by Will Maclean
Angrily, I squashed the tears away at the corners of my eyes, choked down my sadness and walked on. The short cut became an entryway, which became a street. Soon, I found another bus stop, and waited.
I looked at my watch. Just under three hours ago, I had been at Yarlings.
35
St John’s Infirmary was a Victorian building with recent bits grafted on, like a negative of the building I had just come from. The original hospital was a municipal thing of red brick, with no distinctive personality of its own, that could just as easily have been a town hall or a hotel or swimming baths. Growing out of this were several brutalist blocks of concrete and glass, housing the newer departments. I read signs for X-Ray, Outpatients, Intensive Care. Where would Mum be? At a busy central desk, an elderly receptionist gave me convoluted directions, and I wandered off in the direction she had indicated. Was this the same day? Woken by one nightmare, finding myself in another. I had not even had time to ponder the mystery of the writing on the landing wall, a problem that now seemed to belong to an entirely different world, with entirely different rules.
Halfway along one of the endless corridors of green paint and grey tile, I bumped into what was left of Dad.
He looked thinner and sicker and older than I had ever seen him look, but something more fundamental than lack of food or sleep had taken its toll. All sense of purpose seemed to have left him.
‘Tim!’ he said, smiling. He gave me a hug, clinging onto me. I had to peel away from him.
‘Dad,’ I said.
There was a pause. He just stared at me.
‘How is Mum?’ I asked.
‘Still unconscious,’ said Dad. He looked overwhelmed by the statement, and immediately began to sound overly humorous and jokey. ‘Do you want to see her? I’m sure she’ll want to see you!’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have the doctors said anything?’
‘No, they just said we should let her rest. I was just going to get a tin of pop and a sandwich. Can I get you anything?’
‘I’m fine, Dad.’
‘Right you are. She’s in bed number nine. The head nurse is Sue, she seems to be top dog here.’ He was behaving in a way that was so normal it was eerie. I hadn’t heard him say things like right you are and top dog and act this chipper since before Abi vanished. Why would he pick now to pretend his hardest that everything was OK? Right at the moment when it absolutely wasn’t? I heard him whistle as he walked off down the corridor, something jaunty and incongruous. I pushed open the door of the ward.
Twelve identical beds, in two rows of six. Two of the beds had pale blue curtains drawn around them. All of the beds were occupied; I saw various sleeping women, all much older than Mum. I stood for a couple of seconds, unsure how to proceed, until a tall, toothy woman in a starched nurse’s uniform tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Are you Timothy Smith?’
‘I am.’
‘Your mother’s through here. She’s still unconscious, I’m afraid.’
‘Is she OK? Will she be OK?’
The nurse, presumably Sue, didn’t look at me. ‘The signs are good she’ll recover, but she might have lost some brain function.’
‘What does that mean? How much brain function?’
The shrug again. ‘We don’t have any way of knowing at the moment, I’m afraid. We won’t know until she wakes up.’ Nurse Sue’s sensible shoes clack-clacked on the parquet floor, until she eventually stopped at one of the two beds that had a blue curtain wrapped around it. She parted the curtain enough for me to pass through.
Mum’s face was pale yellow and clammy-looking, a waxwork. She seemed both aloof and terribly vulnerable, as if sleep were an act of defiance, but one that was costing all the resources her enfeebled body could summon. As I stared at her, her neck twitched convulsively and her back arched to lift her head from the pillow. When she had expended all her energy, she sank back into the pillows that Sue had taken the opportunity to plump up for her. She looked unlike any memory I had of her, as if a different person now inhabited her frail body.
I sank down into an orange plastic chair. I didn’t want to look at Mum. Turning away, I saw the chart at the head of her bed, bulldog-clipped to the grey metal bedstead.
‘That isn’t her name,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Sue. She was checking the drip that ran into Mum’s hand.
‘Mrs Alice Louise Tyler. That’s not her name. Her name is Alice Smith.’
‘Yes, there was some confusion over that. Your father authorised it, though. He said that given the separation, it was probably for the best, from a legal standpoint.’
‘The … separation?’
I saw alarm in her eyes. ‘Er, I believe that’s what was discussed. I wasn’t here when your mother was admitted.’ Nurse Sue glanced nervously at me, and returned to adjusting the catheter.
The curtain screamed along the rail, and Dad was back, grinning an embarrassed grin.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What did I miss?’
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘Are you and Mum separated?’
‘Call me if you need anything,’ said Nurse Sue, clearly well practised at extricating herself from awkward conversations. She drew the curtain behind her as she left, either to screen the ward from us, or, more likely, us from the ward.
‘Dad?’
He half-looked at the floor.
‘What does that mean? Are you still living together?’
‘Well, of course we are. Where would she go?’
‘So what does it mean?’
He sighed heavily. His clothes hung off him. He looked like he wanted desperately to just lie down.
‘It means that we’re still living in the same house, but not as man and wife.’
‘I’m no clearer on what that means.’ I knew I should cut him some slack, but I felt like being ruthless.
Dad sighed again. He looked down at Mum, lost in unconsciousness. It seemed very lonely for her, and I suddenly understood where she was, and felt desolate.
‘We’re not speaking. We’re sleeping in separate rooms.’
‘OK.’
‘We were also talking about a divorce,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh.’ I felt a panicked jolt all over my body. My parents simply weren’t the kind of people who got divorced, and I had never considered it as a possibility. It shaped the immediate future into something much more confusing.
What will happen to me? I wanted to ask.
‘How seriously were you discussing this?’ I asked.
Dad shrugged helplessly. ‘Pretty seriously, Tim.’
What will happen to me?
‘Don’t you love each other any more?’ I asked.
Dad smiled a joyless smile. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Tim. You haven’t been around much the last few months. It’s become … difficult to live with your mother. She does the same thing every day. She just sits and smokes.’
‘She’s always smoked.’
‘Not like this, Tim. You’ve seen her. It’s all she does. She doesn’t leave the room if she can help it, let alone the house. She’s like a zombie.’
‘But she’s just …’ I wanted to say grieving, but found that the word encompassed more than I was willing to admit. ‘She’s been through a lot.’
‘We’ve all been through a lot, Tim. All of us.’ He motioned towards Mum. ‘Let’s just get through this first, hmm?’
His calmness was infuriating. I felt rage surge through me.
‘Yeah, well, you don’t seem too affected by it all. How’s the redecorating going? Have you managed to wallpaper the spare room yet? Has it plugged the gap where Abi was?’
He looked at me with an expression I had never seen him wear before – one of pure, cold anger – and I fell silent. I had gone too far. I was very conscious of the fact that we were standing arguing over Mum’s motionless body.
‘Go home,’ he said, quietly. ‘We’ll talk about this later.’
My voice, when I spoke, sounded co
wardly and overly conciliatory. ‘OK.’
The curtain screamed aside, and I went.
I was afraid of going home, much more scared than I had been of spending time at Yarlings. Yarlings had been, when all was said and done, an adventure to me, an escape, and our family home, characterised even more than ever now by absence, was the thing I had longed to escape from. I wished, as I put my key in the lock, that there was somewhere – anywhere – else to go. Although it was summer, the house felt chilly, the air in the hallway unmoving and stale.
In the five days I’d been away, Dad’s mania for redecorating seemed to have subsided, and very little had changed in the house, as far as I could see, although the living room was obviously the next room he had his sights on, as there were small test squares of paint on the wall. I turned the television on and sank down on the sofa. Nationwide was on; they were interviewing a man who was growing vegetables in an old car, a project that seemed to cause both the interviewer and the man doing it almost dangerous levels of hilarity. I turned it off, although the absence of chatter made the house seem even more depressing. It was hard to believe it was summer; hard to believe it wasn’t even dusk yet. Had the house always been this dark?
Although – or perhaps because – Dad and I had so much of urgent importance to talk about, we barely talked at all when he got home. Rather, he slunk back into the house like an exhausted shadow, sitting down on the sofa next to me as if it were the last thing he ever intended to do.
‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. ‘Shall I make tea?’
‘That would be nice, Tim,’ Dad said evenly, as if reading from a script. ‘Thank you.’
It took me about half an hour to make beans on toast, toasting the white bread under the grill and heating the beans up in the large aluminium pan my mother had, once upon a time, used to make soup. I set the table for two, and we both ate in silence. Halfway through dinner, I realised that this was the first time any members of our family had eaten together, at the table, since Abi had disappeared.
Dad trudged off to bed early, ascending the stairs with the same exhausted finality with which he’d come home. Soon I crept upstairs too.
My room was cramped, cupboard-like, even smaller than I remembered it being. Even my room at Yarlings was large, compared to this. I wondered what everyone at Yarlings was doing. I wondered, especially, what Sally was doing, and whether she was thinking about me.
36
I could hear clattering downstairs; distracted, without focus, rattling the cutlery and slamming cupboard doors. Dad was evidently awake. I pulled my clothes on, splashed cold water on my face and headed downstairs.
‘Hot water’s on, if you want a bath,’ said Dad, without looking at me. ‘Although tell me if you don’t because I don’t want to heat it up for nothing.’
I liked that he was at least attempting to look after me. ‘I’ll have a bath, Dad.’
‘I made tea.’ He gestured towards a mug on the kitchen counter.
‘Thank you.’ I took a sip of tea. It was cold. ‘Are you going to see Mum today?’
He looked at me with a hint of derision and, for a second, he was very much his old self. ‘What did you think I was going to do? Climb Everest? Are you coming with me?’
I nodded, delighted and saddened by this little flash of business as usual, and sipped more of my cold tea.
Mum’s condition, unsurprisingly, had not changed. In fact, the condition of all of the patients on her ward seemed to be immune to change of any kind. The very elderly ones lay with their eyes closed, as if cocooned, and the younger ones – although, apart from Mum, they were all at least sixty – occasionally writhed and yowled, tormented by toxic dreams.
Mum looked calm and peaceful. I could almost believe she was merely asleep. The ward was oppressively hot, and all the windows were closed. Neither Dad nor I felt it was our place to open them, so we simply sat either side of her, sweating, each unsure of what to say or do. There was no shortage of things in immediate need of discussion, but no way either one of us was going to deliberately address any of them. And so we sat.
The woman in the bed next to Mum’s muttered something, and I saw her face stretch and almost elongate in the throes of a noiseless scream. I winced.
‘Can’t they put Mum in a room on her own?’
‘I asked them that. They don’t have enough beds. That’s why she’s here, with the older ones who’ve gone doolally.’
The woman next to Mum bared her teeth for a second, and then opened her eyes. She saw me and smiled a lascivious, hungry smile, and then buried her face in the pillow.
I thought of my dream of the previous morning, of the furious, malign cloud at the top of the staircase in Yarlings. And then, waking to discover the message. What had it said? So much had happened and there had been so little time to process it. NICE GIRL, it had said. BITCH WHORE. Nice girl. The phrase that had passed between Polly and me before she kissed me.
The woman in the bed next to Mum’s suddenly sat up and laughed a long, loud, filthy laugh, that seemed to hang longer than was natural in the feverish air of the ward.
‘Where are you going?’ said Dad. I realised I was on my feet.
‘Get some fresh air,’ I said.
I had noticed the phone on the way in; a wall-mounted payphone covered by a transparent dome of smoky brown plastic. I put all the change I had into the slot, and dialled Yarlings.
‘Hello?’
‘Sally?’ Thank God. Thank God. ‘It’s Tim.’
‘Oh Lord, how are you? We’re all worried about you. Is your mum OK?’
‘She’s still unconscious,’ I said. ‘They expect her to wake up soon, but there’s no telling when, exactly. How is everything there?’
‘Good! We just had the ol’ usual daily séance.’
‘Oh.’ I was upset. ‘You had one without me?’
‘Yes. We discussed suspending the experiment, but Graham thought we’d lose momentum.’
I was suddenly terribly afraid I was no longer required at Yarlings. ‘You still want me to come back, right?’
‘Of course! It’s not the same without you. Tobias Salt was in a very bad mood, very sluggish and angry. I think he misses you, Tim.’
‘Me? Good God.’
‘We all miss you, Tim,’ she said, and my heartbeat faltered a little.
‘Sally, there’s something I have to tell you.’
‘Oh? Sounds serious!’
‘After we’d been to Rollright, and you went to bed, and Polly and I stayed up talking, she … she was asking me about you and how I felt about you, and’ – I took a deep breath – ‘she kissed me. It didn’t mean anything, and it took me by surprise, so I didn’t stop it as soon as I should, but … I just wanted to tell you.’
To my immense relief, she laughed. ‘Oh Tim! I’d have thought you had enough to worry about without focusing on a little thing like that—’
‘It’s not little,’ I said. ‘To me. I really like you, Sally, and I don’t want you thinking—’
‘Poor, sweet Tim.’ There was still laughter in her voice. ‘Please don’t worry about it. Especially given your current circumstance, hmm? Just make sure your mum is OK and come back to us when you can. Just let us know when.’
Dad asked me if I wanted to go to the high street and pick up some paintbrushes, but I politely declined. Apart from the world-class tedium of this mission, there was always a chance I might run into Tony Finch, or, worse still, Janice Tupp, if I hung around for too long. I elected to go home.
The house was cool and dark. I sat for a long while on the sofa, running the events of the last few days over and over in my mind. It had been good to talk to Sally; to confirm that I was still in her thoughts, still part of events at the house. I wanted, of course, to go back to Yarlings as soon as possible, but it seemed indecent to leave so soon, with Mum still trapped between sleep and wakefulness.
There was a large brown envelope, stuffed with papers, on the coffee table. I gasped as I
emptied it and saw Abi’s face staring back at me, the portrait I had taken the day we faked our ghost photo. The envelope was full of clippings from various newspapers, both national and local, about Abi’s disappearance. Some of these were familiar to the point of nausea, as I had read and re-read them incessantly in the days after Abi vanished, whilst others – more recent – were new to me. I read one of the newer pieces, where my portrait of Abi was joined by pictures of two other girls roughly her age who had disappeared in Cambridge a few months later. The Mr S sketch was reproduced too, alongside a description from someone who’d seen a man with dark eyes and long black hair hanging around a school prior to the disappearance of one of the girls. The witness described him as tall, and possibly of no fixed abode. Again, the van was mentioned. And there, again, was nothing but speculation, and more questions than answers, and nothing helpful or concrete.
I carefully replaced all the clippings in the envelope. Who had collected these? It was the kind of thing Dad did with subjects less tragic and personal, but as far as I could tell, his strategy for dealing with Abi’s disappearance so far had been one of resolute denial and avoidance. Mum, however, had dwelt on every detail, but the idea she’d commit to anything this organised, and so close to the thing that was devouring her, didn’t seem plausible either.
The local paper, the Courier, sat on the table. I picked it up and idly scanned the front page. An inquest was taking place after a fire in a local pub, with an unsubtle editorial insinuation that it had been an insurance job. A local builder’s merchant had been acquitted of accepting stolen goods.
I turned the page.