Gillian Galbraith - Dying Of The Light

‘A rare river dolphin, the baiji, is now thought to be extinct. The species was the only remaining member of the Lipotidae , an ancient mammal family that separated from other marine mammals, including whales, dolphins and porpoises, about twenty-five million years ago. The baiji’s extinction is attributable to unregulated finishing, dam construction and boat collisions. The species’ incidental mortality results from massive-scale human environmental impact.’

Reading it, for a second she felt a wave of despair wash over her. The only supposedly rational species on the entire planet, the one with the fate of the rest of the natural world in its epicene hands, thought the matter so unimportant. The possible, not definite, loss of one of the billion upon billion of members of its own species merited four whole pages of newsprint, whereas humanity’s unthinking obliteration of an entire class of unique creatures deserved only a tiny footnote. Tomorrow more would be written about the boy’s abduction, but nothing further about the end of the baiji. Then again, tomorrow, like everyone else, she would consume the coverage avidly. Possibly she would read it while eating a yellow-fin tuna sandwich from a polythene carrier bag and, certainly, having done nothing for the next species perched precariously on the edge of extinction. Like everyone else, she was too busy living her day-to-day life, her good intentions simply paving on the road to hell.

Sleep was hard to come by, but just as she dropped off the phone rang. Alice woke, and in her dozy state hoped that Ian would answer it before remembering that he was away, visiting his mother. She clamped the receiver to her ear.

‘Ali… eh, Alice?’ Miss Spinnell, her neighbour, warbled. ‘I need your help. Can you come down straight away?’

The World Service was still on the radio. Six pips at two o’clock.

‘It’s only two, Miss Spinnell. It couldn’t possibly wait until the morning?’

‘No. It’s a drama… an emergy… a crisis. We may even need a doctor.’

Dragging herself out of bed, head still longing for the pillow, Alice shivered in the cold, searching around in the darkness for a jersey to put over her nightie. The recent spell of plain-sailing in her dealings with her elderly neighbour had seemed too good to be true. After all, Alzheimer’s did not stop, had no second thoughts about the casual destruction it wrought on its victim’s mind and personality. She had watched as, before her eyes, it had transformed a bright independent old lady into a suspicious eccentric, obsessed with the theft of her possessions by unseen intruders. Alice herself was now treated as a suspect, although her dog, Quill, remained the light of the old lady’s life.

The door had been left ajar by the time Alice reached her neighbour’s flat, but Miss Spinnell had returned to her bed and was sitting crouched on it, head down, knees against her chest, whimpering to herself. Alice came and sat on the edge of the bed. Seeing a wizened hand nearby she clasped it in her own, intending to comfort the distressed woman. Instantly the frail fingers were whipped away as if they had, inadvertently, touched lizard skin. The moaning, however, continued unabated.

‘What is it, Miss Spinnell?’

In response the crouched figure slowly straightened itself, and Alice was surprised to see that her neighbour was wearing dark glasses.

‘Blindness has come upon me! The lights have dipped… er, dimmed.’

Alice edged up the bed, watching Miss Spinnell recoil as she came closer, until she was able to lift the glasses off the ancient nose.

‘I think you have accidentally put on the wrong spectacles. You’ve been wearing dark ones,’ Alice said.

Miss Spinnell screwed up her eyes several times, as if accustoming herself once more to light and sight. She looked, briefly, sheepish before an expression of disdain transformed her face.

‘Accidentally! Accidentally! Ha! How simper… simplistic can it be. Can’t you grasp how they operate? Whilst I’ve been blind, blind I say, yet more of my artifice… arti… arti… things, will have been purloined. Kindly check the silver, Alice.’

‘But, Miss Spinnell, how could they have got in?’

‘Through the open door,’ the old lady said. ‘The door I opened…’ she looked hard at her visitor before continuing, ‘especially for you.’

To put her neighbour’s mind at rest, the tired policewoman opened drawers and dust-laden cupboards, all the while learning more about Miss Spinnell and the havoc the disease had left in its wake. On a high shelf, in among well-thumbed volumes of verse, were little reminders of the person she had once been. A medal dated 1995 from The Poetry Society, a barn owl’s wing wrapped carefully in tissue paper, and, most poignant of all, a faded photograph showing a young girl laughing uproariously with a boy in uniform, and an inscription on the back: ‘To Morag, the most beautiful of the Spinnell sisters, with all my love, Charlie.’ And over the writing in Miss Spinnell’s ancient trembling hand had been scrawled ‘PLEASE DO NOT TAKE’, a pitiful entreaty to a pitiless enemy.

As soon as the polythene bag had been removed the corpse resumed its human shape again. A boyish photographer began to prowl around the body, snapping it from every angle, issuing instructions as if at a fashion shoot and smiling ghoulishly at his own joke, until told off by the pathologist. Meanwhile, Alice eased the woman’s arms off her breast and down to her sides, lifting one of them up to remove the sleeve before rolling her over to release the material at the back. The final cuff peeled off without difficulty.

‘At least she’s cold,’ Doctor Zenabi said conversationally, while raising the body slightly to allow Alice to pull the coat from under it.

‘Does it make a difference?’ she replied, all her concentration on the task in hand.

‘Certainly does. Give me cold flesh, cold blood, anytime. I don’t like it when it’s still warm,’ he continued, ‘- the transitional phase. It’s horrid cutting them then. Far too close to life. I like my bodies to be… well, thoroughly chilled.’

Conversely, we want the body still warm, Alice thought. No time to have passed and the trail still hot. She felt in one of the woman’s coat pockets and pulled out its contents. A mobile phone, a purse and a packet of chewing gum. Putting her hand into the other pocket, she felt a sharp, stabbing pain and withdrew it instantly as if bitten by a cobra. She inspected her palm, and saw a single, tiny puncture mark, immediately below the crease of the little finger. Fighting to contain the panic she could feel rising within her, and cursing her own stupidity, she shook out the contents of the pocket onto a nearby table, and felt her heart sink as the rounded cylinder of a hypodermic syringe rolled across its surface. As she picked it up by the plunger, light glinted on the uncapped needle protruding from the barrel. Things like this were supposed to happen to other people. Not to her.

‘Ahmed,’ she said lightly, but he did not hear her, still busy wrestling an obstinate baseball boot free from a foot while humming to himself in an eerie falsetto.

‘Ahmed, I think I may have been jabbed by something. A needle-stick injury, or whatever it’s called,’ she shouted, holding up the syringe for him to see. Doctor Zenabi looked up, flung the boot he was holding to a technician and rushed over to her. He grasped the hand she was extending towards him and examined it for himself. Blood had begun to ooze from the pinprick and he hustled her towards the sink, ran the cold tap and plunged her hand under its stream. Ten minutes later, her palm and fingers now white and numb from the icy water, the pathologist allowed her to remove it, binding the injury for her in clean paper towelling.