House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  “Oh, Sylvie,” I said.

  Sylvie gazed at the ceiling with that same distant look on her face.

  I wrapped her legs in hot towels, dunked in her bathroom sink, and started massaging her feet, gently at first, wondering how she’d be. But even when I traced a finger up and down her instep there was nothing. Not a jerk, not a gasp, not even a twitch, and I knew how strange that was. I’d got good at ducking out of the way of kicks when I went in hard on the soles with my scraper. But Sylvie was like one of the dummies we trained on. So I got my clippers and cracked off a quarter-inch of yellow-grey horn from each toe, cleaned under what was left, and lathered them in cuticle oil while I took a brush to her legs.

  I even shaved them. I’d never shaved someone else’s legs before. I’d never tried to do a pedicure to feet that were up in the air either. But I managed, with a bit of water-spillage and using every towel in my collection and hers. By the time I was smoothing lotion on, long strokes all the way from her toes to her knees, I was sure she was looking better; less purple and certainly warmer. I covered her up with a blanket and went to the head of the table.

  She was asleep. Her breaths were slow and deep and, under her eyelids—thin as silk—her eyes were moving. She must dream like other people, I thought. Did she remember, when she woke up again, that she’d been dreaming?

  I stroked her hair back and we stayed like that for ten minutes, her sleeping and me stroking, until with a small sigh she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

  “There,” I said. “Isn’t that better? Now, I’m going to sit you back in your chair and do your hands.”

  I couldn’t bear to put her smooth feet into her old slippers again, so I chose two pairs of loose socks from her underwear drawer and cosied her into them. I kept checking all the time I did her manicure, and I was almost sure her feet were a better colour.

  Sylvie showed no interest in anything that was happening. Even when I held her hands up in front of her face—her nails now pale ovals and her skin gleaming with lotion—her pupils didn’t shift. She kept gazing straight through to that middle distance she was always watching.

  “Well, then,” I said, laying them down in her lap again. “I better go and get this lot in the laundry system before your next shower, eh?” I jerked my head at the heap of wet towels. “Or you’ll have to shake like a dog. Eh?” I shook her hands in mine, swinging them and then pumping them back and forward as if we were jiving. And it might have been my imagination but I was sure they weren’t quite lifeless in mine. I was almost sure she pushed and pulled a little too.

  “I’ve trashed all Sylvie’s towels giving her a pedicure,” I said, coming into the staff kitchenette and finding Hinny there, as I had the day before. “How does the washing work? Can I run them through or is there somewhere we put them? And where can I get clean ones to go in her bathroom?”

  Hinny looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup and flashed a look of mock horror. I hoped it was mock horror.

  “You’re brave,” she said.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Mucking up Dr. Ferris’s housekeeping routine. She’s got us all told about how much life you can get out of a towel before it goes out for a wash.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking at the bale I was cradling in my arms. “I’ll take these home and do them, maybe. Keep my nose clean, seeing as I’m new. Unless she’d mind me removing hospital property?”

  “She’d mind you saying hospital,” Hinny said. “Are you stopping for a cuppa?” I looked at my watch and nodded. “Mine’s an Earl Grey then,” she added and winked at me.

  “I was sorry to miss the meeting,” I said, once I was settled opposite her. “Actually, I’m feeling a bit at sea all round.”

  “You’ll get there,” she said.

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Since Dalbeattie primary school went to central catering,” Hinny said. “No scope. I was bored shitless after that. At least here I still get to cook.”

  “Are you from Dalbeattie then?” I said, thinking about getting lifts to work.

  Hinny waggled her eyebrows. “Oh aye. I know you, even if you don’t know me. Born and bred I am.”

  I dipped my head and took a drink of tea to get some thinking time. Earl Grey always sickened me a bit with its perfume and I hated how pale it stayed no matter how hard you squeezed the bag. And maybe it was sitting there, in a new place, in a new job, drinking tea I didn’t like that girded me. I could do this right, right from the start, if I just got a bit of courage up this minute.

  “Yep, we were the talk of the town for a bit there, weren’t we?” I said.

  “You know what they called you? In the King’s Arms?”

  “Fur coat and no knickers?” I guessed. “Pair of bloody idiots?”

  “Not the both of you,” said Hinny. “I mean what they called you.” She took a beat. “Tammy Wynette. Get it? Standing by your man?”

  I got it. Before my silence became too odd, Lars appeared with another nurse, green tunicked and looking harassed.

  “Any more hot in the kettle?” Lars said. “Ali, this is Marion. She’s the deputy charge. Usually on back if I’m on days, but, well, you know.”

  If I was going for it, I better really go for it. “Know what?” I said. “You might as well be speaking Klingon.”

  “Are you a Trekkie?” Marion said.

  “Mum with a son,” I told her. “But seriously, know what?”

  “Ohhhhh,” said Lars, swinging back on his seat and giving me a big grin that showed all the gaps around the back of his mouth. “She didn’t tell you, eh?”

  “Of course not,” said Hinny. She put the last bite of her ginger snap down in her saucer and folded her hands. “The expansion of our team to include a para-therapist specialising in personal care and recreational activities is part of the ongoing development of Howell Hall’s services, the next step in the programme of all-round blah bah blah.”

  “They got all fair and satisfactory in their CC assessment,” Lars said. “No goods and no excellents. And the report goes public … when is it, Hin?”

  “End of the month.”

  “So it’s everyone to their battle stations for the next inspection. Which will be unannounced and anytime now.”

  I hoped I didn’t look guilty, but I was sure I did. All those lies and tall tales on my CV.

  “What’s up?” said Marion. She was the kind of nurse I had come to recognise at ten paces. Neat and brisk and no time for nonsense. She was in her fifties and she must have gone into nursing when it was all tidy wards and bed baths.

  “Right enough,” I said. “We didn’t talk about contracts. I thought it was long-term. I didn’t think I was just in to make the place look good for a few weeks and then I’d be out again.”

  “Depends,” said Hinny. “If you attract enough new business.”

  “How the hell would I do that?” I said.

  “Well, Julia’s never off her phone,” said Lars. “I’d keep in good with her.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “Something Dr. Ferris said about Julia. What’s the holy trinity of psychopathy?”

  “Julia’s no psychopath,” said Marion. “She’s been bunged in here so’s she doesn’t disrupt mummy’s bridge club.” Maybe I was wrong about the woman; that sounded like sympathy after all.

  “Oh no, I know what this is,” Lars said. “It was before she was admitted. She peed the bed, set a fire, and killed a squirrel.”

  Hinny laughed through her last mouthful of ginger-snap crumbs. “God, I’d forgotten about that.” Now Marion was laughing too, half at the memory but half at my face, eyes wide and mouth open.

  Lars brought his front chair legs down with a thump. “Let me explain,” he said. “Fire-setting, bedwetting, animal cruelty: the three predictors of psychopathy. Watch any Hollywood film and you�
�ll see. So Julia hit them all. Trouble is, it’s all total bollocks. If she really was psycho, yeah sure, there’d be a shit-ton of signs. But that’s not three of them.”

  “And she wouldn’t dump them when they got boring and go all out for depression instead,” Marion added.

  “Ah, right,” I said. “Got it. Histrionic personality disorder.”

  “With a touch of Munchausen’s sprinkled on top, we reckon,” said Lars. “Her mum just got to the end of her rope. Well, I mean she wears us out some days.” His watch pinged and he choked on the mouthful of tea he was swallowing. “Bugger! Forgot!” he said, standing. He fished his phone out of a back pocket and started thumbing the buttons. “Mid-day news,” he said. “I’m dying to hear if they’ve got an ID. My pal said there was going to be a briefing.”

  “The body in the monastery!” said Hinny. “Disnae sound real, does it?” She stooped to look over Lars’s shoulder, and Marion crowded in at his other side as the familiar music sounded. I sat where I was but I could hear it clearly, the tinny little voice squawking.

  “ … preliminary results from Glasgow University, where forensic pathologists have examined the remains found in the grounds of Dundrennan Abbey. The body is that of a man, aged between twenty and forty, who died at least twelve years ago. There is no surviving identification. The remains are now being transferred to the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification in Dundee for further investigations and missing persons reports from all parts of Scotland and the north of England are being reviewed by Dumfries and Galloway police, who had this to say.”

  The sound feed changed to the hubbub of an outside press conference and Lars clicked his phone.

  “Aw!” said Hinny. “Don’t leave us hanging.”

  “Ex-father-in-law,” Lars said. “I’ve spent enough time listening to that gobshite.”

  “Well, at least we know it was a man,” said Hinny. And then to Lars: “Don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean.”

  Lars was gathering the cups and running hot water into the sink. “Aye, aye,” he said. “It’s not some wee girl that was taken away and kept alive till she gave out. Or somebody’s wife that he beat too hard one night.”

  His words were so bleak that only a silence followed them.

  “Histrionic personality disorder,” I said, when I thought I’d been quiet long enough and wouldn’t sound heartless. “What causes that?”

  The two nurses looked at one another and Marion shrugged. “Same as everything,” she said. “The usual suspects and nobody knows.”

  I waited to see if one of the them would say more. In the end, it was Hinny who explained. “Abuse, neglect, abandonment.”

  “There’s no hard evidence,” said Lars. “But, yeah.”

  “Or is that for borderline and antisocial?” Hinny added, as if she was trying to remember the Latin names for her favourite flower.

  “The boys go bad and the girls go mad,” said Marion, sadly. Then she took a deep breath and shook the thought away. “Bloody hell! How did we get onto this? We were having a nice wee chat about mouldering bones, and now we’re neck deep in shoptalk.”

  “My fault,” I said. “I was just wondering. About Julia’s father, actually. You know how she says she killed her father? I mean, if he was abusing her, who’d blame her?”

  There was a moment of stunned silence in the tea room and then Lars whistled. “Oh my God! Ali, you’ll have to grow a thicker skin than that and pretty fast.”

  “More like a better bullshit detector,” Marion said. She laughed at my face again.

  “Don’t listen to her,” said Lars. He was drying the cups now, screwing the tea towel hard into them and twisting until they squeaked. Maybe it was because he was a nurse, with hygiene hammered into him, like how Marco couldn’t slice a carrot slowly but had to act like a chef every time. “It’s not bullshit,” he went on. “It’s just not … See the thing is, the pain’s real. The terror—it’s all real. And the causes never sound bad enough. So they kind of … sex them up. Dad’s never just an arsehole that sat behind his newspaper and wouldn’t say he was proud of them, ken? He turns into a mixture of Hitler and Hannibal that beat them with a strap and kept them in the cellar.”

  I gave a little laugh even though his words stung. Sometimes life really was as bad as you felt. Sometimes the strap and the cellar were surely true.

  “Ask her to do a house tree person, if you don’t believe me,” Lars said. “Julia, I mean. When are you seeing her?”

  I shrugged. I hadn’t drawn up any kind of schedule at all. Tomorrow after the meeting I’d have to look for the chart they all talked about and try to slot myself into it somewhere. And as for a “house tree person”—I had no idea what he was on about. Again.

  “This afternoon if she’s free,” I said.

  Marion laughed again as she stood. “Oh she’s free,” she said. “She’s got her one-on-one with the doc first thing then she’s free to waft about in that bloody nightie till the sun goes down. Come and I’ll show you where to find her.”

  Julia’s room was one of the best ones in the house, I guessed. Certainly the equal of the empty room Dr. Ferris had displayed at my interview. The window was a square bay, big enough for a chaise, and the ornate mantelpiece had a real oil painting above it. The furniture was white and gold, the chair legs fluted like columns, little swags and urns picked out around the dressing table mirror and on the bed head.

  So it could have been lovely. But the loveliness was hidden under a layer of crap that took my breath away. There were more clothes than I could believe anyone owned lying about on the chairs and strewn on the floor. And there were shoes, some of them still in their boxes with labels attached. And empty boxes too, and thick bags ripped open and invoices screwed up and scattered around.

  “Is this all new?”

  “Not the socks,” said Marion, pointing. Dirty white socks lay all around the edges of the room where they’d been thrown, looking like tennis balls at the end of a long set with no one clearing. “But everything else is. She shops. The gate’s never done ringing to say there’s a van trying to deliver.”

  “Can’t you stop her?”

  “Not my decision,” Marion said grimly. “I’d have her over my knee. But then, I’d have this place bankrupt in a month if I put everyone over my knee that belongs there.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I’ve always believed a little kindness can go a long way, myself, but Marion was in another league. “I wonder where she is,” I settled for. “I’ll just scout about. Track her down. Maybe in the garden?”

  “I’m needing to go and do a flush on the acute side anyway,” Marion said. I didn’t want to know what she meant so I went the other way and then ducked into a staff toilet at the bottom of the stairs, using the swipe card Dr. Ferris had given me.

  I locked myself in and sat on the toilet lid to Google “house tree person.”

  My blood ran cold when the page came up. There was no way I’d keep fooling everyone with this. If I had really done any art therapy, I would have heard of the technique and I’d only been an inch away from asking Lars what he meant and blowing my cover. I skimmed the Wikipedia page and then chose a link at random. Another couple of minutes and I thought I was ready. I slipped out of the bathroom, checking in both directions, and then went to the side door to search for Julia in the garden.

  There she was right enough, back in the gazebo with a cigarette, but she was in a very different mood from that first morning. She’d been crying. She wasn’t a pretty crier. Her nose was swollen and the skin around her eyes was crumpled and pink while the rest of her face looked pale. It was a flash forward to how she’d be at forty, I thought as I approached her. Or thirty if she didn’t stop smoking.

  “Hiya,” I said, sitting down beside her. “I’ve been looking for you. How d’you fancy a facial?”

  Sh
e took a drag of her cigarette then looked first at the glowing tip and next at the bare skin of my arm below my short tunic sleeve. I stood up and took a step away from her. But she just shook her head and gave a weary laugh.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I can’t be arsed.”

  “Good to know,” I told her. “Come on, eh? You can lie down nice and warm with your eyes closed and I’ll give you a lovely facial. Help your wee face recover from all those tears.”

  “Wee face?” she said. “Am I nine?”

  “Just an express—” I began.

  “I don’t have a wee face,” Julia said. “I don’t have a wee anything. I’ve got a face like the arse of a cow and an arse like the arse of another one.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a way with words,” I said, but she only scowled harder.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’m the funny one. Plug-ugly fat arse, but I can make ’em laugh.”

  I wanted to disagree, but the truth was she wasn’t a pretty girl. She was tall and broad, with frizzy hair and a nose that hooked round to meet her chin. Her eyes had lids under them as large as the lids above and she had gaps between all her teeth. She was plain now; when she was an old lady she would be truly ugly.

  “People can be very cruel,” I said, taking a wild guess. She was eighteen years old and I knew how eighteen-year-old girls aspired to look: a sheet of hair, body like a willow wand, that way of gliding around as if they were on runners. I remembered Julia stomping up the stairs with her elbows going and a wave of pity surged up in me. I sat down again.

  “The trick is,” I said, and I felt her go still, “to live inside your body.” She snorted. “I know it sounds like claptrap, but it’s not. Listen.” I leaned back and let my arm rest against hers. That was another thing I learned when I was ill. Sitting and touching, not talking, not looking. They do it in Africa, in one of those tribes where everyone’s happy even though they’ve all got nothing. “So many girls your age live inside other people’s heads looking back at themselves. You need to live inside yourself and look out. Come and lie down and let me relax you and try to see if you can just visit Julia for a while and see what she sees. Bugger the rest of them.”