Peter James - Dead Tomorrow

They were all from one family who could not cope and had placed them into an institution that they had run away from two years ago. They had been living on the streets since and now had the smiles on their faces he had seen so many times before, and which broke his heart each time. The smiles of desperate human beings who could not quite believe that their luck had changed.

‘How are you doing? All OK?’ he said, in Romanian.

They beamed and jigged their colourful balloons. Tilling had no idea where the balloons had come from, but he knew one thing for sure. Apart from the clothes they stood up in, these were the only possessions they had in the world.

The residents of Casa Ioana ranged in age from a seven-week-old baby, with her fourteen-year-old mother, to an eighty-two-year-old woman who had been tricked out of her home and her life savings by one of the many monsters who exploited Romania’s ill-thought-out laws. There was no welfare for the homeless in this country – and few shelters. The old woman was lucky to be here, sharing a dormitory room with three other elderly inmates who had met the same fate.

‘Mr Ian?’

He turned at the voice of Andreea, one of the social workers, who had stepped out of his office behind him. A slim, pretty twenty-eight-year-old, who was getting married in the spring, Andreea had a deep warmth and compassion, and tireless energy. He liked her a lot.

‘Telephone call for you – from England.’

‘England?’ he said, a little surprised. He rarely heard from England these days, except from his mother, who lived in Brighton, and to whom he spoke every week.

‘It is a policeman. He says he is old friend?’ She said it as a question. ‘Nommun Patting.’

‘Nommun Patting?’ He frowned. Then suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Norman Potting ?’

She nodded.

He hurried back into his office.

Lynn cursed as she saw two flashes from the speed camera in her rear-view mirror. She always drove slowly past that sodding camera opposite Preston Park, but this afternoon it had gone completely out of her mind. She was concentrating on getting home to Caitlin as quickly as possible and on nothing else. Now she faced a fine to add to her financial woes, and another three points on her licence, but she carried on without slowing down, a steady fifty-five in the thirty limit, desperate to get to her child.

Five minutes later she pulled into her driveway, jumped out of her car, jammed her key in the front door and pushed it open. Luke was standing in the hall, limp hair slanted across one eye, wearing a baggy top and trousers that looked like they might have come from the rear of a pantomime horse. His mouth was open and he had an even more gormless expression than usual on his face, like a man on a railway platform watching the last train of the night disappearing and not sure what to do next. He raised his arms by way of a greeting to Lynn, then let them drop again.

‘Where is she?’ she said.

‘Oh – er – right – Caitlin?’ he said.

Who the fuck do you think? Boadicea? Cleopatra? Hillary Clinton? Then she saw her daughter, standing at the top of the stairs, in a dressing gown over her nightdress, swaying as if she were drunk.

Dumping her handbag on the floor, Lynn threw herself up the stairs just as Caitlin stepped out into space, missing the top stair altogether, and tumbled forwards. Somehow, Lynn caught her, grabbing her thin frame in one arm and the banister rail in the other, and, clinging for dear life, managed to stop herself plunging backwards.

She stared into Caitlin’s face, inches from her own, and saw her eyes roll. ‘Darling? Darling? Are you OK?’

Caitlin slurred an incomprehensible response.

Using all her strength, somehow Lynn managed to push her back and up on to the landing. Caitlin tottered against the wall. Luke followed them, stopping halfway up the stairs.

‘Have you been doing drugs?’ Lynn screamed at him.

‘No, no way, Lynn,’ Luke protested, the shock in his voice sounding genuine.

Slurring her words, Caitlin said, ‘I’m like – I’m – I’m like…’

Lynn steered her back into her room. Caitlin half sank, half fell backwards on her bed. Lynn sat down beside her and put an arm around her. ‘What is it, my darling? Tell me?’

Caitlin’s eyes rolled again.

Lynn thought, for one terrible moment, that she was dying.

‘If you’ve given her anything, Luke, I’ll kill you. I swear it. I’ll tear your fucking eyeballs out!’

‘I haven’t, I promise. Nothing. Nothing. I don’t do drugs. I wouldn’t, wouldn’t give her nothing.’

She put her nose to her daughter’s mouth to see if she could smell alcohol, but there was only a warm, faintly sour odour. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

‘I just feel giddy. I’ve got the roundabouts. Where am I?’

‘You’re home, darling. You’re OK. You’re at home.’

Caitlin stared blankly around the room, without any recognition at all, as if she was in a totally unfamiliar place. Lynn followed her eyes as she stared at the dartboard with the purple boa hanging from it, then at the photograph of the rock star hunk, whose name Lynn had momentarily forgotten, as if she was looking at them for the first time.

‘I – I don’t know where I am,’ she said.

Lynn stood up, gripped by a terrible panic. ‘Luke, stay here with her for a moment.’ Then she ran downstairs, grabbed her handbag and went into the kitchen. She pulled her address book out of her bag, then dialled the mobile phone number of the Royal South London transplant coordinator.

Please God, be there.

To her relief, Shirley Linsell answered on the third ring. Lynn told her Caitlin’s symptoms.

‘It sounds like encephalopathy,’ she said. ‘Let me speak to a consultant and either I or he will get straight back to you.’

‘She’s in a really bad way,’ Lynn said. ‘Encephalopathy? How do you spell that?’

The coordinator spelled it out. Then, promising to get back to her within minutes, hung up.

Lynn ran back up the stairs, holding the cordless phone. ‘Luke, can you look up “encephalopathy” on the Net?’ She spelled it out for him.

Luke sat down at Caitlin’s dressing table, opened her laptop and began clicking on the keypad.

Five minutes later, Shirley Linsell rang back. ‘You need to get Caitlin to move her bowels. Would you like to bring her back up here?’

‘Have you found a liver for her?’

There was a hesitation that Lynn did not like.

‘No, but I think it would be a good idea for her to come in.’

‘For how long?’

‘Until we’ve stabilized her.’

‘When will you have a liver?’

‘Well, as I said this morning, I cannot answer that. You could treat her at home for this.’

‘What do I have to do?’

‘Give her an enema. Usually with this condition, evacuating the bowel will regularize her.’

‘What kind of enema? Where do I get one?’

‘Any chemist.’

‘Terrific,’ Lynn said.

‘Why don’t you try that? Give it a few hours, then see how she is and call me. There is someone here all the time and she can come in at any hour.’

‘Yes,’ Lynn said. ‘Fine, I’ll do that.’

She hung up.

Caitlin was lying back on her bed, eyes opening and closing.

‘I think I’ve found what you’re looking for!’ Luke announced.

Lynn peered over his shoulder. His hair smelled unwashed.

Reading aloud off the webpage he said, ‘Encephalopathy is a neuropsychiatric syndrome which occurs in advanced liver disease. Symptoms are anything from slight confusion and drowsiness to change in personality and outright coma.’

‘How fucking great is that?’ Lynn said. Then she turned to Caitlin, whose eyes were now closed. Afraid, suddenly, that she might be slipping into a coma, she shook her. ‘Darling? Keep awake, darling.’