by Cowley, Joy
Chairs were pulled out from tables and white napkins were unfolded. Glasses were filled with pink or white grape juice. A cream of carrot soup used the first of the layers of silverware on the side of their place-settings, and conversation became polite as students focused on their eating. Don’t cut the bread roll. Break it. Use the butter knife. Tip the soup plate away, not towards you. Don’t breathe in when you put the spoon in your mouth or you will make a slurping noise. Above all, do not spill!
Jancie looked round the table at Banjo, who was actually enjoying himself, and at Shog who was not. Taylor Shaw was in a dress of soft Indian cotton in shades of rust and brown, her hair hanging over her shoulders like an orange waterfall. Stephen Chang was in a bright pink suit with a cerise bow-tie. Savannah, exquisite in a long blue gown, glided from table to table, talking to the other students. Her dress and movements were perfect. Every gesture seemed to be part of a finely choreographed dance.
‘I hope I’m like that at the end of this course,’ Taylor said.
‘Don’t we all?’ said Jancie, without really meaning it. Her gaze went on, like a searchlight, round the room. Students, teachers, waiters, bowls of flowers, stands of dishes. There had to be a phone somewhere.
Thoughts of Gran stayed with her throughout the evening. Later, she left Shog and Banjo in front of TV and went to bed early. She lay propped against her pillows, hugging her polar bear, and thinking of the old days. Going to Mass with Gran and sitting on the kneeler in the pew, while Gran passed down liquorice allsorts from her purse. Making toast on a cold evening while Gran sat with her feet in a tub of hot water, telling them stories about the little folk back in Ireland. Seeing Gran in old leather boxing gloves that had belonged to her father, and then running around her as she taught them how to box, covering with the left and jabbing with the right. Listening to Gran whistling them home to tea, with two fingers in her mouth. Hearing, now, Gran’s voice clear as a bell in her head, ‘Keep a loving heart in your body, Jancie, and evil can’t touch you.’
She tried to sleep but could not. The red numbers on the clock beside her bed flicked over, ten, eleven, twelve. She got out of bed and put on her robe. She knew that there was a night staff at the Eventide Home, nurses who sat in the office until morning. She would find a phone somewhere, call, and make sure that Gran was all right. Then, and only then, she would be able to rest.
The tables in the restaurant were bare under the dim night lights, the flowers and silver gone. There was no phone. Nor could she find a phone in the kitchen at the back. She walked between the rows of stainless steel benches, the sinks, the stoves, the fridges, the dishwashing machines. How did they order their supplies?
She checked out the second restaurant which served snacks during the day. She found orange juice, two cartons of frozen blueberry muffins, a sack of coffee beans, boxes of styrofoam cups. No shootin’ phone! Did the shootin’ cooks have personal phones they kept in their shootin’ apron pockets?
Downstairs the offices were locked. So were the shops. The amusement arcade was open, lit by soundless battles and explosions on the screens of machines. As she walked in gladiators waved swords at her, space fighters spat silent laser fire. A clown bounced up and down, laughingly offering, in speech bubbles, to tell her fortune. A car raced on an endless track. She shivered. At this hour, the fun place was turned into a graveyard of ghostly figures.
She hurried to the token booth. No phone there, either.
As she went back up the stairs, she was stopped by a thought. Yes! She knew where there would be a phone! They would have one in that part of the house where no students were allowed, the design centre and cosmetic laboratory on the top floor!
Dozens of times she had walked past the fire doors with their big NO ENTRY sign. Now, in the soft half-light, she pulled a door open and slipped through. The narrow stairs were in darkness and she had to feel her way up them, hand on the rail, bare feet testing the angles of the cold steps. No soft carpet here, Jancie, my girl. No heating, either.
One more turn of the stairs and she saw two very pale patches of light through the glass in another set of fire doors. She pushed one of the doors open and stepped into a small foyer. The room was quite bare and had only one source of light, a small square of glass in a steel door on the other side. The light shining through the glass was bright and clearly showed a lock with two keyholes.
Jancie slumped with disappointment. Of course, the place would be locked. If they locked the offices downstairs, they would lock the out-of-bounds part of the house. She should have thought of that. She tried the handle, anyway. Saints alive! It was not locked, after all! A soft click and the door opened into a brightly lit hallway, all metal and laminate, with shuttered windows to her right and several doorways to her left.
The space had a sterile look, like a hospital, but the air was faintly perfumed with floral and woody scents, disinfectant and another smell that Jancie could only identify as electricity gone wrong. It was the smell of an electric kettle after it had blown its element.
She touched the first door on her left and it opened to release a full scent of orange blossom that drowned all other smells. The room was in darkness but the light from the hall outlined steel benches, sinks, glass bottles, pipettes and flasks, marble slabs and spatulas, mortars and pestles, gas burners. No phone in there. She closed the door quietly and tried the door next to it. It was locked. So was the third. She pushed against the fourth door which opened easily into a large room of quiet humming and soft white light. She stood still, her breath caught in amazement, her eyes trying to convince her that what they were seeing was real. It was like a hospital ward. No! Like a hospital operating theatre.
In front of her were eight small cocoon-shaped bunks, one on top of another in four pairs. Two sets were empty. In the other four cocoons, children lay asleep, all lying on their backs in white cotton shifts and all with shaven heads. Attached to the bald heads were discs and cords that looped to a large computer at the side of each cocoon. More tubes came out of the children’s noses and were connected to the same machinery. As the children slept, their white gowns rose and fell in an even rhythm and the many windows on each computer whirled and hummed coloured patterns. Jancie recognised the small screens that measured pulse, flickerings that looked like an earthquake reading, but the other screens meant nothing to her. Blurred shapes came and went on one, while on another there were rapid lines like bar codes. On each computer there was a flashing green sign MEMORY ACTIVE. MEMORY ACTIVE.
It was a long time before she could absorb what she saw and even then her mind was too numb to believe it. She took a few steps forward and looked down at a child, boy or girl, she could not be sure. The face was dark, perfectly still and peaceful, the eyes closed. A white semi-transparent fluid dripped through a clear tube inserted in one nostril. In the other nostril there was a thicker brown tube that moved slightly every few seconds. The movement of the tube coincided with the movement of the child’s chest.
Jancie stared at the small nose with nostrils spread to accommodate the tubes. Then she looked at the other children. They were all being kept alive with air and fluids!
Oh shoot! She was now looking at bags of another fluid, that hung from the base of the cocoons, with tubes that disappeared under the white gowns. She knew those bags. She had seen them in the Eventide Home attached to old people who could no longer control their bladders.
The computers whirred their strange languages over the screens to the humming and hissing which was as soft as whispers. There was no other sound. The eight sleeping faces were empty of expression. The eight bald heads looked as though they were gripped by the tentacles of some strange dark octopuses.
Jancie’s mouth was dry, her heart hammering like a drum in her ears. She stepped backwards and banged into a stainless steel trolley set against the wall behind her. On the trolley was another cocoon with a steel cover over it. On the cover were two oval handles. She touched the cover, then withdrew her hands
and held them against her chest, where she could feel the racing of her heart. Go, Jancie, she told herself. Shootin’ well get out of here! But her fingers went out again, grasped the handles and she lifted back the lid of the cocoon.
There was another bald kid inside but he was bigger than the rest and he was not asleep. There were round patches on his head where the suction discs had been and dark blue rough skin on the edges of his nostrils. His eyes were not fully closed and Jancie could see a sticky whiteness between his lids. The rest of his skin was a flat greyish yellow except for the tattoos on both his arms.
The kid was dead. The kid was McCready.
Chapter Ten
Jancie did not know that she would lose control. She was all right when she went into Shog’s room to wake him, but then her words got faster, louder, until she could hear herself screaming things about bodies and kids getting their brains electrocuted, and the lights flicked on and Shog was trying to hush her, and Banjo was in the room, and other kids in pyjamas, looking frightened in the doorway, and she was screaming at them to get out, get out, before their brains got wired up too, and Shog was telling Banjo to push the buzzer by the bed, Shog still sleepy trying to hold her, and Marlene was running in a blue robe, hair down, face as plain as a potato pie and worried, and Zeke the photographer was in tiger pyjamas, telling the other kids to get back to bed and Jancie was shouting no, no, go upstairs and see for yourselves, you’re going to get your brains fried good and dead like McCready, and then there was Shog holding her one side, Marlene the other, while Anna came running in with a needle, a prick on the thigh and Jancie yelling a long no until she ran out of breath.
Past the yelling and shaking, a silence came down, trapping her voice. It was a thick silence that caught her arms and legs and made movement difficult. She stopped fighting and sat down on Shog’s bed, trying to work the slowness of her tongue. ‘McCready,’ she mumbled. ‘McCready.’
Anna’s white moon face swam over her. ‘Poor darling! You’ve had a nasty nightmare. But you’ll sleep now and in the morning you’ll be as right as rain.’
Jancie tried to see past her to Shog. ‘McCready—’ she whispered, barely moving her lips. ‘D—d—d—’
Waking was slow, a floating up from some place deep where the thickness was still trying to hold her, and then a surfacing to sunlight and her own room. She turned her head and lifted her arm to see her watch. It took ages to do that. Even her thoughts were in slow motion. Ten o’clock. Why was she still here? Late. Missing, missing—she looked for the word. School. Not at school.
‘Shog?’ she murmured. ‘Shog?’
Eventually he came, with Banjo and Marlene, and she saw concern in all their faces.
‘You okay, Jancie?’ Shog asked, taking her hand.
‘Yeah. I think so.’ But when she tried to focus on him for more than a second or two, his image blurred.
‘That was some nightmare, Miss Jancine,’ said Marlene, bending over her and looking into her eyes. ‘Anna may have overdone the medication, but you were in shock. You could have injured yourself.’
‘Was I?’ Jancie tried to fight the drowsiness but it clung to her thoughts and they could not move backwards into remembering. Bald was the only word that would come to her. Bald. It did not make sense.
‘Is there any food you are allergic to?’ asked Marlene, wiping her forehead with a cool, lemon-scented cloth.
Shog answered for her. ‘Yeah. Crustaceans. Shrimp and crab and lobster.’
‘Oh dear!’ Marlene’s touch was gentle. ‘There was shrimp in the carrot soup last night. I am so sorry, Miss Jancine. Will you drink this?’ She had a white plastic cup. ‘It will clear your head and make you feel better.’
Over the top of the cup, she saw Shog’s eyes, anxious, and then Banjo’s face with the puppy dog expression. Banjo was holding some kind of hat with a big brim.
‘School,’ Jancie said to them. She wanted to make it a question but it didn’t come out that way.
Shog understood. ‘Mr Matisse told Banjo and me to skip school this morning. He thought you’d want us round when you woke up.’
‘But you were so sleepy, we went shopping,’ said Banjo. ‘I got my dad a stetson like Shog’s. Look!’
Jancie drank the last of the powdery white liquid. ‘I—I can’t think,’ she said. ‘Can’t remember.’
‘You will,’ said Marlene soothingly. ‘You’ll feel 100 per cent better in a few minutes. I’ll come back and help you dress, and then Mr Matisse would like to see you and your brother.’
The word came back again. ‘Bald,’ said Jancie and she felt a fear rising through the thickness.
‘Oh no, Miss Jancine!’ smiled Marlene. ‘Your hair is perfectly fine.’
By the time Jancie had showered and dressed, most of the slowness had gone and she could walk without stumbling. But she was still unable to remember what had happened the previous night. Bits came back, floating like cut-out pictures from a magazine, the dining room, Stephen Chang in a deep pink suit, a sack of coffee beans, a deserted amusement arcade filled with flickering light, dark stairs.
She shivered. Phone, she thought suddenly. Phone? She tried to put it with the other word that had come to her. Aloud, she said, ‘Bald phone.’
No, it did not mean anything.
Marlene took her and Shog down to the basement and Mr Matisse’s office. They sat in two black leather chairs in front of Mr Matisse’s desk and were given milk and chocolate chip cookies.
Mr Matisse came in almost immediately. His hair was loose today, fine strands over his shoulders, and he was wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a patchwork jacket. He sat down in a chair opposite them and leaned forward, cracking his knuckles. ‘Well, well, well! We had quite a time of it last night, didn’t we?’ He smiled at Jancie and raised his eyebrows in a mischievous way.
‘I don’t know. I—I can’t remember.’
‘Oh, that’s just Anna getting a little enthusiastic with her favourite cocktail. When the effects wear off, you will remember, my little sunflower. Meanwhile, Mr Ashoga here has talked to me about your nightmare which began, I understand, with your concern at finding a phone.’
Looking for a phone! That was it! She blinked at him. ‘Yes.’
Mr Matisse opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out three magazines. He laid them before her. ‘It’s no secret that we don’t allow phones during training in this modelling school. It’s mentioned in lead articles in each of these magazines. Absolutely, positively, no contact with the outside world in the first ten weeks, except for the most extreme emergencies. You think that is tyrannical? Perhaps it is, but it does produce the results we seek. Look around this office. Do you see a phone here? No. The staff all have neck or wrist phones.’ He held out his left hand to show the neat dial next to his watch. ‘So, my dear Miss Jancine, if you had opened every door in this building, you would not have found a phone in the entire house.’
Opening doors! A small alertness struck Jancie. Last night she had been opening doors.
Shog said, ‘We’re sorry, Mr Matisse. It’s just that she was worried about Gran.’
Matisse smiled and squeezed his hands together, twisting his knuckles, crack, crack. ‘I presume, Mr Ashoga, sir, that you took my advice this morning and spoke to Leroy about the delivery of the Zeus boots.’
‘Yes sir,’ said Shog.
‘And you are satisfied that it was done?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘So you should be. I take my responsibilities quite seriously, as one in my position should, and I can assure you, my lovely Miss Jancine, that in the few days you’ve been here, I have twice called the Eventide Home to enquire after your grandmother’s health.’
‘She knows that, Mr Matisse.’ Shog was anxious and eager. ‘We are both very grateful.’
‘Having said that,’ Matisse went on, ‘I must apologise for giving you a message meant for another student. The aunt of a young lady here asked me to tell her niece that she sent her love.
I put that message on the wrong memo.’ He twined his fingers together and twisted his hands. ‘I am aware that sadly, tragically, your grandmother is beyond communication and I am devastated that a mistake on my note should have caused you such concern. To allay any lingering doubts, I am breaking the unbreakable rule and allowing you to use my phone.’ He picked up a pen and punched several buttons on his wrist. Then he held his wrist beside Jancie’s ear.
The ringing signal was a slight buzz against her skin. Then there was a click and a voice said, ‘Good morning. Eventide Home.’
Jancie hesitated, partly because her thinking was slow and partly because she felt uncomfortable with Matisse watching her.
‘Eventide Home,’ said the voice again.
‘Good morning. This is Jancine Donoghue. I’m enquiring about my grandmother Mrs Maureen Donoghue in ward 2, room 33.’
‘Just a minute please. I’ll put you through to the ward sister.’
There was a click, another calling signal and a cheerful woman answered. ‘Ward two.’
Slowly, Jancine repeated her words.
‘Mrs Donoghue?’ said the woman. ‘Oh, she’s fine. Condition unchanged.’
Jancie looked into Mr Matisse’s bright, inquisitive eyes framed by the gold rims. She said into the phone, ‘Can you tell me what my grandmother is doing now?’
‘As a matter of fact, I can see her from here,’ said the woman. ‘We’re in the common room and she’s sitting in front of TV, twisting a bit of string round her finger.’