Ken McClure - Trauma

“It’s Main, Father, John Main.”

Lafferty held out his hand and Main grasped it briefly.

“We were driving through to see my wife, Mary’s parents. Simon was their first grandchild and they doted on him. It was raining... It was raining very heavily. I remember the wipers were having difficulty coping with the water so I slowed down a bit. Mary had just made a joke about a boat being more use in this country when it happened...”

Lafferty could see that Main was reliving the event. He didn’t say anything.

“I lost control of the car. I don’t know why; perhaps a tyre blew or something. In retrospect it seemed to happen in slow motion. It suddenly slewed to one side and then skidded round in a circle when I tried to brake. We would have been all right if it hadn’t been for the bridge across the carriageway, you know, one of these concrete flyover things. We just ploughed straight into it — or rather, the left side of our car, where Mary was sitting, ploughed straight into it. I was flung out on to the road but she was killed instantly.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Lafferty. “And your son?”

“Simon was badly injured but he was still alive when the firemen freed him from the wreckage. The hospital put him on a life-support machine but when they’d finished all the tests, they told me he had irreparable brain damage. They had to switch the machine off.”

Lafferty swallowed and felt inadequate.

“My son was buried five weeks ago. I never realised what true loneliness could feel like, but without Mary and Simon, there seems to be no point to anything any more. I can’t sleep, I can’t work, I can’t seem to think straight. And now this other thing.”

“Other thing?”

“My son’s grave was dug up and his body was taken.”

“It was your son!” exclaimed Lafferty. “I read about it in the papers. I’m sorry, I should have realised when you told me your name.”

“I can’t cope with it, Father. They say it was the work of occultists, devil worshippers, and I can’t come to terms with it. I’m not a stupid man but I feel as if my son has been kidnapped. I know he’s dead but it feels the same and not knowing what they’ve done to him is making it worse. I suppose a priest might be able to give me some idea.”

Lafferty felt as if the roof had fallen in on him. He tried to keep the shock off his face as he struggled for words.

“My experience of dealing with the forces of darkness,” he began, “has been mercifully limited. In fact,” he confessed, “it’s non-existent.”

Main nodded. He seemed to appreciate Lafferty’s honesty.

Lafferty continued, “This is not to deny their existence. Our universe is largely dependent on equal and opposite forces creating a balance. If we believe in the forces of light and goodness in the world then we have to acknowledge the opposites of darkness and evil.”

“I’m afraid, Father. I’m afraid for Simon’s soul,” said Main.

“These people took your son’s body, John, not his soul.”

Main looked at Lafferty direct in the eye. “I’ve tried telling myself that, but I’m not convinced. If that were so, why would they want his body in the first place?”

Lafferty felt his stomach tie in knots. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I can try to find out. We have an ecclesiastical library in the city and there’s a colleague I can speak to. What do you say we meet again in, say, two days time, and I can tell you what I’ve found out?”

“I’d be very grateful,” said Main.

“Perhaps you could give me an address or a telephone number where I can reach you if I find out anything sooner?”

Main gave Lafferty both.

Sarah Lasseter had been on duty for thirty-five hours with only two hours sleep. She had known what to expect when she started out on the course that would make her a qualified doctor but that didn’t make her feel any better about it. She was exhausted. What made it worse was that she really could not see any need for it. Like so many bad things, it had become ‘traditional’ that junior doctors should work themselves to a standstill. Because of that, there was no real impetus to change matters. If any such attempt was made it usually had to come from junior doctors themselves and in the end, the more vociferous of their number were patronised by the authorities as being young and ‘bolshie’. The others tended to fade from the protest scene, fearing damage to their future careers.

Sarah’s feelings on the matter remained unexpressed simply because she wasn’t prepared to back them up with action. She felt that she had enough on her plate with the study and practice of medicine without getting involved in the politics of it. She also recognised that, as a woman, she was starting off at a disadvantage. Whatever anyone said to the contrary, medicine had a strong male bias. In the upper echelons, very few consultancies were filled by women. Sarah had quietly checked when she’d started at the hospital. The ratio was seven to one in favour of men. She hadn’t mentioned this to anyone because she felt the feminist cause had been lost to the loonies. She accepted pragmatically that to be seen as an equal she’d have to be better. At the moment she was doing her obligatory one year residency work in hospital medicine, finding out her strengths and weaknesses, her likes and dislikes, with a view to future career direction. Her first six months had been spent in general surgery where she had performed well enough to be recommended for her current position in the prestigious Head Trauma Unit. When asked about future plans, Sarah would invariably say that, eventually, she planned to join her father in general practice. Just lately she had become aware of how much emphasis she had been putting on the word ‘eventually’.

Sarah had been brought up in a small town in Norfolk, the only daughter of a country doctor and his wife, who was virtually a partner through her involvement in the day to day running of the practice. Sarah had inherited her father’s intellect but, to her own regret, not her mother’s inexhaustible patience and her capacity to see the good in everyone. Sarah regarded herself as much more of a realist. There had been a time in her teenage years when she’d gone off the rails and had driven her parents almost to distraction. For a year and a half she had rebelled against the values her family held dear and had run wild. Her school work was ignored and she fell in with a crowd who were, to her way of thinking at the time, exciting. This unhappy time for all of them had ended almost as suddenly as it had begun and before Sarah had got into any serious trouble. The leather-jacketed boys who drank and smoked and ‘borrowed’ cars stopped being so exciting. Almost overnight they became boring and vacuous.

Ostensibly, relationships with her father and mother were restored, but Sarah knew that the hurt she had caused ran deep, particularly with her father who had been ill-prepared for her antics. She had done her best to atone by catching up with her schoolwork and then gaining entry to Glasgow University’s medical school.

She knew how proud her father had been on graduation day, but was aware that what he really wanted was for her to join him in general practice and one day take over the care of the people who had come to mean so much to him. She had almost convinced herself that this was what she, too, wanted for herself, but knew that somewhere, at the back of her mind, guilt for the pain she had caused was still playing a part.

What concerned Sarah at the moment was not the fact that she was unbelievably tired and run off her feet but that her immediate boss clearly did not like her. Dr Derek Logan was being less that helpful and she wasn’t sure why. She suspected it had something to do with working-class snobbery. He liked people to know that he had clawed his way up from very humble beginnings and seemed to despise anyone who hadn’t, although he had very clearly set out to distance himself from these very origins. Whatever the reason, Sarah found him very difficult to talk to, and this was a problem, as there was a lot she had to learn. That meant asking questions, but asking Logan invariably brought a shrug of the shoulders and an equivocal response. His look always seemed to suggest that she should have known the answer to her question