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Danny was hoping for a relaxing afternoon, Steely-Dan the stereo, cycle racing on TV with the sound turned off, and a browse through The Independent, but it was not to be. After twenty minutes the telephone rang and Sharon, wherever she was in the house, answered it. She burst into the front room a few minutes later.
"Danielle's woken up! I mean, she's fully awake, back to normal."
"That's great news."
Sharon paused. "There is a catch. She wants to be disconnected from the dialysis machine."
"Ah."
"I talked to her doctor, she wants me to go to the hospital and talk her out of it. Are you coming?"
Previously she'd dissuaded him from visiting, so this was more than a casual invitation.
"Of course."
She already held the keys for Miss. Daisy in her hand, and now simply marched out of the house, demonstrating how quick she could be when the journey wasn't trivial.
"Dr Russell, she said it was far too early to disconnect Danielle, a huge risk," explained Sharon, moments later in the old Mercedes, as they waited for a white delivery van to scream
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through the chicane at the top of St Peter's Street.
"Anyway, Danielle isn't in a fit state to make the decision." The van drove past, scraping loudly on the speed bumps. Sharon took her turn through the constriction. "But it's fantastic that she's back to normal. I mean that is normal. First thing she does is have an argument with her doctor."
Sharon had generally masked her distress while Danielle had been seriously unwell. But now she was better, the relief was clear in Sharon's buoyant mood. She eased the car into the Dover Road traffic, then turned right to cross the foot of Islington Green. They passed Waterstones on their right, once Collins Music Hall, where Charlie Chaplin and Gracie Fields had entertained the crowds before cinemas came along and stole the audience of the music halls.
Elsewhere in the borough were the many cinemas that had been converted into something else when they in turn had lost their audience to TV.
"I left your computer on."
Sharon used Danny's laptop for her email, but was so careful not to change anything and to put the machine back where it belonged that he often forgot it was sometimes shared.
"That's OK."
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"I'm still careful. I don't open any email attachment that arrives out of the blue, even if it's from somebody I know."
"That's good."
"And no unprotected sex with total strangers."
"I'm not too worried about that," said Danny, dryly, "just be careful with your emails."
She had another difficult junction to negotiate, this one from Islington Green on to Upper Street. Parked cars obscured her view. She edged forward until she blocked the southbound lane, then waited for some kind soul to let her into the northbound queue. Before it happened, a baulked BMW arrived next to her window, and the young man at the wheel honked his horn,
"Oh fuck off," said Sharon, softly, at the same time giving the driver her most charming smile.
He gave her a longer burst on his horn.
Sharon leaned towards Danny, grabbed his right arm and dragged it across to the steering wheel to sound her own.
"What was all that about?" asked Danny, as a car finally let them in and Miss Daisy joined the northbound crawl along Upper Street.
"He was pipping at you, so I thought you might like to pip back."
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"At me? You were driving."
"No, that wouldn't have happened if I was on my own. Lone cow invades territory, bull in field attempts to look cool. Cow and bull invade territory together, bull already in field stamps his feet and roars. You just roared back."
Danny thought about it. A rather cynical view of his gender, but it was probably true. As a non-driver, he didn't have much experience of road psychology.
"Women use the horn to stop kids stepping out in front of them," continued Sharon.
"Men think it's there for territorial display. That's why big trucks have macho horns and mopeds have little tinny ones."
"I don't suppose the difference in sound might just help people tell a big vehicle from a small one."
"Are you telling me that size isn't part of display?"
They crawled through the prettiest part of Upper Street, past the scores of small bars and restaurants and shops in the ground floors of early nineteenth century buildings. Danny watched the scenery of pedestrians and old frontages. "Actually, men continually check their horns just to make sure they'll work when a kid steps out."
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He heard Sharon's amused snort.
"Seriously, your horn button's a bit sticky," he added.
"I'll try to get annoyed more often."
On the left was The Dog & Duck pub, once called the Sir Walter Raleigh, where the man himself had lived when the building still looked like the painting on Danny's wall.
"Maybe it's time Miss Daisy retired," he suggested.
"Careful. She might hear you. Anyway, I don't want a modern car. They're all the same."
"How can that possibly be? They're all designed by different computers."
On their left, they passed the oldest building on Upper Street, from 1620, set back, small and insignificant fucker. Few of the pedestrians passing by would have any idea of its age.
"Do you give computers names?" asked Sharon, idly. "I mean professionals in general -
do you give computers names?"
Danny was on the verge of saying no, then hesitated. "Well, if they're networked together, we have to give them names so we can tell which one's which. So servers usually have names."
"You could give them numbers instead."
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"That happens too, but names are easier to remember."
"I could never give a computer a name, any more than I could give one to a TV. No character."
"Really? I think they have the character of their operating system. Take Windows for example - an over-helpful maiden aunty, forever ready with a plate of sandwiches when it's a drink you really need, and liable to faint in a crisis."
That seemed a good note to end the conversation. It was closer to Danny's work than they usually strayed.
They reached the end of Upper Street and the big one-way system of Highbury Corner, with its acre of trees and grass in the centre. In the early 1940s this was still a cramped crossroads that could never have coped with modern traffic, until a V2 rocket arrived.
From there they carried on in silence, following the exact reverse of the old North London cattle drovers' route, along Holloway Road to Archway, and up Highgate Hill as far as the Whittington Hospital.
The total journey was less than four miles, yet took half an hour by car. Two hundred years ago it would have taken the same time by horse and carriage. Modern technology, decided
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Danny, hadn't improved the speed of travel, just the comfort - better suspension, better seats and less chance of somebody's wheels in front spraying you with cow-dung and horse manure.
Up to 3,000 cattle a day trudged down this route, and none had control over their bowels.
Downwind, it would have been possible to smell the road before seeing it.
This old drovers route eventually became the A1. Then the railway era arrived and eclipsed cobblestone and dirt, until mass-produced cars and tarmacadam switched loyalties back to the roads. Cattle that had once been herded on the hoof from Scotland all the way to Upper Street and Smithfield Market, took to the railways, then refrigerated lorries on the A1 and M1, arriving at the market dead rather than alive, as meat butchered in the abattoirs of the north, minus all their messy blood and guts and dung.
Danielle didn't look great. She'd never had much flesh and now had less. Her green hair missed its maintenance - after just a few days it was beginning to show ruddy-brown roots, the same colour as Sharon's cascade.
Sharon marched up to the hospital bed and assessed the various tubes and wires connecting Danielle to medical machinery,
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including an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. She found a free spot and bent down to kiss Danielle's cheek, hugging her lightly to avoid disturbing the apparatus.
When she rose, Danny could see her eyes were glistening. The two sisters had always been close, and doubly so after their parents had died six years ago. That was a year before Danny had met Sharon. Her parents had been touring North Yorkshire on a motorcycle and hit a milk truck on the moors, had instantly offered their lives as tribute to the god of the private motor vehicle - a very demanding god who required the sacrifice of one in 20,000 of the population each year.
Danielle shared many of her sister's qualities, which inevitably meant that Danny adored her too. She looked a lot like Sharon - her nose, eyes, the shape of her hands - just smaller in stature. They shared many attitudes. Whenever Danny looked at Danielle or listened to her, he saw or heard something of his partner.
He had to admit that in normal circumstances the similarities made her sexually attractive too. He'd sometimes wondered if that was a bad thing, but decided on balance it wasn't.
Since he found Sharon so irresistibly gorgeous, it made sense that he found somebody who looked, sounded and often acted like her attractiveness
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too. It wasn't as if they had plans for each other.
Occasionally they flirted, but he knew she felt the same way - they both cared too much about Sharon for it to go beyond the simple recognition of attraction.
Not that she was attractive now. Her mop of dyed hair lay vivid green against the pillow, reflecting back into her white cheeks. She looked like an alien.
"So, how are you, Dee?" asked Sharon.
A strong smell of antiseptic competed with the many lotions and liniments of medical care.
"Better ask the doctor. I think I'm feeling not too bad, she thinks I'm feeling shit. Can you believe this? - she told me that digesting vegetable protein leaves more waste in the blood than animal protein, and it would be easier on my kidneys if I could eat a little meat. That's just total crap. Where do these people learn this stuff?"
That was wonderful to hear, that Danielle had lost none of her bolshiness, that while lying in a hospital bed she could begin a conversation with the inadequacies of doctors. It was confirmation that her mind at least was now functioning as normal.
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"I talked to her," said Sharon. "Dr Russell. She said they had to operate on one of your kidneys to stop the bleeding. It'll be a while before they're working properly again."
Tubes came out of Danielle's arm and neck, her nose too, a couple more disappeared beneath the bed-sheets. There were so many it wasn't easy to work out how many machines, drips and receptacles she was connected to. She reminded Danny of an old school project in fluid logic.
She turned her head towards Danny.
Maybe she didn't want to discuss her kidneys just yet. "Hello, Danny." Her voice was muffled by the oxygen mask. Normally it sounded so much like Sharon's.
"It was named after Dick Whittington, you know - the hospital," he said.
"That's so comforting. I'm in a medical institution named after a pantomime character who gave away his cat in return for great wealth."
"He was also Lord Mayor of London and left most of his fortune to charity. Not a bad chap."
"Good. Remorsefull. So not a complete pillock?. It would feel worse being in a hospital named after a total wanker!"
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"And there's no evidence that he ever had a cat."
"Well he didn't have it for long, did he?
Had it whisked off to Africa and sold so it could chase mice and rats in the court of some Barbary king, who probably broke its tail." Danielle's rate of breathing increased from the effort of verbal exercise.
"I think you're mixing up your Moors with your Malaysians."
Sharon coughed, very pointedly, from her seat on the other side of the bed.
Danielle turned back to her. "How's Tom?"
That was her name for her bike - Tom Cruise. A female cyclist's joke.
"Bicycle by Picasso, I'm afraid."
"It wasn't my fault. All the lights were green."
"I believe you".
Danielle glanced at Danny, but she was too slow and he caught the movement and turned away.
He wouldn't be so easy to con. He'd seen her out there on the highways doing battle a couple of times. She was one of those cyclists who felt that red lights were only for motorised vehicles, and that pavements weren't just for
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pedestrians. Her cycle riding was so cavalier it made car drivers appear relatively considerate and responsible.
"And it wasn't like I was coming in from a side road, or the pavement," added Danielle. "I was on the main road, turning on to Baker Street, in a filter lane, just along from Madame Tussaud's."
The oxygen mask hissed, a heart monitor beeped regularly, two screens showed green text that made absolutely no sense to Danny despite all his computer expertise.
"The doctor says you really need to stay on dialysis for a while," said Sharon. "Just a few weeks, until your kidneys have healed. It's…
Dee, it's essential."
"I don't like that machine. I don't want to use it."
The dialyzer was on a trolley by Danny's side of the bed. It wasn't an attractive piece of apparatus. It was about half the size of a domestic washing machine with four vertical filter tubes at the front and plenty of dials and switches, plus a black screen showing green words and a couple of graphs. It looked like it belonged in a chemistry laboratory,
"It's only a machine," said Sharon.
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"When they were first developed,"
explained Danielle, "they were tested on animals.
And you know I don't use anything that involves animal testing."
"That's fine for shampoo and cosmetics,"
said Sharon, gently, "but this is a medical issue.
You need this machine to help you recover."
"If I gave up my principles every time I was ill, they wouldn't count for much, would they?"
When their parents had died, Danielle and Sharon became rich - at least a million pounds each. Mr Rossway had been a successful businessman and engineer, making lightweight parts for passenger aircraft seats in his own small factory. But Danielle found the wealth incompatible with her views on society and her aspiration for a fairer world, so she gave it away, mainly to African charities. She gave it all away, as far as anybody could tell. Whether people approved or not, and some thought this was downright stupid, it certainly answered the question of whether her principles were real or pretend.
Danny had no idea what Sharon had done with her share of the inheritance. His specialist skills and the huge amounts of cash flowing through his industry excused him from money
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concerns. Presumably the majority was sitting in a bank or unit trust somewhere. She didn't talk about it and he didn't feel the need to ask.
Sharon had her eyes closed.
"Do you think animals were harmed when these machine were developed?" Danny asked Danielle.
"Of course. I bet they took the kidneys out of some poor chimps to see how long they would last hooked up to this monstrosity. Then when the tests were over, the animals were thrown in the bin. I don't want to benefit from that. It shouldn't be allowed."
Sharon's head lowered. She stroked her eyebrows with her right hand.
"I've told the doctor about this," said Danielle, "but she closes her ears and tells me it was tested on dogs and rabbits, not chimpanzees.
But I know doctors lie. There are only 200,000
chimpanzees left in the wild, because people keep killing them to eat them, and a few thousand in captivity. But do we keep those for breeding?
Oh no, just a few hundred, the rest are for biomedical research. We give them HIV, hepatitis and malaria to test our drugs. They die young, after years in solitary confinement.
They're the closest species to us, 98% the same genes, so we either kill and eat them or run
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experiments on them. It's disgusting and immoral and I want no part of it - medical or not."
Danny could have responded that we share 50% of our genes with a banana, but humour wasn't going to be the way out of this.
Sharon was trying not to cry. It was painful to see her this way. There had to be a solution, and he'd better think of it.
"OK. Let's assume that some chimps did die when this machine was developed. Maybe a dozen of them. And you think these were sentient and thoughtful creatures who shouldn't have died that way. Right?"
"Absolutely."
"Then in their final moments, when they realised they were about to die, what do you think their last wishes would have been? Would they have wanted these machines they'd given their lives for to be used only by uncaring humans who don't give a damn about animal welfare, while people like you, who do care, refuse to use them, and get weaker and fewer as a result, less able to fight on their behalf? Or would they see things a different way? What would their choice be?"
There was that sisterly resemblance again.
The look he was getting from Danielle right now, he'd seen in Sharon's eyes just once or twice,
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when he'd really said something wrong. She carried on scowling at him. Sharon's head came up, watching and waiting.
"That's a bastard argument," said Danielle, eventually.
"Well, I'm not saying it's flawless, but I thought maybe you'd want to do right by the animals whose lives were lost."
The more time passed without a reply, the surer he was that he'd won Danielle over.
"I still think the machine's got bad vibes,"
said Danielle.
That was good. No animal argument there. Danny inspected the dialyzer in detail, trying to pick up some feeling about it either way. It looked ugly but was keeping Danielle alive, so on balance he felt quite positive towards it. The indecipherable graphs and words on the screen were some kind of blood test or filter monitoring, presumably.
"You will tell me first if you… have second thoughts?" he heard Sharon say. "Get the doctor to phone me. Promise?"
There was no answer from Danielle, but Sharon didn't continue, so by nod or by default the promise must have been made.
As Danny watched the screen, its small words suddenly changed.
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—Danny, have I convinced you yet?
Frank.
How? He turned to scan the ceiling for a CCTV camera. There it was. He'd better turn back before anybody noticed. Incredible. Dan wasn't just inside the hospital's computer system, he was inside its individual machines, inside its CCTV, inside the dialyzer, and he knew what Danny looked like.
"Something wrong?" asked Danielle.
"No. No. Just a weird reflection on the screen. I wondered where it came from. That's all." The display changed back to unfathomable words and graphs, and Danny tried his best to change his face back to the way it had looked before he'd seen the message. Frank messing about with his bank account and credit card he could handle, but the thought of thought of him lurking inside Danielle's medical equipment was appalling