the Palm Tree, told of suburban happiness with Bill’s family and lurid tales of romance on Bondi Beach. It was increasingly clear that Jane would not be returning home and that if she did few would remember what she had looked like when she left.
Medical interest in the case was more enduring. The newly diagnosed condition of ‘locked-in syndrome’, or LIS, was attracting large private sector and government research funding. LIS had a brief but spectacular history. First diagnosed in a Cape Town road traffic victim in 1985 it had quickly become verified by a string of similar cases from around the world. A conference at Berkeley in 1992 had set down the basic criteria for clinical diagnosis: the trauma which triggered the condition had to be both physical and mental – a combination of severe physical shock and intense stress. The Cape Town road traffic victim had been trapped in the back of a burning minibus, unable to break the windows or brave the flames which had engulfed the engine. The clinical symptoms were simple: the patient became comatose physically while all basic bodily functions operated as normal. The crucial difference between LIS and other comas was a high level of brain activity, a symptom only traceable with modern equipment. The victims remained aware of their surroundings, in some degree, throughout the ‘coma’. The result was what Second World War submariners would have called ‘silent running’ – vital systems only, vigilance, but otherwise no signs of life.
The number of cases was still small enough to secure Laura a kind of minor medical celebrity. Doctors came, professed themselves fascinated, made their examinations, took their readings, and left. Their professional objectivity led them to visit the illness rather than the patient, and they offered increasingly perfunctory sympathies for the victim. Dryden had negotiated anonymity through the British Medical Association and Laura appeared only as Case X – a device which protected her privacy but relegated her to the status of a forensic exhibit, pickled in a theoretical jar. The doctors who bothered to talk to Dryden rarely met his eye: in the thirty-four cases of LIS so far officially diagnosed only four had returned to normal life. All had said they recalled varying forms of consciousness while in the coma, ranging from almost total recall to a surreal remembrance of passing dreams.
Dryden had his doubts. He suspected he’d lost Laura for ever on the night of the accident. The nurses at the Tower preserved a professional optimism. They threw open the windows on fine days, used Laura’s room to chat and work in, and encouraged him to surround her with stimulating reminders of the life her mind continued to reject.
There was little doubt exactly what Laura’s mind was seeking to evade: the memory of the crash in Harrimere Drain. Three hours trapped in a car beneath the black water of the ditch. Three hours in which she could have had no choice but to blame him, as she struggled to understand why he wasn’t there, slowly retreating into a coma which denied the unacceptable reality that she had been abandoned to die. He had driven the car but escaped without her: as a bald statement of guilt it was as seemingly inescapable as the black water through which he had swum towards the moonlight.
He wanted her back so that he could tell her what really happened. What he didn’t want was a recovery which was incomplete. She was the perfect patient as she was: he wanted her back as she had been. What he feared most was a lifetime spent caring for someone who hated him, or worse despised him secretly. He had to be able to tell Laura exactly what happened that night at Harrimere Drain – and know that she believed him.
She had to know that it wasn’t his fear of water that stopped him going back.
Scared of water, or just scared? Cowardice born in the single image of the criss-cross pattern of his skates in ice seen above his drowning ten-year-old head.
Meanwhile the insurance company went on paying the bills – an unavoidable act of grace after Dryden had dropped the good name of the Mid-Anglian Mutual into every interview he had given in the months following Laura’s accident. One day they would resort to the small print on the policy and withdraw the funding, or at least take it to the courts. But he was prepared to move on to their savings, such as they were, and Laura’s parents had offered as well, willing to see their dreams of retirement modified, then abandoned. But the alternative was unspeakable – or at least unspoken. A steel bedstead in some tucked away ante-room in a hospital which would resent her consumption of scarce resources. Or worse, doctors willing to end it without pain.
Dryden began his ritual visit.
He threw the black greatcoat over a chair and unpacked the fresh food he had brought. Laura’s parents had owned a small Italian cafe in north London. He had used it as home when he was on the
Laura was short, compact, and olive brown. Her eyes were liquid brown and huge, her mouth was full – largely with gleaming teeth. Her hair was that particular coppery brown reserved for the Mediterranean. Laura projected a sense of humour, and a slight cast to one eye added a sexy nonconformism. She had the personality to fill a room and overwhelmed Dryden in the time it took to reorder the tortellini. In many ways she was his opposite: sensual, emotional, and a natural actor. She sprang from a family which had never failed to support her, which had never withheld its love, and she placed complete trust in those she loved as a result. Within a month Dryden had slipped effortlessly into this group assuming, unawares, a terrible responsibility.
Her father, a miniature Italian bandit perpetually dressed in a white cook’s apron, specialized in home-made pasta, fresh figs, and fruity sparkling wine for a small, but plump, group of expatriates. Laura never weighed more than seven stone, harbouring a morbid fear of ending up like the tribe of aunts which ate at the cafe on Sundays: black widows who brushed both sides of the corridor as they struggled out after a light meal that had taken two hours to eat. Her four younger brothers were slim and fit and Laura’s teenage life as a surrogate mother, while her own worked in the cafe, had left her little room for indulgence. She concentrated, instead, on the smell and texture of food. She would sit and wait for others to start a meal, taking in the flavours by scent. She breathed food and broke it, like good bread, to enjoy the physical sensations of eating. She filled their flat with fragrances of food, crushing coffee beans and pounding peppercorns, getting Dryden to make a larder below the stairs with a mesh window to let the aromas of cheeses, vegetables and herbs permeate their home.
So each day he brought fresh food. He poured two glasses of wine, always the light Frascati she loved, a little ceremony of hope. He brought music too and set the timer on the CD player to bring the sound on for a few hours each day – at dusk, and in mid-morning when he knew that if Laura was listening she would want the company of Motown and Verdi.
He always made himself look once at Laura’s face. A deathmask: quite unlike the real thing, but more compelling than a favourite snapshot. He always thought she looked frosted: dusted perhaps with a light covering of caster sugar, a perfect face set on the surface of a wedding cake.
Then he turned the lights down and sat looking out into the gardens. Tonight the frost was already white on the trees. The effects of the alcohol were fading fast. It was late but the sounds of the hospital continued: a trolley squeaked past in the corridor, somewhere teacups clinked, and a nurse’s sensible shoes tapped past on the lino outside the door. In the room above Roy Barnett was sleeping off his beer while his heart tip-tapped to an irregular beat.
Dryden’s routine started with reading out the cards, the letters, or sometimes just a newspaper. The doctors
