CHAPTER 22
Warren Street
I’VE NEVER been one of those people who tells everyone they’re fine and tries to climb out of their hospital bed. Feeling as shit as I did is your body’s way of telling you to lie the fuck down and take in fluids—preferably intravenously—so that’s what I did.
I was a little surprised that they took me to UCH, which was not the closest casualty unit, until Dr. Walid appeared in my treatment cubicle and proceeded to loom over the shoulder of the junior doctor who was treating me for various cuts, bruises, scrapes, and possible exposure. To give him credit, the junior doctor, who—from his accent—had inherited his breezy confidence and a private education from his parents, tried for professional insouciance. But there’s just something uniquely intimidating about a wiry six-foot Scot. Once he’d arranged to have a nurse come and put the actual bandages on, he gave me a professional smile and legged it out of there as fast he could.
By day Dr. Walid is a world-renowned gastroenterologist, but by night he dons his sinister white coat and becomes England’s foremost expert on cryptopathology. Anything weird that turns up, living or dead, gets examined by Dr. Walid—including me and Lesley.
“Good evening, Peter,” he said as he advanced on me. “I was hoping you’d make it all the way to Christmas intact.”
He became the fifth person to shine a light in my eyes to check for pupil reactions. Or perhaps he was looking for something different.
“Does this mean you’re going to stick me back in the MRI?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” said Dr. Walid with great relish. “Between you and Lesley I’m finally beginning to develop some decent data on what happens to your brain when you become a practitioner.”
“Anything I should know about?”
“Early days yet,” he said. “But I’d like to get you booked in as soon as possible, I’m supposed to be on the train to Glasgow this afternoon.”
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
Dr. Walid perched on the edge of the bed and scribbled a few notes on a clipboard. “I always go back to Oban for the holidays.”
“So the rest of your family aren’t Muslims, then?”
Dr. Walid chuckled. “Oh no,” he said. “Loyal sons and daughters of the Kirk, each and every one of them. Very dour, serious people except at this time of the year. They celebrate Christmas and I celebrate them. Besides, they’re always pleased to see me since I bring the bird to the feast.”
“You bring the turkey?”
“Of course,” said Dr. Walid, “I have to be sure it’s properly halal after all.”
TRUE TO his word, I was decanted into a wheelchair and raced up to the imaging department, where they stuck my head in the MRI. It’s an expensive piece of kit and has a strict waiting list for tests, which Dr. Walid seems to ride roughshod over at will. When I asked him where his extraordinary privileges came from he explained that the Folly, through a charity first established in 1872, made a contribution to the hospital finances and in return he got to preempt nonemergency cases.
The techs who ran the MRI had been seeing me and Lesley on a regular basis since the summer—God knows what they thought I had. Some form of rare brain cancer, I suppose. I must have been getting used to the machine, because despite the sledgehammer sound of the magnetic coils I drifted off to sleep mid-scan.