The Distant Home Page 5

  ‘All working,’ the radiologist was saying, and then there was a silence, and for a moment Mrs Webster was worried that something had gone wrong with the transmitter. But the radiologist’s silence was caused by amazement. When he spoke again, his voice was choked with raw astonishment. ‘This fracture in the right humerus,’ there was another pause as he pointed to the X-ray image of Sally’s upper right arm. ‘It’s knitting. Look. Left tib and fib were fractured too,’ he said, pointing to the lower leg, ‘and they’re knitting. She’s healing in fast forward!’

  Rosen leaned in and stared at the X-ray screen. ‘You seen anything like this before?’ she said.

  ‘Of course I haven’t seen anything like this before!’ the radiologist yelled. ‘Are you kidding or something? It’d be in all the text books! No one’s ever seen anything like this before! This kid’s a medical freak!’

  Freak. Sally heard the word and winced. Freak is not a word anyone wants applied to them. Her eyes shifted and she caught Rosen’s movement as the doctor reached for the phone. She was punching in a number.

  ‘Dr Rosen here, would you please page Dr Chambers? It’s urgent.’ Then Rosen put the phone back into its cradle, and moved to Sally and looked at her. Sally had closed her eyes and now lay there, pretending to be unconscious. ‘Sally?’ said Rosen. ‘Can you hear me?’ Sally just lay there, and after a moment Rosen turned away, hands together, cracking her knuckles, waiting for her boss to answer her page.

  chapter thirteen

  In the hospital lobby, the desk clerk was leaning in to speak into a microphone. ‘Dr Chambers please. Dr Chambers wanted in X-ray.’

  Bobby, pushing his mop along a corridor, heard it. ‘Dr Chambers please. Dr Chambers wanted in X-ray.’

  In the waiting section of the emergency department, Maria and Jim heard it. ‘Dr Chambers to X-ray please.’ Maria checked her watch, looked around, not for the first time, and then said to Jim, ‘Maybe Bobby’s locked in the toilet. Would you go and look please Jim?’

  ‘Look for … ?’

  ‘Bobby. Our son. Remember him? He’s been gone a quarter of an hour.’

  ‘Oh, that Bobby,’ said Jim. He squeezed Maria’s hand, and then headed off to look for Bobby.

  Bobby was still looking for Sally. As he pushed his mop along the corridor, two nurses passed him, talking, and ignoring him completely. He took that as a good sign. The disguise was working. Then two old men in pyjamas and dressing gowns came past and stared at him. Bobby hurried past them and as he moved on he heard one say, ‘You know you’re getting old when cleaners start looking younger.’

  Along the corridor, a set of elevators doors opened and out came a small, compact man with dark hair and a very pink face. His name was Dr Chambers. Shortly Bobby would get to know and fear him but for the moment he was a stranger. But even though he was a stranger, he looked to Bobby like the sort of person who might not believe you when you said you were a cleaner who had just started work that day. He was preparing to run for it when Dr Chambers turned in through a door marked ‘X-ray’.

  Seconds later Bobby himself reached the door, and stood on tip-toe to look through the glass panel in it. And there was Sally lying on her trolley!

  Bobby’s instinct was to barge in and get her, but he knew from playing Castle of Zahan that if you barged through doors you stood a very good chance of being killed by Tenth Level Thieves, Members of the Assassins’ Guild, Warriors, Were-wolf Knights, Warlocks and Entities. He knew there was none of those in the X-ray department but figured that there might be creatures just as dangerous to his plans, so he checked the room out further.

  There was the woman doctor who had taken Sally from the emergency department, talking to the pink-faced man who had just entered, and with them were another man in a white coat, and a sour-looking nursing sister. They were talking to each other like mad—everyone talking at once. There was a big machine between them and Sally. He decided he could get in unobserved. Bobby propped the mop against the wall of the corridor, opened the door slightly and squeezed through.

  As he entered, he heard the woman doctor saying, ‘You’ve got to look at this, Dr Chambers, we’ve got something here I’ve never seen before.’

  Then Bobby was at Sally’s side. ‘Sail?’ he whispered.

  Her eyes opened. ‘Am I glad to see you!’ she whispered back.

  ‘You okay?’

  Mrs Webster, still in her car heading home, smiled. ‘Well done, young man,’ she murmured.

  ‘They’re saying I’m a freak.’ Sally’s whispered words came through loud and clear on Mrs Webster’s hearing aid. The old lady’s eyes narrowed and she drew in her breath with a hiss of anger. The person who had called Sally a freak would have been wise to steer clear of Mrs Webster for a while.

  In the X-ray department Bobby smirked at Sally in a brotherly fashion, and whispered back. ‘They had to get you in hospital to tell that? I’ve always known you were a freak.’

  Sally was not to be cheered up. ‘Not funny, Bobby. They’re saying all my organs are duplicated.’

  ‘Talk English.’ Bobby knew that Sally was much smarter than he was, but he wished she would not use all these big words.

  ‘Two hearts, I knew about them of course, but four lungs, four kidneys, stuff like that.’

  This did not mean a lot to Bobby. Everyone he knew was different in some way or other, and he could not see that a few extra lungs meant all that much. The medical people were still talking, and Bobby peeped around the edge of the big X-ray machine at them.

  The man with the pink face, the one all the others were treating as if he were Lord Muck, was saying, ‘Do we have a history on this kid? Sally, what’s her name?’

  ‘Harrison,’ said the nursing sister as she checked her clipboard. ‘Born in this hospital twelve years ago. Twelve years ago today, as a matter of fact. One of fraternal twins, her and a brother.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering,’ said Rosen, eager to impress Dr Chambers, ‘is that what we’re looking at? A multiple birth that went wrong? Was there a third child? Is this patient a kind of Siamese twin with the organs of two people?’

  Bobby gulped and withdrew his head. He didn’t want to think about Sally being two people inside. He leaned close to her and whispered, ‘Mrs Webster says I’ve got to get you out of here. Can you walk?’

  Having heard what Rosen had just said, Sally was keen to get out of there herself. She stretched out her leg and then winced with pain. ‘Still a bit sore,’ she said.

  Meanwhile Dr Chambers was pointing excitedly at the X-ray pictures. ‘It looks like a back-up system. It was designed that way.’ He paused, trying to put a very strange idea into words that made sense. ‘It looks as if she’s this way because she was built this way.’ It was as well that Sally and Bobby could not see his face. He had a very intense, greedy look, the sort of look that a glutton might have at the sight of a cake, or that a fanatical stamp collector might have looking in a stamp shop window. ‘To be sure I’ll need to open her up and take a look around inside.’

  Sally and Bobby looked at each other. The words had reached them loud and clear. The way he sounded, you could sense that he was already licking his lips at the idea of opening Sally up and taking that look inside.

  The other medical people were staring at Chambers uncertainly. Feeling their eyes on him, Chambers looked from the X-rays to Rosen. ‘I’m going to have to.’

  ‘Operate?’ said Rosen. ‘There’s no internal injuries that we can see.’

  ‘Correct, Dr Rosen,’ said Dr Chambers. ‘No internal injuries that we can see. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any there. We have to operate in the best interests of the patient.’ He smiled. ‘And while we’re doing it of course, we can record all this for science. Full battery of tests, video and photographic record. This specimen’s unique!’

  At the word ‘specimen’, Sally jabbed a finger at the door, and Bobby started to push the trolley. As they went out the door, Chambers was continuing, ‘Wha
t’s her medical history?’

  ‘None,’ said Rosen.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Chambers. ‘Everyone’s got a medical history.’

  Rosen interrupted him. ‘With respect, sir. None. I just had the family doctor on the phone. She’s seen the parents, seen the brother, never seen Sally. The parents say she’s never been sick. Ever. From anything.’

  There was silence for a moment and then Chambers looked at the radiologist. ‘You say the bones actually knitted as you watched?’

  The radiologist nodded. ‘It was weird. I could see them knitting and straightening. They were already doing it when she came in. We just caught the last five minutes of it.’

  Chambers was like a dog looking at a big steak—he was practically slavering. ‘You realize we could be talking Nobel Prize here? All those people I went through university with. The ones who put me down. The ones who won the medals. They’re going to have to look up to me after this.’ His eyes were distant. ‘Shelley Watson who wouldn’t go to the medical students’ ball with me, Kay McGregor who said I looked like a frog, Patti Brahms who said she wouldn’t date me if I put a bag on my head and gave her ten dollars, they’ll be crawling on their bellies to me after this!’

  Chambers suddenly broke off, realizing that the others were watching him. Embarrassed at having revealed too much, he snapped out some orders to put them in their places. ‘No publicity on this. Absolute blackout. No one says anything. Rosen, I want a full batch of tests, I want to know everything about this kid that medical science can tell me.’ Then he paused, and a sweet, blissful smile spread across his face. ‘Then we’ll prep her and cut.’

  He turned and moved around the X-ray machine, expecting to see Sally on the trolley.

  His jaw dropped. His eyes bulged. For there was no trolley, and no Sally, just an empty space and the door still rocking slightly on its two-way hinges.

  chapter fourteen

  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.

  chapter fifteen

  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 fr
eak 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.’