Winter

by Raven Taylor

  "I heard you coming," she said accusingly, "wailing like a ghost all the way down the corridor, all you need now is some chains to rattle."

  "I'm sorry," I was not sure why I felt the need to apologise, nor why I suddenly felt intimidated. I think I was relating trapped feelings that were associated with some other shadowy, smoking, drinking figure and projecting them onto her.

  "Kept calling out like you were in pain," she said, "calling out for Someone named Lilly."

  Lilly? There she was; White skin around black rimmed eyes of deep green. Long eyelashes. A curl of red hair falling across her face. That was all I saw, those beautiful eyes, before my mind once again snatched away the memory.

  "You alright kid?"

  "Yes," I lied but my heart was pounding and I felt like something was stabbing me inside. This agonising internal pain seemed determined to severe every nerve in my body as it ripped though me and caused me to throw myself to the floor. Bent double on the carpet I saw once again those green eyes staring into mine accusingly but no matter how hard I tried to widen the scope of this vision I could not see any more of the face to which they belonged. Why were they looking at me like that? Why was it that that expression of hurt filled me with such a sense of shame and guilt?

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." I found myself repeating this over and over again despite not having any idea what I was sorry for.

  "Hey! Hey Kid!" as quickly as it had come the pain and the images fled and I came round to Ransley crouched beside me, looking concerned as she tried to shake me out of the bizarre fit.

  "I have to find Lilly," I groaned.

  "Who is this Lilly?"

  "I don't know."

  I slowly sat up and held my head in my hands feeling utterly exhausted and dizzy. Suddenly the room was filled with light and I heard footsteps advancing across the floor. Ransley swore under her breath as two orderly's burst into the reading room and hurried towards us.

  "What's happened? Is everyone ok?" asked a worried voice.

  I looked up to see them standing over us, two tall figures in white overalls wearing matching expressions of concern. Then I watched as their faces melted into what I could only describe as a mixture of disappointment and annoyance as they spotted the half empty bourbon bottle lying on it's side by the chair.

  "Well Miss. Ransley," said the burley male orderly, bending to pick up the bottle, "I'm afraid this type of thing really is not acceptable. You signed the papers agreeing to the rules, why do you continually break them? Not only that but now you're extending your bad influence to other patients."

  I glanced at Ransley. She resembled a moody child as she stuck out her bottom lip and muttered under her breath about how unfair things were. I felt guilty that I had got her into trouble and I wanted to tell them that it wasn't her bad influence that had led me to drink form the bottle but the power of some half remembered memory. From there my opinion of Ransley shifted. When we first met I had never thought we could grow to be friends as we did in the time that followed. Had it not been for that chance meeting brought on by my sleep walking it might never have happened at all. Funny, how the smallest things can change the course of events.

  ***

  When my social worker next visited the next to see how I was settling into my routine at the hospital the first thing I inquired about was you, Caroline.

  "Has she been in touch, to see how I am?" I asked eagerly.

  Denise looked down her long nose and fiddled with the sleeve of her tweed jacked uncomfortably, "We haven't heard anything from Miss. Hunter."

  I was disappointed, surprised and a little hurt. When last we had spoke you had seemed so genuine and interested in my progress. Your parting words had included 'see you soon.'

  "Does she know where I am?" I persisted.

  "She was given a number for the social work office where she could reach me directly should she wish to discuss anything about your case. I'm afraid she has not called and we do not contact people who aren't family to give them updates of any kind, it is up to them if they wish to know what is happening. We have to respect peoples privacy, after all, who are you to her?"

  Her words stung because I knew she was right. I was nobody to you, you did not owe me anything. No doubt you had talked things through with your sister who would have made you see that you had already done enough and remaining involved would not be a wise move. You might have argued about it, your sister telling you you were being foolish, that you couldn't replace the child you had lost with some stray you found wandering the streets. Of course this scenario was entirely made up of my own paranoid thoughts. I could not possibly know why you had decided to step out of my life. I was not angry at you Caroline, I could never be angry at you, It was understandable, but it still hurt to have that tiny little bit of hope and light extinguished. I had so wanted to show you the notes in the book you had given me and the sketches (to join the scribbles of the four poster bed I had since added a crude scrawl of a shadow in a chair and a biro rendering of the beautiful eyes which had none of the beauty they had in my vision). As it was I had to make do with showing them to Dr. Kingston which was not the same. He looked at the drawings and praised them the way one might praise the artistic endeavours of a small child. He only just stopped short of sticking them on the fridge with magnets shaped like alphabet letters. It made me unhappy. I did not want to discuss the mysterious Lilly who's name made me so sad nor the smoking figure and his bottle of liquor but he forced it out of me, speculating on paper only as to what all this might mean and not sharing his opinions which left me feeling frustrated. You would have told me what you thought of the whole thing, you always did treat me like a real person when everyone else spoke to me as if I was simple.

  That days session had left me feeling despondent and lethargic and my mood was only made worse when Ransley came banging on the door to my room demanding to be let in, persisting with her hammering until I had no choice but to get up and confront her.

  When I opened the door her face looked anxious and exited as she barged past me and threw down today's papers on the bed.

  "You want to see what they're saying about you," she gushed, the words falling from her lips as though a dam had just burst, "They found a body in the woods. Some reporter had the bright idea of linking you with it."

  "What?" I snatched up one of the papers and quickly read the story. She was right. The body of a young woman had been discovered in the same woods that I had been found in. She had not been identified but already the papers were putting to use their simple journalistic minds and leaping straight onto the link.

  "Oh no," I cried, "what if it's her?"

  "Who? It's all rubbish you know, speculation."

  "We don't know that. Maybe I did kill her."

  I pushed Ransley out of the way and went flying down the corridor. I had to find someone to talk to. No wonder You hadn't come, why would you when you had probably read that I was a murderer?

  I burst into Dr Kingston's office without knocking shouting, "I killed her!"

  He observed me quietly, his hands clasped under his chin and his glasses perched on the end of his nose.

  "You killed who, Winter?"

  "Her, the girl in the woods, Lilly!"

  "Winter," he said calmly, "That girl who died was called Julie Lyle. I've talked to the police. Don't trouble yourself needlessly. You have nothing to worry about for the moment."

  "But, the papers..." I protested.

  "You shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers. They see two events like these occurring in a similar area and all they see is the chance of a sensational story. They ignore the facts in favour of what they deem to be good reading. Why, you should have seen some of the more bizarre theories they had the stupidity to print about where you might have came from!" There was that tone again, the one he had used this morning, addressing me as though I was a child.

  "Like what? What else did they say?" I wondered.

  "Let's not
trouble our heads with that," he said is his best patronising voice, "You're mind needs to be free of such fanciful non-sense if you are to continue to progress. Now, stop reading the papers. I can but guess who it was who showed you such a thing."

  He gave me a meaningful glare that suggested he knew exactly who it was. Ransley, his eyes said, the trouble maker. The one who smokes and drinks and brings news of the outside world to those who we wish to keep ignorant.

  "Now you need to leave, I have patients to see and a schedule to keep," he waved his hand to dismiss me, "Go, and be mindful of the company you keep."

  Ransley was angry when I told her about what Dr. Kingston had implied but she told me she knew the stories in the papers where rubbish. It did not matter to me though whether the stories where true or not, the damage had already been done, they had linked me to a murder and now you wanted nothing more to do with me. Likely nobody would ever again, even if it did turn out not to be true, they would always look at me with suspicion, there would always be doubt in their mind and I could never defend myself because I could not say where I was or what I was doing when that girl had died.

  We were sitting on the steps of the main entrance, her smoking and me staring glumly across the gardens. It wasn't the most well maintained area. The snow was starting to melt away to reveal the litter that clung to the over grown hedges and the clumps of wet leaves from last fall that lay in a festering brown mush along the flower beds.

  "I have to get out of here," muttered Ransley as she she tossed her spent cigarette on the ground and crushed it under the toe of her doc marten boot.

  "So why don't you just go? I was told no one here was actually committed and every one was pretty much here voluntarily."

  "Yeah, so they say, why don't you try asking them if you can go, see how far you get."

  "Why are you here, anyway?" I guessed that given her forward nature she wouldn't mind such an intrusive question.

  "Depression," she said in a tone that was a little too bright for delivering such a statement, "depression that led to drinking, self harm and three suicide attempts."

  "Oh," I didn't really know what to say.

  "See all these piercings," she pointed to the various pieces of metal that clung to her face, "and all of these tattoos," she rolled up her sleeves to reveal her patterned flesh, "sometimes I get such a craving to feel pain that I have to have it done."

  I studied the intricate designs that adorned her chunky arms.

  "What does the date mean?" I asked, catching a set of numbers on her upper arm.

  "Date?" she looked at me as if I was an idiot.

  "Yes, the 7/1/2005?"

  She made a snorting noise in the back of her throat, "You're head really is fucked kid, somebody must have hit you real hard."

  Why did she say it like that? Was the meaning of the date that obvious that she couldn't believe I would even ask such an absurd question?

  I pulled out my notebook which I now kept on me at all times and turned to the front page. So far there were two dates written in the top corner next to their corresponding names. I added Ransley to the list so that it looked something like this:

  Caroline: 24th December 2011

  Dr. Kingston: 6th January 2005

  Ransley: 7th January 2005

  "What are you doing?" she pestered, leaning in and trying to see what I was writing.

  I snapped the book shut, "just notes, I have to keep notes on anything that comes into my head, anything that might be relevant to helping me find out who I am."

  "Right. How's that working out for you?"

  "Well at the moment all I have is a jumbled scattering of things that seem to have no link to one another. They may or may not be memories, I really don't know."

  "You talk funny," she observed suddenly, cocking her head to one side so that she looked like a giant inquisitive parrot with that big green crest of hair.

  "In what way?"

  "You speak proper. The kings English. No slang. No accent. No swearing. You're not from around here, you come from people with money. Tell you how else I can tell?"

  "Alright I'll humour you."

  "The way you look," she said simply, "Your face. Now I'm not trying to say poor folks are ugly, not at all, but there's something distinguished in you that just cries out wealth. That kind of look, that bone structure, that comes from good breeding, so it does."

  CHAPTER SIX

  Days had passed and my life remained as much a mystery as it had when you first found me. I dreamed vague and tangled dreams of that girl called Lilly most nights. They where always the same. I could never see her clearly and it was as if I watched her from afar. The events of the dreams where rarely significant. In them I saw her doing every day things: walking down a cobbled road, laughing in a bar with her friends, sleeping peacefully in a cosy looking bed. Never in my dreams did I interact with her; I was always the silent observer as though her life was a movie being played to me.

  The New Year arrived without much to mark it other than Ransley and her bottle of Jack arriving at my door shortly before midnight. The days at Greenleaf had become repetitive and I was beginning to loose faith. I continued to attend my sessions with Dr Kingston but it seemed he too was becoming frustrated by my lack of progress. Denise, my social worker, visited frequently to give me updates that never contained anything new and sometimes she sat in on my sessions with Dr. Kingston.

  When I opened my eyes that day she was there in her tweed suit, sat beside Kingston, peering down her hooked nose and scribbling in her spiral bound book. It had been Kingston's idea to hypnotise me. He had used this technique in the past on patients with amnesia to unlock hidden memories.

  I had gone under easily despite being so unwilling at first and now that I was awake again I felt violated. They had just spent the last hour sifting through the private parts of my mind that I myself did not even have access to. I was keen to know what, if anything they had discovered.

  Little was the short answer. There was still no explanation as to who I was. However, what they had found out was interesting.

  “You told us about your love for Edinburgh,” Denise informed me, “That’s pretty much all you talked about. You didn’t mention any people, events, or whether you lived there you just described streets and places in the city in great detail. You seemed to particularly like Grey Friar’s Church yard. Do you remember ever going there?”

  Edinburgh? I thought hard. Had I ever actually been there? Obviously so but I couldn’t remember a thing about it.

  "Would you like to see some pictures?" asked Kingston, handing me a pile of freshly printed images that he had pulled from his computer.

  I took them and began to look. The images were all close to me, the streets and buildings painfully familiar.

  "Yes," I said excitedly, stopping on a picture of a graveyard, "I know this place, I know it well!"

  "That's Grey friars kirk yard."

  “I would like to go there.” I said suddenly, sitting up straight.

  “To Edinburgh you mean?”

  “Yes, I think if I could see the places I talked about I might remember.”

  I saw Denise look at Dr. kingston, waiting him for to give his opinion on the suggestion.

  “Out of the question,” he squashed my hope like a bug, “You aren’t ready to take any trips, I have not finished my evaluation of your mental state.”

  “To hell with your mental evaluation,” I snapped, “I’m tired of being stuck in here, if you want to see progress you’ll take me to Edinburgh.”

  “In a month or two we might think about it but you’re simply not ready.” he insisted.

  “Yes, of course not.” I bit my lip and gazed at the mirror on the wall, the one I knew was one way glass concealing further observers. It wasn’t worth loosing my temper over.

  "At least we can start to concentrate our search efforts on that area. I won't hesitate to lyase with the detective in charge of the case, see if they can start a
fresh appeal for information focused on people in the Edinburgh area."

  I was miserable for the rest of the day and spent the evening alone in my room staring at my reflection in the mirror as the light died around me.

  “Who are you?” I asked my sombre reflection, “Where did you come from? Why do you look so strange?” he did not answer he just gazed right back at me.

  None of this seemed real. I felt numb, dead, like I was just a discarded shell. I regarded my white, almost translucent flesh, the perfect bone structure of my face and the gleaming black hair, the deep eyes, the smooth skin pulled across my chest and taut stomach. All at once I hated the perfection, I looked like I had just stepped out of an old oil painting, one of those idealistic romantic ones painted by the likes of Raphael. I did not feel or look like a real person. I longed suddenly to have all the imperfections others had like Ransley with the spots on her chin and the slight flab around her upper arms or Dr. Kingston with the tiny veins in his nose. I had none of those things. I would have given anything in that moment just to feel real instead being consumed by the timeless sense of unreality. How I longed to be outside, to be walking among normal people and just to forget what a freak I was, just for a little while. But they wouldn’t allow it.