Stephen Leather - Once bitten

I squatted down in front of the old man so that my head was at his level and he didn't have to look up at me. I smiled at him but there appeared to be nothing behind the vacant eyes. My mouth felt dry and I had difficulty swallowing, not because I was nervous but because I knew I was looking at myself in fifty or sixty years time, assuming that I lived that long. Great choice, don't you think, sitting in a chair with a brain like scrambled eggs, or death. That's all there is, there is no other choice, and Turner was a reminder of what lay ahead. I wanted to run away and drink and blot him out of my mind but there were things I had to know.

"I saw one of your films, Mr Turner," I said, speaking slowly. "Lilac Time. Do you remember it? Lilac Time?"

His eyes seemed to focus on my face and he inhaled, the sound of his breath like a wind blowing through a derelict chimney.

"Lilac Time," he repeated.

"Lilac Time. You were the star. You made it in 1932. Do you remember?"

His thin lips curved up into a smile. "Lousy movie," he said. "Shot the whole thing in under six days. Can you believe it?"

The words came slowly, almost painfully, from the slit of a mouth. He had a slight lisp and whenever the mouth opened up enough for me to see inside I was looking into a pink hole devoid of teeth. I wondered what the former movie star had eaten for lunch, and guessed it had been put through a liquidiser first. We begin with baby food and we end with it. We start out helpless and that's how we end our days.

I was surprised how quickly he'd remembered the film which he'd made more than sixty years earlier, but Alzheimer's Disease can be like that, wiping out whole chunks of recent memories but leaving other, more distant ones, untouched. Maybe I'd be lucky.

"I enjoyed it," I lied, and smiled.

"Bullshit," he said.

"It was a good story."

"What are you, a critic?" he wheezed. His chest shuddered and I thought for a second that he was having some sort of attack and then I realised that the old man was laughing. The only sound coming from his mouth was a rasping wheeze but his eyes had crinkled up and the furrows either side of his mouth had curved into a smile.

Nurse Orlowski came over and dabbed at Turner's face with her handkerchief. "Please don't get us too excited," she said to me.

I looked at her tight-fitting uniform which did nothing to conceal her figure underneath. If anything was likely to excite the old man it would be her, she had enough sex appeal to arouse the dead. I wondered what it must be like, to be old and confined to a wheelchair and to have a sexy young blond like Nurse Orlowski administering to your needs. Wiping your face, feeding you, bathing you, taking you to the toilet. When Turner was in his prime I bet he had girls like her queueing up to sleep with him. I bet he'd had to fight them off. He'd been so good-looking then, and rich, and famous. And now, what good had any of it been? He was just a dried-out husk, a shell, and the blonde with the ball-busting figure treated him like a baby and waited for him to die.

"I'll be careful," I said as she went back to her book.

Turner's eyes slowly closed and then he jerked awake. The claw-hand twitched and his eyelids fluttered and then he went still but his eyes were open and focussed on me while he waited for me to speak. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be so old, to be so close to death. I knew the statistics, knew that there was a fair chance that I'd end up like Greig Turner, if I lived that long.

Alzheimer's hits one out of four people by the time they reach eighty five years old and it's the fourth biggest cause of death in the Western world, after heart disease, cancer and strokes. There's no cure, it may be genetic, it may be an illness, but if you get it there's nothing that can be done, the brain cells die in their millions and that's all there is. Doctors used to reckon that it was a normal part of aging and that it happened to everyone in varying degrees, but a Swiss psychiatrist, Dr Alois Alzheimer, all the way back in 1901, did an autopsy on a woman who'd gone ga-ga in her fifties and he discovered the lesions in her brain that identified the disease that was named after him. The one blessing is that by the time you've got Alzheimer's, you've forgotten you had it, if you see what I mean. It's like the old joke. Doctor to patient: "I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is that you've got AIDS. The good news is that you've got Alzheimer's disease so you'll be able to forget all about it." Ha ha. Looking at Greig Turner and the dribble on his chin, Alzheimer's didn't strike me as a laughing matter. It wasn't a prospect I relished. Maybe death would be better.

Maybe. I wanted to ask Turner whether there were any advantages at all in having lived so long, whether the memories made up for the awfulness of being alive in such a decrepit old body. But more than that I wanted to know about Terry Ferriman.

"Mr Turner, do you know a girl called Terry Ferriman?"

"Never heard of her," he said.

"Terry Ferriman," I repeated. "Long black hair, about five-four, five-five. Bright girl."

"So many girls," he wheezed. "You think I'd remember them all?" Yes, I thought. This one you'd remember. No matter how many opened their legs for you, this one you'd never forget.

"You are sure?" I pressed, wondering if I'd strayed into one of the blanks in his memory.

"When? Back when I was a star? Jesus, I can't remember the movies, never mind the dames."

"No, this would be recent. Within the last few years. She had your photograph in her room."

"I don't know anyone called Terry. She had my picture? A fan, huh? I thought all my fans had died long ago."

"This girl is young. I thought she might have been related. Do you have any children, Mr Turner? Or grandchildren?"

"Not that I know about," he cackled. He screwed his eyes up at me. "What are you suggesting, that I can't remember if I have a relative called Terry? What was your name again?"

"My name? Jamie Beaverbrook."

"I might be old Mr Beaverbrook. But I'm not stupid."

"I'm sorry," I said. I realised I'd fallen into the trap of treating him like a child, of behaving like Nurse Orlowski. "But this is very important to me. The picture she had of you was taken on the set of Lilac Time. There was a girl in the movie, a girl called Lisa Sinopoli."

"My wife," Turner said.

"No, Lisa Sinopoli. She played the schoolteacher."

"Yes, I know. She was my wife. We married after we'd finished the film.

"I didn't know. She was very pretty. You made a good team."

Turner snorted.

"What happened to her?" I asked.

He fell silent for a while and I listened to his uneven breathing. He dribbled and the claw of a hand made as if he wanted to wipe away the saliva but it fell back. "She left me," he said eventually.

A thought struck me. "Did you have any children?" I asked.

He looked at me and frowned. "Children? No, no children. Lisa could never have children."

"Is that why she left?" I asked, knowing that I had no right to ask the question but knowing also that Lisa Sinopoli could be the clue I was looking for. Her resemblance was so close to Terry that I was sure they were related. And if Terry was Lisa's daughter, or grand-daughter, or even cousin, than that might explain the photograph of Turner being in her room. A family heirloom, maybe.

"No, that's not why she left," Turner said. He thrust his head forward, the folds of skin around his neck hanging loose like badly-fitting drapes. "You from the agency?"

"What?" I said, confused.

"What did you say your name was?"

"Beaverbrook. Jamie Beaverbrook."

"You a detective?"

"No, I'm a psychologist," I said. He'd started rambling so I tried to steer him back to the movie business where at least I appeared to be on safer ground.