The Touch of Innocents

Her eyes were distracted, dazzled. One moment the country lane had appeared anonymous and empty in the swirling night rain, the next it was a blaze of incoherent light which screamed of danger.

The brain responded immediately, but inadequately. It could not tell that the fool on the tractor, suddenly aware he was blocking the path of an oncoming car, had panicked and switched on all the headlights; there was only that state of alarm that sends the senses cartwheeling, freezing the mind, where instinct rather than intellect takes control.

Isadora Dean would never remember what happened next, the confusion and sense of fear as the source of light came closer, the clarity of understanding that ahead lay disaster, the struggle with rubber and brakes which seemed to adopt a logic of their own as they danced and pirouetted amidst the leaf-strewn mud of an English autumn, the numbing slide away from light into darkness and the unknown, a feeling of weightlessness, of being in space, spinning off into another world, eternity.

Eternity. Death.
Her
death. Damn, what a waste.

She had already crossed into the underworld, it seemed. The car had left the road and was carving a tunnel of light through the tangle of wood that pressed around. Skeletal, leaf-stripped branches leapt out from the darkness to snatch at her, to drag her to disaster as a kaleidoscope of images flashed
past faster than the eye could capture or brain decode.

Fear began only as her mind turned to the children. Benjamin. Little Bella. She released the breath caught in her lungs long enough to begin a strangulated cry. ‘Hold tight!’ How absurd. The boy was still soundly asleep, comprehending nothing, and how could a six-month-old baby hold tight to anything other than a mother’s breast?

She saw the bole of the gnarled oak but barely; it could have been a rock-face, a bolted door, the bottom of the deepest well. But she knew it was Immovable Object. Disaster. The End. Izzy felt nothing, not as her body began to lift from the seat and tear against the restraining belt, not when the inertia lock snatched back at the belt and threatened to carve her in two, not even when her head hit the roof of the hire Renault as it began to roll and the windscreen exploded into a thousand pieces of razor-tipped stardust.

And she would remember nothing. For as the point of her head just behind her hairline came into contact with the pressed-steel frame of the car, a shock wave like that of an earthquake passed through her brain, shaking it, stretching it, causing the cells to vibrate and become microscopically displaced. The damage was at first subtle, but decisive. As the cells twisted away from each other the chemical balance of the brain was disturbed, turning the neurological pathways from a running track into a synaptic slough, tangling and entrapping the electrical messages which perform the brain’s work.

She lost consciousness and when, in a while, she came round, she would still lack coherence and focus because many of the higher functions of the mind remained lost in what had become the ensnaring tar
pit of her brain. She was unable to assist the terrified and penitent farmer who ran to drag her and her children free from the wreckage, found it impossible to respond to the concerns of the paramedics who tended her, didn’t notice the shrugs of the firemen who arrived too late to save anything from the burning metal carcass.

Yet there was still worse. Even as her body gave the impression of making some revival from the initial assault, the bruised and insulted brain was swelling.

And would continue to swell.

A small vein inside the inner brain had burst, spilling blood, creating pressure under which the nearby brain cells and their surrounding nerves would no longer operate, so reversing that original revival and pressing down her senses ever more deeply into the pit of tar.

The eyes opened but did not see, the ears heard but could not comprehend, the senses drifted away on a moonbeam until all coherent memory of the scene would be gone.

Of the crash.

Of the fire which brought terror to half the night life in that usually tranquil Dorsetshire woodland, and of the sirens and flashing lights which did for the rest.

Of her arrival at the Weschester General on a desperately busy night in A&E with its confusion and barely controllable clamour after some drunk had pulled a fire alarm.

And of the rush to get her to the intensive therapy unit as the medical staff began to realize that, instead of recovery, something with their patient was going devastatingly wrong.

Sunrise in San Francisco. A tantalizing purple and pink cast stretched across the horizon, the mist obscuring where parched hills stretched up to kiss the Californian sky, with only the lights of Oakland flickering their daily welcome from across the water to indicate where earth met heaven.

The first Boeings of the day stood out like angry fireflies against the still-dark clouds while two endless lines of automobile traffic swarmed across the Bay Bridge, mimicking the relentless march of worker ants; another half hour and the march would be but an agonizing crawl.

He stood by the open window, a salt-brushed breeze snatching at the smoke from his cigarette as night gave way to the lighter, noisier tones of day and the dawn chorus of streetcars called for their first passengers.

It was like no other city on earth, he thought; at the very frontiers of paradise. So relaxed, so uninhibited, so unlike the bureaucratic jungle of DC where the women didn’t even wait until winter to freeze.

Over the Bay the early-morning flights were beginning to stack up; he’d be catching one back in a few hours’ time. It brought him yet again to pondering how long it would be before his own baby was up there with them. The MPAA. Conceived by computer, gestated in committee, and about to be delivered unto Congress. The lightweight Multi-Purpose Attack Aircraft, the state-of-the-art fly-by-wire variable-geometry radar-reflective Mach-3 aerial acronym that only required a pilot, so they said, to tell it when to go home. The collaborative brainchild of trans-Atlantic aerospace firms which was supposed to solve most of NATO’s and all of his own problems for the next twenty years. Project
Sure Hit, as it had originally and less than tactfully been known. Project Shit, as it had been immediately redubbed.

So the President, angered by the sniggers of a sceptical press conference and eager as ever to shower himself in righteousness rather than ridicule, had on the spot rechristened it Project Dust. ‘And Thine enemies shall lick the dust,’ he had thundered, not textually entirely accurately. But who amongst the reptiles of the White House Press Corps would ever know?

So, the Duster was expensive, but what did they expect of the most technologically innovative piece of military hardware in a generation? So it was already a Cold War cowpat, a weapons system in search of an enemy, a huge and wasteful distraction in a world where the term superpower rang like a ghostly echo through the lengthening dole queues, bread lines and back-street abortion clinics of Middle America. But, after years of recessionary compromise and Congressional gutlessness, it was the last chance, the
very
last chance, to glue back together the design teams and production lines that had saved the West a hundred times over when the liberal pedlars of compassion had prematurely announced ‘peace in our time.’

The Duster would get built – had to get built. For Joe Michelini there was no alternative. No prospects, no job, no future, no understanding finance company, not for a forty-three-year-old planning director with a lifetime of service in an industry that would effectively cease to exist.

So it
would
get built. Even if it meant his kissing the backside of every procurement officer in the Pentagon and sucking the toes of anyone and his mother who had the vaguest connection with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

DC made him think of Izzy, home. If you could call it home, with a wife who – more often than not – wasn’t simply in some other city but on an entirely different continent. She didn’t even use his name.

He glanced at his watch. It was Sunday; over in Europe it would be early afternoon, surely she had to be home this time. Once more he picked up the telephone, listened to the ringing tone; once more it remained unanswered, another of his messages that seemed lost in space. Not just a different continent, another planet. The story of his married life. And this time she’d disappeared with the kids. Nothing, for more than a week.

‘Bitch,’ he snapped quietly, patience and cigarette finished. Through the open bedroom door he could hear the rustle of sheets and saw an elegant, bronzed thigh protrude from beneath the covers to hang limply over the edge of the bed. He shrugged. Somehow, here in California, there seemed to be no ill winds.

He dropped the phone back into its cradle and with the fingers of one hand rearranged his rumpled hair; it was thinning, a few years ago he would have needed to do battle armed with a brush. But so many things had changed in these last few years.

With his cigarette stub he made a slow, deliberate mess in the ashtray, taking a deep lungful of fresh air to fill his chest and flatten his stomach. Then he went back to bed.

They had laid her out on the bed in the far corner, where it was quietest, to die.

The mass of monitoring equipment suggested that the major body functions remained normal but the scan had revealed the problem. The offended segment of the brain had swelled, the white cells and
the surrounding grey-coloured nerves which should have stood out sharp and distinct had become blurred, sucked into the neurological mire, and now even the lower physical functions were beginning to decay.

The teaching sister shone the beam of a pencil torch into the patient’s opaline eye; the pupil reacted, but insipidly, not as it should, and not as much as yesterday. She unclipped the pulse oximeter from the tip of the middle finger and pinched the soft part of the nail which would normally produce an irritated flexing of the digit.

Nothing.

The brain was no longer responding to the stimuli of shocks, commands, smells, noises, pressures, pains. The sister, Mabel McBean, a woman of middle age and generous girth whose hips rolled and shoes squeaked as she crossed the vinyl floor of the ITU, who had half a lifetime’s experience of the self-destructive tendencies of others yet who managed to retain the innate Tayside compassion of her childhood, glanced across at the student nurse and shook her head.

‘I wonder who she
is
,’ the student nurse, an Australian out of Wagga Wagga by the name of Primrose who carried her birthright with shy fortitude, mused for the fifth time that week.

‘Extraordinary. I’ve never known a lass like this to be so anonymous,’ the sister responded. ‘It’s no’ as if she’s a tramp or been living in a cardboard box.’ She picked up the hand once more. ‘Manicure’s expensive.’

She gave the nail another pinch. No response.

She replaced the oximeter and like a fussy mother hen readjusted the cuff which monitored the blood pressure, looking once more into the handsome face
of the patient, a woman in her thirties with fine bone structure and rich, fox-red hair.

‘Bonny make-up job, too.’

The bruised lids of the eyes had turned a vivid purple and pink as though treated by a trainee beautician taking her first tentative steps at colour coordination, and there was a tiny nick below the left eye caused by the fragmenting windscreen which looked angry but had needed no stitches and would have left perhaps only the faintest of scars. If only it were granted the time to heal. Otherwise the face seemed at peace, resting, not dying.

It was a compelling face, handsome if a little too expressive for McBean’s traditional eyes, broad around the eyes and tapering from elevated and faintly oriental cheekbones to pointed chin with a finely carved nose and full, expressive lips. Loving lips. Contemporary cover girl rather than classical beauty, particularly with the carefully cropped hairstyle. The skin was fresh complected, out of doors, the orthodontics out of this world.

Yet there was also a suggestion of suffering, McBean thought, an overdose of experience that had etched a little downward crease at the corners of the mouth as though the woman had made a deliberate choice not to live off her fine looks but instead to compete, to join the daily struggle with the rest of the world. Beneath the battered eyes the skin had the stretched, pale mauve hue of fatigue and the red undertones which mark where tiredness turns to exhaustion and starts eating away inside. More than the strains of motherhood. Implying … what? Stubbornness? Pain? A certain lack of fulfilment? McBean sighed; it seemed they might never know.

Primrose interrupted the sister’s thoughts. ‘Can’t the police trace the car?’

The student nurse was seated at the head of the bed, brushing the hair as she had done every night of the last week, trying to remove fraction by fraction the large clot of blood which had matted and tangled and ruined its deep red lustre. They could have cut out the clot, of course, and destroyed the carefully created short style, but there would be so little chance for it to regrow. Even in death there should be dignity.

Sister McBean shook her head. ‘Renault. Left-hand drive. Could have come from any one of a thousand places in Europe. And the fire destroyed everything, even her identity, poor girl. Got out wi’ nothing but the clothes she was wearing and they were precious little help. Italian silk, American denims, a rainforest wristband and sneaker shoes they reckon might have come from somewhere east of India. Upper class Oxfam.’