Rabbit Hole

by Mark Billingham

  ‘I’m not sorry she’s dead,’ I say.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he says.

  I move my chair a little closer to his and lower my voice. ‘But somebody in here thinks I did it, and the reason why I’m supposed to have done it makes me a target.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ he says.

  ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘No, I mean you’re right . . . that’s bad.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say. ‘I don’t know who to trust.’

  ‘You shouldn’t trust anybody.’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Or . . . you could trust everybody. That might work as well.’

  I watch him smile and give me the thumbs-up. He seems very happy with his plan. He’s either a copper who’s ridiculously good at his job or he’s as mad as a hatter.

  ‘I’m scared,’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes, so am I,’ he says. ‘All the time.’

  ‘I don’t like it. I’ve only ever been really scared once before and I didn’t like it then, either.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I fought back,’ I say. ‘I got weapons.’

  ‘Right.’ That fires him up and he turns his head and starts to look around the room, searching for something suitable. I’m quite excited, so I do the same.

  Bongos, the broken guitar, a collection of board games.

  Nothing that’s going to do anyone a great deal of damage.

  He slaps his hand on the table in frustration, then shrugs, as though it was well worth a try. He says, ‘Do you want to have dinner?’

  It’s sweet, like he’s asking me on a date, and I find myself grinning.

  ‘Could do,’ I say. ‘But just dinner, yeah? I’m not a slag.’

  He giggles again. Mutters, ‘Slag.’

  ‘Then maybe afterwards we can come back here and I’ll help you finish your jigsaw.’

  His face darkens immediately and he leans forward, wrapping his arms protectively around the scattered pieces. He sniffs and looks sideways at me.

  ‘Oh no you fucking won’t.’

  FORTY-FIVE

  Mr Jigsaw – who isn’t called Trevor at all, but turns out to be a Colin – is sitting as far away from me as possible without actually being in a different room, and I find myself dining next to Lauren. This is, of course, a major treat. She eats with her mouth open, humming tunelessly through her nose and leaning into me when she reaches for salt and pepper and ketchup. Then ketchup again.

  She says, ‘That psychiatrist the coppers brought along was nice.’

  ‘Was she?’ It’s a relief to hear that I wasn’t the only patient Perera talked to. But then Lauren spoils it, like she was always intending to. ‘Yeah, we had a cracking natter. Talked about all sorts of things.’

  I can’t help thinking that she means all sorts of people and that what people really means is me. Her fat gob twists into that punchable smile, the one she slaps on if she’s enjoying herself and whenever she wants me to think she knows something.

  What’s really annoying is that it works.

  ‘Pretty as well, don’t you think?’ she says.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Proper lez-bait.’ Lauren nods and ladles more stew into her mouth. ‘I saw Malaika eyeing her up.’

  Talking of which, I’m all too aware that Clare is watching me from the table opposite. She’s sitting with Donna and Ilias, but doesn’t seem interested in whatever those two are talking about. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tiny Tears had cosied up to Lauren as well and is patiently waiting for her to report back on our conversation once we’ve all finished eating.

  ‘She must have had a field day with you,’ Lauren says. ‘That psychiatrist.’

  ‘Must she?’

  ‘Course. Your thing about who killed Kevin, you thinking it was Debbie and all that.’ She leans so close that her greasy hair is like some massive spider on my shoulder and she whispers as if she’s making a dramatic announcement in a scary film. ‘Murder most foul.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ I say.

  She snorts so some stew comes out, then goes back to her dinner.

  I see Tony walk up to the serving hatch and decide it might be nice to join him for a spot of pudding. I tell Lauren to fuck off again for good measure, and when I get up to leave, she picks up one of the plastic knives and jabs it aggressively at nobody in particular.

  I can tell that she wants me to notice.

  Once we’ve both collected bowls of runny trifle, I ask Tony if I can have a word. He doesn’t look thrilled about it, but I tell him it’s all right and guide him gently towards the empty end of one of the long tables. For a big bloke, he’s fairly . . . biddable. Mia and Femi are sitting at the far end, but they’re gassing away anyway and I know that if I talk quietly enough they won’t hear us.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ I say to Tony.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘You know . . .’

  Just like that he goes from being wary to proper crapping himself. He starts looking around the dining room frant­ically, but I reach across and grab hold of his arm. ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘I swear.’

  He looks at me and gradually starts to calm down a little. His chest is still heaving, mind you, and it feels like he could bolt any moment.

  ‘Where is it?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m not sure, but you really don’t need to worry, because it’s not . . . your Thing. It’s mine.’

  His eyes widen. Now he’s not going anywhere.

  ‘I reckon I’ve got a Thing too,’ I say. ‘But it’s different from yours, because I know it’s a person. I know it’s living and breathing and it’s walking about in here.’

  He looks around again, but more slowly this time and a lot more sneakily, because suddenly we’re in this together. He reaches across the table and takes hold of my arm. ‘I’m so sorry, mate.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I shrug. ‘At least I know.’

  ‘It will kill you, you know that, right? That’s the reason it exists. So you need to be careful.’

  ‘Oh, I’m being very careful, and the best part is, I don’t think it knows that I’m on to it or that I’m watching out. Does yours?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Tony screws his eyes up and shakes his head. ‘It’s so bloody clever, though. Like one step ahead all the time.’

  ‘How did you find out about it?’

  He pushes trifle around his dish. ‘When I was eleven or twelve. First I thought it was, you know . . . like an imaginary friend? He turned up in my bedroom one night after my dad left, so we’d sit up there and talk about when Dad was coming back and things would be OK again and that was nice.’ He smiles, just for a second or two. ‘Then, after Mum passed, he came with me to the care home, and once the bad stuff started happening in there he wasn’t quite so friendly, you know? One day he just wasn’t around, but I always knew he was coming back and that when he did, I wouldn’t recognise him. That now it was an it and not a he any more, yeah? I knew that eventually it was going to hurt me, but the worst thing is, I never understood why.’ He lifts up a spoonful of trifle but just stares past me and lets it run off the spoon. ‘To this day, I don’t know what I did to make the Thing so angry with me.’

  We sit there for a while saying nothing.

  Over Tony’s shoulder I can see people starting to leave. I watch Lauren get up and notice Clare follow her out half a minute later. I glance over at Colin, but any UC worth his salt is way too smart to make surveillance of me obvious.

  ‘Do you know, Al?’ Tony asks. ‘Why your Thing wants to hurt you?’

  I nod, because I know that telling him will make me feel better. ‘Because it thinks I killed someone.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And it wants to punish me for it.’

  Tony grunts, like that’s all perf
ectly reasonable. He points the V of two fingers towards his eyes. ‘Want me to keep an eye out for you?’

  I’m not going to walk round the table and hug him, but it’s the most I’ve wanted to hug anyone for quite a while. I thank him, though. ‘I’ll be fine, Tone,’ I say, and I reckon I almost sound convincing. ‘You watch out for yourself . . .’

  For the third night in a row, once I’ve taken my meds, I decide to duck out of a night in the TV room and head to bed early. Well, to my bedroom at least. I’m not sure I’ll be getting a lot of sleep.

  As soon as I’m there, though, I wonder if I’ve made the right decision. I can’t settle and it’s a constant struggle to hold the scary ideas at bay. With the others around to annoy me or make me laugh or just be their ordinary bizarre selves, at least I’d be distracted and there’d be less time for me to upset myself and dwell on things.

  On what people are thinking about me, saying about me.

  On what Perera took away from our little natter.

  On badness and blood.

  On forgetting . . .

  It’s Malaika doing the half-hourly checks on this corridor tonight and, when she knocks on the door which I’ve taken to locking all the time, I don’t want to unlock it. I just stand close to it and tell her that everything’s fine.

  ‘Come on, Alice, you know the rules. I have to see.’

  I open the door a few inches, muster a smile then close it again.

  I think I doze off for a while eventually, it’s hard to be certain. Asleep or not, it’s the usual gory fun-fest, and however much later it is when Clare knocks, I refuse to answer. I just lie here and listen to her knocking until she finally gives up, her mouth close to my door whispering about how she thought we were friends.

  It will kill you, you know that, right?

  FORTY-SIX

  I’m like a child that’s overtired. I’m fractious and weepy and it’s hard to think very straight. Even though I’m physically wiped out and it felt like the walk to the MDR was going to kill me, my brain is still firing off signals so fast that by the time my body chooses to act on one, the instructions have changed. I’m not . . . in sync with myself. It’s like I keep deciding to go on a journey, but as soon as I’ve taken the first few steps, thick fog comes in from nowhere and I get lost straight away.

  Does that make any sense? Probably not.

  I’m starting to lose track of the days. Easy to do in here at the best of times. It must be Friday because of what I’m doing this morning, so . . . five days since Debbie was killed?

  Marcus and Bakshi are both watching me while Marcus makes the pointless introductions then launches into the usual blah-blah-blah about meds and statuses and care plans.

  I straighten out my legs and immediately pull them back again.

  I fold my arms, then put my hands behind my head, then slide them beneath my thighs.

  I hunch my shoulders. I relax them again. Hunch and relax . . .

  When Marcus has finished, I can see they’re all still looking at me, so I try to concentrate and tell him that I prefer these slightly more intimate Friday-morning get-togethers. It’s just Marcus, Bakshi and George today. No trainee-this or Junior-that.

  ‘Every bed on the ward is occupied,’ Marcus says. ‘And sadly, we are still a nurse down.’

  ‘Nurse down . . . nurse down!’ I say it without thinking, like an emergency alert. A tasteless joke. The same way I said officer down a year and a half before, in that flat in Mile End, when I was trying to key the radio with those stupid slippery gloves.

  ‘Are you all right, Alice?’ Bakshi asks.

  Perfectly on cue, I stifle a yawn. ‘I’m not sleeping very well.’

  She looks at Marcus and says, ‘Well, let’s see if we can help you with that.’

  Marcus scribbles something down, a reminder that I need more pills probably, but I’m thinking that anything short of an elephant tranquilliser isn’t going to make a great deal of difference right now.

  ‘The sleeping issue aside,’ Bakshi says, ‘are things OK generally?’

  I nod and say, ‘Absolutely.’ I’m probably nodding a bit too much.

  Things are a long way from OK, but whatever I’ve said to other patients, I don’t really want to say it to this lot. Nobody here is squeaky-clean all the time, but despite a couple of recent . . . transgressions – the call to Andy and the home-delivery weed affair – they’ve still been talking about progress, like I’m actually making some. Barring disaster, I’ll be out of here in four months anyway, but I certainly don’t want to do or say anything to scupper my chances of the section getting lifted sooner.

  ‘Yeah, things are good.’

  Bakshi gets down to it. ‘I gather Marcus has already told you that we need to discuss the incident with Lucy on Wednesday.’

  I’m ready for it. ‘Look, I know what I did was totally unacceptable and I’ve already apologised to Lucy and she’s cool about it. It was a blip, that’s all.’ A smile, a shrug, a no big deal. ‘Me and L are mates again, so no worries on that score.’

  ‘Well, not on that score perhaps, but my understanding is that you didn’t actually remember doing it at all.’ She gives a little hum, and there’s a question mark at the end. ‘That has to be a cause for concern.’

  Alarm bells are starting to ring a little. I’m sure Lucy wasn’t telling tales, but she must have let something slip. ‘Well, what I did was a bit . . . vague, that’s all. Fuzzy, yeah? It’s not like I couldn’t remember—’

  ‘OK. That’s fine. So, do you remember verbally attacking George yesterday, in the dining room?’

  I blink and, just for a few seconds, I consider bluffing it out. I could say ‘Yeah, course I do, it was only yesterday’, but they’d only ask me to talk about what happened – whatever the hell it was – so I know I’ll be found out. All I can do is look at George.

  ‘When you were sitting with Bob and Clare?’ he says.

  Right, got it. When Bob was talking about how much he misses Debbie and Clare started crying. Yes, I can remember that, but I don’t think that’s what they’re on about.

  George is looking at me and I can see he is on my side, willing me to remember. Eventually he sighs and says, ‘When I came over to the table, you were verbally abusive, Alice. Very abusive.’ He’s not happy at having to tell the story, that’s obvious. ‘You kicked a chair, as well.’

  Bakshi is waiting.

  What the hell can I say? My stomach’s jumping and my head is screaming for help and I’ve got . . . nothing. I can only really say sorry to George, so that’s what I do.

  He nods and sits back. ‘No worries, pet.’

  ‘Are you forgetting things a lot, Alice?’ Bakshi asks.

  Now I’m panic-stricken, fidgeting like I’ve got fleas and seeing any prospect of early release drifting away up the Swanee. God knows where the idea suddenly came from that I should be honest with them, because, sitting where I am now, I almost never tell the truth.

  ‘It’s just those two times,’ I say. ‘That I know of, anyway. I mean, there might be other things . . . bits of conversation or whatever. It’s like . . . the opposite of a flash, you know? Like it’s stuff that happens when the lights have suddenly gone off. Just . . . a gap.’

  I wonder if they’re thinking about transferring me somewhere else, one of the wards downstairs even. If they want to extend the section three and detain me for more than six months, I’m not even sure what number section that is. Then I notice that Bakshi actually looks pleased.

  ‘It’s understandable, Alice,’ she says. ‘These kinds of blackouts are a well-documented symptom of PTSD. It’s just the brain’s way of taking care of itself. When it gets . . . overloaded, it shuts down for a while.’

  ‘I was reading about that,’ I say.

  ‘Well, good. Now . . . the PTSD you suffered after the events of eighteen m
onths ago resulted in quite a different set of symptoms, but again this variation is perfectly normal. These things affect people in diverse ways every time. What happened to Detective Constable Johnston led to you having a serious, potentially dangerous breakdown and this time, after the trauma of discovering Nurse McClure’s body, the PTSD is taking a different form altogether. The odd . . . blip as you call it, and some sporadic episodes of memory loss. It’s a rather more benign form, thankfully.’

  ‘Right.’ It doesn’t feel very benign. It certainly didn’t last night when I was lying awake, listening for noises outside and sweating through my sheets, but I see what she’s getting at. ‘So, what do we do?’

  ‘There is medication that can help,’ she says. Marcus scribbles again. ‘So we’d like to start you on that straight away. It’s actually the same thing used to treat the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s.’ She smiles at the look on my face. ‘Don’t worry, you certainly do not have that.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ I say. ‘Oh, by the way, are you sure I ­haven’t got Alzheimer’s?’

  George smiles at the stupid joke and I instantly forgive him for ratting me out.

  ‘The tablets won’t eradicate these blackouts overnight,’ Bakshi says. ‘But the symptoms will ease and, as you know better than most people, PTSD in whatever form can be resolved with professional help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. I’m not sure I’ve ever said it to her before.

  Not meant it, at any rate.

  ‘This is all very positive,’ Marcus says.

  ‘Bang on,’ George says.

  ‘It’s always positive when you can identify a problem early and start dealing with it. If it makes you feel any better, Alice, you should also know that you are far from being the only patient who is . . . struggling a little after what happened to Nurse McClure. Some members of staff, too. In many respects, the whole of the ward is suffering with PTSD right now.’