‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, you told me. But what had you said to them? I don’t think you ever told me exactly what everyone said to everyone.’
‘I told you over and over again,’ said Marco. ‘But you were off your head on tranquillizers and painkillers and those sleeping tablets that made you feel so sick. Ali, don’t go back there.’
‘I’m still there!’ I said. ‘I never left. I’m stuck there. I need to pick the scab off and let it heal to a good strong scar instead. So tell me. What did you say?’
‘I told them you needed them, that there was a funeral planned, and asked them when I could pick them up at the airport.’
‘And who were you talking to? My mum or my dad?’
‘Both,’ Marco said. ‘Skype. And they said they were really busy with the builders and it was ridiculous to have a funeral. Mawkish, your mum said, whatever the hell that means.’ It was the kind of word my mum would use right enough. ‘She said to tell you to get back in touch when you were on your feet again and we could all go over and have a break in the sun.’
For a long time I said nothing. It still hurt but, poking at it, I thought maybe it hurt a bit less than before. Maybe it was the kindness of Dr F, his wise words telling me I’d formed my own bonds and made my family. Or maybe it was that his words were true. Angelo needed me to be the mum now.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you’ve convinced me. But I still need to tell Angel.’ He started to speak. ‘I’m not asking you, Marco. This is between Angel and me. I need to tell him and he needs to know. We should have told him years ago.’
‘I’d better go back in,’ was all Marco said. ‘I need to be there if they call him through. And I’ve been on the bloody phone too much already. There’s a big sign telling you to switch them off and I’ve been sitting right under it yakking for the last half-hour.’
‘Bit of an exaggeration.’
‘Not to you, Ali. To work. I’ve got some good news. Just got a call to say I’m going full-time. I’m moving up to supervisor.’
‘That was quick. Did somebody leave?’ I couldn’t quite swallow anyone leaving a job the way things were just now.
‘The harder you hit the bottom, the higher you bounce,’ said Marco. ‘You know me.’ I bit my lip on the answer. I knew that he had killed a family business stone-dead trying to turn it into something it wasn’t, as if Dalbeattie was some southern foodie heaven. And I knew he’d tanked Face Value trying to stay afloat. I knew he watched Dragons’ Den and had an opinion about every nervous hopeful. I had had to stop watching with him, startled by his unkindness and his short memory, not recognizing him.
‘You’ll be the boss by Christmas, eh?’ I said at last. Marco gave an awkward laugh I couldn’t quite decipher. ‘Give Angelo a kiss and tell him to shame the devil,’ I said.
I put the phone in my pocket, then cuddled down into the coat again, smelling his body spray on the lining and marvelling that my baby boy filled these long sleeves, that the flaps I could wrap right round me only just met and zipped up his front.
From habit, I dug my fingers into the corners of the pockets and pulled out all the detritus. No cigarette ends, no Rizla papers, no beer-can ring pulls. Just hard lumps of chewing gum rewrapped in twists of silver paper. That and the usual receipts. I spread one flat and checked it: 88p from after school on the twelfth. A can of Coke on the way to the bus. And another: £1.76 from the same shop, likely for two. I wondered if this was the day of his big date, if he’d treated the girl, like a gentleman. Then I looked at the date again. The fifteenth. And the time was 3:48. That was the day when he had sworn he was in the Loreburne Centre in Dumfries having his phone stolen. How could he have been in the corner shop in Kirkcudbright buying two cans?
I tried Marco’s phone again but it was switched off. Maybe that meant they were already in the interview room. I looked up the number for the police station and tried it but got lost in a warren of options and pre-records. If I called 999, could I ask to speak to them? There must be some way to get in touch before Angelo repeated the lie in a formal statement and signed it.
Then it hit me. Like a meteor. Thinking about how much we’d come to expect that everyone was accessible all the time these days, it hit me. Ten years ago, no one Skyped anyone, did they?
Chapter 15
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I said, cupping her cheek in my hand and lifting her chin so I could look into her eyes. ‘How are you today?’
Sylvie rested her head in the curve of my palm and breathed out. I felt it like the ache in my chest when tears were close. Dr Ferris had been so clear but she was wrong. There was communication in everything Sylvie did, like the way a cat tells you what it thinks if you pay attention. Maybe Dr Ferris was a dog person.
‘We’re going outside,’ I told her. ‘Look.’ I had brought along a wheelchair and a knee blanket that usually sat in the corner of one of the lounges. Jo had looked up from her jigsaw and said, ‘Someone taken a tumble?’
Sylvie stood up with her hands in mine, then sat down in the wheelchair, lifting her eyes in surprise when it rolled a little because, of course, I had forgotten to put the brake on. I tucked the knee blanket over her and threw a shawl round her shoulders too, lifting it up the back of her head so her cloud of colourless hair was mussed into a ruff.
‘Let’s get some colour in those cheeks,’ I said, and started pushing.
Julia was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, swinging her feet and kicking at the rail of an antique chair. She was dressed, booted and coated. She already had an unlit cigarette in her mouth and her Bic lighter in her mittened hand. ‘It’s supposed to be fresh air,’ I told her. She rolled her eyes. ‘Well, at least blow it away from Sylvie.’
Julia frowned at me, then flicked her first glance towards the wheelchair. So self-absorbed, like all youngsters. Even without the diagnosis. ‘You’re bringing Grandma?’
‘She’s thirty.’
‘Why’s she here?’ she insisted, ignoring me.
I ignored her back. Once I’d negotiated the ramp at the side of the front steps, and faced exactly how hard it was to get the chair to roll over the gravel, I had no breath left for chatting. And when we reached the start of the grass it got worse. The tyres made deep ruts and I had to put one hip against the back rest to keep the chair moving at all. If it hadn’t been for the way Sylvie raised her face, letting the breeze blow her hair back, I’d have packed it in.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Julia said. ‘She looks like a dog hanging out the back window of a Transit van. You’d think she’d never been outside before.’
‘Transit. Vans. Don’t. Have back windows,’ I said, finally getting going on a slight down slope. ‘And it probably has been a while since she was outside so don’t spoil it.’
Julia threw her head back and gave a Tarzan roar, beating her chest so hard she must have been leaving bruises. Then she lodged her ciggie in the corner of her mouth and seized one of the handles.
‘Come on, then, Sylvia! Let’s see what this baby can do!’ She started running and when I skidded on the wet grass, she elbowed me aside and grasped the other handle too. Then she was off. Sylvie’s shawl came untucked and flew like a flag behind them, as I stumbled in their wake.
‘Slow down!’ I shouted. ‘Julia, be careful!’
‘She’s hanging on,’ Julia shouted over her shoulder. ‘She’s fine.’ And they were at the gazebo before I caught them. ‘Skid finish!’ Julia yelled, then screeched like the brakes of a racing car and pulled Sylvie hard round to the left so she was facing me.
She was smiling. Clutching the arm-rests hard, she was pink-cheeked and smiling with her mouth open.
‘Jesus, I’m a fat pig,’ Julia said, throwing herself down on one of the steps and hawking hard to spit up the result of running in the cold air with her smoker’s chest. ‘Just as well it’s not Sylvia pushing me.’
‘Sylvie,’ I said. Julia spat again, then turned to face her.
‘Good name for a sylph,’ she said
. ‘I should be called Bertha.’
‘Oh, now!’ I said. ‘Okay, well, what about me, then?’
Julia pretended to take a good long look at me while lighting up and delivered the verdict with a curling smile. ‘Can’t decide between Priscilla and Prudence,’ she said. ‘How can you bear to be such a Goody Two Shoes with your perfect nails and your perfect hair?’
But I was barely listening. I was watching Sylvie. She was smiling again, even wider this time.
‘Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?’ I said. ‘Priscilla? Prudence?’
But that was too much attention to be taken from Julia. She flicked her cigarette into the grass where it fizzled out in the damp tussocks, then lifted herself to the side and farted long and loud. ‘So, what’s the programme?’ she said.
‘Art,’ I told her. ‘Look at all the leaves on the ground. I want you to gather them and write a message on the grass with them.’
‘You’ve got it,’ Julia said. ‘Is douchebag one word or two?’
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘First you need to decide who you’re writing it to and then you need to decide what to say.’
‘Are we even on a flight path?’ said Julia, lying back on the steps and squinting up into the sky. ‘And how is that art, anyway? How’s it not just writing?’
‘Well, make a collage,’ I said. ‘I’m not the boss. I just looked out the window and saw all the leaves.’
‘And what’s Sissy going to do?’ Julia said.
‘Sylvie.’
‘Can I use her in the collage? Lie her on the grass and stick twigs in her?’
‘Do you have family photos on your phone?’ I asked. ‘You could try to copy one of them.’ Was it too obvious? Was it dangerous to make her think about her family when there were no nursing staff anywhere near?
She was scrolling, Sylvie watching her. I wondered if Sylvie had ever seen a smart phone, then thought she must have when her family visited. If her family visited. I laid a hand on her arm, then perched myself on the wheelchair to hold her. ‘Warm enough?’ I said. Again, she settled into me and I snuggled her closer.
But Julia had noticed and leaped up, shoving her phone into my face. ‘Here’s one of my dad,’ she said. ‘Before I beat his head in with a cast-iron frying pan and shovelled up the jelly.’
Sylvie kept watching Julia but I glanced at the photograph, seeing a smiling man I could easily believe was golfing somewhere warm. He wore a pink cashmere jersey and had dazzling teeth in his brown face. It made me think, for a minute, of the man in the abbey grounds, ‘definitely not a vagrant’. But the man in the picture had a Bluetooth in his ear. He hadn’t been dead all those years.
‘And here’s one of my new dad,’ Julia said, flashing me another shot, this time of a middle-aged man in a dinner jacket and black bow-tie, a cigar in his mouth and his face shining with drink and laughter. He was sitting with his back to a wall of glass and the camera flash had bounced and dazzled, so that something about it looked supernatural.
‘And then there’s my first dad.’ A snaggle-toothed man, clearly upper-class, and possibly also drunk. Red-eyed anyway. He was dressed for hunting, hard hat and everything, standing by a loose-box door with a horse nuzzling at him, spreading snot on the red of his jacket. ‘With my dear mother,’ Julia said, and I laughed because, thinking of Mona Swain, it was so nearly true.
Sylvie started at my laughter. As quick as that, she had fallen back into her stupor.
‘So, forget family,’ I said to Julia. ‘Just make a picture.’
‘House-tree-person again?’
‘Anything you fancy,’ I said.
She got to her feet and went off skipping and lurching in a way I didn’t understand until, leaping to one side and stamping hard, she shouted, ‘Bastard worms. Take that, you slimy little fuck!’
‘Don’t stamp on worms,’ I called over to her.
‘Oh, God. Save the Worms! Print me a T-shirt,’ she yelled back. But she had reached the canopy of one of the sycamore trees and bent to start collecting the leaves instead.
‘And how about you, Sylvie?’ I said softly, when I was sure Julia was engrossed. ‘Would you like to try to draw a picture again?’ Sylvie said nothing and didn’t look at me, but her fingers twitched. Maybe they did. I pulled the pad out of my bag and put the thick marker in her hand.
‘Awright?’ The voice made me jump.
It was Ryan. He’d come up over the bank behind us from the lower, wilder area of the grounds and stood staring at me.
‘Aren’t you at Substance Group?’ I said, throwing a glance back towards the house, hoping one of the nurses was passing a window.
‘Got expelled,’ he said. Like Julia, he hawked and spat, but unlike Julia he glanced at Sylvie, then rubbed his spit into the grass.
‘What for?’ I asked him.
‘I’m a disruptive influence,’ he said, the pride unmistakable. ‘I told some lame cunt she was kidding herself.’
‘That is a really horrible way to talk about someone, Ryan,’ I said. ‘But . . . kidding herself how?’
‘She was all up to ninety over a few wee glasses of sherry. She’s got nae record, nae cautions. She’s just giving her mind a treat. Looking for attention.’
‘So she’s in and you’re out?’ I said. ‘Well, you can join us if you like. We’re a right wee bunch of misfits. The more the merrier.’
Ryan gave one scathing look at Julia’s bottom, really quite prominent as she bent double picking up leaves, then threw another glance Sylvie’s way. ‘Who’s this?’ he said.
I knew Julia was new, but if Ryan didn’t know Sylvie either, maybe it had been some time since she’d left her room. I maybe should have checked, I told myself, shifting uncomfortably. But she seemed fine. Better, I’d say.
‘Sylvie,’ I told him. ‘Catatonic but understands everything. So no more C-words, okay?’
‘And what are youse doing? Are you no’ the slap wifie?’
‘Slap and art,’ I said. ‘It’s art today. Autumn leaf collage on the grass or you can draw me a picture. Hey, actually, has anyone ever asked you to draw a house, a tree and a person? It’s something I’m doing with everyone.’
He lit the inevitable cigarette and settled down with a torn-off sheet and a black marker pen, while I tried again with Sylvie.
‘A house,’ I said. She stared ahead and then once again she drew the tiny square in the corner of the paper. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Never mind, then.’
‘Fucken impossible to draw a flat,’ Ryan said. ‘I’ll draw the whole block and then I’ll just put an arrow, right? And a tree, eh?’
Sylvie, as she had before, scored through the square, top to bottom.
‘A tree, yes,’ I said to Ryan.
‘That’ll do,’ he said, viewing his sheet. ‘And a person.’ He turned away to stop me watching. I only had eyes for Sylvie. She drew a slash through the square making a cross. Just as before. Except this time I knew she wasn’t protesting. She was drawing. She was trying to tell me something.
‘Ta-dah!’ Ryan said and held up the sheet. The block of flats and tree were sketched in well enough but the person was a crude depiction of a woman with her legs open and her genitals huge and detailed. He threw it at me, then walked off, laughing.
‘House, tree, person, darling,’ I said to Sylvie, as I tucked Ryan’s effort into the back of the pad.
She did it again. The square. And the two lines.
I put my finger on all three, one after the other. ‘This is a house?’ She didn’t nod or smile but I was sure she was trying to say yes. There was a softening about her. So I checked. I touched the vertical line. ‘This is a person standing in the house?’ And she didn’t frown and she didn’t shake her head but she was saying no to me. She really was. I touched the horizontal line. ‘Is the tree dead?’ I asked her. This time there was nothing.
‘Ta-dah!’ said Julia, just as Ryan had, which should have warned me. She was standing quite close to us and o
n the grass was a dazzling litter of leaves. How had she done so much in such a short time? She blew on her hands, then beamed at me. ‘What do you think?’
I stood up, surprised at how creaky I felt. Then the thought hit me. I touched Sylvie’s hand and it was icy-cold. Her face was pale and the light had changed and the guns had started without me noticing. As I pulled the blanket closer around Sylvie there was a long barrage and then a single louder crack. How long had I been sitting there after Ryan left? Had it happened again?
‘What is it?’ I said to Julia. ‘I can’t tell what it is.’
‘Best viewed from up in the house,’ she told me. ‘Jesus, it’s cold. Dr Deville will have a great view.’
‘Oh, Julia, what is it?’ I said. ‘Do I need to kick it over before she sees?’
But it was too late. Dr Ferris was on her way already. As we watched she let herself out of the French window in her office and came powering across the grass, her spike heels sinking in but not slowing her.
‘Alison, what exactly do you think you’re doing?’ she said, when she was close enough to speak loudly but not have to shout.
‘Art,’ I said. Julia snorted.
‘What’s Sylvie doing out of her room?’
‘A-art?’ I said.
‘Who gave you permission to form a group?’
‘A group?’
‘These two patients are not—’ She bit the words off.
‘Ryan was here too for a bit,’ I said
‘And she’s frozen!’ Dr Ferris exclaimed, reaching us and immediately bundling Sylvie back into her shawl, hands and all. ‘She’s chilled to the bone. How long have you been out here? What were you thinking?’
‘Dr Ferris – the other Dr Ferris – asked me to take care of Julia this morning,’ I said.
‘Oh, I see!’ Julia said. ‘You drew the short straw, did you? You got landed with me? Well, fuck you very much.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ I said. ‘Stop stirring the shit, will you? And I thought Sylvie could do with some fresh air.’
The Weight of Angels Page 18