Dead Tomorrow

Intensive Care Unit and rang the bell. A nurse let her in. It was warmer in here than out in the corridor. The temperature was maintained high enough for the patients to lie in hospital pyjamas, or naked, without any risk of catching cold. It was an irony, she thought, although she did notdwell on it, that she had once worked as a nurse here, in this very unit. It was in this hospital that she and Nat had met–shortly after he had started as a junior registrar.
    She felt movement inside her. The baby was kicking. Their baby. Thirty weeks old. A boy.
    As she turned right, walking past the central nursing station, where a prosthetic leg had been abandoned on a chair, she heard the swishing of a curtain being pulled. She looked across at the far corner of the ward and her heart lurched inside her. A nurse was drawing the blue privacy curtain around Bed 14, Nat’s bed. Sealing it from prying eyes. They were about to start some new tests and she wasn’t sure she had the courage to be with him while they did. But she had sat by his side almost all day and she knew she had to be there now. Had to keep talking to him. Had to keep hoping.
    He had compound and depressed skull fractures, a lesion to the cervical region of his spinal cord that was likely to leave him a quadriplegic if he survived, as well as an almost irrelevant–at this stage–fractured right clavicle and fractured pelvis.
    She hadn’t prayed in years, but she found herself praying repeatedly today, in silence, always the same words: Please, God, don’t let Nat die. Please, God, don’t let him.
    She felt so damn useless. All her nursing skills and she could not do a thing. Except talk to him. Talk and talk and talk, waiting for a response that did not come. But maybe now would be different…
    She walked back across the shiny floor, passing a hugely fat woman in the bed to her right, the rolls of flesh on her face and body looking like the contours of a 3-D map. One of the nurses told her the womanweighed thirty-nine stone. A sign on the end of the bed said DO NOT FEED .
    To her left was a man in his forties, his face the colour of alabaster, intubated, a forest of wires taped to his chest and head. He looked, to her experienced eye, as if he had recently come out of heart-bypass surgery. There was a large, cheery get-well card propped on an instrument table beside him. At least he was on the mend, she thought, with a good chance of walking out of this hospital, rather than being carried out.
    Unlike Nat.
    Nat had been in steady decline throughout the day and, although she was still clinging to a desperate, increasingly irrational hope, she was starting to sense a terrible inevitability.
    Every few minutes her phone, turned to silent, vibrated with yet another message. She had stepped out to reply to some. To her mother. To Nat’s brother, who had been here this morning, wanting an update. To his sister in Sydney. To her best friend, Jane, whom she had called tearfully this morning, an hour after arriving here, telling her that the doctors weren’t sure whether he would live. Others she ignored. She did not want to be distracted, just wanted to be here for Nat, willing him to pull through.
    Every few moments she heard the beep-beep-bong of a monitor alarm. She breathed in the smell of sterilizing chemicals, catching the occasional tang of cologne and a faint, background note of warm electrical equipment.
    Inside the curtained space, propped up in a bed that had been cranked to a thirty-degree angle, Nat looked like an alien, bandaged and wired, with endotracheal and nasogastric tubes in his mouth and nostrils. He had a probe in his skull to measure intracranial pressure, and another on one finger, anda forest of IV lines and drains from bags suspended from drip stands running into his arms and abdomen. Eyes shut, he lay motionless, surrounded by racks of monitoring and life-support apparatus. Two computer display screens were mounted to his right, and there was a laptop on the trolley at the end of the bed with all his notes and readings on it.
    ‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m back with you.’ She stared at the screens as she spoke.
    There was no reaction.
    The exit tube from his mouth ended in a small bag, with a tap at the bottom, half filled with a dark fluid. Susan read the labels on the drip lines: Mannitol, Pentastarch, Morphine, Midazolam, Noradrenaline. Keeping him stable. Life support. Preventing him from slipping away, that was