Night Mares

by Manda Scott

  ‘I thought you were out of it when you tried with the air?’ I said. I spent all of the past seven and a half years believing that she was still high on the morphine and ketamine from the original death-wish cocktail. I wanted quite badly to continue to believe that.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head, her eyes on the smaller scar on the back of her hand where the hospital drip line had gone in.

  Christ.

  ‘Kellen?’ She put a hand on my shoulder. Lightly, on the scar. Her touch was warm and dry and firm and nothing at all like the scratching, screaming demon of earlier.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That was seven years ago. I was different. I am different. I don’t want to die now, Kellen. Absolutely. Whatever it is that I hear in the dreams, whatever I see, when I’m out of the dream, I want to live. You have to believe that. Of all people, you have to believe in me.’

  ‘I do.’ I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Of all people, I need to believe that.

  ‘Nina …’ I folded the pillow tighter under my head, ‘… if I ask you a question, a therapy kind of question, will you give me an honest answer?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘When you were dreaming, completely dreaming, you looked at me as if I was trying to kill you. Was I?’

  She thought about it. Closed her eyes and drifted back to the border-lands. The planes of her face changed the way they change in the consulting room. Her fingers on my shoulder tightened. We don’t touch in the consulting room. We don’t share a bed in the consulting room. Things are different there.

  Her eyes moved behind closed lids. Like REM sleep but faster, less rhythmic.

  ‘Nina? What are you seeing?’

  She flinched.

  ‘There are horses. Again. Still. These ones are big.

  Bigger than Branding Iron. With teeth like mink. And they’re hunting in packs. Like dogs.’

  ‘Hunting you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her head was jammed back against the pillow, her neck rigid. Her closed eyes scanned a slow semicircle. Watching.

  The paranoia of ketamine. Vivid and real.

  ‘Am I here?’

  ‘Yes. It’s your pack. You’re the hunter. You’re driving them on and you … shit … I’m sorry, I can’t stay …’

  She opened her eyes, snapped back to the present. Sweat ran along the line of her collar bone. Tremors ran in waves down her body, shivering the fine cotton of Steff Foster’s T-shirt.

  ‘It was you, Kellen. You as you are now. Everything else is weird. Surreal. Distorted. Blown up out of all proportion. But you were … just you.’

  Hell.

  ‘Why, Nina?’

  ‘Because I killed Rain.’

  ‘You didn’t kill Rain. You haven’t killed Rain. She’s still alive.’

  ‘In the dream, I killed her. I didn’t mean to, but she was dead and it was my fault. You knew that.’ She looked past me at something out in the night darkness beyond my head. ‘You and the horses.’

  Her arm lay across the pillow beside my head. I took her hand and held it in much the same way the fire chief had held mine outside the cottage. So that she would know that I meant what I said.

  ‘Nina. The mare might die. We both know that. And if she does, it won’t be your fault. I brought her here. I asked you to cut. It was my choice and my risk. If she dies, there is no one to blame but me.’

  ‘I know.’

  I have heard her sound more convinced.

  We dozed then, I think. I did, anyway. When I woke again, her eyes were resting on the scar at my shoulder and the fingers of her free hand traced the twisted tissue. A long-sided triangle, like a butterfly wing that stretches from below my ear down over the top of my collar bone and back up to the top of my arm. The product of a gunshot wound with overlying secondary infection.

  ‘I didn’t know you had your own scar,’ she said.

  Some things I don’t advertise. ‘It’s more recent than yours.’

  ‘But you don’t show it. You told me I should show mine.’

  ‘No. I simply suggested you didn’t need to plan your entire wardrobe around covering them up. This is different. I’d have to be half naked to show mine.’

  ‘True.’ Her smile strayed into a small frown, the way it does when she’s gone somewhere else. Her hand stayed where it was. ‘I thought there were rules,’ she said, pensively, ‘about sleeping with clients.’

  There are. Absolutely. The boundary between acceptable, constructive support and unacceptable abuse of trust is well defined. I know exactly where it is. With Nina, I have always known. A distinct, luminous line, hovering somewhere in the middle distance. Not ever quite close enough to matter.

  Right now, I could reach out and touch it.

  ‘You were hallucinating,’ I said, ‘and dangerous. I wasn’t about to leave you alone. If it’s going to be a problem, I can move next door till the morning.’ There’s no bed and no bedding but I expect we can find something.

  ‘I don’t think it’ll be a problem.’ Her hand moved then. Moved in a circle that had nothing to do with the scar. Lit up incandescent fires in its wake. Fired panic beyond anything I have ever known.

  The line became a circle. A ring. Snapped into place around the bed.

  I caught her hand and pushed it back to the pillow. Rolled over to see her eyes and found a dry, knowing laughter.

  The fires caught light and burned of their own accord.

  ‘Nina, no. I can’t. We can’t. You know that.’

  ‘And if I wasn’t a client any more?’

  ‘But you are.’

  ‘I don’t think so. We can’t keep crossing the lines like this, Kells. One minute I’m the client and you’re the professional, the next, it’s the other way round. We can’t keep going like this. It’s too confusing. Neither of us is handling it. We have to stop. Now.’

  She rolled over, her wrist still held by my hand. Her knee pushed between mine, slid upwards.

  I stopped breathing.

  ‘Nina. No.’

  I let go and turned over. She moved in behind me. Her teeth grazed the top of my shoulder, by the scar. Bit harder. I was not wearing one of Steff Foster’s T-shirts. I wasn’t wearing anything at all. Big mistake. I felt the length of her body press against mine, her hand snaked forward, reaching, exploring.

  ‘No.’ I pulled away. Swung my legs off the bed and sat up.

  All I could hear was her breathing. Steadier than mine.

  There was a glass of water on the windowledge by the bed. I drank all of it, without pausing for breath.

  Her eyes followed me. Dancing, burnished walnut, intense and intent.

  ‘I’m not playing games, Kellen.’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘So then why not?’

  Because you are straight and I am not.

  Because whether you like it or not, you are still a client and always will be and for all of my life I have despised therapists who abused their position with their clients.

  Because we are in the residents’ quarters in the middle of your place of work with, for all we know, your resident next door and your ex-fiancé downstairs and if Matt comes in and finds us like this, whatever you see in your nightmares will be nothing compared to what happens next.

  Because if I say just one of these, we will have crossed the line beyond all chance of ever returning and I’m not going to do that.

  ‘We just can’t,’ I said.

  Her arms wrapped round my waist, her chin on my shoulder, resting on the scar. Her breath sang in my ear.

  ‘Kellen,’ she said. ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning. There is no one here but Steff and she’s asleep. I have just taken myself off your client register. I will not, ever, I promise you, come to you again for therapeutic advice. All you have to do now is close your eyes, lie back and try, just once in your life, to let go and enjoy what’s happening.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can, Kells. Really. You can.’

  And becau
se I was tired, because I was half-asleep, because I was stupid and I wasn’t thinking, because it was three years since Janine left and Nina’s hands were lighting up fires I hadn’t felt since Bridget—and because she was there, I did.

  The world filled with lemongrass and ginger.

  It wasn’t peaceful at all.

  I’m not used to waking up beside a lover and feeling as if the world has caved in.

  I’m not used to treading through breakfast as if I was treading on landmines, waiting for the fabric of reality to shatter around me.

  I’m not used to censoring every wash of feeling before it lights fuses I can’t contain.

  Steff made breakfast of pancakes with lemon juice and maple syrup and fresh-ground coffee. Said it was a tradition for Sunday morning breakfast in the residents’ Lodge.

  I stood by the window staring out at empty fields and I tasted sawdust and river water.

  Steff passed me a tray with a second pancake. ‘You two look wrecked,’ she said, as if she noticed these things on a regular basis. ‘You need to go back to bed.’

  I don’t think so.

  It’s Sunday morning and I have to go into work tomorrow and find out if I can, with any integrity, continue my career. There is only one person in the world I talk to about this and she’s climbing mountains in Colorado. I don’t think I know what to do on my own.

  ‘No. Thanks. I’ll have another coffee and then I need to go home and sort out the rides. We’re down one on the yard staff and Sandy’s got the day off. I have to get back.’

  ‘Sandy Logan?’ Nina poured me the rest of the coffee. Her eyes said things I didn’t want to hear. ‘He called your mobile while you were in the shower. He said to tell you that Kate’s back and not to worry about the rides. He wants to come and visit Rain and the new foal. He said he’d bring your car and take the lorry back to the farm for you. I told him you weren’t up to driving it yet.’

  And a sixty-three-year-old chronic arthritic is? You’re too kind.

  ‘Thanks.’ I concentrated on the coffee, ignored everything else.

  The surgeon and her resident looked at each other across the table, sharing wry amusement. For all I know, sharing everything else as well.

  ‘Is she always this much fun in the mornings?’ asked the resident.

  ‘Only after she’s had eighteen hours’ sleep,’ replied the surgeon.

  I poured the remains of my coffee down the sink and left while I still had some idea of what I was doing.

  7

  My car is probably as much of a challenge to drive as the lorry, although once you’ve got used to starting in second and keeping your foot on the gas to fool the electric choke into staying alive, it’s probably a touch easier to handle on the open road. Sandy Logan drives it with roughly the same degree of enthusiasm as he writes his letters and with every bit as much care.

  I was with Rain and her colt, sitting on the grass just inside the gate to the recovery paddock at the side of the wards, feeding Polo mints to the mare, getting to know the foal, trying to get some kind of grip on reality, when he turned into the gateway at the top of the drive, rattled with joint-jarring care over the cattle grid and rolled down into the yard.

  My mare circled around me, keeping herself between her foal and the source of dangerous noises until she saw a friendly face emerge and whickered a greeting. The foal followed her lead, snickered something small and throaty and, with the naïve innocence of the infant, trotted over to the paddock rails to say hello.

  The old man eased his stiff joints in through the rails and crouched down, the way he always does with foals. He took off his cap and laid it on the grass for the new one to explore. They love his cap, horses. MacDonald believes that he soaks it nightly in herbal mixtures made to recipes inherited from Romany ancestors and there’s every chance he’s right. Personally, I would say that thirty years of farriery have probably impregnated it with a far more fascinating array of smells than any gypsy grandmother could concoct. Neither of us has yet found it necessary to ask the gnome himself.

  The colt was smart, smarter than average. He worked out where the cap came from and left it lying on the grass. Instead, he applied himself to exploring the shining dome of skin with its surrounding rim of coarse cotton-wool hair. If he’d had teeth, he would have bitten anything he could get his jaws round, just for a taste, but he was a good day away from breaking his first milk teeth and so he gnawed with his gums, smearing milky saliva across the bald surface of the gnome’s head in random exploration.

  I’ve never seen a human purr before. Sandy Logan purred. Or at least, he let his eyes rest on the colt’s chest, tipped his head back against the railings and rumbled something uncommonly feline from the depths of his chest. After a while, he sat up and started moving his hands, very gently running the knotted-hawthorn fingers over the soft chestnut skin, getting the colt used to the alien sensation of the human touch and then, slowly, probing deeper, feeling the muscle and then the bone underneath.

  It’s the bone that makes a foal what it is. The skin alters colour often as they age; from chestnut to grey, from dun to roan, from black to white. Muscles and fat come and go with exercise and feeding. The hoofs, when they come from the womb, are soft and have long feathered fronds of silky horn round the edges, protecting the mare from the sharp-edged weapons they form in later life. All these things change. But the bone of the day-old foal tells you what the horse will be if you have the hands and the eyes to read it.

  Sandy has both. And a lifetime’s experience to go with it.

  He explored the full length of the colt, from head to croup, from withers to feet, from the shining white socks to the newmoon star and at the end of it, when he had let the lad amble off to suck from his mother, he sat back beside me against the railings and his eyes shone.

  ‘He’s a cracker, so he is.’

  He is. Bright and sharp-edged. New from the other side of beyond with the wonder of it still shining on his skin. But the other one carried the magic and she is gone.

  ‘I’m sorry about the filly.’ In a night of uncommon guilt, that weighs almost as much as the rest.

  ‘Aye, I can see.’ He shuffled round so that he could read my face. If I knew him less well, I would have got up and talked to the mare. I didn’t. His eyes read whatever was written on my face. I don’t want to know.

  ‘You shouldn’t take it to heart, lass,’ he said, and if I was kind on us both I could believe he was talking only about the foal. ‘It happens. And we’ve got a cracker of a colt. He’ll make a grand wee horse a year or three from now. He’ll be a jumper, no doubt about it.’

  ‘But you wanted a filly. For the breeding. We’ve no use for a gelding.’ We don’t want jumping horses either. Or at least, it’s the first I’ve heard about it if we do.

  ‘No, no.’ He looked shocked at the thought. If I hadn’t seen him hold three of his own colts while Ruaridh Innes knocked them over for the knife, I might think he wasn’t one for letting a horse lose its testicles. But he’s got more sense than that.

  ‘We’ll no’ be gelding this one. He’s too good for that. We’ve got our very own stallion here, lass. You couldn’t ask for more.’

  ‘I can’t handle a stallion, Sandy.’ There are times when even the mares walk right through me. I’ve seen stallions and the men who handle them and I admire both unequivocally. I don’t pretend that I could ever handle horses that well.

  ‘I know you can’t.’ He has a nice line in tact. ‘I’ll handle him for you. And Duncan will help. He’s aye been wanting a son of The Lad to carry on the line. I’ll not say anything but he’ll be wanting to buy this one, you watch. We’ll maybe let him have half-shares.’ He came slowly out of the haze of his dreams. ‘If that’s fine with you, of course,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’ I wouldn’t argue with Sandy Logan’s breeding programme for worlds. ‘So long as I’m not expected to act as temporary stallion-man when you’re both off at some show somewhere.’


  ‘It’s a deal.’ He spat on his hand and held it out. In three years, I’ve not cured him of the habit. I’ve just got more used to it by now. We shook on the deal. He held on longer than I was expecting, as if he could read more of me from the touch of a hand than he could from the lines on my face. ‘You need sleep, lass,’ he said, finally. ‘Suppose we take these horses home and get you to bed?’

  I hadn’t thought of taking the patients home but, on reflection, the idea had a great deal to recommend it.

  The clinicians involved were less enthusiastic. At least, one of them was, the one that it seemed safest to talk to.

  ‘You can’t take her off-site, Kellen. She’s less than forty-eight hours away from a midline laparotomy. There’s no way she can travel. Absolutely not.’

  There are times when I can believe everything everyone says about Stephanie Foster and her lack of human relationship skills. She stood in the doorway to the pharmacy with her arms folded, making full use of her extra four inches and she was not giving any ground.

  Personally, I think that just because something isn’t in the rule book, doesn’t mean you can’t at least consider it.

  ‘It’s a Sunday,’ I said. ‘The roads are clear. We’ll take it slowly. And she’ll have round-the-clock cover at home if we need it. If she shows signs of infection, we’ll bring her straight back in, but I would have thought she was a lot safer out of here.’

  ‘They need treatments, Kellen. Both of them. Intravenous antibiotics twice daily for the mare. Intra-musculars for the foal until we check out if his colostrum hit the spot.’

  So?

  ‘I’m a medic, Steff. I did my time in paediatrics. If they let me jag babies, I can cope with a mare and foal. Just tell me what and where and when and I’ll call you if I have problems.’

  ‘Nina won’t let you,’ she said flatly.

  ‘So does Nina have to know?’

  ‘What?’ She’s big and she’s very, very blonde and she does know what her height does to people. She sank down to sit on crossed legs. Very slowly. Very gracefully. She put one elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand and she looked at me hard. Then she laughed.