Chapter 44

“Kelloway is experiencing mild respiratory depression,”Dr. Bird explained to Rawle outside the TV lounge, minutes after his arrival in a scramble by taxi. Athan was asleep in his Rub-a-dub-dubbers pajamas, slung like a sack of potatoes over Rawle’s shoulder.
The fluorescent lights of the hospital made Rawle’s eyes water.
“What does that mean exactly?” He asked the doctor.
“Her breathing is laboured. There’s slight paralysis in the muscles in her chest and back, which is being caused by a reaction to the chemical. That’s temporary, but it is causing her to have some difficulty breathing right now. She also has a slightly enlarged larynx, right here,” the doctor traced along his voice box to demonstrate, as if Rawle didn’t know what a larynx was. He felt like saying I’m a reporter you arrogant twat, I’m not stupid. But he thought that would sound pretty arrogant.
Plus, he felt sincerely grateful to the doctor for being smart enough to know what his wife was going through and how to help her.
“It hurts for her to speak and she will be in pain for a few days, and then it will clear her system. We’ve given her something for pain.”
The chemical had literally burned the inside of Kelloway’s mouth and esophagus red, he said. She would be monitored overnight to make sure it wasn’t going to get worse, but the doctor was optimistic she was through the worst of it.
Rawle ducked inside the makeshift room and laid Athan on a reclined geriatric chair and tucked a white flannel blanket around his tiny body.
Kelloway was asleep too.
She’d eaten some plain gelatine and water earlier which was supposed to encapsulate any poison that made it to her stomach.
Jesus, help her.
“She says she’s sure she didn’t swallow it,” Fiona Hendsbee whispered at Rawle’s side.
“What the hell was it?” he whispered back.
“Maybe a cleaning chemical. And even if she didn’t swallow it, it still might have absorbed through the mucous membrane in her throat. The question is how much and how will she react to it. She seems to be doing good.”
Fiona left at about 10:30 and took Athan with her for a sleepover. For the next two hours, Rawle sat in silence as his wife slept. The nurses had her on a portable heart monitor they use for pregnant women, in the unlikely event that she’d ingested enough poison to throw her body into circulatory shock.
Rawle sat there in the dim fluorescent light of the darkened TV room and listened to the steady beep of Kelloway’s heart as it was translated through a beige hospital machine. There must be little in the world more terrifying.