The Caregiver Would Like a Drink Now
FAWKES RODE A prolonged and horrible wave of adrenaline in the ambulance, lasting from the suburbs all along the A104 into London. Panic sluiced into his veins whenever he looked at Roddy struggling to breathe. The boy’s grey face registered not only acute discomfort, but a kind of dreadful, wide-eyed surprise, as if each time the boy pulled for breath his body was telling him something is wrong, something is scary, I’m not getting enough. And every few seconds he had to do it again. Fill the lungs. And then: terror. Fawkes kept up a reassuring patter for a time. It’s going to be all right, Roddy. But he kept having visions of Theo’s body bag. The aluminum sinks. He was afraid that if he said anything more, these images would somehow leap from his mind into Roddy’s. So he shut up. Merely placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. What the fuck am I doing here, doing this? Fawkes wondered. Why me? I’m the last person anyone wants as a nursemaid, a caregiver. He kept waiting for the ambulance to stop; for the doors to swing open and for some mature, responsible individual to launch himself into the back of the ambulance with the vigor and confidence of an expert, and say All right, thanks for bringing him this far, Piers; you’re all done; you can hit the pub. This person would wear a joking, knowing smile; this person would know all about him, that he was a drunk, a poet, not the man for this job. But nobody did. So far, they appeared to take him seriously. They appeared to believe he was in the right place. The ambulance bumped along. Fawkes kept his hand on Roddy’s shoulder. This was like wartime, he observed. When people were drafted to do things they were not prepared to do, and then did them anyway.
At the hospital, they were separated. The EMTs rolled Roddy into triage, then into the jammed staging area. Fawkes was instructed to sit on the benches in the corridor. He waited. A doctor eventually came out through the door. He was a bald man with an intense manner. They were wheeling Roddy upstairs, he said. Did Fawkes need to notify the parents? Of course—but where were they taking him? To the chest center. Where he would receive a cocktail of unpronounceable drugs. The doctor actually cited survival rates. Then, before Fawkes could recover, the doctor vanished and the Health Protection representative, a smiling man with a mustache and an earring, appeared. Fawkes just murmured, told Mr. Earring what he wanted to know, and filled out a sheet on a clipboard. At last he was left alone again.
He felt trembly, pale, weak. These were things he did not understand. Things he could not control. He remembered precisely the half-dozen wine bars they had passed on their way to the hospital. He could nose the booze from a block away, like a shark sniffing blood. God, if he could, he would have taken one of those black rubber blotters on the bar—the ones with the little rubber cilia to hold up the glasses, but leave room for the spill—and would have lifted it to his lips, and drunk the tepid soapy water, just to taste the diluted white wine and ale mixed in. He closed his eyes to regain control. He wanted a drink, he needed a drink. No one knew where he was. Roddy did not need him, not for some time anyway. He was going to have a drink. A couple of pints, to stabilize him, warm him up. Or a gin. He knew he shouldn’t. He stood anyway. It would only take thirty minutes. Maybe forty-five.
At that moment he felt the reminder-buzz of the cell phone in his jacket pocket. He flipped it open, hands trembling. Voicemail.
His hands shook harder. He stood staring at the phone in his palm.
It was enough to stop the momentum.
He would not have that drink.
The frenzy of desire passed him by.
Saved.
Whatever message this was, he said to himself in a kind of prayer, he would remember it forever. Someone selling insurance, holidays in Majorca, whatever it was. He pressed a button to listen to it. He heard a voice he knew—who was it, that accent?—and listened to Andrew’s message.
If you don’t come get us, I’m not sure what’s going to happen.
An unaccustomed flood of feeling overcame him. He had avoided close relationships for so long that the closest thing he had to a friend, in that moment, was a seventeen-year-old American whom he hadn’t even met a few months prior. He viewed the selfish, snarky, cold-blooded creature he had become, and felt the acid sting of regret.
Piers Fawkes sank back onto the bench without listening to the whole message. He pressed his hands to his face and, abruptly, began to weep. His shoulders shook. His hands grew wet. People continued passing him in the hallway. This was not so unusual a sight in a hospital. The staff knew to let grief run its course.
ANDREW SETTLED ONTO yet another examining table expecting another round of testing, prodding, injecting. The original nurse had returned and handed him his bag of clothes. He had grown so pliant and passive, he received them like a hostage: ransomed, but still broken in spirit. She told him to complete his paperwork at the desk on his way out, and that someone from the school would come to take him and Rhys back to Harrow so they would not have to take public transport. She reminded him to avoid direct contact with others as much as possible until the tests came back, and to specifically avoid travel; to stay in contact with the hospital . . . the instructions continued. He repeated “okay” several times. Then she left. He began to dress. With each article of clothing, a layer of dignity returned. The school uniform now—to his own surprise—lent him a wily sense of adventure, as if he were disguising himself for a masked ball. The Harrow School uniform: what a cheeky rebuke to this whitewashed medical maze. Soon he stood outside the examining room door, in his greyers, bluers, and black tie.
Over to the right, he saw glass-windowed doors that were dark inside. Next to them were wide windows. He stared. Something in his mind turned. Antechamber. Hadn’t Dr. Minos used that word to describe the units where tuberculosis patients—the advanced ones—were treated?
Roddy, he thought.
The halls were quiet. A nurse sat behind a glass partition, staring at a desktop computer. Footsteps passed and receded. Andrew went to the first darkened door. Felt the handle. It turned. He entered the antechamber. He heard the whir of a ventilation system. He had five feet to change his mind. He opened the second door. He saw a television set on an extending metal arm, and blinds, closed, admitting a white glow.
“H-hello?”
No answer.
He opened the door more widely. Pushed his head inside.
The bed was made. The room was empty.
He retreated back to the corridor. He had been inside only a few seconds. Nothing had changed. Andrew quickly crossed to the next antechamber door. This handle also turned. As soon as he entered, he knew this room would be occupied: the blinds, in the interior room, were cracked; and while the television remained off, there was another source of illumination: a bank of lights on the ceiling, emitting an intense aqua blue. Ultraviolet lights to kill the mycobacteria. Andrew pressed inside. Lumps in the sheets—a patient. No one in the visitor chairs—a patient alone.
“Hi . . . is, is that Roddy?”
The lump in the bed stirred. A clear oxygen mask turned to see the visitor. The pale, round face of his next-door neighbor gazed at him. Roddy sat up.
“What are you doing here?” came the muffled demand.
It was followed by a round of coughing. Not a smoker’s cough. Not a hacking, laryngeal cough. This cough used the whole thorax, as if Roddy’s chest were a bag full of wet sponges being flogged with a carpet beater. Andrew recoiled. Roddy held the oxygen mask to his face tighter, as if a better grip on it could restore him.
“The doctors think you have TB. . . . because you have HIV or AIDS,” Andrew said quickly. “That’s not true, is it? You haven’t . . .”
Roddy’s brows furrowed angrily. “I thought this place was a hospital. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah! All they want to know, is if I bugger my friends! I said, don’t you have medical training? I can’t breathe, you’re worried that I take it in the arse? It’s my lungs that need help—not my arse! I might have been a doctor if I’d known all I had to do was inquire about . . .”
His tirade gave way to another cough. This time Andrew witnessed the panic in Roddy’s face as the cough extended through the length of what anyone would consider a normal cough, then continued, then continued some more. At last it subsided. Roddy wheezed. He sucked greedily on the oxygen mask. Suddenly its narrow air tube seemed woefully inadequate. Andrew hesitated, not sure whether he should stay. But he needed an answer; needed to confirm the suspicion that had struck him during his conversation with Dr. Minos.
“Roddy,” he said. “When you first got it . . . when it first came on . . . did you see anything? Did you feel anything funny? I mean, not in your breathing. But did you, well . . . see somebody? Feel something in the room?”
Roddy stared at him from behind the mask.
“Rhys said there was a heaviness in the room when he came and got you,” Andrew added.
Outside, in the corridor, Andrew heard voices. Someone was close, facing the room and holding a conversation, poised at the entrance.
Andrew gave up his oblique approach. “Did you see a boy with white hair?” he hissed.
Roddy’s eyes opened wide, frightened.
Andrew felt a thrill. “You saw him?” he asked, eagerly.
The outer door opened.
“Tell me, please, Rod,” he begged. “You did, didn’t you?”
Roddy’s expression went distant, as if he were reliving the moments back in his room. Piecing it all together. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said mournfully.
“What on earth!” exploded the nurse, who had now entered. Andrew jumped. “No one is permitted in these rooms! And in street clothes!” Her face was covered by a white face mask. Her eyes coiled in anger. “Get out of here! Who are you? It’s very dangerous!”
Roddy sank back into the bed, resigned, exhausted. The nurse turned her attention to him. Andrew bolted to the stairwell, breaking into a sweat; not from exertion, but from fear.
THEY HAD BEEN in the taxi for twenty minutes, nosing through the London traffic. The boys’ faces were drawn, fatigued. Their school uniforms hung on them like wrinkled costumes, as if they were actors who had been abducted in the middle of a play. Rhys in particular brooded. Fawkes had met them and hailed them a cab on the busy thoroughfare outside the hospital—expensive, but necessary, if they were to avoid public transport. It was one of the old black London cabs. They piled into the double-sided backseat.
Fawkes recounted for the boys as much as he remembered from his quick conference with the man from the Health Protection Agency. Andrew and Rhys, Fawkes repeated, represented the inner circle—the people with greatest contact with Roddy and Theo. The X rays had been inconclusive. Their blood tests would show definitive results in forty-eight hours. During that time, they could do without masks—those had been necessary when the extent of their infection was unknown—but they needed to lie low. There was only a small chance they had active TB, he told them, trying to sound authoritative. There was an even smaller chance they would pass it to the other boys. The best thing was to keep quiet about the tests. Keep quiet about Roddy’s diagnosis. What they needed to avoid was a panic.
Rhys stared out the window, gloomily. Andrew squirmed with impatience.
“Have you called my parents yet?” Rhys asked.
“I haven’t,” Fawkes admitted. “Let’s call them together, when we return.”
“They’re going to freak.”
“It’s Harness,” Andrew burst out. He could hold it in no longer.
Fawkes glanced nervously at Rhys before turning to Andrew. “What?”
“Harness is getting people sick.” Andrew leaned forward. “The doctor told me he couldn’t explain the TB advancing so quickly with Roddy and Theo.”
“Unless it’s AIDS,” spat Rhys bitterly.
“Did they give you AIDS tests?” asked Fawkes, surprised.
“Think so.”
Now Fawkes understood their shattered looks. To be diagnosed with one potentially fatal disease is enough for an afternoon; to hear about two in one go would send anyone into a tailspin. And no doubt the boys had been grilled. All the prejudices about boys’ boarding schools—especially a prominent one like Harrow—would have risen to the surface. They’d have been accused of living in Sodom-on-the-Hill.
“It’s not AIDS,” declared Andrew.
“No way,” agreed Rhys.
“It’s Harness,” Andrew repeated.
“What are you on about? What harness?” demanded Rhys.
“Not what, who,” corrected Andrew. “Harness is the name of the Lot ghost. He’s real. He died of TB.”
Rhys rolled his eyes. “Oh, God.”
“You said yourself, you felt something in the room with Roddy.”
“I . . .” Rhys shook his head. “I did. But it wasn’t the Lot ghost.”
“Oh, it was the Newlands ghost, visiting from next door? I spoke to Roddy. I think he saw it.”
“Roddy’s sick. We might have TB or AIDS. We have enough to think about without bringing ghosts into it.”
“Quite right,” said Fawkes, staring hard at Andrew and wishing he would shut up until they could speak privately. Head of house or no head of house, it was clear that Rhys had reached his limit.
Andrew leaned forward again. “The doctor said the TB came on so fast, the only way to explain it was AIDS. You know, a broken immune system. Roddy got sick fast. Theo died fast. That’s why they kept harping on AIDS. But Rhys? Roddy?” He made a face. “Theo? Me? All of us? With AIDS? Come on. But then I remembered. John Harness had TB. He died of it. It’s in the history books. The Harrow Record.” He sat back triumphantly, watching Fawkes’s expression.
“And you think . . .”
“I think Harness is infecting people!” Andrew declared. “We have to do something. Roddy’s really, really bad. And Harness will infect someone else next. There’s only me and Rhys left on the floor!”
“But . . . do what?” Fawkes asked him.
“Remember? Find out who Harness killed and why. We have nothing else to go on. Have you spoken to Father Peter?”
Fawkes’s intestines squelched with guilt. “I have. I visited him.”
“And?”
“He’s getting dispensation from the Church of England to do it. Some special ritual. It’s not the kind of thing he’s trained on.”
“How soon can he do . . . whatever it is he needs to do?”
“Not sure,” Fawkes said, looking out the window. Say something. Tell him. Come clean. My God what if he gets it and dies; you’ll have it on your conscience. “Andrew . . . ,” he began.
“Piers.”
“I . . . I haven’t been straight with you. I’ve been selfish.” Andrew just stared at him. Fawkes continued. “I’ve been more interested in the outcome of our little investigation, than in your welfare. My publisher . . .” He stopped. “Oh for fuck’s sake, can I have a fag in here?” he shouted to the driver. The driver said yes.
“Sir,” objected Rhys, “we might have TB. That’s a lung disease.”
“It’s only one fag.”
“No!”
Rhys locked eyes with his housemaster. Then broke into a wide grin. Then started laughing; Andrew joined in next, and for the first time that day, all three of them broke into hysterical, grateful laughter. When it subsided, Fawkes hurried to finish his confession while he still had the cover of good humor.
“I told my publisher I could package the play with a sort of literary discovery,” he blurted. “If I give it to her with a story about Byron’s lover committing murder, she’ll publish it. If I don’t . . . she won’t.”
“So that’s great. Our research will help you.”
And I sort of told Father Peter to slow down.
I decided you and Rhys and Roddy dying was less important than my work.
Go on, say it.
They had reached the highway. Fawkes stared out the window, watching the apartment complexes whir past. At last he spoke:
“So I’ve been more focused on the research,” he stammered, “than on the effect all this has on you.” He was sweating. The boys were staring at him with uncloaked curiosity.
“But that’s exactly what we need,” said Andrew.
“It is?”
“Of course! I need to finish my research faster.”
“What have you found so far?”
“I found some letters in the cistern room. Old letters. I gave them to Dr. Kahn.”
“Oh, right,” Fawkes said, downplaying his surprise and excitement. “And?”
“They were damaged. Dr. Kahn sent them to Trinity College, Cambridge, to some research people she knows at the Wren Library.” Andrew thought a moment. “How long does it take to get to Cambridge?”
“About an hour on the train.” Fawkes knew why Andrew was asking. “You really think the letters will help our cause?”
“I think Harness wanted me to find them.”
Fawkes chewed his nail. “Trinity, is it?” Fawkes glanced nervously at Rhys before addressing Andrew. “There are lessons tomorrow,” he said dubiously.
“Roddy can’t wait.”
“You’re supposed to be lying low. No public transport. By order of the Health Protection Agency.”
“All right, so you go.”
“I have a house of eighty boys to look after. And I’m on probation. I have a daily meeting with Sir Alan. If I miss it, I’m sacked. Then I’m no good to anyone.”
Rhys looked at Fawkes in surprise. “Are you serious, sir?”
“You can stop calling me bloody sir, and yes, I’m serious. I may be the worst housemaster of all time, as far as I can tell. Look at all this mess.”
“If it’s only an hour,” continued Andrew, “I can leave first thing tomorrow and be back by lunchtime. You can say I slept in, after a trying day.”
“Right,” Fawkes said, uncertainly.
“Why are you hesitating?” asked Andrew. “You know I need to go.”
Fawkes tried to hide the raw emotion he’d been swept with earlier in the day. “With Roddy getting sick, I feel more protective of you boys. That’s all. You especially, Andrew.”
“This is my job. You and Dr. Kahn assigned this part to me: do the research on Harness, and write it up for Essay Club. I can’t wait anymore.”
“I’m going to say no,” Fawkes said at last.
“Are you kidding?”
“I’m not. When we get back, I’ll find Father Peter. We’ll do the ritual. We’ll be rid of John Harness. And then, you know,” he waved his hand vaguely. “All this will clear up. We don’t need to know what any letters say, or what some long-forgotten murder was about. All right?”
Andrew frowned. He had seen Harness’s violence, his determination. He wasn’t at all convinced that a simple ritual was going to make him go away.
He tried again. “What if I went with someone? Rhys could go with me.”
Rhys made a face.
“No. I’m sorry,” said Fawkes. “Your safety is more important.”
The words sounded pretty good. Or they would have, coming from someone else. Fawkes wrestled with himself. This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? He had made a resolution, now, to be better; to help Andrew, first and foremost. Keeping him at school, under his protection, was the most important thing. Yet as he watched Andrew, he saw that the boy’s gaze had grown distant; anger darkened his eyes, and he had reclaimed that lonely sulk Fawkes had first observed in him. My God, Fawkes wondered, is this what it’s like to be a real authority figure? To chafe people? Have them resent you? Question your decisions? Maybe this is what Colin Jute feels like all the time.
“I think you’re all completely mad,” said Rhys.