Roy Barnett had been detained overnight after being discharged from the local hospital’s accident and emergency department. His condition was described as comfortable. This was hardly surprising as he had had at least twice as much to drink as Dryden, who didn’t know what day it was.
There was a suggestion, however, that a mild heart attack had joined forces with the alcohol to produce the collapse. Dryden would check his condition in the morning. Next time he had a chance he would also ask the mayor, chairman of the local Labour party’s public services pressure group, exactly why the NHS wasn’t good enough for him.
Liz Barnett didn’t bother to visit. Roy slept soundly and unloved.
Laura Dryden was in ‘Flat 8’ on the ground floor of the Tower – a suite comprising a bedroom, bathroom, WC, and visitor’s room. It cost the insurance company £360 a week, a fact Dryden hardly appreciated given his complete disdain for the management of risk. Laura had taken out the accident insurance policy without his knowledge and lodged it with their solicitor, alongside, as it turned out, a batch of policies covering Dryden and her parents, all paid for by the proceeds from the TV soap opera Clyde Circus through which she had become a minor celebrity.
The bedroom, nearly two years after the accident, was almost free of medical equipment. A small computer screen showed Laura’s pulse and other vital data against a soothing corporate blue background. A clutch of multi-coloured plastic pipes at her wrist brought in liquid food. Others, discreetly hidden, ferried out the waste. The room struggled to look non-utilitarian. But the institutional cleanliness, and the precise neatness, made it appear like an exhibit in a museum of modern life – ‘Contemporary Bedroom’. Personal effects were arranged on the table and a single shelf in that self-conscious way typical of a house opened to the public. It could have been a room inside a glass paperweight.
There were two bedside tables. One held fruit and some fresh bread rolls, broken, with a glass of Italian sparkling white wine. The other, hairbrushes, make-up, and a small picture of Laura’s parents marked ‘At home – Torino, 1958’. There was a picture of Laura with Dryden – ‘Honeymoon, 1990, Rome’. They looked criminally confident.
At first the national tabloids had ‘monstered’ the story – sending their best reporters and snatch photographers out to the Fens to provide a string of ‘Clyde Circus star fights for life’ exclusives. Dryden had felt ambivalent about the group of dishevelled characters who set up a temporary camp outside the Tower’s main gates; he vaguely knew some of them, but had drunk with them all. In bad weather they ran a rota with one snapper on duty to catch celebrity visitors while the rest fortified themselves in the Rifleman, a pub half a mile out of town.
Dryden met them there by agreement and read them brief bulletins on Laura’s progress, letting out snippets of newsworthy trivia: the letter of support from the rival cast of Coronation Street, the personal visit from the leading lady of Clyde Circus who was reported to be Laura’s arch-rival, and the personal get-well message from the director-general of the BBC. They loved it and thanked him, organizing whip-rounds to buy Laura flowers. But he knew it wasn’t enough.
The inevitable request for a picture, made a month after the accident, caused a wave of nausea and a hot spit of self-loathing for his trade. But he knew the pressures: news editors were tired of Laura’s fight for life and bored with the reality of a colourless and featureless coma. The story was changing from hope to tragedy and the lifeless picture exclusive was the next inexorable step. If he refused he knew the consequences: the super-telephoto lenses, the bribes to hospital staff, the invasion of his own privacy, the unpeeling of their lives. And, despite Laura’s deepening coma, he felt a bond with the hacks out in the cold. He had been there too, on Fleet Street, desperate for the story.
When the picture of Laura finally appeared he was stupidly thankful that they had all chosen the most lifelike and appealing of the set he had provided. Laura’s parents, on the first of several flying visits from retirement in Umbria, asked for a copy: a request which strangely disturbed him – perhaps with its hint of family surrender – so that he sank his face into Laura’s pillow and cried for the first and only time at what the accident had done to him.
The newspapers dropped the story relatively quickly after that. Laura had been written out of Clyde Circus with ease; her character, GP’s-nurse-turned-drug-addict Jane Corby, flew without notice to Australia in answer to a telegram from her long-lost father Bill. With each episode, postcards, read to the locals at the Palm Tree, told of suburban happiness with Bill’s family and lurid tales of romance on Bondi Beach. It was increasingly clear that Jane would not be returning home and that if she did few would remember what she had looked like when she left.