The Cold Calling Part 5

At night, you discover, stone is always cold.

Sleeping on stone that's not natural. You awake time after time, usually uncomfortable as h.e.l.l and sometimes in a panic simply because of the stone all around you. Well, that's good it shouldn't come easy, not at first. Without a challenge there can be no achievement.

Which is just as well because this particular burial chamber, where I slept last night, is fully exposed, the earthmound which once concealed it having long since eroded. It is like a long, low stone table on little, stubby legs. Or maybe a clump of big mushrooms fused together. Kind of weird-looking, but not what you would call spectacular. Indeed, without a large-scale map you would not find it at all except by accident.

Well, certainly not at night.

Under your head is an old gray stone which you can feel as though there was no sleeping bag there at all. What it makes you think of is those petrified pillows supporting marble effigies on tombs in old churches. Creepy, huh?

Hey, come on. This is a scientific experiment.

Anyway, like I said, when you sleep on stone, sometimes you awake but you're not awake, if this makes sense. You know you can't be, because the stone isn't cold, nor even hard; you're sinking into it so d.a.m.n grateful it isn't cold and hard any more that you just let yourself luxuriate in it. And down you go, quite painlessly, into the ground, into the earth. Your subconscious mind that is. Or whatever you want to call the part of you that admits the dreams.

You come to realize that the very easiest phase is the letting go. I say easy ... it was hard for me at first. I am, as you can guess, the odd one out on this course, most of the others being half-a.s.sed pseudo-mystics who are just here for the buzz. (You will notice, Grayle, that I have been at pains not to say 'people like you'.) They tell you not to think too hard before you go to sleep, so maybe it's just as well your main concern is to get comfortable. If you go into waking fantasies and your conscious mind influences your dreams, this is a bad thing, obviously.

Before you know it, you've been gently awoken and the therapeute is whispering, Did you dream? Tell me ... describe it to me...

You feel wonderful then. You did it. You interacted.

The actual interacting, the dreaming, often becomes, well ... kind of scary, if you want the truth. Not at all what you're expecting. Maybe it has occurred to you that this place where you're sleeping, when it comes down to it, when you get beyond all the screwball stuff about secret energies and the healing powers of Mother Earth...

... is a grave.

A repository for bodies. Flesh has rotted here, bones have crumbled.

The claustrophobia, at this point, can be intense. You start to scream inside. All you want is out of there. But, like I said, you have to stop your conscious mind getting a hold of you. What you are dealing with here is the unconscious and that must be left to find its own route to what you would probably call enlightenment.

In relation to this, OK, there is one small problem, I am told.

You know how, in nightmares, when you get into a very frightening situation like, you're about to fall a thousand feet onto rocks or you turn around to find the psycho with the ax was behind the door all the time you awake?

Well, sleeping in a prehistoric burial chamber, so they tell me, you can't always count on this happening implying that under these physical conditions it is possible to reach a deeper level of unconsciousness. This, I am convinced, is the first step to a scientific explanation of so-called prophetic dreaming, as supposedly experienced by Jacob and tribal shamans the world over, and it excites me profoundly.

Before you say a word, sure I've heard that stuff about how, if you weren't able to awake from a nightmare, when you got into a terminally tight corner you'd just die.

Like I said, it's important that it isn't easy. That there are risks. Nothing significant is ever achieved without risk.

'Your parents seen any of this?'

Lyndon McAffrey solemn now, maybe the old newsman's antennae starting to vibrate.

Grayle shook her head. 'Don't Show the Folks. Pain of death. We used to put it on cards and letters when we were kids.'

'When you were kids is one thing-'

'Listen, it's bad enough we haven't had a letter or a phone call in five weeks. No, I didn't show it to them then and I don't plan to. My father would be acutely embarra.s.sed on his younger child's behalf and blame it on my mother's genes, like he does with me. Mom would be spooked all the way to the cocaine cupboard. No, h.e.l.l, this is down to me. Time for Crazy Grayle to get her s.h.i.+t together.'

'OK.' Lyndon leaned back. 'What are your own personal conclusions here? That Ersula blew out her mind under some old stone and went native? Among the primitive Brits?'

'I know ... you don't believe, any more than my father would, that my sister could be psychically damaged by any of this. You don't believe for one second that she's messing with awesomely powerful cosmic forces. You think more likely she got laid inside a stone circle, fell in love, lost track of time ...'

'OK,' Lyndon said. 'What do you plan to do about it?'

'Well ... I already called this University of the Earth summer school. Spoke to a guy who was very helpful. Surprised we hadn't heard from Ersula, on account of the course ended a month ago and they presumed she'd flown home. He didn't sound like a fruitcake ...'

Lyndon's expression said he wouldn't trust Grayle to identify a fruitcake at knife-swinging distance. She averted her eyes.

'So, I ... I called the police department. I guess there'll be some kind of hook-up with the English cops. But ...'

'The English police are very thorough,' Lyndon said. 'If there's anything wrong here, they'll find out.'

'You don't think I should fly over there?'

'How would that help?'

'Well ... it would help me, I guess.'

'Grayle, you yourself admit that Ersula is the balanced one.'

'And, yeah, she went to Africa, just out of high school, and we didn't hear from her for close to two months. But that was when the folks split. Her way of coming to terms with all that. This is different. She's a grown woman. Also she knows that if the very last letter I get from her is as weird as this ...'

'OK,' Lyndon said. 'You have a point. See what the cops come up with. They may not be too enthusiastic about finding a grown woman who's only been missing a few weeks, but being she's a professor's daughter and all ... Leave it to the cops.'

'Right.' Grayle's voice a little too high. 'You're right. That's sensible.'

Lyndon nodded. He folded the blue airmail letter, tucked it under Grayle's coffee cup. He hadn't read the other pages.

Because she hadn't given them to him.

About Ersula's dream. The page with the disturbing details of Ersula's dream lying out on the burial chamber.

So Grayle went home to her windchimes and her crystals and her tree-of-life wallchart. Tried to meditate, gave up and half watched an old John Wayne movie on TV until she fell asleep and dreamed uneasily about dreaming.

III.

Around two-thirty a.m., Sister Anderson, scenting smoke, slid quietly into the sluice room. The young Nigerian houseman, Jonathan, bounced off the wall like a scared squirrel, tossed his cigarette out of the window.

When he saw who it was, Jonathan looked no less intimidated. 'Sorry,' he muttered. 'I'm sorry.' His face no longer black but grey with fatigue in the white lights.

These kids. He'd have been hardly born when Sister Andy, red-haired then and vengeful, had first hunted down wee nurses and sprog docs who'd risked a ciggy in the sluice or the lavvies. Been a good while now since she last chewed the leg off a junior housie no fun terrorizing some hollow-eyed kid at the end of a sixteen-hour s.h.i.+ft. But reputations stuck.

'Jonathan,' Andy said wearily. 'Daft sod y'are, wasnae likely to be the chairman of the b.l.o.o.d.y hospital trust this time of night. Here ... have yourself a replacement.'

Jonathan looked surprised and then smiled tentatively, still unsure whether it was a trap. Getting the cigarette to his mouth, his hand shook, poor wean. Twenty-six years old, veteran of three weeks in A and E, two on the slaughterhouse s.h.i.+ft.

'Aw, come on, son.' Andy flashed the ancient Zippo. 'It happens. You did your best, no?'

'Is that what I am supposed to keep telling myself every night for the next forty years?'

'It's what I've been saying to young guys like you the last thirty.' Andy sighed. 'Aye, you're right, it's a trite wee phrase.'

She lit up too, having a good idea what was coming next.

'I honestly don't think I am going to stick it,' Jonathan said bleakly. 'It's like working in some sort of meat-processing plant. By midnight, one gets so one doesn't want to go back out there.'

If she'd had twenty Silk Cut for every time an intern said that to her, she'd have gone down with nicotine poisoning years back. What the h.e.l.l was she supposed to say? If she told him the truth of how bad it became, he'd just think she was stir-crazy. The truth was you grew to love it. The stink, the drips, the bedpans, the old guys who drooled you loved it all and, when you took a holiday, your heart ached to get back.

This was how bad it became.

'But I mean,' Jonathan said, 'does anyone ever surprise you? You know, by suddenly responding to treatment? Does that happen any more? And is anybody ever, ever grateful?'

'Oh, thank you, thank you, doctor, you saved ma life.' Andy a.s.suming a geriatric quaver. 'Stayed awake long enough to administer the right drugs in the right order. A credit to the hospital trust.' She sighed. 'Ah, Jonathan, in my own worst moments I figure if you manage to save a life you must've beaten the system, y'know?'

The same way you loved the whingeing patients and the underpaid nurses and the thirty-year-old doctors looking fifty, so you hated the suits, the admin guys, the caring, cut-gla.s.s quango ladies with their spectacles on gold chains and clipboards full of rationalization plans. It was all a business now and the last thing businesses were about was healing.

She became aware that Jonathan was looking down at her in some kind of awe.

'Sister Andy! My G.o.d, it's true, isn't it? You really are leaving us.'

'Where've you heard that?' Knowing dammit that with the sharpness of her tone she was confirming it. Although it wasn't certain, by no means.

'Well, I ... somebody said you accepted a retirement package. But someone else said it was just a vicious rumour and they'd never get you out ... out ...'

'... alive? Never get me out of here alive? b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, Jonathan, I look that old and ruined?'

Jesus G.o.d, were the d.a.m.n sprogs beginning to pity her? Maybe it was time to start dyeing the hair again. Bring back the old red. Fiery red and halfway down her back when she came down from Glasgow in sixty-five. Faded ginger seven years ago when she and Mick were divorced. Straggly grey now.

'Well, you know, a lot of people nowadays are taking early retirement,' Jonathan said, embarra.s.sed. 'To do the things they always promised themselves. Travel the world ...'

'Sod off,' said Andy. 'You're just digging yourself in deeper.'

'Sorry. Another job, then? It'll go no further, I promise. It's just that if even you are getting out-'

'Look, son.' Andy glared up, smoking no-hands, pus.h.i.+ng the words out the side of the ciggie. 'If anybody wants to know, I'm gonny marry a brilliant heart surgeon and fly out to his private clinic on Paradise Island, OK?'

'Sorry. None of my business.'

'Right,' said Andy.

Paradise. Sure. Paradise stripped down to a stone and timbered village huddled under the Black Mountains, which were the lower vertebrae of the Welsh border. A paradise called St Mary's. A grand wee place, in its way, a haven, a sanctuary ...

... and the nearest general hospital twenty rugged miles away. A clean break, right enough. Jesus G.o.d, was she really going through with it this time? Big hospitals, most people found them soulless and scary, but they gave Andy just a fantastic buzz, the smell of p.i.s.s and disinfectant invigorating all her senses like ozone. Her element. Was her element. In the days before the suits. Before healing got deprioritized.

'OK,' Andy said. 'I'll tell you the truth. But it goes no further, right?'

Jonathan placed his hand over his heart.

'Only, I've been worried a while about the personal touch going out of health care. Like you said, a production line. I worry about the drug companies ruling the world, y'know?'

'Don't they?'

'I've been studying alternative healing,' Andy said. 'Y'know what I mean?'

Jonathan's eyes widened. 'Mumbo jumbo?'

'This is the question, Jonathan. Is it?'

'Well now, Sister Andy, that is a very profound question.'

'Glad you think so. I was a wee bit scared to mention witch doctors and such in case you took it as some kind of racist slur on the African health service. We're all treading eggsh.e.l.ls these days, son.'

Jonathan grinned. 'It's all turned around again. Now, witch doctors are part of a great cultural tradition. And sometimes ... unlike us ... they still come up with the odd miracle. But Sister Andy pardon me if this is racist one is not aware of a similar tradition here in the UK.'

'Oh, it's there, right enough. Just buried deeper. OK. Couple of years ago, before you came, I developed what was turning into chronic ulcerative colitis, y'know?'

'Unpleasant.'

'And inconvenient. You cannae do this job efficiently when you're spending half the morning in and out of the lavvy. I was pretty desperate. Down to about eight stone. Eight Asacols a day. All I wanted was to sleep. Only it doesnae give you much sleep, the colitis. Your hair falls out, you develop big red lumps on your legs ...'

Jonathan looked her up and down. 'You seem fine now. Surgery?'

Andy shook her head. 'Nor drugs. But it's cured. Ask me how it happened, we're talking serious mumbo-'

Jonathan's bleeper went off.

Shutters slamming down on personal issues, Sister Andy took his cigarette and held open the plastic door for him, like the grizzled old guy in the war movies who pushes the paras out of the hatch.

'Get your a.r.s.e outa here, son,' Andy said. 'Never let the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds see the fear, aye?'

'b.u.g.g.e.r!' The paramedic sweating. 'I think he's b.l.o.o.d.y well arrested.'

The injured guy was still strapped to the stretcher, the red blanket wrenched back and the guy's chest bared. Big Nurse Debbie Barnes running alongside reaching for the carotid pulse.

'He's right, Sister. Nothing.'

'Oot the way, Debbie.' Andy's accent thickening the way it always did in crises. 'Come on, son,' she hissed at the patient, 'we're no havin' this.' Bringing her fist down like a hammer on his chest. 'Let's have him on the table, aye?'

'Car or something,' the ambulance driver said, helping Debbie attach the terminals. 'Or mugged maybe. Didn't just fall over, though he's had a few. Hit and run, I reckon. Thrown over the bonnet, comes down on his head. Nothing below seems to be broken, but-'

'Stuff the speculation,' Andy said briskly. 'No your problem, Michael. Defib. Come on, move it!'