Lily Poole

by Jack O'Donnell

‘The thing about death is it’s an absence, but also a presence. There’s not a minute in a day I don’t think about my Jamie.’ Blotchy tears appeared on his face, rolling down his cheeks. He sniffled, making no move to wipe them or hide his grief.

  John felt a surging anger growing in his throat and stomach as if he had been cheated. Bert had made him talk about himself because he needed some form of reassurance from him.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He wanted to look away, hide his head under the hospital blanket and feign sleep as he had ­earlier, but the watery sorrow in the old man’s eyes pinned him into place. Then he was babbling the first thing that came into his head, speaking quickly, trying to get it all out. ‘When you go up to his grave, he’s playin’ football in the field beyond you. He’s eleven now. And he tells his friends that he’s got to go because his mum really needs him. He says the new house is nice, but you need to get a colour telly. A house is not a home without a telly. He’s sorry about Mum and what happened between you. Don’t be sad, he said, you’ll meet someone nice too.’

  The overhead lights buzzed as the nurses switched them on and they began their rounds, patrolling the wards. A frowsy older woman, wearing a blue hat at a jaunty angle, began mopping outside the entrance to their bay. They heard the thump and the slosh as she kicked her bucket, sliding it along with one dainty black shoe, until they could only see her shoulders moving from side to side behind the partition. A wet slug trail filled the air with the armoury of disinfectant.

  ‘How dare you!’ said Bert, in a scathing tone. ‘I don’t think you’re right in the head. I’ve never heard such shite. I’d a daughter not a son. A daughter! Ya fuckin’ eejit. And my wife will be up to visit later on.’ He rose up out of his blankets straight-backed, his head turning, one way and then the other, looking for assistance, looking for something to throw, but he contented himself with stabbing out his cigarette in the cup he used as an ashtray. ‘You shouldn’t be in this ward. You should be in the fucking loony bin.’

  The patients in the other beds were sitting up, struggling out of the cocoon of sleep and hospital-cornered blankets. The man with the bed nearest the window was already padding towards the toilet and stopped mid-step to listen. ‘What’s he done, mate? You know what these young boys are like! Tried to get in bed beside you and get his leg over?’

  Bert turned his head, as he addressed the other man. ‘You’re nothing but a foul-mouthed, stupid old bastard. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Bert. Bert. Easy Bert,’ said the man in the bed across from them. ‘He’s just having a wee joke.’

  ‘Ha fuckin’ ha,’ Bert said. He pointed index finger and thumb at John in a warning shot. ‘I intend to have a word with the matron and have you moved to another ward. In the meantime, don’t speak to me, don’t look at me and don’t come anywhere near me. Is that clear?’

  John’s neck and cheeks flushed plum-purple. He nodded in agreement and stared at his feet entombed in clean blankets. He desperately needed to pee, but was scared to get up and go to the toilet with so many eyes on him.

  Bert yanked across the curtains that separated their beds. John was cut off from him and partially cut off from the other patients. He vacillated between grateful and mortified, willing the nurse to come and provide a distraction so he could go to the toilet without any snide comments.

  Day 20

  The auxiliary nurse mopped under John’s big feet. He tried dancing out of the way to escape her attentions, but his chair was squashed in beside his bed, and she seemed to delight in hitting him. He had dressed for breakfast, put on his denims, but they smelled dank as fungi and felt damp on his legs. A discarded Glasgow Herald hid his face from the other patients; he peeked out from behind it as he flicked through the sports pages. Nobody was taking any notice of him, which made him feel better. The matron paraded through the ward; the student nurse, a step behind her, managed a scattergun look that rested on everyone except John.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he told the matron, when she turned in his direction.

  ‘Yes. I know.’ The matron walked round the bed and tugged the curtain that separated his bed from Bert’s. ‘I’ve already arranged for you to be moved to level four, Men’s General Medical.’ She took a deep breath, the upside down timepiece on her chest heaving, before she continued, ‘Where you should have been in the first place.’

  He folded the newspaper and placed it between the plastic beaker and the glass quarter-filled with tepid water on top of the bedside unit. She had misunderstood. ‘Nah, I’m no’ goin’ to level four. I’m leavin’ the hospital.’

  ‘But you’ve still to see the neurologist!’

  A shake of his head infuriated her even more. The ­student nurse looked on the verge of smirking. The matron gathered in her expression and spoke in a monotone. ‘Fine. I suppose technically you’re an adult. I’ll just get the forms for you to sign.’ He watched her broad back retreat, the student nurse trotting behind her.

  Outside the wind blew and there was a nip in the air, but the sky was cloudless and his stride lengthened. He ­followed the short leash of perimeter road, leaving behind the antiseptic, enclosed world of concrete and glass for traffic fumes, busy roads, wide pavements and hurrying pedestrians. He had no money in his pockets. It was a couple of miles walk home, but he didn’t mind.

  He got to Partick Station. Crossing over Dumbarton Road, he decided to jump on the next train to Dalmuir. Speed-walking through the station, avoiding the eyes of the staff behind the Perspex screen, he went safely up onto the railway platform. It was a familiar game. He got a window seat on the Balloch train. At every station, as the train slowed, he scanned the commuters on the platform for a ticket inspector. His luck had turned for the better; none got on. He prowled up and down the aisles in the smoking compartment until he saw what he was looking for – a used return stub. At Dalmuir ­Station, a bottleneck of passengers waited for the guard to take their tickets. He sloped in among the crowd, handed the guard the stub and brushed against a man in a gabardine coat as he hurried away. John took the stairs outside the station two at a time. From here it was a five-minute walk home.

  The weather had held, but he was more than a day late meeting Lily. There was no heavy rain, no snow and no logical reason why she could not walk the last stretch of road down to the school herself. He trotted up the Cressie stairs, taking him onto Duntocher Road. He pondered what his mum had told him about Ally and Lily’s friendship. The rules and roles, it seemed, had changed. Lily might be sitting waiting for him, waiting for them, at home. He dabbed his forehead, blessing himself, as he passed the front entrance of St Stephen’s Church. Down the street the panda car was parked near the school gates. Up ahead on the hill, scant sunshine had faded into a memory of Scottish summer, and Lily was scuffing one shiny black shoe off the toe of the other, waiting for him. He felt confused, as if he had lost a hundred pound note and found a fiver, or the other way about.

  He cut across the road to meet her and she ran down the brow of the hill shouting, ‘Wehhhh!’ He chuckled as she bumped into him, clutching at his legs.

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’ He rubbed her arm through the blazer.

  ‘T’s OK.’ She thrust her hand into his and tugged him towards the junction of the road and the school. He pretended she was too strong and she had pulled him off his feet, and he staggered beside her.

  They stood on the edge of the pavement and looked left and right with exaggerated care before crossing the road, swinging and looping their arms up into the air. He initially failed to notice, but her hair was different, it was tied in little pink-banded pigtails and not kirbies.

  ‘Lily . . .’ he said.

  John leaned down to ask her about who it was that had helped her change hairstyles, but the doors in the police car clicked open and thwacked shut. The cops who had beaten him leaned against the car as if they were on home base.

  ‘Bad men,’ said Lily in a solemn voice, biting her lips.

  He nodded, but kept
a hold of her hand. They walked a little slower. ‘You’ll need to run very fast. No other kids are in the playground. But it’s OK, cause the bad men only see me. Not you.’

  She shivered as she looked up at him, but he was unsure whether it was the sudden gust of wind, the policemen waiting for them, or that she didn’t know what he was talking about. He dithered and dragged at her hand so she stopped too.

  ‘You don’t have to go to school,’ he said. ‘You’re late. I could take you home. Where is it you live again?’

  Lily scrutinised his face and frowned as she considered this for what seemed the longest time. She shook her head and tightened her eyes in a way that indicated going home was beyond her. Her constant trust in him and her innocence renewed his belief in the goodness of life. The lightest touch of her little fingers in his, urged him forward, made him fall into line beside her. It picked apart the barriers between them and made her seem more his responsibility than before.

  The policeman who had beaten John strode up towards them and made a grab at his arm. John shortened his shoulder and shrugged him off.

  ‘Run, Lily! Run!’ John shouted.

  He felt his arm wrenched behind his back, forcing his head down, so he could no longer see her. He expected punches and kicks, but he was pulled across the road towards the waiting car. The sergeant put his hand on the crown of John’s head and pushed him into the back seat. John looked out the window, he felt an old hand that had seen it all before. The panda slid past the white garages and boxed houses of the Holy City on Second Avenue. It was a journey he had become familiar with, but instead of taking a right down Kilbowie Road towards the police station at Hall Street they kept going. The siren was put on. Lights flashed. Cars and vans pulled into the side of the road. They took a left up the hill. John had no idea where they were taking him.

  Day 20 (afternoon)

  Janine had decided to kill herself so many times she was getting fed up with the idea of dying. She followed the other defeated shufflers from the breakfast room to the telly room, and hooked a chair to face reception. Nobody looked at anybody here unless they bumped into each other in the corridor. The telly was never off – it was the one consistent voice, filling in the corners of silences, an antidote to every condition but the human condition.

  Then two policemen, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, delivered a new face to the ward. They looked at her out of the corner of their eyes, as if they wanted to eat her out. Uniforms. They were so predictable. Policemen made everybody nervous and, Janine knew better than most, nervous patients were hard work. She hung about watching the show. The consultant psychiatrist, Mr ­Williams, processed the boy, sectioned him with a mandatory twenty-four-hour stay, do-not-pass-go, and got rid of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in double-quick time. He was smart that way. Not that anybody ever did any work with the patients, but the idea was a good one, a sound one, clinically proven.

  There was an empty room three doors down on Janine’s side of the corridor. She waited to see who could be coaxed out of the nurse’s office to escort the boy to his single berth, his new home, before she made her play. Just her luck it was her designated case-worker, Stephen, on the seven-to-three shift. Stephen’s skin was the colour of mixed concrete. She hated his fruity smell and the stained and oversized shirt and trousers he wore as a uniform.

  Stephen held his hand out, warding her off. ‘Just give John here a minute to get settled before you jump on his bones, Janine.’

  ‘Just give him a minute, Janine.’ Her face twisted in disgust as she mimicked his poofy voice.

  John glanced past the portly nurse at her, his gaze shifting to his feet, a firecracker lighting his cheeks.

  Janine felt a tingling in her vagina as if a pilot light had come on. She melted into the pleasure of his kinked smile as he sneaked another look at her through long lashes, then back down at the floor. Excitement and protective tenderness spread under her skin, making her glow. She felt a tingling contentment in the timbre of her voice as she answered, ‘I’m just goin’ to my room to lie down for a bit.’

  ‘You can lie down anytime and anywhere.’ Stephen licked his thick lips as he spoke and proprietorially took John’s elbow to guide him away from her.

  Janine could have slapped Stephen, but the damp, boyish smell of John made her pause and mellowed her. She stood, watching the nape of his neck, the shape of his head, and remembered the form of his face, the crooked nose, eyebrows that suggested something dirty and bright, hooded eyes, which sheltered boyish shyness. Ballsy plans for his body made her stomach flip. She would make him worship her in the privacy of her room. But not in public. Not yet. God she was hot.

  Nobody flaunted sex like Janine. If you did, you were cheap. And if you were cheap, you were written off as a nymphomaniac. Not worth talking about – though everybody did. Men held the answer to how to unslut a slut. They did that in chapel or church. Then a slut became a lovely bride. Such a loving mother. The poor thing. She hated that hypocrisy. Hated men. She hated herself most of all, but hoped she could play this one differently. She waited until Stephen passed her in the hall, going the other way, returning to his scrapbook of unlined A4 paper to write something trivially monumental about her in his report. He waved an admonitory finger.

  Her room door was open. She could tell if somebody had been in, rooting about – nobody had. She stood at the window, let her hand slide into the top of her denims, peeled back her pants, fingers in her tush, and waited for a sense of normality to come along, to wash her away, in the same way that she waited for a bus. With her mind full to bursting with junk it took longer than expected. A glow radiated from the dark yellow curtains that looked gaudy in daylight. The window only opened three inches, enough to push a dout out, empty cartridges of make-up, or a warm can of Coke that had gone flat. Her eyes glazed. She fixated on the sandstone gable of the opposite ward and the grassy knoll with the wind whipping through a sprawling rhododendron bush. She shivered, shook, and bit down hard on a moaning sound. Sniffing her fingers, she loped out of the door to wash her hands.

  He stood in that awkward way in the corridor, reading the fire regulations on the wall, avoiding looking at her. She wasn’t having that. Nipping his bum, she made him turn.

  ‘Hi,’ she kept her voice low, friendly. His cheeks were lipstick red. She liked that, and she liked even more the apple-green shine to his eyes and the way they flickered away from her face. ‘I’m Janine. I spotted you coming in.’ She laughed and stuck her hand out for him to shake. That relieved some of the tension in his shoulders. He smiled back at her as he gripped her hand. She held it a few seconds too long, rubbed her juice into his thumb. ‘Thought since no one else has, I’d show you around.’

  ‘That’d be great,’ he said.

  ‘There’s not much to see,’ she said, in a mocking, confidential tone.

  ‘That’d be great,’ he said again, floundering, the way most men did.

  She easily took the slack. ‘What’s that in your hair?’ Her expression took on a perplexed look.

  He patted at his head as if searching for a piece of lint and expecting a nit or bug.

  ‘No, there.’

  He leaned over and down. She moved her head sideways and ran her fingers up and down through his hair, marking him hers again and again.

  ‘You got it?’ He straightened up.

  ‘Emm,’ she replied, slipping her arm through his. She led him two circuits of the ward and threatened to blindfold him and see if he could do a third alone.

  The pilot light was on, burning hot. After lunch, she pushed him into a chair in the corner of the day room, grilled him until she knew everything there was to know about him, and why the police had delivered him to her. She kissed him and made it seem as though it was his idea. He kissed her back. The pressing together of their lips, slipping and sloping their bodies against each other was a testing, slick and cool.

  Day 26

  From their house the phone box was a two-minute walk. The inside of it
was grotty and smelled of pee, which was just badness, Mary thought, because if anybody needed the toilet that badly they could have slipped round the back of the garages close by. She had a stack of ten pences – fifty-pence-worth – balanced on the chipped metal tray. Her feet slipped on broken glass as she dialled the number, waiting for the pips. She wanted news, any news that her son would be alright.

  Mary was glad Joey was out working when two policemen had come to the door. She hadn’t invited them in. It gave the neighbours an earful and something to gossip about. The older and fatter officer had said they’d taken John to a place of safety. He mentioned all the wee girls that had gone missing in recent years and made it sound as if they were doing him a favour. As if they were doing her a favour. She’d flared up at them and told them where to get off; John couldn’t abduct himself never mind some stupid schoolgirls, but it all came out wrong and she ended up making a fool of herself. She knew what they meant. They’d put him in the loony bin. She thought of her uncle rotting in some far-flung institution for years.

  Visiting time, she was dutifully informed, was usually between half two and half three. The nurse on the phone that first night said they could be flexible, but it was better to leave it a few days to let her son settle. A casual dismissal of the structure of the day worried Mary, but she grunted, ‘Uh-huh,’ as if she understood.

  Over the next few days she could never quite catch the names of the nurses she spoke to on the phone. When she directly challenged them, asking them in her most polite elocution voice, ‘Who am I speaking to, please?’ they mumbled something, skipped along the pathway of a different conversation and made reassuring noises. Later, Mary heard one nurse, the one she thought of as Krinkly Crisp because of the way she talked, tell another staff member that ‘It was that pain-in-the-arse woman on the phone again’. Mary banged the receiver back onto the cradle, and lit a fag to calm herself. She felt like getting a taxi up to Gartnavel and knocking heads together. When she told Joey later, he just looked over the history book he was reading in bed and laughed.