Free The Lost Labyrinth by Will Adams Page B

something else, smiled and touched his arm. She had the most disarming smile, Gaille. It could melt glaciers. The policeman rose to his feet and walked a little way with her, then pointed her up the corridor, laughing and waving his hands, barely glancing at Knox as he ducked his head and pushed the monitor through the ICU department’s double doors. He left it against the wall, washed his hands with gel at a basin, dried himself off, opened the door to the ward itself. Two nurses behind the reception desk were squabbling in hushed low voices; he caught something about missing supplies. Claire was in the far corner, sitting on the far side of one of the four beds. Even though Knox had braced himself, it was still a shock to see Augustin, the tubes and monitors of life-support, the cage over his chest to keep the bedclothes off his upper body, the white bandaging around his skull, the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, his cheekbone swollen and tinted lurid inhuman colours.
    Claire must have sensed his arrival, for she looked up, haggard, grey and harrowed, no remnant of her earlier joy. She frowned and blinked to see him standing there, as though struggling to place him. Then she touched a finger to her lips, got to her feet and came to join him outside.
    ‘How is he?’ he asked.
    ‘How does he look?’
    Knox didn’t know what to say, what Claire needed from him. Situations like these rendered normal language and the conventions of human behaviour inadequate. He put his arms around her, held her against him, stroked her hair. It took a moment for the sobs to arrive, but once they’d started she couldn’t stop, her shoulders shaking with grief, anxiety and fear—and not just on Augustin’s account, he imagined. It was one of the crueller aspects of tragedies like this, that they made good people like Claire worry about their own futures, so that they’d later lacerate themselves for their selfish thoughts while their loved ones lay dying. He put his mouth close to her ear and murmured: ‘It’s going to be all right. I promise.’
    She stiffened at once, so that he knew it had been a mistake. She broke away, took a step or two back, wiped her eyes. ‘All right?’ she asked. ‘Are you an expert on traumatic brain injury, or something?’
    ‘I didn’t mean—’
    ‘Augustin’s skull has almost certainly been fractured, and his parietal and frontal lobes violently traumatised. His blood-brain barrier will have broken down. Cerebral oedemas are going to form. Do you know what they are?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘They occur when blood and other fluids are pumped into the brain faster than they can beremoved. The whole head swells up, like a sink filling when the plughole is blocked. First it will affect his white matter, then his grey matter. It’s one of the most common causes of irreversible brain damage, and it’s happening to Augustin right now, and there’s nothing I can do about it, except hold his hand and pray. And you’re telling me it’s going to be all right.’
    ‘I’m so sorry, Claire.’
    She nodded twice, wiped her eye again with the heel of her hand. ‘I’ve worked in a hospice,’ she told him. ‘I’ve seen car-crash victims and gunshot victims and people with brain tumours. You think I haven’t gone through this before? The doctors are putting Augustin into an induced coma: who knows if and when he’ll come out of it? And then what? Traumatic brain injuries don’t kill at once. Did you know that? They take their own sweet fucking time about it, while the body just falls apart piece-by-piece around them. And even if he should pull through, he’ll be at increased risk for the rest of his life from tumours, depression, impotence, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, headaches, you name it. So please explain to me just how it’s going to be all right.’
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ repeated Knox helplessly.
    ‘What good is that? What good is being sorry? What are you going to do about it?’
    ‘Everything I