The Weight of Angels

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Mucking up Dr Ferris’s housekeeping routine. She’s got us all told about how much life you can get out of a towel before it goes out for a wash.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, looking at the bale I was cradling in my arms. ‘I’ll take these home and do them, maybe. Keep my nose clean seeing I’m new. Unless she’d mind me removing hospital property?’

  ‘She’d mind you saying “hospital”,’ Hinny said. ‘Are you stopping for a cuppa?’ I looked at my watch and nodded. ‘Mine’s an Earl Grey, then,’ she added, and winked at me.

  ‘I was sorry to miss the meeting,’ I said, once I was settled opposite her. ‘Actually, I’m feeling a bit at sea all round.’

  ‘You’ll get there,’ she said.

  ‘How long have you worked here?’

  ‘Since Dalbeattie Primary went to Central Catering,’ Hinny said. ‘No scope. I was bored shitless. At least here I still get to cook.’

  ‘Are you from Dalbeattie, then?’ I said, thinking about getting lifts to work.

  Hinny waggled her eyebrows. ‘Oh, aye. I know you, even if you don’t know me. Born and bred I am.’

  I dipped my head and took a drink of tea to get some thinking time. Earl Grey always sickened me a bit with its perfume and I hated how pale it stayed no matter how hard you squeezed the bag. And maybe it was sitting there, in a new place, in a new job, drinking tea I didn’t like that girded me. I could do this right, right from the start, if I just got a bit of courage up this minute.

  ‘Yep, we were the talk of the town for a bit there, weren’t we?’ I said.

  ‘You know what they called you? In the King’s Arms?’

  ‘Fur coat and no knickers?’ I guessed. ‘Pair of bloody idiots?’

  ‘Not the both of you,’ said Hinny. ‘I mean what they called you.’ She took a beat. ‘Tammy Wynette. Get it? Standing by your man?’

  I got it. Before my silence became too odd, Lars appeared with another nurse, green-tunicked and harassed.

  ‘Any more hot in the kettle?’ he said. ‘Ali, this is Marion. She’s the deputy charge. Usually on backs if I’m on days, but you know.’

  If I was going for it, I’d better really go for it. ‘Know what?’ I said. ‘You might as well be speaking Klingon.’

  ‘Are you a Trekkie?’ Marion said

  ‘Mum with a son,’ I told her. ‘But seriously, know what?’

  ‘Ohhhhh,’ said Lars, swinging back on his seat and giving me a big grin that showed all the gaps around the back of his mouth. ‘She didn’t tell you, eh?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Hinny. She put the last bite of her ginger snap on her saucer and folded her hands. ‘The expansion of our team to include a para-therapist specializing in personal care and recreational activities is part of the ongoing development of Howell Hall’s services, the next step in the programme of all-round blah-bah-blah.’

  ‘They got all “fair and satisfactory” in their CC assessment,’ Lars said. ‘No goods and no excellents. And the report goes public . . . When is it, Hin?’

  ‘End of the month.’

  ‘So it’s battle stations for the next inspection. Which will be unannounced and anytime.’

  I hoped I didn’t look guilty, but I was sure I did: all those lies and tall tales on my CV.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Marion. She was the kind of nurse I had come to recognize at ten paces. Neat and brisk and no time for nonsense. She was in her fifties and she must have gone into nursing when it was all tidy wards and bed baths.

  ‘Right enough,’ I said. ‘We didn’t talk about contracts. I thought it was long-term. I didn’t think I was just in to make the place look good for a few weeks and then I’d be out again.’

  ‘Depends,’ said Hinny. ‘If you attract enough new business.’

  ‘How the hell would I do that?’ I said.

  ‘Well, Julia’s never off her phone,’ said Lars. ‘I’d keep in with her.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ I said. ‘Something Dr Ferris said about Julia. What’s the holy trinity of psychopathy?’

  ‘Julia’s no psychopath,’ said Marion. ‘She’s been bunged in here so’s she doesn’t disrupt Mummy’s bridge club.’ Maybe I was wrong about the woman: that sounded like sympathy after all.

  ‘Oh, no, I know what this is,’ Lars said. ‘It was before she was admitted. She peed the bed, set a fire and killed a squirrel.’

  Hinny laughed through her last mouthful of ginger-snap crumbs. ‘God, I’d forgotten about that.’ Now Marion was laughing too, half at the memory but half at my face, eyes wide and mouth open.

  Lars brought his front chair legs down with a thump. ‘Let me explain,’ he said. ‘Fire-setting, bedwetting, animal cruelty: the three predictors of psychopathy. Watch any Hollywood film and you’ll see. So Julia hit them all. Trouble is, it’s all total bollocks. If she really was psycho, yeah, sure, there’d be a shitton of signs. But that’s not three of them.’

  ‘And she wouldn’t dump them when they got boring and go all out for depression instead,’ Marion added.

  ‘Ah, right,’ I said. ‘Got it. Histrionic personality disorder.’

  ‘With a touch of Munchausen’s sprinkled on top, we reckon,’ said Lars. ‘Her mum just got to the end of her rope. Well, I mean she wears us out some days.’ His watch pinged and he choked on the mouthful of tea he was swallowing. ‘Shit! Forgot!’ he said, standing. He fished his phone out of a back pocket and started thumbing the buttons. ‘Midday news,’ he said. ‘I’m dying to hear if they’ve got an ID. My pal said there was going to be a briefing.’

  ‘The body in the monastery!’ said Hinny. ‘Disnae sound real, does it?’ She stooped to look over Lars’s shoulder and Marion crowded in at his other side as the familiar music sounded.

  I sat where I was but I could hear it clearly, the tinny little voice squawking, ‘. . . preliminary results from Glasgow University, where forensic pathologists have examined the remains found in the grounds of Dundrennan Abbey. The body is that of a man, aged between twenty and forty, who died at least twelve years ago. There is no surviving identification. The remains are now being transferred to the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification in Dundee for further investigations. Missing-person reports from all parts of Scotland and the north of England are being reviewed by Dumfries and Galloway police, who had this to say.’

  The sound feed changed to the hubbub of an outside press conference and Lars clicked his phone.

  ‘Aw!’ said Hinny.

  ‘Ex-father-in-law,’ Lars said. ‘I’ve spent enough time listening to that gobshite.’

  ‘Well, at least we know it was a man,’ said Hinny. And then to Lars: ‘Don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean.’

  Lars was gathering the cups and running hot water into the sink. ‘Aye, aye,’ he said. ‘It’s not some wee girl that was taken away and kept alive till she gave out. Or some poor cow that got beaten once too often.’

  His words were so bleak that only silence followed them.

  ‘Histrionic personality disorder,’ I said, when I thought I’d been quiet long enough and wouldn’t sound heartless. ‘What causes that?’

  The two nurses looked at one another and Marion shrugged. ‘Same as everything,’ she said. ‘The usual suspects and nobody knows.’

  I waited to see if one of them would say more.

  In the end it was Hinny, the dinner lady, who explained. ‘Abuse, neglect, abandonment.’

  ‘There’s no evidence,’ said Lars. ‘But yeah.’

  ‘Or is that for borderline and anti-social?’ Hinny added, as if she was trying to remember the Latin names for her favourite flower.

  ‘The boys go bad and the girls go mad,’ said Marion, sadly. Then she took a deep breath and shook the thought away. ‘Bloody hell! How did we get on to this? We were having a nice wee chat about mouldering bones. And now we’re neck deep in shoptalk.’

  ‘My fault,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering. About Julia’s father,
actually. You know how she says she killed her father? I mean, if he was abusing her, who’d blame her?’

  There was a moment of stunned silence in the tea room, then Lars whistled. ‘Oh, my God! Ali, you’ll have to grow a thicker skin than that and pretty fast.’

  ‘More like a better bullshit detector,’ Marion said. She laughed at my face again.

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ said Lars. He was drying the cups now, screwing the tea-towel hard into them and twisting until they squeaked. Maybe it was because he was a nurse, with hygiene hammered into him, like how Marco couldn’t slice a carrot slowly but had to act like a chef every time.

  ‘It’s not bullshit,’ Lars said. ‘It’s just not . . . See, the thing is, the pain’s real. The terror – it’s all real. And the causes never sound bad enough. So they kind of . . . sex them up. Dad’s never just an arsehole that sat behind his newspaper and wouldn’t say he was proud of them, ken? He turns into a mixture of Hitler and Hannibal that beat them with a strap and kept them in the cellar.’

  I gave a little laugh, even though his words stung. Sometimes life really was as bad as you felt. Sometimes the strap and the cellar were surely true.

  ‘Ask her to do a house-tree-person, if you don’t believe me,’ Lars said. ‘Julia, I mean. When are you seeing her?’

  I shrugged. I hadn’t drawn up any kind of schedule at all. Tomorrow, after the meeting, I’d have to look for the chart they all talked about and try to slot myself into it somewhere. And as for ‘a house-tree-person’ – I had no idea what he was on about. Again.

  ‘This afternoon if she’s free,’ I said. Marion laughed again as she stood.

  ‘Oh, she’s free,’ she said. ‘She’s got her one-on-ones with the doc first thing. Then she’s free to cut about in that bloody goonie till the sun goes down. Come, and I’ll show you where to find her.’

  Julia’s room was one of the best in the house, I guessed. Certainly the equal of the empty room Dr Ferris had displayed at my interview. The window was a square bay, big enough for a chaise-longue and an ornate mantelpiece with a real oil painting above it. The furniture was white and gold, the chair legs fluted like columns, little swags and urns picked out around the dressing-table mirror and on the bed head.

  So it could have been lovely. But the loveliness was hidden under a layer of crap that took my breath away. There were more clothes than I could believe anyone owned lying about on the chairs and strewn on the floor. And there were shoes, some still in their boxes with labels attached. And empty boxes, too, and thick bags ripped open and invoices screwed up and scattered around.

  ‘Is this all new?’ I said.

  ‘Not the socks,’ said Marion, pointing. Dirty white socks lay all around the edges of the room where they’d been thrown, looking like tennis balls at the end of a long set with no one clearing. ‘But everything else is. She shops. The gate’s never done ringing to say there’s a van trying to deliver.’

  ‘Can’t you stop her?’

  ‘Not my decision,’ Marion said grimly. ‘I’d have her over my knee. But then I’d have this place bankrupt in a month if I put everyone over my knee that belongs there.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I’ve always believed a little kindness can go a long way myself but Marion was in another league. ‘I wonder where she is,’ I settled for. ‘I’ll just scout about. Track her down. Maybe in the garden?’

  ‘I’m needing to go and do a flush on the acute side anyway,’ Marion said. I didn’t want to know what she meant so I went the other way, then ducked into a staff toilet at the bottom of the stairs, using the swipe card Dr Ferris had given me.

  I locked myself in and sat on the toilet lid to Google ‘House Tree Person’.

  My blood ran cold when the page came up. There was no chance I could get away with this. If I had really done any art therapy, I would have heard of it and I’d only been an inch away from asking Lars what he meant and blowing my cover. I skimmed the Wikipedia page, then chose a link at random. Another couple of minutes and I thought I was ready. I slipped out of the toilet, checking in both directions, then went to the side door to search for Julia in the garden.

  There she was right enough, back in the gazebo with a cigarette, but she was in a very different mood from that first morning. She’d been crying. She wasn’t a pretty crier. Her nose was swollen and the skin around her eyes was crumpled and pink while the rest of her face was pale. It was a look forward to how she’d be at forty, I thought, as I approached her. Or thirty, if she didn’t stop smoking.

  ‘Hiya,’ I said, sitting down beside her. ‘I’ve been looking for you. How d’you fancy a facial?’

  She took a drag of her cigarette, then looked first at the glowing tip and next at the bare skin of my arm below my short tunic sleeve. I stood up and took a step away from her. But she just shook her head and gave a weary laugh. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I can’t be arsed.’

  ‘Good to know,’ I told her. ‘Come on, eh? You can lie down nice and warm with your eyes closed and I’ll give you a lovely facial. Help your wee face recover from all those tears.’

  ‘Wee face?’ she said. ‘Am I nine?’

  ‘Just an express—’ I began.

  ‘I don’t have a wee face,’ Julia said. ‘I don’t have a wee anything. I’ve got a face like the arse of a cow and an arse like the arse of another one.’

  ‘You’ve got a hell of a way with words,’ I said, but she only scowled harder.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’m the funny one. Plug-ugly fat arse but I can make ’em laugh.’

  I wanted to disagree but she wasn’t a pretty girl. She was tall and broad, with frizzy hair and a nose that hooked round to meet her chin. Her eyes had lids under them as large the lids above and she had gaps between all her teeth. She was plain now, and when she was an old lady she would be truly ugly.

  ‘People can be very cruel,’ I said, taking a wild guess. She was eighteen, and I knew how eighteen-year-old girls aspired to look: a sheet of hair; bodies like willow wands; that way of gliding around as if they were on runners. I remembered Julia stomping up the stairs with her elbows going and a wave of pity surged in me. I sat down again.

  ‘The trick is,’ I said, and I felt her go still, ‘to live inside your body.’ She snorted. ‘I know it sounds like claptrap, but it’s not. Listen.’ I leaned back and let my arm rest against hers. That was another thing I learned when I was ill. Sitting touching, not talking, not looking. They do it in Africa, in one of those tribes where everyone’s happy even though they’ve all got nothing. ‘So many girls your age live inside other people’s heads looking back at themselves. You need to live inside yourself and look out. Come and lie down and let me relax you. Try to visit Julia for a while and see what she sees. Bugger the rest of them.’

  She took another drag of her cigarette, then pinged it with thumb and forefinger, sending it sailing in a bright coral-blue arc onto the grass where the damp doused it. ‘Do you pop blackheads?’

  ‘You haven’t got any,’ I told her. ‘Stop being so awkward.’

  ‘What about my bikini line?’

  ‘I’m not touching you with a bargepole till you’ve had a bath,’ I said.

  She opened the neck of her nightie and stuck her head down, sniffing hard. ‘You’ve got a point.’

  ‘That’s the second time you’ve smelt yourself and pretended to be surprised,’ I said. ‘You’re not fooling me this time, Julia.’

  She gave me the look I knew so well from Angelo, the look of outraged injustice: this time there really was a wolf and the villagers down the mountain should learn to tell the difference.

  ‘I’m not trying to fool you!’ she said. ‘I forgot. I drift. They’re still trying to get my meds right and they keep changing the balance. I forgot where I fucking was yesterday morning. I thought I was in a hotel. Thought I had a hangover.’

  ‘A facial, and then we’ll sit together and do something lovely and relaxing, eh?’ I said. I stood and
held out my hand to her. For a minute I thought she was going to take it and then she rolled her eyes and got to her feet, brushing past me.

  She was quiet, as quiet as Sylvie, while I worked on her. And gradually she relaxed, her face smoothing to serenity. I dug my hands in under her head and worked on the knots in her neck.

  ‘You’ve got a good skull,’ I said. ‘Nice neck and jaw.’ She said nothing. ‘You would suit your hair cut close. Like Halle Berry.’

  ‘Or Julius Caesar,’ she murmured, and I laughed softly.

  ‘You would, though.’ What I really meant was that the frizzy hair bushing out round her face, along with the hooked nose, made her look like a clown. But if she went all out for bone structure – wore that nose proudly – she’d be magnificent instead of ridiculous.

  ‘Do you cut hair?’

  ‘I could take you into town to a salon,’ I said. ‘Do you get days out?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Course, you’d have to lose the dressing-gown and actually put on some of these new clothes you keep buying.’ I looked again at the heaps of shopping littering her room.

  ‘I don’t think my fairy godmother would be very happy about me going off the reservation,’ she said. Her voice was slack and gravelly, either from the massage or from the meds she was taking.

  ‘Dr Ferris?’ I asked. ‘I’m just going to masque you now.’

  ‘Pretty sure the deal with my mum was to keep me bricked up in the tower so I can’t do any more damage,’ she said, hardly moving her mouth as I smeared the warm paste over her face and down her neck.

  ‘What did you really do, Julia?’ I said softly.

  ‘I hurt my daddy,’ she answered even softer.

  ‘Hurt him how?’

  ‘I hurt his middle.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like the end of the world.’

  Her voice was no more than a whisper now. ‘I killed my father?’

  ‘Ssh,’ I said, and I listened as her breaths grew deeper and slower and then I listened to her sleeping.