Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

He turned away from the image, unable to fully comprehend what he was seeing.

“Put on some clothes,” he said to Abby, trying to cling to anything that might represent normality.

ROYLE RUSHED ACROSS the hospital car park, thinking the worst.

He’d received the call twenty minutes ago and had wasted no time in getting here. His car was parked at an angle, taking up two spaces, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was lucky to have made it here without running someone down. He could remember none of the journey; he’d completed it on auto-pilot.

He barged through the main doors and headed towards the maternity wing. The hospital was quiet; people were pushing trolleys laden with breakfast into side rooms, a few patients wandered the halls in their dressing gowns, doctors and nurses with weary eyes and soft morning faces talking in low voices.

At the reception desk, Royle told a small, frail woman with thick spectacles who he was and why he was here.

“And we called you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I got a call not long ago to tell me that she was here.”

The woman checked her computer for the second time, the light from the screen reflecting in the lenses of her glasses. “What was the name again?”

“Mine?”

“No, the patient’s.”

“Vanessa Royle.”

Her eyes darted across the screen. “I’m sorry, but she isn’t on here… when exactly was she brought in?”

“She came in last night, with pregnancy complications, or so I was told. Listen…” He paused, trying to rein in his temper, and something occurred to him. “Oh, hang on. She might be down under her maiden name.” He shrugged when the woman glanced up at him, her face filled with tired pity. “Vanessa Mantel.”

“Mantel… ah, yes. Here she is. Ward Ten. Just go down the corridor there and turn right at the end.” A smile crossed her face, briefly but brightly, and then she dismissed him by peering over his shoulder at the other people milling about near her desk.

He walked through the doorway the woman had indicated and passed a couple of empty rooms, several closed doors, and a ward containing a group of pregnant women. When he finally reached the ward where Vanessa was staying, he paused and tried to gather his thoughts.

They hadn’t told him much over the phone, just that he needed to get down here because his wife had been brought in with complications. They told him not to worry, but to get here as quickly as he could. Not to worry… such stupid advice, especially when it came from someone at the hospital where your pregnant wife had been rushed in the early hours of the morning.

He remembered the sound he’d heard — or thought he’d heard — coming from her belly the last time he’d seen her. Hadn’t she also said that the baby had been kicking hard? Surely that was a sign that the baby was okay, that it was developing well. A dead baby couldn’t kick.

He closed his eyes, trying to banish such thoughts. But it was no good. This was his biggest fear, the terror that gripped him every night, part of the reason he reached for the bottle: that the baby would die, and it would kill his marriage when it did so. All he wanted, everything he needed, was in this building. He couldn’t face the idea of leaving it here, in a medical waste bag headed for the incinerator.

Fuck, why did he always have to think such negative thoughts… why was he so damned dark? Sometimes he blamed the job, but then he thought that he was probably drawn to become a police officer in the first place because of that darkness, which had always been at his centre: a hard little kernel of night. And wasn’t the alcohol just another way of trying to drown that seed, to render it powerless? Or was it just a way of watering it and helping it to grow?

He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his shirt collar, and pushed open the door.

He saw Vanessa immediately. She was in the bed nearest the door. Her face was so pale that she looked like a ghost of herself. She didn’t see him at first, so when he approached the bed she twitched in shock when he spoke.

“How are you?”

She smiled. “Okay. It’s good to see you.”

He felt like crying. He wanted to start punching and kicking the walls, tearing apart the place. “What happened?”

“Have you spoken to the doctor?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I came straight up here, to the ward.”

A nurse walked over from her station. “Mr Royle?”

“DS Royle,” he said, not understanding why it was important to state his rank to this civilian. That wouldn’t help here. Death would not be scared off by official seniority.

“DS Royle… yes. The doctor asked me to let him know once you arrived. He’d like to talk to you, if that’s okay.”

He reached out and Vanessa’s hand found his. He squeezed it, looked down at her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Go and see the doctor. I’ll be fine.” She squeezed him back.

He followed the nurse back out into the corridor, where she led him to a small, cramped room. The door was open and a middle-aged doctor sat behind a desk, squinting at a computer screen.

“Doctor Gable,” said the nurse. “Mr… sorry, DS Royle is here.”

The doctor looked up. He had a large, open face and a grey goatee beard. He blinked several times, smiled, and nodded. “Thanks, nurse. Please, DS Royle… won’t you come in?”

The nurse hurried away. Royle stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, unsure of what to do, and then he stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him.

“Sit down, please.” The doctor leaned back in his chair. He had a big belly and thin arms. His medical coat was ill-fitting, as if they hadn’t quite been able to accommodate his odd shape.

“What’s wrong with my wife?”

The doctor grabbed a pen off the desk and rolled it between his palms. “As you know, she was brought in here a few hours ago. She called an ambulance complaining of pains and they wasted no time in getting her here. A woman of her age… well, we can’t afford to take any risks.”

Royle nodded. “Go on.”

“We did an ultrasound and found something unusual.” He paused.

Royle waited for him to continue.

“There’s a growth, DS Royle. It’s attached to the wall of her womb. At first we thought it might be an underdeveloped twin. That happens sometimes, one twin is stronger than the other and the weaker one expires.”

“Twins?”

“No. Not twins. That’s just what we thought at first. I’m afraid your wife has a tumour. We can’t tell if it’s benign or malignant at this stage, but one thing’s for certain — it needs to come out. We have to operate, and we have to do it quickly."

Royle stared at the window behind the doctor’s head. The sun was almost full up; the sky was lightening by degrees, the clouds parting. “How soon can you do it?”

“You have private health care. That means we can bump her up the list and do it almost immediately — certainly in the next twenty-four hours, here at the hospital. We need to monitor the situation first, get the results of a biopsy. We’re not sure how serious this is, but I need to warn you both that it might be very serious indeed. If the tumour is malignant… well, I’m sure you understand what that might mean.” The doctor stopped playing with the pen. He placed it on the desk, then touched it a couple of times with the tip of his finger, rolling it a few inches back and forth across the surface. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “We’ll do everything we can.”

Royle stood and backed away from the desk. “Yeah. Thanks.” He needed to get out of there, to get away from the hideous little man and his distracted demeanour. He couldn’t take it all in; the world was coming apart at the seams, letting in impurities from whatever lay beyond the veil. The dark seed at his centre was starting to flower.