‘Ally, you better stop acting it.’
‘It’s not Ally. It’s me. Lily.’
The breath on the back of Jo’s neck smelt sickly-sour. Jo turned her head and sprung out of bed screaming. A glimmer lit Ally’s empty eye sockets, the smudged colour of mud.
Jo sprinted up the hall, smacked the light on and plunged into her parents’ room. Mum was already up and out of bed and caught her sobbing body. Da was slower, falling from his berth, but, realising he was naked, he slid back under the covers.
‘Mum. Mum,’ cried Jo. ‘Can I sleep in beside you? Little Ally’s turned into a ghost.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Joey, fretting. ‘I’ve got work in the morning.’
‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ said Mary, stroking Jo’s face. ‘We’ll bring Ally in here beside Daddy and I’ll sleep in beside you for a wee while.’
Day 36
Ally’s head felt fuzzy in the morning. A musty, old-wallpaper pong made her eyes flutter open. She had been sharing a bed with Jo and now she was in her parents’ bed. Da struggled to sit up. Her nose lay squished up against his bare back. He broke away from her with a cough, and sat at the edge of the bed, with his feet on the floor. He sensed her looking at him. In the gloom of the room, he turned to peer back at her, the hedge of his eyebrows lifting. He reached across and caressed her curling legs through the blankets. His knees cracked as he leaned across the bed, kissed the side of her hair and whispered, ‘You’ll be alright now, beauty.’
She giggled, because Black Beauty was a horse on telly, and she wasn’t a horse, but Da could sometimes be funny. Mum had an arm roped around her waist, pulling her body tight into the pillows of her breasts. The familiar cloud of fading talc and cigarette smoke enveloped her. Ally sleepily turned towards her mum for warmth and a cuddle. But she had moved away a tad, then another. A gap appeared between them, and Ally’s fingers curled like seaweed fronds round the space where her mum had been.
‘I’ll need to get up too, darling,’ said Mum, but her voice sounded wintry.
Ally puzzled over what she had done wrong before she found an answer in sleep.
She scrambled out of the gloomy bedroom, with her chewed teddy bear for company, to piddle in the toilet, and scurried through to the cosy warmth of the living room. Jo traipsed out of the kitchen, balancing a soup bowl stacked with a mound of cornflakes. She patted Ally on the top of the head like a spaniel and stole the best seat by the two-bar electric fire.
‘Mum. Mum. I wanted that seat.’ Ally’s bottom lip made an island and sulked, her eyes on the edge of tears. She stamped her feet, but her mum didn’t come rushing to comfort her or tell Jo off.
Ally stumbled into the kitchen with her grievance up for renewal, her teddy bear bumping behind her from carpet shine to dull linoleum. Surrounded by a girdle of cigarette smoke, Mum stood in the corner, her back pressed against the smaller of the two sinks.
‘Mum. Mum,’ said Ally again, but was stopped short. Mum clattered briskly across, meeting her at the door. Crouching down on her knees, her hand resting on the back of Ally’s head, she jerked her daughter’s body in close, the girl’s mouth sandwiched against her shoulder, muffling the intake of breath and unfinished sound of sniffling.
When Mum spoke it was with a whispery sigh. ‘Is Lily with you today?’
Ally had to wiggle her head out from underneath her mum’s oxter. ‘No, Mum.’
Mum lifted and carried her, plonking her bum down on the wooden chair at the kitchen table. Her spoon and cornflakes bowl were already set out for breakfast, slightly elevated, a bit too high for Ally’s liking, but she dutifully picked up the spoon. Mum’s head listed to one side, heavy with sighs. ‘Well, you tell Lily from me,’ Mum sniffed a few times and took a deep breath. ‘You tell Lily from me, never, never, never to come back here again and bother us.’ She leaned her head down, her face an angry knot that Ally failed to unravel. ‘You got that?’
Ally’s fingers loosed and her teddy bear slipped and fell to the floor. Tears smudged her cheeks. ‘Yes, Mum.’ She dipped her spoon into the bowl, but there was no space in her belly for cornflakes; her mouth tightened into a question, but she didn’t know what it was. The spoon clattered onto the table, bequeathing a stodgy silence neither of them could fill.
‘Bye.’ Jo peered cock-eyed into the kitchen before leaving for high school. A few seconds later the sound of the front door banging shut reverberated through the house.
Mum resumed her sentry position with her back to the sink. She chain-smoked, one cigarette lit from the other, put the kettle on the ring, twice made tea that remained untouched in its cup and then swirled it down the sink. ‘You finished?’ she asked, watching Ally playing. She was spooning milk and dropping bombs of it back into the bowl, but Mum’s voice was icy and her look inky. ‘Remember. You hear me? You see that Lily, you tell her from me.’
Ally’s head fell into her chest, her eyes grew big as tea plates and she dared not look upwards. ‘Yes, Mum,’ she lisped, lips barely moving, a cloying loneliness in her throat. She was scared to move from the chair, scared to breathe. She watched Mum duck into the living room. Ally’s legs were jammed together, knees knocking, but her bladder was tighter than both of them; a trickle, then a flood of pee pooled where she sat, soaking through the nylon fabric of her nightie and dripping onto the linoleum. She shook her head and cried. When she looked up Mum stooped over her, studying her, her arms by her side. ‘It wasn’t me, Mum. It was Lily that did it,’ sobbed Ally.
Mum’s hand shot out and cinched her wrist, jolting her off the chair. Ally’s body sagged, but she stood bare-toed, the front of her nightie wet and her face blotted with shame. Mum gripped her lower jaw, kept Ally upright, jerking her face from side to side. She stared into her daughter’s eyes. Her grip loosened, allowing Ally to squeal and fall to the floor. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I won’t do it again. I promise, I promise to be good.’
‘You won’t get her without a fight.’ Mum yanked her to her feet and marched her through the living room and into the hall. Ally, unable to keep up, slipped, but her mum swung her body around and dragged her towards the front door.
‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m sorry.’ Ally’s pleading voice was a mixing bowl of hair and snot. She slumped at her mum’s feet at the alcove beside the front door.
Mum reached up to a shelf covering boxed-in pipes that ended in a ledge and brought down a medicine bottle filled with a clear liquid. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven—’ Unscrewing the lid, she sloshed holy water over her daughter’s head. ‘Hallowed be thy name—’ She made the sign of the cross on Ally’s forehead, reciting the Lord’s Prayer again and again.
Day 37
John expected more fuss to be made about him absconding from the ward. A few of the nursing staff made inane comments as if he were a wean of five that had stolen a chocolate biscuit, not a grown man of nearly seventeen. Listening was too much like work for them. He had clamped his lips shut, acted suitably chastised, and the natural law of hospital inertia reasserted itself and brought him back into the bonkers brigade. He made a quick circuit of the ward. Nobody took any notice of him. Many of the chairs were imprinted with the bodies of the patients he had left behind.
He also expected to be in the same room, but it had been allocated to a stoop-shouldered woman who would not meet his eyes. His relocation to another room was punishment enough. It had been cleared of a crazy dance of chairs with three legs and tables that tipped and dipped, and it was next door to the continual flushing of the communal toilets. The walls were a sickly, mildew green, the radiator broken, the window frame was lopsided and locked open six or seven inches, letting the wind whistle in. His cack-handed attempt to improve matters made it worse. The frame creaked and shifted as if it was going to topple, fall to the ground and smash the windows. He was already tainted with the stigma of absconding, and explaining how that had happened to a roomful of greeting-faced nyaffs made his gorge rise. He clambered outside and shoved the fram
e back into place before scrambling safely back inside. It remained shoogly, but held.
The loss of a room he could stomach, but the realisation Janine was not back in the ward sat less easily. He needed to find writing paper, an envelope and stamp so he could write her a letter, but although he was sure he could have found his way back to the street and flat where she lived in Partick, he did not pay any attention to her address. He sat on his bed, looking out the window, and thought about what he had done to upset her, but came up as empty as a bottle of Da’s Bell’s whisky at Hogmanay.
As a consolation he had sneaked into Janine’s room. Staff had not touched her stuff and it still felt lived in, haunted by the sweet scent of perfumes and lotions. Checking out the expertly made bed, his cock stirred and grew in his denims. He bolted from her room and into the decompression chamber of the corridor outside.
After lunch he moped about the day room and dropped into his – and her – padded hospital chairs, the slow carousel of ward routine moving round him. He had even stashed medication for Janine as a memento, like Blackpool rock without the sticky bits, and thought about just popping them into his mouth and gulping them down so that the day without her, which stretched endlessly, passed quickly.
He picked up the stub of a bookies pen and an old Daily Record somebody had left lying aslant on the shiny floor beneath the visitors’ tables. It was neatly folded and the crossword section was face-up with the word ‘cleave’, four down, spelled out. He looked at the pointer for a clue, and the answer marked in black biro did not make any sense. One seat up, two tables across from him, a grey-haired man rocked back and forth, the tic in his jaw working to a different rhythm, and John snorted at the idea of crossword clues making sense in a place where nonsense was the argot. Doodling around the edges of the newspaper, inking in adverts, he created a cartoon world of the ward staff and patients and time speeded up.
Somebody said something, startling him and making him sit up straight, but it was difficult to make out what it was above the blare of the telly. He glanced up to see Myra, a nurse he liked, leaning across, curtsying her body to get a better view of his etchings. His hand slid sideways and covered over a straggle-haired sketch of a Venus figurine with grotesquely ballooned buttocks and breasts in case Myra thought she was being mocked.
‘Whit?’ he half-smiled, in what he hoped was a friendly way.
‘Mr Williams wants to see you.’
‘Whit does he want to see me for?’
She sighed, her eyes straying to the television and she answered in monotone. ‘Dunno. The police were looking for you. He probably wants to make sure—’ A barrage of dramatic music came from the screen and her voice trailed off. ‘Doesn’t matter. He wants to see you.’
Yawning, John got to his feet and stretched his arms behind his head, loosening the kinks. Meandering through the day room in the direction of Mr Williams’s office, they zigzagged past old hands who had taken up hiding positions near the stucco-grey pillar. Their faces were working over the equation of whether he was worth tapping for a fag.
They missed their chance.
Isolated in harsh ward light, Janine leaned against the door jamb of the pool room. Her hair was tied tightly back from her face and smoke rings clung to her skin. She looked jaded. He dropped back, out of step with Myra, but the nurse did not notice. His throat clogged as he got close enough to whiff cheap perfume, and he waited for his brain to catch up with his body. He knew he sounded aggrieved and a bit stupid, but the words came tumbling out. ‘Fuck sake. Whit happened to you? I thought you’d already be here.’
Her lips tightened and she chugged on the filter of an Embassy Mild, before answering, ‘I’m here now. What more do you want?’ Her eyes settled on his face, but she looked at him like a stranger.
‘I mean . . .’ John said.
Myra stood at the consultant’s door, looking back at them.
‘You going to see Williams?’ asked Janine. Then she whispered, ‘Just make some shite up about your family, your wee sisters. He eats things like that up.’
‘Right.’ His face buckled into a smile, glad of her newfound sympathy. ‘I’ll speak to you when I get back. Tell you how it went.’
She pooh-poohed, her ciggy burning down in her fingers, in a model pose of couldn’t-care-less.
He hurried away from her, towards Myra. The staff nurse knocked, then put her head in the door to say they were waiting.
Williams was reading some dry old file with such concentration he looked like one of those blokes who wandered around in words and got lost in sentences, for whom real life was an intrusion. John wondered if he should clear his throat or if Myra was going to use professional practice and push the small of his back to bully him forward into the room. Williams’s sharp face turned towards him and his eyes narrowed. The sound of Myra’s feet squelching off along the corridors made John feel isolated, and he realised with a start that it had been his file the psychiatrist had been reading.
‘Come in.’ Williams raised his arm, flapped his wrist effeminately and curled his fingers into an invitation.
The narrow office space smelled lived in. Williams flicked shut the folder on his desk. Gripping the underside of his cushioned seat, he rocked backwards in a segmented circle. John squeezed past him. The psychiatrist’s chair faced his and boxed him in. John cradled his hands in his lap, making sure their knees did not touch. Their eyes met briefly and Williams cleared his throat. John expected him to ask, in his nobby English accent, why he had run away from Gartnavel, but he surprised him by asking a different question.‘Why do you think you are here?’
John frowned and after a few seconds of Williams’s intense gaze, shrugged his shoulders.
He rephrased the question. ‘Why do you think you are in this ward?’
‘And not another?’ John said, his voice fluting.
The psychiatrist gave this throwaway remark more attention than John expected. His white coat stretched at the back, biros in his front pocket threatening to fall to the floor; he scrutinised John’s face as if by candlelight, his hands pressed down on his knees, lips puckered in concentration. ‘Well,’ he said, after an age, ‘one of my favourite films is Harvey.’ His salutary nod included John, as if they both knew what he was talking about. ‘Harvey was a six-foot rabbit,’ he explained, ‘that few people could see.’
‘I don’t see six-foot rabbits.’ There was a hiss of exasperation in John’s voice.
Williams held the palm of his hand up in a placatory manner and continued. ‘Harvey had a friend Elwood P. Dowd, who he sometimes lived with and they liked to go out for drinks. They didn’t really bother anybody and were well liked, but soon people began to talk.’ He paused, and his index finger flicked towards John, to emphasise the point he was making. ‘What does the world do with an Elwood P. Dowd?’
John felt as though he was in one of those Bruce Lee movies when the opponent had swept his feet from under him. The fluorescent light above their heads buzzed and clicked. He took a deep breath, chewed his lips and shuffled his feet as he tried to think and explain. ‘I don’t see big rabbits. I see a little girl.’
‘What’s the difference?’ The psychiatrist’s eyes softened and the wrinkles around his mouth crinkled into a smile.
‘Well,’ John smirked, ‘one’s a rabbit and one’s a girl.’
‘How do you know that?
John shook his head. ‘I know the difference between a girl and a rabbit.’
‘So if you were walking down the road and met a giant rabbit, you’d find that strange?’
‘Yeh,’ John laughed.
‘But if you met a little girl that no one else could see?’ Williams tapped him on the knee. ‘What’s the difference?’
‘Dunno.’ John shrugged, sick of being caught out and the psychiatrist’s stupid games.
‘Well, then,’ Williams said, ‘why do you think some people get so exasperated with you seeing a little girl?’
‘Dunno.’
&nb
sp; They sat in silence for a few moments that seemed to go on and on. John found himself saying, ‘You mean the police?’
Williams’s fingers played with the wisps of hair underneath his chin and throat, but he said nothing more, waiting for the patient to speak.
‘They probably think I’m doing things to the wee school kids.’
‘What kind of things?’
John’s face flushed and he studied the gnawed nail bed round his thumbs. He felt as if he had swallowed a fistful of pebbles from Rothesay Beach; they were rolling about his mouth before he was able to spit it out. ‘Sex things.’
‘And did you?’
‘Naw. Don’t be daft.’
His voice had climbed a few octaves. He stared across at the consultant, suddenly bold, challenging him. Williams’s head bowed slightly – whether this was in acknowledgement of John’s outburst he was unsure – but the gaze of his dark eyes remained level and his jaws loosened into a little smile that disarmed John.
‘So you’ve never hurt, or had sex with, an underage girl or boy?’ His words were very precise, as if he’d been reading it from a legal document pinned to his patient’s forehead.
‘I would never dae anything like that. No. Never.’ John looked away, but Williams seemed to catch some inflexion in his voice. When John met his eyes, he knew that he knew, and he bumbled on, ‘I sometimes just have these mad dreams.’
‘Tell me about them.’
John faltered, not knowing what to say or how to put it. ‘I know it sounds daft, but sometimes when I go to bed I sleepwalk.’
Williams shook his head and blinked rapidly. ‘That’s not daft at all. In fact, it’s a relatively common occurrence.’ He made a joke out of it. ‘I’ve even been known to sleepwalk myself after a few too many Glenfiddichs.’
John stifled a yawn and gave him the kind of tired smile that his joke deserved. ‘I hardly ever sleepwalk,’ he reassured him. The psychiatrist nodded back at him and John’s face grew serious, and his tone more solemn. ‘But when I do fall asleep I have these weird dreams. It’s as if I leave my body. And it’s me lying in bed and not me getting up out of the bed.’ He couldn’t explain it better. ‘You know what I mean?’
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