The Ninth Life of Louis Drax Read Online Free PDF Page B

that filter through to them from the ward. There have even been cases – rare, I will admit, and much-disputed – of a comatose twin telepathically communicating with his identical sibling or a mother ‘hearing’ the voice of her unconscious child, clearly, in her head. Not all brain activity can be picked up by a machine. We fool ourselves if we think it can be.
         So I had my usual optimism when it came to Louis Drax, though when I read his notes in more detail, I must admit that my heart sank a little. He’d had a fit the week before, which had led to his transfer here. According to the latest electroencephalograms, the episode had plunged him into a deeper coma than before, with a diagnosis of Persistent Vegetative State not far off on the horizon. What usually happens to PVS patients is that when they come down with something – it tends to be pneumonia – a doctor like me – in consultation with the relatives – lets nature take its course. It’s not unheard of for a patient to emerge from a coma that deep, but nobody holds their breath.
         All morning, in my office, I listened out for the crunch of gravel on the driveway, while Noelle buzzed in and out with letters to sign, reminders of appointments, and a fresh memo from the directeur , Guy Vaudin, about evacuation procedures in case of a fire threat. Eric Masserot – the father of my anorexic, Isabelle – was arriving later, and I would need to make time for him. A detective with an odd surname had called and would ring back. If I wanted to order new equipment for the physio unit, I must liaise with the new physiotherapist by Thursday at the latest. Had I prepared my talk and my slides for the symposium in Lyon next week? I replied to Noelle’s various questions and signed her bits of paper, but my mind stayed on the Drax boy.
         It was late morning when the ambulance rolled up the drive. By now the static weather had shifted into something more restless, with the air growing blustery beneath a cobalt sky, making the olive leaves shiver like shoals of fish, dizzy and capricious. There are times when the mistral can drive you mad. Times when it does not fan you, but merely churns the hot air. Today’s wind had menace in it, the same menace van Gogh painted over the cornfield the day before he took his life, the kind that starts outside but lodges in your head as soon as you feel its breath. They wheeled him in on a trolley. Age, nine. Condition, very poor. White-clad nurses on either side, one of them carrying a stuffed toy. And in his wake, the mother, who immediately impressed me with the way she held her small, upright body. Something about her carriage and the tilt of her head announced, ‘proud victim’. Madame Drax was petite, with pale hair that hovered somewhere between red and blonde. Her features – fine and delicately scattered with freckles – were too unremarkable to make her striking at first sight, but she had an allure. Something cat-like. As for the child–
         The poor boy.
         His hair and lashes were dark, but his face was deathly pale. He might have been cast from wax. There was something almost luminous about his skin, which brought to mind those stone carvings of the dead you see in churches, with their tiny, perfect hands and feet, their dreamily closed eyes. His breathing was so shallow that you could barely make out the influx and exhalation of air.
         All I knew at that point was that back in April, Louis Drax had technically died as a result of a fall, but that somehow he’d returned from the dead – or at least from a shocking mis diagnosis. Either way, it was so bizarre that it bordered on the grotesque. A medically unusual case, then, with a dismal prognosis in the wake of his fit, according to the notes I’d just read. One to store in one’s mental scrapbook perhaps, not much more to me. But I was a different man then. I knew nothing.
         And so the man who knew nothing