Chapter Twenty Nine
At first
there was only grey cloud. Shapes came and went through it,
solidifications of mist. Someone hung an electric sun high in this
strange sky, and after that the mist-shapes had more substance.
They could pass between Laurie and the light. Soon after this the
shapes developed hands. They lifted, grappled, performed intimacies
he was too disconnected from his flesh to mind. Then the pain
began. The shapes made sounds. They called to one another urgently,
whales in a tight-knit pod. The pain receded, blanketed off, and
before it could begin again, Laurie became a cloud too. He
dissolved. The thin white sun began to fade.
Something was holding him down. He was tethered to a very
distant warmth. For a while he was a kite, fluttering over
Birchwood Heath. His fabric was so tattered that the wind blew
right through him, but someone with a grip like steel was clutching
his string. Laurie became a bird. He was pleased that he could
still transform. The hawk was in better shape than the kite had
been too, though desperately tired. He circled down. At first he
thought he was attached to a falconer’s cord. Fear engulfed him
when he understood that he was free, but then he saw the clearing
far below among the trees. Not Birchwood, not the scene of so much
pain. Laurie had never been to this place before, but he knew it.
There were pines, distant mountains, a wild infinity of space and
light. Romania, he
realised, and a rush of joyous homecoming strengthened his
wings.
Sasha
stepped out of the trees. It was Sasha who had held him in the sun,
Sasha’s strong fist round the string of the kite. He was smiling,
holding out a bare arm, and Laurie experienced a moment’s terror of
hurting him. But Sasha knew how to catch him without harm. Laurie
knew now how to come to him, talons and dangerous windspeed and
all, and be safely caught. He shapeshifted again, becoming human,
falling into Sasha’s open arms.
One of the cloud-shapes spoke. “Look at this. His vitals are
much better now.” Laurie knew the voice. He’d been listening to it
for a few days, unable to respond when it shouted his name, asked
him if he knew where he was, then reeled off orders for blood,
medications, preparation for surgery stat.
“Well, they couldn’t have been a lot worse. What brought that
on?”
“I don’t know. But don’t shift Mr Petrica. Tell the team to
work around him.”
Laurie
recognised the second voice too. That was as far as his mind would
take him. He had made safe landing, though, and someone was holding
his hand. He fell asleep.
***
There was so much sunlight. Laurie let it filter through his
eyelashes, for a long time doing nothing more than watching
rainbows. His perceptions lifted outwards. The electric sun—a neon
strip above his bed—had been extinguished. Slowly he worked out
that the team of patient rats who’d been getting paid to gnaw night
and day on the end of his cock was nothing more than a catheter.
That the underground fairytale horror-lab of Frankenstein was only
a hospital room, the various wires and drips that would
give his creation life only saline and blood in their innocent frames by the
bed.
And they
had apparently worked. Laurie lay in wonder at the fact of his own
created life. Not even his breathing was being left to chance. A
regular in-and-out hiss told him that, as well as the alien press
of a tube in his throat. Shortly the tube would bother him very
much indeed, but just for now he was too doped for his reflexes to
fire. He couldn’t move his head. That was all right too. There was
plenty to see from here.
His
sister, for example, working through her ballet drill. There was a
trolley against the far wall: she was using its handle for a barre.
Her concentration was absolute, her expression that of a little nun
for whom divine inspiration was just the norm, a fact of daily
life. Laurie remembered their conversation in the churchyard, about
dancers and actors and humans. Laurie hadn’t been at all sure then
which side of the line his own talents had placed him on. He knew
now.
He would
have liked to tell her, but his reborn humanity had other things on
its mind. He had to move his head a little now. Everything ached,
and the soft beeping he hadn’t yet associated with the ongoing beat
of his heart speeded up a little, skipped and then settled. There
was someone sitting by his bed. Laurie shifted one more time to be
quite sure, and then lay still again, joy spreading through him in
bright rings.
Sasha,
sound asleep with his head on his folded arms. He’d been writing in
a notebook. The pen was still loosely clasped in his fingers.
Laurie wondered why he hadn’t been using his cherished laptop:
whatever he’d been working on, it looked complicated. There were
stray sheets of paper scattered across the bed. If Laurie squinted
at the nearest one, he could just see the name repeated across it.
Yosiri Cuza... Laurie’s joy increased. The sight of that dark head
on the blanket, of Sasha so engrossed in the work he loved that
he’d nosedived into it from sheer exhaustion—that was a sight from
the real world, the daily-bread existence Laurie had thought
forever lost.
Sasha’s free hand was wrapped around Laurie’s. Even in his
sleep, his grip was firm and sure. Stay
with me, it said, plainly as if Sasha had
painted the message in three-foot-high letters on the wall. He had
been there all the time.
Laurie
wanted to stroke his hair. His skin ached to do it, to know again
the warm silk, the delicate hollow at the base of Sasha’s skull.
When he tried, a dull sting ran up his arm. Something was taped to
his wrist. He wasn’t sure what the device was called but he could
feel a tube jammed into his vein. That was okay, he told himself
fiercely. The tube was hitched up to a thin red line, delivering
life. No need to panic over that...
No. He’d
save panic for the giant bloody drainpipe someone had shoved down
his throat. He tried to yell. The thing was sitting on his vocal
chords, and the effort backfired on him, clenching his muscles
tight round the obstruction. He convulsed on the bed, sending
papers flying.
Sasha
jerked bolt upright. He stared at Laurie for one second from the
depths of sleep, eyes blank with shock. Then he pulled his hand out
of Laurie’s, jumped up and ran for the door. Laurie heard him
shouting in the corridor and was distantly glad that the worst of
the expletives were Romani. Running feet responded, the squeak of
soft-soled shoes on lino, and the room burst into chaotic motion,
cloud-shape men and women becoming solid flesh around his bed. One
of them pinned Laurie down. Another reached to snap the mask off
his face. “It’s a tube,” she said soothingly. “There. Just a tube.
Coming out.” Something slithered up out of Laurie’s throat, the
sensation indescribably horrible, and he coughed and retched and
seized a huge inward breath on his own. “Good lad. You ready to do
that for yourself now? That’s it—you just breathe.”
Laurie
fell back. He sucked lungful after lungful of the stuffy hospital
air, tasting disinfectant, not minding that or the scarlet band of
pain across his back. There was a terrible noise going on, though,
a sound he was glad he didn’t seem to be making himself. He managed
to turn his head and get a view past the doctors bustling around
him, checking his drip feeds and wires. “Clara!”
She was trying to tear her way through poor Elena Dracinsky to
get to him. The dragon was trying to reason with her. Laurie heard
the words deportment and composure, but Clara had gone past those things for once in her
constrained little life. She was wailing like a siren, feet
scrabbling on the lino while Dracinsky held her. “It’s okay,”
Laurie rasped. “Let her go.”
“Not until I’m certain she won’t leap on you and disarrange
equipment. And distract and be a nuisance to the doctors, Miss
Fitzroy! The very people trying to help your brother the
most...”
“She won’t,” Laurie interrupted wearily. “Will you?”
Clara
stopped herself between one howl and the next. She froze,
wide-eyed. “Nn-nn.”
Dracinsky released her, keeping a grip on the back of her
T-shirt. She let her walk to the bedside in carefully controlled
steps, like a fisherman paying out line. “Excuse me,” Dracinsky
said to the doctor fastening a pressure-cuff round Laurie’s arm.
“May this distraught child see her brother?”
The
doctor grinned. “Since she did nothing but practise her pliés while
we all thought he was dying, I’m quite glad to see her distraught.
Yes, let her rip—just mind Laurie’s drip feeds, please,
Clara.”
She
scrambled onto the bed. She had calmed herself by desperate force,
but sobs were hitching at the whole of her skinny frame, and Laurie
made room for her at his side. She curled up, burying her face
against his chest.
The tide
had swept Sasha to the far side of the room. He was standing by the
window, arms folded over his chest. Now that Laurie could see him
by proper light, he was hollowed with exhaustion, his face gaunt
with fear and sleeplessness. And yet there was clearly some part of
him that believed he had no place by Laurie’s bed, not when the
doctors and the blood family were there. And that belief—that
uncertainty of his worth—was Laurie’s fault. “Sasha,” he said,
holding out a hand.
***
The tide
had receded. One by one the doctors had finished their tasks and
their checks. Clara’s dragon had formally introduced herself,
apologising for the deception and explaining that, until Clara
finished her run in the States, she had been instructed by Agent
Kucharski to remain in place as her guardian. She had neatly bowed
acknowledgement of Laurie’s gratitude, then turned on her heel and
exited, leaving her charge curled up and sound asleep at Laurie’s
side.
A child
allowed on the bed, a private room, an ugly postmodernist splodge