The Weight of Angels

by Catriona McPherson

  Julia shot to her feet and screamed, a long, whistling scream of pure terror. Sylvie bent her head and drew her knees up, curling herself into a tiny ball under her covers.

  ‘You!’ Julia said, sticking a finger into my face close enough to make me draw back. ‘Leave me alone. Don’t you dare mess with me any more or I’ll fucking kill you. I’ll stick a knife in your belly and fucking kill you.’ She slammed out of the room, taking a swipe at a little side table as she went and sending it flying, scattering a bowl of potpourri and smashing a glass lamp-base into tiny shards on the pale carpet.

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t go to comfort Sylvie, or follow Julia to stop her harming herself or anyone else who might get in her way. I was turned to stone. I was still just standing there when Lars put his head round the door, his eyes like saucers, and found me. ‘What the fudge, Ali?’ he said. He hurried over to Sylvie’s bed and laid a hand on the highest point of the quivering mound under the covers. ‘Ssh-ssh,’ he said. Then he looked back over at me. ‘Seriously, what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I can’t explain it.’ But at last the spell that had locked my knees and glued my feet to the floor was fading and I went over and folded the covers back from Sylvie’s head, stroked her hair and kissed her brow.

  She took a deep breath in, her bottom lip wuthering twice against her teeth as she sucked the air, then shifted onto her back, pushing her legs down the bed, and turned to look at Lars. She smiled at him.

  Lars’s eyes fell wide and his mouth dropped open. ‘Hel-lo!’ he said. He glanced up at me, then back at Sylvie, a grin spreading over his face. ‘Sylvie, I’m Lars. We’ve not exactly met.’

  ‘La-la,’ Sylvie breathed, touching the tip of her tongue very precisely to her teeth. She rolled her head on the pillow until her eyes met mine. ‘La-li,’ she said, with the same two careful flicks of movement.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Lars. ‘We need to get the doc in here to see this.’

  ‘No,’ I blurted.

  Lars frowned and turned his head to one side, as if he could see me clearer from the corner of his eye or as if he was maybe listening to something only he could hear. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.

  ‘I have no clue,’ I told him. ‘Yet. So let’s just keep this to ourselves until I get one.’

  I’m not sure if he would ever have agreed to it if it was only me but he couldn’t argue with both of us, and Sylvie was right behind me. She rolled her head again, fixed Lars with the clearest look I had ever seen on her face and said, ‘Ssh.’

  Chapter 20

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said to Lars, when we were out of Sylvie’s room. He glanced at his watch but nodded. ‘How easy would it be for a patient to fool you?’

  ‘Make out they’re better and get out?’ he said. ‘It happens. If someone’s sectioned in, but they’re determined, they can give us all the right answers and get home again.’

  ‘I meant the other way, actually,’ I said. ‘Malingering, I suppose you’d say.’

  ‘Even easier,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t happen so much here where somebody’s got to pay a bill. But it’s part of the game in the NHS. In for five weeks and six days, touch and go, then miraculously better on day seven when the benefits dry up. You get used to it.’

  ‘But you’d know what they’re at,’ I said. ‘What I’m asking is, can people really make you believe they’re seriously ill if they’re not? If they’re just maybe hiding out here. Or they’ve got some reason they want to be here.’

  ‘Are we talking about Sylvie?’ Lars said. ‘No. No one could keep that up for fifteen years.’

  ‘Not Sylvie,’ I said. ‘Julia.’

  Lars considered it before he answered. Then he shook his head. ‘Naw. She’s a troubled wee soul. The diagnosis might change depending on where she is in her mood-cycle, but there’s no chance she’s having us on. Why would she?’ He glanced at his watch again and started walking, speaking over his shoulder: ‘Sorry, Ali. I’ve got to run. Catch you later, eh?’

  I walked out the front door and across the grass to the gazebo. I should be working. I should be wrapping Posy in seaweed or threading Jo’s eyebrows up into cheerful arches, see if I could lift her depression face-first.

  And I would. If I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong in twenty minutes sitting thinking, I would let it go for good. I was practised at that, after all.

  But first I’d let it rip. What were my worst fears whispering to me? I was there as a stooge. I was going to be planted there one night shift to take the blame for something, my faked credentials and my medical history all doing their bit to bring me down. As I tramped over the wet grass, my work shoes squeaking and squelching, I tried to throw my mind back over everything that had happened, every word and look, to see if there were any clues about what that something might be.

  Julia. What else, if not Julia? The job advert went out not long after she arrived there. And we’d been thrown together from my first day. And Lars hadn’t answered the question I’d asked him. I wanted to know how someone could fool the staff and he’d come back with ‘Why would she?’.

  But if Julia was in here on the trail of something she knew – that same something I almost knew if I half shut my eyes and half turned away – then the why was answered and only the how remained.

  I had reached the gazebo. Its inside was littered with cigarette ends and it stank of pee in a way it hadn’t the day before. Had one of the boys, caught short, saved himself a trip? Had Julia squatted here, too lazy to go back to the house? I turned and looked back. The French window in Dr Ferris’s office overlooked this bit of the garden, but her desk faced the other way. In fact, I could see the back of her head as she sat there now. She’d have to stand up and walk to the glass to see me.

  Still, and despite the reek, I went inside and sat down right at the back, in the shadows, on the wooden bench that lined the wall.

  Dr Ferris had employed me. If something rotten was going on at Howell Hall, some corruption or abuse of power, fiddling the council or bilking the parents, she knew about it. Her own husband said she was the businesswoman, and all he wanted to do was help patients get well.

  Dr Ferris wouldn’t wonder ‘why’ Julia had got herself committed, not if she was hiding something. So Dr Ferris might be able to see through the act: the shouting and swearing, the shopping, the tantrums, even the chopping off of all that frizzy hair. Maybe she’d met Mrs Swain in Tesco that night to try to persuade her to take Julia away. Did that make any sense, I asked myself. Honestly? I didn’t think so. Why wouldn’t Dr Ferris just call Mrs Swain, or email her, or even ask both parents to come in for a meeting?

  I tried to think it through. Maybe Dr F wouldn’t let Mrs Swain come to the hall so soon after Julia had been admitted in case seeing her mother got in the way of her official treatment plan. I knew that was the sort of thing places like this went in for. Like a cult. Certainly, if Dr F believed Julia was really ill, he wouldn’t approve of his wife trying to get Mrs Swain to take the girl home.

  But if Julia really was here to spy on the Ferrises and Dr Ferris knew that, she’d have to find a way to deal with the girl. Finally, I saw a glimmer of a reason for me being employed there. Dr Ferris was going to accuse Julia of doing something so dreadful that the hall couldn’t keep her. Something dreadful that needed a patsy, although I didn’t understand why the patsy couldn’t be Belle or Surraya or one of the others.

  Until suddenly I could. They were valuable members of the team. The hospital couldn’t function without its nurses. I was expendable. If something happened when a beauty therapist was taking a turn of the night shift, and it came out after that she’d lied her way into the job, everyone would blame her – blame me! – and once the hospital had got rid of them both, the framed patient and the disgraced staff member, Howell Hall would carry on the same as ever.

  If this was real, I needed to warn Mrs Swain that Julia was in trouble, maybe even in danger, try to p
ersuade her to get the girl away.

  If it was real. And how could I warn her when I didn’t know what the trouble or the danger actually was? What was the rottenness at the heart of Howell Hall? What was the secret Julia had got herself in here to ferret out?

  I went as far inside my head as I could get and found . . . nothing. I had to let this go.

  So. A bench. Except the park I sat in when I was pregnant with her was Angelo’s park. The swings had plastic beads set into the safety rails that he used to spin round endlessly with one cold little pink finger, his mitten pulled off and held bunched in his other hand. He didn’t want me to push him. More than that, he would wail and wave me away if I tried to push him, the movement spoiling his concentration on the fascinating little beads as he spun them and spun them. Once or twice, I even felt a shift of unease in me. This was how autism started: obsessively repeated behaviours, unnatural focus and a pulling away from others. But he was always happy enough to come away when I said it was tea-time, taking my hand and chatting to me about how much he loved sausages and where Daddy was and why trees stopped holding on to leaves.

  If not Angel’s park, how about the hospital? People sometimes donated couches to the antenatal-clinic waiting room, or the neonatal-unit family room, but no one wanted a memorial to a baby in there. I wouldn’t have wanted to sit on a dead baby’s couch when it was my time.

  Anyway, first we’d have to have a name to put on the brass plaque of the bench or embroider on scatter cushions for the couch. I lifted my head and looked through the fretted-wood lintel above the gazebo door at the grey sky and the bare branches. Skye. Leaf. Pearl. Dawn. I began to understand what Dr Ferris had said about ‘Angel’. But I kept thinking ‘Sylvie’. It was perfect for her. She was a sylph, only ever seen as a silvery fish on the early scans before she slipped away. Sylvie, over there in her room, with her unmoving bookmark in her Maya Angelou, was another one. Silvery and slipping away. I wondered if Julia called her Sissy just to be mean, or to pay Sylvie back for ‘Juju’. But then she was used to Juju. That was what Mona called her too.

  Mona! Whose daughter knew it was real, no matter what I was telling myself, sitting here trying to name a child who’d never been and picking out imaginary furniture I knew I’d never buy.

  I’d never buy it because Marco would never agree.

  The memories of our whispered words that night in the side-ward were burned into me. I’d been taken away from all the other mums, and I didn’t know why. Maybe my stark face and empty arms would frighten them, or maybe their sleepy smiles and milky warmth would send me raving. Whatever. I was in a side-ward, curtains closed across the glass front wall and lights dim. Marco had taken away the flowers I’d brought in with me. The girls at work had bought them for me, a huge burst of orange and red gerbera, freesia and gladioli, like a firework going off, and a balloon bobbing above them – You can do it!

  Afterwards, when I opened my eyes, shuffled to the toilet, brushed my teeth, shuffled back, choked down a cup of weak tea and finally looked around, there were no cards, no teddies, no ribboned parcels of tiny dresses.

  The nurses just outside at their station were speaking in low voices at first, no laughter. But by the end of the night they were back to normal, clucking and cooing at the other babies and giggling about what one of the dads had done. But by that time I was dressed and sitting on the side of the bed. I just needed the doctor to sign off on me and I was ready to go.

  ‘I know we can’t take her home,’ I said to Marco. ‘I get that. I really do.’

  ‘Take . . . home?’

  ‘But I want to hold her. Just once.’

  ‘Ali.’

  ‘Or even just see her. I want to see her face.’

  ‘Face?’ Marco said, so sharply that the nurses’ conversation outside dipped a little. ‘Ali, I thought you were awake when they told you. Didn’t you hear what they said?’

  ‘Anencephaly,’ I said. ‘I heard.’

  ‘So why . . .?’ he said. His voice was gravelly with exhaustion, his face grey-yellow under long stubble and his breath sour from a night of coffee out of the machine. ‘You can’t see a face, Ally-pal. There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘I keep thinking I can hear her crying,’ I said. ‘I hear her calling for me.’

  ‘We need to get you out of here,’ Marco said. ‘They’ve given you the furthest-away room but of course you can still hear them. You need to come home.’

  But it wasn’t the other babies I could hear. I mean, of course I heard them: their reedy voices lifted high in hunger or grunting rustily as the fumbling new mums tried to get them dressed and comfy. But I could hear something else besides. All the way home from the hospital I kept straining to see if I could still hear it over the stretching miles and then I slumped into the emptiness when I was finally sure it was gone. That first night when I heard her in my dreams, ‘Mmmhmmm’, I felt no fear at all, only a wash of pure relief that she was still with me.

  It was the six months in the day-clinic, three days a week, that turned her voice into a problem, a symptom, something to be recovered from. I went in furred over with sleeplessness and loss and there, in group, in class, in session, I killed her all over again. I unpeeled her gripping fingers from around my heart and brushed her off me. I left her there and walked away without a backward glance, all the way to Australia and the perfect silence of being far too far away for her to find me.

  After that, any time I heard her voice my pulse rattled like dice in a cup and my mouth flooded bitter. If your head hurts, you take an aspirin. If your leg’s broken you put a cast on. If your dead daughter calls your name, you ignore her.

  If, on the other hand, someone else’s daughter, eighteen years old, is in the kind of trouble I suspected Julia was in, you pay attention. But was she? Or was it all smoke and shadows?

  I squeezed my eyes tight, then lifted my head to look out, past the fretted woodwork of the gazebo this time, all the way to the far trees, trying to clear my brain. As I gazed out over the gardens, starting to feel my certainty drain away, getting the first whiff of the foolishness coming along at its back, I saw a sudden movement.

  Dr Ferris was standing at the French window looking out into the garden. I thought she had a hand clapped to her head in a parody of shock or outrage but when I saw her lips move, then saw her throw her head back and shake her hair, I knew she was on the phone to someone. And I knew it was someone who made her happy. She was laughing and, with her free hand, she smoothed the front of her throat and let one finger catch on the string of pearls at her collarbone. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought she was flirting. At least I could be sure she couldn’t see me sitting there in the shadows: she would never have carried on that way if she knew someone, the likes of me, was watching.

  After another minute she hung up but kept her eyes on her phone and her thumbs busy. She lifted it to her ear. And gazed out. She seemed to be looking right at me when my phone started vibrating in my pocket. My fingers felt numb as I plucked it out and swiped the call to life.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Alison,’ came Dr Ferris’s voice, clipped and sure, down the line. I watched her turn away from the window and heard through the phone the woodpecker pock-pock-pock of her heels on the floor as she paced while she was speaking. ‘I think we talked about this but I didn’t expect to have to call on you quite so soon. Would it be at all possible for you to take a night shift tonight?’

  ‘Tonight?’ I said. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘Of course not.’ To ask her on what planet a woman with a family can do an overnight away from home at the drop of a hat, but I managed to stop in time. ‘What exactly would I have to do?’ I said.

  ‘Sleep in Sylvie’s room with her,’ Dr Ferris said.

  ‘Sylvie?’ I knew it had come out as a squawk.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ she said. She was back at the window again. ‘We always have someone sleep in Sylvie’s room. You haven’t been paying attention at shif
t change, have you?’

  ‘I thought the night shift stayed awake.’ I had been paying attention at shift change, taking notes even. This was pure fantasy.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dr Ferris. ‘The night shift has three awake and one on call. The one on call sleeps in Sylvie’s room.’

  She sounded so sure that she almost had me believing her. If I hadn’t been able to see her I might have swallowed it whole. As it was, I saw her take the phone away from her ear and stare at it, annoyed to have a pawn in her game not simply agree to go where she placed it.

  ‘Well?’ she said, putting the phone back.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll need to slip home and get some things, but yes. Okay. Who should I ask what to do? Lars?’

  ‘No!’ It was slightly too loud. ‘Come to my office. I’m busy just now but I’ll be there all afternoon. Come before eight o’clock and I’ll go over things with you.’

  ‘Right-oh,’ I said. ‘And it’s double-time, right? Even though I’m just on call and not actually working?’

  ‘Yes, yes, good grief,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you this evening.’ The line went dead and I saw her go back to worrying over her phone with her thumbs again. There was another short phone call to the same person as before. At least, I would have put money on it, because she laughed and stroked her throat again. But I wasn’t really watching closely now.

  Sylvie.

  Not Julia. Sylvie.

  Or not just Julia, but Sylvie too.

  And it made sense. After all, it was Sylvie that Dr Ferris took me to see that very first day. It was Sylvie looking at me, making contact with me, that had unsettled her so. It was the thought of Sylvie drawing the Mercat Cross that rattled her. And then me taking Julia and Sylvie out together had enraged her. As it would if, somehow, I was scuppering some carefully laid plan.

  What careful plan? I asked myself, as I sat there.

  There was only one thing I could think of that would get rid of Julia, involved Sylvie and could be laid at my door. I couldn’t even let myself think it, though. And I had to stop it.