One For Sorrow

by Sarah A. Denzil

  He laughed, and it was wonderful. I’d made Tom laugh. That was enough of a victory for today.

  *

  After dinner, Tom went upstairs to finish straightening his room while I unpacked a few extra boxes in the kitchen. As I pulled our toaster and kettle out of the box I realised how old and dirty they were. A new house meant new things, not toasters with rust spots and kettles with lime scale. I washed them as best I could, opened the cheap bottle of wine I’d bought to celebrate the new house, and took it outside with a threadbare throw and a chipped mug. There was a rusty garden chair outside the front of the house, a long-forgotten thing with tall grass growing over the legs, tangling nature and manufacturing together, rooting it in one spot.

  I sipped on my wine, pulled the throw more tightly around my shoulders and watched the bats swoop and flutter in the twilight sky.

  The worst was over. The worst had started with the funeral and ended when I arrived back to the cottage after my first day at Crowmont. It was over. I shed tension like a snake sheds its skin, drinking deeply, letting the wine warm my bones. This was where I was supposed to be, with my Tom, and my house. And without him.

  When I heard the startling sound of an animal grunt from somewhere deep within the farm, I thought of the pig-fucking and giggled into my wine. Seb Braithwaite and his brothers might seem a little rough around the edges, but I couldn’t imagine them doing anything so disgusting. Then again, I’d never lived in the countryside before. Who knew what these rural types were up to?

  I drank my wine and leaned back into the uncomfortable lawn chair. It was after ten, and the sky was a clear, dark ink stain spotted with white pinpricks. I never used to see the stars in London, but here they were in abundance. All around, the bats swooped and fluttered, more than I’d ever seen before, as though they were hunting in a pack. The movement was hypnotising, like a murmuration of swallows vibrating through the air. Soon my eyelids drooped, and I felt myself drift into a light slumber.

  There were a few things I remembered about that night, but the rest was blurry, which was strange because I’d only had a couple of mugs of wine. Perhaps it was because of my long, stressful day at a new job and being worn out from moving house that week. Perhaps it was because I hadn’t eaten enough. I’m not sure what it was, but I wasn’t quite in my right mind. One of the things I remembered was clutching my mug as I slept, and waking with it still upright on my lap. I’d woken with a start, the imprint of a man’s voice in my ears. The fat ginger cat that lived in our bushes was growling, and my arms were covered in goosebumps. My breathing was laboured, and there was sweat on my forehead despite the cold night air. I placed the mug down by my feet and must have drifted straight back to sleep, because the next thing I knew, I woke up at the kitchen table, having fallen asleep with my head on the table top. After retrieving my phone from my jeans pocket, I realised that it was 4am, and I was freezing cold because the kitchen door was wide open. After that, I went to bed and set my alarm for 6:30.

  Why didn’t I go to bed when I woke up in the first place? Did I sleepwalk into the kitchen? I hadn’t done any sleepwalking since I was nine years old, but it was possible the stress of the last week mixed with the wine had messed up my sleep cycle. It still didn’t feel like me, and I was more than a little perturbed by these things happening, but I had to sleep before work the next day, so I pushed it all out of my mind, and slept the remaining two hours of the night before I had to get up and do it all over again.

  I still don’t remember what I dreamt.

  Chapter Five

  The next day, Isabel took me out into the small, enclosed garden at Crowmont. There she introduced me to Pepsi.

  He was a large magpie with a proud way of holding his head, beady little black eyes, and wings that shone electric blue in the sunlight. Chi stood by the door as I walked Isabel around the garden, her carrying her tame bird, and me walking alongside, not too close.

  “Do you want to stroke his feathers?” she asked.

  “That’s all right,” I replied, eyeing the large bird nervously.

  “He’s perfectly tame,” she said. “He was a baby when I found him. Poor thing.” She lowered her face to the bird and pursed her lips to make a kissing noise. “It was horrible seeing him like that. But when he was better I felt like one of those girls in a fairy tale about wolves or tigers with splinters in their paws.” She laughed. “I guess it’s a strange thing for a convicted criminal to do, especially one in a hospital like this.”

  “Not at all,” I replied. “You’re getting better and helping him get better at the same time. It makes a lot of sense.”

  “You’re right, it does. At least, it does if I’m getting better.”

  “Don’t you think you are?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I guess it depends what I’ve got to get better from.” She angled her head away from me so that I couldn’t see her expression.

  “You don’t agree with the doctors about your illness?”

  “They tell me I have delusions, that I’m mentally ill. They’ve been telling me that for years. They give me pills, and apparently, it stops it all and makes me better. That’s all I know.”

  I supposed it must have been hard for her to have been institutionalised for such a long time. She’d been fourteen years old, barely developed as a human being. Perhaps if I’d been given medication for a mental illness for so long I might begin to grow suspicious of my own sanity too.

  “The doctors have trained for a long time, and they know what they’re doing,” I said. “It might feel strange to do everything they tell you to do, especially when you’ve been here for so long, but they are here to help you.”

  Isabel let out a laugh, a low, sad chuckle. “And it’s more than I deserve, if I did what they say I did.”

  I decided not to continue the conversation. Yesterday, Isabel had told me she didn’t kill Maisie Earnshaw, and I got the feeling she was hoping to bring up the crime in conversation again today. One thing I’d learned working with sociopaths was that they loved to talk about their crimes. Though I was curious—too curious—to know how Isabel felt about the crime for which she had been convicted, I didn’t want to talk about it, not yet. I didn’t want to be reminded, and it all felt too personal, too soon. The barrier between patient and nurse went up.

  “You told me Pepsi brings you things. What does he bring you?” I asked.

  As we’d been walking around the rather sad little garden at Crowmont, I’d noticed that most of Isabel’s body language was particularly childlike. She played with her hair, tucking and untucking it from her ears; she walked in long, enthusiastic strides, sometimes bouncing on her toes; and she often licked her lips before she spoke. She did all three of these things before answering my question, excited to be talking about her bird.

  “Sometimes worms. Sometimes silly things like bottle tops or crisp packets. Sometimes bits of grass or flower stems. I think birds have a different definition of things that are useful than people do. I’m not sure what I could do with a worm.”

  Chi knocked on the window separating the garden from the hospital and cheerfully pointed at his watch. Isabel sighed and launched Pepsi up into the air.

  “See you soon,” she said to the bird, watching as his wings unfurled against the cloudy sky.

  We began a slow walk back to the hospital, with Isabel swinging her arms lightly against her body. She glanced across at me and then down at her belly, stretching her hoody against her body.

  “Do you think I should lose weight?” she asked.

  The question caught me off guard, but it wasn’t the first time a patient in a psychiatric facility had asked me that question. Weight gain was a common issue, and it often made patients feel insecure or lacking in confidence.

  “A healthy diet is definitely important,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

  Isabel smiled. “You’re very polite, Leah, but I’ll take that as a yes.” Isabel opened the door into the hospital. “I’m
going on a diet, Chi. I’ve become quite the podger, don’t you think?”

  Chi tutted at her. “Why be so mean to yourself? Isn’t life hard enough already? But eating healthily is good.”

  Isabel tipped her head back as she laughed. “You nurses.”

  Chi lifted his shoulders. “What did I say?”

  “I think Isabel thinks we’re predictable. I said the same thing about healthy eating,” I explained.

  “I’m never predictable. Would a predictable nurse do this?” Chi dropped to the ground and leapt back up, spinning around in an elaborate dance move.

  Isabel’s laugh deepened, and she gave Chi a quiet round of applause. Though her laugh was quiet when she cracked up, it was still infectious, and I found myself joining in. Chi was unlike any charge nurse I’d ever worked with. He ran the ward in a relaxed way, always making sure the rules were adhered to, but never seeming stressed or overstretched. He made the organisational side of the ward extremely relaxed, and for that reason I had become comfortable almost immediately.

  But it was perhaps that sense of ease that allowed me to forget where I was, because there came a time when I stopped thinking of Crowmont as a hospital, and that was how I made a terrible mistake.

  *

  It’s the same old cliché, isn’t it? Doctors and nurses never take their own advice, and they end up with unhealthy habits. Yes, I was a smoker, which meant I was allowed the occasional break outside the hospital in the smoking area. I’d taken that break alone on my first day, but this time there was someone else there already. A man leaned against the wall, staring contemplatively down at the cigarette between his fingers. He wore dark blue trousers and a light blue top with the NHS logo on it. He turned and nodded towards me as I approached.

  “You’re the new nurse on Morton,” he said, straightening up from the wall. He lifted his hand as though offering it to shake, then seemed to change his mind and saluted me like a soldier instead.

  I noted the way his hair was styled in a slight quiff, with plenty of hair gel. It was an unusual style for a guy his age—which I put roughly at twenty-five—seeing as most young men were sporting a beard with a fifties-style cut. He leaned back against the wall and sucked on his cigarette, and as I watched him do it a jolt of familiarity hit me like an electric shock. Ignoring the strange sensation, I flipped open my packet and pulled out my own cigarette.

  “Yeah, that’s right. I’m Leah.”

  “Alfie,” he replied. “I’m a porter here, and apparently, the only other bugger who smokes.” When he talked he kept his head angled away from me, which gave me a reprieve from his piercing eyes. Perhaps it was because I hadn’t had much contact with the opposite sex for a while, aside from my little brother Tom, or perhaps it was because he reminded me of someone—though I didn’t know who—but his presence definitely had my nerves jangling.

  I popped the cigarette between my lips and ignited my lighter.

  “I’ve been here for years,” Alfie continued. “Seen a lot of nurses come and go in that time, but I never seem to leave.”

  “I’ve heard there’s a high turnover of staff.” I pulled in a drag and sucked it into my lungs. Even after the exhale I felt anxious.

  “Not from me. I guess I’ve got used to it.” He brushed back his hair. “Weird thing to say, I know. It’s a weird place to enjoy working at, but I do. Does that sound wrong? Sick?”

  “No,” I said, though I felt uncertain.

  “It’s got a deep history, this place,” he said. “I’ve picked up a few stories working here, stuff that you’ll find on the internet if you really want to know. I guess I have some sort of inquisitive mind, you might say.” He turned to me and grinned, which made me shiver from head to toe. “Ever heard of the Peeler?”

  I shook my head.

  Alfie gestured to the wall of the hospital behind his head. “He was one of the patients here. Some sort of tortured artist, apparently. I think his name was William… William… O’Neil, that’s the one. It was the 1920s, and he was a famous artist, like Picasso or any of them fancy artists who painted squares and shit and said it was a banana. Well, this William fella, he was a bit of a character, and he had a blinding temper. There were these two art critics who trashed one of his paintings in the newspaper, said that old Will didn’t have any talent.” Alfie flicked ash from his cigarette. “That didn’t go down so well with Mr William O’Neil. Instead of drowning himself in whisky, like he probably should’ve done, old Will decides to travel down to London and find these two critics who said his painting was a heap of crap. He took the two of them to dinner and played all nicey-nicey with them until he invited them back to his hotel room. Then he offered them both a nightcap and a cigar, all the while acting like he was fine with the way they’d called him names in the paper, and, I mean, they were brutal. They said he was talentless, a hack, an ape with a paintbrush—nasty, nasty stuff. Now, that’s pretty difficult to get over, I’m sure you can agree.” As Alfie took a drag, I rubbed my arms for warmth, that chilly March breeze easily penetrating my cotton shirt. “Old Will slipped them both a sleeping pill. There was no way he was letting those insults slide. After the two critics had fallen asleep, O’Neil strung them both up, tying them to the beams in the room. He stripped them naked, gagged them, and slowly, agonisingly slowly, began to peel the skin from their bodies with a sharp knife, like peeling the skin from a grape.”

  My lunch churned in my stomach as I took another drag of my cigarette, sickened by the story, the way Alfie had told it, and the ashy taste of smoke in my mouth. I brushed the hair back from my face and struggled to find a response.

  But Alfie laughed. “Sorry, love. I forget that not everyone is as morbid as I am.”

  “No, it’s okay. It was interesting.”

  “There’s a whole lot of interesting in these walls,” he said with a wink. “Trust me.”

  Chapter Six

  I fell into a routine more quickly than I imagined I would. Even the craggy moors and shadowed forests felt like home after a few journeys to and from Crowmont Hospital. Tom carried on at school, walking the thirty minutes from the bus stop every day without a single complaint. The exercise would at least do him some good. After work I sat out on the lawn chair and watched the bats. At the weekend I battled with the ant problem in our kitchen, putting down poison for them and staying up to make sure they didn’t escape.

  On Sunday, when I was clearing away empty cardboard boxes, I found the magpie illustration from Isabel. Pepsi stared at me with black beady eyes, and it felt as though the bird was in the room with me, waiting, watching. I snatched the paper and considered throwing it into the bin, but instead I tucked it into a desk drawer and left it there.

  We lived on threadbare carpets, with curtains that needed a good wash and chairs that creaked when you sat on them. We were more solitary than we should’ve been. Tom always disappeared into his room in the evening, playing his loud bands, tapping out essays on the ancient laptop we couldn’t afford to replace. I was painfully aware of the other teenagers on their iPads, Surfaces and Mac laptops, top of the range and brand new. But my Tom would be studying for his A-levels on a laptop that took five minutes to boot, with a webcam that hadn’t worked for years.

  But we were together, and that was what mattered. At least, I told myself that as I sipped wine and listened to the pigs grunting in the nearby fields.

  We never talked about our parents. Sometimes I wanted to, but my own fears held me back.

  Our parents were the reason we’d moved to Hutton. Tom and I had been living with them at the time; in fact, we’d lived with them most of our lives, as children tend to do. I’d even moved back after a disastrous three-year relationship with a man who made a full-time job out of finding ways to avoid an actual job. The day it happened was a day I would never forget. It was the reason I sat and watched the bats swooping through the air, sipping on wine, letting my eyes droop every night. It was the reason I woke in the morning, bleary-eyed, with a stom
ach churning with anxiety. It was the reason I continued to drive to work with my pulse too quick, the wine from the night before sour on my tongue.

  Perhaps it was the reason I was so anxious on my first day at Crowmont. Perhaps what happened to my parents was the reason for everything that happened to me after moving to Hutton. But all I could focus on at that time was the fact that my parents were dead and I needed to look after my little brother.

  At least the job seemed to be going well. Tracy took a few days to warm up to me, but before long I was supervising her as she assisted the kitchen staff, and chatting to her and Emily in the communal area. Isabel was much quieter, requiring me to go to her room most days. We mostly talked about birds as we walked together to her art therapy sessions. She would tell me all about the omens different birds brought.

  On Monday, she handed me a pencil sketch of a white dove.

  “Purity,” she said. “Innocence.”

  “Doves are beautiful, aren’t they?” I replied. “Thank you for this.”

  “I saw a dove once. Dad took me to a rich girl’s birthday party once. They had a magician there performing all kinds of card tricks. But he had this one trick where she had to go up and open a box. It was empty. Then, a few seconds later, he told her to open the box again, but this time a white bird came out and flew up into the sky. Everyone was clapping and cheering as the dove flew away, but all I could think about was that bird stuck in a box, waiting for it to be opened. How long had the bird been in there, waiting?”

  “Did you think it was cruel for the bird to be stuck in the box?” I asked.

  “Of course. Who wouldn’t?” she replied.

  She seemed agitated as I took her to her art therapy lesson, and I couldn’t help wondering if something was bothering her today. It was later in the afternoon when I realised what it was. She had a visitor, her brother Owen. Chi told me as I ate my sandwich at lunchtime.