The Visitors

by Catherine Burns

  Marion ran from her bedroom. As she hurried down the first-floor landing she glimpsed a devilish face leering at her through the doorway of the guest room. She let out a little scream, before realizing it was just that pattern on the wood of the old oak wardrobe lit by a flash of lightning. Almost down the final flight of stairs she felt something catch her foot and stumbled forwards. Managing to cling to the banister and save herself just in time, she remembered with a chill that according to Aunt Agnes, Mother had tripped at this exact same spot, on the fourth stair from the bottom, falling, then crushing her baby brother beneath her as she landed on the hall floor.

  When she got to John, she saw his clothes were soaking wet as if he had just been washed ashore by the tide and his hair flopped to one side like a clump of matted seaweed, exposing his naked scalp.

  “What is it? What happened?”

  He grasped hold of her hand so tightly, she thought the bones might break.

  “I was trying to move it, to lift the damn tree away from the wall, and I got a terrible pain—down my arm and my chest! Please, love, help me.”

  She tried to help him up, but she could no more lift him than the sycamore trunk itself, and the muscles in her back screamed each time she tried.

  “I’ll get help, I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “No, no, you can’t do that.”

  “But, John, what else can I do? I can’t leave you out here in the garden.”

  Marion went to the hallway and phoned for an ambulance with trembling fingers. When the operator asked for the address, her mind went blank and she couldn’t remember the number of her own house.

  The operator, a man with a very kind voice, told her to walk calmly to the front door and take a look; he said that happened to people sometimes, that they forgot things when there was an emergency. When she gave him the address, he told her they’d send someone very quickly and Marion thanked him.

  Marion wrapped her arms tightly around her body as she stood on the doorstep. When she heard the siren, she felt breathless with terrible excitement. Usually that sound made her think there had been an accident somewhere, some poor unknown soul was in dire trouble, but on this occasion she was the one who had called the ambulance. It was coming for her brother.

  • • •

  WHEN THE AMBULANCE stopped in the street, she waved to the driver to let him know which house to go to. It irritated her to see Mr. Weinberg standing on his step, watching everything.

  As the two young men in medic’s uniforms followed her into the house Marion felt her usual shame at the state of everything. As they went through the kitchen Marion noticed the cellar door had been left open, the key still in the keyhole. While the two men were examining John in the garden, she locked it, then placed the key into a biscuit barrel.

  Going outside herself, she heard John arguing loudly with the two young men who were trying to move him onto a stretcher. Each time they touched him, he screamed out in pain.

  “Who do you think you are? Get your bloody hands off me!”

  “Sir, we need to take you into hospital to get you checked out.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, you see, I can’t!” said John, slapping the men’s hands away as they tried to move him.

  “You’ve got to let us do our job—”

  “You buggers need to leave me alone.”

  The men looked at Marion for support.

  “Please, John, you have to let them help you,” Marion said gently.

  He looked into her eyes, and she knew he was afraid. Kneeling down in the mud, she took hold of her brother’s hand. The fingers felt cold and limp.

  “I promise it will be all right, love. You don’t need to worry. Mar will take care of everything,” she said.

  John squeezed her fingers very weakly, then his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.

  HOSPITAL

  It was impossible for Marion to make sense of all the words and pictures colliding with one another inside her head. The fallen tree, a blocked blood vessel, and a broken hip: so many awful things at once! Why had this all happened now? The nurse had left her sitting on a small sofa in what was called the “Family Room” (those words made her feel lonelier than she ever had in her entire life), telling her that someone would come and fetch her when John’s operation was over. But she hadn’t said how long that would be, and according to the clock on the wall, Marion had been waiting nearly five hours. She watched the black hands, sharp as scalpels, steadily move around the clock’s cold, white face.

  On the other side of the room there was a table with tea- and coffee-making things. A half-used packet of digestive biscuits stood upright, its torn wrapper unspooling across the tray. Despite having had nothing all day, she would sooner have put sand in her mouth than attempted to eat one.

  Before the surgery, someone had asked her who was John’s next of kin. She had said that would be Mother. And then, when they asked how to get hold of her, she had told them that Mother was dead, and they looked at her like she was a complete fool. The doctor, a young Chinese woman wearing a pink jumper that didn’t seem very doctorlike, snapped at Marion as if she were a child who had been caught telling fibs:

  “Do you realize there is a high possibility that your brother might not survive this surgery?”

  The thought of his glasses left folded on the bedside table next to a half-eaten roll of Trebor mints, his cable-knit cardigan hung over the back of a chair like the pelt of a slain beast, ripped her apart. She might never hear him whistling along to the radio again or iron another of his shirts. For all his faults, John loved her and she loved him. Without him there would be no one. He was there on birthdays and at Christmas. He might only buy her something cheap or forget to buy her a present at all, but at least he was there. Someone to get angry with for not doing the right thing was better than no one at all. He was her brother. She had known him all her life. Without John, she felt, there would be nothing to fasten her to this world and she might just float off into the clouds.

  “Please God,” she prayed, “I am sorry I was so angry with him. I promise if you let my brother live, I will never be cross with him again. I will do everything he tells me and do my very best to be a good sister and make him happy. Just don’t let him die. That is the only thing that matters. If he dies, I’ll be all alone, so you might as well kill me too.”

  Marion sat up rigid all night on the little orange sofa, too frightened to cry or sleep. Every time she heard footsteps from the corridor, she dreaded it was a nurse coming to tell her he was dead. By morning, no one had come and Marion wondered if they had forgotten she was there at all. Her bladder full, she left the Family Room and walked around the hospital looking for toilets. Eventually she followed a sign for the facilities that took her down two flights of stairs and along another corridor. Then, when she had finished using the toilets, she realized she didn’t know how to get back to her small sanctuary.

  • • •

  AFTER WALKING AROUND for a while, she came to a café but had no money to buy a sandwich or drink. Her handbag, along with her mobile phone and purse, had been left at home. Thoughts of the mobile hurt because John had bought it for her. “You have to have one, Marion. Everyone has one these days. You can’t live in the past forever,” he had told her. Even if she had it with her, there was no one to call apart from Judith, and she would probably be too furious about the wall to want to help. She was so tired and cold and hungry. Her back and her feet hurt, her clothes felt grimy and itchy, and she longed for a hot bath. If only Dad were alive and could bring the big, safe Bentley to take her home.

  As long as I can’t find out where he is, then no one can tell me he has died. So if I stay lost, he will live, Marion thought. Then Mother’s voice scolded her for being so silly. He’s your brother, Marion. He needs you. You have to find him. He is depending on you.

  She wandered around, feeling too timid to ask anyone for help; she trudged down long corridors, not knowing if she had been
down them before or not. Endless wards, clinics, waiting rooms, one place in the hospital looked exactly like another. At least if she could find her way back to the Family Room, she could make herself a cup of tea and eat some of those biscuits. How precious those biscuits had suddenly become—why had she ignored them earlier? Finally she came across a map, and after squinting at it for a long time (her glasses had been left at home too), she managed to work out directions back to where she came from. She must have walked a long way, because it took her nearly twenty minutes to get there. When she opened the door, she was surprised to see a young couple sitting on the orange sofa. The woman was holding a naked baby doll by one leg and weeping while the man had his arm around her shoulders. Their heads were lowered, and they were too involved in comforting one another to notice Marion.

  It was rather a nasty-looking doll, one of those bald, plastic things that Marion had never liked, even as a child, since they weren’t soft enough to cuddle. Wasn’t it rather unseemly to bring it to the hospital naked? Though of course they had probably left their home in haste and grabbed anything that might be used to comfort a sick child. The man had a shaved head and a tattoo of a skull on his hand. The woman’s hair was dragged back in a scruffy ponytail. They both wore tracksuits and trainers, and Marion thought they looked like the sort of people who claimed benefits.

  The doll, hanging upside down, glared at Marion with a surly expression on its plastic baby’s face as if to say: “A child is sick. Your problems are nothing compared to that. Go away and leave us alone.”

  Of course she ought to feel terribly sorry for them, but under the circumstances, she could not find even a scrap of compassion to spare for anyone else. And at least they have each other, she thought with a pinch of resentment.

  Having the Family Room occupied by strangers distressed her. She felt, having spent most of the night there in a state of extreme anxiety, it belonged to her. Still, it wouldn’t be right to go in and start making tea and eating biscuits with those people weeping on the sofa. Instead, she found a little garden where she sat for a while until she got cold, then she went to read the magazines in the shop. The afternoon she spent watching TV in the waiting rooms of “Fracture Clinic B.”

  One of her Heartfelt Productions, Always Trust a Stranger, was playing on the small television monitor bracketed to the clinic wall. She had watched the film at least twice before, and it felt like bumping into an old friend. Of course the sound was turned to mute, but that didn’t matter because Marion remembered most of the dialogue.

  People came along and waited in the seats for a while before getting called for their appointments.

  “How long have you been waiting to see Dr. Palladine, then?” an elderly woman in a blue head scarf and shiny green mackintosh asked her.

  “Oh, nearly an hour,” answered Marion, too embarrassed to explain her predicament, yet feeling a little guilty for lying to the nice old lady.

  The woman shook her head in sympathy. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? I had to wait nearly two hours the last time I came. So much for this so-called NHS.”

  Then the old woman told her about her husband who had been a fireman and her children who both lived in Australia. “They begged me to move over with them, but I wouldn’t leave my home for the crown jewels. I go to see Eric’s grave every Sunday. I haven’t missed a week since he passed. You won’t get me on that plane unless you dig him up and put him on it too,” she said rather sternly to Marion, as if she were colluding with the daughters to whisk her over to Australia away from Eric’s precious grave.

  When the clinic closed and all the patients had been seen, she was forced to leave the waiting room. While she was sitting by a vending machine in a corridor looking hungrily at the sandwiches, an African cleaning woman asked her if she was all right. The woman’s eyes, deep brown wells of kindness, brought Marion to tears.

  “Not really,” said Marion. “I need to find my brother, John. He’s had an operation.”

  The young woman left her cart of cleaning things to take Marion to an information booth near the front entrance.

  After making a phone call, the woman at the information desk informed her that John Zetland was in the “Acute Intensive Care Unit,” which could be found by “following the blue line” running along the corridor wall. Marion followed the mysterious line upstairs and across floors (ignoring orange, green, and yellow lines), as carefully as Hansel and Gretel following bread crumbs through the forest. When she finally reached John’s ward, the door was locked shut and she had to press an intercom buzzer to be admitted. While waiting, her chest filled with an awful tingling sensation as she dreaded the news she was about to be told.

  A male nurse came to fetch her, and she was taken to another small room to speak to a doctor. The doctor was Indian and very handsome. He sat leaning forwards with his forearms resting on his knees and an earnest expression on his flawless brown face. He referred to John by his first name and spoke about him with as much compassion as he might about his own brother. He told her that John had broken his hip while trying to move the tree, and the shock had given him a heart attack. But he was alive and it was a miracle that he had survived the operation. He said that her brother was a fighter, and that he was very lucky, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  Before she was allowed to see John, she had to scrub her hands very carefully and put on a flimsy plastic apron. When she found him, he was wearing an oxygen mask and his eyes were closed. He looked pale and crumpled like an old shirt in need of pressing. She took hold of his hand and it felt very cold.

  “Oh, John, I am so glad to see you, love! You won’t believe what it’s been like. I’ve been worried to death about you.”

  John opened his eyes and looked at her warily as if he didn’t know who she was. The nurse gave him a little drink of water from a paper cup.

  “Your husband is doing great, but he needs to rest,” said a thin nurse with spiky blond hair.

  “He’s my brother, not my husband,” said Marion.

  “Maybe if you come back in an hour or so, he’ll be able to chat with you.”

  Marion had to scrub her hands and put on a fresh apron each time she went into the intensive care unit, then take it off again when she came out. When she returned to the ward later, John was sitting up in bed drinking tea.

  “How are you feeling, love? I’ve been beside myself with worry.”

  “Not so good—but they’re looking after me all right.”

  “Well, that’s something. The nurses seem nice.”

  “Marion, how long have I been here?”

  “Since yesterday morning.”

  He waited for a nurse to take away the tea things before beckoning her towards him.

  His lips began to move, but his voice was so weak, she was unable to understand what he was trying to tell her.

  “I’m sorry, love, I didn’t hear that.”

  She leaned right over him. He smelled of disinfectant with a hint of bad breath.

  “And the girls, are they all right?” As he spoke, a small amount of spittle dripped from his lips onto his chin. She felt she ought to wipe it away but could not bring herself to do so.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the cellar.”

  It shocked Marion to hear him mention them in public.

  “Have you checked on them? They’ll need food and water.”

  “But I haven’t been home.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been here all the time, of course. Waiting for news about you.”

  “But they can’t take care of themselves. They can’t move around.”

  “Oh my goodness—John.” She leaned away from her brother.

  What did he mean, they couldn’t move around? There was a clatter of metal trays as food was being served to the patients. The smell of mashed potatoes and boiled meat turned her stomach.

  Then it occurred to her, they couldn’t do anything because he must keep them tied
up. And without him, they couldn’t even feed themselves. An awful sick feeling surged through her body as suddenly the idea of those women trapped in the cellar of their home became very real to her. She glanced around the ward; a man and a teenage son were sitting next to the bed of an old woman. The woman’s face was so bloated, it hardly appeared human. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and she seemed close to death. Her lifeless gaze fell on Marion. The man was holding the woman’s hand, while the boy lounged back in his chair, checking his mobile phone.

  “You have to go home now, Marion.”

  “I came in the ambulance with you, and I don’t have any money to get back.”

  “Call Judith up and ask her to take you home. It’s about time she did someone else a favor.”

  “But I don’t like bothering her. Anyway, I want to stay here with you,” Marion pleaded. The thought of going back to the house alone, to deal with them, made her bones cold with dread.

  Straining to sit upright, John gripped the steel handles attached to the side of the bed, but he could hardly move more than a few inches. Exhausted by the effort, he slumped back into the pillow and lay there struggling to regain his breath.

  “I could be in here for weeks and you can’t stay here all the time. You have to go home and make sure they get food and water.”

  She turned her head away, unable to look at him.

  “What do you mean? I can’t go down there—you told me I should never ever—”

  “Marion,” he interrupted, “listen to me, you have to or they’ll be done for.”

  “Oh God, John, please don’t make me. Please.” She put her hands over her face, unable to bear the look in his eyes.

  “I need you to do this for me.”

  She remembered her promise, that she would do anything to make her brother happy, just so long as he lived.

  “A person can only last for three days without water. Three days at the most.” John shook his head. “It will be your fault, Marion. And there’s a little one now.”