House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  “Is that a house?” I said. “Can you put a roof on it? A door? How about some windows?” And I held my breath as Sylvie lifted the pen and set it down a quarter inch above the little shape. She pulled the pen down until she had made a slash right through it. Then she lifted the pen and slashed through it again, left to right. She let the pen drop out of her hand and I bent and snatched it up before the ink could bleed into her pale-green carpet.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to nag you. I’m really sorry, sweet girl. Here, let me take that paper away.” I had got it hidden and the pen capped and stowed when Yvonne came back.

  “Hey, look at you!” she said, chucking Sylvie under the chin. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen her in anything but her nightie.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “Bit of a nerve, waltzing in here thinking I know better than folk that’s been here years.”

  Yvonne turned to me with her mouth hanging open. She had a weak chin and small eyes behind her narrow glasses and the expression made her look vacant. She was anything but. “What the hell did you just hear, Ali?” she asked me. “Because what I said was meant to be a compliment.”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  She walked over and put her hand on my arm. “Get your chin up,” she said. “You’ll need it.” It sounded like a threat, but I didn’t want to do it again—hear something that hadn’t been said. “Did Dr. F get a chance to talk to you?” she asked me. She moved her hand down to under my elbow and drew me away, right out of the room.

  “What about?” I said.

  “Standard,” said Yvonne. “New staff get a counselling session. Kind of like a vaccination more than anything. There’s some pretty manipulative individuals in here, you know. The ana-mias can have you tied round yourself if you’re not careful.”

  “Counselling?” I said. “I don’t need counselling. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Just so the doc can see where your sore spots are,” said Yvonne.

  “I don’t have any sore spots,” I said. “And I need to go back to Sylvie’s room. I’ve left my bag in there.”

  Yvonne finally let go of my arm and stopped dragging me. Where was she taking me anyway? Straight to Dr. F’s office to be put under the microscope? “Just as a matter of interest,” she said, “how old were you when it happened?”

  I couldn’t speak. There was no way she could know that anything ever happened to me.

  “Was it your mum or your dad?” she said. “That abandoned you.”

  “It was both,” I said. “But I was in my thirties.”

  “Can’t be that then,” she said. “What is it, Ali? What are you so sorry for?”

  I was never going to answer her, but still the clip-clop of Dr. Ferris approaching filled me with relief. She came round the corner of the dining room corridor and stopped two paces before she bumped into us.

  “At last,” she said. “Yvonne, you should be in group. Alison, you need to go to Julia and see what you can do. I can’t even speak to you yet. I’ll try to calm down and you can come to see me before lunch. Twelve fifteen in my office.”

  “What’s happened?” I said.

  “You and I need to have a long conversation about boundaries,” she said, quietly. “I thought, given your experience, that you could be trusted to work independently, but perhaps it would be more suitable for me to draw up a rota and set some targets for you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—” I said.

  “Go to Julia now,” said Dr. Ferris. “I will talk to you later.”

  I bounded up the stairs with my heart a high, painful lump and my face red with the shame of it. I hadn’t been spoken to that way since I was at school. And if I was so useless and had made Julia worse, I was the last one she should be sending to fix whatever it was. I gave a quick rap on the door and went in.

  “Oh, Jesus!” I said.

  She was sitting on her bed with a pair of scissors in her hand and a lapful of her bushy, orange hair. She had hacked it off in handfuls, all over her head, only missing the odd tuft at the nape of her neck where she couldn’t quite reach. She’d made no attempt to follow the curve of her skull either. Some of it was down to the scalp and some of it was an inch long.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  I didn’t know whether it was tears or laughter burbling up inside me, only that if I let it go, it would come out in hysterical shrieks. “I was right,” I said. “It’s better. You need some blusher, but you’re halfway there.”

  “What the actual fuck are you on about?” Julia said, scrambling to her feet. “This face needs all the camouflage it can get.” She stalked into her bathroom. “Oh! Oh fuck no!” she screamed. “Stupid ugly shit!” I heard a sound I was pretty sure was the scissors hitting the mirror. She had covered her face with both hands by the time I came up behind her and took her in my arms.

  “What have I done?” She was sobbing into my neck. She’d had a bath anyway. She smelled of lemon and coconut.

  “Sit down on the bog seat,” I said, “and give me ten minutes. I promise you I can make it okay.”

  I’m not a hairdresser but some of it rubbed off, all those years in Face Value, and I set to with as much confidence as I could scrape together, knowing Julia needed it. Knowing that the sight of her bald head had touched something that lay deep under whatever was wrong with her—her histrionic personality. It touched a wee girl that just wanted to be pretty. See, that’s the thing that used to bug me about Marco. He never said it, but he always believed that what I did was shallow. Because you care so much what things look like, Ali, he said to me once, like it made me less than him, who cared so much what things tasted like instead.

  “Now, who told you you were ugly?” I asked Julia as I clipped away, taking off the long hanks and ruffling up what was left. I was only making conversation. I wasn’t aware of Yvonne’s words still rattling around in my head.

  “Who didn’t?” she said. “My mum, my granny, teachers at school, Dr. Ferris.”

  “Get away!” I said. “What the hell school was this then?”

  “Don’t try to make me laugh,” she said. “They didn’t say it as such, but we did The Boy Friend and I wanted to be a flapper, but they cast me as Madame Dubonnet.”

  “Is she ugly? I’ve never seen it.”

  “She’s old. Then we did Macbeth. And I was a witch.”

  “Well, there’s hardly any parts for girls in—”

  “And the other two who were witches had fake noses and warts and blacked-out teeth. But the drama teacher just back-combed my hair and said I’d do.”

  “What a bitch!” I said. “But see? I’m right about your hair.” She said nothing. I was clipping away at the back of her neck now. It was a shame, really, because it was the only place there was any length left at all, but an extreme mullet wouldn’t help her and I had meant what I’d said the day before, she had a lovely head and her hair grew in a perfect butterfly over the tendons on her nape. Mine grows like a crash helmet so I always notice. “At least your mum didn’t call you Dido,” I said. My heart swelled when she rewarded me with a soft chuckle.

  “Right, then. Where’s your make-up?” I asked her when I was done. I knew she’d have some. No way she’d ignore the potential to spend so much money online. But I was surprised when she bent and hauled the basket out from underneath her basin.

  “Half of Boots in here,” I said, rummaging. “I’m confiscating the green eye shadow. And this lipstick’s hellish. Shut your eyes and don’t argue.”

  When she turned her face up to me, I thought of Angelo when he was little and needed a nose-blow. He had never minded it. Never fought me like some I’d seen, twisting away from their mums and leaving trails over their cheeks.

  “I’m plucking your eyebrows,” I told her. “No arguments.” She winced like clockwork at every pinch but
she let me. And she was biddable about looking down and then up as I turned her lashes black.

  “Tilda Swinton doesn’t wear mascara,” was all she said.

  “Tilda Swinton is freakishly beautiful,” I told her. “And even she’s touch-and-go. Ordinary mortals like you and me need all the help we can get.”

  I went to town with the contour and the highlight, and by the time I was choosing a lipstick I had surprised myself. Her beautiful head, her jaw and temples, her huge eyes with the privet-hedge eyebrows gone, her razor’s edge cheek bones and yes, yes, her glorious haughty nose were astonishing now they were out from inside that flaming nest where they’d been hiding.

  “You have no idea on this earth what lipstick suits you, do you?” I said, throwing out a purple nightmare and a crimson shimmering lip-gloss. I mixed some peach blusher with a slick of balm, just to give her the idea, and stroked it on with a brush.

  “Okay,” I said, raking my fingers through her hair one last time. “You ready? You will never be a pretty girl, Julia. Because you’re stunning and magnificent. So much better than pretty any day. Bloom fades. But bones like you’ve got last forever. You’ll be even more gorgeous when you’re sixty than you are now.”

  “Are you ever going to shut up and show me?” she said.

  I looked behind the mirror above the basin and saw it was only hanging on a cord, so I lifted it off and held it in front and slightly above her.

  She said nothing. She turned this way and that. She ran her fingers over her head. Then she leaned forward and looked at what I had done to her eyes.

  “I look like a drag act,” she said. “You’re a bitch for getting my hopes up.” She stood up and was suddenly so close to me that I took a step back, holding the mirror like a shield. “Put that bloody mirror down before I smash it.”

  When I lowered it, leaning it against the wall and stepping away, she pounced, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing me so hard my bra squeaked. “I’m joking, you moron,” she said. “I look fantastic. I’m going to kill my mum.”

  “I can’t actually breathe,” I said, and she let go, laughing.

  “And my granny. Telling me I was ugly! Will you come in every morning and fix me?”

  “No, but I’ll teach you,” I said. “Now get dressed and come downstairs, eh?”

  “Can I have the first lesson today?”

  “I’ve got a full morning and Dr. Ferris before lunch,” I said, but Dr. Ferris was already on her way towards me as I spoke, stalking through the corridors on her high heels. Both of us heard the smack smack smack of her climbing the stairs and then listened to the soft thump thump of her coming along the corridor.

  “Bye-bye, gotta go, catch you soon,” Julia said, and then the doctor was crossing her bedroom floor and sweeping the bathroom door wide. I stood in front of Julia, without thinking.

  “Alison. My office. Now.” She was even angrier than before. I stepped to one side and put my arm on Julia’s shoulder. I knew I was beaming.

  The doctor registered the transformation with a flash of her eyes. I saw it. I saw her pupils dilate.

  Then Julia spoke. “She cut the rest of it off. She cut it all off. She’s scalped me. It’s all gone. She cut it off.” She was rocking back and forward on the toilet seat. Rocking so far back that her head banged off the wall behind the cistern and the cistern lid scraped and clanked every time her shoulders hit it.

  Dr. Ferris turned away. She pulled a mobile from her back pocket and spoke into it, very calmly. “Lars, urgent to Julia’s room, please.”

  I cupped the back of Julia’s head so it was my fingers taking the brunt. Now my wedding ring was hurting us both, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen. Because in her other hand Dr. Ferris held my sketchpad, open at Sylvie’s drawing, her fingers white and her nails red with the strain of how hard she clutched it.

  Lars was there within a minute and, soundlessly, he got Julia on her feet and away from all the hard edges of the bathroom. She pulled her head back as if to butt him in the face but he changed his hold and tsk-tsked at her.

  “I like your hair,” he said. “But you’ve wrecked your mascara.”

  “Alison!” said Dr. Ferris, once she was sure Lars had it in hand. “Outside.” She stood foursquare in front of me and held the sketchpad up against her chest. “What’s the meaning of this?”

  “I’m not with you, Doc,” I said.

  “My husband is Doc,” she said, as if the word was a slur. “And don’t buy time. Why did you write Sylvie’s name on this doodle and leave it in her room?”

  “Actually, I left in my bag,” I said. “And my bag was zipped shut.”

  “Until I opened it to see who it belonged to.” That was reasonable enough, I supposed. If it had been me I’d have taken it to the staff kitchen and got a witness to watch me opening it, but she was the boss. “I shall repeat my question for the final time: why did you write Sylvie’s name on your doodle?”

  I searched her face but I was sure she wasn’t being clever-clever, trying to catch me out. She genuinely had not the slightest suspicion that Sylvie’s name was on there for the reason people’s names are always on pictures, from handprints bound for the front of the fridge to Rembrandt’s last self-portrait.

  “I meant to write notes on the page,” I said. “But I never got round to it. The doodle doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Informal private notes about a patient?” she said, in the same tone as she’d said Doc.

  “Sylvie’s not my patient,” I said. “She’s my client. Like you said at the meeting, I’m not a therapist.”

  “Sylvie and the other residents are under my care,” said Dr. Ferris, “and you are in my employment. Any notes you make must be entered into the patients’ files after proper cross-signing by a member of the medical team.”

  “But then how would I get them out again?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  I frowned at her. I didn’t try to tell her her job. “To check back what products I used or what tint mix had worked or not worked,” I said. “To see when I’d done the last treatment and when it’d fall due again. To be able to tell you all what I’d done to help.”

  “What are you talking about? Help what?”

  “If you said someone had slept through the night and I’d given them an aromatherapy massage, or if someone was upset and I’d—”

  “—told her to cut off all her hair?” She turned and walked away from me. “Ask one of the enrolled nurses to give you the Bible and you can spend the rest of today trying to bring yourself to a better understanding of what goes on here and what the true scope of your role really is.” She turned back and threw the sketchpad at me like a Frisbee. Or a Chinese star, maybe. Unfortunately for her mood, I caught it. “After you clean the hair from Julia’s room. I need to go and make a written report to deliver to her parents about the incident.”

  “Her parents?” I said. “Did her dad come back then?”

  “Be very careful,” Dr. Ferris said.

  As I watched her walk away, her perfectly cut trousers winking at the knee with each stride, the hems lifting to show the polished tip of her heels and the pale leather of her insteps then falling free again, I said to myself, “If I start being very careful, that’ll make one of us, missus. Because you are all over the place. What the hell—what, as Julia would say, the actual fuck—is going on here?”

  Twelve

  The “Bible” was four fat spiral binders: Care Scotland protocols, NHS guidelines, Best Practice reports from NICE, and Howell Hall house rules, plus leaflet after leaflet tucked into plastic sleeves about everything from alcohol abuse warning signs to dealing with dementia. Between the bleeding obvious that an alien landing from Mars wouldn’t need to be told and the total codswallop that nobody—not even the pen-pusher who wrote it—could explain if their life depended on it, it made for a
long day.

  Lars brought me a cup of tea and a huge cupcake halfway through the afternoon. “It’s the anniversary of Hinny’s divorce,” he said. “She always celebrates it.”

  “Tell me what’s going on out there in the real world,” I said. “I feel like I’ve been stuck in here for a week.”

  “This is for telling Julia to cut her hair, is it?”

  I didn’t think so. I was pretty sure this was for whatever rule Dr. Ferris reckoned I’d broken by writing Sylvie on a piece of paper with a square and two lines drawn on it in marker pen. But I didn’t want to say that. Not even to Lars. I wanted to take it home and Google the life out of it first.

  So I shrugged. “For one,” I said, “I didn’t tell her to cut her hair. I suggested she get a haircut. And for two, she liked it. She bloody liked it until Fanny-Ice-Arse came, then she started kicking off.”

  “What did I tell you?” he said, but everyone had told me so much I had no idea what he meant. I shrugged again. “Watch out for the personality disorders. Julia’s very sick. She’ll manipulate you any way she can. Of course she pretended she hated her hair and made out you’d traumatised her.”

  “She was fine,” I said. “When I was doing it, she was absolutely fine.”

  “Of course she was,” said Lars. “She had all your attention, all your focus. She’d have loved it.”

  “Yeah but—” I began, but managed to stop myself. He was a psychiatric nurse and I’d blagged my way into this job. If he thought it was a sign of illness to want a bit of pampering, I shouldn’t argue.

  “And as for what’s going on out in the world,” he said. “There’s another update from the pathologist. We know the body’s not a vagrant because he had about a million pounds worth of dentistry done just before he died. Hadn’t even finished it. He still had a temporary crown in one side.” Lars gave a huge grin, showing off the empty gums where his molars should be.