The Glimpse (31 page)

Entranced, Ana floated through the door, feeling as though she’d hopped across the folds of space and time to the most magical place in the universe. Young stars swirled around the spiral galaxy’s golden centre. Silvery-blue light trailed behind them, as though the galaxy had just been stirred by a giant spoon.

Cool air blew across the tips of Ana’s face. She blinked, 282

was back in the tank. Water gurgled as it drained. The young nurse jumped down beside her prostrate form.

Water splashed around the nurse’s waist, but she didn’t seem to care about her uniform getting wet. She laid two fingers on Ana’s windpipe, checking for a pulse. When she felt one, she grappled for an oxygen mask attached to a long hose wound along the side of the tank.

‘No,’ Ana said.

Startled, the nurse’s finger shot to her lips, signaling for Ana to be quiet. She attached the mask over Ana’s head. Just as it snapped on, Cusher loomed over the side.

‘Wel?’ she said.

‘The pulse is faint,’ the nurse answered, looking at Ana warningly.

‘Once you’ve checked her vitals, bring her to my office.

I’l see her first.’

The nurse nodded, then began to undo the strap across Ana’s shoulders. The stage echoed with the click-click of Ana’s shoulders. The stage echoed with the click-click of Cusher’s shoes and the sound of the other girl coughing and retching. Ana strained to sit up, but the nurse gently put a hand on her chest and shook her head. She began to rub Ana’s legs with a towel.

As Ana lay there, an icy feeling of anger and power coursed through her. When a far-off door banged shut, she puled herself up. The nurse stepped back. Ana swung off the metal frame into ankle-deep water, then climbed the stepladder. At the top of the tank, she jumped the five-foot drop on to the stage floor. Her hair and gown dripped water everywhere. The nurse appeared behind her at the top of the tank.

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‘Give me that,’ Ana said, snatching the towel. She stormed over to the next tank where the girl she’d come in with now lay curled up in a bal on the floor. Puke dribbled down the girl’s lips and around her cheek, which pressed flat against the concrete. Gently, Ana lifted her blonde head of hair and began mopping up the vomit.

She moved the girl away from the puddle of sick, puled tight the towel already draped over the girl, and began to rub. The girl burst into tears.

‘What’s your name?’ Ana asked.

‘Helen,’ the girl cried.

‘How old are you, Helen?’

‘Thirteen.’

The stench of vomit twisted up Ana’s nostrils and seethed down her throat. She’d done nothing as boys seethed down her throat. She’d done nothing as boys took advantage of an unconscious girl, nothing as McCavern cuffed her and led her here, nothing as Cusher drowned them.

The anger grew so dense, she thought it would choke her.

*

Ten minutes later, Ana sat on Cusher’s tweed sofa in a bland room, short hair drooping over her eyes, gown clinging to her damp skin.

‘Tel me, Emily,’ Cusher said, after a drawn out silence.

‘What was going through your mind while you were trapped under water?’

‘Tel me, Dr Cusher, do you enjoy drowning your patients?’

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Cusher’s left eye twitched. ‘Let’s stick to me asking the questions, shal we?’

‘Contrary to popular belief,’ Ana said, ‘they actualy drowned more women for witchcraft in the age of Enlightenment than in the Middle Ages. Trials by drowning.’

‘Tel me how you felt, Emily.’

‘The Age of Reason.’

Cusher bristled with irritation. Her finger curled back the short hair already combed behind her ear.

short hair already combed behind her ear.

‘Why don’t you tel me about the last time you were institutionalised?’

‘Because you don’t listen.’

‘I’m listening.’

Ana held Cusher’s gaze. Cusher smiled, dropped her eyes and began shuffling through the papers on her desk.

‘I was never institutionalised.’

‘Realy?’

‘My name is Ariana Barber. My father is Ashby Barber.

He won the Nobel Prize for identifying the mutated set of genomes responsible for schizophrenia. When he finds out I’m here, you’re going to lose your job.’

Cusher sniffed and pinched her nose. She noted something down while stifling a yawn.

‘Wel, let’s see if you’re stil feeling that way tomorrow, shal we?’ she said.

As though on cue, the door opened and McCavern entered with a wheelchair. Seeing Ana, surprise flickered across her gaze, quickly folowed by contempt. She groped for her cuffs, obviously not used to needing them after the tanks.

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Ana got up and stood looking down on the psychiatrist.

Cusher stopped tidying up and met her gaze, trying to appear amused, an effect that was undermined by the spasm in her left eye and the lip tremble when she smiled.

Ana turned, strode to the wheelchair and plumped down.

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23

Shockers

McCavern wheeled Ana alongside the river, over the cattle bridge, and past the empty car park. They roled to a halt outside the wash-block door to the compound.

Ana waited.

McCavern’s eyes driled into the back of her head. Ana clenched her jaw and sat up straighter. The tight manacles gnawed at her wrists. But she sensed any effort to aleviate the pain would be taken as a sign of weakness. Perhaps exactly what McCavern was waiting for now.

She held her hands stil in her lap. Finaly, the orderly produced a chain of keys from her belt, unlocked the wooden door, and pushed Ana into the grey building.

The stink of excrement assaulted Ana’s senses. She’d been too scared to notice on her way out, but faeces smeared the corridor wals and piles of vomit rotted in dark corners.

Resisting the impulse to gag or cover her nose with the sleeve of her gown, Ana focused on the square of yard beyond, bathed in daylight. Only one day in Three Mils, and she was actualy glad to be returning to the compound.

compound.

In the main yard, patients miled around, twitching, fidgeting, arguing with each other, or themselves. A group of girls fought over blankets. Registering Ana, they quietened and shushed each other, though most didn’t dare look over.

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McCavern removed the cuffs. Ana stood up without prompting, ensuring the three inches she had over McCavern were felt. McCavern didn’t move. She was obviously stil thinking about taking matters into her own hands.

Such an unruffled countenance after a trip to the tanks couldn’t be good for morale.

Ana held her head high. She felt the orderly’s presence behind her and was determined not to flinch or duck away.

The wind tugged at her flimsy robe and swept through the damp strands of her cropped brown hair. She breathed in, letting the cold burst through her lungs, noticing Tamsin, who was leaning against Studio 8’s brick wal.

The wheelchair creaked. Rubber roled across tarmac.

McCavern retreated.

Ana remained stil and poised, taking in her audience.

Tamsin met her roaming gaze with a fixed, appraising stare.

Ana gave a smal smile and strode towards her. The yard sprang back to life.

Tamsin frowned. ‘You had hydrosynthesis this morning,’

she said.

‘So that’s what they’re caling it?’

Ana had heard of narcosynthesis, where patients were given narcotics and then put through analysis. But hydrosynthesis was a new one.

A hush fluttered over the yard. Ana turned to where everyone was looking. Someone else was being wheeled out of the wash-block. The male patient’s head draped over his body.

‘Most people don’t have your stamina,’ Tamsin said.

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Ana gripped Tamsin’s arm, scrunching her good eye to see better.

The orderly tipped up the wheelchair. The patient flopped forward, smacking face-down on the tarmac, one arm twisting around his back. Ana broke into a lopsided run. The orderly quickly turned and disappeared back into the wash-block.

Ana knelt beside the sprawled figure. She stroked back the tangled, sandy hair. ‘Jasper?’ she whispered.

‘Jasper?’

His name stuck in her throat.

He groaned. She looked up helplessly. A huddle of girls stood several metres away, watching.

‘Give me a blanket!’ Ana ordered. The girls clung to the precious covers around their shoulders. Ana jumped to her feet and hurtled towards the group. She snatched the nearest blanket, meeting no resistance. Returning to Jasper, she wrapped the cover over him and lifted his head on to her knee. He moaned when she moved him, hands protectively coming up over his ears. She stroked his hair, hummed his favourite Miles Davis jazz piece. He dropped his hands and slumped against her. He smelt awful; unwashed, metalic, a faint trace of chemicals sweating through the skin.

After a couple of minutes, Ana became aware that the persistent background clamour of the yard had not resumed. If anything the murmuring had grown quieter.

She looked up. A hundred faces stared at her. Boys and girls crowded into the main court from the games room.

Tamsin lingered among those who stood closest. Ana gazed at her imploringly.

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‘He needs to lie down,’ she said, wrapping an arm under his shoulder. After a moment’s hesitation, Tamsin stepped forward and took up the other side.

‘Where to?’ she asked.

‘Where I can keep an eye on him.’

They staggered across the yard to Studio 8, Jasper’s torso flopped over their hunched shoulders, his legs dragging behind. The crowd parted with looks of dragging behind. The crowd parted with looks of amazement, confusion and fear.

Inside Studio 8, they lowered Jasper on to a mattress.

He groaned again, barely conscious.

‘Why isn’t he wet?’ Ana asked.

‘He didn’t have hydrosynthesis. He’s a shocker.’

‘Shocker?’

‘Electric Shock Treatment. One of their better ones.

Wipes out memory, messes up the neurological system, causes permanent brain damage. Your difficult patient syn-drome is totaly cured. ’Course there’s no future in being a vegetable, but at least it’s not a corpse, right?’

The dust from the mattresses, coupled with Jasper’s odour scratched the back of Ana’s throat.

‘Shock Treatment is safe,’ she said feebly, repeating the advertising slogans she’d heard again and again growing up but knowing as she said it, she didn’t believe it.

‘Ninety per cent successful. Immediate relief for depression.’

‘Yup,’ Tamsin said. ‘I suppose that’s one definition of relief, an actual inability to have a clear thought about anything.’

Ana sank on to the mattress by Jasper’s feet. It would be 290

her father’s fault if Jasper wound up brain damaged. She had to get them both out of there.

She spent the next hour by Jasper’s side in the dim half-light of the studio. At lunchtime a bel rang and girls began to trickle out into the yard. Tamsin, who’d gone off, now reappeared in the doorway.

‘You need to eat,’ she said.

‘I can’t leave him.’

‘He needs to eat, then.’

‘We can’t carry him al the way up there.’

‘No, we can’t. But you can come with me and sneak him back your bread rol. He’l be OK. No one bothers the shockers.’

Ana rubbed her swolen eye, which had started to itch, then got up reluctantly. She stretched her stiff legs. Her stomach grumbled at the thought of food.

‘He’l be fine,’ Tamsin repeated, retreating.

Narrowing her good eye against the brightness, Ana folowed.

Only a handful of patients stil loitered in the yard. Ana drifted towards the main building where they’d eaten supper the previous night. Six bodies now lay heaped in front of the wash-block, like debris tossed ashore. Three covered their heads with their arms, two were curled into bals, one lay lifelessly. Ana stopped, thinking one of the baled-up girls was the thirteen year old from the tanks.

‘Hurry up,’ Tamsin shouted over her shoulder. Ana edged towards the girl, but it wasn’t Helen.

‘There isn’t time,’ Tamsin said, coming back and yanking her away. ‘Move it!’

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In the dining room, Ana hurried through her lentils and mashed potato, wondering what had happened to Helen.

She hid her bread rol in a fold of the blanket Tamsin had given her. The orderlies prowled up and down the aisles between the tables. Once Ana had finished her meal, she waited for an orderly to pass before rising and folowing in the same direction. As she moved by Tamsin, her arm shot out and snatched Tamsin’s half-eaten rol. In a flash, Tamsin’s hand clamped over hers.

‘There are six of them out there,’ Ana whispered.

Tamsin studied her for a moment, then let go. Ana tucked the rol away. She walked the aisle behind the orderly, appropriating the rols of every girl in Tamsin’s posse.

Back in the yard, she handed out the bread. After checking on Jasper and getting him to eat a few crumbs, she searched for Helen. She eventualy found the girl tucked into a far, dark corner of Studio 3, sniveling and muttering to herself.

‘Helen?’ Ana said, walking towards her.

The girl screamed and lashed her arms in the air, as though fending off a monster.

Ana took a step back, crouched down and talked to her in soothing tones.

in soothing tones.

‘Remember me? I was in the tanks with you. It’s OK.

You’re OK now.’

Crying and trembling, Helen held up her fists like she was stil expecting some kind of attack.

Ana inched forwards, keeping her movements smal and unthreatening. ‘Are you hungry? I bet you missed lunch.

Not that there’s much to miss. Overcooked, mushy lentils.

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Old mashed potato. I have bread. Do you want some bread?’

Helen’s raised fists sagged. Her eyes finaly seemed to focus on Ana. Ana broke off a piece of the rol Jasper had barely touched. She held it out. Tentatively, Helen took it, clasping the bread in shaky fingers for several seconds, as though waiting to see if this was a trick.

‘It’s OK,’ Ana said.

Helen brought the bread to her lips and nibbled. When Ana didn’t stop her, she pushed the whole lump into her mouth. Ana held out more. Helen looked at the bread, then at Ana. Her eyes filed with tears, glistening in the semi-darkness.