Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  They let Steven catch a few minutes’ sleep. All of them sit with their backs against the wall, covering their eyes. Paul’s head hangs down between his knees, his legs are folded up, and he slumps like a dropped puppet. They don’t say anything to each other.

  Steven turns his head, mumbles something. Paul looks up, lets a hand fall off his knee. He reaches out for Steven, and as he does, Albin says, “Wait.”

  Paul looks at him, expressionless.

  Albin’s voice is dry, hoarse. “See what he says.”

  And Steven speaks.

  At first, it isn’t words. He speaks in phrases, sentences. There’s pause and emphasis as though he was talking sense, but it’s just sounds, the syllables are right but they don’t link up; it’s like listening to a foreign language.

  Paul blinks, his eyes close, his eyes open, and he reaches for Steven again. As he does, Steven turns a little and says, “Darryl, where’ve you been?”

  Paul’s hand stops.

  “Why won’t he help? He’s a doctor.”

  “No, no, not a work-related dream after all this time,” Sarah whispers, hands to her eyes like a child.

  “Parkinson should know I’m here.” He sounds like he’s arguing.

  If it wasn’t for the creches I’d think he was faking, the calm, reasonable voice, hardly slurred, almost like he was talking awake, but I heard a lot of sleep-talk for eighteen years, and that’s how it sounds.

  Then I think—Parkinson?

  Carla sits up. “Parkinson? Did you hear that? Wake him up, wake him up.”

  “Who’s Parkinson?” Paul mumbles, reaching through the bars to shake Steven, and I think, Parkinson? The doctor at St. Veronica’s? The one who delivered Leo? The one I talked to—the one who was in the hospital the night—the night Seligmann…escaped.

  Walking out of the hospital under the eye of security would have been next to impossible. I thought at the time they must have turned a blind eye because he was one of them and they didn’t care for DORLA. It wouldn’t have happened that way. DORLA or not, no security man worth his salt would let a charged criminal with a bitten wrist walk off. If someone in the hospital distracted them, if someone with authority created a window…

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” Carla is smiling, her voice is almost friendly. She’s been keeping a man awake for almost four days. Whatever her motives, that smile is one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.

  Steven thrashes, kicks at Paul’s hand, yelling to be let alone.

  “No, no, listen, I’m trying to help you. Look, I can’t get out of here yet, but I think I could get word to someone, only I didn’t know who to ask. But if you know Dr. Parkinson, well, I do too, a little, and he knows lots of people, I bet he could help if I got word to him.”

  Parkinson was there. And he was visible, he talked to me, he got a good look at the team. Was he on the right floor for his department? I don’t remember, but maybe it was more than chance that I met him. It’s a big place, St. Veronica’s, a big place and a busy one. The odds of just bumping into someone are not high. If he heard someone from DORLA was coming, though, and made a point of being out in the major thoroughfares, keeping an eye on things, that would make it possible. A man brought in from DORLA with a bitten wrist wouldn’t be his department, but doctors and nurses and patients talk. It would be all around the hospital within minutes. Parkinson would have known Seligmann was there. I struggle to explain further, but that’s it, my brain blurs, I need sleep, I’ll never get though this without some more sleep.

  “Just leave me alone,” Steven says, his voice drunk with fatigue.

  “Don’t you know Parkinson? I’m sure I could get word to him,” Carla says, cracked lips stretched into a smile.

  Steven stares at her, and he can’t make her out, he’s sick and confused and tired to death. “He—prolly know I’m—he wouldn’t—” He pushes at the air, as if shoving away a ghost, and collapses back into the straw.

  “Won’t you let me help you?” Carla’s eyes are glazed like a doll’s.

  All right, I say, it’s enough. I’ve got a name, it makes no sense he’d be involved but I’ve got a name, you can leave him alone. I say this in my head, desperate, I mean it so hard there’s a moment of surprise that she keeps talking to him before I remember she didn’t hear me.

  I pull myself to my feet, swaying. I’ve had more sleep than they have, and even so, I’m tired enough to sit down and cry. I don’t, though. I press my hand to my throat, and walk out, up the narrow stairs, my hand still resting there. It’s a minute before I recognize the gesture: an old one, from when I first started to work here. There used to be a pendant there, a medal of St. Giles I was given at school. It got taken off and thrown away when I was twenty-two, but all of a sudden, I want it back.

  I make it all the way up the stairs, into the containment department. Nobody’s much surprised when I go in and give orders.

  Steven is separated from the others, put in a cell by himself, monitored. The rest of them go upstairs to A block, are given mattresses, blankets, pillows. I don’t wait around to watch it happen. I will not take the credit for that gift.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  There’s only one way to do this.

  What I want is to talk to this doctor. No, what I really want is to go back to church and pray for forgiveness, spend days on my knees and beg the saints to intercede for my ruined soul. That’s what I’d like to do, but as long as I have unfinished business, then nothing’s going to help my soul very much. Any sensible saint would tell me to sort out my good works first and save the introspection for a better moment.

  I need to talk to him, and I can’t think of any other way.

  I don’t want to do this.

  The idea, my only idea, takes hold of me early on, and it shakes me so badly I get stupid; all other ideas clot in my brain. I spend a day looking out of my window, walking up and down, a tight, sick knot under my ribs, and every time I think of it the knot twists, and fat white grubs squirm in my throat. I know I can do it if I have to, and that’s worse, though what I’m feeling, for once, isn’t really about guilt. My conscience hurts at the idea, but I’ve done terrible things before now, and this one won’t hurt anyone but me. Me and my daughter up in Heaven. If she’s in Heaven, she’s beyond my reach, I can’t hurt her.

  I don’t want to do this.

  The first thing to do is ask Hugo to help me get the free-rangers released. I tell him the story, tell him what I need.

  “The story won’t work from inside DORLA,” I say. My hands are folded, my face is still. I meet his eyes, gaze to expressionless gaze. He was right all along. If you stay dead on the surface, you don’t get pitied, you don’t get pried into, nobody presumes on you with their judgments. A blank face gives you privacy.

  “Everyone will know that they were here.” His voice is as calm as mine, and for the first time I understand it, this quiet, neutral gentleness of his. “They won’t be able to explain it away, such a long absence.”

  “They won’t have to. We met in here, there’s no need to hide that. If they’re back in the world, it doesn’t look like duress. If they’re in here, it does.”

  He looks at me without aggression. “What do you hope to achieve by this?”

  I don’t make a speech. “I don’t know. I’d like to try it.”

  “And you’re certain these individuals—they won’t be released unconditionally, you understand, they’ll be charged with loitering and bailed—you’re certain that they have no involvement in the killings?” He says the word “killings” with no inflection, and neither of us flinches.

  “Yes,” I say, “I’m sure.”

  I’d like it if they could just be released without ceremony, without my having to see them. It isn’t possible. I commandeer an interview room and call up the only ones I need, Carla and Paul. Though really I just need Carla. At the thought of what I’m going to do, my mouth turns sticky and the knot tightens inside my chest, but it’ll ha
ve to be done. I must get used to telling this story.

  They look better. They’ve been tidied up, given clean clothes, though just the gray track suits we keep to hand out on Day One mornings to the lycos who wake up naked, and they look unfamiliar. They look a little shrunken, but better than they did.

  Paul sits in his chair. He looks at me and says nothing.

  Carla breathes lightly, holds herself together. “We were told our release was conditional, we had to do something for you.”

  I keep the face I learned from Hugo. “That’s not quite right. You’ll be released in any case, but there’s a course of action I need to take that may go a long way toward proving your innocence. If you help me with it, you’ll be helping yourselves.”

  They are both innocent, and it’s not much of an inducement, but neither of them says anything. They’ve been in the cells long enough to learn not to make provocative remarks.

  “Obviously you could argue your innocence in court, but the best thing for you is if the real culprit is caught. I—we have a suspect, and you can help me gain access to him.”

  “Parkinson?” says Carla. “Why suspect him?”

  “Do you know him?” I ask.

  “Professionally. We work in the same hospital, that’s all.” She stops talking, waits for me to answer her question.

  “I think there had to be someone in the hospital who helped our suspect to escape.”

  She doesn’t ask why I think it’s Parkinson.

  I keep my face still. “I need you to refer me to him as a patient.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t arrest him without evidence. I’d like to be around him a little.”

  Paul hasn’t taken his eyes off my face.

  Carla looks down at her hands. “He does gynecology and obstetrics. Why would I refer you?”

  “You say we got talking while you were here, I asked you about something outside your area.”

  “What?”

  I draw a quiet breath. The air is cool in my throat. “I told you I was having trouble conceiving and I was worried about it.” Paul flinches; his face jerks with a convulsive half laugh.

  “You’d see a fertility specialist about that, it’s not his field.” Carla’s lips barely move.

  “Tell him I was worried about my past. You say I had a miscarriage a few years ago, and was worried it might have caused permanent damage.”

  “He’d check your records, they’d show it wasn’t true.”

  I don’t look away from her worn, chapped face. “It is true. The records would show it.” I see Paul flicker in the corner of my vision. I don’t move my head.

  Carla’s face pinches at the eyes for a moment, then she folds her hands. “How long ago?”

  “Six years.” I don’t have to do the math.

  “When you were how old?” The look on her face is familiar—the impersonal autopilot professionalism that takes over when you’ve had too little rest and too many surprises.

  “Twenty-two.” Paul keeps looking at me. I should be able to read his face, but it’s still, mute. “After it happened they checked my family records, and there’s a history of miscarriage. “When we were young, we didn’t know our mother miscarried twice before we were born. It only came out after what happened to me. Becca felt sorry for her when she heard the news; after she told me that, we stopped speaking for months. She said she could be sorry for two people, but I didn’t believe her, not then. I’m sorry, now, about Becca, but only about Becca. There were lots of things I didn’t forgive my mother for. Not warning me is the one I can’t let go.”

  Carla’s hands twist. “I—I don’t know if I can give him enough reasons.”

  “He treated my sister, that’s a start. You know more about medicine than I do. Make something up.”

  “Was it Ally?”

  Paul’s voice is hoarse, quiet. It takes a moment to recognize it. “What?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You mean was Ally the father?” My throat is pressing tighter and tighter, it’s difficult to swallow. “No. He—we trained together, we trained on dogs. His name is Robert. He’s gone to another city now.”

  There are lines around Paul’s eyes. When I first knew him, when things were good, they were just little traces, tiny tracks in his skin, but now they’re deep, sharp. “Were you planning an abortion?”

  I stretch my hands, stare at them, keep myself still. “No. I wasn’t. I was going to keep her.”

  “Her?”

  My fingers bend back as I stretch them out. Little patches of white bloom at the tips of the nails. “They did an ultrasound. She was a girl.” No one says anything. “I was going to call her Ann.”

  He stares at me, creasing his face against the light from my window. “Why would you have kept a baby?”

  “She was mine.” I can’t explain it, not here, not anymore, I don’t know what to say. Of course he’d suppose I was planning an abortion. That’s what he’d think of me. I thought of it myself, I sat down and looked at the blue strip and read my bank statement and looked around my tiny apartment, and knew what would make sense. I hadn’t counted on feeling anything. But I had scars running up and down my limbs, and I knew what it was like to be torn at. I thought of a suction pump, tearing at my skin, dragging me mangled out into the light, pulpy with blood, and I knew I couldn’t do that to her. And I had a leaflet, a green-printed pamphlet from the pharmacy, talking about giving up smoking and the importance of exercise and eating balanced meals. What I understood then was that she needed me healthy. Whatever happened to me happened to her. Ann was the only person in the world, ever, who was utterly on my side. “Let’s say I went bitter after the miscarriage,” I say aloud. “Let’s say it turned me sour.”

  “Did you?” he says.

  “I asked you about luning and you couldn’t explain it,” I say. “Don’t ask me to explain this. Let’s say this is the thing I can’t explain.” I worried about luning, I asked him questions he didn’t dare answer. Now he knows: he’s not the only one with an ugly secret. It’s a gift, of sorts, it’s the best I can give him.

  “Were you going to get married?”

  I shake my head. “No, no. I told him I was pregnant, and I told him to leave. I didn’t want him around.” He just looks at me, wordless. I close my eyes for a moment, screen myself behind the lids. “It was a long time ago. I told him to leave because we’d been going out for some time but he hadn’t been a very good boyfriend. All right? He was fond of making clear what I couldn’t expect from him. Big on boundaries. There are lots of boys like that around. I could take it when it was just me because I thought I was in love with him, but I couldn’t deal with that and a baby as well. I was better off on my own. I don’t think I would have—” I stop, the words hitch in my throat. What I was going to say was, I would have left him sooner if the sex was better. I would have been better able to think straight. As it was, he kept me compliant with little more than sheer, desperate frustration. We don’t discuss this, but bareback men are not good lovers. Any man whose first experiences are furtive scuffles in a locked creche, never knowing when the girl may change her mind and put a knee in his groin, is liable to have difficulties. I was too young. I was still trying to stick with my own kind, then. It was before Paul, before I really understood what I was missing. If it hadn’t been for Ann, Robert might still be in the same city.

  Paul stares into his lap, shakes his head. He’s bewildered, lost for things to say.

  Carla sits up straighter. “Can you tell me the circumstances of the miscarriage?”

  My jaw aches, my teeth are too hot. I must get used to telling this story. “I got knocked over on a moon night.”

  “You went out?” she says.

  “I hadn’t told many people. It was the fourth month. I didn’t know there was a tendency to miscarry in my family.” She stares at me, and I press my hands down on the table. “I hadn’t talked to any older women about it, and I was twenty-two. I was broke; catche
rs get bonuses. I thought I could just operate the van. But someone came at us unexpectedly. I got mauled. This lune got me down and worried at me, dug a piece out of my hip.” The scar is still there, a deep hollow in the flesh. Paul asked me about it once, and I wouldn’t discuss it. “It wouldn’t have been fatal. I just lost a certain amount of blood. They patched me up at the shelter, told me to go to the ER next day if I wanted it checked. I didn’t start bleeding till early the next morning.”

  My throat closes. I can’t say any more.

  I remember lying in the hospital, staring at the ceiling, the plaster rose around the light fitting. That was when I started the twitch. My eyelid jerked and crawled like a hooked worm. I stood up and stared in the mirror till it stopped. When the nurse came in she almost dropped her tray at the sight of me on my feet. I almost remember the pain.

  Becca sat by me for a while, but I wouldn’t talk to anyone.

  The doctors told me to come in for after-care checkups. I didn’t go. I haven’t been to a gynecologist in six years.

  Most days I can look at six-year-olds and feel okay.

  I’d like to say some of this to Paul, but I can’t talk. Carla agrees to refer me. It’s unlikely, she says, that Parkinson will insist on seeing my husband or partner; he’d refer me on after a single appointment. She says this without either of us looking at Paul or asking him anything.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Carla calls me a couple of days later and tells me she’s gotten me a private appointment with Parkinson. His fees are considerable, but I can get DORLA to pay them. She says she told him various medical details, that I shouldn’t explain much when I go. I just turn up, talk about conception, don’t try to justify myself. She’s done all the work. Her voice is neutral, she doesn’t betray herself. I wish we could have been friends.

  I don’t hear from the others. They go back out into the world, probably start piecing their lives back together, see doctors, psychiatrists, friends. Someone. Paul doesn’t say good-bye.