang into a huge male orderly who grabbed the end of the trolley, brought them to a sudden halt, and stood staring hard at Bobby, who was still holding the other end.

‘Excuse me,’ said Bobby, ‘I’m taking this patient to the operating theatre.’

The orderly glared at him in total disbelief.

‘It’s okay,’ said Bobby. ‘I’m a doctor.’

Sally closed her eyes. Bobby was so embarrassing when he tried to tell lies.

‘You look kind of young for a doctor,’ said the orderly.

‘I only just joined,’ said Bobby, and then added with a fair attempt at sounding indignant, ‘Do you have something against short people?’

The orderly was spared having to answer that by the arrival of Dr Chambers, Dr Rosen, the nursing sister and the radiologist. They immediately surrounded Bobby, Sally and the trolley, and Bobby turned his attention to them. ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘my name’s Dr Bobby, that’s short for Dr Robert, and I was just explaining about how I was taking this patient for a walk. To the operating theatre. Just exploratory, you understand.’

Sally looked at Chambers and Rosen. ‘Please don’t get him in trouble, he’s my brother.’

Chambers looked at Bobby in a way that Bobby did not like at all. It was as if his eyes had little flames in them. Then he smiled, but with Dr Chambers this looked more as if he were baring his teeth. ‘You’re Sally’s brother? That’s nice. That’s very nice. I’d been hoping to meet you, little boy. What’s your name?’

Bobby scowled and set him right. ‘I’m not a little boy and I don’t tell my name to strangers.’

The nursing sister consulted her clipboard. It had never left her grasp. Bobby thought it was probably grafted to her left hand. ‘File says his name’s Robert Giovanni Harrison.’

Bobby was outraged. ‘You ever heard of privacy legislation?’ he said to her. He had heard his Aunt Kate talk about this. ‘You’re not supposed to reveal stuff about patients.’

‘But I’m a doctor,’ said Chambers, smiling his silky smile, ‘so I’m allowed to hear stuff about patients.’ He looked from Bobby to Sally and back. ‘Robert, it occurs to me that maybe you’d like to help us with our tests?’

Bobby looked at Chambers smiling that terrible smile down at him. The smile seemed to stretch right across the doctor’s face, and showed as many teeth as a crocodile. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

‘Let’s talk to mummy and daddy about that, shall we?’ said Chambers.

‘I don’t have a mummy and daddy,’ said Bobby, ‘I have a mother and father!’

‘Then we’ll talk to them instead,’ said Chambers, his smile never wavering. Looking at Rosen, he said, ‘I’ll admit the patient, you talk to the parents about this young man.’ And then he turned to the orderly. ‘Here. With me.’

The orderly started wheeling Sally away, Chambers moving after him.

Maria and Jim were very relieved when they saw Bobby coming towards them, but not so relieved when they realized that Dr Rosen was holding him firmly by one arm. It looked like a citizen arrest.

But Dr Rosen was smiling as she approached. ‘Just found Bobby wandering in places where he shouldn’t be,’ she said.

‘How’s Sally!’ Maria and Jim said in unison.

Rosen’s smile became even more professional. Bobby wondered whether she did TV commercials for toothpaste. ‘Sally’s fine,’ Rosen said. ‘We thought she was quite badly injured when she came in but clearly that was shock. Dr Chambers, he’s one of our senior men, he’d like to keep her in for observation for a few days.’

‘They’re saying she’s a freak!’ Bobby said, and shook himself free from Rosen’s grasp.

Jim wished Bobby was not so prone to exaggeration. ‘Now, Bobby,’ he began to say but Bobby kept going.

‘They want to do experiments on her, that’s why they want to keep her in here!’

Maria got angry. ‘Bobby, you mustn’t interfere with her treatment!’

‘This Chambers wants to test me as well, in case I’m a freak too. He’s a mad scientist, Mum, he wants to cut Sally open and look inside her at all her hearts and lungs and stuff!’

Jim and Maria looked at Rosen. Bobby certainly seemed upset about something. Rosen smiled again, exposing her molars. ‘I’m afraid that Bobby came into the X-ray room when we were having a very technical discussion which he couldn’t possibly have understood.’

‘Two hearts? Four lungs?’ Bobby interrupted her. ‘Siamese twin as far as her insides go? That’s not so very technical.’

Jim and Maria were now looking at Rosen very hard.

‘There is,’ Rosen admitted with the greatest reluctance, ‘there is some duplication.’

‘You’re saying Sally really is a freak?’ The distress evident in Maria’s voice and on her face caused Jim to put his arm around her shoulders and hold her to him.

‘There are some unusual features,’ Rosen allowed, ‘but nothing to worry about. Clearly Sally’s a very healthy child. Unusually healthy.’ She paused. ‘Abnormally.’

‘Abnormally!’ Maria and Jim shrieked together.

‘Healthy!’ Rosen corrected herself. ‘Abnormally healthy. You told us yourself that she’s never seen a doctor. Wouldn’t you say that was abnormally healthy?’

‘Abnormal isn’t a word I use in connection with my daughter,’ Jim said, in a very cold voice.

‘I just meant above average. In terms of health,’ said Rosen, trying to get out of the hole she had dug for herself. ‘And in view of that, we’d like to do routine tests on all the family.’ She smiled again, winningly. ‘There may be lessons here which could help others not as fortunate, health-wise.’

Maria and Jim looked at Rosen long and hard, and then at each other. ‘I suppose if it could help other people …’ Jim said.

‘They called her a specimen, Dad,’ Bobby put in.

Maria and Jim looked back at Rosen.

‘I’m afraid Bobby must’ve misheard.’

‘The doctor who looks like a pink frog, Chambers, he called her a specimen.’

‘Dr Chambers said her powers of recuperation were very
special
,’ Rosen said, and waited.

After a moment, Maria and Jim slowly nodded. ‘If it can help other people in the future, we’ll be pleased to cooperate,’ Maria said.

Bobby slumped. With his parents believing Rosen, he knew that escape was now all up to him and Sally.

Chambers, looking remarkably like a giant pink frog in a white coat, stood by Sally’s bed in the private room they had brought her into. The nursing sister was standing a metre or so back from him, with a tray of instruments. ‘I don’t think my parents can afford a private room,’ she had said when they brought her in there, but Chambers had brushed that objection aside.

Now he was explaining to her what he wanted to do. Sally did not like the way he was doing it. He seemed too eager to please, too eager to persuade her that nothing was the matter, too friendly in an oily kind of way. He was like kids at school who tried to talk you into things that you did not want to do. ‘It’s just a series of routine tests, nothing to worry about.’

‘If there’s nothing to worry about,’ said Sally, ‘why do you keep saying there’s nothing to worry about?’

Chambers turned his smile on and off. ‘Cute,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be worried,’ he added. ‘Sometimes children don’t like hospital.’

Sally decided to let the ‘children’ crack pass for the moment. If there was a child here, it was Chambers. He was like a baby wanting its own way at all costs. ‘Is it something to do with my internal organs being duplicated?’ she said, hoping to catch him off balance.

He stared at her. ‘You know about your organs?’

‘I knew I had two heartbeats,’ said Sally. ‘Kids always feel their own heartbeats.’

‘And you didn’t think to tell anyone?’ Chambers was looking at her hard.

‘I didn’t realize it was unusual till I started reading books.’

‘And when was that, Sally? That you started reading books?’

‘I was about four, I guess. I found it in the encyclopaedia.’

‘Don’t lie to Dr Chambers!’ The nurse was looking at her angrily. ‘No one can read an encyclopaedia when they’re four!’

‘I’m not lying!’ Sally was flushed with anger, both at the nurse for accusing her, and at herself for having let slip the fact that she had learned to read long before she went to school. It was one of those things about her that seemed to worry other people, and that she therefore kept secret. ‘I learned to read early. Mum taught me,’ she improvised. This wasn’t strictly the truth. Sally had picked up reading by herself at the age of three, and when Maria discovered that her daughter had already started to read, she had provided her with books from the library. ‘And I found out about most people having only one heartbeat.’

‘And kept it a secret,’ said Chambers.

‘There’s a kid at school with six toes on one foot. He doesn’t like people to know,’ Sally said. Then added, ‘Because a really stupid insensitive person once called him a freak.’ And she looked at Chambers, psyching him out.

‘You’re not to use that tone of voice with Dr Chambers,’ snapped the nurse.

‘No, sister, I’m very interested in everything Sally’s saying,’ purred Chambers. ‘Very interested. Now, Sally, we’d like to take a blood sample. You’ll just feel a pin prick, no worse than an injection at the dentist.’

‘I’ve never had an injection at the dentist,’ Sally said. ‘All I ever have is check-ups.’

‘Perfect teeth?’ asked Chambers.

Sally shrugged.

Chambers gestured to the nursing sister, who moved in, and put an inflatable bandage around Sally’s left arm, and started to pump it using a rubber bulb.

Sally looked on warily. ‘I don’t want to do this. Do you have my parents’ permission?’

‘You were admitted to casualty, Sally, we don’t need their permission,’ Chambers said.

The sister picked up the syringe, and was about to slide the needle into the vein on the inside of Sally’s elbow.

Sally looked at Chambers. ‘Before you do it, I have to tell you, you’re going to find something abnormal.’

Chambers put up a hand to halt the nursing sister’s actions.

‘My blood’s a funny colour,’ Sally said, reluctantly. ‘About the same colour as moist copper sulphate crystals.’

‘Blue-green?’ Chambers said, his eyes narrowing in disbelief.

‘That’s what I said. I could never work it out.’

Mrs Webster’s car pulled up outside her house in Middle Street. As she got out of the little car and headed for her house, she had one hand to her hearing aid, listening to Sally’s conversation with Dr Chambers.

‘You never told anyone?’ asked Chambers.

‘It’s like reading when you’re four,’ said Sally. ‘Would you have? It’s bad enough knowing you’re different, you don’t have to tell other people about it.’

‘A weird thing like that should’ve been picked up on school medicals,’ Chambers said. He hated it when a system failed. How had this kid slipped through the net for so long? Still, he was glad. If she had not evaded identification and capture, he thought, some other doctor, less worthy than he, would have got all the glory. As it was, the credit would be his now, all his. Maybe, if he felt generous, he would give Rosen a small mention.

‘Sarah Abels stands in for me,’ Sally said.

Mrs Webster, entering her house, laughed out loud. ‘Good one!’ she said, and punched the air with one fist. She had a tigerish grin at the success of Sally’s tactic but there was still concern in her eyes and haste in her step. She headed for the kitchen and her appliances.

In the private room in the hospital, Chambers was staring at Sally. ‘Sarah who does what?’

Sally shrugged. ‘Sarah Abels stands in for me at school medicals. She’s my friend in a senior class. We play chess together. I knew the school doctor’d pick up on the heartbeats and make a big fuss, so I got her to stand in for me.’ She grinned. ‘One year they recommended I have glasses. Sarah’s got an astigmatism. That means a distortion of the lens of the eye.’

‘I happen to know what an astigmatism is!’ Chambers spluttered. The gall of this kid, explaining medical things to him! ‘I suppose,’ he said, his voice loaded with sarcasm, ‘I suppose you don’t have any problems with your eyesight. I suppose you’d have perfect vision, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t think that was anything to be ashamed of,’ said Sally.

‘Too much perfection in one person can be very suspicious, Sally,’ Chambers said. ‘It can make people wonder about you.’

‘That’s right,’ Sally sighed. ‘That’s absolutely right.’

Chambers nodded to the nursing sister. She pumped the inflatable bandage and then slid the needle into Sally’s vein. She was very good at her job, it really was just like being stuck with a pin.

Sally looked down at the syringe slowly filling with the sample of her blood. Chambers and the nursing sister were also looking at it, but they were staring, transfixed.

They had not truly believed what Sally had told them, but now they were seeing the truth of her statement with their own eyes. The blood was a beautiful blue-green colour.

As Sally’s blood sample was being taken, Mrs Webster was busy in her kitchen. Rapidly, with the precise, disciplined movements of a well-trained soldier assembling a weapon, she unplugged the telephone from the wall and then plugged it in again to the back of the microwave oven. Then she swung round to the dishwasher and began pressing its programming buttons in a particular order. This process set the microwave going.

Mrs Webster’s kitchen appliances were more than they seemed. All the while she was doing this, she was monitoring Sally’s conversation with Dr Chambers.

‘Your brother’s blood? Is it like yours?’ Chambers asked.’

‘No,’ said Sally. ‘He’s always falling off bikes and out of trees, and his blood’s red like everybody else’s.’

‘But you’re twins,’ said Chambers.

‘But not identical,’ Sally explained, as she had explained to so many people before. ‘We’re only fraternal twins. Identical twins come from the division of the same ovum, so you just can’t have boy and girl identicals.’

‘I already know that!’ Chambers roared. This kid kept on lecturing him about medical matters! Then again, he thought, she knew more about twins than he did at her age. But, he thought, comforting himself, she was a twin, so naturally she knew more about it. It wasn’t as if she was any smarter than he was.

‘I usually have to explain things to people,’ Sally said, by way of apology.

Dr Chambers was developing a twitch at one corner of his mouth.