The Weight of Angels

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘What have I done?’ She was sobbing into my neck. She had had a bath anyway. She smelt of lemon and coconut.

  ‘Sit down on the bog seat,’ I said, ‘and give me ten minutes. I promise you I can make it okay.’

  I’m not a hairdresser but some of it rubbed off, all those years in Face Value, and I set to with as much confidence as I could scrape together, knowing she needed it, knowing that the sight of her bald head had touched something that lay deep under whatever was wrong with her – her histrionic personality: it touched a wee girl that just wanted to be pretty. See, that’s the thing that used to bug me about Marco. He never said it but he always believed that what I did was shallow. ‘Because you care so much what things look like, Ali,’ he said to me once, like it made me less than him, who cared so much what things tasted like instead.

  ‘Now, who told you you were ugly?’ I asked her, as I clipped away, taking off the long hanks and ruffling up what was left. I was only making conversation. I wasn’t aware of Yvonne’s words still rattling around in my head.

  ‘Who didn’t?’ she said. ‘My mum, my granny, teachers at school.’

  ‘Get away!’ I said. ‘What the hell school was this, then?’

  ‘Don’t try to make me laugh,’ she said. ‘They didn’t say it as such, but we did The Boy Friend and I wanted to be a flapper, but they cast me as Madame Dubonnet.’

  ‘Is she ugly? I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘She’s old. Then we did Macbeth. And I was a witch.’

  ‘Well, there’s hardly any parts for girls in—’

  ‘And the other two who were witches had fake noses and warts and blacked-out teeth. But the drama teacher just backcombed my hair and said I’d do.’

  ‘What a bitch!’ I said. ‘But see? I’m right about your hair.’ She said nothing. I was clipping away at the back of her neck now. It was a shame, really, because it was the only place there was any length left at all, but an extreme mullet wouldn’t help her, and I had meant what I’d said the day before: she had a lovely head and her hair grew in a perfect butterfly over the tendons on her nape. Mine grows like a crash helmet so I always notice. ‘And at least you’re not called Dido,’ I said. My heart swelled when she rewarded me with a soft chuckle.

  ‘Right, then. Where’s your make-up?’ I asked her, when I was done. I knew she’d have some. No way she’d ignore the potential to spend so much money online. But I was surprised when she bent and hauled the basket out from under her basin.

  ‘Half of Boots in here,’ I said, rummaging. ‘I’m confiscating the green eye shadow. And this lipstick’s hellish. Shut your eyes and don’t argue.’

  When she turned her face up to me I thought of Angelo when he was little and needed a nose-blow. He had never minded it. Never fought me like some I’d seen, twisting away from their mums and leaving trails over their cheeks.

  ‘I’m plucking your eyebrows,’ I told her. She winced like clockwork at every pinch but she let me. And she was biddable about looking down and then up as I turned her lashes black.

  ‘Tilda Swinton doesn’t wear mascara,’ was all she said.

  ‘Tilda Swinton is freakishly beautiful,’ I told her, ‘and even she’s touch and go. Ordinary mortals like you and me need all the help we can get.’

  I went to town with the contour and the highlight, and by the time I was choosing a lipstick I had surprised myself. Her beautiful head, her jaw and her temples, her huge eyes with the privet-hedge eyebrows gone, her razor’s edge cheekbones and, yes, yes, her glorious haughty nose were astonishing now they were out from inside that flaming nest where they’d been hiding.

  ‘You have no idea on this earth what lipstick suits you, do you?’ I said, throwing out a purple nightmare and a crimson shimmering lip-gloss. I mixed some peach blusher with a slick of balm, just to give her the idea and stroked it on with a brush.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, raking my fingers through her hair one last time. ‘You ready? You will never be a pretty girl, Julia, because you’re stunning and magnificent. So much better than pretty any day. Bloom fades. But bones like you’ve got last for ever. You’ll be even more gorgeous when you’re sixty than you are now.’

  ‘Are you ever going to shut up and show me?’ she said.

  I looked behind the mirror above the basin and saw it was only hanging on a cord, so I lifted it off and held it in front and slightly above her.

  She said nothing. She turned this way and that. She ran her fingers over her head. Then she leaned forward and looked at what I had done to her eyes.

  ‘I look like a drag act,’ she said. ‘You’re a bitch for getting my hopes up.’ She stood up and was suddenly so close to me that I took a step back, holding the mirror like a shield. ‘Put that bloody mirror down before I smash it.’

  When I lowered it, leaning it against the wall and stepping away, she pounced, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing me so hard my bra squeaked. ‘I’m joking, you moron,’ she said. ‘I look fantastic. I’m going to kill my mum.’

  ‘I can’t actually breathe,’ I said, and she let go, laughing.

  ‘And my granny. Telling me I was ugly! Will you come in every morning and fix me?’

  ‘No, but I’ll teach you,’ I said. ‘Now get dressed and come downstairs, eh?’

  ‘Can I have the first lesson today?’

  ‘I’ve got a full morning and Dr Ferris before lunch,’ I said, but Dr Ferris was already on her way towards me as I spoke, stalking through the corridors on her high heels. Both of us heard the smack-smack-smack of her climbing the stairs, then listened to the soft thump-thump of her coming along the corridor.

  ‘Bye-bye, gotta go, catch you soon,’ Julia said, and then the doctor was crossing her bedroom floor and sweeping the bathroom door wide. I stood in front of Julia, without thinking.

  ‘Alison. My office. Now.’ She was even angrier than before. I stepped to one side and put my arm on Julia’s shoulder. I knew I was beaming.

  The doctor registered the transformation with a flash of her eyes. I saw it. I saw her pupils dilate.

  Then Julia spoke. ‘She cut the rest of it off. She cut it all off. She’s scalped me. It’s all gone. She cut it off.’ She was rocking back and forward on the toilet seat. Rocking so far back that her head banged off the wall behind the cistern and the cistern lid scraped and clanked every time her shoulders hit it.

  Dr Ferris turned away. She pulled a mobile from her back pocket and spoke into it, very calmly. ‘Lars, urgent to Julia’s room, please.’

  I cupped the back of Julia’s head so it was my fingers taking the brunt. Now my wedding ring was hurting us both but I couldn’t move. I was frozen. Because in her other hand Dr Ferris held my sketchpad, open at Sylvie’s drawing, her fingers white and her nails red with the strain of how hard she clutched it.

  Lars was there within a minute and, soundlessly, he got Julia on her feet and away from all the hard edges of the bathroom. She pulled her head back as if to butt him in the face but he changed his hold and tsk-tsked at her.

  ‘I like your hair,’ he said. ‘But you’ve wrecked your mascara.’

  ‘Alison!’ said Dr Ferris, once she was sure Lars had it in hand. ‘Outside.’ She stood four square in front of me and held the sketchpad up against her chest. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’

  ‘I’m not with you, Doc,’ I said.

  ‘My husband is “Doc”,’ she said, as if the word was a slur. ‘And don’t buy time. Why did you write Sylvie’s name on this doodle and leave it in her room?’

  ‘Actually, I left it in my bag,’ I said. ‘And my bag was zipped shut.’

  ‘Until I opened it to see whom it belonged to.’ That was reasonable enough, I supposed. If it had been me I’d have taken it to the staff kitchen and got a witness to watch me opening it but she was the boss. ‘I shall repeat my question for the final time: why did you write Sylvie’s name on your doodle?’

  I searched her face but I was sure she wasn’t being clever-clever, trying
to catch me out. She genuinely had not the slightest suspicion that Sylvie’s name was on there for the reason people’s names are always on pictures, from handprints bound for the front of the fridge to Rembrandt’s last self-portrait.

  ‘I meant to write notes on the page,’ I said. ‘But I never got round to it. The doodle doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Informal private notes about a patient?’ she said, in the same tone as she’d said ‘Doc’.

  ‘Sylvie’s not my patient,’ I said. ‘She’s my client. Like you said at the meeting, I’m not a therapist.’

  ‘Sylvie and the other residents are under my care,’ said Dr Ferris, ‘and you are in my employment. Any “notes” you make must be entered into the patients’ files after proper cross-signing by a member of the medical team.’

  ‘But how would I get them out again?’

  ‘Why would you want to?’

  I frowned at her. I didn’t try to tell her her job. ‘To check back what products I used or what tint mix had worked or not worked,’ I said. ‘To see when I’d done the last treatment and when it’d fall due again. To be able to tell you all that I’d done to help.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Help what?’

  ‘If you said someone had slept through the night and I’d given them an aromatherapy massage, or if someone was upset and I’d—’

  ‘Told her to cut off all her hair?’ She turned and walked away from me. ‘Ask one of the enrolled nurses to give you the Bible and you can spend the rest of today trying to bring yourself to a better understanding of what goes on here and what the true scope of your role really is.’ She turned back and threw the sketchpad at me, like a Frisbee. Or a Chinese star, maybe. Unfortunately for her mood, I caught it. ‘After you clean the hair from Julia’s room. I need to go and make a written report to deliver to her parents about the incident.’

  ‘Her parents?’ I said. ‘Did her dad come back then?’

  ‘Be very careful,’ Dr Ferris said.

  As I watched her walk away, her perfectly cut trousers winking at the knee with each stride, the hems lifting to show the polished tips of her heels and the pale leather of her insteps then falling free again, I said to myself, ‘If I start being very careful, that’ll make one of us, Missus. Because you are all over the place. What the hell – what, as Julia would say, the actual fuck – is going on here?’

  Chapter 12

  The ‘Bible’ was four ring binders of Care Scotland protocols, NHS guidelines, Best Practice reports from NICE, Howell Hall house rules and leaflet after leaflet tucked into plastic sleeves about everything from alcohol-abuse warning signs to dealing with dementia. Between the bleeding obvious that an alien landing from Mars wouldn’t need to be told and the total codswallop that nobody – not even the pen-pusher who wrote it – could explain if their life depended on it, it made for a long day.

  Lars brought me a cup of tea and a huge cupcake halfway through the afternoon. ‘It’s the anniversary of Hinny’s divorce,’ he said. ‘She always pushes the boat out.’

  ‘Tell me what’s going on out there in the real world,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’ve been stuck in here for a week.’

  ‘This is for telling Julia to cut her hair, is it?’

  I didn’t think so. I was pretty sure this was for whatever rule Dr Ferris reckoned I’d broken by writing ‘Sylvie’ on a piece of paper with a square and two lines drawn on it in marker pen. But I didn’t want to say that. Not even to Lars. I wanted to take it home and google the life out of it first.

  So I shrugged. ‘For one,’ I said, ‘I didn’t tell her to cut her hair. I suggested she get a haircut. And for two she liked it. She bloody liked it until Fanny Ice Arse came. Then she created blue murder.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ he said, but everyone had told me so much I had no idea what he meant. I shrugged again. ‘Watch out for the personality disorders. Julia’s very sick. She’ll manipulate you any way she can. Of course, she pretended she hated her hair and made out you’d traumatized her.’

  ‘She was fine,’ I said, ‘when I was doing it. She was absolutely fine.’

  ‘Of course she was,’ said Lars. ‘She had all your attention, all your focus. She’d have loved it.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ I began, and managed to stop myself. He was a psychiatric nurse and I’d blagged my way into this job. If he thought it was a sign of illness to want a bit of pampering, I shouldn’t argue.

  ‘And as for what’s going on out in the world,’ he said. ‘There’s another update from the pathologist. We know he’s not a vagrant because he’d had about a million pounds’ worth of dentistry done just before he died. Hadn’t even finished it. He still had a temporary crown on one side.’ He gave a huge grin, showing off the empty gums where his molars should have been.

  I could feel my colour rising, flustered as I was by his lack of discomfort. I changed the subject before he could ask me what was wrong. ‘Can I ask your advice about something?’ He nodded and I plunged on: ‘My kid, my son. He’s fifteen and he’s had a bit of a knock. Some girl asked him out, then sent all her friends along to laugh when he turned up for the date.’ Lars whistled. ‘He’s taking it really badly.’

  ‘First ever rejection?’ said Lars. ‘And no Morrissey to help like I had.’ I laughed. ‘It is his first ever rejection, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’re still married to his dad, eh? No losses?’

  ‘Grandparents,’ I said. I blurted it out so hard that Lars cocked his head, interested.

  ‘Recent?’ he said. ‘Sorry, if it was one of yours.’

  ‘Oh, no, it was ten years ago,’ I said. ‘But it was complicated. That’s all.’ I took a breath and tried to get hold of the conversation again, tried to steer it away. ‘And he was pretty low anyway yesterday.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He had his phone stolen and it was the one that was used to call the cops about the body.’

  It was out before I’d decided to say it.

  Lars had been nodding along, but it took a couple of blinks for him to take that in.

  ‘This is just between you and me, right?’ I said. ‘Except I’m surprised you haven’t had it from your pal already. Whatsisname.’

  ‘Boney,’ said Lars. ‘What makes you think it was stolen?’

  I thought back over everything and couldn’t remember who had said that or why we’d thought it.

  ‘Because you live there, right?’ Lars went on. ‘Across the road? Does your son ever go to the abbey? Because it said on the news it was a hang-out.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘What? Oh, come off it, Ali! I’m not saying anything about your boy! Just that, if you live there and he goes there, maybe he dropped it. And if someone was over there and saw something suspicious and spotted a phone just lying . . . Well, of course they’d want to use the lost phone and keep it anonymous. Wouldn’t you?’

  Relief rushed in and filled me until I felt I might start floating. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Oh, my God, you’ve no idea the nightmares I’ve been having. I thought he was lying about it being lost. I thought he was lying to the police and he knew something about the bones.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  I stared at him. Because he looked at the police lights that night and said, ‘I’d just about given up, as it goes.’ But I didn’t say it. And I didn’t even say, ‘Because he’s too upset for it to be a stand-up from a girl he hardly knew,’ either. What I did say – changing the subject again – was ‘Something suspicious? Like what?’

  ‘Bones breaking the surface when the flood went down,’ Lars said. ‘That’s the obvious thing. You’re right, though. Nobody’s ever said it. We’ve no idea how the person who made the call knew the body was there, have we?’

  ‘Kind of gets in the way of saying they found Angel’s phone lying there and grabbed it,’ I said.

  ‘Angel’s your boy?’ said Lars.

  ‘Angelo.’

  ‘Unless . . .’ He looked at his watch
and started. ‘Bugger it, I’m late.’

  ‘Unless what?’ I asked him.

  ‘Unless it was the killer,’ he said. ‘Unless the killer’s been visiting the grave all the time the bones were in there, knowing he’d have to report them sometime, and then he sees a phone and thinks it’s a sign. TTFN, Ali.’

  And he was gone, just leaving me with it. A killer coming to gloat over the site of his crime. Bones breaking the surface. Angelo over there all those nights on his own.

  ‘How you feeling?’ I asked, as I edged round his bedroom door.

  ‘Shit, thanks. You?’ he said, from under his duvet.

  The room was beyond stale. It was foetid. My fingers itched to open the window. I sat down on the end of his bed and he snatched his feet away as if the touch of my hip had burned them. ‘What have you got planned for the weekend?’ I said.

  ‘Skiing,’ Angelo muttered. ‘Surfing. Scuba-diving. Might go to the opera.’

  ‘You’re a cheeky wee toerag,’ I said, grabbing an ankle through the bedclothes and squeezing it. ‘Do you want us to take you to get a new phone or will I just give you cash and you go yourself?’

  ‘I don’t need a phone,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no one I want to talk to.’

  ‘Now, look, Angel,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry you got hurt. I’d like to track her down and tan her arse for her, if you’d tell me her name.’

  ‘Her arse is tanned already,’ Angelo said. ‘She’s got a sunbed.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ I said. ‘That sounds more like you. And I’m going to choose to think that was a guess, by the way, and you’ve never seen her arse.’ But I made a note to tell Marco to buy some condoms and hand them over. ‘I’m not here to talk about that, anyway. I want to talk about the abbey. The times you were over at the abbey.’