I let out a nervous laugh. “Yes, they really do.”
Sue directed me through to the metal detectors where a security guard told me to place my car keys into a plastic tray, along with the small amount of change I’d brought and my coat and other belongings. I stepped through the metal detector, still tense about my arrival at a new job, but calmed slightly by the no-nonsense but warm people around me. The third security guard was called Simon, and was slightly younger than Ian. He wasn’t as chatty as the other two, probably because he had a more intense role in the security procedures.
After the scan, I was given back my belongings and told to put them away in a staff locker, aside from my lunch and my change for the tuck shop, which I was allowed to put in the fridge in the staff room. It was like being at a very strange, paranoid school where I was expected to be both pupil and teacher. Simon showed me to the office for the charge nurse who would give me instructions on my first day.
As I walked into the office to start my day, my palms began to sweat, and a sensation of walking to the head-teacher’s office washed over me. I was sixteen years old again, with scuffed knees from a scrap with Rebecca Boyce on the tennis courts, waiting to receive the inevitable bollocking. Pushing away the memories, I knocked lightly on the open door and the man at the desk lifted his head.
“Leah?” he asked. Even though he was seated at a desk with a cup of tea, I could see he was short and stocky with powerful shoulders. He wore a black t-shirt and smart grey trousers.
“Yes.”
He stood and crossed the room to shake my hand. “I’m Chioke Obi. Chi for short, if you like. Welcome to Crowmont. Would you like a cup of tea while we get down to it?”
“I’d love one, thanks.”
“Then let’s go into the staff room for a minute or two.” Chi grinned and rubbed his hands together. I hoped that his eagerness was infectious enough to transfer onto me, seeing as I felt about as enthusiastic as a limp piece of lettuce that morning.
I followed Chi through the small network of staff rooms to the main area, with an oval table in the centre, a small kitchen area, and a couple of uncomfortable-looking chairs.
“Milk? Sugar?”
“Milk, no sugar,” I replied.
Chi got to work with the kettle, all the time smiling, slowly putting me at ease despite my initial shakiness. After the first mouthful of soothing tea, and the first ten minutes where Chi told me more about the hospital and the ward I’d be working on, I began to relax, and the sweaty-palms sensation dissipated.
“The main thing you need to know is that you’re the primary nurse for three patients,” he said, with a hint of an African accent in his voice. “Tracy, Emily, and Isabel.”
Chapter Two
The first thing you notice about a high-security hospital is that the patients are not as frightening as you think they’re going to be. It’s easy to conjure up images of serial killers standing in the shadows, their features obscured aside from a set of narrowed eyes. It’s not Silence of the Lambs. I wasn’t Clarice Starling walking past barred cells, dodging the semen of a psychotic killer. I’m Leah. I’m a nurse. I was there to help my patients.
In the past, when I’d been asked questions about Whitmore, I realised that people found it much harder to picture the average patient as someone who was unfortunate, someone who had been a victim for most of their life, who was never given the start in life that they needed. What they wanted to believe was that some people were born degenerates, or that they were evil to the core. That wasn’t my experience.
In Whitmore I worked with many patients suffering from antisocial psychological disorder—or sociopaths, if you want to call them that—and discovered that most of the residents under my care had been abused by a significant person in their life, usually at a very young age. Children need love and care. They need to form an attachment. When a child fails to form an attachment with a caregiver, they fail to learn empathy.
That’s how you build a sociopath.
I followed Chi through the corridors of Crowmont, still feeling the throb of my pulse in my fingertips. Despite my experience at Whitmore, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. In some ways, Whitmore was more disturbing and more frightening because most of the patients were violent male offenders. But some were referred to us because they had self-harmed in prison, or because they had special needs. Not all were psychotic serial killers.
Crowmont was an all-female hospital. Many of these women had committed violent crimes, but the hospital was smaller than Whitmore. I knew that there were two main wings in Crowmont: One was for rehabilitation, where the patients were allowed more freedom to move around the hospital, and the other was the intensive care ward, where very sick patients struggled to socialise with each other. I was employed to work on the rehabilitation ward.
Chi had briefed me in his office. My main duties were to check in with the patients through the day. I would ensure they ate their food and took their medicine, and I would observe them quietly as they went about their day and help them if they were experiencing any difficulties.
I met Tracy first. She sat on the sofa in the communal area of the ward, with one leg elevated. Her arms were stretched above her head, showing the scars down her forearms. She had short hair and a snub nose. She was very overweight, verging on obese—patients often take comfort in food, especially when they’re on medication that increases appetite—and in her late twenties. Chi introduced us and we shook hands.
I saw right away that Tracy was upset.
“I’m still a kitchen helper, aren’t I?” she asked Chi. “They haven’t taken that away, have they? I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s all right. You can stay on in the kitchen. But Leah is here if you need her.”
As we walked away, I asked. “What did she mean?”
Chi sighed. “There was an incident. It’s nothing to worry about, but Tracy does occasionally need extra supervision.”
I nodded my head. ‘Extra supervision’ usually meant suicide attempts.
Emily was a much smaller young woman with greasy hair to her shoulders. She was playing draughts with an older woman. She shook my hand as she fidgeted in her chair.
“Who’s winning?” I asked.
“Debbie,” Emily replied.
“I beat her every week,” Debbie boasted.
Emily gave a shrug and scratched her shoulder. “Least I’m trying.”
Chi clapped his hands together so loudly it made us all jump. “That’s the spirit. People were designed to try. That’s what we do.” He grinned until Emily tentatively broke into a smile of her own.
“Maybe we can have a game or two,” I suggested.
“You’re on,” Emily replied.
I got a good vibe from this hospital. No psychiatric nurse ever expects their job to be simple, but it was a relief to see patients smiling on my first day.
After a brief conversation about how I would be looking after Emily, and how if she had problems she should come to me, Chi led me away.
“Emily has come a long way,” he said. “She was on the intensive care ward for so long I never thought she’d make it to rehabilitation.”
“Was she a referral?” I asked, meaning someone who had come to the hospital through the legal system.
Chi pursed his lips, then glanced to the left and the right before he answered. “Yes. Emily is a convicted murderer. She killed her baby during postnatal depression. When she came to us she was on suicide watch for a month.”
I took a second to let that all sink in. “If she ever leaves here, will she go straight to prison?”
“For at least another six years,” he replied.
It was an unbearably sad case, but then many are in a place like Crowmont. The guilt that weighed down on her shoulders must have been a heavy burden to bear. Not to mention the judgment and the grief from the people in her life who were connected to her child and the crime she committed. The father. The grandparents. The uncles and auntie
s. An event like this would almost certainly tear the family apart.
Chi led me out of the communal area, using his swipe card to get through the door and into a corridor.
“This is where the patients’ rooms are. They’re all numbered so you can remember who goes in which room. On this ward, you need two keys to enter the room. So you would need to come and find me if you had a reason to go into the room outside the communal time. Right now, patients are free to keep their doors open, but at night they will be locked. Unless the patient is on twenty-four hour surveillance.”
“Suicide watch?” I asked.
Chi nodded.
It was procedure that I was already accustomed to. At Whitmore, there were six-key rooms, where six nurses were required to be present when the door was opened. They worked as a team, ensuring that the patient was properly restrained, each entering or exiting the room one at a time, and each with a role to play in the restraint. At the end, when a patient was taken back to his room, he would be placed down on the bed, with each nurse leaving one at a time, from the nurse furthest away from the door to the nurse closest to the door. All outings for those patients were carefully scheduled with several members of staff, from the security team who monitored the CCTV cameras to the nurses on the ward, all designed to ensure the safety of staff and patients alike. Those patients were not allowed to leave those rooms whenever they liked.
But Morton Ward had a different atmosphere to Whitmore. Something about the long corridor of doors—almost all open, with music coming from some, the sound of chatting from others—reminded me of halls of residence at university. If not for the hospital-green walls and the heavy locks on the doors, I could have imagined I was about to go and greet a friend on my course.
Chi stopped outside the room furthest along the corridor, next to another locked door that led somewhere else deep inside the hospital. The door to this room was swung wide open so I could see the contents: a bed, a desk, a small closet to the right which led to a bathroom I couldn’t actually see but presumed existed. It was a small room and would feel claustrophobic after an extended period of time, but one that you could probably grow accustomed to if forced. And, in this case, that sense of claustrophobia was exacerbated by the clutter, chaos, and covered walls. From ceiling to floor, every inch was plastered with drawings. Corners of A4 sheets of paper curled, and Blue Tack shone through the pearl of the paper like little blue beads. In the centre of every page was a bird illustration.
Magpies. Blue tits. Sparrows. Crows. Robins. Hawks. Eagles. Finches. Cranes. Flamingos. Black wings, yellow beaks, red breasts, iridescent blues, green feathers, brown eyes. The eyes were the most arresting and seemed to watch me as I followed Chi into the room.
“Isabel, how are you doing today? This is Leah. She is going to be your nurse from now on.”
With all the birds on the walls I’d failed to notice the young woman bent over her desk. As she rose to greet me, I saw the charcoal stains on her fingers, and the fingernails bitten down to the skin beneath.
She was plump, with a soft, round face and a small belly protruding from her jogging bottoms and t-shirt. She was young, barely twenty years old, with brown eyes that twinkled beneath a fringe of medium-brown hair. Her hair was long and messy, as though she’d just rolled out of bed. But the most arresting feature was her easy smile, and the way she stood with one hand on her hip, relaxed. I wasn’t used to seeing patients in high-security hospitals appearing so relaxed.
“Oh, what happened to Alesha?”
“She moved on,” Chi said.
“But I never got to say goodbye.” Isabel’s eyebrows rose and her eyes seemed to grow larger with sadness. “Alesha was lovely. I hope she’s okay.”
“No need to worry, she’s fine. She got another job, that’s all.”
But I knew it was strange for a nurse not to say goodbye to her long-term patients before she moved on to another job. Alesha must have left in a hurry. Unless she didn’t want to upset Isabel before she left.
“So you’re my new nurse.” Isabel assessed me with eyes that trailed from my forehead to my toes. “Did you see the magpie outside?”
“Yes,” I replied in surprise. Of all the first questions I was expecting, one about a magpie wasn’t even in my top fifty.
“His name is Pepsi and I’m training him.”
I almost laughed. “What are you training him to do?”
“Eat out of my hand,” she replied eagerly, her words speeding up with excitement. “Fetch me twigs and worms. Squawk when I ask him to. Magpies are the cleverest birds, you know. They symbolise many things, too. Most people think they symbolise cunning and bad luck, but to me they’re magic. And mystery. I’ll show you Pepsi when we go on a walk into the garden.”
“I can’t wait,” I replied. “But why is he called Pepsi?”
“I found him in the garden with his foot stuck in a Pepsi can. Chi helped me get him out of the can and nurse him back to health.” Her eyes were glassy with excitement and she grinned from ear to ear. “Do you like birds?”
“They’re beautiful creatures. I can see you like them very much.” I gestured to the walls.
“I always wanted to be able to fly.” She gazed at the walls. “Maybe one day.” She came alive with movement so quickly that I took a step back, but she wasn’t preoccupied with me, it was her art she was interested in. She began to search through a pile of papers on her desk, finally retrieving the item she sought, and passed it to me. “Here, take it.”
I took the paper gently from her hands. It was a charcoal drawing of a magpie in flight with its wings outstretched, soaring through the sky. I had to admit that the artistry was excellent, and Isabel was an extremely talented girl. Looking at this bird gave me a sense of peace that I hadn’t anticipated from my anxious morning. I was aware of the effect art had on people, though I’d never truly understood it, not even when my first boyfriend—an amateur graffiti artist—used to drag me to exhibitions, but there was an ethereal quality to this picture that gave me pause.
“Thank you,” I replied, clearing my throat, suddenly self-conscious of my reaction to the gift.
“You’re welcome,” Isabel said, broadening her smile.
Chapter Three
I’d met my three patients, I’d taken a tour around Morton Ward, and I’d eaten lunch in the break room with the other nurses. It was a relatively quiet place, not as bustling with action as Whitmore was. Even the communal areas for the patients were calmer than Whitmore, with fewer residents and a more sedate atmosphere. I began to wonder why I’d been so nervous.
“What was Whitmore like?” asked a nurse called Tanya, leaning her elbows on her knees to get closer to me.
“The same, really, except they were all men,” I replied.
“Smellier then?” she said with a laugh.
“At times, yeah.” I tried not to think about the dirty protests or the patients who refused to shower for days at a time. “I was on rehabilitation like you are, though. I never saw the bad cases in intensive care.”
Tanya’s eyes widened. “I couldn’t stand it on IC. Did for like three months and asked for a transfer. Most don’t get it, but I was lucky. There’s a biter, and she’s a little shit. One of them scratched my arm from elbow to wrist with her fucking fingernails. I know they’re ill, but it’s bloody hard. I couldn’t do it.”
We’ve all been there. There’s no way to work in psychiatric care without bites, scratches, punches, and kicks. I once spent New Year’s Eve with a black eye courtesy of Bill Jones, a man with paranoid schizophrenia who thought I was there to stab him in the ribs.
“Who was your scariest patient?” she asked, sipping on her Cup-a-Soup. “Was it Cowell?”
“Probably,” I admitted. “But I never saw him. The worst on our ward were from organised crime. Almost all of them were recruited as teenagers and turned into killers. They didn’t stand a chance in the real world. It was pretty sad.”
Tanya nodded. “It’s a rec
urring theme.”
“Do you have any high-profile cases here?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. As much as I’d told myself that I never gossiped and never thought of the patients as “infamous,” there was a bubbling curiosity swelling inside and not a lot I could do about it. I was, and always will be, human.
“That’s easy,” Tanya said. “Isabel Fielding.”
The name gave me a start. “Isabel? The girl with the birds?” Isabel was my ward, and even though it was my first day, I thought Chi would have mentioned if she was a special case. “But she’s on the rehabilitation ward.”
“Yeah, because if it turns out she’s not crazy anymore, she’ll go straight to prison. She gets reassessed in May. If she’s fit to go, she gets transferred.” Tanya set down her mug and eyed the door to the break room. “Chi doesn’t like us talking about Isabel’s case because it’s so high profile. Do you remember the little girl found dead in a duck pond? She’d been murdered by a teenage girl.”
I didn’t respond right away because the blood was draining from my face, and I felt nauseated. Of course I remembered the story; it was all over the national newspapers. Three young children had been playing next to a pond. One of them had been murdered. One of them was found covered in the blood of the dead girl, who had either been struck by an object or beaten, I couldn’t remember. What I did remember was the visceral thump of disgust at the thought of a child killing another child. I remembered the way my mind refused to accept that a child could be anything other than innocent, turning away from the story and pushing the paper across the table. And then, when my mind decided it wanted more, I pulled the paper back and devoured the story from beginning to end, needing all the gory details, searching online for as much as I could find before feeling sick again and forcing myself to stop.
“Yes,” I finally replied. “I remember the story. So it was Isabel…?”
“Yup. And since then, she’s been in and out of juvenile centres, secure psychiatric wards, and now Crowmont. She’s been here since she was sixteen. She started out in intensive care and then came to rehabilitation two years ago. If she does well in rehabilitation and they decide she isn’t crazy, she goes straight to prison.”
One For Sorrow Page 2