Lucca
For much of the night, Daniel’s mind drifts back and forth between fitful sleeps and half waking. The same themes and anxieties surface in shifting sequences; work, Alex, Gulnaz, Scoff. By the time the alarm rings out, a night that should have offered fulfilling rest to a head that for once was sober has instead left him utterly exhausted and quite desperate to be done with it. This, Daniel knows, cannot go on. For all his attempts to dismiss the ‘man in the cemetery’ episode as dead and buried, something just won’t let it go. He crawls from the bed and fumbles through to the kitchen and the gravitational pull of coffee. When the phone rings he assumes in his dazed state that it must be Greenalls.
“Jerry?”
“Hello Daniel. No, it’s Gulnaz. Sorry to ring so early. I’m just leaving for work. I rang to ask if you’ve had the DNA results yet.”
Her voice brings him properly awake.
“Two weeks, they said.”
There’s a noise on the line like a stifled cough.
“Two weeks?? But that’s ridiculous. Then, you still don’t know either way?”
“Nope.”
“Right, let me talk to Dr Prentice today, see if he can get things speeded up.”
Like I could stop you, he muses, visualising the two of them snuggled nose-to-nose on the pillow, the phone propped up against her ear.
“The thing is, I’ve been asked to help out at the hospital this morning, on the children’s ward. I just thought, if you were going in to see him, we could maybe meet up and have some lunch.”
Her voice sounds edgy and calculating, impatient for an answer. Much as Daniel reviles any idea of another close encounter with that Frankenstein’s monster, his nightlong ordeal suggests it may be the only way to lay Alex’s ghost once and for all. He also has reservations about reconnecting with Gulnaz. By the sound of it, she has something of an agenda – probably some lame excuse to justify her rudeness over the meal. He certainly doesn’t need that. Nor should he go stirring up fresh feelings for her. But the very thought of another day at work like yesterday’s has him agreeing a time and place, then leaving Greenalls a message to say he’s unwell.
In marked contrast to the hurried departure and drive into hell of the previous visit, this morning Daniel allows himself plenty of slack, and gives the car licence to treat the journey like some gentle Sunday outing. When the hospital again rears its formidable face, this time he is able to handle the emotion. Its power before had all been drawn from his fear of the unknown. He’s seen off those skeletons now. Sidestepping the queue at reception and ignoring the instructions to cleanse his hands, he forges past the busy wards to the quieter corridors of Intensive Care. It’s only when the double doors of the ICU are pushed aside that Daniel’s former sense of dread kicks in.
Within the confines of the room the air is hot and stifling, electrically charged. Standing alone is quite unlike having Prentice here to chaperone him. The space threatens and exposes; the resonant hum of equipment suggests he is caught inside a living machine. It monitors Daniel the way it monitors the patient. It plugs him in, swallows him up, feeds on his nerves. And there, at the heart of this machine, the inanimate figure is still laid out, dead to the world but for the slow rise and fall of his chest. Again, the partially masked face taunts with its familiar and unfamiliar nuances. The deviations from Daniel’s own bone structure, nose, mouth and eyes may be slight, but to him they stand out a mile. These alone would be enough to lay the whole matter to rest, had this face not become so dreadfully wasted. The chilling truth is, starve him to the same degree and Daniel too might look exactly this way.
And there’s something else to bear in mind. As children, for all their similarities of appearance, no matter how much their mother would dress them the same, arrange their hair the same, feed them the same, school them the same, pamper them the same, still they had stubbornly grown to be chalk and cheese: Alex the tough, sporty, reckless risk-taker; Daniel the nervous bookworm with a passion for military vessels, science and seashells. If nine years of life together could drive them so far apart, then where on earth would another twenty leave them, spent without contact of any kind? Two utterly different lifestyles could so easily carve out facial differences as subtle as these.
Wild, impulsive Alex; guarded, apprehensive Daniel. Two polar opposites, yet as locked together as Yin and Yang, Jekyll and Hyde. So much more than just brothers, so much more than best friends, for those extraordinary few years they’d been like two sides of the same coin. So often they would predict each other’s thoughts and actions; much of the time they barely had need of words. Some nights they would test out their powers of telepathy, one of them furiously transmitting thoughts through the bunk bed while the other tensed every muscle in an attempt to capture the incoming signals. On a crazy whim, Daniel leans forward over the alabaster face and applies his mind with that same ferocity. He drills his words deep into the hardened skull; ‘Are you really my brother Alex? What’s happened to you? Where have you been all these years?’
The thoughts bore their way through flesh and bone, as he waits with eyes tight shut for a connection. But only the same words bounce back, delayed by some synaptic loop that scrambles the question. ‘Are you really my brother Alex…other Alex…Where have you been…you been…all these years…these years?’. Hopeless. Like one of those strange overseas phone calls, when he used to speak to his father, only to wonder why a small child at the other end insisted on repeating back everything he said.
For an instant, an impulse grips him to tear away the tubing and disconnect the equipment. It’s an overwhelming urge to put things back the way they were, a fear that on this bed may lie the seeds of his undoing, someone about to turn his whole life upside down. He could never have known this was coming. To have such power over someone’s life – the realisation sends a sickening thrill through his system. As if to defend itself, the dormant figure snatches a breath, a brittle inhalation of thick phlegm. Daniel pulls back in disgust and tries to counter with a rush of healing energy, something between a prayer and a commandment, anything to repel that need to inflict harm. In his shame, he turns tail, pushes through the doors and sets off to put as much distance between them as possible.
What madness this was to have returned; to have put himself through such horrors all over again and yet be no nearer the truth. If forced to make a judgement, Daniel would have to say no, the inhuman abomination in that ward wasn’t his brother. But then again he so could be. Gulnaz had talked of him being abducted as a child, possibly even held prisoner. Never mind different lifestyles, if she were right, that face could be the work of decades of torture and deprivation, each little disparity of detail the mark of some unspeakable violence.
His footsteps announce a curious opening up of sound. While Daniel’s mind has been elsewhere something odd has been happening to his surroundings. Carpeting has given way to a hard floor of patched linoleum. The impeccably spotless walls are gone. Scuffmarks now zigzag their way across faded paintwork. At the corridor divide, a sign indicates left for main reception and exit. It feels all wrong, back to front, yet at the same time foolish to disobey. But every step after that only leads Daniel further into uncharted territory: no more shiny plaques beside doorways, just signs strung badly from a ceiling of missing tiles and roof cavities crammed with ducting and wires. And still those signs egg him on. Not only the way out, but also Gynaecology, Oncology, and Radiology. Daniel suddenly clocks with dismay where exactly they are taking him. These are the very corridors he had walked all those years ago. This wing had once been his second home. Three, maybe four times a week for a year he would come here: nearly two hundred visits in all. He’d known every turn, every straight, every shortcut; a ground plan that was etched deep into his brain. If memory serves him right, his mother’s old ward would be a few yards further on. Ward 10a. To stumble upon this, now of all times, was beyond cruelty itself, a cynical twisting of the surgical knife.
Day after day he would sit there with her,
never knowing what to expect, how much worse she would be. Good days and bad days. Then only the bad. He remembers the eight beds on that ward, how in the space of a year those eight beds had accommodated ten times as many patients. And every one of those patients had come to know him. Daniel became their family – in some cases their only family. Many simply vanished between visits. A lucky few escaped those beds under their own steam – not cured as such; ‘in remission’ they had bravely named it as they said their choked goodbyes. Ten years on, he wonders how many were still around to say that.
All the staff knew him too. By Christ, those nurses really got their hands dirty. They were old school, like Gulnaz. Day in and day out they dealt with sick, and shit, with misery and death – something those automatons in reception behind their computer screens couldn’t begin to imagine. Yet ultimately even those nurses betrayed him. His own mother never saw ‘remission’. She made it from the bed, just, but never from the hospital. Not on foot, at least. Only in a box.
But now there is nobody. What the hell is going on here? Instead of leading to the exit, these signs are drawing ever further into the bowels of the building. He takes a ward at random and peaks inside. The whole room lies in darkness, totally cleared out. Likewise with a second ward. Nothing, not even a whisper, along the corridor beyond the hum and rattle of ducting. He’s rounded two more corners before muffled voices drift into earshot. He locates them behind a windowless door and teases it open. Two doctors and a nurse are busying themselves around a bed in one corner. Some sort of debacle is underway. A trolley is wheeled over, curtains hastily pulled across. Strange cries and moans rise from behind the screen. An urgency is spreading among the staff. Daniel edges back and lets the door close silently. This death is not his to be witnessing.
It feels like if he doesn’t get out soon he’ll go mad. The choice is a simple one. Turn back or stay with the signs. ‘Exit and car park’ – it’s pretty unequivocal. He hurries on.
But no further than the next corner. Beyond that, the route is cordoned off with tape. Asbestos warnings everywhere. The riddle is finally answered: the tarpaulined wing of the hospital; the cancer at work. Someone has wedged a large piece of corrugated card, ripped from an old carton, across the handles to the doors ahead and scrawled, ‘No entry. Referbisment in progress,’ and below, in absurdly small writing, ‘Folow tempory markers.’ A chalked arrow on the wall adjacent points back the way he’s come. Arrows to the right, arrows to the left, arrows pointing up to the sky – all the way to heaven probably, and heaven is doubtless closed for referbisment.
The chalk arrows lead down another maze of corridors, thankfully steering well clear of the ICU and slowly reconnecting with normal hospital hubbub. The last arrow points to a reassuring sign indicating reception, enquiries and waiting area. It’s well past the appointed time with Gulnaz, and Daniel quite expects her to have gone home. But no, there she is, as they’d arranged, sat among those same plastic chairs. Fortunately her face is turned away. Before make his appearance, he needs a moment’s grounding; time to shake off the ghosts that have been stalking him for the last half hour.
“Ah, there you are,” she exclaims, when he finally feels able to present himself.
“Yeah, got a bit lost coming from Alex’s ward.” He’s caught off guard, hearing it described as such, as though the matter were now settled.
She bridles. “Oh, those renovations! They’re causing total mayhem. Someone should have escorted you.”
“I’m glad they didn’t. I needed to be alone.”
“Of course.” Gulnaz pauses. “Would you rather I left?”
“No, no, I’m fine now. Thanks.”
Her face lights up again with a smile. “And you saw your brother?”
Time to call it, once and for all. Daniel bites his lip and nods. “Yes. But it’s not Alex. It’s like you said before. I wasn’t thinking straight when we found him.”
Her smile dies. “Oh, Daniel, I’m so sorry. But, you know, the DNA might…”
“I don’t need to wait for that. I’m not coming back here again. Actually, can we just get out of here?”
“Ugh, try and stop me!!” Gulnaz rolls her eyes a little too emphatically to convince, as though still struggling to find a plane on which to reach him. “Four hours with those kids is plenty for one day. How about we go and grab a coffee somewhere where we can talk properly? There’s a new café just opened in town, if you don’t mind driving. Or we can take the bus. They say it’s really good.” She tries again to smile. It turns a shade impish. “My chance to show you a real cup of coffee.”
Wherever they go makes no odds to him, so long as it’s far away from here.
As they head across the forecourt Gulnaz suddenly revises the plan – to leave the car and take a stroll along the canal. Daniel shrugs. If that’s what she wants. And a walk might be just the thing to clear all the insane crap churning about in his head. But first he’ll need to move the car, or he’ll end up with a ticket.
Some way down the road from the hospital, on Gulnaz’s instruction, Daniel pulls onto the kerb opposite a footpath that cuts through to one of the canal’s disused locks. He’s never before been remotely tempted to walk this pre-industrial relic. From past glimpses he’s snatched between derelict warehouses he’s always assumed it to be a cesspit, best avoided. Gulnaz, by contrast, seems transported by the experience. When they hit the water’s edge she breathes deeply; a symbolic act, Daniel can only assume, as there’s nothing remotely different about the air. The narrow towpath forces them into single file. Taking up the rear, Daniel spots something a little odd in her gait, as though a muscle in her back has been pulled, maybe at work, or maybe not at all. Perhaps he simply hadn’t noticed the way she walks before.
“You must feel devastated,” she declares, after some minutes. “Like you’ve lost your brother all over again.”
He grunts. “I’m dealing with it.”
Discussing sensitive matters into the back of someone’s head, or in her case into thin air is hardly ideal, and their efforts at conversation soon peter out. The rhythm of their shoes on gravel and the slowly shifting landscape keep Daniel suitably distracted. There is actually something of the countryside about the route, though little to get worked up about; this is hardly some paradise garden. A few birds flit through the trees, but down in that dark, fetid water a fish would have no chance. Even out here, shopping trolleys and bicycle parts poke out from the surface; great dams of rubbish gather in the foamy backwaters; plastic bottles bob about. And all the time the town’s drab skyline walks with them, rising above their tentative corridor of greenery; chimneys and rooftops, grey tower blocks, a disused gasworks, and to Daniel’s left, a solitary crane (not of the flying kind) that points to the skeletons of yet another industrial estate.
Gulnaz is talking again. She’s been using her connections to make some checks. Nobody has been reported missing from any of the local hospitals or psychiatric units. Now she’s suggesting they attend the next service at St. Bart’s to see if the rector or any member of the congregation had noticed anything unusual going on in the grounds on Christmas Day.
“And we should talk to the police.”
That gets his full attention. Definitely not the police. Not a good idea at all.
“If I thought it was Alex, then maybe,” he retorts. “But like I told you, it’s not him. I know the hospital’s keen to find out his identity, so let them call the police. I’ve got other things to worry about. Frankly, it’s not my problem.”
Gulnaz finally gets the message and says no more on the subject.
The next half a mile descends through a series of locks; graffiti-daubed, windowless rear walls of factories gradually hemming them in, litter beginning to choke the hedgerows, a continuous hum rising in the air from the advancing cobweb of electricity pylons to accompany the growing drone of traffic. At last the footpath sign steers them away from the canal and up through the industrial estate into the main shopping square.
Its recent pedestrianisation at first leaves Daniel disorientated. It must be twelve months at least since he had cause to be here and so many shops have either gone or been vandalised beyond recognition. Ugly new-builds with exposed steel frames and dazzling halogen lighting bully their way between the few survivors of the old town. Café Lucca turns out to be a small, glass-fronted establishment just beyond the pedestrian zone, very seventies retro. Not Daniel’s cup of tea at all. Brash and tacky would sum it up nicely. Everything brown and cream – okay, the colours of coffee and this is a café. Big shitty deal. The bitterness of roasting beans alone would have made that point. Their walk has given him a taste for sausage, beans and mash, but the menu proves to be all paninis and cold meats. Out of sheer necessity he grabs a pastry from the stack on the counter and opts for a cappuccino. Gulnaz, for all her zeal to take lunch, makes do with a salad.
“I can understand why you’d mistakenly thought he was Alex,” she announces suddenly, once they’re seated. “But what I don’t understand is the photograph.”
A muscle contracts in Daniel’s chest. Shit, yes, he’d rather conveniently put that from his mind. Could he really believe that a total stranger had found a copy of that photo before conking out against his mother’s gravestone?
“That’s partly why I was suggesting the police,” her words jab again.
The pastry is suddenly too dry to swallow. “I don’t know how he got hold of that photo, but believe me, I know the police. A trivial thing like that isn’t going to interest them one bit, any more than it’s going to draw the attention of a bunch of churchgoers on Christmas morning.” Talking with his mouth full isn’t easy. The cappuccino is brought in to assist. “Believe me; round where I live, people keep themselves to themselves.”
The first attempt to drink delivers nothing but foam. He scowls into the cup. When on the second try the coffee touches his lips it’s at boiling point and tastes like old fag butts. If this is ‘real’ coffee then he’s happy to make do with the imaginary stuff back home, thanks all the same.
“I don’t get this. Any more than I get that.” He points at her drink. Two pounds thirty. A cup straight out of a doll’s house, half-filled with a thimbleful of tar. What the hell is that about? He returns his to the table, deliberately avoiding the saucer, wipes the scum from his face and heads off to order something stronger. A familiar feeling is welling up inside. An anger. He wants to pick a fight with everything that’s going on here. He wants to shake the whole institution by the shoulders and tell it to grow up. They’re not in Italy, so why the Italian menus? These waitresses sure as hell don’t read Italian and clearly nor do any of the customers. So why does everyone collude like this? Can’t they see nothing has really changed? All this ‘makeover’, it’s fooling no-one. It’s still the same shithole of a town; all they’ve done is garnished it with tat.
The drinks menu, also in Italian, is of little help, but a rather elegant bottle of clear liquor on the bar between the vodkas and brandies catches his eye. The barman shrugs when asked about it, picks it up and reads the label.
“It’s called Grappa. It’s just, er, your white wine, basically,” he says.
Daniel orders a double, downs it there and then, making sure his back is turned to Gulnaz, then orders a second to take back to their table. It most certainly is not ‘basically just your white wine’. It has exactly the kick of a mule that he needs. This hasn’t been the easiest of mornings. For most of it he’s felt utterly manipulated. But if Café Lucca is where he has to chill then he might as well do it Italian-style. At least he can sink into these horrid brown leather chairs, sip his drink and wait it out until the world stops seesawing him up and down.
As he takes his seat, Gulnaz launches into an anecdote from her shift in the children’s ward. To his surprise, Daniel finds himself drawing some comfort, not so much from the words themselves, but rather from the entertainments playing out across her face; from the little dances of her eyebrows and lips, from the melodies in her voice. A part of him wants to hold this moment. Let her talk, let him drink and let the world mind its own damn business.
But another part of him is tempted to break in with a different script, one that clears the air over where exactly they now stand with each other. They’ve been acquainted just three days, but already she has become so many things to him that he no longer knows quite which Gulnaz he’s dealing with. At the start, she had been a meddling nuisance, then a welcome companion, then a brief obsession, then a two-timing heart-breaker. And now? Casual friend? Confidante? Private Eye? She might like to tell him just what they are doing here; why she wanted to meet at the hospital and why he’d agreed to walk with her. Here she sits, all sensitivity and small talk, no doubt expecting the same: what is she doing tomorrow? What did she have for dinner last night? They could be old schoolmates, or the product of a fleeting friendship on some past holiday – even ex-lovers: nothing really in common but a shared memory of something that’s no longer there. Yes, he could return the polite chat. He could even raise the stakes, venture to delve into her past: how she got into nursing, when it was that she’d left Iran, if any of her family were still alive. But for what? Surely that would require an investment of energy, something approaching commitment, and he’d have to be genuinely interested. In all honesty, if she’s knocking off that doctor, it just didn’t seem worth the bother.
The espresso she’s ordered sits empty now at her side, just a deep stain remaining. The story over, she moves on now to the salad, lovingly anointing its varietal leaves with oils and vinegar. Daniel’s half-finished Danish on a side plate looks vulgar by comparison. A charade it may be, but Café Lucca succeeds in shaming even him for not playing along. Another drink feels altogether more Mediterranean. She’s going to be some time yet with that salad.
“Won’t be a moment,” he murmurs, pushing away his plate and taking his glass.
“Daniel, don’t forget your car’s waiting at the end of the canal. Won’t another take you over the limit?”
Like a medical person needs to ask. It’s true though, he’d forgotten about the car.
“Oh yeah…
“No, actually it’s fine. I can catch a bus from here straight home; pick up the car tomorrow.”
Gulnaz drops her head and eats in silence – hard to know whether that’s a green or a red light, so Daniel leaves her to it and re-joins the queue at the counter. By the time he’s been served his third Grappa, another double, she has almost finished. When he sits again she makes no attempt to connect or even look up.
“Something wrong with the salad?”
“No, no. I must be going, actually.”
“You alright? It’s a bit sudden.”
Finally she raises her head. “Well, I had hoped we might walk back together, Daniel.”
“Yeah, I know. But it’s just that there’s no direct bus from there.”
“It’s fine. I’ll go alone. Your drink is clearly more important.”
She says it’s fine; he swigs a mouthful. No, of course it isn’t fine. Even Daniel George can spot neon flashing sarcasm. Shit. Why does he always have to be such a shit? Why can’t he put this drink down, apologise for his moment of indiscretion and behave for once like a decent human being? They’re on a date, for God’s sake. Well, kind of. Whether they are or not, this is no way to treat someone you… respect.
“Well, if you’re sure,” he replies, and knocks back the rest of the Grappa.