St Matthew's Passion - By Sam Archer Page 0,50

the convolutions of the brain, but all that meant was that the swelling wasn’t massive or immediately life threatening. The next twenty-four hours would be critical; but even if the intracranial pressure was successfully lowered, there was no telling how long Fin would remain unconscious.

Or if he’d ever wake up.

Melissa stepped into the ICU and was struck as always by the unique atmosphere of the place: a layer of tranquillity undershot by a dynamic of suppressed tension and foreboding. It was at once far calmer and quieter than most other, more ‘normal’ wards, and closer to the phenomenon of sudden death. By its very nature it had a limited number of beds, catering as it did for the most critically ill patients in the hospital. The staff bustled quietly, their footsteps and murmured voices accompanied by the rhythmic beeping of countless monitors and the clunky hiss of ventilation machines.

The nurse at the front desk looked up and nodded when she recognised Melissa. The staff on the ICU knew Melissa was a close colleague of Mr Finmore-Gage’s. To them it was perfectly natural that she’d come up to visit him, sit by his bed.

Fin was in one of the bays at the far end of the room, a nurse adjusting the flow through his intravenous line, the ICU registrar, Melissa’s counterpart, consulting a medication chart at the end of the bed. As she approached Melissa had a sudden moment of panic. Were they preparing to turn the life-support off? But the central line remained in place, snaking up to Fin’s neck where it had been inserted into the internal jugular vein and was held in place with tape, and the ventilator hissed and pumped, sending air into Fin’s lungs through the tube in his windpipe.

Melissa knew the registrar, who greeted her with a tired smile and brought her up to date with the management so far. Oxygen sats were satisfactory, as were other vital signs. Diuretic medications had been added to the steroids in order to promote the draining of excess fluid from Fin’s body and thereby from his brain. The usual precautions were in place to protect him from the risk of bedsores which tended to arise in immobile patients more quickly than most people realised: the ICU bed was a special model with a gently vibrating mattress.

Now all anyone could do, apart from watching the monitors, was wait. And hope.

The registrar and the nurse moved on to another patient and Melissa pulled up one of the low armchairs at the side of the bed. Seated, she was at eye level with Fin’s supine form. Melissa realised this was the first time she’d actually had a chance to study his face. Even after their frenzied encounter in his office, they hadn’t examined each other in the normal way two people would after making love.

Feeling almost guilty, like a voyeur, Melissa let her gaze take in his face from the side. Even under the circumstances, the ugly breathing apparatus that was keeping him alive protruding from his mouth, Fin was beautiful. The profile was classical, a sculptor’s ideal, with its straight nose, ever so slightly uptilted at the very end, its prominent cheekbones made more so in repose. His skin was paler than usual but as always virtually unlined apart from two faint parallel creases on his forehead, the stamp of a man who spent much of his life thinking, who was deadly serious about the values that were important to him. To Melissa’s astonishment, she noticed his eyelashes for the first time. Usually his striking eyes drew attention away from them. Now, thickly black, almost sooty, they were as still as death.

Melissa choked, and quickly turned it into a cough in case anybody in the ICU noticed. For a moment she’d forgotten to breathe. She had had a vision of the future. A bittersweet, richly detailed one, like a lengthy film that had been compressed into the space of a few seconds but every frame of which was engrained with absolute clarity on her memory.

In this vision, several years had passed. Fin had died, and Melissa was an eminent consultant in her field, an internationally acclaimed professor of trauma surgery. She was head of the department at St Matthew’s, travelled to New York and Beijing and Sydney to share her knowledge and her skills with the world, and had pioneered several revolutionary techniques which had had an immense impact on the relief of suffering across the world. She’d achieved everything