The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

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СКАЧАТЬ …’ she had begun, but shrank into the pillows. Something inside was holding her back. Made her uneasy.

      ‘Look, Izzy, I know it must be difficult, but think of what you still have. You have Benjamin. Your family. A fine career. So much to look forward to.’

      Somehow the neurologist’s words didn’t gel.

      ‘Will … will I be able to continue?’

      ‘With a career or motherhood?’ he asked.

      ‘Both.’

      He smiled and reached for her hand. ‘You’re making excellent progress. Just three days out of a coma and you’re reading, watching television, taking an interest, regaining your strength. You’ve nothing to worry about.’

      ‘Doctor.’ She beckoned him to lean closer so she could whisper directly in his ear. ‘Bullshit.’

      He gave her a long, calculating stare. ‘OK, Izzy. If you want the full picture, I think you’re strong enough to take it. The truth is no one can yet be sure. Your brain took an almighty beating inside, and sometimes there are lingering after-effects. Some memories may never return. You’re bound to be emotionally unsettled for a while. It’s possible – not likely, you understand, but possible – you may be susceptible to epilepsy in later life, but we have drugs for that. You might find some areas of your brain don’t want to work as well as they did. We know there is some damage and brain cells don’t repair themselves, but the system has an amazing knack of compensating, finding another way of getting the job done. You’re in excellent physical shape, you’re recovering remarkably well. I can guarantee nothing, but if you were a horse personally I’d back you in the Grand National.’

      ‘If I were a horse you’d already have shot me.’

      ‘You’ll be fine,’ Weatherup insisted, laughing. ‘Climb Mount Everest. Have another ten babies. Just don’t attempt it all at the same time!’

      ‘Mothers don’t always get a choice,’ she replied, but the mist of depression had lifted a fraction.

      ‘Tell me, Izzy. It’s a personal question, do you mind?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘I’ve wondered about it ever since you were admitted. You have a remarkable scar, just …’ He glanced down as though trying to examine himself, suddenly uncomfortable.

      ‘Just here, on my breast.’ She ran her fingers over her nightdress just above her left nipple.

      ‘We had to examine you thoroughly, you understand,’ he explained hurriedly, not wishing to imply that his thoughts were focused on anything other than sound medical practice. Even so, she was a remarkably fine-looking woman …‘A strange injury. We couldn’t decide what it was.’

      ‘Bullet wound. Probably from a nine millimetre Uzi. Badly stitched. My car got shot up in Colombia by a drugs gang I was investigating. The head of the cartel promised me exclusive access for a week assuming I would sleep with him. When I didn’t he took exception, for some reason didn’t want either the tape or me getting to the airport. Wrecked the car but this hole was the only damage they managed to do to me or my crew. If only they were as pathetic with their other business operations.’

      She made it sound matter-of-fact, as if she were reporting on someone else’s problem.

      ‘Good God,’ Weatherup muttered in astonishment, sounding very English. ‘We don’t get too much experience at this hospital with wounds from machine guns.’

      ‘Sub-machine guns,’ she corrected.

      ‘And that’s what you want to go back to? My dear girl, you must be quite crazy. But very brave.’

      ‘Not really. Screwing him would have been brave, but there are parts of me that even my editor doesn’t own. Anyway, I was five months pregnant.’

      ‘More crazy than I thought!’

      ‘Not at all. I used the bump to smuggle out a world exclusive in my knickers and underneath my sanitary wear. The good Catholic border guards just wriggled, far too embarrassed to look closely.’ She smiled, but his words had hurt. Had she been a man the doctor would have been not amazed but enthralled, excited by the challenge, relishing the danger, anxious to hear more. Instead, he had patronized her, unintentionally and nowhere near as badly as she was patronized in her own office, but still a grating reminder that already she was re-entering the world she had left, and all the contradictions and torments it held for her came flooding back.

      Like the missed birthdays and broken promises which she hoped Benjamin was yet too young to understand or be hurt by. The searing pain when he seemed to treat the nanny as more of a mother than her. The games and rhymes she had so much wanted to teach him but which he’d already learned. From someone else.

      The insanity of arriving back from the death camps of civil war scarcely three hours in almost any direction from Charles de Gaulle, in time to wash for Sunday lunch.

      The anxiety when she discovered that from her ‘happy box’ of essential travelling supplies were missing the dozen clean syringes she carried to avoid the infected needles of a war zone, and the blind fit of anger with a two-year-old when she discovered Benjamin had taken from it the tiny compass without which she couldn’t guarantee locking onto the satellite. On such small things might hang her life and the story, although she did not care to ask which her editor valued more highly. Gambling her own wits against snipers from Beirut to Bosnia for an audience she knew was so jaded by nightly overkill they might just as well be watching their laundry spin and who thought the Golan Heights were a suburb of Cleveland.

      Waiting on the sandy beach outside Mogadishu as the execution by machine gun of two army deserters was held up, even as they stood blindfolded and bound tight against empty oil drums, trousers fouled. Held up, not by God or a quixotic judge, but by a BBC cameraman while he changed his clapped-out battery.

      Returning to receive not accolades or understanding but a relentless demand for more, more, more, knowing they were pushing her harder than anyone else, waiting for the little woman to plead cramps or hormones or simply to break down and make a mess of her make-up. The pigs.

      Balancing the lust for a story against the demands of self-preservation, conquering your own fear and crawling that extra exclusive maggot-infested mile before remembering you were a mother with responsibilities back home.

      Home. It was time to call her husband. Her nervousness, for which she had no explanation – or, at least, none she could remember – came flooding back.

      A ring. An answer.

      ‘Joe?’

      A silence. A long silence.

      ‘Joe, it’s me. How are you, darling? Have I interrupted you?’ God, it was pathetic. Sunday morning, what could she have interrupted?

      Another long silence.

      ‘Where are you?’ he muttered.

      ‘In England, Joe.’

      ‘I thought you’d disappeared to Mars.’

      ‘Joe, please. I’m in hospital. There was a car crash. Did you hear me?’

      He didn’t seem to have made the connection. СКАЧАТЬ