The Fall

36

Sam made the introductions as he drove along the dirt track, “This is Zita Prestwyck. Zita, this is the Reverend Thomas Hather.’

‘Great to meet you.’ It was a typical Zita greeting. Hearty, vigorous, with an almost knuckle-cracking handshake. Sam clocked Thomas’s look of surprise at the firm grip. He also noticed this 19^th Century clergyman’s next expressions of surprise as he registered Zita’s sassy tiger-patterned leggings and bare arms, her T-shirt, and the studs and chains in her ears and nose.

And just wait until you see the stud in the tongue, Sam thought. That will really blow your socks off.

In the back seat, clutching his cloth cap in both hands, Thomas gave a sharp shake of his head, obviously suspecting that this was a hallucination. He squeezed the arm-rests experimentally, looked round at the interior of the car, then stared out of the window at the meadow flying past at a dizzy rate.

‘This road engine travels at a greater rate than I could have imagined,’ he said in a small voice.

‘We’re doing almost 40,’ Sam called back over his shoulder. ‘Just wait until we hit the road, then I can really open her up.’

‘Open her up? Then it will only take a few moments to reach town?’

‘If it’s a clear run I can make it easily in five minutes.’

‘Five minutes. Dear Lord… dear Lord…. at one mile a minute that means you will be travelling at 60 miles per the hour. That’s impossible.’

Zita looked back over her shoulder. ‘Best wear your seatbelt.’

Thomas’s look of bemused innocence intensified. His mouth hung open as he looked round for the seatbelt… whatever that might be.

‘Here, let me.’

Zita knelt upon the passenger seat facing backwards; quickly she fastened the seatbelt across the surprised man.

‘When you want to release the seatbelt, just press this button firmly. Okay?’

‘Okay. Very okay.’

‘The countryside’s changed a hell of a lot,’ Zita said as she strapped herself back in. ‘All those crappy electricity pylons have gone.’

‘And look at the fields.’ Sam nodded. ‘Look how small they are.’

‘And all those hedgerows and trees. It looks like a different country.’

On the main road Sam took the car up to 60. He’d expected the roads to be like rutted cart-tracks, but if this was an average example of an 1860s road, then they were pretty good. The carriageway didn’t consist of blacktop. There were no white lines, or any camber to speak of. Instead the road was a broad strip of dazzling white. Probably limestone chippings rolled down until they formed a hard, flat surface. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he noticed the wheels were kicking up a hell of a lot of dust. To anyone watching the car pass by it would look as if steam was rising in a plume from its back.

He concentrated on the road. It didn’t have curves so much as sharp elbow-crook bends. It had been designed for foot and horse, not for a 1999 Range Rover that was easily capable of hitting a hundred on a good stretch of late 20^th Century road-tar.

As with the 1940s roads there was a goodly amount of horse dung. The car’s big tyres zipped through this with a slish-slash sound.

His arms and shoulders began to ache from the tension of gripping the steering wheel so tightly. He realised also that the car was turning the heads of people walking along the road. And in contrast to the 20^th Century habit of walking at the side of the road on pavements, most of these people walked in the middle, expecting to encounter nothing faster than a horse-drawn mail coach. Sam made free use of the horn, yet still he had to steer a zig-zag line to avoid flattening astonished locals, who watched open-mouthed as the metal box on wheels roared down on them.

‘Good Lord,’ Thomas repeated over and over in the back. ‘Good Lord… The saints protect us… Oh, good Lord…’

‘Thomas,’ Sam called without taking his eyes off the road. ‘Sing out which road to take when we get into Casterton.’

‘Yes… I – Oh, good Lord…’

Sam weaved round a horse drawing a cart piled high with cow hides. The horse reared between its shafts at the sound of the car.

‘Oh Lord, don’t frighten the horses, Sam. Don’t frighten them.’

‘I’ll try not to.’ He laid off using the horn and eased down the speed a little. But the fact of the matter was that he wanted to get to the Middleton household as fast as possible.

So Carswell thinks I’m crazy, he told himself. But they could save a life here. In any day or year that was important in itself. But, again, he realised here was an opportunity to show that humankind weren’t passive victims waiting for the Grim Reaper’s scythe to cut them low. They could build hospitals, train doctors, develop medicines. And sometimes, God willing, they could slap Death in the face and send it on its way with its tail between its legs.

‘Watch out for the geese!’

He braked at the sound of Zita’s warning. There, waddling in front of the car, were a dozen fat geese being driven along the road to market.

‘How far to the Middletons’ place?’

‘A mile, a little less.’

‘Damn geese.’ He honked the horn. The geese honked back. Carefully, he eased the car forward, pushing a path through the big birds.

Beside him, Zita had taken a paperback book from the briefcase and was riffling through the pages. He noticed that her hands had begun to shake.

He guessed it was one of Dot Campbell’s textbooks from the time when she’d been a nurse. ‘What does that say about diphtheria?’

She read aloud: ‘An acute bacterial infection primarily affecting the nose, throat and larynx. Death results from the growth of a membrane across the throat that chokes the child. And it says here it can be cured with penicillin.’

‘God bless you, Sir Alexander Fleming.’

‘The problem is it doesn’t give any dosages.’

‘So we don’t know how much to inject into the boy?’

‘No.’

‘But is it possible to OD on penicillin? It’s not as if it’s a narcotic, is it?’

‘Search me.’

Sam glanced at Thomas in the rear-view mirror. He was concentrating hard on the conversation, and though he probably didn’t understand it completely he caught the gist. ‘You think you can treat the Middleton boy?’

‘We’re going to try, Thomas. We’re going to try.’

Thomas nodded, his expression tight with worry. ‘Then we really must hurry. If I’ve been called he won’t have much time.’

‘You’ve got it.’ Sam accelerated into town, He was concentrating almost every shred of nervous energy into getting the car through the narrowing streets in one piece. Even so, he noticed the buildings were lower, and everywhere there were little cottages, looking like children’s toys that had been gathered up in great handfuls and tossed higgledy-piggledy around the town centre.

A pall of smoke from domestic fires painted a grimy streak across an otherwise perfect blue sky.

Sam noticed Zita staring too. Women in long skirts walked briskly along the street carrying absurdly large shopping baskets. Every man in sight wore a hat of some kind. The working classes had soft brown caps while the professional classes favoured high top hats that were such a shiny black that they made him think of black liquorice. The hats were complemented by frock coats from which could be glimpsed the starched cuffs and collars of shirts that were a dazzling white. These were sharp-dressed men, no doubting that.

And everyone was hurrying, too. So much for the myth of past ages being slower, less stressful, more relaxed. The town centre was hustling and bustling like any modern street in New York, London, Paris, Rome – you name it. This was like an ant heap that had been prodded with a stick.

They were hurrying busily, that was, until they saw the car. Again he was conscious of people stopping to stare at what must have appeared to them a monstrous contraption roaring through their safe little market town.

Sam had to keep the speed down to 20 now to avoid people who simply walked out into the road to stare at the car.

At that moment he wanted to yell at them to shift their butts out of the goddamn way. A mental image of the boy lying feverishly in bed, drowning in his own sputum, suddenly sizzled its way into his brain as savagely as a red-hot cattle brand. He could almost hear the hiss of air through the boy’s throat as the diphtheria membrane sealed the airway shut.

‘Move it, move it,’ he muttered. Sweat dripped down into his eyes. Beside him Zita sat with the book open in one hand while she stared at an ampoule of penicillin in the other.

‘Christ, this is going to be kill or cure,’ she muttered to herself.

‘Sam, turn left here. Yes! By the cooper’s.’

‘The cooper’s? Oh, the barrel maker’s?’

Sam turned into the side street. It was hellishly narrow. If a horse turned up in the other direction there’d be pandemonium.

‘How far now?’ Sam called.

‘A hundred yards or so. It’s the first one in a row of redbrick villas. You can’t – There, Sam, there it is! Red door.’

Sam braked hard. The car slithered over the cobbled street, the back end fishtailing as the tyres lost their grip.

‘Okay, Thomas,’ Sam said, slipping off his seatbelt. ‘Just lead the way. We’ll follow.’

Already a crowd had gathered outside the house. Sam realised that this was the age when life revolved around the home. People were born in their parents’ bedrooms. They died in their own homes, too. It would be another 80 years or so before it would become the custom for lives to begin as well as end in hospitals.

At first, he glared in fury at the crowd of men, women and children standing at the door, thinking that this was some ghoulish kind of spectator sport. But then he saw their expressions.

With all medical help gone, and all hope gone, friends and neighbours were mounting a silent and respectful vigil. They were offering moral support to the man and woman inside the house as their child slipped into that final coma.

The crowd parted as the vicar made his way to the front door.

Sam didn’t doubt that he and Zita attracted puzzled stares, but they were focused on what they had to do now.

Inside the house it was still gloomy, and strangely cool despite the heat of the summer’s day. All the curtains were drawn.

Sam couldn’t really see in front of Thomas or hear what was said, but soon they were climbing the stairs, led by a woman of around 50 in long skirts.

Already Sam’s tongue had dried. He’d never seen a dying child before. And suddenly the landing in front of him when he reached the top of the stairs was filled with a kind of dark fog. He realised all this frightened him to the bone. He was frightened to see a child dying; he was frightened to see the parents, their hearts torn to little pieces by grief.

He glanced at Zita beside him. She clutched the briefcase to her chest, her eyes large in the gloom.

The walk along that landing to a closed door seemed to take forever. It was a dark and terrible journey. He’d never experienced anything like this before. Not even when the lightning bolt had flung him from that tree and killed his friends.

Then he’d been numbed by physical as well as emotional shock.

But here every nerve ending was made sensitive to a near-unbearable degree. A lavender smell flooded his nostrils; he heard the whispery rustle of feet against the polished boards; even in this gloom he could still see individual dust motes lit by what little sunlight needled its way through microscopic holes in the velvet drapes.

The woman opened the door.

Sam licked his dry lips. This was it. There was no going back now.

With the curtains drawn, the nursery bedroom lay deep in gloom.

The first thing Sam heard was a crackling, like brown paper being quickly scrunched in someone’s hands. Then he heard the constant yet very low moan of a child in pain.

He thought he was prepared for what he’d see.

But the reality was still a shock.

A tiny face lay half-buried among the bedclothes while two tiny fists gripped the top of a sheet. There was some kind of exhausted desperation in that grip. It was as if the hands were trying to stop the sheets sliding up over the face and stifling what life there was left.

And, dear God, that face was so grey. So incredibly grey. The colour of wet putty. A fringe of brown hair was stuck down against the pallid forehead. Again emphasising the pitiful grey that radiated its deathly pallor.

The boy’s eyes were partly closed, with the pupils fixed on a point just above the window as if he was watching something there. The crackling in his lungs grew louder. He tried to cough out the sputum but didn’t have the strength. His chest beneath the blanket merely shook slightly, interrupting the laboured breathing before it continued again in achingly shallow gasps.

Sam stopped, feeling as if he’d just taken a blow in the stomach. He heard the blood stop dead abruptly in his neck for what seemed whole moments. Then it started again with a deadly thudding sound.

Suddenly he felt their intrusion into this death was crude; fuelled by his arrogance. They had no right to be here. No right at all.

Thomas sounded in control. In a very low, very soft voice he said, ‘Dr Goldman.’

The doctor looked up. A middle-aged man with dark crinkly hair and soulful eyes that expressed nothing but a tired despair.

‘Ah, Reverend,’ he said softly, as if not to wake the boy. ‘I’m glad to see you. Very glad.’ He directed those brown soulful eyes in the direction of a young man and woman who sat side by side on straight-backed chairs beside the bed. Sam realised these must be the mother and father. Both leaned forward to watch their sick son with such a look of concentration on their faces that Sam realised they were willing their child to breathe. He even saw the mother take a large breath every now and again as if she could somehow breathe for both of them.

Ever so gently, with a compassion that sent a shiver down Sam’s spine, Thomas rested his hands on the shoulders of the parents. Then he spoke to them in a low murmuring voice.

Zita stood statue-like beside him, watching without moving a muscle.

Oh, God. This was a tableau he’d seen in old paintings.

The child’s deathbed scene. The parents sitting at one side of the bed. The doctor at the other, his strained face revealing his frustration and sorrow at being able to do nothing on God’s Earth for the child. And the child itself, dying by inches.

Sam could almost hear the undertaker’s hammer pounding nails into coffin wood, and the scraping of the gravedigger’s spade opening a pitifully small slot in the ground.

Again he felt that Zita and he were ugly intruders. Blundering into a place where they simply did not belong.

He looked down again at that grey face. Impossibly grey. It was if all the grey in the world was contained therein fantastic concentration.

And the little boy’s partly-open eyes still gazed at the curl of torn wallpaper above the curtain.

At that moment the father turned to Sam and Zita. He was a young man, not much more than a boy himself, yet with old eyes behind his spectacles. ‘The Reverend’s just told us that you’ve come here to try and help Harry. I’m grateful.’ He spoke in a soft voice, barely above a whisper. ‘Believe me when I say I am. Thank you. But—’

Sam turned cold.

‘Dr Goldman here’s done his very best. And the little lad’s fought his hardest… but he’s suffered so much in the last few days. We think he should be left to his peace now.’

Sam said gently, ‘We won’t disturb him. Or hurt him. We can give him an injection that will—’

The man shook his head. ‘Thank you for your concern. But, no. We wish to let him go now… It’s really more than our flesh and blood can stand to see him endure anymore.’

Sam was going to try again, but Zita caught his eye. She gave a tiny shake of her head. No, she was saying. Let them be.

He nodded at the man. For a moment he wanted to express his sympathy to him and his wife. But there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t sound so crass it would jangle from those walls like the coarsest of insults.

Sam and Zita backed out of the room, leaving the doctor gazing at the dying boy’s face, the parents still willing the boy to breathe, while the Reverend Thomas Hather stood behind them with his hands on their shoulders.

In a moment Sam and Zita were outside in the glaring brilliance of a summer’s afternoon.

Sam felt chewed up and spat out by the events of the past few moments.

He’d given it his best shot.

Not good enough, Sam, old buddy. Not nearly good enough.

He followed Zita to the car. It was covered in chalky smears from the drive into town. A few people were taking a close interest in it. A boy had climbed onto the bonnet to look in through the windscreen. An old man was poking one of the tyres with his walking stick.

Zita leaned against a wall, holding the briefcase to her chest. She looked exhausted.

Sam leaned against the wall next to her.

‘I screwed up,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I screwed up royal’

‘We did our best. But you’ve got to respect the parents’ wishes. Besides, I don’t think I could have given the boy the injection anyway.’ She shrugged, looking sick with herself. ‘I wouldn’t have had the guts.’

Across the town came the sound of a church clock striking two. Sam allowed his gaze to range across the street with its people hurrying to and fro. He noticed a good number of them were limping. There were people with legs that were so bowed they curved outwards until they looked as if they’d exchanged legs for springy bamboo canes. A girl of around 15 stared at him as she walked by, surprised at his and Zita’s bizarre clothes. The girl had a cruel squint, with one eye turned in to stare down the left hand side of her nose.

Squints, rickets, bow legs. The kind of medical problems that were ironed out of the human race after the Second World War by vitamin supplements and state-of-the-art medical care. Now he saw that perhaps one in five of all passers-by was suffering from some visible deformity or disability. This was the age when a glitch in your bone structure or a cast in your eye just couldn’t be fixed. So you stayed with the limp or squint all your life. He also noticed a couple of women with pink crinkled skin on their necks and faces; no doubt burn scars from nightdresses catching alight after brushing against lamps. Hadn’t he read somewhere once that in the 19^th Century perhaps as many children were killed by their clothes catching fire as from disease?

Despite killer viruses, homicidal psychopaths, terrorists and speeding cars, 1999 suddenly seemed a very safe place to be.

‘Well,’ Sam said at last, ‘shall we be getting back to our little patch of tomorrow at the amphitheatre?’

‘Why not?’ she sighed. ‘I’m going to go down on my bended knees and beg a brandy from Carswell.’

‘Yeah, why not?’ He walked towards the car, feeling dirty and tired, and wishing for nothing more than to slide into a hot bath.

Yeah, in your dreams, Sam, old buddy.

He avoided looking up at the curtained window behind which the little boy lay dying. Shame and guilt were working hard together in his gut and he didn’t like the sensation. He didn’t like it one little bit.

He reached into his pocket for the remote to unlock the doors. As he did so he felt a hand touch his elbow.

He turned round to see a woman of about 25 looking earnestly at him through eyes that were so red and sore-looking that it seemed as if sand had been rubbed into them.

It only took him a moment to realise that she was the dying boy’s mother. She looked emotionally wrung out, her voice was a rasping whisper, but she was calm. ‘Sir… sir.’ She fixed those painfully sore eyes on him. ‘You won’t hurt him? You can give your word?’

He looked at Zita.

‘It’s just an injection,’ Zita said gently. ‘But we need to be as quick as we can.’

The boy’s mother nodded and hurried back to the house with both following.

Sam asked Zita in a low voice, ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’ve never injected a human being. I don’t know how much penicillin to use. I’ve never been so scared in my life before.’ She shot him a tiny smile. ‘But I’m going to do my level best.’

They went back into the house and up the stairs. Back across that darkened landing with dust motes hanging like silver stars in the air. Sam’s mouth was dry. The fate of the child was in Zita’s hands now. Maybe in God’s, too.