The Distant Home Page 6

  ‘The doctor who looks like a pink frog, Chambers, he called her a specimen.’

  ‘Dr Chambers said her powers of recuperation were very special,’ Rosen said, and waited.

  After a moment, Maria and Jim slowly nodded. ‘If it can help other people in the future, we’ll be pleased to cooperate,’ Maria said.

  Bobby slumped. With his parents believing Rosen, he knew that escape was now all up to him and Sally.

  chapter sixteen

  Chambers, looking remarkably like a giant pink frog in a white coat, stood by Sally’s bed in the private room they had brought her into. The nursing sister was standing a metre or so back from him, with a tray of instruments. ‘I don’t think my parents can afford a private room,’ she had said when they brought her in there, but Chambers had brushed that objection aside.

  Now he was explaining to her what he wanted to do. Sally did not like the way he was doing it. He seemed too eager to please, too eager to persuade her that nothing was the matter, too friendly in an oily kind of way. He was like kids at school who tried to talk you into things that you did not want to do. ‘It’s just a series of routine tests, nothing to worry about.’

  ‘If there’s nothing to worry about,’ said Sally, ‘why do you keep saying there’s nothing to worry about?’

  Chambers turned his smile on and off. ‘Cute,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be worried,’ he added. ‘Sometimes children don’t like hospital.’

  Sally decided to let the ‘children’ crack pass for the moment. If there was a child here, it was Chambers. He was like a baby wanting its own way at all costs. ‘Is it something to do with my internal organs being duplicated?’ she said, hoping to catch him off balance.

  He stared at her. ‘You know about your organs?’

  ‘I knew I had two heartbeats,’ said Sally. ‘Kids always feel their own heartbeats.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to tell anyone?’ Chambers was looking at her hard.

  ‘I didn’t realize it was unusual till I started reading books.’

  ‘And when was that, Sally? That you started reading books?’

  ‘I was about four, I guess. I found it in the encyclopaedia.’

  ‘Don’t lie to Dr Chambers!’ The nurse was looking at her angrily. ‘No one can read an encyclopaedia when they’re four!’

  ‘I’m not lying!’ Sally was flushed with anger, both at the nurse for accusing her, and at herself for having let slip the fact that she had learned to read long before she went to school. It was one of those things about her that seemed to worry other people, and that she therefore kept secret. ‘I learned to read early. Mum taught me,’ she improvised. This wasn’t strictly the truth. Sally had picked up reading by herself at the age of three, and when Maria discovered that her daughter had already started to read, she had provided her with books from the library. ‘And I found out about most people having only one heartbeat.’

  ‘And kept it a secret,’ said Chambers.

  ‘There’s a kid at school with six toes on one foot. He doesn’t like people to know,’ Sally said. Then added, ‘Because a really stupid insensitive person once called him a freak.’ And she looked at Chambers, psyching him out.

  ‘You’re not to use that tone of voice with Dr Chambers,’ snapped the nurse.

  ‘No, sister, I’m very interested in everything Sally’s saying,’ purred Chambers. ‘Very interested. Now, Sally, we’d like to take a blood sample. You’ll just feel a pin prick, no worse than an injection at the dentist.’

  ‘I’ve never had an injection at the dentist,’ Sally said. ‘All I ever have is check-ups.’

  ‘Perfect teeth?’ asked Chambers.

  Sally shrugged.

  Chambers gestured to the nursing sister, who moved in, and put an inflatable bandage around Sally’s left arm, and started to pump it using a rubber bulb.

  Sally looked on warily. ‘I don’t want to do this. Do you have my parents’ permission?’

  ‘You were admitted to casualty, Sally, we don’t need their permission,’ Chambers said.

  The sister picked up the syringe, and was about to slide the needle into the vein on the inside of Sally’s elbow.

  Sally looked at Chambers. ‘Before you do it, I have to tell you, you’re going to find something abnormal.’

  Chambers put up a hand to halt the nursing sister’s actions.

  ‘My blood’s a funny colour,’ Sally said, reluctantly. ‘About the same colour as moist copper sulphate crystals.’

  ‘Blue-green?’ Chambers said, his eyes narrowing in disbelief.

  ‘That’s what I said. I could never work it out.’

  Mrs Webster’s car pulled up outside her house in Middle Street. As she got out of the little car and headed for her house, she had one hand to her hearing aid, listening to Sally’s conversation with Dr Chambers.

  ‘You never told anyone?’ asked Chambers.

  ‘It’s like reading when you’re four,’ said Sally. ‘Would you have? It’s bad enough knowing you’re different, you don’t have to tell other people about it.’

  ‘A weird thing like that should’ve been picked up on school medicals,’ Chambers said. He hated it when a system failed. How had this kid slipped through the net for so long? Still, he was glad. If she had not evaded identification and capture, he thought, some other doctor, less worthy than he, would have got all the glory. As it was, the credit would be his now, all his. Maybe, if he felt generous, he would give Rosen a small mention.

  ‘Sarah Abels stands in for me,’ Sally said.

  Mrs Webster, entering her house, laughed out loud. ‘Good one!’ she said, and punched the air with one fist. She had a tigerish grin at the success of Sally’s tactic but there was still concern in her eyes and haste in her step. She headed for the kitchen and her appliances.

  In the private room in the hospital, Chambers was staring at Sally. ‘Sarah who does what?’

  Sally shrugged. ‘Sarah Abels stands in for me at school medicals. She’s my friend in a senior class. We play chess together. I knew the school doctor’d pick up on the heartbeats and make a big fuss, so I got her to stand in for me.’ She grinned. ‘One year they recommended I have glasses. Sarah’s got an astigmatism. That means a distortion of the lens of the eye.’

  ‘I happen to know what an astigmatism is!’ Chambers spluttered. The gall of this kid, explaining medical things to him! ‘I suppose,’ he said, his voice loaded with sarcasm, ‘I suppose you don’t have any problems with your eyesight. I suppose you’d have perfect vision, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t think that was anything to be ashamed of,’ said Sally.

  ‘Too much perfection in one person can be very suspicious, Sally,’ Chambers said. ‘It can make people wonder about you.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sally sighed. ‘That’s absolutely right.’

  Chambers nodded to the nursing sister. She pumped the inflatable bandage and then slid the needle into Sally’s vein. She was very good at her job, it really was just like being stuck with a pin.

  Sally looked down at the syringe slowly filling with the sample of her blood. Chambers and the nursing sister were also looking at it, but they were staring, transfixed.

  They had not truly believed what Sally had told them, but now they were seeing the truth of her statement with their own eyes. The blood was a beautiful blue-green colour.

  As Sally’s blood sample was being taken, Mrs Webster was busy in her kitchen. Rapidly, with the precise, disciplined movements of a well-trained soldier assembling a weapon, she unplugged the telephone from the wall and then plugged it in again to the back of the microwave oven. Then she swung round to the dishwasher and began pressing its programming buttons in a particular order. This process set the microwave going.

  Mrs Webster’s kitchen appliances were more than they seemed. All the while she was doing this, she was monitoring Sally’s conversation with Dr Chambers.

  ‘Your brother’s blood? Is it like yours?’ Chambe
rs asked.’

  ‘No,’ said Sally. ‘He’s always falling off bikes and out of trees, and his blood’s red like everybody else’s.’

  ‘But you’re twins,’ said Chambers.

  ‘But not identical,’ Sally explained, as she had explained to so many people before. ‘We’re only fraternal twins. Identical twins come from the division of the same ovum, so you just can’t have boy and girl identicals.’

  ‘I already know that!’ Chambers roared. This kid kept on lecturing him about medical matters! Then again, he thought, she knew more about twins than he did at her age. But, he thought, comforting himself, she was a twin, so naturally she knew more about it. It wasn’t as if she was any smarter than he was.

  ‘I usually have to explain things to people,’ Sally said, by way of apology.

  Dr Chambers was developing a twitch at one corner of his mouth.

  chapter seventeen

  Mrs Webster was tapping the buttons of her telephone, like a Morse Code operator. She was punching in a message.

  As she did so, the transparent door of the microwave oven was suddenly no longer transparent. It was like a video screen on which words were appearing. At least, they looked like words, but they were not in English, and not even written in letters that anyone in Middle Street would have recognized. The strange words in their strange script scrolled over the screen from bottom to top and right to left.

  As she punched in her code, Mrs Webster was muttering to herself. ‘Code’s rusty. This better work. Codename Webster breaking deep cover … trouble … red alert.’ And all the while she continued monitoring what was happening to Sally in the hospital.

  ‘How long do I have to stay here?’ Sally said, as Chambers and the nursing sister headed for the door.

  Chambers paused. ‘I’ll be discussing that with your parents,’ he said.

  ‘Why not discuss it with me?’ Sally told him. ‘I do understand the issues involved.’

  ‘I’ll discuss it with your parents!’ Chambers almost yelled. He and the sister went out and he slammed the door. As Sally rolled out of bed, she heard a key turn in the lock. They had locked her in!

  She tried the door to test it, but it was definitely locked. She spun away, moved quickly to the wardrobe, opened it and sighed with relief when she found her own clothes in there.

  Swiftly, she slipped out of her hospital smock, and dressed in her ordinary clothes. Now at least she would be ready to move when she got the chance.

  Sally was intent on escape. Bobby had told her that Mrs Webster had said it was important for her to get out of there, and on a matter like this she tended to take Mrs Webster’s word. Also, she totally distrusted Dr Chambers, whom she had already summed up as being a bully who just wanted his own way, whatever it cost other people. She certainly didn’t want to be in the power of anyone like him.

  As Sally was dressing, Chambers and the nursing sister were moving away down the corridor.

  ‘Who else knows about this?’ Chambers was saying.

  ‘Just you, me, Dr Rosen and the radiologist,’ the sister replied.

  ‘It goes no further,’ Chambers said. ‘I’m relying on you.’

  The sister nodded. In her experience, when people told her that they were relying on her, it was a very polite threat. There always was an ‘or else’ there that had not been spoken.

  In the X-ray department, Rosen was already busy with Bobby, Maria and Jim. Bobby had just been scanned and now it was Jim and Maria’s turn.

  ‘See?’ Bobby had said. ‘Perfectly normal. Your machine just went bananas when Sally was in it.’

  Rosen ignored him and ushered Maria to the machine.

  Meanwhile Sally was dressed and using the telephone in her room. By experimenting she had worked out the number to call for the switchboard, and now she was using her best deep adult voice to speak to the operator. ‘Could you page Dr Bobby please, I’m on three one two.’

  ‘Dr Bobby?’ asked the puzzled operator.

  ‘Yes, Dr Bobby. That’s …’ Sally hesitated, then spelled it out, ‘that’s B-O-B-B-I. He’s … he’s from India. On attachment, only arrived this week.’

  ‘Paging him,’ said the operator, and Sally hung up, and let out a breath of relief. She hadn’t been sure that she would get away with it.

  In the lobby, the desk clerk was leaning forward and speaking into the microphone. ‘Dr Bobbi please. Dr Bobbi …’

  The voice floated through the hospital, ignored by everyone whose name was not ‘Dr Bobbi’.

  In the X-ray department, Jim was in the machine with Maria watching anxiously. Bobby was in one corner, planning his next move. For a moment he did not react to what he was hearing. ‘Paging Dr Bobbi. Dr Bobbi, there’s a call for you on line four,’ said the soft voice coming from the paging system.

  Bobby was stunned for a moment. Maybe there was a Dr Bobby working in the hospital. No, he didn’t believe that. It must be Sally trying to reach him. He looked around, saw a telephone on a desk, moved to it, picked it up, and then sat down out of sight behind the desk with the phone in his lap. He picked up the receiver and pressed button number four on the main pad. That did not work. Then he saw the little buttons above the main ones, and pressed the fourth one from the left.

  ‘Dr Bobby here,’ he said, dropping his voice.

  ‘Bobby,’ said Sally’s voice, ‘got to be quick. They might come. The extension number written on the phone is three one two, so that’s probably the room number as well. There are bars on the windows, they’ve deadlocked the door.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bobby, improvising a plan, ‘I’ll be there soon as I can. A fire axe should deal with the door.’

  ‘No fire axes, Bobby,’ said Sally. ‘Just get up here. Room three twelve.’

  ‘Right. Soon as I get clear,’ he was saying, when a shadow fell across him. He looked up to find himself looking up into the pink froglike face of Dr Chambers. The thin lips were stretched into what Dr Chambers obviously thought was a smile. ‘Hello Bobby,’ he said. ‘I need your blood.’

  ‘I think I have to go now,’ Bobby said into the phone, ‘I’ll make basketball practice just as soon as I can.’

  chapter eighteen

  Sally was standing on her bed examining the air-conditioning ducting when she heard the key rattle in the door’s deadlock. Immediately, she got down and was smoothing the bed covers when Dr Rosen entered with another woman. The second woman carried a briefcase and wore the same sort of black business suit that Auntie Kate often wore when she was making court appearances. Sally thought she looked as if she were a professional of some sort.

  ‘Sally, this is Dr Allport,’ Dr Rosen said, and then noticed Sally’s clothing. ‘Changed our clothes, have we?’

  ‘I’m feeling fine,’ Sally bluffed. ‘I thought I might check myself out now. Mum and Dad must be worried.’

  ‘Oh I’m afraid we can’t just check ourselves out quite yet, dear. We’ve had a very serious accident. Dr Allport is going to ask you to do some simple tests.’

  Allport was already getting some papers from her briefcase. Sally recognized them as the sort of tests she had occasionally done at school. ‘Intelligence or personality tests?’ she asked.

  Allport shot a glance at her as if to say that nice little girls did not ask questions like that, then said, ‘A bit of both, Sally. Dr Chambers was interested to know …’

  ‘What made me tick?’

  ‘… what made you tick. Yes. Very good.’ Allport was putting the first test down on the trolley table that fitted over the bed.

  ‘Do you want me to get them all right?’ asked Sally.

  ‘That’s an interesting question, Sally,’ said Dr Allport.

  ‘Sometimes when I do them at school, they say I’m cheating.’

  ‘And why do they say that?’ said Dr Allport in a silky, confiding kind of way.

  ‘I sometimes get too many right. They seem happier when I get a few wrong.’

  Allport smiled. She had a nice smi
le, but Sally felt that she was being humoured as a quaint little girl. She had had a lot of that in her life. ‘I want you to try to get all of them right, but don’t worry if you can’t finish in time. There’s no shame in that. No shame at all.’

  She handed Sally a pen. ‘Shall we begin?’

  In another room in the hospital, Bobby’s blood flowed dark red into the barrel of a hypodermic syringe. The sister took the needle from his vein and put a gauze pad on the puncture mark. ‘Press hard there,’ she said.

  Bobby put his thumb on the gauze pad, and looked at the syringe full of his blood. ‘You realize that was technically a criminal assault?’

  Chambers gestured at Maria and Jim. ‘But Bobby, we had your parents’ permission. You saw them sign the form.’

  ‘It’s just to help their experiment,’ Bobby said to Maria and Jim. ‘They want to see if we’re all freaks like Sally.’

  ‘Your sister’s not a freak!’ Jim was getting very sick of this.

  ‘What do you say, Doctor?’ Bobby was glaring at Chambers.

  Chambers stretched his face into his froglike smile. ‘I say we’re acting in your best interests, Bobby.’

  Bobby looked at Jim and Maria. ‘Mrs Webster’s always warned me against people who say that,’ he said. ‘She says it means they’re up to no good.’

  Dr Chambers looked at Bobby the way teachers did when he answered back. Chambers yearned for the good old days when you could give boys like this a good thrashing without being unreasonably accused of child abuse.

  In the private room, Sally was skimming through her IQ test, scarcely pausing at the questions. It was as if she knew the test by heart, and was just ticking the boxes from memory.

  Dr Allport stared at Sally’s speeding pen. Now she looked at the stopwatch on the top righthand corner of her clipboard and then back as Sally finished the test and handed her the papers. ‘I hope you were reading the questions, Sally? And not just ticking the boxes any old how?’

  ‘I read the questions when you handed me the papers.’

  ‘I saw you glance through the sheets.’