Beauty Sleep

by Kathryn Evans

  “Medicine? You run a cosmetics empire.”

  She tipped her head to one side and smiled. “It’s not just that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She leaned forward, her eyes even wider than normal. “We discovered that the revival process after cryogenic preservation stimulates the production of macrophages – cells that are critical for the immune system, for the healing process of the body. With so few effective antibiotics available today, the benefits of that are immeasurable.”

  “Benefit to who? Not to those kids in the basement.”

  She sat back. “You know what you can do, Laura, what your body can do. You fought off a tracker virus in minutes. Your body can regenerate new flesh. If we can extend that, we could patch up brains riddled with dementia, grow new bone, nerves, any kind of tissue – if they’d let me carry on with my research the potential is limitless.”

  I could see her passion, her obsession. She was so convincing I could almost see her justification. But the reality… What she’d done to human beings. To children. To Alfie.

  “Where’s my brother?”

  “You don’t need him.”

  “How can you say that? My family…”

  She leaned forward. “Yes, your family. That is what I want to talk to you about. Won’t you take my hand?” She was looking at me like she was about to give me a wonderful surprise.

  I edged away from her.

  “You think you lost your family, but you didn’t. I am your family.”

  I stared at her. Had she completely lost it?

  “You are my daughter. It was my egg that was implanted when your parents came to me for fertility treatment. The woman you knew as your mother was just a womb to carry you.”

  Shock sent freezing roots burrowing through me.

  I shook my head, trying to get the confusion out. “No, I don’t believe you.”

  “Yes. Blackhurst was at the forefront of IVF technology. No other clinic was even close to success when your parents were looking to conceive you. They jumped at my offer of a trial attempt and were quite happy to be sworn to secrecy. It was a simple thing to implant one of my fertilized eggs instead of your mother’s. DNA records will prove it.”

  I felt sick. I looked around for Melody. She seemed as shocked as I was. When she realized I was staring at her, she gave herself a shake and said, “Do you want to leave?”

  Miss Lilly reached for me but the guard put a heavy hand on her shoulder and sat her back. For a very brief moment, her face rippled with displeasure before her gentle smile was back in place.

  I didn’t want to believe her but she said, “You know it’s true, don’t you? We actually look a little alike, I think. And we sound almost identical.”

  I remembered the lift in the kitchen responding to my voice, mistaking me for Miss Lilly. I was trembling but I had to hear the whole story. “Why? And what about Alfie?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Insurance. You had measles when you were nine, do you remember? I was a little worried I’d put all my eggs in one basket, so I offered them another free round of IVF.”

  I was struggling to make sense of what she was saying. “You tricked Mum and Ima? So Mum would carry your children? But why? Why not pay a surrogate?”

  “I didn’t need to pay them. Their reward was sixteen years of you. What other surrogate gets that?”

  “But hang on…” I did some quick maths in my head. “That can’t be true. I was born in 1969, you’d have been a young child yourself.”

  “I know when you were born, Laura. I’m not an idiot. Let’s just say I’m a little older than I look.”

  “A little older? You’d have to be thirty years older.”

  She smiled and shrugged. “How old do you think I am? Fifty? Fifty-five? You assumed I was a child when my parents died, but I was twenty-five when you were born, Laura. Which makes me, crumbs, how old? I’ve not thought about my real age for a while…eighty-three?”

  I stared at her, astonished. It wasn’t possible.

  She went on, “Sadly, while I can hold back the years on my skin, I’ve had less success with my internal organs. My team have worked hard but even they can’t perform miracles. Not yet. My time on earth is limited, Laura, and I want you to take over the business. I want you to carry on the work I’ve been doing.”

  She said it like she was handing me a golden chalice, not a poisoned one. I wanted to shake her. Hurt her. Make her see what she’d done – because she seemed to have no idea. No comprehension that she had wrecked countless lives. I was almost blinded by the fury that flooded my body.

  “Don’t be cross with me, sweetheart.”

  I searched for something to say, something to shock her like she’d shocked me. “If you wanted a baby so much, why didn’t you bring me up?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t want a baby. I wanted an heir. And I didn’t have time to raise a child. You had an excellent upbringing and I kept an eye on you from a distance. I was busy, Laura. Besides, I took great care selecting your parents. Leaving you with them was good for all of us. A child couldn’t run my empire – I needed a young woman, and here you are.”

  “So why freeze me? Why not just wait for me to be old enough? Why put my parents through all that pain?”

  “Sweetheart, think about it. I was only in my forties when you were frozen. I had years ahead of me then and I knew, if I kept you young, when the time came, you’d have years ahead of you too. I was confident the cryogenic process was safe. We’d done trials and we hadn’t had a death in months. It made perfect sense.”

  She said it like all her plans had been an excellent idea.

  “You’re mad. You’re completely mad.”

  She rolled her eyes as if she was disappointed in me.

  I was raging inside. I wanted to storm out of that room and never speak to her again, but she was the only one who could tell me what had really happened to my brother. I had to find a way to coax it out of her.

  “How did you make it seem like we were ill?” I asked. “Stacey said you poisoned us with the TB jab.”

  Miss Lilly shook her head. “That girl really is useless. I was so disappointed you chose her for a best friend. You completely ignored all the girls I placed at that horrible school to befriend you.”

  I felt a pang for Stacey and crossed my fingers that she was getting better. Miss Lilly might have been disappointed I’d chosen her, but I knew I couldn’t have chosen better.

  “We did sponsor a national programme for TB,” she continued, “it was getting quite out of control – but that was nothing to do with you.”

  “How then?”

  “It was the vitamins. We told your parents there were concerns that IVF babies couldn’t retain crucial elements needed for proper development. Given our involvement in your conception, it was natural for us to provide the solution.”

  The vitamins. Mum and Ima had made us take them every day – a tablet for me, half a tablet for Alfie.

  “But we’d been taking those for ages before we got ill.”

  “Honestly, Laura, will you use your brain? If you’d started taking them and then keeled over, suspicion would have fallen on the tablets straight away. I needed you to keep taking them – in fact your parents had to think you needed them even more because you were ill. I hadn’t planned on giving them to Alfie, your foster-parents took that upon themselves.”

  “Don’t call them that.”

  “Once you were in hospital, it was easier. I had someone working there who administered the drug through your IV line – it wasn’t hard. Security in state hospitals was very lax in those days. It made you ill enough that your foster-mothers—”

  “Don’t call them that!”

  She carried on. “I contacted them when I ‘heard’ you were sick. The local hospital was struggling to identify your illness and loosely, and usefully as it turned out, diagnosed a rare cancer. You were already too weak for the only real effective treatments they had for cancer then
. They had nothing else to offer so I suggested bringing you here.”

  “You could have killed us,” I whispered, shocked to the bone that she could tell me all this so calmly.

  “Of course not. The dosage was carefully calibrated and easily reversed if you knew what it was. We have excellent chemists at Blackhurst.”

  Miss Lilly turned elegantly in her seat and asked the guard if she might have a drink. Melody tapped my shoulder and asked if I wanted one too. I must have nodded because someone came back with two paper cups of lukewarm water. I felt disconnected from everything. It was all so mad, so unbelievable, I barely knew what to ask next. I said, “You could have let Alfie get better. It was me you wanted.”

  She shook her head. “There would have been too many questions if your mystery illness didn’t follow the same trajectory.”

  I closed my eyes and whispered, “So you kept him for your child farm.”

  “Child farm? Where on earth did you get that phrase from?”

  “What else would you call it? You were harvesting chemicals from them, destroying their bodies…”

  “Do calm down, Laura.”

  “Calm down? You took everything from me, from my parents!”

  “But I didn’t. You were never really theirs to lose, don’t you see?”

  She smiled and held her hands out towards me again.

  Even then. Even after everything I knew, I still wanted to hold them. I still wanted her approval. I sat on my own hands to stop them betraying me.

  “Did you have Alfie killed?”

  “Oh for goodness’ sake, what kind of monster do you think I am?”

  “You really don’t want me to answer that. Are you going to tell me where my brother is or not?”

  Silence.

  “Okay. Melody, I want to leave now.”

  I got up and walked away slowly in case she decided to tell me, to stop me leaving. Instead she said, “I tried to do my best for you.”

  I nodded. In her own crazy way, she had. But the cost of her actions…it was beyond anything I could comprehend.

  Outside, I asked Melody, “Where are they keeping Stacey?”

  “Worthing General.”

  “Can we go? Now?”

  Stacey was in a room on her own. Her whole face lit up when she saw me and I glimpsed an echo of the girl she’d been, before age and grief had remapped her features.

  “Lu!” She tried to sit up, but pain flashed across her face.

  I said, “Hey, how are you doing?”

  “Hey, yourself. Bit of a headache.”

  I said, “Stacey, I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. I should have…”

  She shook her head. “Don’t be sorry. You’ve done nothing wrong. I can’t imagine how weird this is for you.”

  We had years to catch up on, but I could only think about one thing. My eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know what to do, Stace. No one knows where Alfie is. And the only person who does won’t even tell me if he’s alive. Do you have any clues?”

  She shook her head. “I kept trying after I got out of prison, but she had an injunction against me. I had to be careful. Prison was so hard, Lu. I didn’t want to go back. If I broke the injunction, I knew I might get another custodial sentence.”

  It hit me then – really hit me – just how much she’d given up for me, how much she’d lost and how much she’d risked.

  “But you sent letters to the clinic, after I was revived.”

  “Things changed when I knew you were awake. It was worth the risk to try and make contact. I had to make sure you were okay. I was scared but prison seemed less important than you…”

  “I’m so sorry, Stace. For not believing you. For not being there. For all of it.”

  She held her arms out and I hugged her. She patted my back and shushed me like a mum would do and I wondered if she had even given up her chance of being a mother because she was looking out for me.

  Tears of guilt came then: hot, heavy, sorry tears.

  Eventually, we both stopped crying. I picked up her hand and said, “Thank you… Your whole life…you did everything you could.”

  She sniffed. “You’d have done the same.”

  I wasn’t sure I would have done. Not then. But I think I would now.

  I said, “When you get out of hospital, we’ll make up for it. We’ll listen to The Cure. Phone some random boys.”

  Her bottom lip wobbled. “I think I might get arrested again if I start phoning teenage boys.”

  I woke up in a room on my own in a proper bed. It was like sleeping in a cloud. Light streamed over me and I thought I was dead. That I must be in heaven. Until I moved and found a tube draining out of my arm. I sat bolt upright and felt something tug in a place nothing should tug. I looked under the cover – disappearing into a pair of pyjama bottoms was another tube shoved into my thing. I yanked it out, gasping with pain as I did – but, jeez, what kind of nutcase wants someone’s wee?

  I pulled the one out of my arm too. Blood trickled down the inside of my stump but I knew that would stop soon – I’d always been a good healer. Only some sensor had triggered an alarm and just as I was getting to my feet, a woman in white blocked the doorway.

  I looked around for something to throw. The bag of wee was trickling itself empty on the floor – fat lot of use that would be. I backed around the bed, putting it between me and her while I tried to think.

  “Shem, it’s okay. No one is going to hurt you. I’m a nurse. I’m looking after you.”

  “I don’t need your kind of looking after, thanks.”

  A man appeared behind her. My heart nearly thudded its way out of my chest.

  He held his hands up. “It’s okay. Shem, you are free to go whenever you want, but you’ve been through a lot and we’d like to take care of you for a bit.”

  “You put a tube in my thing.”

  The nurse said, “A catheter – you’ve been unconscious for a couple of days.”

  I let that sink in before I said, “I can go?”

  They nodded. “But the police would be very grateful if you’d give a statement first. Would that be okay?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t talking to no police. “I just want to leave.”

  Someone else came in. Another woman. I felt cornered, panicked. There was a window in the room but I couldn’t see how to open it. Maybe I could just dive through it and run? My legs were wobbly and weak but it was amazing where you could find the strength if you dug deep.

  The new woman whispered something and the nurse said to me, “We’ll leave you to think about it. If you need anything, you can call me with the buzzer by your bed.”

  They went, leaving the door open. I looked around the room for my clothes but all I had were the blue pyjamas I was wearing. I pulled the blanket off the bed and wrapped it round my shoulders. I peered out of the door.

  The corridor was empty apart from one nurse sitting at the end, tapping on a computer. She smiled at me and went back to her work. Could I really just leave?

  I stepped out. Just walked down the corridor. There were other rooms, all with kids in, some with nurses sitting by their beds. No one stopped me.

  I got to the end of the corridor and sped up, my legs threatening to give way any second. There was a door ahead and through it, the outside. I was sure it would be locked but it wasn’t. I glanced back to see if I was being chased – there was a nurse watching me but she just nodded. I was free. Really free. I opened the door and went outside. The sun felt good on my face. I looked around to get my bearings.

  Across the grass was a massive white tent. Someone strode out of it – a bulldozer of a woman with a beautiful white dog on a lead. A white dog that nearly pulled her over when he saw me.

  “Scrag! Oh my God, Scrag.”

  I dropped the blanket and fell to my knees. She unclipped him and he flew at me. I caught him up. He licked my face, whining and yipping and wagging at the same time.

  “Scrag, you’re alive. You’r
e alive!”

  He wriggled out of my arms and rolled on his back. I rubbed his belly – he was so white, even his tummy was white.

  “You look like a little prince. How can I call you Scrag now, hey?”

  The woman who’d had him on the lead stopped near us. I looked up at her and said, “This is my dog.”

  “I know. I’ve been taking care of him.”

  She gave me his lead. Like he’d need that again. Still, I didn’t forget my manners.

  “Thanks, thank you.”

  “My pleasure. I’d happily keep him. Delightful dog. Clever too.”

  “You can’t—”

  “It’s okay. I know he’s yours. Laura, the girl who found him, she explained everything to the police. Besides, anyone can see he’s your dog. Got somewhere to go when this is all over?”

  I shrugged. Back on the streets, I guessed, but I never said that.

  She stuck out her hand. It took me a minute to realize she wanted me to shake it – it had been so long since anyone had treated me like an equal. Except maybe that girl.

  “I’ll leave him with you then,” the woman said. “I’d better get back to my pupils – they’re waiting to see Laura. Perhaps you’ll let me say goodbye to this little chap later?”

  “If I’m still here,” I said.

  A man came out of the tent. I struggled to my feet. He kept his distance and said, “Shem, hello. My name is Adam, I’m a police officer here. I’ve been assigned to make sure you’re looked after. If you’re up to it, we’d be very grateful if you’d give us five minutes of your time? It would really help with our enquiries here. Perhaps you’d come into the marquee?”

  I shook my head – I wasn’t getting trapped anywhere. I had all I wanted now I had Scrag back. I just wanted to leave.

  “What if we talk here?” he said. “I don’t need to come any closer? We could get you some clean clothes? Something to eat maybe?”

  Something to eat would be good. And maybe a coat and some shoes. Before I got back on the road.

  So I nodded. “Okay, but right here. And you don’t touch me, or my dog.”

  Back at the flat, Melody came with me to the kitchen. There were papers all over the table and officers poring over them.