‘I saw you earlier,’ said Lillian Andrews as she pulled me into the alley. We were instantly curtained by the smog. ‘Watching me. You’ve been following me, haven’t you?’ She didn’t give me a chance to answer but clamped her mouth on mine. Her tongue pushed deep into my mouth. She shoved me away and leaned against the alley wall and unbuttoned her jacket and blouse, exposing her full, milky white breasts in the dim light.
‘Is this what you want? Is this why you’ve been following me?’
I stared at her breasts. Her hand was now on my crotch and nature had given her something to hold on to. I could still smell the perfume she had smeared on me with her kiss. I thought about the small, frightened man who had tried to buy me off.
‘Listen…’ I backed away. ‘I-’
‘No?’ she said with a cold smile. ‘I didn’t think so.’
Something that felt like a steel hammer smashed into the back of my head and the smog suddenly penetrated my skull. Became even thicker. Darker.
Like so many Glaswegians at the weekend, I woke up on Saturday morning in a ward in the Western General Hospital. A pretty nurse was sitting reading the Glasgow Herald at my bedside. I tried to sit up but something exploded in my skull. Bright lights flashed and a searing pain sliced mercilessly through my head. I gingerly explored the back of my head with my fingertips, felt my hair matted beneath my touch and winced as I found an ugly ridge on my scalp punctuated by the hard knots of surgical stitching.
‘Now, now…’ said the nurse. ‘We don’t want to be doing that, do we?’
I groaned, fighting back a wave of nausea.
‘We’ve got to take things easy.’ Nursey maintained her unconvincingly solicitous tone. Through the pain I pondered whether there was some convention, some regulation, that compelled all medical professionals to speak in the first-person plural.
The nurse – small, like most Glaswegians – creased her pretty, perplexed brow. ‘I think we should get the doctor…’
I looked at her heart-shaped face, crowned with russet hair and nurse’s cap.
‘Why don’t we do that, nurse?’ I said.
I watched her petite, trim figure disappear and made a mental note, in my searingly sore head, to make a pass at her later. It was then that the events of the night before came back to me: Lillian Andrews’s milky skin; her hot, probing tongue; the blow to my head from her accomplice, hidden in the swirls of smog.
The nurse came back with a young, skinny doctor with bad skin and an artificially authoritative manner.
‘Ah, Mr Lennox… you seem to have bashed your cranium last night. Perhaps we’ve partaken of a little too much of the uisce beatha?’ There was that first-person plural again.
‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ I said. ‘Firstly, it’s Captain Lennox. Secondly, if you had done the most basic of blood tests, you would know that there was absolutely no alcohol in my system. So, before you begin patronizing me, sonny, make sure you have the social or intellectual credentials so to do. Now, tell me… is my skull fractured?’
‘No.’ The young houseman’s cheeks flushed red. The British were always so easy to manipulate. So ridden with hang-ups about class and authority. There had been a few occasions since being demobbed where I had played the officer-class card. My accent being difficult to place also threw them. I found it funny: so many Brits had talked to me about the British ‘healthy disrespect for authority’. Next to the Germans, the British were the most likely to follow, without question, instructions from their ‘betters’. And the Germans had learned their lesson.
‘Do I have any kind of serious oedema resulting from the blow to my head?’
‘Not that I can see, Mr… Captain Lennox.’
‘Am I fit enough to be discharged?’
‘Actually, I think it would be a good idea if you stayed with us for a while.’
‘And why is that, exactly? According to what you have said, my head injury is not that serious.’
‘It’s serious enough for us to want to keep an eye on you.’ He struggled to recover some of his lost authority. ‘And if this wound was inflicted on you, then perhaps we should get the police involved. But it’s not your head injury that is our primary concern at the moment. As you know, tuberculosis is endemic in Glasgow. The National Health Service is keen to eradicate TB in the city. Everywhere for that matter. You were brought in by ambulance. You were found in, well
… unconscious in an alley. So you can understand why we thought that it had something to do with drink.’
‘What’s this got to do with tuberculosis?’
‘Well, as part of our programme, we routinely do a screen – I mean an X-ray – of the lungs of anyone brought in under such circumstances. Actually, there are plans to bring in a mobile screening service. Anyway, we did an X-ray of your chest. I’m afraid we found what would appear to be a small shadow on your left lung. However, we think it may simply be a faulty film. We’d like to take another X-ray of your chest.’
‘TB?’ I thought of the morning coughing bouts every time I lit my first cigarette; of the way I could always predict the onset of bad smog.
‘I wouldn’t be too alarmed, if I were you. There’s every chance it’s simply a smudge on the film. Have you been prone to coughing fits?’
‘Isn’t everyone in this town? Sometimes. In the morning.’
‘Is it a productive cough? I mean, do you cough anything up? Particularly blood?’
I shook my head.
‘I wouldn’t worry then. But if it is TB, then we have caught it early enough to sort out. There’s a place we can send you. A sanatorium, up north. Clean air. It would work wonders for you.’
‘One of these places where they push your bed outdoors overnight? I’d rather take my chances in the smog.’
‘It’s best to be safe.’
I spent the rest of the day in the ward while the shining machinery of Britain’s brand-new National Health Service ground with the efficiency of an ancient steamer. While I waited I used the public telephone in the hall to call Mrs White. I explained I had been taken into hospital for observation and told her that there were concerns about my chest. I left out the fact that for the second time in quick succession I’d been used as a punch-bag. I told her that I would let her know whether or not I was going to have to go into a sanatorium. In any case, I assured her, I would still pay rent to keep my rooms.
‘Let me know as soon as you find out, Mr Lennox.’ I liked the sound of her voice on the ’phone. It sounded younger. It helped me to imagine her before war and grief had changed her.
I was X-rayed again in the middle of the afternoon and an hour later the young doctor came back to confirm that it had come back clear. He re-examined my head.
‘You mentioned a sanatorium… where would that be?’
He looked confused for a moment. ‘You do understand that we’ve given you the all-clear?’
‘I know that,’ I said irritatedly. I wasn’t thinking about myself. It was a cheap lace handkerchief spotted with blood I had in mind. ‘I just want to know where you would send someone to recover if they presented tubercular or bronchial symptoms. Where are the sanatoria?’
He explained that most TB cases in Glasgow were treated at Hairmyers Hospital, from where they were sent to sanatoria in the countryside. He gave me three addresses: two in Inverness-shire, the other in Perthshire.
‘Most patients from Glasgow would be placed in the Perthshire sanatorium,’ he explained. ‘Easier for family to visit. ‘But the demand exceeds the supply. Sometimes they’re shunted further north.’