We sailed into the fog. Lundman was at the wheel, and he asked me how things stood.
‘I don’t know. Her blood pressure is falling.’
We were off at full throttle, straight into the whiteness. His assistant, whom I didn’t know, was looking in anguish at Sima, strapped in the stretcher. I wondered if he was about to faint.
An ambulance was waiting on the quayside. Everything was enveloped in the white fog.
‘Let’s hope she makes it,’ said Lundman as we left.
He looked worried. Presumably he knew from experience when a person was close to death.
It took us forty-three minutes to get to the hospital. The ambulance woman sitting beside the stretcher was called Sonja, and in her forties. She set up a drip and worked calmly and methodically, occasionally communicating with the hospital about Sima’s condition.
‘Has she taken anything? Tablets?’
‘I don’t know. She might have been smoking pot.’
‘Is it your daughter?’
‘No. She simply turned up out of the blue.’
‘Have you contacted her relatives?’
‘I don’t know who they are. She lives in a foster home. I’ve only met her once before. I don’t know why she came to me.’
‘Ring the care home.’
She reached for a mobile phone hanging from the wall of the ambulance. I rang directory enquiries and was put through to Agnes’s house. When the answering machine responded, I explained the situation precisely, said which hospital we were heading for, and left a telephone number that Sonja had given me.
‘Ring again,’ she said. ‘People wake up if you keep on trying.’
‘She might be out in the shed.’
‘Doesn’t she have a mobile?’
I didn’t have the strength to phone any more.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t have a mobile. She’s unusual.’
It wasn’t until Sima had been taken into A&E and I was sitting on a bench in a corridor that I got through to Agnes. I could hear her anxious breathing.
‘How is she?’
‘She’s in a very bad way.’
‘Tell me exactly how things are.’
‘There’s a risk that she might die. It depends how much blood she’s lost, how deep the trauma is. Do you know if she took sleeping pills?’
‘I don’t think so.’
I passed the nurse the phone.
‘It’s the girl’s guardian. Talk to her. I’ve explained that it’s serious.’
I walked along the corridor. An elderly man naked from the waist down was lying on a trolley, whimpering. The nurses were trying to calm a hysterical mother with a screaming infant in her arms. I continued until I reached the A&E entrance. An ambulance was standing there, empty and unlit. I thought of what Sima had said, about the telescope that could home in on an individual person standing on the moon. Try to stay alive, I whispered to myself. Chara, little Chara, perhaps one day you will become that person who went unnoticed here on earth, but got her own back standing on the moon and waving down to the rest of us.
That was a prayer, or perhaps an invocation. Sima, lying in intensive care and trying to stay alive, needed all the help she could get. I don’t believe in God. But you can create your own gods whenever you need them.
I stood there appealing to a place near Los Angeles called Mount Wilson. If Sima survived, I would pay for her to go there. I would find out who this Wilson was, the man who had given his name to the mountain.
There’s nothing to prevent a god having a name. Why shouldn’t the Creator have the name Wilson?
If she died, it would be my fault. If I’d gone downstairs when I heard her crying, she might not have injured herself. I’m a doctor, I ought to have understood. But above all else, I am a human being who ought to have recognised some of the enormous loneliness that a little girl can feel.
Without warning, I found myself longing for my father. I hadn’t done so since he died. His death had caused me great pain. Even though we had never spoken intimately to each other, we had shared an unspoken understanding. He had lived long enough to experience my success in training to become a doctor — and never concealed his surprise and pride over it. During his final days, when he was confined to bed with his excruciatingly painful cancer that had spread from a little black spot on the heel of his foot to become metastases all over him that he compared to moss on a stone, he often spoke about the white coat that I would be privileged to wear. I thought his concept of power being embodied in that white coat was embarrassing. It was only afterwards that I realised he envisaged me as the one who would gain revenge on his behalf. He had also worn a white jacket, but people had trampled all over him. I would be the means through which he got his own back. Nobody belittled a doctor in a white coat.
I missed him now. And that magical trip to the black forest pool. I wanted to turn the clock back, I wanted to undo most of my life. My mother also flitted before my eyes. Lavender and tears, a life I had never understood. Had she carried around an invisible sword? Perhaps she was standing on the far bank of the river of life, waving to Sima?
In my mind, I also tried to talk to Harriet and Louise. But they remained silent, as if they thought I ought to be able to sort this out myself.
I went back inside and found a small waiting room that was empty. After a while, I was informed that Sima’s condition was still critical. She was going to be moved to an intensive care ward. I shared the lift with her. Both men in charge of her trolley were black. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back, and had an urge to tell him about that remarkable telescope on Mount Wilson. Sima was lying with her eyes closed; she had a drip and was being fed oxygen through a nose catheter. I bent over her and whispered into her ear: ‘Chara, when you are well again you will visit Mount Wilson and see that there is somebody standing on the moon who looks remarkably like you.’
A doctor came and said nothing was certain, but that they would probably need to operate and that Sima was not reacting to anything they attempted. He asked me several questions, but I had to tell him that I simply didn’t know if she was suffering from any illnesses, or if she had tried to commit suicide before. The woman who would be able to answer questions like that was on her way here.
Agnes arrived shortly after ten. It occurred to me to wonder how she could drive a car with only one arm. Did she have a specially adapted vehicle? But it wasn’t important. I took her behind the curtain to where Sima was lying. Agnes sobbed quietly, but I didn’t want Sima to hear anything like that and took Agnes out again.
‘There’s no change,’ I said. ‘But the very fact that you’ve come makes everything better. Try talking to her. She needs to know that you’re here.’
‘Will she be able to hear what I say?’
‘We don’t know. But we can hope.’
Agnes spoke to the doctor. No illnesses, no medication, no previous suicide attempts as far as she was aware. The doctor, who was about my age, said that the situation was unchanged but slightly more stable since Sima had been admitted. There was no reason for the moment to be unduly worried.
Agnes was relieved. There was a coffee machine in the corridor. Between us we managed to scrape together the necessary small change for two cups of awful coffee. I was surprised by the adroitness with which she used one hand where I needed two.
I told Agnes what had happened. She shook her head slowly.
‘She might well have been on the way to Russia. Sima always tries to climb mountains. She’s never satisfied with walking along normal paths like the rest of us.’