Chasing Angels Read Online Free PDF

at home in her cottage just outside Glenfinnan in Inverness-shire when he first became ill, and she was not at all amused. As far as she had been concerned he was part of a life she had left behind
and would never return to, even if he had remained, against her will, in the back of her mind. She’d told the doctors this five years ago, when the long, final act had started. She’d do
the necessary when the time came, and that was more to do with her own need to round things off than affection for Con, but she would not devote her life to caring for him indefinitely. It seemed
that Old Con had set out for the Barras market as usual that day. It was how he had always earned his drinking money, doing odd jobs for the market traders. Then he had settled into the next part
of his routine, propping up the bar of the Saracen’s Head pub across the road in the Gallowgate. Occasionally, in the weeks leading up to the great collapse, his legs had felt tingly, as
though he had pins and needles, he said later, but if he sat down to rest for a while the feeling went away. And on this particular day the tingly feeling had happened again, so he’d sat down
for a moment, but this time, when he tried to stand again, he couldn’t. From that moment on he was paralysed, it was as quick as that, though the gradual pickling of his nervous system had
been underway for many years beforehand.
    There had been all sorts of tests done, and at one point he had been transferred in the middle of the night from the Royal Infirmary to the Neurosurgical Unit at the Southern General, by an
overenthusiastic medic who thought Con had a brain tumour. That’s when Kathy had been summoned from Glenfinnan, the first of several summonings in the years to come, because in the absence of
the adored son and heir she was the next of kin, and she felt the touch of the hovering hand as it grazed her life. In time the tumour had been ruled out, as had various other exotic conditions,
until the consultant asked to see her.
    ‘Tell me,’ he had said tactfully, ‘does your father drink much?’
    ‘Only as much as he can get down his throat,’ she’d replied, ‘and believe me, his throat is wider than the Clyde.’
    In that case, the consultant had told her with the deepest regret, it was his considered opinion that Old Con was suffering from a form of polyneuritis, brought on by years of alcohol abuse. He
would never regain the ability to walk, he would have to depend on a catheter to drain urine from his bladder into an externally-worn plastic bag, and for the rest of his life his bowel movements
would be, as they coyly put it, assisted. As he had no feeling, and therefore no control, over the muscles from the waist down, the nurses would administer suppositories to evacuate his bowel when
necessary, and if that didn’t work, as happened from time to time, they would perform manual evacuations, a process that didn’t bear thinking about as far as Kathy was concerned, but
better them than her. She had often thought of poking her finger in his eye, but it was the only part of his anatomy she had ever considered, and she wasn’t about to change her mind now, so
let the nurses get on with it.
    ‘Ah always knew he was dead frae the neck up,’ Kathy had replied, when his condition and future care requirements were outlined by the consultant that day, in the vain expectation
that she would take them on. ‘Noo he’s dead frae the waist doon as well. Doesnae leave much, does it?’
    The consultant didn’t reply.
    She had served her time looking after her father, her apprenticeship had started the moment she was born, and when Lily died she had taken over completely. His entire life had been spent in the
care of women. His own father had been a merchant seaman who died on a voyage and was buried at sea, leaving his widow with two daughters and one son, Con. When his mother decided she
couldn’t cope, it was her daughters she had sent to the nuns at