The Bellwether Revivals (8 page)

‘Keep them shut,’ Eden said. ‘Empty your head again.’

Oscar seemed to be sitting there for a long time, eyes closed tight. Nothing appeared to be happening. He could hear nothing, sense nothing around him, and he began to feel embarrassed; he was sure they were all playing a trick on him, that they would all erupt with laughter at any moment. Just as he was about to open his eyes again, the melody of the clavichord bit through the silence. It was an arresting kind of sound—brittle but sweet, light but pure—and the music seemed to cascade around him like falling snow.

The tune was slow and mournful to begin with, and it relaxed him. With each note, he felt his body loosening. The air flowed smoothly through his lungs and his heartbeat seemed to regulate itself.
Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah
. His arms tingled, and the tension in his shoulders eased away, like creases smoothed out with an iron. He was getting so comfortable, so calm, that he found himself smiling. But suddenly the tempo shifted, and the music became frenzied, discordant. Jarring notes speared the air, sharp and strange to his ears. At once, the cello joined in. The instrument was right up close to him, and its deep, languorous music seemed to shake the slackened muscles of his arms and legs.

That’s when he felt it: an urgent warmth at the base of his neck.

The voices came next. Yin’s deep baritone drawing outwards, then Jane and Iris in unison, their sweet, songbird tones off-setting it, forming a volley of words that Oscar couldn’t quite understand. The singing and the fluid cello countered the spikes of the
clavichord, anchoring the music, giving it gravity. He wasn’t sure if it was just his mind playing games with him, but he swore he was falling out of consciousness. The music pushed and retreated in his head, steady as the tide. He was falling away. He could still hear the voices of the others, but they were muted now, just words passing through a long, dark tunnel. His eyelids felt heavy. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. A dry ache on his tongue. A sedating heat against his neck. And the next thing he knew, he was wide awake and blinking.

Iris was on her haunches, looking up at him, one hand on his thigh, the other touching his face. ‘Oscar, can you hear me? Oscar?’ She seemed slightly panicked.

‘Woah,’ he replied, adjusting to the light. ‘I think I fell asleep.’

Everyone laughed, and the sound seemed to pull him further into consciousness.

‘Can you feel anything?’ Iris asked. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Yeah. I’m okay, I’m just a bit groggy. What happened?’

She replied in a wary kind of way: ‘Look down.’

He peered at his feet. Nothing. He checked his right side. Nothing. Then, as he looked towards his left, he saw it—a thick roof-nail, about four inches long, skewering the loose skin on the back of his left hand, just below the knuckle of his middle finger. He flinched, feeling like he might throw up, and tore his eyes away. ‘Jesus! What the hell have you done? You said it wasn’t going to hurt.’

‘I think if it hurt you’d be screaming by now,’ Eden said.

Oscar waited a few seconds for the pain to register, but it didn’t. He gave it another moment, allowing his brain the chance to catch up. But he felt nothing. ‘You hypnotised me?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Eden said.

There was still no pain in his hand at all. Everything else felt fine—he could wiggle his fingers and feel the leather against his skin.

‘I told you I could prove it,’ Eden said.

‘By sticking a nail through my hand? Thanks a lot. If I get some kind of infection, I swear, I’ll—’

‘Oh, relax,’ Marcus said. ‘It’s been sterilised. Perfectly clean.’

‘You might be a little sore in the morning, though,’ Iris said.

‘Take it out. Take this thing out of me
right now
.’

Eden shook his head, folded his arms. ‘If I take it out, it’ll hurt. Trust me, you’ll want me to put you under again. It’d be like a dentist pushing a rotten tooth back into your jaw. Not very nice.’

‘Just get this thing out of my hand, okay? Or I’m going to—’

‘Going to
what
?’ Marcus laughed. ‘Calm down.’

Yin spoke up then. ‘Okay, come on, guys, fun’s over. Take it out, Edie. Give the guy a break.’

‘Fine, not a problem. It’ll just take a sec.’ Eden looked at Oscar. ‘Lean back. Close your eyes.’

Again, the silence. Again, the brooding melody of the clavichord, followed by the cello, followed by the heat and the voices, followed by drifting, drifting, drifting. Something like an ether consumed him, gradually. When he woke up, the furniture was back in its right place. A dressing was taped to his hand. And the five of them—Eden, Iris, Marcus, Yin, and Jane—were all sitting around him, in an arc of chairs, leaning on their elbows, talking.

‘I didn’t understand the questions at the start,’ Jane was saying.

‘Oh, I was just having some fun with him,’ Eden said. He was not paying attention to Oscar as he woke. ‘Smoke and mirrors, that’s all. I could’ve kept him under a lot longer if I’d wanted to.’

Oscar felt a pain in his left hand, like a searing burn, and he grabbed for it with his right, as if holding it might lessen the agony. He didn’t understand why he was hurting. The last thing he remembered was sitting down in the chair and Eden telling him to empty his mind.

‘Hello. We’ve got movement,’ Eden said. He tilted his head and waved. ‘Morning, sunbeam.’

Oscar looked at them with wet eyes. ‘Fuck. Did I pass out or something?’

‘Yep,’ Eden said. ‘You were out for the count.’

‘What happened?’

‘I’m not sure. I think it might have been Yin’s aftershave.’

Everyone laughed, and Yin gave a sarcastic titter.

‘Don’t you remember anything?’ Iris asked. There was a softness to her voice that felt to him like genuine concern.

‘I remember sitting in the chair and you all starting to play, and then—’ He broke off. ‘My hand is killing me.’ Oscar stood, flexing the fingers of his sore hand. A sort of panic came over him. It was not the pain itself that made him fearful, but the strangeness of it, the fact that he didn’t know where it had come from. ‘What the hell happened to me?’

Iris was about to speak, but Eden placed his fingers upon her shoulder. ‘You had an accident,’ he said. ‘We were halfway through the demonstration and you fainted. You fell onto one of the candle jars and cut your hand. Are you alright?’

‘I did?’ Oscar looked at the others. Their faces were blank, static, and he didn’t know how to read them. Another surge of pain gripped his hand. ‘It hurts like mad.’

‘I dressed the wound. It’ll heal up fine,’ Iris said.

Eden held out his palm. ‘Let me see.’

‘What?’

‘Let me take a look at your hand.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I say so.’ Eden’s voice was dry and hollow.

‘You better let him look,’ Iris said. She smiled at Oscar in that way that he couldn’t resist. Her pupils were steady, reassuringly set. Reluctantly, he put his hand into her brother’s palm.

Eden removed the dressing. Two small lesions were seeping, an inch apart. The wound looked like a snake bite. A yellowy bruise was starting to spread across the swollen skin. The sight of it made Oscar light-headed. He turned away.

‘Oh, it’s not that bad,’ Eden said. ‘I’ve seen worse. On horses.’

‘Are you sure I don’t still have some glass in there?’

‘You’ll be fine.’

He winced as Eden placed his other hand over the wound. ‘Hey! What are you doing? That kills. Stop it!’ But Eden only gripped harder. His fingers viced. There was an urgent heat in his hands. ‘For fuck’s sake, stop it!’ Oscar shouted. But Eden wouldn’t release his grip. He only extended it over Oscar’s wrist and stared into his face. His eyes had that weird sheen about them, that purity of focus. The pain was still there in Oscar’s hand, but more overwhelming was that deep, distracting heat coming from Eden’s fingers.

‘Let go of me!’

Eden squeezed harder and harder. His face was concentrated, sneering.

‘I said, let
go
!’

Iris took a timid step backwards.

‘Edie, can’t you just leave him alone now?’ Jane said.

‘Yeah, man, don’t hurt the guy,’ said Yin.

But Eden’s skinny thumbs kept pressing and twisting, pressing and twisting. Then he quickly released his grip, and Oscar reeled backwards. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ he shouted. ‘Are you trying to torture me or something? Jesus!’ He was shaking with anger and could feel the blood rising through his body. A queasiness came over him. He wanted to get away from this dark room, these people. He was too frantic to speak. Hauling on his coat, he ran out into the hallway. The leather caught underneath his heels as he stepped hurriedly into his shoes, but he didn’t stop to adjust them.

He was still struggling with the latch on the front door when Iris rushed out to the hall. ‘Hey, come on, don’t go,’ she said. ‘It’s Eden being Eden, that’s all. Will you let me explain?’ She stared at him with a look of regret—not as if she were sorry, but as if she were somehow disappointed in him. ‘He went too far, I know. We all got a bit carried away in there. But
please
. Please don’t leave. He was just trying to—oh, I don’t know what he’s trying to do.’

Oscar said nothing. He couldn’t find the words to express how angry he was, how much he objected to being made a fool of, experimented on,
used
. He stood there in the dim hallway, breathless, shaking his head. Iris turned her eyes to the floor. It was as if she had seen something in his face—a sight that could explain his feelings much better than words. ‘Look, perhaps it’s better for everyone if you go home and cool off,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you, okay?’

‘Don’t bother,’ he said. The words sounded so definite, so final. He pulled back the door with his good hand, walking out into the fading remnants of the night, where the glow of TVs burned blue in upstairs windows along the street, oblivious and unreachable. All he wanted was to go home and get up for work again in the morning and never see Eden Bellwether again.

Nobody at Cedarbrook noticed the wound on Oscar’s hand—none of the residents, none of the other nurses—because the next day it had almost disappeared. He’d gone back to his flat, swallowed a codeine with a gulp of vodka, and fallen asleep with the wound still aching. The medicine had kicked in overnight, or so he assumed, because he’d woken up feeling no pain at all. The cotton dressing was spotted with blood, dried to a blackish burgundy. But, lifting it back to check the skin underneath, he’d found only two faint scabs below his knuckles, no bigger than freckles. It didn’t seem possible. He had the vaguest memory of the night before: the initial panic of seeing the wound, the mention of broken glass, and the sheer persistence of Eden’s grip on his hand. Maybe, in the anger of the moment, the injury had seemed worse than it was. Maybe he’d overreacted. But if he’d really fallen, like Eden said, shouldn’t there have been some indication of it: a lingering soreness in his body; a bruise, a mark—
something
?

Still, he was glad that he didn’t have to explain his injury to anyone at work that week. It was better that way. No fuss, no
questions, no time to dwell on what a fool he’d been. From Tuesday to Sunday, he harboured the shame inside him like a pilot light. He stayed behind an extra few hours at the end of every shift, helping Jean and the other nurses. He signed himself up for nights the week after, five in a row—and weekends—every available slot until the end of November.

Dr Paulsen was easy to evade. He’d withdrawn into his room again, still raw from the incident at Sunday dinner, and too stubborn to press the nurse-call when he needed attention. So Oscar arranged for Deeraj to take the old man his meals, and empty his urine bottles, and change his bedding, and bathe him. In exchange, he agreed to take on all of Deeraj’s least favourite duties. ‘You can start with Mrs Radnor’s corn plasters,’ Deeraj said, ‘and then you can shave Mr Clarke, and I’ll see what else after that.’

For two weeks, Oscar found no time to read—or rather, no will. The thought of it overwhelmed him now; seemed futile and humiliating. A whole fortnight had passed by the time he noticed
The Passions of the Soul
was still lying on his night table, untouched. On Monday morning, he gave it to Deeraj.

‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘I need you to return it to Paulsen for me.’

‘No chance,’ Deeraj said. ‘If he thinks I’ve been anywhere near his precious books, he’ll start with the spitting again.’

‘But I can’t give it back to him myself.’

‘Why not? I thought you two were friends.’

‘I just can’t, okay.’

Deeraj chewed on his lip. He gathered a fresh set of towels from the store cupboard. ‘Sorry, pal. Better handle this one yourself.’

Tuesday was a pleasant, sunny day—a break from the flat grey weather that had pervaded the previous week—and Oscar worked so hard through the morning that he had completed most of his duties by early afternoon. He walked down to the foot of the
garden and stared at the vines of wisteria. They would bloom an intense purple in the spring, covering the front of the building, but for now, they only gave the building a feeling of unmet potential.

He was gazing around the newly turned flowerbeds in the Cedarbrook grounds when he heard a high, scratching knock from above him. He looked up towards the building. Dr Paulsen was standing at the window of his room, rattling the handle of his cane against the glass.
Tack-tack, tack-tack
. He was wearing a tweed blazer, and a panama hat, white as a picket fence. Motioning his arm slowly, he gestured for Oscar to come inside.

The Passions of the Soul
was in the staff room, and Oscar went to retrieve it from his locker before going upstairs. There was a bar of light under the old man’s door. Oscar called hello as he went inside but heard no reply. Paulsen was waiting at the foot of the bed, one hand gripping the crook of his cane. The floor was a chaos of clothes. ‘I can’t seem to work the telephone. All this dialling nine and zero first,’ he said. ‘Would you be so kind as to order me a taxi?’

‘Where are you going?’