The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  Cloudberries. Julia. This woman in the blue dress gushing her life out on the pavement and insane with shock is Julia.

  I ripped off my tunic, wadded it, pressed it against her abdomen. It turned red immediately and she was moving so much I couldn’t keep the pressure on. I knelt on her shoulders. “Julia. Don’t die. You can’t die. Julia. Stay with me! Julia.”

  Footsteps. Hjørdis, cradling her hunting rifle. “I called an ambulance. It was so fast! Oh, dear god, Aud.”

  “Come here. Hold this down. Press hard.” She did. I started unwinding the bandages from my shoulders and arm.

  “But you’ve been shot!”

  I stripped off the bloody mess and wadded it. Blood trickled freely down my back and arm. “When I count to three, lift your hands and put them straight back. One, two, three. Press hard.”

  Squeal of tires. Slam of car doors. Running feet.

  “They’re dead,” I said to Sampo and the woman. “Drag that one”—McCall—“across the road. Put him over here by the other one.” Ginger. “Make it look as though they killed each other. There’s a gun in the Volvo with my fingerprints on.” The gun I didn’t use. The gun I should have used. “Get rid of it.”

  “Aud, I can’t hold her.”

  Julia was thrashing like a wild thing, as mindless and limber as a beast in her shock, throwing off Hjørdis, who was a big woman, long enough to twist over onto her stomach. No exit wound.

  “Sit on her legs.” I wrapped my arms around her head. “You,” I called to the woman with Sampo, “come and pin her shoulders. Tante, I’ll take over the compress.”

  “…a gaping wound, wider than the hands of anyone who would try to staunch the bleeding. A hole so big it could swallow the world.”

  “I have big hands.”

  She writhed, like a run-over kitten with a broken back.

  “Julia. The ambulance is coming. Just stay alive a few more minutes, then they can do it for you. Stay alive.”

  Everything under my hands was red.

  fifteen

  She stayed alive until the ambulance arrived. I had to help the EMTs keep her still so they could get shunts in both arms. When one suggested I ride in the second ambulance that was pulling up, spilling red light over Hjørdis’s street—red the exact colour of the bunad—I took him by the throat and shook him a little.

  She stayed alive until we got to the hospital. She was still alive as they wheeled her into surgery.

  “She’s strong,” I told the three nurses and one doctor in surgical greens who stood with me by the swinging doors. One of the nurses held a hypodermic. “Shouldn’t you be in there, helping her?”

  “We’re here to help you.”

  “Oh, no,” I said gently. “I’m fine,” and I plucked the needle from the nurse’s hand and squirted the drug onto the floor, but then something bit through my pants and three of them were nodding in satisfaction as the fourth stepped out from behind me and capped her own syringe.

  “We need to take a look at you,” one of them said. I backed up against the wall.

  “Julia.”

  “There’s nothing you can do to help her now.”

  The wall was cool and solid against my skin. It also seemed to be moving upwards. All I could see were four pairs of green-clad legs and white scrub shoes.

  “Go get a gurney.”

  One of the pairs of green trousers walked away down the corridor, then all I could see was the floor.

  The room smelled of clean sheets and the lemons Hjørdis had left.

  “The police are accepting the story that those two American men were fighting over a woman and you got hit in the cross-fire,” said Sampo.

  “Not easily.”

  “No. But what other explanation is there? Especially as your prints were on neither weapon and you are such a respectable citizen. The wound helps, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  We measured each other. If it wasn’t for my letter insurance, I would never have woken from that sedative.

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Harald.”

  “Like the king.”

  “Just like the king.”

  We didn’t shake hands before he left.

  A nurse came in with a tray full of needles and scissors and bandages. She worked quickly, with that lack of tenderness endemic to the profession. “You have another visitor waiting to see you. I told her you had already talked to too many people today.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I didn’t get her name. She’s American.”

  “Tell her she can come in when you’ve finished.”

  It was Annie. No longer laughing, eyes circled with jet lag and worry. She took a chair by the bed but did not seem to know what to say.

  “When did you get here?”

  “Two hours ago.”

  “Are her brother and sister coming?”

  I thought for a moment she didn’t understand me. “Oh. No. Drew…well, Drew can’t come. And Carmel is at the U.S. Research Station in McMurdo Sound. In the Antarctic. I haven’t been able to get through to her.” She sat there helplessly.

  “You’ve talked to the doctors?”

  “Yes. They tell me she’s critical but stable. A lot of internal damage. Her liver—” She stopped abruptly. “I was going to say it’s shot to pieces. A figure of speech. But it really is. It really is shot to pieces. They had to take out four inches of colon, too. And one of her kidneys. It was the bullet, they said. A special bullet that bounced around inside.”

  “The only irreparable damage is to her liver.”

  “She…she’s strong, isn’t she?”

  “Very strong.”

  “And a liver transplant would make her as good as new again, wouldn’t it?”

  “Almost.”

  “Why won’t she wake up? She just lies there and there’s no sound but that beep beep beep of the machines.”

  “It’s her body’s way of focusing its attention on what’s necessary. She’s fighting to stay alive the best way she knows how. When she regains strength, she’ll wake up.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely. You know Julia, she can’t bear to miss anything that’s going on.”

  She started to smile, but the stretch turned into a quiver. “I can’t do this.”

  “You’re tired. I bet you didn’t sleep on the plane. Julia doesn’t sleep on the plane, either. A few hours’ rest will work wonders.”

  “But I have to see to her things. Insurance. Her clothes. Make arrangements.”

  “Hjørdis, my aunt, is already dealing with getting our things from the seter—the farm where we’ve been staying. Everything is being taken care of. And Julia is safe now. She’s in good hands. Get some sleep, Mrs. Miclasz.”

  “Annie.” A ghost of the former roguish smile, gone in a moment. “You saved her life.” I should never have let her go. “You love her, don’t you?”

  My hawk with broken wings and matted feathers. “Yes.”

  “So do I. If we join forces, she’ll have to live.”

  “She’ll live.” She had to.

  “The doctors tell me you were hurt, too.”

  Cracked scapula, chipped elbow, nerve damage. Infections had meant they had snipped away bits of skin and muscle; I had had a blood transfusion; and there were enough stitches to make my arm look like that of a child’s clumsily sewn-up teddy bear.

  “Nothing that won’t mend.”

  She stood. “When I come back tomorrow I’ll bring some vitamins. I want you to get well quickly. Julia is going to need us both.”

  A nurse brought in a phone. It was my mother.

  “Hjørdis has told me what you told her happened.” A diplomat’s nicety of language. “I take it your trip to England will be postponed?”

  “Yes. I’ve chartered an air ambulance and will accompany Julia and her mother to Atlanta tomorrow. They’ve found a donor they can keep alive until we get there.”

  “Will she survi
ve the operation?”

  “The odds are about even.”

  “Keep me informed. And if you need anything, anything at all, call.”

  I held Julia’s hand all the way across the North Sea, across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, even though this was one flight during which she would not be afraid. When I had to release a hand to let the nurse be about his business, I rested my palm against her thigh. Somewhere deep down in her crocodile brain I wanted to register the fact that she was not alone, that she never would be.

  Annie sat on the other side of the bed. Sometimes she held her hand, too; mostly, she just looked.

  Over the Irish Sea, the plane lurched a little.

  “I hate turbulence,” she said.

  “It must be genetic.”

  “You should be resting that shoulder.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The plane droned through the arid reaches of the afternoon sky.

  “She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s too young, too beautiful to die.”

  “I won’t let her die.”

  “I saw it from the beginning, you know.”

  “Saw what?”

  “That you two were right for each other. She was so upset about Jim’s death, all to pieces. It was quite unlike her. I haven’t seen her like that before, well, not since…”

  “She told me about her brother.”

  “Oh. Well, I couldn’t understand it, why she fell apart like that. Almost as if she was blaming herself. And then you came along, out of the blue, and suddenly she wasn’t in pieces anymore.” She smiled. “Did she ever tell you she thought you’d done it at first?”

  “The police told me.”

  “She went to the police about you?” She shot Julia a startled glance.

  “It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. He was her friend. I was there when it happened. But the police didn’t take her seriously.”

  “Well, I’m glad she didn’t get you into any trouble.”

  Any trouble. Any trouble. I wanted to laugh, but did not know if it would escape as a howl.

  Annie said softly, “But what am I saying? I’m not a fool. The Norwegian police don’t really believe your story about two men attacking each other and Julia getting shot by mistake.”

  “Do you?”

  The engine note climbed as the pilot tried to find his way out of the turbulence.

  “I’ll believe that rather than believe Julia might have been at fault somehow.” Her face was set and so pale that the blusher seemed almost garish, the kind of work mortuary beauticians do.

  “Julia was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. No, not just in Oslo. It started in Atlanta.”

  “When Jim died.”

  “Before then.” I told her what I knew, up to breaking into Honeycutt’s house and taking information to Denneny. She didn’t need to know about that, or my deal with the cartels. But as she had said, she was not a fool.

  “So you killed them. No, don’t say anything. I’m glad. If I thought asking you to kill a hundred times would keep Julia safe, I’d ask you to do it.”

  And I would. A hundred times. A thousand times.

  “But we don’t need to worry about that now, do we? The Atlanta police will take it from here. They called, you know, while you were away. They have some new evidence. They wanted to talk to Julia again. I told them she was in Oslo, consulting with Olsen Glass.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They wanted the name of the person she would be seeing. I gave them Edvard’s number. He came to the hospital, you know.”

  I nodded. He had visited me, too.

  “He was so young, and he seemed to take Julia’s injury personally—kept apologizing on behalf of his country. I didn’t know what to say, so I just hugged him until he shut up. He cried. I had to mop up his tears. At least it gave me something to do, something that made a difference.”

  We both looked at Julia lying still and silent and beyond our care. The engines resumed their steady hum. We were above the turbulence.

  “That sculpture garden he and Julia were planning, are planning, sounds lovely. All those story characters and settings for the children. The adult version sounded challenging and exciting, too, but I think it was the children’s garden he really wanted. Wants. Oh, god, Aud, I’m talking about her and the garden in past tense.”

  We landed just before six in the evening, Atlanta time. The air was thick and hot and flavoured with diesel fumes. The ambulance drove to Piedmont Hospital along streets crowded with convertibles full of tanned people in shorts and pastel polo shirts, eyes blank and anonymous behind shades. The trees were heavy and green with full summer foliage, the sky an impersonal, bland blue. I insisted that the EMTs give Julia a second blanket; the air-conditioning was fierce. By seven, she was being prepped for surgery.

  The surgeon came to talk to us in the visitors’ suite before he scrubbed. “The operation will take several hours, and you won’t be allowed to see her for hours after that, but I don’t suppose there’s any point telling you to go home and get some sleep? No. Well, I’ll call in again after the operation and let you know how it went.”

  I pulled two armchairs together for Annie, and two for myself, and found us both blankets. We curled up. When I woke at two in the morning, Annie was staring at the ceiling.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “May as well,” she said.

  Hospitals at night are strange places. The floors gleam in the dark and the air is too dry and hot. In a few hours, gurneys trundled by hospital porters spiriting away those who had died in the night would squeak down these corridors, past doors behind which frightened people lay awake, listening. I passed a vending machine on the way to the nurse’s station, but ignored it.

  Annie sat up when I came back with fresh coffee. “Where on earth did you find this?”

  “I told the nurse that if she let me into the nurses’ break room to make some fresh, I’d not only make a generous donation to the hospital children’s fund, I’d bring her a cup, served any way she liked. You’ll be pleased to know that she takes cream and sugar. And she likes cookies.” I passed her the plate.

  The coffee was long gone and we were playing backgammon when the surgeon returned. He was one of those men who needed to shave three times a day. He was wearing slacks and sports jacket. On his way home.

  He was frowning when he came in, but smiled when we stood up.

  “Let’s all sit down again, shall we?” Always we with doctors. “You’ll be pleased to know that the operation went smoothly and the patient is stable. But as you know, recovery can be a slow process.” He couldn’t remember her name.

  “When can we see her?” Annie asked.

  “She’s not conscious yet.”

  “When?”

  “In the morning? Yes, in the morning. A quick peep around ten o’clock. But very briefly. Yes, I think that would be best.” The man was so tired he was talking more to himself than to us. He started to get up.

  “But someone will let us know how she’s doing?”

  “The nurses’ station just down the hall will have all that information. Just ask. As I’ve said, the operation went very smoothly.”

  Annie just nodded. He left. I got up. “I’m going to get some more coffee.”

  I caught up with him at the nurses’ station, where he was commenting on some blunder on a TV hospital show the night before. They both laughed.

  “Doctor.”

  “Ah?”

  “Another question, about Julia Lyons-Bennet, the woman you just gave a new liver. When will we know if she will reject the liver or not?”

  “At least twelve hours. Tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps even later.” He just wanted to go home.

  “It must have been a complicated operation.”

  He made a vast effort and dredged up a smile. “Well, yes, she’d been shot and there were one or two things that we don’t normal
ly encounter but, given that, everything went very well. Very smoothly. As I said.”

  “But she’s still not conscious. What were the one or two things?”

  He let his smile fade. “We had to resection her colon, and there are indications that her remaining kidney is under strain. But I can’t stress enough that she is currently stable and doing very well under the circumstances. It was a good organ match. We have high hopes.”

  “How high?”

  “High,” he said firmly. He was lying.

  When I got back to the visitors’ suite with more coffee, Annie was crying. “She’s going to be all right, Aud. She’s going to be all right. I know it. Oh, please god she’s going to be all right.” She wiped at her eyes and sipped her coffee. I had put extra sugar in it. “He was very thoughtful, changing out of his bloody clothes before he came to see us, don’t you think?”

  More likely he had needed the time to think of the phrases that would reassure without actually lying.

  “Ah.” She put her cup down. “I think I can sleep now.”

  I stayed awake, thinking. Julia, facing me that first time in the street in the rain. Julia, telling Dornan about penis piercing. Julia, in my arms at the fjord. Julia, Julia, Julia. So many mistakes.

  After I had seen Julia, I took a cab back to the house. The flowers were all dead from lack of water and the house smelled of air-conditioning. The chair sat empty in the centre of my workroom. I called Benny. “I hope you don’t have any arrangements for lunch because I need some information, and I need it now. Anything you can find on the death of Michael Honeycutt in New York. The Bridgetown Grill at twelve.”

  I showered, changed, unpacked, and dumped the dirty clothes on the floor by the washing machine. I knelt to sort them. Hjørdis had packed; Julia’s clothes were jumbled in with my own. I held a soft blue shirt to my cheek, remembered Julia’s sly smile as I had unbuttoned it at the seter one afternoon, remembered her laugh and wave as she drove off down the track, beautiful in her blue dress. I couldn’t bear to wash away her scent. I left the laundry on the floor.