House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  Suddenly I was exhausted. Whatever she was playing at, I wanted out. Marco would flay me if I just walked away, though. I decided I’d make her get rid of me.

  “I do have one question,” I said, turning back to face her. She gestured me out of the bathroom and I didn’t actually start speaking until we were back in the corridor again, resuming our tour. “I wondered if I could have an advance on my salary. Well, expenses, really, I suppose. To buy some supplies. A couple of hundred should do it.”

  I waited for her to laugh or grab me under one elbow and march me out of there, phone through to the gate to make sure I left the grounds. Instead she answered me in that same smooth tone.

  “Shall we say a round thousand?” she said, stopping with her hand on the fire door. “I can write you a cheque when we get back to my office. Unless you’d prefer cash. For any reason.”

  “Either,” I said, and I was shamed to hear the rasp in my voice. “Cash or cheque. It’s all one to me.”

  “Cash then,” she said, almost purring. “Now then, as you see, here we are in the newer part of our facility.”

  Funnily enough, the wipe-clean area was less creepy than the renovated manor. It was bright and purposeful. An orderly in a green overall was mopping the floor in one of the rooms. And there was a nurse with a big rattling bunch of keys, busy doing what looked like a stock-take of a drugs cupboard. Although I supposed it couldn’t really have been a drugs cupboard since she was on her own, with no one checking. It must be bandages and kidney bowls.

  Best of all, there were patients. Three of the rooms had young men in them, dressed in track bums and t-shirts, lounging on their beds, thumbs busy, their doors locked open with steel clips. They wore the mulish expressions of teenagers who weren’t getting their own way. Maybe their way was heroin or glue instead of new trainers or a later curfew, but they weren’t so different from Angelo, as far as I could see. In fact, looking at the angry rash of acne on one of their faces, I wondered if something Angelo had taken had broken those spots out on his baby face, because he looked exactly like that sometimes—a cue for days of hiding behind a hank of hair and rifling through the skin-treatments bit of my product case then swearing blind he hadn’t.

  I shook the thought away as we headed back through to the carpeted corridor. Bad skin was nothing to do with drugs, and Angelo didn’t even smoke. I sniffed everything he put in the washing basket to be sure.

  We were at the head of the staircase when, corner of my eye, I saw a flash of pink. The woman from the garden flew up the stairs like a bat, swooping right up in front of me to whisper urgently into my face.

  “She’s not a doctor,” she hissed. “Don’t let her operate on you. She’s not a doctor.” She was just a girl, really, aged by her weight and that terrible frizz of hair.

  “And this,” said Dr. Ferris, “is our Julia.”

  “Ten years!” hissed Julia.

  “Julia has been lighting up our lives for ten weeks. This is Alison, Julia. She’s coming to work here and you should be nice to her because she’s got a lot to offer you.”

  “I killed him and they’ll never let me go.”

  She was close enough for me to smell her breath—cigarettes and mints—so I put my hands on her arms, just above the elbows, and moved her back about a foot. I didn’t care if that counted as assault. I was never coming back here and I didn’t want to leave with this maniac’s spit on my face.

  “Nice to meet you, Julia,” I said, not caring if it rang true. “When I’ve got my treatment menu printed out, you could be my first client.”

  “Treatment menu?” she said, not hissing now. Her normal voice was the same as Dr. Ferris’s. Posh Scottish that sounded English except for the Rs. “What the hell kind of quack are you then?”

  “Beautician,” I said. “And art therapist.”

  “You don’t do acrylics, do you?” Julia said, holding one of her hands out in front of her and showing me a set of nails bitten down to the beds. “I’ve wrecked these trying to scrape a tunnel out of my padded cell, haven’t I, Doc?”

  “Why don’t you go and get dressed?” said Dr. Ferris. “Pop that robe in the wash.” She wrinkled her nose and Julia tucked her head down to the side and sniffed at her armpit.

  “Gad, you’re right,” she said. “Ah me! I don’t know whether it’s the meds or the panic attacks, but I am riper than a Stilton rind.” Her voice had changed again. Now she was drawling. “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Alison. I’ll be one of your first customers.”

  She swept past me. She did smell a bit, actually. But it wasn’t the sharp tang of adrenalin. I knew what that smelled like. And it wasn’t the sweetish fug that comes from being marinated in strong drugs either. It was just someone who hadn’t bothered to change her clothes for a few days and needed to wash her greasy hair. I could have helped her, if I’d been coming back.

  “Oh, Alison?” she said, spinning round and lunging towards me again.

  I raised my eyebrows and smiled, managed not to take a step back.

  “When you do a bikini wax,” she said, “tell me you don’t try to work round a pair of knickers like a bashful nun. I really need done, but only if you’ll make a proper job of it. Arse crack to clit hood. Those long arse hairs are a bitch.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again without speaking. With a whoop of delighted laughter, Julia spun back and this time she really did leave. I turned to Dr. Ferris, hating the way my cheeks had stained.

  “What exactly is wrong with her?” I said.

  “Of course, you’ll be brought up to date at your first staff meeting,” Dr. Ferris said, “but as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, we can’t discuss confidential patient information in the communal areas of the house.”

  “God forbid,” I said. “I’d hate to embarrass her.” Dr. Ferris simply shook her head and laughed softly. “We done?” I asked. “I might just get going, actually.”

  Dr. Ferris got a speculative look in her eye. “One more,” she said. “I’d like you to meet Sylvie. Now, Sylvie really has been here for ten years. Well, goodness me, almost fifteen now. This way.”

  I fell behind as she clip-clopped her way along a side hall. I was fully ten paces back when she stopped at a door, knocked lightly, and walked in. She held the door open and beckoned to me.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but the room behind the door was a sort of summer parlour, by the looks of things; halfway to a palm house or orangery or whatever they called conservatories in the old days. Apart from a single bed hidden behind a printed-silk screen, there was nothing to suggest that the woman sitting by the window gazing out wasn’t the lady of the manor, waiting for a maid to bring her tea or help her dress for dinner.

  As I drew closer I saw that she was much younger than I’d thought, younger than me. The hair I thought was white was really just faded and dry, bolls of thistledown behind and wisps as light as cobweb on her brow. Her skin, what little I could see since she was facing away from us, was dry too, pale and crumpled, and she looked as soft as raw dough inside her loose clothes.

  Did she ever move? Her ankles, bare above her bedroom slippers, were purple with oedema and the skin was scaly and sore-looking. The hands that rested bonelessly in her lap, their untrimmed nails curling round like ram’s horns, looked as if they’d been discarded there and forgotten. There was a book sitting facedown on the table beside her—Maya Angelou, with a bookmark tucked into the pages, claiming it was half-read. I didn’t believe it.

  “Sylvie, darling,” said Dr. Ferris. “This is Alison McGovern, a new member of staff. Alison’s going to be joining us and she’ll be helping to look after you.”

  I walked around in front of her armchair and bent down to stroke the woman’s hand.

  “Hello, Sylvie,” I said. She kept her gaze lowered. I could only just see the glint of her eyes through her lashes. But it wasn’t
her eyes that struck me. She was breathing through her mouth and her top lip had dried until it had snagged on one of her teeth and puckered. The tooth was dry too, furred with plaque. I couldn’t help myself. My training took over. I crouched down and rummaged in my bag, finding the little pot of salve I always carried there. I snapped open the cigarette case that Marco had given me for my thirtieth birthday. I never carried cigarettes in it; I’d never smoked in my life. But it was perfect for a few cotton buds. I twirled one in the salve and touched it to her lip, swiping it free of her tooth. I dabbed the salve into the corner where her skin was broken and then I cupped her cheek in my hand, rubbing her temple with my thumb.

  “There,” I said. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

  She took a deep breath, like a baby waking, and looked at me. Her voice made no sound, but her lips moved. “Better,” she breathed.

  As I stood, she followed me upwards with her eyes, moving her head in three creaks.

  “I’ll see you next week,” I said, and I thought I saw the ghost of a smile.

  Then I looked at Dr. Ferris.

  Her face had drained and there was a flicker at the side of her neck where her pulse showed in a soft place between her sinews, like the fontanel of a newborn. By the time I managed to drag my eyes away from it, she was on the move again, padding across the carpet and then clip-clopping on the parquet.

  She had recovered before we got back to her office.

  “You are honoured,” she said. “Sylvie doesn’t make eye contact.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “Hysterical catatonia,” said Dr. Ferris. I nodded, as if I understood what that meant and tried to commit it to memory to look it up when I got home. “She hasn’t spoken a word or interacted in any way with another person—client or team—since she got here.”

  “But,” I said, then I stopped. Probably mouthing echoes of words she’d just heard didn’t count. I’d find out when I looked up … Oh God. I’d forgotten both words already.

  “Now then,” Dr. Ferris went on, briskly. “About that cheque.” She waited but I didn’t bite. “Or no—forgive me—I think we said cash, didn’t we?”

  I like to think it played no part. I would want to believe that I changed my mind about going back because of Sylvie and that whisper of a smile. But it’s hard to deny that ten one-hundred-pound notes in my bag didn’t make a difference as I drove off to the nearest petrol station and planned what easy, tasty junk to have for tea.

  Three

  Back at home, sitting outside in the car, I looked across at the Abbey. A thing I don’t often do.

  When I was ill, before Australia, I met this one girl—Anne, she was called—who was scared of dying. She had found her friend after an overdose and it had got right into her bones like a cancer. She was scared to sleep at night and scared to move in the daytime, in case she died. In case being awake or falling asleep or even just living somehow killed her.

  But every time she felt herself get better, you know what she did? She went to the cemetery to look at her friend’s grave. She was in my group, and I got sick of listening to her after a while. She’d had a bad experience nearly a year back, that much was true, but she wouldn’t help herself. I said so.

  “You’ve got very clear ideas, Ali,” the group leader said one time. And the rest of them just looked at the floor. I never could work out if they agreed with her. But being there wasn’t some kind of new hobby for me, like it was with some of the others. I wanted to get better and get back to normal, and that’s what I did.

  I learned what things to steer clear of and I cracked it in six months. My intake appointment was in July and by Christmas I was off their books again. Back home to Marco and little Angel and we all had the trip of a lifetime to Australia before the start of school.

  That was the beginning of the good times. Marco had turned a small-town chippy into the kind of business he could be proud of and he was sure it would thrive and flourish. Soon he’d be a local celebrity, he told me, pretending he was kidding. I knew he meant it and I knew there was even more that he didn’t say. I knew he looked at telly chefs and then in the mirror. And dreamed and dreamed. I was happy with the salon. I had all the chairs and beds rented out, a receptionist and a shampoo girl, a book of clients that came back every month and used me for their weddings. We bought the house before it was even built and chose every last light switch and doorknob to suit ourselves. Put a pool table in the playroom for Angelo and never minded how many of his pals we ended up feeding.

  How smug we must have seemed to the people around us who were already leading the lives we led now. They were surely there. I just didn’t see them.

  Just like I didn’t see trouble the first time I looked at the Abbey. We came to pretend to make our minds up about the cottage. Truth was, we had no choice. The rent was cheap—mates’ rates from Marco’s pal—and it was out of the town. That was the main thing. So I wouldn’t see Face Value lit up and bustling, somehow doing just fine without me. Marco wouldn’t see the free flyers pile up on the floor behind the glass door of McGovern & Son, lying there empty.

  Of course, as soon as Angelo clapped eyes on the Abbey, he wanted to go exploring and I went with him, big lunk of fourteen though he was. Too many things had gone wrong too fast and I was holding on tight, grabbing any chance of him showing an interest in anything—even this—to see if I could get him talking.

  The grass around the ruin had looked like velvet from a distance, but it was lumpy and uncomfortable to walk on. Fallen masonry, I told myself, but I couldn’t kick the thought that it was coffins, or even bodies with their coffins long rotted away. Angelo read from the information boards. “The Abbey was home to a thriving community of Cistercian monks from its foundation in 1142 until it fell into disuse after the Reformation. When was that, Mum?”

  I shrugged. How many monks in all those years? Too many to be buried side by side. There must be bodies under bodies under bodies, crammed in like a junkyard. And then it was used for sheep. Angelo was reading it out, laughing. “A shelter for sheep and cattle,” he shouted to me. I thought of the rams nudging at the soft earth with their horns. They didn’t de-horn sheep then, did they? Grubbing up bones and …

  But sheep were vegetarians, so my thoughts turned to dogs. A pack of wild dogs, scrapping and snarling over the bleached bones of all those abbots and friars.

  “Mary Queen of—Mum? Are you listening?” Angelo had shouted. “Mary Queen of Scots spent her last night in Scotland sheltering here, before taking a boat across the Solway to seek protection from her cousin Queen Elizabeth.” He made a harsh noise like the horn on a game-show. “Bad move, Mary.”

  I gave him the best grin I could muster. It wasn’t good enough. Not by half.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Absolutely nothing.” I said. And really there was nothing wrong.

  When I was a wee girl, we used to make daisy chains and if we had any left over we’d pinch them in the crook of our pointing fingers with our thumbnails and we’d sing Mary Queen of SCOTS got her HEAD chopped off! And we’d flick and then giggle as the daisy head fell. Harmless. And once in the Museum of Childhood I saw a peepshow of it. The guillotine, the red satin of her dress, and the sacking hood of the executioner. You put in a token and watched the show. The executioner raised his axe in three jerks, the figure in the red satin gown shook. Then the axe fell and the head dropped into the basket, its pale face turned up, its black hair rubbed off where it had hit the basket every time over the years in exactly the same spot. I shoveled in another token and kept watching. I wanted to see how they put it back together. But discs fell over the eyeholes and turned everything black. All I could see was my own eyes reflected there and when the discs lifted, her head was on again.

  I wouldn’t even have said it made much of an impression. But it came back to me. When I was ill. Before we we
nt to Australia. In my memory, those painted bystanders around the back walls of the peepshow were all singing, the jingle as tinny and fake as the axe falling. Mary Queen of SCOTS got her HEAD chopped off!

  Then I learned how to keep away from things. Of course, sometimes it caught me unawares. Those faceless angels. Those bloody ceramic faceless angels. I didn’t see that coming. Pam at the salon collected them. She was a hairdresser and she had one at her chair. Then she had two, then seven, and she got me in the secret Santa and suddenly I had one. I sat it out on the mantelpiece in the lounge and went to bed. Never gave it a thought.

  It was half-past three in the morning when I heard it calling to me. Of course it didn’t have a mouth—didn’t have any features at all—and so it couldn’t really shout. It just sort of moaned, with its clay face stretching and bulging. “Mmmmmm,” it called. “Mmmmhmmm.” I woke up sweating.

  “You mixed wine and cocktails,” Marco had muttered beside me. “You did, didn’t you?’

  I said nothing, just sat there panting.

  “Sit tight and I’ll get you an Alka-Seltzer.” He started to swing his legs out of bed. “You don’t need a bucket, do you?”

  “I’m not drunk,” I said. “I just need a pee.”

  “Sshh! You’ll wake the wee man.”

  I hadn’t even realised I was shouting. I went downstairs and picked up the angel. It was cold and still in my hands. Of course it was, now I was awake. But I threw it in the bin anyway. Felt relief as it shattered. And I turned the other way when I had to pass the growing collection by Pam’s chair.

  Only once more they got me. I was alone in the salon late one night, working on my tax return. I didn’t even know what the noise was at first. I was concentrating hard and the humming might have been the fridge or the heat. Except, of course, I knew the shop’s noises and this was new. It was faint, because they were far away, down on the haircutting floor, but Pam had ten of them by then, so the chorus reached my ears.