Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

At Heathrow Airport they loaded the corpse into the hold of Flight CigAir 101—bound for Houston, Texas, USA. The corpse’s name was Royce Traynor. On February 11 the old oiler had been walking down a street in Kensington when a roofslate the size of a broadsheet newspaper came scything down at him. He died in the ambulance, cradled in the arms of his wife of forty-three years, Reynolds. Reynolds now sat in a more attractive part of the aeroplane, in seat 2B. She was tearfully drinking her second Buck’s Fizz and looking forward to the moment when the Captain would switch off the no-smoking sign.

Of the 399 passengers and crew on this ten-hour flight, Royce Traynor was the only one who would feel no erosion of his well-being.

Tender-yeared Billie Meo walked through Casualty with such fascination that the scored lino strained to feel the weight of her tread. Her slippers were landing heel-down, but there was a tiptoe in her somewhere — in the calves, perhaps. Russia Meo, when she took her daughter’s hand, could feel the fractional levitation of inquisitive anxiety as, all around them, figures like distorted statues were being lowered, winched up, bent over, turned. And the noises, and the smell.

It was nine o’clock before Russia called the police and started ringing round the hospitals. It was nearly ten when she learnt that her husband had been admitted to St Mary’s with a closed-head injury that was thought to be minor — as opposed to major. By that time Billie was altogether caught up in her mother’s agitation, and Russia felt she didn’t have a choice but to let her ‘come with’. (The baby, Sophie, had been down for hours — pompously at peace, with her nose upturned.) Russia had trusted herself to take the car, though she already felt like a driver on a stretch of black ice: no grip on the road, and many futures vying to become her next reality. But that would be to get ahead of yourself, because the evening had become a tunnel, and there was only one possible future now — the one at the hospital. She was aware that her body was being internally tranquillised, that time had slowed on her behalf. Like Billie, she was in a state of hallucinogenic curiosity. She parked the car across the street beneath the other building, where she had given birth to both her girls. Then the Reception area, where families and parts of families sat in taciturn vigil, some groups erectly tensed, others in sprawling abandon, as if for a twelve-hour flight delay.

In hospital, she thought: no the or a . In court, in jail, in church. What did these institutions have in common? Something to do with the settling of fates … Billie had been in hospital only twice before: on the occasion of her birth, and, more recently, when it was discovered that she had consumed half a bottle of liquid paracatemol. That had also taken place at night. Billie was in fact concluding that hospital was what automatically happened if you succeeded in staying up very late.

They were now directed to Trauma.

‘A head injury’, said the Intensivist, ‘entrains a sequence of events. We talk of the Three Injuries. The First Injury occurs in the first few seconds, the Second Injury in the first hour, the Third Injury in the first days or weeks or months. Your husband — Alex — has sustained the First Injury. It is my immediate task to prevent the Second and the Third. He lost consciousness, it seems, for about two or three minutes.’

‘I thought anything over a minute …’

‘Three minutes is not the end of the world. Although he couldn’t remember his surname or his telephone number, he was lucid in the ambulance. His blood pressure was normal. The brain was not deprived of oxygen: the Second Injury. His respiration was found to be strong and regular. When there is irregular or depressed respiration in the presence of an adequate airway, the prognosis is invariably grave.’

Some doctors are diffident about the power they wield. Other doctors glitter with it. Dr Gandhi (satanically handsome, it seemed to Russia, but starting to bend in on himself as he reached the middle years) happened to be a doctor of the second kind. He was gratified, he was warmed, by how intently people listened to what he said, with their imploring eyes. They were right to do so, and it was natural to fear him, to love him: he was their interpreter of mortality. What he dispensed — what he withheld … Billie was in the adjacent playroom. Russia could hear her. The child, too, seemed to be taking deep breaths and then holding them; she gasped and sighed as she married and severed the plastic Sticklebricks.

‘Alex was reasonably lucid in the ambulance. By the time I examined him he was talking gibberish. I was not discouraged. He enjoyed obedient mobility and his eyes responded normally to light. Over the space of an hour his score on the Glasgow Scale rose from nine to fourteen, one short of the maximum. The X-ray revealed no fracture. Better still, the CT-scan revealed bruising but only minimal swelling. Which would have been the Third Injury. I administered a diuretic as a precaution. This dehydrates and thus shrinks the brain,’ said Dr Gandhi, reaching out his hand and clenching it. ‘He is in Intensive Care. And asleep, and breathing normally, and fully monitored.’

‘And that will be that?’

‘… Madam, your husband’s brain has been accelerated . The soft tissue has been impacted against its container: the skull. On the front underside of the brain there are bony ridges. What are they for! Nobody knows! To punish the head-injured, it would seem. As the brain accelerates it rips and tears on this — this grater . Nerve cells may be damaged, or at least temporarily stunned. The brain, we believe, attempts to restore the deficit, using surplus cells in a process of spontaneous reorganisation. This may take time. And there are a myriad possible side-effects. Headache, fatigue, poor concentration, poor balance, amnesia, emotional lability. Lability? Liable to change. Mrs Meo, which of these four words best describes your husband’s temperament: serene, easy, irritable, difficult.’

‘Oh, easy.’

‘Expect a tendency, in the coming weeks, towards the difficult. Would you and uh, Billie like to look in on your husband? He has been given a muscle-relaxant. I suggest you do not wake him. An hour ago my colleague tried to shine a light in his eyes. Alex was not best pleased!’

Intensive Care felt like a submarine or an elderly spaceship: dark compartments where important devices whirred and ticked — electrocardiograms, panting ventilators; the churning of life and death in shapes and shadows. Smiling, the charge nurse drew back the curtain. In they crept.

When she saw him Billie gave her characteristic groan of love — but there seemed to be grief in it now. Feeling a pain in her throat, Russia stooped hurriedly and lifted the child into her arms.

They had him at a steeper angle than she expected. The hefty white collar he wore and the way the sheets were puffed up round his neck made it impossible to avoid the thought that he was slowly emerging from the depths of a toilet bowl; and there were wires taped to his scalp.

‘Why he not awake?’

‘He’s a sleep ,’ she whispered sibilantly. ‘He got an ouch and he’s a sleep .’

Suddenly his eyes opened and he was staring straight at her. She felt herself rock back: what was it? Accusation? Then focus was lost, and the lids sank slowly, obedient to a chemical torpor.

‘Blow a kiss,’ said Russia, ‘to make it better.’

As she was walking back through Reception, with that light tread, that flat-heeled tiptoe, Billie looked up at her mother and said, with unreadable contentment,