by Jodi Taylor
His dirty milk colour seemed remarkable restrained. He was holding himself in tightly. He looked up and smiled.
‘Mrs Cage, hello. How are you feeling?’
I wasn’t sure how I was feeling and my mouth felt dry and sticky and unpleasant, so I just nodded.
I thought he would come to sit beside me – Erin had put a chair ready, but he remained at the foot of the bed. A safe distance away.
‘I’m not going to trouble you with talking about your injuries just at this moment. I shall leave that to Dr Lewis whom I’m sure you will remember. She will be your primary doctor. I want to assure you that I shall not be directly involved in your treatment.
You have enough on your plate without having to cope with your dislike of me, but I’m here if you need anything. You have only to ask.’
I nodded again, suddenly tired, and when I next opened my eyes, he was gone.
Dr Lewis was here, however, standing in the doorway talking to someone I couldn’t see. I used the opportunity to look around. Apart from the medical equipment, nothing much seemed to have changed although it was obvious this was now a hospital room rather than a bedroom. I looked down at my white hospital gown and the catheter in my hand and sighed. To distract myself I turned my head to look out of the window. The view through the window was equally discouraging. The patch of sky that I could see was grey, full of ominous, dark clouds swollen with snow.
While I was looking out of the window, she had approached the bed. ‘Mrs Cage, I can’t tell you how sorry I am to see you here. And I don’t mean that to sound unwelcoming.’
Still not feeling like speaking, I nodded.
She hesitated and then said, ‘Do you want to know the extent of your injuries?
Did I? Did I want to know what Michael Jones had done to me? I closed my eyes. As if that would shut out my thoughts.
She put a gentle hand on mine. ‘Another day then. There’s no rush. The important thing you should know is that you’re quite safe here, Mrs Cage. There is nothing here that can hurt you. Dr Sorensen has asked me to assure you that we only want you to be well. I know your last visit did not go … quite as well as we could have wished, but you need have no fears this time. Now …’ she opened the locker next to my bed. ‘Here is your handbag. Your keys are inside. Your neighbour, Colonel … Barton?’ She looked at me and I nodded, ‘has your other set. He says he will keep an eye on your house for you. Especially in this weather. He telephones every afternoon to tell us everything is well and to ask after you.’
I felt my eyes fill with tears. He was such a lovely man. I saw him again, standing over me, heard him bark defiance at Michael Jones who could probably have snapped him in half without even trying.
I had to know. I forced my mouth open and said, weakly, ‘Jones. Where?’
‘He’s not here,’ she said, crisply and I could see she was telling the truth. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know where he is – they haven’t told me and I don’t particularly care anyway – but he’s absolutely and categorically not in this clinic, Mrs Cage. You need have no fears. You are quite safe here.’
I nodded again, feeling my eyelids growing heavy. She patted my hand and left.
Initially I just slept. And if I wasn’t sleeping then I pretended to. I lay in my bed, not thinking about anything and watching the snow pile up on the window sill. One morning it was over six inches deep. How deep must it be outside? I didn’t speak much to anyone, but I smiled and nodded in all the right places and gave them no trouble.
‘You’re in the right place here, Mrs Cage,’ said Erin one morning, brushing my hair for me. I’d said I could do it myself and then discovered I barely had the strength to lift the brush. ‘It’s a nightmare out there. It hasn’t stopped snowing for nearly a week. They’ve had to mobilise the army to take food to the more remote areas and even they can’t get through most of the time.’ She caught my expression. ‘Oh, no need to worry – we’ll be all right. We’ve plenty of food here, and we have our own generator, not like some of the poor souls out there.’ She replaced my hairbrush. ‘You stick with us, Mrs Cage. Best place to be.’
She was right. We watched the news bulletins together. The weather was getting worse all the time. There were power cuts and food distribution problems. It was rather frightening and all the time the snow never stopped floating down from the sky, day and night. Was this climate change at last? Were we embarking on another ice age? The world seemed so silent and, apart from the snowflakes whirling past the window, so still. There was a feeling of unreality about everything. People were beginning to worry. I could hear the nurses discussing the situation as they worked. They were anxious for their families. Especially Erin whose family farmed in the Lake District.
‘They’re all right for the time being,’ she said one morning, straightening my bed covers. ‘The army’s dropping supplies from helicopters now and that’ll tide them over for a bit, but there’s food shortages everywhere. Nothing’s getting through.’
They talked to me about my injuries. Not that there was much need – I could see my injuries. A broken arm, a bruise the size of a dinner plate over my ribs – which were cracked. As was my shinbone, also badly bruised. There was nothing that wouldn’t heal. Physically.
I closed my mind to it. All of it. The disbelief. The betrayal. The pain. I would not waste my time in endless replays. I would not wonder what I could possibly have done to make him do such a thing. I would not spend hours trying to concoct plausible scenarios. I would not look for a reason. Or an excuse. I would not seek for something that would make everything all right again. I would wipe it all from my mind and move on.
My recovery was slow. Probably because I wasn’t trying particularly hard. Fortunately, there weren’t many patients. I remembered Ted telling me they always sent as many people home as possible at Christmas time, so I had three nurses altogether. Erin, my principal nurse, Keira and Beverley.
Surrounded by their protective clucking I began to move around. I had my first bath. They washed my hair for me. I think they fought over me behind my back. There were so few patients that they were desperate for something to do. As I said to them, the service here was superb. They laughed and said they were mostly trying to avoid snow-clearing duties. They were young and light-hearted and for them, this was all a bit of an adventure. I smiled. Compared to them, I felt about a hundred years old.
Dr Sorensen stuck his head around the door just once. He wouldn’t come in, he said, but he had messages from Colonel Barton – everything was fine at home and he and Mrs Barton were very well, all things considered.
‘I passed on your thanks and best wishes,’ he said. ‘I thought you would want me to.’
I nodded.
‘You must be sick of this room. Get Erin to wheel you around a bit tomorrow. Go and have a poke around the library or have a coffee in the dining room. Nothing too strenuous, mind, but a change of scenery will give you something else to think about.’
I never thought I’d actually say this, but Sorensen was right. It did give me something else to think about.
Erin stuck her head around the door the next morning. ‘Dr Sorensen’s compliments and would you like to join him for tea this afternoon. He promises not to eat you.’
I looked up. ‘Did he say those exact words?’
‘He did. And I think he was nearly smiling too.’
‘Do you think he’s been replaced by an alien?’
‘We all certainly hope so. Do you want to go? I can get you a wheelchair.’
I looked out of the window at the grey sky and the still falling snow. Suddenly the thought of looking out of a different window was very inviting.
‘Yes, my compliments to Dr Sorensen, I shall be delighted to join him this afternoon. I promise not to eat him.’
‘Great. I’ll find you a chair.’ She disappeared.
We all enjoyed a small girlie flurry that afternoon as they found me a clean gown, did my hair for me and installed me in one of the h
ospital wheelchairs.
‘Here you go,’ said Erin, smoothing a blanket over my legs. ‘Ready?’
‘As I’ll ever be.’
She wheeled me along the corridor, past the nurses’ station and on towards the lift. Just as we arrived, someone called her name. ‘Erin! Telephone call for you. It’s your mum.’
She stopped. ‘Mrs Cage, do you mind? I must find out how they’re coping.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Take as long as you like. I’ll just wait here for you.’
‘Oh, thank you so much. I’ll park you here by the window so you can see out and I’ll be as quick as I can. Promise.’
She disappeared.
I was quite horrified at the view from the window. The gardens had completely disappeared under a blanket of white. Rounded humps denoted former trees, bushes and garden ornaments. Everything was just a featureless, undulating white plain. And still the snow came down. I felt a twist of unease. Suppose it never stopped. It would be bad enough when the thaw came – we were all going to be swimming for our lives – but suppose the thaw never came. Suppose this was our weather from now on. They say we have Stone Age DNA within us. My Stone Age DNA was very, very uneasy indeed and urging me to migrate south before it was too late.
I turned away from the window and sat quietly for a few minutes, just looking up and down the corridor. No one was around. I suspected they were all off having tea – as I should be. I sat back in the chair, closed my eyes and let my mind wander.
It was very faint to begin with. So faint that I only became aware very, very gradually. Like a door opening briefly a very long way away. I opened my eyes but nothing had changed. I still sat in a warm corridor, painted in shades of expensively neutral colours, looking out at a snowscape. I closed my eyes again.
Shit!
I jolted in my chair, hurting my arm, my ribs and my leg all at the same time.
Stop. Stay calm. Stay … calm. Breathe slowly. I stared at my hands. It was very, very important that I stay calm.
Only when I had a reasonable amount of control did I look up. The corridor was still empty, as was the nurses’ station behind me. I couldn’t even hear Erin’s voice on the telephone. The lift was only six feet away. I trundled towards it, careful not to hurt my arm and pressed the button. The doors opened immediately. Once inside, I closed the doors before anyone saw me and studied the controls. Second floor, first floor, ground floor. And the basement.
Taking a deep breath, I pressed ‘B’.
The lift slid smoothly downwards.
I found myself in a familiar long corridor. Pipes still ran along the walls – a little more neatly than they had done seventy years ago, and there were more of them now – but I’m sure I recognised some of them. And there were the doors to the medical supply storerooms, now all with keypad locks in this much less trusting age. Gone was the old furniture and piles of files – too much of a fire hazard, I guessed, but just above me was where the ceiling had come down, blocking our escape. The night we tried to save Evelyn Cross. Me and Michael Jones.
That thought reminded me why I was here. I wheeled myself out of the lift, hurting my arm and hardly noticing because it was just down this corridor here and off to the left …
There were five doors on the right-hand side and all of them were open. I set off.
The first room was empty. I never found out what was in any of the others because the second was the one I was looking for. I stopped in the doorway.
It was a bare, bleak room. Not dirty – I’m certain that Dr Sorensen – that’s Sorensen as in ‘that lying bastard Sorensen’ – wouldn’t permit dirt anywhere in his clinic, but it was a far cry from the comfortable rooms upstairs.
I saw a bed – not against the wall, but at an angle in the middle of the room as if it had just been shoved in here as quickly as possible and left. Abandoned even. Next to the bed was a small wooden cabinet with three drawers. There was no traditional fruit bowl or water glass. The top was empty. On the other side of the bed was a drip of some kind. I had no idea what it was dripping. It was a clear fluid, so not blood, but further than that I couldn’t say. A thin transparent tube ran downwards to the bed. And at the end of the tube lay the thing that had been Michael Jones.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I was more angry than I could ever remember.
No. Angry wasn’t the right word. Anger didn’t even begin to cover it. I was ready to explode with rage. Hot and cold waves of fury washed over me. I clenched my fists so hard they hurt. They’d lied to me. They’d all lied to me. Again. And I’d believed them. All of them. Again. Over and over they’d told me I was safe. That Michael Jones wasn’t here. That I had nothing to worry about and all this time he’d been here. In the same building as me. He’d been here all the time. I could feel the blood pounding in my head, beating out a rhythm in time to the words. He’d been here all the time.
And running through all that, a cold vein of fear. Because he’d been here and I hadn’t known. I had once sensed his distress across an entire town. I should have known he was here. Yes, I was ill and yes, his presence was very weak – I’d had to leave my room to feel it … but even so …
No, wait – I hadn’t had to leave my room – I’d been invited out of my room. By Sorensen. I’d been taken from my room by Erin in all good faith. She’d certainly believed the telephone call was from her mother. I’d been parked near the lift. And there were cameras everywhere. I was willing to believe Sorensen knew exactly where I was at this moment.
I was clumsy with the chair, but I eventually got myself alongside the bed so I could see him properly. I knew it was Michael Jones because … well, I just did, but his own mother wouldn’t have known him. I could not believe such a change could occur in only one week.
My next thought was that I was too late. That he was already dead and I was looking at his corpse. His face had fallen in. Thin, grey skin was stretched tightly over sharp cheekbones. His nose stood out like a prow on a ship. His hair had mostly fallen out. A few sad wisps lay on the pillow.
No one had bothered to shave him. Patchy grey stubble covered his chin. He looked like an old man. A week ago he’d been – well, he’d been Michael Jones, vigorous and full of life and rolling in the snow – and now he was here, abandoned and cold and dirty and neglected. And dying.
I wondered if that was why I’d been brought here. To say my farewell. Unlikely. I couldn’t see Sorensen giving way to a compassionate impulse. I was here so they could see how I reacted. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I think that was the moment I made the decision.
I was having trouble catching my breath and I knew from experience that coughing was not something my ribs would want me to do, so I sat back in my chair, gripped my cold hands together under the blanket and struggled to be calm. The cold was a help. This room was freezing. Anger raced through me again. There wasn’t much of him left and the bastards couldn’t even be bothered to keep him warm.
He was, quite literally, a shell of his former self and what was left was diseased and stinking. His stick-like arms lay outside the thin sheet that was all they’d covered him with. His once solid body had caved in on itself. Michael Jones was no longer a big man. Worst of all was the smell. They say smell is the most evocative of all the senses and with just one breath I was back in my living room not a week ago, fighting against the endless void that lies beyond death, and smelling the rancid smell of rotting dog. Here, in this horrible room, I could smell Clare all over again and I knew what she’d done.
She’d used him to strike at me and it had killed him. I suspected Michael Jones had been dead since the moment he walked through my front door. His body had continued to function, powered by whatever malignant thing had been consuming him from the inside, but it had killed him. Eaten him up. He was strong – had been strong – but what lay in front of me now was just a burned-out husk. Her ultimate revenge on both of us. To use him to punish me and then to leave him with just enough awareness t
o realise what he had done. I remembered his bewilderment. He’d said, ‘Cage …?’
My stomach heaved. What was in front of me were the final remains of Michael Jones, used and discarded. Rotting from the inside out. The stench of putrid flesh was overwhelming. I couldn’t help it – I gagged, vomiting up my lunch onto the bare concrete floor.
I found a tissue in my pocket, wiped my mouth and threw it away. I would sit here for a moment, regain my composure, then return to my room. And after that … after that, there would be … revenge.
He opened his eyes. Even his eyes were different. A runny, watery blue. Almost colourless. The whites were yellow, shot through with blood where the delicate veins had burst. Like an egg, poached in blood.
He saw me and all at once I saw a little flicker of gold, just over his heart. Just a tiny flicker. Like a match struck in the vastness of a dark night.
I put my hand on his, feeling his cold dry skin beneath my touch.
He made a faint inarticulate sound and tried to pull his hand away. Shame and humiliation very nearly extinguished his little flame. I tightened my grip. ‘Michael, it’s me. Can you hear me?’
A tear trickled down his cheek.
Now I knew why what I had to do. Ignoring the stench, I leaned forwards.
‘Can you hear me?’
He nodded very slightly. Another tear ran down the track of the first one. A glistening trail to be lost in his stubble.
‘It wasn’t you. Do you understand me? It wasn’t you. It was Clare.’
He made another faint sound.
‘I don’t forgive you because there’s nothing to forgive. It wasn’t you. She used you, but it’s all over now.’
And it was. That tiny flicker was fading fast.
I felt a whisper of wind in the still, cold air. The world blurred – and not because my eyes had filled with tears. I looked up and Evelyn Cross stood on the other side of the bed. She wore her nursing sister’s uniform – a dark blue dress, starched cap and apron. I could even make out the upside-down watch pinned to her breast.