by A. A. Bell
She twisted her head away from him.
‘Mira, that’s what who said?’
‘Him!’ She pointed to the ghostly soldier as he waded towards her, so close now she could see the bristles of his beard. ‘Keep away! Please, no! Stay away from me!’ She wielded the hairbrush wildly like a sword to chase them away.
‘Mira, you’re safe,’ Ben replied, trying to soothe her. ‘There’s nobody here but you and me. You’re hallucinating.’
‘No, they’re real! More real than you! They’re in the water, can’t you see?. Get away!’ she shouted to the soldiers again. ‘You have to leave me!’ Rain and hail stung the air, but not her skin. She saw the first soldier disappear beneath the swirling flood waters and she screamed, but the howling wind stole her voice away.
Static prickled behind her. Salty tears burned like acid through her fresh wounds and stitches, but still she kept her eyes clamped tightly shut behind the blindfold. ‘Go away, go away!’
‘Hey, Neville,’ Ben whispered into the radio behind her. ‘Can you ask Matron Sanchez to send over another dose of meds for Mira? I think she’s going off with those fairies you mentioned.’
‘They’re not fairies!’
Yet as Ben deftly caught, disarmed and immobilised her flailing arm, she knew she had no way of convincing him.
‘Better than that,’ replied the voice riding the static. ‘I’ll bring Steff and she can teach you a little trick with a Taser that sometimes brings her out of it.’
‘Hey, I don’t think she needs —’
‘Relax,’ replied Neville’s crackling voice. ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. And not nearly so bad as what she went through getting them stitches.’
Again, from another room, she heard a scream.
Fredarick’s straitjacket was warm.
His headphones were slipping, though, killing his music. Now jackhammers drilled inside his head; voices, screaming, echoing. Every sound permeated from every tomorrow, rippling back to him through time like raindrops on a pond, ever dissipating as ripples do, until each of the weakest whispers break the soft end of the sound barrier.
Hugging the padded wall, curled up like a human ball, he had managed to stay deaf to it most of his life.
‘Dysfunctions of his inner ear should guarantee it,’ they’d said; six decades of specialists. ‘Basilar membranes just don’t shake this way.’
Yet as he glanced to his rubber-coated door with its super-safe circular window, he saw Matron Sanchez and knew that she was different. By now, she would have read the staff reports about that incident — what he’d done to Mira’s eyelids — her sweet face warning him that she suspected there was far more to the situation. Perhaps she could even see it; a deaf old man and a young blind woman, reflections of each other in the distorted waters of a turbulent gene pool. Together, they were trapped in a tragic triangle with the matron,who suffered her own problems in addition to suffering his and Mira’s through empathy.
Sanchez had watched him all the night through the full moon of his window; his spike-haired angel. The white light behind her in the hall appeared to him as her halo, but he couldn’t bear to look at her; porcelain pale.
She stroked the glass moon with her petite hand — curled by the childhood foe of polio, long defeated — to remind him that he was not alone in his zoo of mime artists. He knew that she would also reassure him, if he would only turn his head long enough to read her lips, that as the new matron of Serenity, she would leave no rock unturned in pursuit of a little peace for him. Even a heartbeat of true silence would be bliss. Yet already the pain of failure had etched his sweet cherub with tears that seared even deeper into him.
It’s my fault she suffers at the sight of me; my fault she lacks the truth of what I am and what’s to come for her. And for Mira. He scolded himself time and again, and bumped his bald head into the corner, trying not to hear the screams which still echoed back to him from tomorrow’s tenants — until time slid by enough that he noticed his own sobbing had become ominously absent from the racket.
He glanced to the glass moon, and she was there again, just as he feared: Matron Madonna Sanchez. She was trying to smile, but her precious mouth was already trembling. Fear made her lips so hard to read, but he’d listened to the echoes of this moment for so long, there was no need.
Her eyes lingered too long on the damp stain on his pants, so he guessed that she must suspect it too; the time had come to confess the evil he’d committed upon Mira. Only then could she permit his release.
* * *
Entering the rubber room, Madonna Sanchez took care as she stepped up onto the soft floor, since the heel of her right shoe was four inches taller to compensate for a lack of length in one leg. An elastic knee support also helped, but she gave no greater thought to her own aids, nor to the weakness of her shrivelled left arm which could barely open the door without an extra nudge from her healthy hand. As matron and psychologist, her thoughts were already firmly focused on the client ahead of her.
She chose to leave the door open — not for a quick exit, since she feared no personal harm from him, but as a promise of release if he chose to cooperate and stop tearing at his ears. According to his file, he hadn’t needed either a straitjacket or padded room since his first year, six decades ago, when Serenity had still been known as the Likiba Isle Benevolent Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Not that raiding a neighbour’s chicken coop while stark naked should have been crime enough to commit him as an adolescent six decades ago. Still, here he was.
‘Hello, Freddie,’ she said as she squatted beside him — although until he answered, she couldn’t be sure if it was a sulking Freddie Leopard she addressed, or one of his quieter alter-egos known as Fredarick, the sage.
‘Neville has a bet going that you’ve clammed up for another sixty years, but if Ben and I made you laugh once, I figure we can do it again. I’m betting on us, and you don’t want me to lose money, do you?’
He continued to watch her with his weepy eyes, and his mouth opened as if he might break his latest silence, but when he moved his lips, she caught no more than the breath of his whisper.
‘You’re Fredarick?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry that to punish one, I must punish all of you.’
Taking her own white tissue from between her breasts, she dabbed a strand of saliva from the cornerof his mouth and straightened his headphones. Such an odd thing for a deaf patient to need, she thought, but since most of his personas cherished the idea of music so much and cared for no other little luxury, she could hardly bring herself to take them off him except in punishment, and only then for the most heinous crime.
‘I can’t let you keep them for long,’ she said, ‘unless you tell me which of you did that terrible thing to Mira. And why.’
A tear escaped his eye as if he regretted it.
‘It was you?’
He nodded, but she couldn’t set him free until she was sure he wouldn’t try anything so cruel again. Not against any other resident, let alone Mira Chambers, who would be bearing the marks of what he’d done to her for many days, if not years, psychologically.
He glanced to the door but made no attempt to move for it. He remained slumped in his corner, moving his mouth like a fish out of water.
Mira, Mira, she read from his lips.
Sanchez tipped his head until his eyes rolled from the door to her face. ‘You need to speak clearer, Freddie. I can read lips too, but you can’t just keep repeating her name.’ His clumsy tongue made it difficult to understand him at the best of times, and although he’d spoken to her often since she’d made him laugh, he’d barely spoken enough for a whole sentence in the six decades before that, so his mouth moved as if he’d forgotten how to shape words — almost as if he was still sucking his fist.
Mira, Mira, on the floor. Who’s the sanest one of all?
‘Louder, please. You put her on the floor. You stitched her eyes shut, and I need to know why. She was already blind.’
He sh
ook his head. ‘Mira, Mira,’ he said as another tear fell. ‘I looked in her eyes and saw myself staring back at me.’
‘She’s blind, honey. Her eyes are more crystalline than they should be. But she’s very touchy about it, so if your paths ever cross again you must promise not to stare or go near her.’
‘But she’s like me!’
Sanchez stroked his back, knowing that her lightest touch had become like balm to him. ‘She’s blind. You’re deaf. And you both suffer a mild intellectual handicap.’ Both also argued hotly with staff and had developed their refusals to cooperate to a fine art. And although Freddie had fractured into multiple personalities recently while Mira was still on the verge of breaking, Sanchez chose not to remind him of any such negatives that could be turned around eventually.
‘You’re like everyone here at the sanctuary,’ she assured him, ‘and you’ve never done anything like this before. So why Mira?’
He burst into tears and banged his head against the wall.
‘Because she begged me!’
In Sanchez’s pocket, her phone vibrated.
‘Never a dull moment,’ she muttered as her receptionist summoned her back to her office.
As the new matron, she was finding it difficult after six weeks to understand how so many phone calls and emails could be urgent. She’d also been finding it challenging to get to know all of the clients at Serenity personally. In her previous role as a psychologist at a special-care centre for juveniles on the mainland, it had taken less than a month to get to know everyone intimately. So she’d expected the island environment to make it easier, being such a relatively confined community of handicappedadults — almost a third of whom were too ill to make it far from their beds.
However, she had teams of staff to handle the day-to-day sessions now. They reported to her weekly with summary reports, so it was only through her daily rounds that her professional radar had detected two clients who’d been failing to thrive under existing strategies for their physical and mental health. Both Freddie and Mira were reclusive, and struggling even to cope.
Employing Ben to design specialist programs for them wasn’t intended to work miracles. But she could hope. Already, Ben’s suggestion to her that Freddie should try writing a play using the voices in his head as his muse, had resulted in Freddie cracking his first grin. Then for a fortnight, he’d barely shut up — sixty years of silence bursting out through at least seven distinctly different personas — until the incident with Mira. She’d barely arrived from the mainland before he’d taken a keen and desperate interest in her.
Now Sanchez needed time for her new tactics to work, but in the meantime, Freddie’s younger brother, an army colonel, had finally seen fit to return her calls. Colonel Kitching needed her cooperation for an upcoming health survey to validate the scope of new medical equipment, which had been organised by their respective state ministers under a cloak of secrecy. Odd, she thought, since the use of handicapped people for medical tests was outlawed, but then she’d learned that staff and clients from many government departments would be surveyed on a volunteer basis.
Even so, if Colonel Kitching expected her to cooperate happily with his medical team after neglecting Freddie for so long, then he was sorely mistaken. According to staff, the sour old mongrel hadn’t acknowledged Freddie with so much as a birthday card since he’d been committed to the isle.
No, she decided. If Colonel Kitching wanted his team’s project to run smoothly at Serenity, it would come at a price.
TWO
Seagulls on Likiba Isle had grown accustomed to the screaming. Muffled by thick beach-stone walls hand-hewn by convicts centuries beforehand, the wails of caged humans had become as commonplace as the breeze and as surreal and mournful as the night hawks.
Perched in the highest mangrove trees along the shore, the hawks and seagulls were more often likely to have their feathers ruffled by the rush and bang of developers. Or by Freddie Leopard, pegging stones at them on his daily walks. On this occasion, however, with uncommonly heavy clouds closing in from the mainland, it was the roar of a motorbike and sidecar leaping off the end of the derelict tram bridge onto the timber-planked shore-line.
Freddie saw them from his own perch on the great wall of Likiba, restricted by the terms of his release following the incident with Mira. However, he’d known for almost a fortnight that he’d be here to witness the arrival of the two military doctors. Deaf as he may be to everything that moved around him, he’d heard the echoes of their coming a dozen times as he passed by this way on his morning walks. And now, as Time rippled over its own threshold between presentand future, he was reduced to watching their arrival in silence — and with dread, since he’d overheard far more than their initial arrival. He had followed their echoes throughout Serenity and heard every word and every conversation they would ever have on the island, including their eventual plans for Mira and the dreadful fate that awaited her and Ben, because of them.
Pointless, he’d learned, to try warning anyone. Staff had failed to take him seriously. After all, he’d heard of Mira’s initial arrival too, and that incident with her stitches and the subsequent traumas with Ben, and yet here he was, watching all of their lives still unravelling. Powerless to prevent it.
Yet there was still a chance he could save his sweet angel, the matron. Ben had suggested he should express himself by writing a play, and so he stole down from the wall and slinked away into the forgotten dungeons beneath Serenity, hoping to finish it in time — and in Braille, lest it fell into any hands that could bring disaster back to them.
The Harley Davidson nearly rolled, its sidecar teetering. The passenger gripped onto his map and seatbelt, leaning heavily in the opposite direction to remain upright. Behind them, fishermen shouted and shook fists at them before recasting their lines into the swift salty water.
‘Scenic route be damned, Mitch!’ shouted the sidecar passenger. ‘Next time we use the new bridge!’
‘Live a little, Zan. I did warn you to hang onto your helmet.’
‘Keep your extreme sports for the weekend! Plus, you’ve lost our bodyguards.’
‘Hardly; look again. These guys may not be the best the colonel could find, but they’re adequate.’
Zander Zhou turned his head and lifted his foggy visor to see a white four-wheel-drive zigzagging at speed around roadworks along the new bridge from the mainland. ‘They don’t look happy.’
‘Meatheads are never happy unless we’re not. Relax — enjoy the ride and the sunshine.’
‘It’s still overcast!’
‘Fresh air then.’
‘How can I, when you’re so lost? Look, this island isn’t even supposed to be here. It’s an unnamed mangrove swamp!’ Zhou waved the map at his hulkish companion, who snatched it and cast it over his leather-clad shoulder into the breeze.
‘That’s a tourist map. You won’t find this place on any tourist map.’
A horn blared and Mitch Van Danik accelerated to avoid a concrete truck exiting a construction site where the work on foundations for a new marina had turned the remnant vegetation, grey sand, mud and mangroves into a foul-smelling paste. Van Danik signalled two victorious fingers at the truck driver and accelerated his Harley in the opposite direction along the only sealed road on the island. Dodging potholes in the time-punished bitumen, he swerved onto the wrong side and raced past regular gaps in the kerb that promised a future grid of adjoining side streets.
The road wound around a small tidal marsh before rejoining and running parallel to the derelict tramway, both of which terminated in a clearing at the base of a low hill. There sat a gleaming bus shelter that guarded the crumbling beach-stone walls of a large colonial-style building like a fresh sentry at an old jail.
Rusted razor wire curled along the top of the wall, intertwining with flowering vines — and the peering face of an old man watching them. Spotted, he vanished; his hairy, bare-footed legs briefly visible to
Dr Zhou where a hole
in the wall had been ‘patched’ by a scrawny brown hedge.
The hedge followed a cobbled driveway uphill to a modern security checkpoint, where a large sign welcomed visitors to the Serenity Centre and promised a sensual extravaganza at an upcoming festival. However, a red witch’s hat blocked the driveway, along with a makeshift sign apologising for renovations still in progress and asking all visitors to park outside and then follow a painted line of yellow happy faces to reception.
‘You’d think they’d at least rope off a decent car park,’ Van Danik complained. ‘Although I suppose that says a lot about the frequency of their need for visitor parking. Hang on, Zan. It’s time again to embrace your rally driver within.’
Dr Zhou gulped and gripped his seatbelt just as the sidecar bumped off the road onto the sandy grass verge and footpath.
‘This place is a mole on a porn star,’ Van Danik muttered as he avoided a light pole to park behind the bus shelter. He braked under the umbrella of a mature weeping fig, cut the engine and pocketed the key. ‘Why leave a blemish like this standing when there’s an expensive facelift going on down there along the waterfront?’
‘Everyone’s entitled to a sound roof and a decent view,’ Zhou defended. ‘Handicapped or not.’
‘They’re retards; the view is wasted.’
‘Intellectually handicapped,’ Zhou argued, and glanced uphill to the security checkpoint in time to catch another glimpse of the strange little man as he scuttled past the boom gate towards a cluster of old limestone buildings. ‘The term “retard” is offensive.’
Feeling physically crippled himself after an hour in the black-and-gold sidecar, Zhou scrambled out awkwardly, teetering on his spindly legs as he disgorged his head and black, shoulder-length hair from the helmet.
‘You should be grateful Colonel Kitching was able to arrange so many survey participants in one place,’ he told Van Danik. ‘You’re the one who said you were sick of working with criminals and trained killers.’
‘Those trainee astronauts at Cape Kennedy were okay.’