Ward Z Read online

  "What do you know about the Haitian plague outbreak?" June asks, her eyes filled with a kind of intense obsession.

  "Remarkably little," I reply with a sigh, "but something tells me you're going to -"

  "Dominique Ribery was one of the heads of an aid organization that a lot of people blame for indirectly accelerating the spread of bubonic plague, cholera and loads of other disease in the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes out there." She pauses breathlessly, as if she expects me to take this information and do something with it. "And then, just when the Haitian government was poised to ask her to leave, all this crazy stuff went down. Her colleague was burned to death in a tent, and Dominique Ribery ended up being quarantined for a couple of years. And now, ta-da, she's here!"

  "You've really been researching this, haven't you?" I reply, not sure whether to be impressed or a little sad.

  "I do background checks on all the new patients," she replies. "I want to know who's on this ward with me. It's not like there are locks on the doors, is it? They could move a murderer in right next door, and we'd be powerless to protect ourselves. Besides, we see each other in little more than dressing gowns and pajamas. It's very intimate and I want to make sure there's no-one inappropriate near me. Don't think I didn't take a look at you when you arrived, either. I check everyone out, but I've never found anything interesting. Not until now."

  "So she was in Haiti," I reply. "So what? So she's mildly famous in the international aid community. Does that make her a bad person?"

  We sit in silence for a moment.

  "I'm starting a petition," June says suddenly.

  "Oh, Jesus -"

  "To get rid of her!" She stares at me for a moment, as if she thinks she's not losing her mind. "The last thing we need on Ward C is a woman whose nickname is the Angel of Death!"

  "Have they changed your medication again?" I ask, peering closer to check that her pupils are the right size.

  "I've already pre-signed the petition with everyone's signatures," she continues. "If you disagree with the petition, you can come to me and I'll remove your name."

  "That's not how petitions work," I point out.

  "Welcome to the twenty-first century," she says with a knowing nod. "There's no time to lose, Cally. The people in charge of this place are relying on us to be placid and docile. They're working on the assumption that we won't make a fuss, but we've got rights, you know. There are enough of us on this ward to kick up a stink, and I'm gonna make damn sure that we get our asses in gear. Dr. Park thinks he can do what he wants, but we're the ones who're basically paying his salary, right? We've got enough problems on this ward without -"

  "Without making up new ones," I reply, wincing as I get to my feet. That pain in my side is getting worse, as if something's getting tighter and tighter. "I don't care about some new arrival," I say as I limp to the door. "I don't give a damn."

  "But she's bad news," June says as she stands up.

  "No!" I say firmly. "Don't follow me! I need to go back to bed!" I pause for a moment, seeing the desperate look in her eyes. "I don't give a rat's arsehole about this woman, okay? I don't care if she stays, I don't care if she goes, I don't care if she vanishes in the night, I just don't care what she does. Believe it or not, I have a few other things on my plate right now. I'm glad, June, that you have so few problems that this woman actually matters to you, but I don't have long left, and I'd rather not fill my remaining time with crap like this." I pause again, wondering if maybe I'm being a little too harsh and direct. "Take my name off your petition," I add, turning and heading out into the corridor. "I don't want anything to do with it."

  Thankfully, June doesn't follow me. She's not a bad person, but being cooped up on the ward for so long means that she's gone a little stir crazy. As I make my way slowly, painfully along the corridor, dragging my drip-bag and squeaky-wheeled trolley as I go, I spot a trolley-bed being taken over to one of the examination rooms, with a middle-aged, dark-haired woman resting her head on the pillow. She glances over at me for a moment, before disappearing from view as she's wheeled into the room. I guess that must be this Dominique Ribery woman. Funny, she doesn't look like the Angel of Death. She looks like just another poor sick bastard clinging to the hope that she might get out of this place alive.

  Dr. Andrew Page

  "How was my blood-work?" Ribery asks, keeping her eyes fixed on me as I type some details into the computer.

  "Fine," I reply. "Well, it was red, so that's a good start, but we'll have to wait until the results come through."

  "How long will that take?" she asks, her voice sounding strained and tired.

  "I've asked the lab to prioritize all your samples, so we should know something by the end of the day." Glancing over at her, I can see the look of concern in her eyes. "You seem nervous," I add after a moment. "I mean, everyone's nervous here, but you seem... a different kind of nervous."

  "I'm a doctor too," she says with a half-smile, "remember? I'm better than most of your patients at seeing through the bullshit."

  "And there's nothing else?" I ask, unable to shake the feeling that something's troubling her. "As you point out, most of my patients don't really know how these procedures work, so it's a refreshing change to have someone I can talk to on an equal footing. I don't believe in hiding things from people in my care, so if there's anything you want to know, I hope you feel able to just come out and ask."

  I wait for her to reply, but she turns away and seems lost in thought. Returning to my work, I double-check some of the files that were sent over from her previous hospital.

  "When I was in Haiti..." she starts to say suddenly, before something seems to make her think better of it. "Never mind," she adds. "You know the worst part of being a patient? The part that no-one tells you until you're in one of these beds? It's the sheer boredom. You sit around for hours and hours with nothing to do but think about the most basic details while you wait for someone to come and stick a needle in your body or deliver the latest round of bad news. It's no wonder you end up obsessing over things. You're lucky that your ward isn't full of lunatics."

  "Who said it isn't?" I reply, trying - and failing - to make her smile. "We're going to perform an endoscopic biopsy in order to get a sample of that mass in your stomach. We'll get it done today, so that I can take a look at the results this evening. I'm afraid my colleagues in Paris rather bodged the whole thing."

  "What makes you say that?" she asks, with a concerned look on her face.

  "Relax," I reply, as Nurse Jacobs enters the room and starts preparing the equipment. "People make mistakes every day. The results they sent through were..." I pause for a moment as I try to come up with the right word. "Unusual," I say eventually. "I'd rather -"

  "What was unusual about them?" she snaps.

  I open my mouth to reply, but something about her keenness is starting to worry me. I thought it'd be easier to have a smart patient with a medical background, but now I'm not so sure. "Ms. Ribery," I continue eventually, "are you sure there's nothing you'd like to tell me?"

  "Like what?"

  "Anything that you think might be relevant to your condition. Perhaps something that's not in your medical records?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," he replies, her voice filled with tension.

  "Still," I say, catching Nurse Jacobs' eye for a moment and spotting her look of concern, "I can't help wondering if anything's on your mind."

  "Jesus," Ribery mutters, "I..." She sighs, as if something's holding her back.

  "Nurse Jacobs," I say after a moment. "Could you leave me alone with Ms. Ribery for a few minutes?"

  Smiling politely, Nurse Jacobs turns and hurries out of the room, leaving me to cautiously approach Ribery's bed. From the look in the woman's eyes, it's absolutely clear that something's bothering her. I can't shake the feeling that there's something she's not telling me, and I'm damn well certain that I want to get to the bottom of this before we proceed with the next phase o
f her treatment.

  "Out with it," I say after a moment. "Anything you tell me will be kept in the strictest confidence, but I need to know."

  "I didn't come here to be interrogated," she says defensively.

  "No," I reply, "you came to be treated, and as I'm sure you're well aware, as your doctor I need to know anything and everything that's relevant." I pause. "It won't leave this room, but if there's something that might impact upon what we're doing here, I need to know, and I need to know now. Please, don't make me tease it out of you bit by bit. If that's your thinking, I'd rather you just turned around and went back to Paris."

  She sighs.

  "Why did you come all this way to see me?" I continue. "There are other doctors. There are people in France who could have helped you."

  She stares at me with fear in her eyes.

  "Help me to help you," I say calmly.

  "When I was in Haiti," she replies after a moment, "I was exposed to a lot of different diseases. I guess I'm just worrying that one of them, or some of them, or all of them, might have lain dormant in my body until now."

  "For five years?"

  She nods.

  "I don't see how that could have happened," I tell her. "If you'd contracted cholera back then, believe me, you'd know about it by now."

  "You don't understand," she continues. "Things were different. I saw..." She pauses again. "Have you ever made a decision, Dr. Page, that you knew at the time was wrong, but you made it anyway because you were too scared to do something else?" She waits for me to reply. "Have you ever been asked to do something brave and fearless and selfless, and refused?"

  "Such as?"

  "Such as..." She pauses. "Have you ever been in a situation where perhaps the right course of action would have been to take your own life, but you refused? Instead, you put your own selfish needs above the needs of others, above the needs of the whole world, and you told yourself that it didn't really matter anyway, and you kept going?" She pauses, and I can see that there's genuine fear in her eyes.

  I stare at her for a moment. "I can't say that anything quite like that has ever happened to me," I say eventually.

  "Of course not," she replies. "You've never really set foot out of a clinical environment, have you? You've never seen a place like Haiti after the earthquakes. You've never seen how messy it gets. To you, everything behaves the way the textbooks say it should behave."

  "My mind isn't closed to -"

  "You should get out there," she says, leaning back into the pillow, "into the real world. You should stop bottling yourself up in this hospital, and you should go see what it's really like out there."

  "And this relates to your condition... how?" I ask, starting to wonder if she's completely lost her mind.

  "I'm just saying," she continues, "that if any of your results seem unusual, don't assume that they're wrong. Maybe there are things out there, Dr. Page, that you don't know about. Things you can't know about if you've spent your entire career in a safe, sterile hospital." She pauses again. "Just promise me that when I die, you'll have my body incinerated."

  "I think you're jumping the gun a little," I tell her.

  "You want to know why I came to you, Dr. Page?" she asks after a moment. "You want to know why I had myself loaded into a helicopter and brought all the way here from Paris? It's not just that you're a good doctor, although that's certainly a consideration. The most important thing is that I believe you're not the kind of man who'd make the same mistake I made. If the time comes, and action needs to be taken, I believe you'll make the right choice."

  "I appreciate your faith," I reply, a little concerned by the fact that she seems to genuinely believe what she's saying. Grabbing her medical chart, I take another look at the list of drugs she's been given over the past few months. There's nothing on there that should cause psychosis or paranoia, but I can't ignore the fact that she seems to be rambling. Given her extensive medical background, I would have thought Dominique Ribery might be able to remain rational, but she seems to be genuinely spooked by something. I guess she won't be the perfect patient after all.

  "You won't find it on there," she spits at me.

  "What?"

  "The thing that's killing me."

  As Nurse Jacobs appears once again in the doorway, I realize that maybe it's time to focus on the more practical parts of Ribery's condition. Waving the nurse back into the room, I hang Ribery's medical charts back on the end of her bed.

  "If you came here because you trust me," I say after a moment, choosing my words very carefully, "then perhaps it's time for you to start trusting me, don't you think?"

  She sighs.

  "Let's get this biopsy out of the way," I continue, exchanging a concerned glance with Nurse Jacobs. "We need to know precisely what we're dealing with here, so that we can define the best treatment path." As I start the scanner, I realize that Ribery is watching me closely. "Don't worry, Ms. Ribery," I say, starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable. "I promise, this will all be over soon."

  Cally Briggs

  "It's fish," says Anthony, the orderly who always brings lunch, as he places the plate in front of me. "Can't you tell from the smell?"

  "To be fair," I reply, using a white plastic fork to lift the gelatinous mess up from the plate, "the beef and chicken both smell like fish anyway, so..."

  "Eighty-seven pence," he replies dourly.

  I turn to him.

  "Eighty-seven pence," he says again. "That's the budget, per patient, that the kitchen has for each meal, so really, the fact that everything smells like fish is hardly a surprise. And as for the consistency, I'd have thought someone with sore gums would be happy that everything they eat feels like jelly." He pauses, before a hint of a smile crosses his lips. "At least the vegetables don't smell like fish."

  "They don't smell like anything," I say, inspecting the chunks of carrot. "They don't taste like anything. It's like they were frozen in the Ice Age and thawed when Victoria was on the throne."

  "Well," he replies with a grin, "if you wanted fine dining, you shouldn't have got fucking cancer, should you?"

  "You make a good point," I reply, before wincing as I feel the pain in my side again.

  "You okay?" he asks.

  "It's just cramp." I wait for the pain to pass, but I'm very much aware that Anthony is still staring at me. "Cramp," I say again. "Didn't you ever get cramp?"

  "Huh," he replies, clearly not convinced. "Maybe I should get Dr. Page to come and take a look at you anyway. I assume you haven't mentioned this 'cramp' to anyone yet?"

  "I'm sure Dr. Page has got better things to be doing than running around dealing with a case of cramp," I mutter, sitting up a little higher in the bed. As soon as I shift position, the pain seems to be numbed a little, although I can still feel its faint impression. "There. It's just caused by my insanely poor posture, that's all. Nothing that a plate of good food won't cure."

  "Good luck finding good food around here," he mutters. "Seriously, though. You know everything has to be reported, even if it doesn't seem like anything. You should tell Dr. Page next time he's in."

  "It's just -" I start to say, before the cramp hits again, sending jolts of pain scattering through my body like hundreds of little spinning knives. I can't disguise my discomfort, and I hold my breath for several seconds until the sensation passes. This is the third or fourth time I've had this pain over the past few days, but I've never had two attacks so close together. "Fine," I say, figuring that I can't blame cramp any longer, "I'll tell him when he comes to see me this afternoon. Happy now?"

  "He might be a little late," Anthony replies. "This new patient's getting all the bells and whistles."

  "You mean the Angel of Death?" I ask, scooping up some of the fish but delaying the moment when I have to put the disgusting jelly-like blob in my mouth.

  "I heard they called her the Witch Doctor," he says. "The bitch killed hundreds of people in Haiti just because she refused to give out the right vac
cinations at the right time. That's what they say, anyway. The truth -"

  "I'm sure the truth is much more complicated," I reply, eating a mouthful of the fish and, unsurprisingly, almost retching as I swallow it whole. Thanks to my most recent round of chemo, my gums feel like they've lost a fight with a cheese-grater and my throat feels as if a lining of skin has been ripped away to expose the raw, blood-red meat beneath. "She probably only had eight-seven pence per patient," I add. "No wonder she couldn't deliver the right vaccines."

  "You met her yet?" he asks.

  I shake my head, still tense in case the pain returns.

  "She's not exactly a barrel of laughs," he replies. "The bitch has got a mouth on her, that's for sure. She thinks she's a big-wig and she doesn't mind letting you know exactly what you're doing wrong. I mean, the woman complains about everything. I even heard her giving poor Dawn Aubry a hard time for the way she disposed of some old gloves." He pauses, before lowering his voice. "I know it's not nice to wish bad things about a cancer patient," he whispers, "and I'm a good person, I really am, but I hope she shuffles off pretty fast. God, if she's a lingerer, the next few months are gonna be hell."

  "I'm sure she'll oblige as soon as she's able," I reply.

  "Speaking of the truth," he continues, "I saw that gorgeous little girl of yours running down the corridor earlier. She looked so happy and carefree." He pauses. "It's funny, really. I could've sworn you said you were going to -"

  "Monday," I say, immediately feeling defensive. "I'm telling her on Monday."

  "Poor thing," he says quietly.

  "Me or her?"

  He pauses. "Both," he says, before patting my blanketed legs. "I've gotta scoot, kid, but I'll be back for your tray in an hour. Don't forget to eat it all, now. It might look and smell like unmitigated shit, but there's some nutritional value tucked inside somewhere. We want you fighting fit and raring to go for your next round of chemo, don't we?"

  "You spoil me," I say with a faint smile.