by Tanvir Bush
‘Robin is blushing,’ whispers Jenny to Alex.
‘Well, I think that is enough now, everyone.’ Robin is moving the tour group backwards towards the door. The long, darker recesses of the ward will remain unexplored. ‘I don’t think we should disturb these lovely folk any more. They need their rest.’
‘Looking around,’ Jenny says to Alex, ‘it does look as if most of the rest of the clients are sleeping already.’
Very soft music, the same Vivaldi from TOSA and Job Central, is being played through speakers set high up on the walls. Jenny points and then apologises to Alex. ‘Heavens! There are cameras everywhere.’
‘Yes,’ says Robin brightly, back on the script. ‘We have twenty- four hour surveillance of all the wards. It is for our clients’ safety, following on from the abuse scandals of the last few years in other establishments. That would never happen here. Anyone treating our clients badly would be caught on film, remanded and prosecuted.’
And he will say no more but presses them all to move. ‘Come on, now, quiet as mice, please … more biscuits and juice back in the family room!’
At the mention of biscuits and juice Lily vomits horribly at his feet, and for the next several minutes there is minor mayhem as Jenny and Robin rush about organising clean-ups and exit strategies and the camerawoman stands aside laughing, and the Health Visitors’ Gazette man stalks off, disgusted.
They have only been back in the family room for a few minutes when Jenny gasps and grabs Alex. ‘I’m missing one!’
‘What?’
An alarm is sounding down the hall, a high-pitched cheeping.
‘Priya! We are missing Priya.’
And indeed they are.
It happened that Priya had also been interested in the cards. While the tour group was moving away from the old man’s bedside, she had plucked up the glittery card to look and accidentally knocked an apple off the top of the fruit bowl. Horrified, she had watched it roll off down under the plastic partition and into the next unit. Being a good kid, she had crawled off after it, just at the same time that Lily began throwing her guts up.
‘I dropped an apple!’ she had called over her shoulder, but no one had heard her.
‘There was another man in the next bed too,’ she says to Alex and Jenny as they cross the car park back to the school bus. ‘But he was fast asleep and didn’t even notice the apple coming into his section, or me, neither. Or at least he was kind of asleep but his eyes were still open a bit an’ he looked horrible. So skinny and like a skellington.’
Priya had frantically searched around the space for the apple and breathed a huge sigh of relief when she had seen its shiny red skin glowing down on the floor next to the leg of the sleeping man’s bed. She reached for it and two things had become apparent to her almost simultaneously. One, the apple was hard, hollow and made of plastic, and two, the man’s gnarly-toed foot had slipped from under the sheets and was hanging slightly off the side of the bed. The man’s ankle was tied to the bedpost by a long leather cord.
Before she had time to think about this, she realised the rest of the tour group were heading out of the double doors at the top of the ward. The doors were shutting. She had been left behind. Still clutching the apple, she had been about to run after them all when she heard the old man in the next bed laughing.
‘It was weird ’cos he sounded like he was getting up,’ says Priya, wrinkling her nose at Jenny.
Instinctively, she had crouched back down behind the partition. She didn’t know why, but she felt frightened. Through a gap in the plastic she watched as the first man pulled the tube out of his nostrils and swung his legs off the side of the bed.
‘He was wearing his shoes in bed,’ Priya says wide eyed. ‘And when he called out his voice was different.’ Priya doesn’t remember exactly what the man had called out to the woman across the hall, but it was something that made the woman laugh.
And then the alarm had sounded and he had leapt right back into the bed, and been stuffing the tubing up his nose when a nurse had come running straight to where Priya was crouching and dragged her out by her forearm, and Priya had screamed and dropped the apple.
Now Priya is sitting on the front seat in the bus next to Jenny, and Alex is standing in the doorway with Chris on his lead, wagging his feathery tail.
‘Am I in trouble?’ the little girl asks.
‘Oh no, not at all,’ says Jenny giving her a hug. ‘You were only chasing an apple.’
‘But it was a plastic apple,’ says Priya. ‘An’ the nurse was really cross. She kept asking me what I had looked at, over an’ over.’
‘Well, I am just glad you are safe and back with us, Priya,’ says Alex and squeezes the girl’s knee. ‘You had quite a fright.’
Alex leans over and gives Jenny a piece of paper. ‘It’s got all my contact details on it. Would you call me later? I have some things I want to discuss.’
‘An’ I took a picture on my phone!’ Priya’s hand is held out. ‘Of the skellington man tied to the bed.’
Jenny and Alex become very still. Slowly, Jenny reaches for the phone.
‘Err … you had your phone?’
‘Oh, yeah. Daddy says I must always keep it with me in my inside pocket. Nurse Dyer never asked me for it, honest.’
Jenny is looking at the picture on the phone. ‘Alex, you’re a journalist, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you will want to have a copy of this.’
Binding’s Bad Temper
The Good Doctor Binding is in an extremely bad temper. He doesn’t exchange pleasantries with Gina, the Colombian maid, as he comes through the door of his daughter’s home, merely hands her his coat. ‘Where’s the meeting?’ he barks.
‘They are gathering upstairs in the living room, Dr Binding.’
‘Right. Need a quick drink first.’ He strides off in the direction of the library. ‘Tell Stella I’m here, would you, Gina?’
The maid does her usual little duck and nod and dashes off. The Good Doctor is rarely riled but when he is, it is best to steer clear.
In the library and still snarling, Binding throws his briefcase on the central desk and heads to the sideboard to pour himself a very large malt.
‘Hello, Daddy.’ Stella wafts in on a cloud of expensive perfume. ‘You are early …’ She takes one look at her father and her serene smile flattens. ‘Jesus, what is it?’
‘That paltry little prick Pansy!’ Binding swirls the malt around his gums, drinks and refills his glass.
OK, this is not new, and Stella’s shoulders drop from her ears. ‘Ah, Professor Pansy. What has he done now, Dad?’
‘The “P Formula”. He says he has got the whole procedure down to just six days. Six days, Stella? How is it possible?’
‘Are you sure he isn’t exaggerating? Come on, Daddy … it’s Fred Pansy, after all. He’ll say anything to rile you.’
‘Stella, I saw the paperwork. In fact …’ He strides over to his briefcase and pulls out a file of paper and glossy photographs, which he lays out on the desktop.
Stella is so angry she can barely squeak. She takes a deep breath. ‘Daddy. You absolutely cannot be carrying around any of this material. I thought you understood the sensitivity of this project.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Binding flaps his hands at his daughter. ‘I will shred it all as soon as I have had another look through.’
‘Now, Daddy. Shred it now!’ Stella grabs a metal wastepaper basket from under the desk.
‘Stella.’ The father in his voice is enough. Stella falters. The basket is dropped to the floor.
‘I just don’t understand how he is doing it.’ Binding circles the desk, peering down at the scribbled figures. ‘Pansy says he is processing nearly a hundred people a week. He says he has taken even the fittest and reduced them to ash in the six-day time slot. I just can’t believe it. The whole point is to ensure that the cause of death is “natural”. You can’t do that in six days. He must be che
ating somehow. We are still taking nearly fourteen days per patient. We can’t compete.’
Stella comes closer to the table and looks down her nose at the papers and the photos of emaciated bodies.
‘Look, Daddy, I can’t be witness to any of this. It is not officially sanctioned yet. And anyway, you originally costed for three weeks per patient. Two weeks means you are not just hitting your targets but surpassing them.’
‘Yes, Stella, but if Pansy is truly clocking six days and a turnaround of ninety-three per week then he will be the man they call on when they roll out the CDD to the wider population. I will lose the contract! And it is my bloody project in the first place.’
‘Hang on, Daddy. If he is getting through ninety-three a week, how is he disposing of them? He doesn’t have a Resomator too, does he?’
‘No. No, he doesn’t, thank goodness. He is still having to pay off the local crematoriums.’ And, as here, any extra body parts are probably just dumped into local sewer systems, Binding thinks but does not add out loud. ‘But you are right. That is costly, and it will slow him down. Apparently, he also had a couple of his first batch escape. He had to send “people” to track down and dispose of them. More foolish waste. I imagine he will lose points for that too.’ He glances at his daughter. She shrugs, heads to the sideboard and fixes herself a vodka and tonic.
‘Daddy, I would be very surprised if you lost the contract to Pansy. After all, in the end it is down to Henri Rennes and myself. Have you forgotten to what heights your daughter has risen?’ She laughs and Binding relaxes.
‘You are right, my dear. But I would still like to know what he is using to get that six-day result.’
‘Well, we can go through all this after the meeting, Daddy. I really need you to be on best behaviour for these UN dignitaries. Mummy has brought in an Ethiopian chef just for the ambassador.’
‘Oh hell. Gloria knows injera gives me terrible flatulence.’
‘And you promise you will come right back here and shred this stuff, Dad? I won’t have it on the property overnight.’
‘Yes, yes.’
He is thinking again, circling. Stella tips back her lovely neck and finishes the vodka in her glass. ‘I’m heading up, Daddy. Please don’t be long. Mummy is getting frantic about the coffee ceremony.’ She waits until her father grunts assent then slips from the room.
Binding will shred the file, but reluctantly. And there is something else he hasn’t told Stella. To protect her … and maybe also because she would be furious and tell him the one-upmanship with Pansy has gone far enough.
‘It’s in the interest of medical science,’ he mutters to himself, thinking of Pansy’s decision to film the six-day processing, purely to prove to Binding that he can do it. ‘Stella just wouldn’t understand.’
And anyway, disclosure doesn’t matter now as the experiment is already underway. He and Pansy had selected the candidates together. They had the most outrageous luck too. Pansy had been trawling the local juvenile detention centre for subjects and had found a set of seventeen-year-old twins. Binding had checked them over and yes, they were perfect. In good health, apart from mild learning difficulties, probably the result of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The mother had died in one of Pansy’s centres less than a year ago, of cirrhosis. She had been thirty-five. The twins ticked all the boxes: no living relatives, no economic viability, drain on the state, possible future crime risk and so forth.
One of the lads had been quite cocksure, joking with Binding that even a short stay in hospital would be better than a day in ‘juvi’. He was a mere inch taller than his brother, almost handsome behind the acne and the chipped brown teeth. He said he was learning to read inside and fancied he would one day join the army and be able to look after a family. His brother had watched him joshing with the nurses, slack-jawed, uninterested.
‘Whatever,’ he had murmured when they had asked to take blood.
The cheeky one, Dan (or Twin One), would get the six-day process and his brother, Wayne (Twin Two), would be the control. Filming had already begun.
‘My name’s Dan and I’m your man!’ Dan had grinned at the camera. He had an infectious cheeky laugh and the nurses couldn’t help but join in.
You are indeed our man, The Good Doctor Binding had thought at the time.
There is a subtle knock on the library door and Binding looks up to see Gina is holding his dinner jacket. He sighs. ‘Oh all right, I am coming … and Gina, make sure you lock this door behind me, all right?’
A Stupid Mistake
Gunter is about to step into the taxi outside the home he shares with Stella when he remembers he has left his copy of George Szirtes’s The Burning of the Books in the library, and he needs it for his tutorial in the morning.
‘Kurde! Damn!’ he hisses. ‘Hang on, please,’ he asks the cabbie and dashes around the side of the house, waving at his wife’s government security guard. ‘Ben, it’s just me. I left a book in the library.’
The guard nods. ‘Righto, Mr Gorski, you’re clear,’ and carries on, leaving Gunter to scrabble in through the scullery. He dashes up the stairs, praying not to bump into anyone. He doesn’t want to be caught in a conversation about where he is going or when he is coming back. He has a secret bolthole, the lobby of the run-down Bismarck Hotel in the West End, which he uses for private tutorials. There is a particularly beautiful Rhodes Scholar who wishes to discuss Rumi. In his experience, discussions of Rumi are often punctuated by the need to drink wine, which in turn might lead to the need to … anyway, he doesn’t think Stella would approve of his teaching methods.
Does he feel guilt … yes. He loves … loved Stella. But she has become completely obsessed with her climb to the throne, and he is a man with a huge appetite for … ‘Rumi’. A verse settles feather-like on his forehead.
Love has nothing to do with
the five senses and the six directions:
its goal is only to experience
the attraction exerted by the Beloved.
Afterwards, perhaps, permission
will come from God …
Yet he is not thinking about the Rhodes Scholar. He is thinking about that woman with the wonderful breasts and the eyes that were flaming and failing at the same time. Lovely eyes. Alex, wasn’t it? Yes, his ptaszek, Alex. He remembers he jotted down her phone number, somewhere … He pauses.
The hall is dark. He can hear the muted tinkle of glass and conversation coming from upstairs and remembers the charity event. He breathes, relieved, and shoulders into the library, hitting the lights nearest the door and crossing the room quickly. He knows exactly where the poetry collections are and in seconds has his hands on the text. Turning back, he notices the central desk is covered in papers. He glances at it as he walks past, sees figures and pencilled scrawls. Not interesting. But wait. There is a photo. A terrible, frightening photo of an emaciated body on a bed. Not one, but two, three … My God. What is this?
Then Gunter makes a very bad mistake. He stops and looks more closely at the papers laid out on the desk. But his are not the only eyes glistening in the gloom. Gina almost comes into the library, pauses – and, touching her lips, retreats.
Chris and the Storm Crow
The ground has been baked dry by the sun. Sharp, miserable lumps of faded grass poke up from between Chris’s paw pads. Even so, the intense joy he feels, a giddying rush in his pelvis, stomach, head is lessened not a jot. Free! Free!
A crow watches him from the fence, its head cocked to one side. Chris gets a waft of its wormy black cynicism but chooses to ignore it. Crows are such utter snobs. Freedom isn’t just about being able to fly, you know.
Chris is sprinting to the horizon, puffs of dust rising up behind him. Faster and further. He has almost made it! Now he wheels around and gallops back again, head a whirl of happy speed and sensation, muscles stretching, heart pumping. Oh joy!
Alex is coming along. She is slow and talking into her phone, as usual. Chris pelts past her,
heading towards the far field; the rush of wind lifts his ears, his tail whips in circles. And then, like a lasso, he is caught by a stink and must follow it. It leads him to another one, stronger. He squats and pees (guide dogs don’t raise their legs … most indelicate). Another lasso of stench. Golden trails of piss and pungent territory-marking. And that one … that could be a rabbit. That one, a dead insect. That one, an old mouse nest.
‘Storm coming,’ says the crow. Chris pauses and raises his wonderful nose, breathes the sunlight. There is not a cloud in the sky and almost no breeze, but crows can’t lie and yes, there it is, far, far away, a smell like the tinkle of distant Christmas bells, a glittering smell.
‘It’s days away,’ says Chris.
‘Going to be a doozy.’ The crow stretches its wings, looking down its sharp lacquered beak.
‘Righto!’ says Chris, spinning around and dashing off again, feeling the whoop of wolf in his belly. Arroooo! He dives past Alex again, as if on the trail of a deer. He can feel bloodlust. He can feel power. Then boom, he stumbles over an old tennis ball.
‘Alex, Alex, Alex!’ He brings the ball, dropping it at her feet. ‘Alex, ball, ball, ball!’ He tries to make eye contact. ‘Alex, ball, Alex, ball!’
‘Jesus, Chris, where did you find that old thing? Gross. It could have anything on it.’
Chris knows exactly what it has on it. The saliva of about ten other dogs including a German shepherd called Arnold and a collie bitch called Poppy. There is also river mud, rabbit poo, dead ants and a lot of anonymous dirt. It is a wonderful thing. It is a ball.
‘Alex, Alex, ball, ball!’
She throws. He throws himself after it. Brings it back. ‘Again, Alex, ball, ball!’
The crow jumps into the sky and pauses, managing a little show-off free fall over Chris’s and Alex’s heads.
‘Storm a-coming!’ it caws again. ‘Find shelter!’ It flaps away, leaving Alex and Chris in the park. Alex watches it.