The White Tower (6 page)

‘You felt responsible?'

‘For what happened to Niall? I didn't know the extent of it until afterwards. I knew something was bothering him.'

I waited.

‘It was a sin of omission, of oversight on my part, not to get to the bottom of that business with the internet. Niall was part of my team. I should have been paying more attention.'

‘Did you argue with him?'

‘I tried to find out why he was coming to work looking like he hadn't had a wink of sleep.'

‘Did the other radiographers know what was going on?'

‘Niall was a very private young man. That was part of his problem. What is it that his mother wants you to do?'

‘Help her understand what happened.'

Fenshaw's pager blipped. ‘Excuse me.' He half turned away from me. ‘I'm needed I'm afraid.' His wide mouth turned down apologetically. ‘One of Niall's former colleagues, Colin Rasmussen, will show you around. Please give me a call if I can be of any further help.'

‘I'll do that,' I said, and thanked him for his time.

I stopped at the desk to ask for Colin Rasmussen. The receptionist told me to take a seat, he wouldn't be long.

I passed Fenshaw as I was walking to the row of seats nearest the door. His dark head and big protective shoulders were bent over a small girl. He smiled, bent even closer, said something to the child, who laughed, looking up at him. The woman standing with them, a tall woman, standing stiffly, carrying the child's features, chanced a smile herself, the stiffness cracking a little along her jawline, caught between gratitude and terror.

. . .

Colin Rasmussen held out his hand and introduced himself.

‘I'm used to people staring,' he said. ‘It's not that often you meet someone with different coloured eyes. Chimaerism, it's called. People with one brown and one blue eye. From different cell lines.'

‘Different what?'

‘A very early fusion of eggs, one expressing one set of genes and one another. I should have been a twin.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Does it affect your vision?'

‘No.' Colin blushed as though he'd heard more in my question than I had intended.

I followed him out through the reception area and along a corridor. He held himself erect, not glancing back at me or making small talk. I stared at the back of his head, a good thirty centimetres above mine. He wore his fine blond hair tied back in a ponytail, as Niall had in the photograph Moira had lent me. But Colin was built very differently. Whereas Niall had been slight, but in proportion, Colin was tall and thin, with rounded shoulders and a concave chest. His ill-fitting white coat made him look a bit like an albino scarecrow. When he finally turned round and started talking to me, his brown and blue eyes startled me all over again.

But then he smiled, as though, having taken in as much of me as he could at first glance, then digested this impression with his back turned, he'd decided that I wasn't as much of a threat as I might have been.

He'd obviously given some thought as to what might constitute a satisfying tour of the department. One of the treatment rooms was vacant and he offered to show me that first.

He led me down a narrow corridor with a ninety degree turn half way along it, explaining that the design was an extra precaution against people wandering into a treatment room by mistake. Another precaution was a flashing red light above our heads. He opened a metal door and stood aside for me to go in ahead of him.

The great eye of a linear accelerator stared down at us from the centre of the room. The accelerator was attached by a long arm to the body of the machine designed for radiation treatment, and the whole was connected by cables to cameras and monitors flush with the ceiling. Colin picked up a small device that looked like a TV remote control and showed me how the eye and arm could be tilted in any direction. A narrow bench stood next to the accelerator, covered with a white sheet, and there was a steel shelf and cupboard in one corner. The cupboard was slightly open. Inside it hung a row of metal vests and on the shelf was a pile of hospital gowns.

‘We have two Ventacs,' Colin said. ‘All our equipment is state of the art.'

He flicked a switch and a double row of flashing numbers came up on the machine, repeated in the TV monitors. ‘This one, the Ventac 2, is eighteen MeV and it's a dual energy machine which means it can produce both electrons and X-rays.'

‘What does MeV stand for?'

‘Million electron volts.'

Pressing another button on his remote, Colin raised the bench and tilted the accelerator so that the bench and huge eye were in line with one another. ‘Relatively shallow tissue is treated with electrons. To reach deeper tissue, the electron beam is converted into X-ray photons.'

Part of the bench was solid steel, and part transparent. Colin pointed to what looked like a crosshatching of black wire under clear perspex. Again he pressed a button, and the bench was lifted higher. ‘This is for the electrons to come up through here. A lot of our patients are treated that way.'

‘Where are you while the patient's being treated?'

Colin indicated the wall opposite the TV monitors. ‘The observation room's through there. The patient's being filmed from a number of angles. You can see it all clearly on the monitors.'

Neither of us spoke for a few moments. The reliable, unerring hum of the accelerator was the only sound, a sound so superior to human ones that it created its own form of indifference. Its eye took us in and reproduced our silence on the screens.

Colin returned the bench to its original position and replaced the sheet.

‘How long did you and Niall Howley work together?'

‘About two years.' Colin's face was turned away from me and I couldn't see his expression. I realised I should have asked my first question about Niall when we were facing one another. I sensed a change in him, a tensing of his shoulders, a self-protective narrowing of his chest.

‘What was he like to work with?'

Colin was saved from having to answer when the door was opened by a dark-haired young woman in a white coat.

‘Eve.' Colin smiled nervously.

Eve returned his smile in a way that showed she appreciated the effect she had on men.

‘This is Sandra Mahoney. I'm giving her the grand tour.'

Eve's eyes barely grazed mine as she opened the steel door of a locker.

Still watching her apprehensively, Colin said, ‘I'll show you the control room next.'

. . .

Laughter came through the control room door as Colin opened it, and two young women turned to stare.

They were sitting at a bench in front of computers. Monitors above their heads showed the treatment room we'd just left. What had the joke been about? They weren't laughing now.

Colin introduced us, blushing again. Neither woman seemed willing to meet his different-coloured eyes.

I glanced up at a monitor. Eve was using the remote control to position the treatment bench.

Colin explained how the computer verified the treatment data against the settings she was choosing.

A man who looked to be in his late sixties entered the treatment room. Eve helped him take off his coat, and he walked unsteadily over to the bench.

I thought it would be better if we left the two women to get on with their job. Colin led me down another corridor and opened yet another door. ‘I'll show you how we make the shells.'

He took a plastic face mask from a cupboard and smoothed his hand gently over curves of chin and cheek.

The mask, or shell, as Colin called it, was attached by staples to a wood and plastic stand. He undid these and pointed to a narrow headrest made of wood and yellow foam.

‘This is where the patient's head goes.' His voice was warm and interested. Whatever had upset him was gone, or at least he felt able to set it aside.

‘This cross here is the treatment area for—' He glanced down at a name written in black texta on the base of the mask. ‘Anne.' Saying the name, he seemed to be recalling the person with affection. ‘We make them here. Of course, each mask has to be made and fitted individually. These lines—' Colin pointed out the crosshatching on the side of the plastic neck, ‘correspond exactly to tattoos on the patient. The tattoos are made with blue ink just under the skin. Lots of patients take their shells home with them.'

Colin glanced across to a cupboard, where masks like the one he'd shown me lay in a heap. They'd obviously belonged to patients who hadn't wanted to take them home, but Colin was remembering the ones whose attachment to a bit of wood and plastic might have equalled his.

‘They have to fit absolutely perfectly.' He showed me how, once the head was in place behind the shell, the sides were stapled down. ‘The patient mustn't move at all.'

‘How long do they stay like that?'

‘Five or ten minutes usually. Sometimes longer. Most of our patients, once we decide on a course of treatment, come every day. Ten days to two weeks would be average. The longest we've had since I've been working here is thirty-five days.'

‘Thirty-five days straight?'

Colin nodded. ‘Weekends are rostered. There's generally only one radiographer on at the weekends, but if we have to schedule more, then of course we do. In the case of that patient it was felt that to miss even one day would be dangerous.'

As Colin spoke, his greeny-blue and brown eyes sought mine, willing me to feel as he did. I thought of Eamonn and what he'd said about Niall's commitment to healing. Colin's skin was very fine. Colour ebbed and flowed beneath it. He was the type to blush easily and often, but it was his eyes that drew attention to themselves. It seemed as though, having that uniqueness, being born to, growing up to curiosity about it, he'd decided that there was no point in subterfuge, that he might strive
not
to be noted as an oddity, but this striving would always be thwarted.

He held the mask tenderly for a moment before replacing it.

The plastic face stared up at me. Odd how a mask with holes for eyes and mouth could stare, but it seemed alive in that moment, in spite of the black and red lines on its transparent neck. It wasn't a death mask, not an impression of a dead person's face fashioned for posterity or family record, but an imprint of a living human being, made for treatment, for healing.

‘You know, a lot of our patients keep in touch, they come back to say hello. Their families. We get close to them. And they come from as far away as Orange, some of them. The patients live in at the hospital while they're having their treatment. We get to know them pretty well.'

‘And the radiotherapists? Are you a close-knit group?'

Colin didn't answer immediately. He busied himself tidying the cupboard, bending down and rearranging the masks on the bottom shelf. With his back to me, he said, ‘We do our job, that's what's most important. Let's see, what else is there? We make our own shields as well.'

He took what looked like a moulded wedge of lead from a shelf above the now neat face masks.

‘These have to be done individually too of course. This one was made to go over a lung, to shield the healthy part of the lung from the electrons. We work with the technicians. We rotate all the jobs, so sometimes we're giving treatment, sometimes we're planning it. We use an X-ray simulator for that. I can show you in a minute. Sometimes we're doing technical stuff like this. This one here—' Colin picked up part of a lead face mask with one eye hole cut out. ‘This was for a tumour at the corner of the left eye. Feel how heavy it is.'

I weighed the mask-shield in my hand and asked, ‘Did Niall ever talk to you about what was bothering him?'

Colin stared down at the shield as though he regretted having let me hold it, tilting his whole body away from me. The effect was almost comical, like our dog Fred when he wanted to sneak a sandwich crust that Peter had left on the floor.

‘I didn't really know Niall Howley.' Colin cleared his throat. ‘Actually I didn't know him at all.'

‘Did he have friends here, among the radiographers?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Did it ever strike you that Niall was hiding something?'

‘No.' Colin went red, the painful blush of very fair-skinned people reaching right up through his scalp.

I handed back the lead mask and he replaced it carefully in its position on the shelf. He hesitated, then turned on his heel and left the room.

I followed, determined to go on asking questions about Niall, no matter how uncomfortable they made him. That question about having something to hide—wasn't the right answer yes, that his life was being taken over by a MUD? And why didn't Colin know who, in the hospital, had been a friend of Niall's? I was forming a disturbing impression, that not only were Colin's eyes different colours, but they looked in different directions as well, as though better to avoid having to meet mine.

He marched ahead and I hurried to keep up.

‘Doesn't it strike you as rather contradictory? Niall cared about his work, and it obviously requires a great deal of concentration. Yet he sat up all night playing a computer game.'

Colin didn't answer. I persisted. ‘What do you think?'

Colin turned to face me, frowning. ‘I've already told you, I didn't know him personally.'

‘Are you interested in MUDs yourself?'

‘Of course not.' Colin turned away from me with an expression of disgust. ‘I don't know anything about them.'

He went on to show me more glistening machines, one the X-ray simulator he'd referred to earlier. But I'd reached saturation point and barely took in anything about them.

He raised his head at the sound of footsteps hurrying past in the ­corridor. The door to the room containing the simulator was three-quarters shut, so he couldn't see who it was. I wondered if it was Dr Fenshaw, if Colin recognised his step, and had been listening for it, if that might explain the undercurrent of anxiety in his manner, an ear tuned through practice, an already nervous disposition, to his boss's footsteps.