Medical interest in the case was more enduring. The newly diagnosed condition of ‘locked-in syndrome’, or LIS, was attracting large private sector and government research funding. LIS had a brief but spectacular history. First diagnosed in a Cape Town road traffic victim in 1985 it had quickly become verified by a string of similar cases from around the world. A conference at Berkeley in 1992 had set down the basic criteria for clinical diagnosis: the trauma which triggered the condition had to be both physical and mental – a combination of severe physical shock and intense stress. The Cape Town road traffic victim had been trapped in the back of a burning minibus, unable to break the windows or brave the flames which had engulfed the engine. The clinical symptoms were simple: the patient became comatose physically while all basic bodily functions operated as normal. The crucial difference between LIS and other comas was a high level of brain activity, a symptom only traceable with modern equipment. The victims remained aware of their surroundings, in some degree, throughout the ‘coma’. The result was what Second World War submariners would have called ‘silent running’ – vital systems only, vigilance, but otherwise no signs of life.
The number of cases was still small enough to secure Laura a kind of minor medical celebrity. Doctors came, professed themselves fascinated, made their examinations, took their readings, and left. Their professional objectivity led them to visit the illness rather than the patient, and they offered increasingly perfunctory sympathies for the victim. Dryden had negotiated anonymity through the British Medical Association and Laura appeared only as Case X – a device which protected her privacy but relegated her to the status of a forensic exhibit, pickled in a theoretical jar. The doctors who bothered to talk to Dryden rarely met his eye: in the thirty-four cases of LIS so far officially diagnosed only four had returned to normal life. All had said they recalled varying forms of consciousness while in the coma, ranging from almost total recall to a surreal remembrance of passing dreams.
Dryden had his doubts. He suspected he’d lost Laura for ever on the night of the accident. The nurses at the Tower preserved a professional optimism. They threw open the windows on fine days, used Laura’s room to chat and work in, and encouraged him to surround her with stimulating reminders of the life her mind continued to reject.
There was little doubt exactly what Laura’s mind was seeking to evade: the memory of the crash in Harrimere Drain. Three hours trapped in a car beneath the black water of the ditch. Three hours in which she could have had no choice but to blame him, as she struggled to understand why he wasn’t there, slowly retreating into a coma which denied the unacceptable reality that she had been abandoned to die. He had driven the car but escaped without her: as a bald statement of guilt it was as seemingly inescapable as the black water through which he had swum towards the moonlight.
He wanted her back so that he could tell her what really happened. What he didn’t want was a recovery which was incomplete. She was the perfect patient as she was: he wanted her back as she had been. What he feared most was a lifetime spent caring for someone who hated him, or worse despised him secretly. He had to be able to tell Laura exactly what happened that night at Harrimere Drain – and know that she believed him.
She had to know that it wasn’t his fear of water that stopped him going back.
Scared of water, or just scared? Cowardice born in the single image of the criss-cross pattern of his skates in ice seen above his drowning ten-year-old head.
Meanwhile the insurance company went on paying the bills – an unavoidable act of grace after Dryden had dropped the good name of the Mid-Anglian Mutual into every interview he had given in the months following Laura’s accident. One day they would resort to the small print on the policy and withdraw the funding, or at least take it to the courts. But he was prepared to move on to their savings, such as they were, and Laura’s parents had offered as well, willing to see their dreams of retirement modified, then abandoned. But the alternative was unspeakable – or at least unspoken. A steel bedstead in some tucked away ante-room in a hospital which would resent her consumption of scarce resources. Or worse, doctors willing to end it without pain.
Dryden began his ritual visit.
He threw the black greatcoat over a chair and unpacked the fresh food he had brought. Laura’s parents had owned a small Italian café in north London. He had used it as home when he was on the News. From the street it had looked like a sandwich bar but down a long dim corridor was a small dining room, lit by coloured Victorian skylights, with red-checked tablecloths on a dozen tables. Laura had introduced herself by spilling a plate of fresh tortellini into his lap. Clearing it up had been oddly erotic.