The Quick. Laura Spinney

important. He paused for effect. ‘As I see it, you will be the hub of the wheel, and the rest of us the spokes. It will be your responsibility to oversee the patient’s training, to observe her responses and adjust the schedule accordingly. You will relay her needs to us and we’ll tweak the device to accommodate them. That way, it will develop in parallel with her. If everything goes according to plan, I predict that this young woman, who has not spoken for ten years, will be chattering away in a matter of months. Weeks, even.’

      My heart was racing. With a pretence of nonchalance I got up and strolled towards the bookshelves that lined one wall to confront a row of thick tomes: a medical dictionary, Gray’s Anatomy, a slimmer volume written by the professor, entitled simply, Perchance to Dream. A patient who had been shut off from the world for a decade and to whom we might now restore the power of speech, I said to myself with a little tremor of excitement. If we gave a voice to her, what was to stop us doing the same for hundreds, perhaps thousands of others? What insights she could offer us. What potential there was for learning about the effects of paralysis on the brain, the rearrangements in its structure and function, the compensation, recruitment of previously redundant areas, changes in sensory function, personality, consciousness… the possibilities were endless. And yet, it seemed already as if the opportunity were slipping through my fingers. There was too much work for me at the hospital, and my assistants were not yet experienced enough to deal with the harder cases. I would never get permission to manage an intensive training routine such as this patient would undoubtedly need, especially if she was far away. At best, I envisaged a long return trip each day; at worst, I would have to find accommodation close to her, and that would mean requesting several months’ leave. But I hadn’t been in my post long enough to have earned a sabbatical. Was I really to be offered the most interesting case of my career to date, just as my duties became so onerous as to rule it out?

      I heard a drawer open and close, and looked back at the professor, whose hands were now resting on a piece of paper. I sauntered back towards him. Playing for time, I asked him again who the patient was. DL, he called her, using the convention in the medical literature of referring to patients in single case studies by their initials alone. And having delivered this tiny morsel of information, as if it should be enough to satisfy me, he settled back in his chair, pressed his fingertips together and brought his quizzical gaze to rest on me. I lowered my eyes. It had never occurred to me that I would have to choose between the professor and the job I had always dreamed of. I felt torn between my loyalty to him, my desire to help him and to be a party to the glorious climax of his career, and my love of the job he had, to a certain extent, groomed me for.

      ‘Is she far away?’ I asked, quietly.

      I heard him pick up the paper he had been guarding from my sight, and push it across the desk towards me. I raised my eyes and saw that it was a typed, formal letter of consent. From the two short paragraphs of text printed there, the name of our hospital leapt out at me. I blinked at it, barely understanding what it meant.

      ‘She’s been under your nose all this time,’ he said, and laughed.

      4

      It was dark when I stepped out into the street, but this time with nightfall. It must only recently have stopped snowing, though, because the snow had settled in an even layer over the pavement and was almost undisturbed by footprints. The night was cold, and a three-quarter moon shone crisply over the city. The people in the streets were uniformly muffled in coats and scarves.

      I made my way back to the hospital, deep in thought over the professor’s new project, and it was only when I stood in the large entrance hall that I became fully aware of my surroundings. It was deserted just then, though echoing footsteps receded down one of the long corridors. And it was dark; it occurred to me that a couple of light bulbs must have blown. The globe lamps on the walls had been switched on, but they seemed to shine rather weakly and hardly to penetrate the polished black slate floor. The gloom deepened towards the centre of the space, where the signpost stood. But the signpost itself was bathed in the moonlight whose shafts entered via glass panels in the ceiling. All in all, it was a ghostly scene.

      The clock above the corridor that led to the north wing showed six o’clock. I had intended to go straight up to the fifth floor and introduce myself, if that’s the right expression, to Patient DL. I hesitated. They would soon be serving supper on the wards. DL wouldn’t be eating, of course, since she received her nutrients through a tube that fed through her nose, down her oesophagus and into her stomach. But there would be activity on the ward, and perhaps the general commotion would distract someone with a potentially tenuous grip on reality. Better to go in the morning, I decided, when it was quiet and she had a good night’s sleep behind her. After ten years, one more night wouldn’t make any difference.

      At that moment, a figure stepped out from behind the signpost and moved in a wide semicircle towards me. It seemed to walk on the balls of its feet, in a strange sort of dance, and I recognised Nestor. He often loitered around the entrance hall. He was employed by the university as a technician, though most people still thought of him as a porter, because that had been his job for many years. He had the porter’s inside knowledge of the hospital, and more. He knew every cracked pipe, every broken window latch, as well as which nurses were sleeping together and who among the registrars had played angel of death on the wards. People who worked there were afraid of him. Everyone knew that he liked his drink. But sometimes he disappeared for days at a time, and although people whispered about his absences, and his rumoured forays on to the upper floors at night, nobody dared question him openly.

      The latest rumour was that he had been barred from the paediatric wing. I had no idea if it was true, but here was Nestor in front of me, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, asking if I would like to accompany him down to his room. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I asked, amused. He raised a hand to touch the rolled-up cigarette that was tucked behind his ear, smirked and said he was surprised Mezzanotte hadn’t explained. He had agreed to operate the Mind-Reading Device. The latest version of it was downstairs in his room, and he was under instructions to show it to me at my earliest convenience.

      ‘You?’ I asked, surprised. Puffing out his chest, he tapped it with a tar-stained forefinger. Perhaps I was still looking at him sceptically, because he glanced quickly over his shoulder, then brought his round, slightly greasy face close to mine and muttered that all the other technicians had refused. He wore his grey, wispy hair long on his neck. He was dressed neatly in grey flannels and a brown pullover, with a knitted green tie. It was hard to put an age on him, somewhere between forty and sixty, but there was something of the overgrown schoolboy about him. He wore a gold stud in his left ear, and around his right eye there were traces of a bruise. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

      He danced off with the same bizarre gait, his bony rump high in the air, as if he were walking on hot coals. I followed him through an unmarked door that opened off the entrance hall, just to the right of the corridor that led to the north wing. We descended a flight of concrete steps and passed along a corridor lit by a single neon tube.

      It was the first time I had been down to the basement. Stacked up on the floor along both sides of the corridor were hundreds of derelict computers, models five or six years old, some covered in old sheets, others in a thick layer of dust. Their keyboards had been thrown down haphazardly between them, and fraying wires stuck out in places. Some of the screens were shattered, as if someone had deliberately put a boot through them. Nestor mumbled something about skeletons. When I asked him what he had said, he stopped, turned to face the phalanx of defunct hardware, and announced that I was walking through the graveyard of a computer system that had once been installed in the hospital.

      The idea, apparently, had been to transfer all the patients’ records on to an electronic database. Ours was to be the first paperless hospital in the country, and if it worked, others would follow. But the computer hard disks turned out to have a flaw in them. Records were irretrievably lost, referrals sent to the wrong department. There were actually empty beds in the hospital for the first time, a fact that was trumpeted in the newspapers until it became clear that the sick were still waiting to fill them, their names had merely been wiped from the computer’s memory. There were stories of patients dying of treatable tumours that had been diagnosed twelve months earlier,