Poppet (2 page)

Three deep breaths. He opens the door. Looks one way up the corridor, and the other. There is nothing. Just the usual things he’s got used to over the years: the green tiled floor, the fire muster point with its diagram of the unit, the padded handrails. No wispy fleeing hem of a gown rounding the corner and disappearing out of sight.

He leans against the doorpost for a moment, trying to clear his head. Dwarfs on his chest? Little figures in nightgowns? The whisper of small feet? And two words he doesn’t want to think:
The. Maude
.

Jeeeez. He knocks a knuckle against his head. This is what comes from doing double shifts and falling asleep in a tie that’s too tight. Really, it’s crazy. He’s supposed to be a supervisor, so how has it worked out this is the second night shift he’s covered for one of the nursing staff? Completely ridiculous, because the night shift used to be the coveted shift – a chance to catch up on TV or sleep. Everything has changed since what happened on Dandelion Ward last week; suddenly anyone rostered in overnight has been jumping ship like rats, calling in sick with every excuse under the sun. No one wants to spend the night in the unit – as if something unearthly has come into the place.

And now it’s even getting to him – even he is hallucinating. The last thing he wants to do is go back into his office, revisit that dream. Instead he closes the door and heads off towards the wards, swiping through an airlock. Maybe he’ll get a coffee, speak to a few of the nurses, get some normality back. The fluorescent lights flicker as he walks. Outside the big windows of the ‘stem’ corridor a gale is howling – lately autumns have been so odd, so hot early on and so ferociously windy mid-October. The trees in the courtyard are bucking and bending – leaves and sticks fly off through the air, but oddly the sky is clear, the moon huge and unblinking.

The admin block beyond is in darkness and the two wards he can see from this vantage point are minimally lit – just the nurses’ station and the nightlights in the corridors. Beechway High Secure Unit was originally built as a Victorian workhouse. It evolved over the years – into a municipal hospital, then an orphanage and then an asylum. Years later, after all the ‘care in the community’ upheaval in the eighties, it was designated a ‘High Secure Psychiatric Hospital’, housing patients who are an extreme danger to themselves and others. Killers and rapists and the determinedly suicidal – they’re all here. AJ has been in this business years – and it never gets any easier or any less tense. Especially when a patient dies on the unit. Suddenly and in an untimely fashion, like Zelda Lornton did last week.

As he walks, with every turn in the corridor he expects to catch a glimpse of the tiny figure, tottering crookedly away ahead of him in the shadows. But he sees no one. Dandelion Ward is hushed, the lights low. He makes coffee in the nurses’ kitchen and carries it through into the station where one or two nurses sit sleepily in front of the TV. ‘Hey, AJ,’ they say lazily, raising a hand or two. ‘ ’Sup? You OK?’

He considers starting a conversation – maybe asking them why their colleagues keep calling in sick when all they have to do is sit and watch movies like this – but they’re so intent on the TV he doesn’t bother. Instead he stands at the back of the room and sips his coffee, while on TV the Men in Black shoot aliens. Will Smith is mega-good-looking and Tommy Lee Jones is mega-grumpy. The villain has one arm missing, and there’s a half-crab/half-scorpion living in his good hand. Ace. Just what you need in a place like this.

The coffee’s done its job. AJ is awake now. He should go back to his office, see if he can finish reading the world’s most boring report. But the nightmare is still lingering and he needs a distraction.

‘I’ll do the midnight round,’ he tells the nurses. ‘Don’t let me interrupt your beauty sleep.’

Lazy, derisory comments follow him. He rinses his cup in the kitchen, pulls out his bunch of keys and goes silently down the corridor, swiping his way into the night quarters. Into the silence.

Now he’s been promoted to coordinator he’s expected to attend management meetings, do presentations and staff training. All afternoon he’s been at a Criminal Justice Forum, a meeting with local community leaders and the police – and this, he is starting to see, is his lot in life. Meetings and paperwork. A daily shoehorning into a suit. He never thought for a minute he’d miss anything about nursing, but now he sees he misses this – the nightly round. There was a kind of satisfaction knowing everyone was asleep. Sorted for the day. You can’t get that from a bunch of reports.

The lower corridor is silent, just muffled snoring coming from some of the rooms. He opens one or two of the viewing panes into the rooms, but the only movement is the bend and rush of the trees shadowed on the thin curtains, moonlight moving across the sleeping forms of patients. The next floor up is different. He can sense it the moment he rounds the top of the staircase. Someone is uncomfortable. It’s little more than a feeling – an unease he gets from years of experience. Like a vibration in the walls.

This is the place Zelda died last week. Her room is the first on the right and the door stands open, a maintenance warning sign in the opening. The bed has been stripped and the curtains are open. Moonlight streams blue and vivid into the room. A paint roller in a tray is propped up against the wall. At morning and night, as the patients are led to and from the day area, they have to be encouraged to walk past the room without peering in – crying and shaking. Even AJ finds it hard to think about what’s happened here this month.

It started about three weeks ago. It was at ten p.m., and AJ had stayed on late to check through some staff returns records. He was in the office when the lights died from a power cut. He and the duty maintenance man rummaged for torches and soon found the source of the problem – a short-circuited dryer in the laundry room. Most of the patients knew nothing about it; many were asleep and those who were still awake barely noticed. Within forty minutes the lights were back on – all was normal. Except Zelda. She was in her room on the upstairs corridor in Dandelion Ward, and the yells she let off when the lights came on were so high-pitched at first AJ thought it was an alarm, jolted into action by the electricity.

The night staff were so used to Zelda screaming and complaining that they were slow about going up to her. They’d learned if she was given time to get it out of her system she was easier to deal with. The decision backfired on them. When AJ and one of the other nursing staff finally went up to check on her they found they weren’t the first. The door was open and the clinical director, Melanie Arrow, was sitting on the bed, cupping Zelda’s hands as if they were fragile eggs. Zelda was wearing a nightdress and had a towel draped around her shoulders. Her arms were covered in blood and she was weeping. Shaking and trembling.

AJ’s heart fell. They’d have been a lot quicker off the mark if they’d known this was happening. Especially if they’d known the director was in the building to witness it. From her face it was one hundred per cent clear she wasn’t happy about the situation. Not happy at all.

‘Where were you?’ Her voice was contained. ‘Why wasn’t anyone on the ward? Isn’t it in the protocol? Someone on every ward?’

The on-call junior consultant was summoned and Zelda was taken to the GP’s room next to AJ’s office to be checked over. AJ had never seen her so subdued. So genuinely shaken. She was bleeding from the insides of both arms and when the wounds were examined it was found they’d been gouged with a roller-ball pen. Every inch of her inner arms was covered in writing. Melanie Arrow and the consultant went into a conspiratorial huddle under the blinding fluorescent lights while AJ stood, arms folded, back against the wall, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. The consultant had been asleep twenty minutes ago and kept yawning. He’d brought the wrong glasses, and had to hold them about a foot in front of his eyes in order to scrutinize her arms.

‘Zelda?’ Melanie said. ‘You’ve hurt yourself?’

‘No. I didn’t hurt myself.’

‘Someone did. Didn’t they?’ Melanie let the sentence hang in the air, waiting for an answer. ‘Zelda?’

She shifted uncomfortably and rubbed her chest as if there was a tightness there. ‘Someone hurt me. Or some
thing
.’

‘I’m sorry?
Something?
’

Zelda licked her lips and glanced around at all the concerned faces peering at her. Her colour was high – spidery veins stood out on her cheeks – but her usual fight was gone. Completely gone. She was bewildered.

‘One hundred grams Acuphase,’ the doctor muttered. ‘And level-one obs until the morning – two to one please. Maybe bring her down to level two in the morning.’

Now, AJ puts his head into the room and glances around, wondering what actually happened in here. What did Zelda really see that night? Something sitting on her chest? Something small and determined – something that skittered away under the door?

A noise. He lifts his chin. It’s coming from the last room on the right – Monster Mother’s room. He crosses to it, knocks quietly on her door, and listens.

Monster Mother – or rather, to give her her legal name, Gabriella Jackson – is one of the patients AJ likes best. She’s a gentle soul most of the time. But when she’s not gentle it’s usually herself she takes it out on. She has slashes to her ankles and thighs that will never go away and her left arm is missing from the elbow down. She cut it off one night with an electric carving knife – standing in the kitchen of her million-pound home and calmly using the vegetable chopping board to rest the limb on. She was trying to prove to her dimwit husband how serious, how very serious, she was about not wanting him to have another affair.

This missing limb is the chief reason Monster Mother is in Beechway, that and a few other ‘kinks’ in her understanding of reality. For example, her belief she has given birth to all the other patients – they are all monsters and have committed vile deeds because they sprung from her poisoned womb. ‘Monster Mother’ is the name she has given herself, and if you spend long enough talking to her you will hear a detailed account of the birth of every patient in the unit – how long and troublesome the labour was, and how she could see from the first moment that the baby was evil.

The other kink in her reality is a belief that her skin is detachable. That if she removes it she is invisible.

AJ knocks again. ‘Gabriella?’

The protocol is always to use the patient’s real name, no matter what fantasy they’ve developed about their identity.

‘Gabriella?’

Nothing.

Quietly he opens the door and glances around the room. She is lying in her bed, the sheets up to her chin, her eyes like saucers, staring at him. AJ knows this means she is ‘hiding’ and that her ‘skin’ is elsewhere in the room – placed somewhere to draw attention away from herself. He doesn’t play into the delusion – though he’s permitted to express gentle doubt, he must avoid challenging it directly. (More protocol.)

Without making eye contact he comes in and sits and waits. Silence. Not a murmur. But AJ knows Monster Mother, she can’t keep quiet for ever.

Sure enough, eventually she sits up in bed and whispers, ‘AJ. I’m here.’

He nods slowly. Still doesn’t look directly at her. ‘Are you OK?’

‘No, I’m not. Will you close the door?’

He wouldn’t close the door behind him for most of the patients in this place, but he’s known Monster Mother for years and he’s a coordinator now, responsible, so he gets up and pushes the door shut. She shuffles herself up in the bed. She is fifty-seven but her skin is as unwrinkled and pale as an eggshell, her hair a red explosion. Her eyes are extraordinary – the brightest blue with dark lashes, as if she takes hours putting mascara on. She spends all her allowance on her clothes, which would look more at home on a six-year-old at a fairy party. Everything is floaty tulle in a rainbow of colours, tutu skirts and roses in her hair.

Whichever colour she chooses to wear is a reflection of how she sees the world on that particular day. At good times it’s pastels: pinks, baby blues, primrose yellows, lilacs. At bad times it’s the darker primary colours: dense reds, dark blue or black. Today a red lace negligee is draped at the foot of the bed, and that gives AJ an idea of her mood. Red is for danger. It also tells him that her skin is hanging on the end of the bed too. He directs his attention halfway between the negligee and her face. Somewhere on the wall above the bed. Neutral.

‘What’s happening, Gabriella? What’s on your mind?’

‘I had to take it off. It’s not safe.’

AJ resists the urge to roll his eyes. Monster Mother is sweet and she’s gentle and yes, crazy, but mostly kind of funny crazy, not aggressive crazy. He takes his time answering – again neither denying nor confirming her delusion. ‘Gabriella – have you had your meds tonight? You did take them, didn’t you? You know I’ll ask the dispensary if they saw you take them. And if they
didn’t
see you … well, I don’t need to search the room, do I?’

‘I took them, AJ. I did. I just can’t sleep.’

‘When’s your depot up again? I haven’t checked, but I think it’s got a long way to run.’

‘Ten days. I’m not mad, Mr AJ. I’m not.’

‘Of course you’re not.’

‘It’s back, though, AJ – it’s in the corridor. It’s been running around all night.’

AJ closes his eyes and breathes slowly. What did he expect coming up here? Did he really think it was going to dispel his nightmare? Did he imagine laughter and gaiety and people telling jokes to take his mind off things?

‘Look, Gabriella. We’ve talked about this before. Remember all those chats we had in Acute?’

‘Yes. I locked those chats in a box up in my head like the doctors told me I was supposed to.’

‘We agreed you weren’t going to talk about it again? Do you remember?’

‘But, AJ, it’s back. It’s come back. It got Zelda.’

‘Don’t you remember what you said, in High Dependency? I remember you saying: “it doesn’t exist. It’s just a made-up thing – like in the movies.” Remember?’

She nods, but the glisten of fear in her eyes doesn’t go.