My Brother's Keeper Read online

  "That's a first. You mean you're disenchanted with your job? I thought you loved those AID jaunts, hopping all over the globe and dishing out the dollars. What's up, have they stopped treating you like royalty all of a sudden?"

  "Not quite." His tone had changed. I realized that he had not listened to me, and was only able to reply from an instinct as to what I must have said to him.

  "What's wrong?" I looked at the instrument panel.

  "She's not handling right." He was frowning at the gauges also. "Everything shows as though it's fine, but it's not. She's yawing, and I can't trim her to correct it. The hell with this, I'm going to take her back to Heathrow. Call in and request an emergency landing for us."

  I reached for the radio, but before I could make connection it became irrelevant. The helicopter lurched sickeningly to the right, levelled for a moment as Leo struggled with the controls, then swooped sideways again, vibrating madly.

  "I can't hold her at all," Leo grunted. His face was tense and flushed with exertion. "We'll never make it to Heathrow. What's down there on your side? I'll have to try and slip her that way and straighten us when we're really low."

  Off to my right I could see a dizzying pattern of fields and roads, leading a mile or two ahead to the more heavily built-up area of East Reading.

  "As soon as you can," I shouted, still concentrating on the ground. "It gets worse the further we go. We're better off here than nearer the town."

  Leo did not speak, but I heard his grunt of effort. The air was rushing past us and the helicopter was rolling and yawing crazily as we lost altitude. At three hundred feet we straightened for a moment. I could see a hedge, a muddy pool, and a plowed field, and beyond that the line of a major road with houses on the other side of it.

  "Right here, Leo. Turn her now." My voice was high-pitched and panicky. "Watch out, you'll have us on the road."

  He did his best, pulling us close to level at the last moment. It just wasn't good enough. I saw the ground coming towards me—much too fast—and in the moment before impact I could see so clearly that I could have counted the individual weeds that grew in the plowed furrows. When we hit there was a noise like the end of the world.

  In a way, that's exactly what it was.

  Nobody would believe me when I told them that I had not—repeat not—lost consciousness when we hit. They pointed to my injuries as proof that I must have been knocked out. I couldn't offer my proof for many months. But I was right. The idea that I had hallucinated in post-accident trauma was plausible nonsense.

  To make this strictly and absolutely accurate, I actually did black out for maybe a second or two at the moment of impact, but I feel sure it was brief. I came to when the noise of settling metal and bending struts was still going on around me. Although I was in no pain, I couldn't move a finger—or a toe either. The helicopter had struck almost flat, thanks to Leo's last-ditch efforts, but fast. I had been thrown forward and to the right, to smash against the side panel and window as the machine jerked to a violent halt on the uneven ground.

  It's hard to say how long I lay there, listening to the creak of twisted metal and wondering what I would do if the wreck caught fire. (Answer: nothing, which was all I could do.) The right side of my head was flat on the metal, and I was looking out of the window at the dark brown earth. From where I lay the perspective was distorted. It seemed that my nose was flat against the steel surface, just as though my head had been sheared in two to the right of my nose, and the left half laid on the cold metal panel.

  All the fear and emotion that I felt before the crash had gone. I remember thinking, About time, too, when I finally heard footsteps moving on the broken frame of the helicopter. Surely it couldn't be Leo? He would have dragged me clear of possible fire before going to look for help. As the footsteps came closer I realized there were at least two people, stepping cautiously over the angled floor. There was a sound of labored breathing, and a grunt as some heavy object behind me was lifted and moved to one side.

  "It's not on him, Scouse," said a voice a few feet from my head, "There's no sign of it."

  "Bloody hell, it's got to be," said a second voice, this one with a strong Liverpool accent. " 'Ere, you let me have a look at him, an' you try the other one. Mebbe he already gave it to 'im. Are yer quite sure yer got the right one 'ere?"

  "Of course I'm bleedin' sure. He's unconscious, but that's Foss all right. See that tie pin, same as 'e 'ad on 'im last time? I'll take a look-see at this one, but that's Leo Foss."

  A pair of black shoes, leather-soled and black-buckled, appeared a few inches in front of my face. Hands were moving lightly over my body, patting and probing.

  "It's not on 'im, either," said the first voice. " 'Less it's underneath 'im. I'd 'ave to lift 'im up to see that."

  "Well, get on an' do it, yer great git." Scouse sounded uneasy. "Lift him an' do it sharpish. We don't have all bleedin' night 'ere."

  Up to that point there had been no pain for me, not even a twinge. But now hands began to raise and turn me, and that was murder. My long-suffering body began to protest, all the way from my toes to my neck. Streaks of agony were like darts shooting into my spine and my right side. It was too much. When I slid dizzily into unconsciousness I was very glad to go. My final thought was of Leo. I hadn't seen him since the crash, but the words of the two men told me that he was at least still alive. That was some comfort during my descent into darkness.

  - 2 -

  The first waking didn't count for much. It was a blurry, mush-minded few minutes of staring at an unfocused white ceiling, wondering who I was, where I was, and why I was aching all over. I didn't even try to move, which I later found out was just as well.

  The second time up from the pit was better and worse. I found myself in a firm bed that was raised at the head end ten or fifteen degrees. I was in no danger of falling out, though—not with the tubes and wires that hung all over me like spaghetti. I was the central meatball. And I hurt even more than the first time.

  I lay there, blinking. My right eye was providing me with a set of strange and uncoordinated images, and I spent the first few minutes trying to get things into focus. It was hard work until I learned the trick, which was to concentrate only on the object and not on the way my eye did the focusing. When the image in front of me finally became sharp it was debatable if the result was worth the effort. I was looking at a fat, bald-headed man with bulging eyes. He was sitting on a chair at the end of the bed, holding an apple in one thick-fingered paw and stolidly munching on it.

  He nodded at me cheerfully when he saw that I was awake and finally focusing on him.

  "With us for a while, eh? Good. I can stop guarding you for a little bit. D'ye know who you are?"

  I made a miserable croaking noise, and he looked sympathetic.

  "Try again."

  "Ah—ah—Li'el Sa'ki'."

  "Terrific." He threw the apple core somewhere out of sight, wiped his hands on the pants of his crumpled blue suit, and stood up. "That's the first question answered. I think you'd do well now to have another little nap. Don't go away now, and I'll bring the nurse."

  His voice was deep and self-confident, with a West Yorkshire cut to the vowels. He moved out of my line of vision—I was getting nothing from my left eye—and I heard the squeak of heavy leather boots as he went out of the room. A minute later a nurse in a blue uniform slipped a needle into my right arm, and I went under again. As I did so I wondered why I needed the services of a policeman to guard me. My name is well-known enough, but I'm certainly no celebrity.

  As I became unconscious I wanted to ask about Leo, but I had left it too late.

  Third time lucky. I was improving a little when I woke, and I knew it. My overall ache had progressed to sharp points of individual agony, but the feeling of being disembodied and unfocused was much less. My head still buzzed and reeled, but it felt like my head and not some anonymous cauliflower. I came out of a strange dream of my childhood, back before Leo and I were
reunited. The familiar views of Middlesbrough and Stockton where I had grown up were overlaid with alien images of surf, flat palm trees, and fast-moving freeways. The harder I tried to concentrate, the more the images mixed and moved.

  I finally worked my eyes open, to see the same fat man sitting there staring at me. He had taken a big clasp knife out of his pocket and was opening it when he saw my eyes blinking at him. He put the knife away again and moved quietly out of the room, still betrayed in his movements by the squeaking boots. When the nurse came in to crank my bed to a higher position for my head I turned to look at her.

  "What's happening?" My voice was still rusty, but in better control. "Why do they need a policeman here to watch me?"

  She looked worried, shook her head, and slipped out of the room again without answering me. I heard her voice nearby.

  "I'm afraid we have a problem—a new one. He's awake, but he's rambling, something about being watched by a policeman."

  "I'll be in in a moment," said a deep voice. "I don't like the sound of it, but all his other signs look good."

  It was my fat friend again. There was another mumble from the nurse that this time I could not catch, then he appeared, grinning at me as he entered my limited field of vision. The nurse was behind him, a dark-haired woman with a great figure and with worry lines in her forehead. She was frowning at me accusingly.

  "He did say it," she said. "I'm sure he did." Then, to me, "What was it you were telling me about a policeman?"

  My left arm seemed unwilling to move when I tried to lift it. So even though my right forearm was a mass of IV tubes and monitor contacts, I managed to raise it far enough to point.

  "Him," I said. "The policeman. Why is he here guarding me?"

  She put one hand up to her mouth and her eyes widened. The worry lines vanished. "Ooh," she said. "Sir Westcott." And without another word to either of us she hurried out of the room.

  The fat man pulled a chair towards the bedside and sat down on it with a grunt.

  "She'll be back." He was scowling. "Gone to have a good laugh, if I know her. I think mebbe it's time I introduced meself. I'm Westcott Shaw. I'm the one who operated on you when you were brought in."

  I looked at the hand resting on the back of the chair—the fingers were like a fat bunch of sausages—and shuddered at the thought. If he'd been pawing around in my delicate insides . . .

  "Where am I? Is my brother Leo all right? And how long have I been lying here?"

  "One thing at a time, and let's not rush it. You're in the Queen's Hospital Annex, just outside Reading. Tomorrow it'll be four weeks since you were admitted."

  That was a bad shock. Four weeks, and in that whole time I must have been conscious for a total of five confused minutes.

  "What about Leo? Is he here too? Is he all right?" The questions came buzzing up without any conscious control.

  "No, he's not all right." He saw my expression. "But it's a lot more complicated than you think. I don't want to start on that now, but I promise you I'll tell you all about it next time." He looked down at the catheters, intravenous feed tubes, monitors, and sensors that ran from my body to a variety of drip-feeds, waste bags, and electronic recorders. "I even think we can start to get rid of some of this plumbing, You're coming on faster than I hoped. We'll get Tess to take care of some of that this afternoon. How much do you hurt?"

  "A lot."

  "I'll believe it. You've had a fair hack about. I'll put you under again if you want me to, but if you can stand to stay awake for another half hour I'd like you to do something for me."

  "I'll try. But it will have to be something easy. My brain's like cottonwool."

  "It should be easy. I want you to think about your childhood, and about your life before you came in here. Just let your thoughts run where they want to, but do it in as much detail as you can. Don't worry about forgetting, or making any sort of note. Just let yourself go." He stood up. "I know it sounds daft, but it's important for your treatment and recovery."

  He came closer to me and peered into my face. "You're coming along fine. Anything coming in yet from that left eye? Blink each one, and try and look at my finger here."

  Sausage—no sausage—sausage—no sausage.

  "No. My right eye seems fine, but what's wrong with my left one?"

  "Nothing. You'll see all right in a while. Give it time." He was off around the end of the bed before I could ask more, and I heard again that familiar squeak of boots—somebody should tell him he needed oiling. I closed both my eyes and felt dizzy again. Why couldn't I see out of my left eye? That hadn't been injured, I was sure of it—I had seen things with it right after the accident. What had happened when they brought me in here? And what had happened to Leo? It was difficult to see why the surgeon didn't want to talk to me about him.

  In a minute or two I heard the nurse beside me, muttering and grumbling to herself. "I knew it, I knew he'd get you all excited. Your pulse is up again and so's your blood pressure. I told him to wait a couple of days more."

  She saw that I had opened my eyes and was staring up at her miserably. She shook her head.

  "Honestly, a policeman." She smiled, the worry lines disappeared, and she was suddenly very attractive. "I had to leave when you said that."

  "Are you Tess?"

  "Nurse Thomson to you." (But her smile took the edge off it.) "I know how you felt, when I first saw Sir Westcott I thought he must have stopped in at the hospital to deliver meat to the kitchen. A policeman's a new one, though—what made you think that?"

  "It was his fault. He said he was guarding me."

  "He meant he was keeping his eye on you—you're his prize patient." She had finished checking the monitors, and seemed happy with the result.

  "Tess, what's happened to me?"

  "Nurse Thomson." She bit her lip. "I shouldn't talk about it, really I shouldn't. But you're going to be all right—you've got the best doctor you could ever get. You were in a very bad accident." She moved to look into my face, studying it. "I'll be taking the catheters out later, and I don't think you want to be awake for that. I can tell you're hurting, but Sir Westcott told me to leave you as you are if you can stand it. Will you be all right to stay awake for a few minutes more?"

  "If you'll stay to hold my hand." As I said it, I wondered what was happening. I would never try a line like that—particularly when I was quite incapable of following up on it. My concussion must be worse than I knew.

  She just smiled. "I'll be back in twenty minutes. It's always a good sign when a patient gets fresh. Shout if you need me sooner."

  I lay back and closed my eyes again, to assess my pains jointly and severally. Right leg, ribs, and head were the worst, with stomach and neck a close second. They competed for attention. It was a poor time to try for boyhood reminiscence, or for thinking of any kind, but if it would speed my recovery, I ought to at least give it a try.

  * * *

  Being drugged is certainly no obstacle to recalling your childhood; I would say that it even helps. In the next twenty-four hours, drifting in and out of sedated sleep, I tried to obey Sir Westcott Shaw's request and worked my way forward from my earliest memories. I took his word for it that the exercise would have some value, and the order of recollection didn't matter.

  I suppose that by my third birthday I already knew that I was a "twin," and that being a twin somehow made me special. It was unfair. I didn't know my twin, and Uncle Fred and Aunt Dora did. They would talk about him and about me when I was presumed to be asleep or watching the television.

  "It's not fair to bring them up apart like this," Uncle Fred would say. "They have to get to know each other. We should send him out there for a visit with Leo."

  "Don't be daft, Fred. We don't have the money for anything like that, and you know it."

  "Well, mebbe Tom could find some way to send Leo over here for a holiday to see Lionel."

  "It's a long trip from out there. It would cost a lot."

  At the a
ge of six I knew that "out there" was Los Angeles, a location as far away to me as the Moon. It seemed farther away. After all, I could see the Moon. In a way, Leo and I were true Moon-children. We were born on July 20, 1969, the day that humans first landed on the Moon and so far as we were concerned the Space Age began.

  When we were one year old, Mum and Dad had been killed. They had gone down to Leeds for a day out, a casual shopping expedition, and they had stayed there for dinner. At seven o'clock in the evening, a big truck had gone out of control in the middle of the town and smashed in through the front of a restaurant. Fourteen people were killed. That was a statistic. Mum and Dad were at a window table and died instantly. If that was also a statistic, it was one that changed our lives forever.

  Big Brother Leo went to live with Mum's brother and his wife, Tom and Ellen Foss. In 1972 Tom lost his job with Marconi and was offered a good one with Standard Oil of California in La Habra. Leo and I, two years old, had a final meeting in December, 1972. Later we both claimed to remember it, but I think we were recreating it from other people's descriptions.

  I stayed on in Middlesbrough, living with Dad's brother, Fred, and Aunt Dora.

  They could have no children of their own. It took me many years to learn that the two deaths they would have given anything to prevent had enriched their life together and given it a new meaning.

  The earliest memory I can positively identify came at Christmas, when I was four years old. We had a telephone call from America and I talked to Leo. I was enormously excited when I was told that my "twin" was on the phone, and enormously disappointed when he said nothing more than the sort of things I might have said myself.

  Memories came thicker after that. As I lay there in the Reading Hospital I did my best to work my way steadily forward in time, but it was hopeless. Either I was too sick, or I was too full of drugs and mental confusion. Instead of the quiet years at Middlesbrough, through elementary school and then on through grammar school, I conjured up a distorted, surrealistic collage of events. The cold front room where I had practiced on the black upright piano was there, but the used-only-at-Christmas furniture with its shiny covers had vanished in favor of casual, low-slung chairs and couches with bright patterned upholstery, lit by a fiercer sun than the north of England ever knew. My solo performances on the piano, at school and later in the Town Hall, were clearly remembered; but they had acquired a different audience, full of tall, tanned girls with long hair and perfect teeth. They were noisy and cheerful, crowding in toward the stage while I struggled with a Mozart sonata.