House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  “It’s got to happen somewhere, pal,” Marco had said. “Sewage treatment, nuclear power, army training.”

  Mental illness. He didn’t say it, but I heard it anyway.

  “Middle of Sauchiehall Street would be a bit daft, eh?”

  Of course, he was right. Galloway is empty and this little corner of Galloway, a bulge in the coast with no beaches, is even emptier than the rest of it. And, Marco said, there were unforeseen benefits. Rare orchids, fragile mosses and shy nesting birds flourished here with no ramblers to flatten them or picnickers to scare them. It wasn’t just a training range, he told me. It was a site of special scientific interest. It was a haven. A sanctuary.

  All I could think was how those shy birds would feel when the tanks started. And how those even shyer birds, those rare and fragile residents of Howell Hall, must feel on gun days.

  I drove out from under the trees within a minute or two. The army must have left them there—or even planted them—for privacy, to stop geeks gawking from the roadside when the troops were on manouevres. But fifty yards inside the gate and as far as the eye could see, everything had been cleared. There was nothing but grassy dips and swells, and those lumps of concrete, like at paintball. What were they called—Bunkers? Pillboxes?—only these ones had pockmarks blasted out of them instead of the splatters of colour.

  One smudge of dark, straight ahead like the soldier said, had to be the hospital grounds. Yew trees, I reckoned, from the height of them and their black bulk.

  It hadn’t flooded up here, but still the tussocks were battered flat and sopped into clods like hairballs from all the rain. Grey-yellow grass and grey-white concrete and a gun-grey sky.

  “Blasted heath,” I said to myself. I couldn’t remember where that came from, didn’t even know what it meant exactly, but it felt right. Imagine, on the worst day of your life, when you finally gave up and gave in and let yourself be taken where everyone told you you had to go … imagine coming here, to this.

  The sign for Howell Hall helped a bit. It was a chunk of granite, polished on the front but rough round the other three sides, set into the grass at the side of the gateway. The name was chiseled, like on gravestones, and painted gold. It looked permanent and reliable and safe to lean against. It looked like a country house hotel. Like the website promised. It was nothing like any hospital I knew. Nothing like the memory, the one I squashed down every time it started to rumble, of a white enamel sign on tubular steel legs, the words in a trendy font unveiled at a meeting along with the logo.

  I was doing about five miles an hour as I made my way along the drive, so I had loads of time to take the place in. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable. Just another big house, built on a wave of Victorian money. Marco was a history buff. Anything from a standing stone onwards was enough to have him parked up in a gateway and hacking his way through brambles for a closer look, but the Industrial Revolution was his darling, when his mother’s family left Naples and came north and when all the murky deeds were done that earned bewhiskered gentlemen houses like this one.

  With a closer look, you could tell Howell Hall was something different. The keypad entry at the front door, the reinforced glass in the downstairs windows, the bars over the plain glass of the upstairs windows, and round the corner a high chain-link fence separating the garden, with its many benches and its spacious gazebo, from the open drive.

  There was someone in that gazebo. I didn’t stare but I could tell even from the corner of my eye that they were dressed in night clothes. No one wore pale pink trousers and a pink fluffy mackintosh. Those were pyjamas and a dressing gown, so that was a patient. One of the special needs clients of my so-called wide experience.

  As I slid the car into a free space between two BMWs and climbed out, I saw the figure start to move. I leaned in for my bag and folder. When I turned back she was halfway over the grass, fluffy dressing gown and wild orange hair flying out behind her.

  “Help me!” she yelled. “Get me out of here. You’ve got to help me!”

  I stood behind the car door as if it could protect me.

  “Ten years!” she screamed, grabbing hold of the fence and shaking it, her hair over her face and her fingertips purple from how she’d shoved them through the chain link. “Ten years and I’m the only one left now. I don’t want to die!”

  Two

  I slammed the car door and scurried away to the front of the house with my mouth tasting bitter and my heart beating in big sickening gulps at the base of my throat. I meant to wait and gather myself before I rang the bell, but the door was already opening when I approached and the woman who came to greet me saw me stumble as I looked over my shoulder.

  “Ms. McGovern?” she said. “Alison? I’m Dr. Ferris.”

  She was definitely a doctor. She wasn’t wearing a white coat or anything, but there was no doubt. She had a soft green jumper on, cashmere probably, and dark green trousers. Not jeans or cords: proper slacks with pressed creases. They hung a perfect quarter-inch off the ground, just skimming the toes of brown high-heeled court shoes. She probably wore them all day and claimed they were comfy.

  She held out a hand to shake and, when I took it, put her left hand on top. I had only ever seen men do that, and only on the telly, but it gave her a chance to show me her wedding rings: the solitaire, the half-hoop, and the platinum band. And the pearl-pink manicure. Her skin was cool and silken and I was sure the hangnail on my thumb scratched her as she let go.

  “Come inside,” she said. “Welcome to Howell Hall.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Is that how it’s pronounced? How-well?”

  “Exactly. I can’t think of a better name for a place of this kind, can you? It’s like a good omen.”

  It was like the worst case of denial I’d heard since I met someone called De’Ath at work one day. Mrs. De’Ath, she’d told me with a straight face.

  Dr. Ferris led me into an office facing the gardens and went to sit behind a desk with her back to a French window. I squinted out past her and saw that the woman in the pink dressing gown was back in the gazebo again, smoking.

  “I met one of the patients,” I said, nodding at the window. “She seemed quite distressed.”

  Dr. Ferris twisted round in her seat and looked, giving me a chance to admire her profile. Her neck was about twice as long as mine and her jaw made me think of swans. I lifted my chin and poked it forward. Her hair was held back in a silk scarf patterned in exactly the green of her jumper, the green of her slacks, and the brown of her shoes. I didn’t even know what shops still sold those scarves these days, like the ones the Queen used to wear with the knot on her chin that daft way.

  “Ah,” she said. “That’s Julia. Well, yes, she can be rather mischievous. What did she say we were doing to her this time?”

  “Nothing!” I blurted out. “She just implied that she needed my help for some reason.”

  Dr. Ferris laughed; such a surprising clear bell of a laugh that I found myself smiling too.

  “Spoken like a diplomat,” she said. “And I don’t mind at all that you call her a patient, by the way. We are plain speakers here at Howell Hall.”

  My smile died.

  “So,” she said, opening the folder on her desk. I recognised the form that Marco had filled in, but there were three extra pages attached. Just as well I had decided to go with the fake CV if Marco had already sent it anyway. She flicked through them. All the wonderful things I had done in Australia: the special school where I’d volunteered; the memory-care end-of-life facility where I had been the resident therapist. Memory-care and end-of-life. He had found all the right words on the homepages of other nursing homes and hadn’t missed a single one.

  “This is all marvellous,” she said, “but quite a while ago. Am I right in thinking that for the last … ”

  “Ten years,” I supplied, and felt an echo in my head from that pa
tient screaming.

  “You’ve been working in the commercial sector?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I had the salon in Dalbeattie. Face Value?”

  “I pass it every week,” she said. The smile was there again. “But you decided you’d rather return to a care environment?”

  “I did,” I said. Marco had made it sound like a calling.

  “Very brave of you to sell up before you had a job to move to,” she said smoothly.

  “I knew I needed to refresh my skills,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing that can be done by halves.”

  “Refresh and extend!” she said. “It was your art therapy experience that made your application stand out from the crowd, if I’m perfectly honest.”

  I tried hard but I knew a quick frown must have passed across my face before I managed to smooth my expression again to match hers. Crowd? The crowd of beauticians with psychiatric care experience who’d applied to work here?

  Her smile was as calm as ever but I was sure her eyes glinted.

  My art therapy experience was a free night-class on landscape painting I had signed up for after Marco’s mum gave me a water-colour pad and a set of paints at Christmas. I had stared at the half-opened parcel and wanted to weep. She must have spent fifty quid on that thick, creamy paper and that rainbow of paints with the soft little brushes clipped to the lid. “Because how could you live there with that glorious view and not want to paint it?” she said, meaning the Abbey. She gushed on and on about the Abbey the one time she came to visit us. As if the view of a crumbling ruin could make up for the galley kitchen and the metered electricity, for our car parked on the road and Angel’s bike under a tarp round the back because there wasn’t so much as a shed to store it in.

  “Don’t write that down!” I had said, looking over Marco’s shoulder as he filled in my recent experience. Intermediate landscape painting. “It’s about as relevant as my swimming badges.”

  “Little faith,” he said. And right enough when he was typing the covering note, he went into a ton of detail about my long interest in both the diagnostic value and healing potential of art for patients right along the care continuum following my experience in Australia.

  Dr. Ferris turned a page and kept reading. I could feel a flush beginning to flood my cheeks.

  “Would you be willing to do the odd night shift?” she said.

  “Night shift?” I stared at her. Why would the patients need beauty treatments or painting classes at night?

  “Emergency cover. Would that be a problem? There would be overtime, of course.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s my son, you see. Angel’s only fifteen and he’s going through a bit of a … challenging spell, if I’m honest.” This was my escape. If I said no to night shift, I wasn’t going to have to do any of it.

  “Angel?” she said. For the first time, she sounded sharp. “You called your child Angel?”

  “It’s a nickname,” I said. “From Angelo. He’s—My husband’s Italian and it’s a family name.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “Did you know, Alison, that Angel is the most popular name for a stillborn child?”

  I couldn’t speak. I leaned forward and peered at her. Silhouetted against the window like she was, I couldn’t see anything of her expression. Her eyes weren’t glinting now. It was like they had receded somehow.

  “But I digress,” she said, and sniffed. “What would you say to a starting salary of forty?”

  I blinked, trying to work it out. Forty pounds a day was two hundred a week, eight hundred a month, not quite ten thousand a year. It wasn’t the excellent pay I’d been imagining. And at eight hours a day full-time, it wasn’t even legal.

  “I’m not sure I could actually agree to that,” I said. The relief was making me bold. “It’s a lot less than I was expecting.”

  “Forty-five?” she said. “Forty-five thousand, four weeks paid holidays as well as your statutory days and overtime for these night shifts we mentioned?”

  She had heard me gasping but kept talking without a hitch. She definitely knew. She had said it that way to catch me out.

  “That sounds fine,” I stuttered. “Forty-five is fine.” I had never taken that much home, not even in Face Value’s best year.

  “And I’m assuming you can start right away,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Excellent. Shall we say by the end of this week you’ll have your care plans ready for the staff meeting and a timetable drawn up for your first month. And you’ll start as soon as your PVG comes through. You can meet the residents accompanied over the next few days and get a feel for things.”

  I nodded dumbly. Care plans? PVG?

  “You do understand,” she said, “that a disclosure, even an enhanced disclosure, won’t be enough.”

  I added a smile to my nod, but I was sure she knew I had no idea what a disclosure—enhanced or otherwise—might be. And she didn’t call them patients after all.

  “I can start right now,” I said. “If any of them are free.” Because if I met one of them and showed Dr. Ferris I didn’t have a clue, she would be less surprised when I phoned her up and told her I’d changed my mind.

  “Excellent,” she said again. She stood up and walked around the desk, her heels clicking smartly on the polished floor. “Unless, that is, you have any questions?” she added, smiling down at me. “Anything you want to ask about our methods, intake, CC status?”

  “CC?”

  She crinkled her nose. “Clinical Care,” she said. “My goodness. You are rusty.”

  My cheeks were flaming again as I followed her.

  The biggest downstairs rooms were set up as lounges, that country house hotel again. The silky striped wallpaper, the spindle-legged furniture, even the flower arrangements—professionally bland—said here was a place to hold a golden wedding party, not somewhere to kick a drug habit.

  A couple of women sat over a jigsaw at a long table in the dining room. They turned to us and watched our approach but said nothing. Dr. Ferris put a hand on one shoulder of each and gave them one of her smiles. They looked back dead-faced. They were nothing like one another, really, but their pallor and the dark shadows under their eyes, the downward turn of their mouths, were so identical they could have been sisters.

  “This is Alison,” Dr. Ferris said. “Alison is a beautician. She’s going to be working here. She’s going to do your hair and give you lovely back rubs, aren’t you, Alison?”

  “Ali,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you both.”

  They just kept gazing up at Dr. Ferris as if I hadn’t spoken, and with another squeeze of their shoulders she turned away.

  “Let’s go up and see the bedrooms,” she said as we moved off. Not a word about either of the jigsaw-puzzle women. Upstairs was yet more of the country house hotel, but with keypads on the bedroom doors and little sliding shutters at head height so staff could look in. Dr. Ferris kept walking, silent now on the nap of the pale green carpet, until we came to a door propped open with a painted wooden wedge in the shape of an alligator.

  “This is one of our nicest rooms,” she said. “Vacant at the moment although we’re expecting an old friend to rejoin us in the next day or two.” She waved a hand. “Look around, Alison.”

  I wandered this way and that, pretending to be interested in the suite of antique furniture and the view of the blasted heath.

  “Bathroom,” said Dr. Ferris, opening a door.

  I peered in and nodded. “Very nice.” It was better than nice, in all honesty. The bath stood in the middle of the floor, facing the window and the pile of fluffy sea-green towels heaped on the towel rail at its side matched the selection of sea-green soap and lotions arranged on the shelves.

  “They don’t bring stuff from home?” I said, nodding at the bottles.

  “Depends,”
said Dr. Ferris. “Of course,” she added, with that smile again.

  “Right,” I said. “Drugs.”

  She blinked. She might even have started with surprise. “I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone cunning enough to dissolve drugs in a bottle of Pantene,” she said. “How would they ever precipitate it out again in a useable form?” She laughed musically.

  I turned away to give myself some thinking time and noticed too late that she could still see me in the mirror above the basin. I met her eye. “I don’t have any experience of drug-abusers,” I said. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “Did you foresee them coming to art and beauty therapy while they’re in active detox?”

  I was frozen, couldn’t nod or shake. Certainly couldn’t break eye contact. She was absolutely on to me. Why was she keeping at it, like a cat toying with a mouse long after it died of fright?

  “They won’t rotate into your programmes until they’re past the need for acute medical care. Of course,” she went on, “our usual concern regarding toiletries is one of our Ana-Mias glugging the stuff to purge. And actually, the returning guest who’s coming here tomorrow would think nothing of a little—” She raised her hand and mimed drinking, then she gathered up the collection of bottles and smiled at me.

  “I’m surprised you’d put them in a room as nice as this,” I said. I tried to sound casual, not too proud that I knew what ana-mia meant. “With these lovely carpets and everything.”

  She raised her eyebrows and twisted her mouth. “I’m very surprised that none of your teenaged clients in Australia had eating disorders,” she said. “In fact, didn’t your statement say that you had considerable experience … ?”

  I was frozen again: a little scrap of a mouse, clawed up into the air for fun and then dropped again.

  “They’re so incredibly cunning,” she said. “The pukers. You could share a two-berth caravan with one and never know a thing. There’s not the slightest chance one of them would ever stain a carpet.”