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The Children’s Hospital was cheery enough, thought Gordon—as far as hospitals went. Still, there was no way they could get rid of that antiseptic smell, and the alien trappings of childhood irritated him and made him uncomfortable. High voices, pop music, bright murals of cartoon creatures that he didn’t recognize: teapots with dotty faces? Ogling crabs and tuna fish? Medical apparatus lined the chill, windowless corridors, which echoed like the corridors of a ship in deep space. A young nurse, young enough to be his granddaughter—maybe a doctor she was, with the trousers and the stethoscope; he had never got used to lady doctors—walked humming past him, a bouquet of lollipops blooming from the breast pocket of her white coat.
The first film he’d ever been in, half a century before—“Our Mutual Friend,” Joan Fontaine, Larry Olivier, 1936—there had been a scene in a children’s hospital. Gordon was seven years old, an extra, lying in an iron bed on a set in Twickenham with black circles painted under his eyes. He and Dolores had stayed up late to watch it on television about six months ago. Sitting there in the curtained sunroom with his decaf coffee and his low-salt popcorn, and seeing the little face—plump and healthy even under the makeup—which had somehow, unbelievably, once been his own, all he could remember was how he had stealthily attempted to flatten a wad of chewing gum against the roof of his mouth as the arc lights blazed red through his closed eyelids. Later, between takes, he’d watched some of the older kids pretend to get drunk off the dregs of a bottle of Scotch that they said they’d stolen from Miss Fontaine but that actually had come from the makeup man; he and a girl his own age, annoyed at being excluded, had turned their attention to pinching a smaller boy until he cried. It was to be the most prestigious film Gordon would appear in in his entire career, though he would not become aware of this for another twenty years or so. And it was a fine film; it stood up, even now. Alec Guinness had done an excellent job as the old Jew.
The garish cartoon faces on the wall—green-armored space creatures, with slitted bandit kerchiefs tied around their eyes—goggled down at him; with a sinking feeling, he became aware of the first, timorous lurch of the now familiar nausea. Fried eggs didn’t sit so well with the roentgens. They’d tasted good in the coffee shop but he’d known he’d be sorry later.
He’d been in the States for fifty years, had almost completely lost his accent, though even when he was a kid it had all been largely phony, all those Geordie MacTavish phrases like “wee braw lassie” and “och the noo.” His real name was Gordon Burns, but in the pictures he’d been Geordie MacTavish for six years. Geordie MacTavish the Highland Lad: Geordie rescuing hurt animals, Geordie breaking up smugglers’ rings and fighting the Nazis, Geordie sent away to public school. Twelve years old and skipping around in a bloody kilt like Bonnie Prince Charlie, sneaking smokes between takes with the cameramen. Then the contract with Paramount, bit parts in costume dramas. He hadn’t been in a film in thirty-five years. For the past thirty, he’d lived in Burbank with Dolores, in the same little pink stucco bungalow they’d bought when they were newlyweds, working on his golf game and doing public relations for one of the big production companies. He’d never been all that fond of P.R., had never been particularly crazy about his colleagues or the work that he did, but since he’d had to retire (it had got to be too much for him, he tired so easily, he just couldn’t do it anymore), he missed it desperately. Away from the camaraderie of the shared routine, the office acquaintances had begun to slip, and he didn’t see too many other people on a regular basis, not even in the neighborhood where he had lived for so long—moving vans always in the driveways, strange dogs, unfamiliar kids, faces changing all the time.
He was definitely feeling ill now; he wished Dolores were with him; he wanted to turn around and go back home. But how could you refuse a request like this? His doctor had told him about the little girl. Down at the Cancer Center in San Diego, he’d said, a bit of a drive, but it would mean so much; old stills of Gordon all over the walls and even a Dandie Dinmont terrier—named, of course, Bobbie, after Gordon’s sidekick in the series. Nine years old and dying of leukemia—some chromosomal kind, nearly always fatal. “She watches your movies before she goes into chemo,” the doctor had said. “Says Geordie’s never afraid and neither is she.” What a rotten world, thought Gordon.
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