The White Devil (23 page)

He followed her down the corridor. The halls were wide and square and strangely empty-feeling down here. They eventually came to a large sign, in capitals:
SPUTUM INDUCTION ROOM
. Rachel knocked and pushed open a door into a small, rectangular room with two transparent plastic cubes, like mini phone booths, on the right. A waiting technician rose and started murmuring over equipment with Rachel.

“All right,” said the technician, a small-framed black woman. “You’re going to sit in the chamber, and breathe in air through the tube.” She indicated an accordion tube draped inside one of the phone booths. “And then you’ll fill the cup with sputum. Not spit. The thick stuff. All right?”

“Very much not all right,” Andrew replied. “What am I breathing?” He was paranoid now. Were they pumping him full of tuberculin, or whatever?

“Air with vaporized salt water. To stimulate coughing. We need the sample for a culture.”

Andrew realized he didn’t have much of a choice and sat in the booth. It was cramped. The seat was low. He heard motors whizzing overhead and felt a current move around him. Some kind of fan was sucking the air out of the chamber—
to keep it clean for the next guy
. He put the tube to his mouth and inhaled. And winced—it stung. But it made him cough all right. He hacked, and dribbled a globule into the cup. The technician nodded encouragingly and said something. But he could not hear her over the fans. He took another toke on the plastic tube. Hacked again. Spit. His throat burned. Rachel stood in the corner, watching. He stared out at them from his whirring chamber. He was entombed, looking out at the living, the well, the free. Suddenly Andrew felt a sense of connection to John Harness. The loneliness of being sick. Having everyone stare at you in this detached, disgusted way, asking themselves, not,
Poor person, how can I help?
But:
How do I keep from getting what he has?
He sucked on the tube. The gag reflex began somewhere around his fifth attempt. At his ninth, he opened his mouth and retched.

16

The Caregiver Would Like a Drink Now

FAWKES RODE A prolonged and horrible wave of adrenaline in the ambulance, lasting from the suburbs all along the A104 into London. Panic sluiced into his veins whenever he looked at Roddy struggling to breathe. The boy’s grey face registered not only acute discomfort, but a kind of dreadful, wide-eyed surprise, as if each time the boy pulled for breath his body was telling him
something is wrong, something is scary, I’m not getting enough
. And every few seconds he had to do it again.
Fill the lungs.
And then:
terror
. Fawkes kept up a reassuring patter for a time.
It’s going to be all right, Roddy
. But he kept having visions of Theo’s body bag. The aluminum sinks. He was afraid that if he said anything more, these images would somehow leap from his mind into Roddy’s. So he shut up. Merely placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
What the fuck am I doing here, doing this?
Fawkes wondered.
Why me? I’m the last person anyone wants as a nursemaid, a caregiver
. He kept waiting for the ambulance to stop; for the doors to swing open and for some mature, responsible individual to launch himself into the back of the ambulance with the vigor and confidence of an expert, and say
All right, thanks for bringing him this far, Piers; you’re all done; you can hit the pub
. This person would wear a joking, knowing smile; this person would know all about him, that he was a drunk, a poet, not the man for this job. But nobody did. So far, they appeared to take him seriously. They appeared to believe he was in the right place. The ambulance bumped along. Fawkes kept his hand on Roddy’s shoulder. This was like wartime, he observed. When people were drafted to do things they were not prepared to do, and then did them anyway.

At the hospital, they were separated. The EMTs rolled Roddy into triage, then into the jammed staging area. Fawkes was instructed to sit on the benches in the corridor. He waited. A doctor eventually came out through the door. He was a bald man with an intense manner. They were wheeling Roddy upstairs, he said. Did Fawkes need to notify the parents? Of course—but where were they taking him? To the chest center. Where he would receive a cocktail of unpronounceable drugs. The doctor actually cited survival rates. Then, before Fawkes could recover, the doctor vanished and the Health Protection representative, a smiling man with a mustache and an earring, appeared. Fawkes just murmured, told Mr. Earring what he wanted to know, and filled out a sheet on a clipboard. At last he was left alone again.

He felt trembly, pale, weak. These were things he did not understand. Things he could not control. He remembered precisely the half-dozen wine bars they had passed on their way to the hospital. He could nose the booze from a block away, like a shark sniffing blood. God, if he could, he would have taken one of those black rubber blotters on the bar—the ones with the little rubber cilia to hold up the glasses, but leave room for the spill—and would have lifted it to his lips, and drunk the tepid soapy water, just to taste the diluted white wine and ale mixed in. He closed his eyes to regain control. He wanted a drink, he needed a drink. No one knew where he was. Roddy did not need him, not for some time anyway.
He was going to have a drink
. A couple of pints, to stabilize him, warm him up. Or a gin. He knew he shouldn’t. He stood anyway. It would only take thirty minutes. Maybe forty-five.

At that moment he felt the reminder-buzz of the cell phone in his jacket pocket. He flipped it open, hands trembling.
Voicemail
.

His hands shook harder. He stood staring at the phone in his palm.

It was enough to stop the momentum.

He would
not
have that drink.

The frenzy of desire passed him by.

Saved.

Whatever message this was, he said to himself in a kind of prayer, he would remember it forever. Someone selling insurance, holidays in Majorca, whatever it was. He pressed a button to listen to it. He heard a voice he knew—who was it, that accent?—and listened to Andrew’s message.

If you don’t come get us, I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

An unaccustomed flood of feeling overcame him. He had avoided close relationships for so long that the closest thing he had to a friend, in that moment, was a seventeen-year-old American whom he hadn’t even met a few months prior. He viewed the selfish, snarky, cold-blooded creature he had become, and felt the acid sting of regret.

Piers Fawkes sank back onto the bench without listening to the whole message. He pressed his hands to his face and, abruptly, began to weep. His shoulders shook. His hands grew wet. People continued passing him in the hallway. This was not so unusual a sight in a hospital. The staff knew to let grief run its course.

ANDREW SETTLED ONTO
yet another examining table expecting another round of testing, prodding, injecting. The original nurse had returned and handed him his bag of clothes. He had grown so pliant and passive, he received them like a hostage: ransomed, but still broken in spirit. She told him to complete his paperwork at the desk on his way out, and that someone from the school would come to take him and Rhys back to Harrow so they would not have to take public transport. She reminded him to avoid direct contact with others as much as possible until the tests came back, and to specifically avoid travel; to stay in contact with the hospital . . . the instructions continued. He repeated “okay” several times. Then she left. He began to dress. With each article of clothing, a layer of dignity returned. The school uniform now—to his own surprise—lent him a wily sense of adventure, as if he were disguising himself for a masked ball. The Harrow School uniform: what a cheeky rebuke to this whitewashed medical maze. Soon he stood outside the examining room door, in his greyers, bluers, and black tie.

Over to the right, he saw glass-windowed doors that were dark inside. Next to them were wide windows. He stared. Something in his mind turned.
Antechamber
. Hadn’t Dr. Minos used that word to describe the units where tuberculosis patients—the advanced ones—were treated?

Roddy, he thought.

The halls were quiet. A nurse sat behind a glass partition, staring at a desktop computer. Footsteps passed and receded. Andrew went to the first darkened door. Felt the handle. It turned. He entered the antechamber. He heard the whir of a ventilation system. He had five feet to change his mind. He opened the second door. He saw a television set on an extending metal arm, and blinds, closed, admitting a white glow.

“H-hello?”

No answer.

He opened the door more widely. Pushed his head inside.

The bed was made. The room was empty.

He retreated back to the corridor. He had been inside only a few seconds. Nothing had changed. Andrew quickly crossed to the next antechamber door. This handle also turned. As soon as he entered, he knew this room would be occupied: the blinds, in the interior room, were cracked; and while the television remained off, there was another source of illumination: a bank of lights on the ceiling, emitting an intense aqua blue.
Ultraviolet lights to kill the mycobacteria
. Andrew pressed inside. Lumps in the sheets—a patient. No one in the visitor chairs—a patient alone.

“Hi . . . is, is that Roddy?”

The lump in the bed stirred. A clear oxygen mask turned to see the visitor. The pale, round face of his next-door neighbor gazed at him. Roddy sat up.

“What are you doing here?” came the muffled demand.

It was followed by a round of coughing. Not a smoker’s cough. Not a hacking, laryngeal cough. This cough used the whole thorax, as if Roddy’s chest were a bag full of wet sponges being flogged with a carpet beater. Andrew recoiled. Roddy held the oxygen mask to his face tighter, as if a better grip on it could restore him.

“The doctors think you have TB. . . . because you have HIV or AIDS,” Andrew said quickly. “That’s not true, is it? You haven’t . . .”

Roddy’s brows furrowed angrily. “I thought this place was a hospital. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah! All they want to know, is if I bugger my friends! I said, don’t you have medical training? I can’t breathe, you’re worried that I take it in the arse? It’s my lungs that need help—not my arse! I might have been a doctor if I’d known all I had to do was inquire about . . .”

His tirade gave way to another cough. This time Andrew witnessed the panic in Roddy’s face as the cough extended through the length of what anyone would consider a normal cough, then continued, then continued some more. At last it subsided. Roddy wheezed. He sucked greedily on the oxygen mask. Suddenly its narrow air tube seemed woefully inadequate. Andrew hesitated, not sure whether he should stay. But he needed an answer; needed to confirm the suspicion that had struck him during his conversation with Dr. Minos.

“Roddy,” he said. “When you first got it . . . when it first came on . . . did you see anything? Did you feel anything funny? I mean, not in your breathing. But did you, well . . . see somebody? Feel something in the room?”

Roddy stared at him from behind the mask.

“Rhys said there was a heaviness in the room when he came and got you,” Andrew added.

Outside, in the corridor, Andrew heard voices. Someone was close, facing the room and holding a conversation, poised at the entrance.

Andrew gave up his oblique approach. “Did you see a boy with white hair?” he hissed.

Roddy’s eyes opened wide, frightened.

Andrew felt a thrill. “You saw him?” he asked, eagerly.

The outer door opened.

“Tell me, please, Rod,” he begged. “You did, didn’t you?”

Roddy’s expression went distant, as if he were reliving the moments back in his room. Piecing it all together. “I don’t know
what
’s going on,” he said mournfully.

“What on earth!” exploded the nurse, who had now entered. Andrew jumped. “No one is permitted in these rooms! And in street clothes!” Her face was covered by a white face mask. Her eyes coiled in anger. “Get out of here! Who are you? It’s very dangerous!”

Roddy sank back into the bed, resigned, exhausted. The nurse turned her attention to him. Andrew bolted to the stairwell, breaking into a sweat; not from exertion, but from fear.

THEY HAD BEEN
in the taxi for twenty minutes, nosing through the London traffic. The boys’ faces were drawn, fatigued. Their school uniforms hung on them like wrinkled costumes, as if they were actors who had been abducted in the middle of a play. Rhys in particular brooded. Fawkes had met them and hailed them a cab on the busy thoroughfare outside the hospital—expensive, but necessary, if they were to avoid public transport. It was one of the old black London cabs. They piled into the double-sided backseat.

Fawkes recounted for the boys as much as he remembered from his quick conference with the man from the Health Protection Agency. Andrew and Rhys, Fawkes repeated, represented the
inner circle
—the people with greatest contact with Roddy and Theo. The X rays had been inconclusive. Their blood tests would show definitive results in forty-eight hours. During that time, they could do without masks—those had been necessary when the extent of their infection was unknown—but they needed to lie low. There was only a small chance they had active TB, he told them, trying to sound authoritative. There was an even smaller chance they would pass it to the other boys. The best thing was to keep quiet about the tests. Keep quiet about Roddy’s diagnosis. What they needed to avoid was a panic.

Rhys stared out the window, gloomily. Andrew squirmed with impatience.

“Have you called my parents yet?” Rhys asked.

“I haven’t,” Fawkes admitted. “Let’s call them together, when we return.”

“They’re going to freak.”

“It’s Harness,” Andrew burst out. He could hold it in no longer.

Fawkes glanced nervously at Rhys before turning to Andrew.
“What?”

“Harness is getting people sick.” Andrew leaned forward. “The doctor told me he couldn’t explain the TB advancing so quickly with Roddy and Theo.”

“Unless it’s AIDS,” spat Rhys bitterly.

“Did they give you AIDS tests?” asked Fawkes, surprised.

“Think so.”

Now Fawkes understood their shattered looks. To be diagnosed with one potentially fatal disease is enough for an afternoon; to hear about two in one go would send anyone into a tailspin. And no doubt the boys had been grilled. All the prejudices about boys’ boarding schools—especially a prominent one like Harrow—would have risen to the surface. They’d have been accused of living in Sodom-on-the-Hill.

“It’s
not
AIDS,” declared Andrew.

“No
way
,” agreed Rhys.

“It’s
Harness
,” Andrew repeated.

“What are you on about? What harness?” demanded Rhys.

“Not what, who,” corrected Andrew. “Harness is the name of the Lot ghost. He’s real. He died of TB.”

Rhys rolled his eyes. “Oh, God.”

“You said yourself, you felt something in the room with Roddy.”

“I . . .” Rhys shook his head. “I did. But it wasn’t the Lot ghost.”

“Oh, it was the Newlands ghost, visiting from next door? I
spoke
to Roddy. I think he saw it.”

“Roddy’s sick. We might have TB or AIDS. We have enough to think about without bringing ghosts into it.”

“Quite right,” said Fawkes, staring hard at Andrew and wishing he would shut up until they could speak privately. Head of house or no head of house, it was clear that Rhys had reached his limit.

Andrew leaned forward again. “The doctor said the TB came on so fast, the only way to explain it was AIDS. You know, a broken immune system. Roddy got sick fast. Theo died fast. That’s why they kept harping on AIDS. But Rhys?
Roddy?
” He made a face. “Theo? Me?
All
of us? With AIDS? Come on. But then I remembered. John Harness had TB. He died of it. It’s in the history books. The
Harrow Record
.” He sat back triumphantly, watching Fawkes’s expression.