There was so much sunlight.Laurie let it filter through hiseyelashes, for a long time doing nothing more than watchingrainbows.His perceptions lifted outwards.The electric sun—a neonstrip above his bed—had been extinguished.Slowly he worked outthat the team of patient rats who’d been getting paid to gnaw nightand day on the end of his cock was nothing more than a catheter.That the underground fairytale horror-lab of Frankenstein was onlya hospital room, the various wires and drips that wouldgive his creation lifeonly saline and blood in their innocent frames by thebed.
And theyhad apparently worked.Laurie lay in wonder at the fact of his owncreated life.Not even his breathing was being left to chance.Aregular in-and-out hiss told him that, as well as the alien pressof a tube in his throat.Shortly the tube would bother him verymuch indeed, but just for now he was too doped for his reflexes tofire.He couldn’t move his head.That was all right too.There wasplenty to see from here.
Hissister, for example, working through her ballet drill.There was atrolley against the far wall: she was using its handle for a barre.Her concentration was absolute, her expression that of a little nunfor whom divine inspiration was just the norm, a fact of dailylife.Laurie remembered their conversation in the churchyard, aboutdancers and actors and humans.Laurie hadn’t been at all sure thenwhich side of the line his own talents had placed him on.He knewnow.
He wouldhave liked to tell her, but his reborn humanity had other things onits mind.He had to move his head a little now.Everything ached,and the soft beeping he hadn’t yet associated with the ongoing beatof his heart speeded up a little, skipped and then settled.Therewas someone sitting by his bed.Laurie shifted one more time to bequite sure, and then lay still again, joy spreading through him inbright rings.
Sasha,sound asleep with his head on his folded arms.He’d been writing ina notebook.The pen was still loosely clasped in his fingers.Laurie wondered why he hadn’t been using his cherished laptop:whatever he’d been working on, it looked complicated.There werestray sheets of paper scattered across the bed.If Laurie squintedat the nearest one, he could just see the name repeated across it.Yosiri Cuza...Laurie’s joy increased.The sight of that dark headon the blanket, of Sasha so engrossed in the work he loved thathe’d nosedived into it from sheer exhaustion—that was a sight fromthe real world, the daily-bread existence Laurie had thoughtforever lost.
Sasha’s free hand was wrapped around Laurie’s.Even in hissleep, his grip was firm and sure.Staywith me, it said, plainly as if Sasha hadpainted the message in three-foot-high letters on the wall.He hadbeen there all the time.
Lauriewanted to stroke his hair.His skin ached to do it, to know againthe warm silk, the delicate hollow at the base of Sasha’s skull.When he tried, a dull sting ran up his arm.Something was taped tohis wrist.He wasn’t sure what the device was called but he couldfeel a tube jammed into his vein.That was okay, he told himselffiercely.The tube was hitched up to a thin red line, deliveringlife.No need to panic over that...
No.He’dsave panic for the giant bloody drainpipe someone had shoved downhis throat.He tried to yell.The thing was sitting on his vocalchords, and the effort backfired on him, clenching his musclestight round the obstruction.He convulsed on the bed, sendingpapers flying.
Sashajerked bolt upright.He stared at Laurie for one second from thedepths of sleep, eyes blank with shock.Then he pulled his hand outof Laurie’s, jumped up and ran for the door.Laurie heard himshouting in the corridor and was distantly glad that the worst ofthe expletives were Romani.Running feet responded, the squeak ofsoft-soled shoes on lino, and the room burst into chaotic motion,cloud-shape men and women becoming solid flesh around his bed.Oneof them pinned Laurie down.Another reached to snap the mask offhis face.“It’s a tube,” she said soothingly.“There.Just a tube.Coming out.”Something slithered up out of Laurie’s throat, thesensation indescribably horrible, and he coughed and retched andseized a huge inward breath on his own.“Good lad.You ready to dothat for yourself now?That’s it—you just breathe.”
Lauriefell back.He sucked lungful after lungful of the stuffy hospitalair, tasting disinfectant, not minding that or the scarlet band ofpain across his back.There was a terrible noise going on, though,a sound he was glad he didn’t seem to be making himself.He managedto turn his head and get a view past the doctors bustling aroundhim, checking his drip feeds and wires.“Clara!”
She was trying to tear her way through poor Elena Dracinsky toget to him.The dragon was trying to reason with her.Laurie heardthe wordsdeportmentandcomposure, but Clara had gone past those things for once in herconstrained little life.She was wailing like a siren, feetscrabbling on the lino while Dracinsky held her.“It’s okay,”Laurie rasped.“Let her go.”
“Not until I’m certain she won’t leap on you and disarrangeequipment.And distract and be a nuisance to the doctors, MissFitzroy!The very people trying to help your brother themost...”
“She won’t,” Laurie interrupted wearily.“Will you?”
Clarastopped herself between one howl and the next.She froze,wide-eyed.“Nn-nn.”
Dracinsky released her, keeping a grip on the back of herT-shirt.She let her walk to the bedside in carefully controlledsteps, like a fisherman paying out line.“Excuse me,” Dracinskysaid to the doctor fastening a pressure-cuff round Laurie’s arm.“May this distraught child see her brother?”
Thedoctor grinned.“Since she did nothing but practise her pliés whilewe all thought he was dying, I’m quite glad to see her distraught.Yes, let her rip—just mind Laurie’s drip feeds, please,Clara.”
Shescrambled onto the bed.She had calmed herself by desperate force,but sobs were hitching at the whole of her skinny frame, and Lauriemade room for her at his side.She curled up, burying her faceagainst his chest.
The tidehad swept Sasha to the far side of the room.He was standing by thewindow, arms folded over his chest.Now that Laurie could see himby proper light, he was hollowed with exhaustion, his face gauntwith fear and sleeplessness.And yet there was clearly some part ofhim that believed he had no place by Laurie’s bed, not when thedoctors and the blood family were there.And that belief—thatuncertainty of his worth—was Laurie’s fault.“Sasha,” he said,holding out a hand.
***
The tidehad receded.One by one the doctors had finished their tasks andtheir checks.Clara’s dragon had formally introduced herself,apologising for the deception and explaining that, until Clarafinished her run in the States, she had been instructed by AgentKucharski to remain in place as her guardian.She had neatly bowedacknowledgement of Laurie’s gratitude, then turned on her heel andexited, leaving her charge curled up and sound asleep at Laurie’sside.
A childallowed on the bed, a private room, an ugly postmodernist splodgeon the wall and a view out across what looked like Hampstead Heath.“I’m thinking...not the Soho walk-in centre,” Laurie said,breaking the silence that had come down with the departure of thelast nurse.
“No.You’re in the private ICU at Golders Hill.”Sasha wassitting upright by the bed.His paperwork was gathered up andtidily stacked on Laurie’s bedside table.“The ambulance took youto Royal Free, but then your mother turned up.”
“My ma?At the hospital?”
“Yes.Someone had called her.I guess she’s listed as your nextof kin.She stood in the middle of reception with her chequebook inher hand and demanded that her son be given the best ofeverything.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yeah.You can imagine how well she went down with the junkiesand the A&E docs trying to patch together a busload of touristsfrom Cardiff.But it turns out she’s still paying into yourfamily’s private-healthcare plan, so once you were out of surgerythey brought you here.”
Sashawas smoothing the sheet on his side of the bed, over and overagain, the movement small but tight with nerves.Laurie tried topicture the scene.He wondered if Marielle had worn her fur coatand diamonds—if she’d brought Gibson with her or come on her own.He was touched at the display of maternal care, but he wonderedwhich margins Sasha had been swept into while this was going on.Marielle wasn’t Laurie’s next of kin.“I don’t believe in privatemedicine,” he said awkwardly, although that was the last thing hewanted to talk about now.
“Unless you’re paying for a private shrink for me?”
“That’s different.”
“Well, it’s difficult, isn’t it?I see you there in the chaos,and there’s Marielle with her magic wand.I didn’t argue.If it’sany comfort to you, the NHS guys saved your life.”
