?There was a phone ringing somewhere, but I couldn’t drag myself out of sleep properly. It was one of those old black wall-mounted phones with a heavy ornate receiver, in a fuzzy glow of gold light but I couldn’t remember where it was, landing maybe? Hugo’s bedroom? and my body wasn’t working right, I couldn’t get to it. It kept ringing and I realized that was probably all wrong, it had to be my mobile— My eyes still wouldn’t work, all I could see was a thick fog of gray speckles, but I groped for my phone and swiped blindly. “Hello?”
“Toby,” said a rich warm voice that for a moment felt almost comforting, a lifeline amid the confusion. “This is Detective Mike Rafferty. Listen: your uncle’s collapsed. He’s in an ambulance, on his way to St. Ciaran’s Hospital.”
“What?” I said, after a moment. I managed to sit up, dizzy and rocking. “What happened?”
“We don’t know yet. Who’s his next of kin?”
“What? He doesn’t have, I mean—”
“He’s the oldest brother, right? Who’s next? Your dad?”
“Phil. My uncle Phil.” Gradually my eyesight was clearing, but the room looked wrong, unstable and dangerous: armchairs canting at subtle angles, rug rucked up, gray-tinged darkness that could have been dawn, twilight, storm.
“Can you send me his number? Like now, right away?”
“Is Hugo dead?”
“He was alive five minutes ago, anyway. The paramedics were stabilizing him. I’m following them to the hospital”—for the first time I realized there was background noise, engine rush, Rafferty had me on speakerphone as he drove. “We should be there in ten minutes, if you want to meet us there. Get me that number first.”
“OK,” I said. “I’m coming,” but he had already hung up.
My phone said it was quarter to seven in the morning. Somehow I texted him Phil’s number and ordered a taxi and found my coat and shoes—dazed, heart rattling, unsure whether this was really happening or whether I was still trapped in the dream. Raw wet air, streetlamps still on. The taxi jolting from side to side. Thick vanilla stench of air freshener, the rearview mirror festooned with rosaries and miraculous medals and yellowed pictures of saints. The driver was a hunched, skinny old guy who hadn’t said a word since I got in, and I wanted to lean forwards and tell him there had been a change of plan and I needed to go to Donegal, Kerry, just keep on driving so I would never have to get out.
* * *
?The first step into the hospital hit me like a tidal wave. It was all there, the unceasing blur of noise, the relentless parching heat, but most of all that smell: disinfectant layered thickly over utter pollution, hundreds of bodies and sicknesses and terrors crammed together in too little space. The place felt like a weapon expertly crafted to strip you of all humanity, hollow you to a shell creature that would do anything it was told for the slim chance of someday getting out into the living world again. I almost turned and ran.
Somehow I managed to explain the story to the pancake-faced woman on reception, but I forgot her directions the second I turned away and ended up lost in a maze of corridors and stairwells, miles of rubbery blue floor tiles, people in scrubs bustling past me without a glance, wards jammed with metal beds and jaunty pale-blue curtains and drawn gray faces, things beeping and someone moaning and a guy on crutches dragging himself along with a terrible thousand-yard stare that I knew only too well. I had lost track of what floor I was on and I was fighting a flutter of panic—no way out, trapped here forever—when I turned a corner and saw a lean dark figure at the far end of the corridor, back to me, hands deep in overcoat pockets. Even against the numbing white light I knew it was Rafferty.
In that place he looked like salvation. I limped towards him as fast as I could, and he turned.
“Toby,” he said. He was shaved and crisp and alert, smelling of that sprucey aftershave; the hospital didn’t seem to have affected him at all. “I was waiting for you.”
“Where is he?”
Rafferty nodded towards a set of double doors. Next to them was an intercom with a large sign above it saying “THE BELLS,” which set a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in my throat. I managed to swallow it down. “They’re just getting him into a bed. They said we can go in once he’s settled.”
“What happened?”
“Not sure yet. I left him around half-ten last night. He was tired, wanted to get some kip, but he was in good form; joking, even, telling me if he was getting one last weekend away from home he would’ve rathered Prague. I made sure someone would check on him every half hour, see if he needed anything, wanted a doctor.” It seemed to me that Rafferty should have sounded at least a little defensive, Hugo had been in his care and now look, but he didn’t; he was cool as ice, he might have been filling in another detective on the night’s events. “According to the officer on duty, he got to sleep somewhere between eleven and half past. No complaints, not in pain, not feeling sick, didn’t want anything. The last check was at six: he was asleep, breathing fine. I got in at twenty past. He was on the floor, unconscious. We got the ambulance straightaway. I told them about his cancer, and the seizures.”
I couldn’t see anything through the double doors, empty corridor, white and blue and chrome— “What did they say? The doctors?”
“Not a lot. They checked him over in the ER, took him for a CT scan; then when they came out, they said they were heading here to ICU. I’m not family, they can’t tell me much. But they said”—Rafferty moved to catch my eye, I couldn’t stop jerking my head around, trying to get a handle on the place, all the perspectives seemed off—“Toby. Mostly, when someone who’s in custody gets taken to hospital, we keep an officer right next to them at all times. In case they try to do a runner, or attack someone, or they say something we need to hear. With your uncle, the doctor said no need for that, I could wait out here.”
“But,” I said. He was trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t sure I was getting it right. “If it was a, another seizure, they’ve got drugs for that. They can do things—”
The door wheezed behind me and I whipped round. It was a stocky white-haired guy in green scrubs, pulling off latex gloves. “Are you here with Hugo Hennessy?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m his nephew. What happened? Is he, is he OK?”
The doctor waited for me to go to him. He had to be about sixty, wide-shouldered but flabby with it, but he moved like a boxer, that same absolute arrogant control of the space, like everyone else was there only by his permission. His eyes slid over me—droopy eyelid, gimpy leg—with a casual assessment that set my teeth on edge.
“You know about your uncle’s brain tumor,” he said. “Yes?”
“Yes. He was diagnosed a couple of, I think August—”
“He’s had a brain hemorrhage. It’s fairly common: the tumor disrupts the tissues, erodes through them, and eventually you’ll have bleeding. The blood created pressure on the brain. That’s what made him lose consciousness.”
“Is he—” I was starting to say Is he awake yet or possibly Is he dead, but the doctor kept talking like I didn’t exist.
“We’ve stabilized him. A hemorrhage like this can make the blood pressure unstable—his was all over the place, when he came in—so we’ve given him medication to keep that under control. Now we’re just going to keep monitoring and see how he does. We’ll hope he wakes up soon. It all depends on how much damage has been done.”