by Stef Penney
One of the nurses comes daily and pricks me with a needle. It fascinates me to watch her pushing the metal tip under my skin, while the expected pain doesn’t materialize.
“What if it stays like this? Can’t you do something?”
The nurse is young and cheerful. She has rosy cheeks that she ineffectually tries to tone down with greenish powder, and a small gold cross around her neck that swings out of her cleavage and dangles over my bed like a benediction. Even without the cross, you can tell that she’s swaddled in the love of Jesus.
“We’ll organize some physiotherapy for you. But there’s no physical damage, so the nerves should recover on their own. You’ve got every hope.”
She smiles at me. She’s so young—about twenty-four—so confident, sweet, and pleasant. I bet she wanted to be a nurse from the age of five.
I have every hope. That sounds so nice. I wish it were true.
I am getting better; I can tell. Over the past few days—I don’t know how many it is—I have been recovering speech and movement. But I still can’t remember how I came to be here. And I can’t atone for the mistakes I have made. Being a victim doesn’t exonerate you. After the Georgia debacle, people said to me it wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t have foreseen what would happen. But they were wrong. I had met her killer. I looked into her killer’s eyes. I should have known.
Sometime later—I must have finally dozed. I open my eyes to see someone sitting beside my bed on one of the leakproof plastic chairs. (They don’t even trust visitors to be continent.) At first, it’s only because the broken sunlight coming through the cherry tree makes a different pattern. A pattern splashed with red. Lulu Janko. With her red shoes and red lipstick, her red, bitten nails. And, today, a thin crimson scarf wound around her neck like a slash of blood. It takes me a second to remember why I should be surprised that she’s here; my sluggish brain, fogged by the sedatives they give to help me sleep, creaks into action, and I am duly ashamed. But she is here. I’m not sure whether to be happy about this or worried. I think that, on the whole, I am happy.
“Are you awake? Ray? Hello, Ray.”
She looks a little irritated.
“Hello.”
My voice comes out reasonably clearly.
“You look much better today.”
“You came before?”
I try to think back—I can’t picture her in the hospital room at all. “Yes. You weren’t awake, though. Not very . . . with it. I didn’t stay long.”
God. What sort of state was I in? But she has come—twice! Take that, wheelchair man.
“That must have been a pretty sight.”
“Yeah.”
She smiles.
“What brings you here?”
The smile goes. I didn’t mean to sound aggressive.
“Would you rather I went?”
“No. I didn’t mean that. I’m really glad you came. I know the last time we met . . . Well, I’m sorry—about it all. Wouldn’t be surprised if you never wanted to set eyes on me again.”
Shouldn’t have said “really glad.” Just glad. Or touched. Or . . . indifferent: something less than the truth.
“Doesn’t matter. So you’re feeling better?”
“Much better.”
“That’s a relief.”
“So are you on your way somewhere?”
She shakes her head.
“I just wanted to see how you were.”
“Oh.”
I can’t think of anything to say. I am full of questions, just not appropriate ones.
“Erm . . . How is Christo?”
There’s something nagging away at the edge of my conscious mind. Something to do with her.
“He’s doing well. He’s still in hospital, but . . . they’re really looking after him.”
The more I think of it, the more I don’t understand why she’s here, why she’s being nice to me at all.
As though she’s reading my mind, she says, “I phoned your office. I spoke to your boss. He told me you were in hospital and . . . so here I am.”
“My boss? I don’t have a boss.”
“Oh . . . well, the man there. He sounded . . .”
“Posh voice?”
Caught out, she actually blushes. She isn’t the first person to assume Hen is the boss.
“Did he tell you what happened?”
“He said that you’d been taken ill and crashed your car. And that you were in quite a bad way.”
She shifts in her chair.
“Yeah. I was poisoned.”
Her eyes widen.
“Poisoned? What do you mean? Food poisoning?”
“I went to see Tene and Ivo. I think they gave me something to eat. And . . . here I am.”
“Oh, God.”
She leans forward, her forehead creasing. She looks horrified.
“What did you eat? Was it shellfish?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. But I wondered if . . . they were okay. They might have got ill, too.”
“Oh . . . God, I don’t know.”
She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a short, sharp sigh.
“I’m so sorry, Ray, that’s awful.”
She called me Ray. She can’t be too angry with me.
“According to them here, it was plants.”
“Plants?”
“Yeah. Poisonous plants. I think . . . henbane was one . . . and ergot.”
She doesn’t look at me anymore. The crease in her forehead deepens. Finally, she says, “Do you . . . have any idea how it could have happened?”
“Well . . . I suppose it must have got into the food, somehow.”
I am speaking to the top of her head. For the first time, I notice a little stripe of gray at the roots of her parting. She must have been too distracted to see to it. Distracted . . . by what? For some reason, this fact squeezes my heart with an almost physical pain.
“You should check on them. It wouldn’t do to be ill like this and not be in hospital. Especially Tene.”
She nods, fiddles with the handbag on her lap, although “handbag” is a misnomer. You could get a cocker spaniel in there.
She looks at me, finally. I’m not sure, but there could be tears in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry about this, Ray. I . . . They do collect stuff to eat sometimes, like mushrooms, berries, and things, you know—I suppose it’s easy to make a mistake . . .”
“Yeah.”
I shut my eyes for a minute. After the harsh sunlight, searing patterns scribble themselves on the insides of my eyelids—they resemble monsters with long teeth, and filthy claws.
Lulu seems uncomfortable, uncertain. A couple times she almost stammered. It strikes me that this is the first time she doesn’t have a default position that puts me automatically in the wrong: defiance, suspicion, outrage.
“I’m really sorry about all this. My family drive me mad, but they aren’t bad people. They wouldn’t hurt you deliberately. Ivo . . . I know he doesn’t always seem very . . . polite, you know, but he loves that boy with all his heart. He’s really grateful for all you’ve done for him, with the specialist and so on.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t think I accused him to her face.
Then I think, if she hasn’t seen them, how does she know he’s grateful?
She jerks her head toward the door of my room.
“They say you’re going to be fine. I hope you get better very soon.”
“Thanks. You should tell Ivo, though . . . in case he doesn’t know. It’s dangerous.”
“Yeah, yeah. I will.”
I am still bothered by the feeling that there’s something important I need to remember. Something involving her.
I just can’t for the life of me think what it is.
Lulu avoids my eyes and stares into the middle distance, chewing at her lipsticked mouth, wearing off the harshness of the red, leaving it blurred and sore-looking. A strand of dark hair has slipped out of her barrette and falls
in a long wave down the side of her face—it forms a reverse curve: the elongated S, the most beautiful of lines, according to Chinese aesthetes: the line of a woman’s hip and waist when she’s lying on her side . . .
Oh, my girl, you don’t know. You don’t know what you do to me.
“You know, I found something,” I say, recklessly, because now I’m afraid she’s about to go; I can feel her attention slipping off elsewhere, tugging at the leash. I want it back. “I was about to tell Tene, but I didn’t get a chance . . .”
I try to move my right hand but can’t. Still dead meat.
“About Rose . . . About . . .”
A look of anxiety comes over her face, and she leans in to me. And suddenly, with a jolt like a thousand electric shocks, I’m aware of her hand on mine. My numb right hand, lying on the cover with its plastic bracelet like a dead snared rabbit. With as much feeling. She’s holding my hand. Well, not holding but definitely touching—I can just see it out of the corner of my eye. Typical. She touches me when I’m paralyzed—or, perhaps, because. And I think: of course, that’s the way she likes them. I can’t feel a thing. Not a thing. Although I imagine that I can.
I imagine everything.
“What is it?”
I realize I can’t remember if I told her before. Or was there something else?
“You told me about the . . . bones they found. Is that it?”
I open my mouth to speak. The human remains . . . Yes. And there was something else, I’m sure, but the thought is breaking up even as it forms in my head. Maybe if I whisper, she’ll lean down toward me, her ear an inch from my lips. Maybe I will catch a whiff of her cigarettes-and-perfume smell.
At the same time she seems to become aware of my eyes on our hands, and though I try not to react, she moves her hand away, and it dives into her vast handbag and starts to scrabble in the murky depths. For what? The answer? It comes out again, empty.
“You look tired. I shouldn’t keep you any longer.” (No! No! You should!) “I have to go, anyway. Got to be at work soon.”
It’s like a slap in the face. Go. Work. Him.
The illusion of intimacy evaporates like scent.
“Work. Of course.”
She gets up, glances at me suspiciously, although I didn’t say it in any way at all. But then she stands by the bed for a long moment, about to speak.
“Ray . . . uh, I hope you feel better soon. I’ll see you. Okay?”
She walks out, her shoes busily ticking off the seconds down the lino-leum corridor. I listen to the sound fade, and time returns to its normal hospital crawl.
In the slow hours that follow her visit, I have the time to think about things. Like, what was she going to say at the end, before she changed her mind? Like, why did she come and see me, twice? To check that I wasn’t dying, so she can report to the family that they don’t need to skip the country?
To assuage her own guilt?
And what on earth does she keep in that vast sack of hers that she needs to drag around with her all day? Her purse, her cigarettes, a selection of red lipsticks . . . a year’s supply of hostility . . . an economy pack of disapproval . . .
The secret, inexplicable blueprint of all my desire and delight?
How did it end up there?
33.
JJ
The pain wakes me. I come to, having no idea where I am. I’m curled up, surrounded by something prickly. A strange smell. Something hard juts into my hip. My right fist is throbbing, and, when I try, I don’t seem to be able to straighten my fingers.
I shift, and there’s a rustling all around me. It’s very quiet. Then, from somewhere nearish but outside, I hear a car engine—a smooth, expensive car engine—start up and drive off, and I remember where I am. A soft thudding comes from much nearer, which means the horse is walking around in his stall. An explosion of air from horse nostrils. It’s a good sound. I was right to come here, I think. It’s going to be all right.
I had to break in to the stable last night: the door was locked, which surprised me—it hadn’t occurred to me that people would lock a horse in for the night, but luckily one window was open, so I slithered through, scraping a load of skin off my hip bones on the windowsill in the process. The horse was moving around but didn’t seem alarmed at my appearance. He didn’t start making a lot of noise, anyway. I spoke to him in a low voice, reminding him who I was. I could just see the gleam of his eyes in the dark. He seemed mildly curious, that’s all.
I didn’t want to put the light on in case someone saw it, but I remembered that the stable was divided into three loose boxes and a small extra bit at the end for tack. There are wooden walls in between that don’t go all the way up to the ceiling. The end box is where Subadar lives; the middle one is empty, apart from a couple bales of hay and odds and ends, and the one at the other end is where they keep the straw for his bed, and tools, and his food and stuff. There’s a big stack of straw bales—I remembered that you couldn’t see the top when I was here before, but that was a couple weeks ago, and there is less now. Still, I climbed up and made a sort of hollow where I couldn’t be seen from the door, and fluffed lots of straw around myself, so I’d be pretty hard to spot even if you were standing right next to me. The only bad moment was when I slid down to fetch one of Subadar’s stripy horse blankets. I reckoned he wouldn’t mind. I managed to knock over a metal bucket in the dark, and it made a horrendously loud clanking and ringing noise as it rolled around on the brick floor. I froze, sweat springing in my armpits, waiting for lights to come on everywhere and police sirens to start, but nothing happened. I suppose Subadar kicks buckets quite often. I climbed up onto my straw platform and lay down, pulling the blanket over my head, trying not to giggle with nervous horror because I had kicked the bucket.
I’m superstitious, I suppose. I told myself it was just a coincidence. People—farmers and so on, especially—must kick buckets all the time, and they don’t die. Not right away, anyway. To calm myself down I drank some more of the whiskey and ate a few more sweets—I’m rationing them, of course—and then I don’t remember anything else.
The longer I’m awake, the more I remember about what happened last night, and the more I realize what a mess I’m in. My right hand is purple and swollen from where I punched in the window of the last car. My knuckles are bruised, and there’s dried blood on them. My hip bones are red raw where I slithered over the windowsill, and there’s a long, sore scrape down my side—I have no idea where that came from. The worst thing, though, is my left arm. I remember digging the glass dagger into the skin above my wrist, but in a strangely detached way—it’s as though I’m thinking about someone else doing it, a crazy person that I’m watching for some reason. I wasn’t trying to kill myself, or anything stupid like that; it wasn’t that at all. I just knew I had to do it, like lancing a boil or something. Letting out the poison. It was horribly fascinating. Hard to do, despite the whiskey. I had to force my right hand as though someone else was pulling my arm away.
I had to grit my teeth.
But the rush when I saw the blood well up and run down my arm—it was amazing.
I remember all this now with great clarity, although, in daylight, it seems like a pretty dumb thing to do. I kind of wish I hadn’t done it, to be honest. I don’t think the cut itself is too bad—I mean, it’s not that deep, and it’s not bleeding anymore, but it hurts quite a lot, and it makes me feel sick to look at the inside of myself exposed to the air like that, so I pull my sleeve down to cover it up. It throbs with a hot sort of pain. I can’t cover that up.
I eat two more of the sweets—an orange one and one of the not-very-nice green ones. What are they supposed to taste of, anyway? There are only four left, and three of them are green. I’m incredibly thirsty, and I have to go to the toilet quite badly. Luckily, I have my watch on, so I know that by now Katie will have been taken to school, and there’s probably no one here. Or maybe just Mrs. Williams. Very slowly and cau-tiously, I peer over the top of
my nest, then slide down the straw stack. The stable is so luxurious there’s even a tap in here, so I put my head under it and drink and drink, and then try to wash off some of the blood. Subadar looks around mildly. Now I see he’s tied up to a ring on the wall, probably to stop him from eating all the hay at once. He’s got some food in his rack, so it seems likely that someone has been in this morning and didn’t notice anything odd. I feel a warm rush. Was it Katie? Was she near me while I slept?
Halfway through an endless pee—I do it in the gutter that runs along the stalls, reckoning that as the horse does it there, it must be all right—I remember that it’s Saturday. Why did I think Katie would be at school? She could come in at any minute. Luckily, she doesn’t—I don’t think I could have stopped peeing, no matter what. After, I shoot back up to my hiding place and lie down. I don’t feel too great. I feel kind of sick, and my head hurts, probably from the whiskey, and my various scrapes and cuts ache with different degrees of sharpness and heat. Soon I’ll be very hungry. And then—but only then—I’ll have to think about what to do.
When I wake up again I know, without having to look at my watch, that it’s afternoon. Where is everybody? Does she leave the horse on his own in here all day? Surely she’ll come and take him for a ride. I’m starving hungry and eat the rest of the sweets, even the green ones. I can’t see any point in saving any. But putting something in my mouth just makes me hungrier. My headache has gone, but the cut on my left arm is itching like mad. When I pull up my sleeve to have a look, the skin has gone red and swollen, and it’s hot—I can feel the heat coming off it when I hold it up to my lips. The raw flesh is disgusting—wet and crusty at the same time. I know this is not good—it’ll have to be disinfected. Stitched, probably. And my right hand is completely stiff, bent into a swollen claw shape, so it’s not very easy to do things with it. I wonder if I can hold out for another night.
The thing is . . . here’s the thing. The thing is, me and Katie, we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend. In fact, I’ve barely spoken to her in the last two weeks. Since that afternoon in her study, which I’ve thought about at least a thousand times a day, we’ve gone back to our previous habit of basically ignoring each other’s existence. This is the way I expected it would be at school, so it was no surprise, and I didn’t mind too much. She lifted her eyebrows at me on the second day, and I smiled before I could stop myself, and she turned away with a toss of her hair, quick as a flash. I felt I’d failed some kind of test, and I cursed myself for being so uncool. Stella has been talking to me more, though, which made me wonder if Katie had told her anything. On the whole, I don’t think so. She didn’t say anything that made me suspect that she knew what had happened; she was just her normal, friendly self, like before she came to our trailer and it all went wrong.