The Weight of Angels

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Alison,’ said Dr Ferris, speaking low and cold as she grasped the handles of Sylvie’s wheelchair, ‘that is extremely unprofessional language to use to a client.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Julia said.

  But Dr Ferris ignored her. ‘And Sylvie’s care is not your concern, beyond the cosmetic and aesthetic matters you were employed to cater to.’

  ‘I was catering to them,’ I said. ‘Fresh air is essential to good skin. I was absolutely—’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to—’

  ‘And, anyway,’ I went on, ‘it’s working. Julia took her for a hurl and made her smile. And look!’

  I held out the notepad to show her Sylvie’s drawing but she didn’t so much as glance at it.

  ‘Julia took her?’ she repeated, voice even colder. ‘Are you suggesting that you left one vulnerable patient in the charge of another, unsupervised, patient? A patient still under initial assessment?’

  ‘Standing. Right. Here,’ Julia said. ‘And look at what she’s showing you, at least.’

  Dr Ferris did flick a glance at the notepad then. Then she stared at Sylvie. She had grown very still and her heels were sinking further into the wet ground the longer she stood there so that she looked as if she was deflating. ‘Are you trying to tell me that Sylvie . . . made those marks?’

  ‘She was trying to draw a house, a tree and a person,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she’s as far gone as you thought, actually.’

  ‘And you – you guided her hand?’ said Dr Ferris. ‘To – to make those marks?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She did it herself.’

  Dr Ferris held out her hand for the pad and I gave it to her. ‘It’s not helpful to concoct fanciful interpretations,’ she said. ‘And this would be Ryan’s, would it?’

  Julia went to stand beside her and look over her shoulder, giving a thunderclap of a laugh – ‘Ha!’ – at the drawing. Dr Ferris snapped the top sheet back over.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Julia, staring at the paper and then at me. ‘You’re right, though. It’s not fanciful at all. The square’s a house and the line’s a tree, right? That is spooky. That is seriously creepy.’

  ‘My office, ten minutes.’ Dr Ferris folded the whole pad in half, cracking the cardboard backing, then put it under her arm like a soldier’s baton. She tugged her feet free, kicked the brake off Sylvie’s chair and struggled off across the grass with her, sinking and shoving, so grimly set on getting away from me that I don’t think she even noticed one of Sylvie’s hands creeping out of the folds of the shawl and wagging gently at her side, as if she was saying goodbye.

  ‘So . . . why’s she so pissed off?’ Julia said. ‘Isn’t it good news if Whatshername’s better? And why the hell shouldn’t I be allowed to hang out with her? Everyone else gets together and plays ping-pong if they feel like it. What makes me so toxic?’

  ‘Apart from nearly bouncing a frail woman out of her wheelchair onto wet grass?’ I said.

  ‘She’s less frail now than she was at breakfast. Like you said. So why isn’t Dr Frosty glad of it?’

  I shrugged and it turned into a huge shudder that left my teeth chattering. Without speaking, we started across the grass towards the house again. When we were halfway there, Julia heaved a huge sigh. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘It’s Monday, isn’t it? I tell you what, Ali, I’ll swap you. I’ll go to get bollocked by the ice queen and you can go to my one-on-one with Gummy Boy and think up something new to shock him with.’

  ‘Gummy Boy?’

  Julia stretched her lips over her teeth and mugged. ‘Lars. He creeps me out. I want to ask him what’s going on. Same with that whale Bella. What a fucking cheek they’ve got letting her talk to the skinny minnies about body image. But Gummy Lars is worse. Hey, listen! I don’t suppose you know what tats he’s got under those stretchy bandages, do you?’

  ‘Belle,’ I said. ‘Not Bella. What do you mean, “think up something new to shock him”?’

  ‘Go on. Ask him to show you and then you tell me. I’m dying to know, but when I made a grab for him and tried to rip one off he was too quick for me. He had my arms pinned and the help bell going off before I could blink.’

  I nodded, remembering my own run-in with him on the range that morning. As another bout of gunfire split the air, I found myself wondering what Mona Swain was playing at, and asking myself what sort of mother would send her daughter here. With the Ferrises, and all the staff taken on after they’d been fired from somewhere else. I’d never let Angelo within ten miles of it even if he peed himself every night for a year, killed all the wildlife in the county – and what else was it?

  ‘Why don’t you tell Lars the truth instead of making up stories to shock him?’ I said. ‘He might be able to help you.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Julia. ‘I can’t remember the truth. I can’t remember anything. But I know it’s real. It happened even if nobody will admit it.’

  ‘Any of what? Who won’t?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she bellowed. Then she shook a cigarette out of the packet and lit it with shaking fingers. ‘So here I am, trying to find out.’

  ‘By talking crap to the people trying to help you?’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ she said. ‘I’m not exploring my inner turmoil. Jesus! I’m here. Back in the ancestral pile my bloody parents offloaded to the docs, because I’m trying to find out what the fuck’s going on. Because here is where it’s happening. Whatever it is.’

  I stopped walking and stared at her. After a few paces, she realized I’d fallen behind and turned to scowl at me. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Or are you farting? Waft it away, will you?’

  ‘You’ve fooled them all,’ I said. ‘You haven’t got any kind of personality disorder, have you?’ She opened her eyes very wide. Marion had said it and so had Lars. Dr F had touched on it too. The pain under the fairytales was real. ‘You’re as sane as I am, aren’t you?’

  She regarded me for a long slug of dead time before she spoke again. ‘As sane as you are? Oh, Ali, how much does that say?’

  Chapter 16

  I stretched the ten minutes as far as I dared, taking the time to check in with Angelo, via Marco.

  ‘Fine, Mum. Jeez!’ was all I could get out of him and it soothed me. He sounded back to his old self. I could almost hear his eyes rolling.

  ‘Dad’ll pick you up after school, if you like,’ I said. ‘Spare you the bus.’

  ‘I’m not going in,’ Angelo said. ‘Dad’s dropping me at home.’

  I wanted to argue but I was ten paces from Dr Ferris’s office door so I just told him I loved him and he should text me what he wanted for tea. Then I put the phone away, smoothed my hair back into a tighter ponytail and squared my shoulders.

  I had my hand back to rap on the door when I heard their voices.

  ‘. . . absolutely adequate to the requirements,’ Dr Ferris was saying.

  ‘We should have had a shortlist and interviewed candidates together, Tam,’ her husband said, in the same kind voice he had used talking to me. I put my head closer to the door and held my breath.

  ‘For God’s sake, she’s washing their faces and letting them paint pretty pictures! It’s not worth all this.’

  ‘That’s my point,’ Dr F said. ‘We could have had a nutritionist, another physio, a drama therapist. If we really wanted to make this level of investment in para-therapies, we—’

  ‘There’s another consideration,’ said Dr Ferris.

  ‘Isn’t there always? What are you up to this time?’

  I heard a chair move and the unmistakable sound of Dr Ferris’s heels on the parquet. She was pacing. One, two, three, and turn. Back, two, three, and turn. She was literally pacing.

  ‘Oh, you know me,’ she said at last. ‘Protecting our investment, securing our future. The usual donkey work. But by all means you carry on listening to their whining and patting their heads.’

  ‘That’s what makes us such a great team,’ said Dr F. ‘I’ll plod
on doing the work we have to do and you play your games and see what you can cheat your way into this time.’

  The pacing stopped. I put my ear against the wood of the door and only then noticed Hinny, in her kitchen whites, standing at the far end of the corridor watching me. I jerked up and away, cheeks flaming. Hinny flitted towards me and breathed in my ear. ‘Share it if it’s good stuff,’ she whispered, then glided off again, silent in her soft shoes. I cleared my throat, rapped on the door and, at a word from Dr Ferris, sidled in.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said.

  ‘I had to call my kid but I’m here now and I’m ready to learn where I went wrong and make sure not to do it again. I really hope Sylvie didn’t catch a chill.’

  ‘She’s minty.’ Dr Ferris said, her voice biting at the word. She sniffed. ‘As all the kids are saying these days, apparently.’

  She had got so far under my skin I suspected she was using that stupid slang word to prove that she was better at talking to teenagers than me, that she didn’t need to phone her kid, because her kid phoned her. Paranoia. I shook it away. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I really am—’

  ‘My husband is going to deal with you,’ she said, cutting me off and, without another word, she swept out, leaving a ringing silence behind her.

  ‘So,’ I said, after an awkward moment, ‘you’ll have heard that I screwed up, I suppose. I let one patient meet another and I took one outside to do some art with the— Oh, actually, can I have a look at it from this window?’

  ‘Feast your eyes,’ said Dr F. ‘I’ll need to get out there with a rake before this afternoon. Posy’s mum and dad are coming for a visit and family therapy session.’

  Julia’s handiwork was an enormous penis. Of course. It was made of dull yellow sycamore leaves, topped with bright red maple leaves and finished with a little heap of brown birch leaves for pubic hair.

  ‘It’s actually quite well done,’ said Dr F, joining me to look at it. ‘But even saying that to you is sexual harassment so I’ll need to get rid of it.’

  ‘And do you need to get rid of me too?’ I said. ‘I really didn’t mean to let Sylvie get cold.’

  ‘Sylvie?’ said Dr F. ‘You took Sylvie out? With Julia?’

  ‘I thought she needed the fresh air. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, she’s so inactive. We have to be careful. Pneumonia’s a constant concern when someone moves as little as she does.’

  ‘Shouldn’t she move more, then? Sorry.’

  ‘Her case is very complex,’ Dr F said.

  ‘But shouldn’t she be getting physiotherapy or something? In a swimming pool if she’s too wobbly to be on her own two feet. Although, you know, she walked about quite the thing when I was holding her hands. And outside today, she was smiling!’

  ‘We’ve been taking care of Sylvie for a long time,’ Dr F said. ‘You don’t need to worry.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said. ‘Maybe it is a waste of money having me instead of someone else who could—’ I stopped when his eyebrows had risen high enough to be lost in his untidy hair. ‘I might just have caught a bit of what you were saying,’ I admitted.

  ‘Have you heard of transference, Ali?’ said Dr F. I shrugged. ‘Where a patient in therapy imagines a close relationship – a love connection or a family bond – with their therapist?’ I nodded, waiting. ‘And then of course there’s counter-transference, where a professional in a caring role can reflect that imaginary bond and start to project a relationship onto a patient. Typically a patient who offers a way back to unresolved relationships in the therapist’s own past.’ I nodded again, maybe with a bit less certainty now. ‘Sylvie is absent but she is not your mother,’ he said. ‘She is within age-range for it but she is not your sister.’ I nodded very fast. I wanted him to stop talking. ‘And although she is very helpless and very appealing, she is not your child.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, yes. I see that. I get that. Absolutely. Thanks.’ I breathed in deep and managed to stop talking. ‘But I really helped Sylvie. Why would Dr Ferris mind that?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

  ‘She’s not jealous, is she?’ It was a stupid idea, that someone so polished and perfect could be jealous of me.

  Dr Ferris considered me for a long time before he spoke again. ‘Jealousy is not in my wife’s repertoire,’ he said. ‘Look, absolutely off the record, do you really need this job?’

  I answered what lay under the words instead of the words themselves. ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there? You don’t need a beautician for twenty-odd patients and it’s not worth forty-five thou even if you do.’

  ‘Forty-five?’ he said. ‘Look, Ali, it’s easy to think things are calm and you can cope when the nursing staff are on hand in case of trouble. But it takes real training to manage a crisis. Especially at night when staffing levels are reduced.’

  Was he warning me off the night shift I’d agreed to?

  ‘I had better go and rake up Julia’s leaves,’ he said and, without another word, we left together.

  Gales of laughter were gusting out of the staff kitchenette, like sweet puffs of air from a bakery, and I felt myself smiling and walking faster. Surraya was in there with Hinny and Lars today. She was holding a tissue under each eye and crying with laughter.

  ‘Oh, stop!’ she said. ‘Stop it. I’m losing my lenses. My eyes’ll be killing me the rest of the shift if I need to lick them and put them back in.’

  ‘Ali, you’re a wee smasher,’ Lars said. ‘I’ve got it on my phone. Look.’

  I nodded at the photograph of Julia’s leaf collage taken from an upstairs window but I couldn’t laugh.

  ‘Aw, come on!’ Hinny said, slapping a tea mug down in front of me. ‘It’s the best laugh we’ve had here since Rosa went streaking through the dining hall.’

  ‘Rosa who’s dying?’ I said.

  ‘A while back this was,’ Hinny said.

  ‘I’m in big trouble,’ I said. ‘I’ve maybe given Sylvie a chill that might turn into pneumonia and I’ve formed a group without permission and I’ve just had a lecture from Dr F about counter-transference and he’s asked me to think hard about if I really need this job.’

  I was expecting more knee-jerk sympathy but, to my surprise, they exchanged a look, like a snooker ball kissing off three cushions before it disappeared.

  ‘Aye, he gives everyone that warning,’ Lars said at last. ‘He knows her better than she knows herself.’

  ‘I have no idea what you mean,’ I told him.

  ‘Hard to explain,’ Surraya said.

  ‘Dr Ferris trades in loyalties,’ Hinny said. ‘Dr F is just loyal.’

  Lars whistled through his teeth and Surraya gave a short laugh. ‘Coming to something when the cook can say it better than the psychiatric nurses, eh?’ she said. ‘Anyway. Ali, thank you for calming us down. I get red eyes if I cry with my lenses in and that wee bitch Roisin’s wrecked my specs. So thanks, pal.’ She stood, threw her tissues into the bin and clapped her hands. ‘Right. I’m doing the new alkie’s drink diary with him. I’d better get going.’

  ‘And I’ve got three pork shoulders to whack apart for a casserole,’ Hinny said. ‘Bloody local-sourced butcher meat. A catering pack from Reid’s, you just open the plastic and tip it in. None of this Hannibal Lecter shite. You’ll do the cups, eh, no, Lars?’

  ‘I’ll get dishpan hands,’ said Lars, ‘but for you, anything.’

  ‘Tell her about the specs,’ Hinny said, over her shoulder, as she was leaving.

  ‘Surraya’s specs?’ I said. ‘What did Roisin do? She’s one of the . . .?’

  ‘Aye, that’s her.’ Lars stood, peered into my mug, hoping I’d finished, then started washing up the rest. ‘Grabbed them and snapped them. No, though. The specs on the corpse, this is. Ken how they found a bit of one of the leg bits? Still there even though the nose and ear was gone? Like, totally smashed into the skull?’

  I said nothing and he craned over his shoulder t
o see if I was listening. ‘Specs, right,’ I said.

  ‘Armani.’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘It’s on the BBC feed. They released it so fast Boney couldn’t even leak it to me. Designer glasses by Giorgio Armani. No word of a lie.’

  ‘And a Kangol belt and Asda’s own-make jeans?’

  ‘Weird, eh? The polis are saying it’s bound to help narrow it down, get something to run the DNA against. The “intersection of the two sets” is going to be likes of one guy, right?’

  I wondered who he was quoting, but before I could ask him he told me anyway. ‘Lola. My middle one. I asked her how school was going last night and she talked about maths for forty minutes. She gets it from her mum.’

  ‘You must miss them,’ I said. In answer, he did what everyone always does these days. He reached into his tunic pocket and took out his phone, scrolled and passed it over to me. I looked at the picture of the three girls sitting on a stone wall squinting into strong light. One was still chubby, her belly pushing out the skirt of her sundress and the ruched bodice dead flat against her chest. The middle one was long and gangly, one of her thin legs bent up so her knee was by her ear. The oldest was a beauty, burnished skin and tumbling curls. She sat with her littlest sister hugged on her lap, smiling widely. No sulks or pouting.

  ‘They’re gorgeous,’ I said. ‘And they look like good kids too.’

  ‘How about you?’ said Lars. ‘You got any photos?’

  His voice was soft and it made me look up at him. ‘Of my son?’ I said. ‘Only about a million.’

  But he shook his head. ‘Or a footprint maybe? Her handprint?’

  I stared at him and felt my eyes fill, and the tears start to fall. ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no pictures. Because she wasn’t even— I never really—’

  ‘Aye, but she was, wasn’t she?’ Lars said. ‘And you still are.’

  The tears were so hot, I felt them spike as they came up out of me, stinging my cheeks as they fell.

  ‘You need a wee hug?’ Lars said.

  I shook my head hard. ‘How did you know?’