He stepped back; I went in again. ‘You followed me, didn’t you? It was you in the bushes.’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘You said you know me!’
I couldn’t bear to look at him. Sickness was rising once again as I imagined him on top of me, hitching up my skirts, sliding down my drawers, opening my legs. They must have been heavy, a dead weight, and my face as blank as a corpse.
‘What did you do?’ I cried. ‘Why? Because I wouldn’t see the stars with you? Because I don’t like your stupid face?’
‘Katy, I don’t understand.’ He grabbed for me.
I screamed as I dodged him – not a scared scream, but a scream of fury.
Then I lunged.
I clawed at him and felt his skin clog under my nails. I ripped out his hair. I battered him with my fists until he was on the floor, cowering at my feet, his arms up, trying to protect his precious face. I swung my leg back and brought it down against his ribs, kicking the breath out of his lungs. He wheezed as he clutched his stomach. He was on his side, curled into himself, and I brought my foot back again and swung, my boot wedging into the softness in his groin.
He wailed, and I thought of how he had robbed me of my voice that night. I was just about to kick his head when Marion sidled into me, tackling me to the ground.
‘Stop!’
She was in her nightgown, shoeless and missing her glasses.
‘It is him, Marion!’ I pointed at Daniel, who was just beginning to roll onto his knees, groaning as he did so. ‘He did it, Marion. I know it was him.’
She crouched beside me and took my head into her arms. The fight had suddenly evaporated from me, leaving me limp. She shushed me as I sobbed, and swept my hair from my wet cheeks.
Daniel was on his hands and knees, coughing. He managed to stand, although he was wobbling. I thought he might fall over, but his body just leant into the air. ‘You’re a crazy fucking bitch.’ He spat on the floor. Blood glistened on his lips.
‘Daniel,’ Marion said. ‘Please don’t say anything.’
‘It was him,’ I repeated, though I wasn’t sure she heard me through my tears.
‘What is she on about?’
‘Something happened. Where were you this time two weeks ago?’
‘What?’
‘Where were you?’
He plucked a cigarette from the packet in his pocket. His hands shook as he struck the match. ‘I don’t need to answer any of your questions.’
He turned his back on us and staggered away as smoke silvered the air around him.
26
1956
Clouds swelled overhead. The morning was murky and cool. Iris pulled her cardigan close, thinking how distant those heady, heatwave days seemed.
She was feeling the cold because of her tiredness. It had been difficult to sleep after reading Kath’s diary. Kath had seemed so detached from it, the horror in the words not at all reflected in her face.
‘It wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me,’ Kath had said when Iris had asked how she could be so calm about it. Iris had shuddered, wondering how things could possibly get worse.
And she was also tired because of Shirley. She’d been absent from work for the last couple of days. Simon’s promise kept ringing in Iris’s ears. He would sort it, but how?
Iris had considered going to the police with her small bruises but realised she would be laughed out of the station. No one would believe her word over John’s. There were no witnesses. The marks could have been made by anything and anyone.
It would be the same for Shirley. Both of them young working-class girls; no one would take them seriously. Iris was the only person Shirley could turn to, but there seemed no chance of that happening any time soon.
‘Hey!’
Iris turned. Shirley was marching towards her. She was not wearing her uniform but a pair of pale pink trousers, a white shirt, and a buttoned-up cardigan. Coiffed out of her face, her hair was as pristine as ever, but her makeup was not thick enough to conceal the dark circles under her eyes.
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
Iris’s smile dropped.
‘Getting Simon involved. That really is a low trick.’
‘He saw what John did to me.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Why on earth do you think I’m lying? John does it to you, why would it shock you if he did to someone else?’
‘Because he doesn’t do that to me anymore.’
‘It’s been one week.’
Shirley’s lip curled back as she glared at Iris. ‘You don’t even like Simon. You’re stringing him along, aren’t you?’ She laughed. ‘Poor little Iris, I thought, she’ll be a virgin forever. You’re not as innocent as you make out.’
Iris swallowed. This was not Shirley; it was John.
‘What has Simon done?’
‘I don’t know, but John’s been in a godawful mood ever since he saw him. He wouldn’t tell me.’
‘He didn’t hit him?’
‘Simon?’ Shirley scoffed. ‘Jesus, he might look thick, but he knows who to pick his battles with.’
‘And so does John.’ John was a bully and a coward; he wouldn’t stand a chance against Simon if Simon lowered himself to John’s standards. ‘Shirley, please, think about this. I know you’re trying to get away from your dad, but—’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘John won’t make you happy.’
A terrible smirk drained Shirley’s features. ‘He makes me happy enough.’ She crossed her arms in front of her chest defiantly. Iris wondered what the bruises underneath her shirt looked like now.
‘You’re my best friend, Shirley.’
‘I never want to see you again.’ The iciness of her voice made Iris gasp.
‘We have to see each other. We work together.’
‘You can clean up shit and wipe snotty noses for the rest of your life.’ She thrust out her left hand, jabbing the diamond ring into Iris’s face. ‘But I’ll have a husband coming home to me.’
Nurse Okeke caught Iris’s arm before she entered the ward and brought her to one side.
‘What is it? She’s not…’
‘Not yet.’ Okeke picked the cuff of her uniform. ‘She’s worse, though. A few days, a week at most, we think.’
Iris sagged against the wall and let her hot forehead meet the cool paintwork. She took some deep breaths.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
Iris tried to smile, but she wasn’t sure if she had managed it. She pushed herself upright and sniffed back the tears; it would do no one any good to get upset. Bracing for the worst, she crept to Kath’s bed.
The curtain had been partially drawn. Propped up against the pillows, Kath looked greyer than ever, her lips white. A deathly complexion. Her breath rasped in and out of clotted lungs. Her eyes had shrunk deeper into their sockets; only a hint of sky-blue was visible underneath papery lids.
Nurse Okeke brought in the cup of tea and placed it on the table. She gently pressed Kath’s hand and leaned close to her ear. ‘Iris is here to see you.’
Kath’s lips tapered into a smile.
‘Would you like me to read to you, Kath, or do you want to rest?’
‘Read,’ Kath breathed, her voice now nothing but a whisper. ‘Get to the end.’
27
1901
Friday 1st February
I was sure Daniel would tell on me and I’d be dismissed, but he’s kept quiet. Marion found out he was saying he’d tripped in the dark when he was having a smoke. I don’t know why he hasn’t reported my attack, but I assume it is a guilty conscience.
He avoids me at dinner, seating himself on the other side of the room, and I am grateful for it, though he still watches me. One time, I held his gaze. His grin had vanished, and the candlelight created deep shadows of his eyes. Was he thinking about what he had done to me? Was he sorry? I don’t think a boy like Danie
l can feel sorry for anything; he walks the ground as if he owns the earth and everybody on it. Perhaps he was planning how he would do it again?
I try to never be alone now. I stick to Persey’s side, or else I am Marion’s shadow. The sound of my own footsteps makes me hold my breath, and I strain to hear if someone is creeping up behind me. The flashing silhouette of birds as they fly beyond the window makes me shrink away from the panes. I can no longer administer medicine without shaking, for the glass bottle taps against the syringe and I am sure the sound is what I heard that night, behind me in the bushes.
I lie in the bath each morning and night, the steam veiling me, and I think I see a figure in the corner of the room, waiting beside the door.
I remember that time I woke and it had been snowing. The footsteps that morning had been fresh, had pointed towards the main house away from our room. They could not have been the footsteps of Miss York; she had left for her duties before it had snowed. Marion had not gone out either. I had felt a presence in the room that night. I put it down to waking from a torrid dream in the depths of a winter’s night – who would not feel the hairs on their arms stand up? But now, as I recall how I pulled the coverlet over my head and squeezed my eyes shut, I imagine how that presence might have crept into a beam of moonlight, loomed over my sleeping body, and run its cold fingers under the covers to feel my warmth.
Marion wakes me most nights. My eyes burst open to find her face close to mine, her eyes watery and red as she grips my shoulders.
‘You are all right, Katy,’ she whispers. ‘Hush now, hush. I am here.’
I blink the dreams away and find my candle burning low, about to extinguish. ‘What…?’
‘A nightmare again.’ Marion rubs the permanent dimples on the sides of her nose from where her glasses usually sit. She is as tired as me. I wish, for her sake, that these dreams would end, but they are getting worse.
I am running, pounding down a steep slope, the grit on the ground tumbling beside me. My chest burns, but I cannot stop. There is someone behind me, someone coming for me.
I race over the fields, tripping on holes, my face slamming into the frosted grass, but I get up just as a hand clutches for me. I stumble on beside the stream, consider jumping into it and swimming out to sea where Edward waits for me on his boat, but I cannot find a way down from the field. So I continue forward until I see trees, and there is always the ecstasy of hope; Bertie will be there. I will crash into his arms and he will save me.
I clatter over twigs and brambles. I slip on the sludge of old leaves. I cannot find our stump. I go around and around searching for our spot, where I know I shall find Bertie, but the woods grow thicker. The branches of the trees link overhead and block out the sunlight. I cannot see anything as I fumble in the undergrowth, calling out to Bertie, and then I hear him say my name. I try to follow his voice, but he gets quieter and quieter, and the trees come closer until I face a wall of bark. And as I stare at the bark, I know someone is behind me.
The stranger grapples me to the floor and I kick out my legs, meeting only air. I am face-down and he is on me, digging into my shoulder blades, bashing my thighs apart. I am screaming into the earth for it to stop…
That is when Marion breaks through.
‘Something must be done,’ Marion said yesterday morning as she brushed the tangles out of my hair. ‘You cannot go on like this.’
I tell Persey I am losing my mind. She still makes me repeat it all, every afternoon, and she sits there frowning in concentration. She is hunting for the slightest change in my story, as if my subconscious will give us a clue.
‘Surely you must remember something new by now?’
She says she forgot exactly what she did to Edward for a few days afterwards. She says those days gave Henry time to create the lies. She was bedbound, reeling in her own nightmare, able to see only the labyrinth of white bone and red brain and black hair and bloodied hammer. She shook and shrieked for five days straight, the image burned on the back of her eyelids, and that is when the doctors visited.
When her senses returned, she pieced it all together, but Edward and his boat were gone. The doctors told her there had never been an Edward Blake as Henry stood inside the frame of the door, unable to meet her gaze.
‘The first thing they question is your memory. You must hold on to it, at any cost,’ she said, and pulled out her tin whistle. ‘And then you must find proof.’
I watched her play and thought how little good memory and proof had been to her.
Friday, 8th February
Four weeks tonight since it happened.
It is like I have a new timeline; before and after. The before is tainted; the after is one long blur of fear and pain.
I am raw between my legs. The water each morning and night scalds my thin skin, but I like the feeling. Fire is cleansing, that is why they burned witches years ago.
In our village, there is a little hill, and Grandma used to tell me stories of how old women were dragged on top of it in nothing but their nightdresses, their grey hair like rats’ tails around their shoulders, and strapped to an old wooden post. A pyre was built around their feet, then set alight. I used to have nightmares about it – imagining my grandmother doomed to such a fate. But then she died in her own bed when I was nine, and I could rest easy, knowing she’d had a peaceful end.
I wonder, when I lie in the bath, how it would feel to burn. I close my eyes and imagine the splinters against my back, the cool breeze against my bare shins before the flames begin. I hear it – the crackle of hot wood. Heat licks the soles of my feet, pleasant at first, before it starts to prickle. My armpits sweat. It comes from below – a slow parade of agony, searing the flesh so I can smell my own skin as it cooks. My legs warp as my kneecaps burn. My nightdress is as dry as tinder; it shrouds me in orange. My hair alights, so that I have a crown of fire...
I must get such images out of my mind.
Saturday, 9th February
I went to the privy after my bath this evening. The piss stung as it seeped over my grated skin. I pressed paper to myself, then put the paper to the light. But it was clear. I thought my flesh might have been bleeding, for this afternoon, it felt like it ripped as I sat down too quickly, but it appeared to be intact.
And then it struck me.
I would have been grateful to have found blood on the paper.
Thursday, 14th February
I knew there was something inside me. The slug. It is growing.
I hit myself in the stomach, sure that I will be able to knock it out. I keep feeling a rush inside of me and I run to the privy, sure that it will gush out of me in a bloody downpour, but I find I only need to piss.
I should throw myself down the stairs. I would prefer to drink a whole bottle of gin, but I cannot do that here. And if not the stairs, then I shall have to find a woman who knows plants; rumour has it that there is such a creature a mile outside our village, her home a circle of odd-shaped stones at the edge of the forest. I have heard that girls have gone there and traded with her; ten years of life for a safe miscarriage.
Ten years less of life sounds no hardship if I can be rid of whatever it is that forms inside of me. A seed of evil. I will have the devil for a son.
Perhaps it really was the devil that night who found me. If God could do it to Mary, surely the devil could do it to me? That is why I cannot remember; he will have made it so that my memory is lost. Perhaps that is why the child will not be loosened out of me; he makes it stick.
Saturday, 16th February
We sat before the fire today, as it was raining outside. Great big drops of water made a grey curtain which blocked the view. Even Annie did not want to step into it, so we stayed inside.
I repeated the story to Persey, but even she grows tired of it now, her eyes drooping as if I am telling her a fairy tale.
My speech ended as it always does: ‘Then Miss York put me to bed.’
The wind rumbled down the chimney and made th
e fire splutter. Behind us, other patients played cards or read, all of us weighed down by the greyness, wishing for spring to arrive.
‘I am pregnant.’
My words came out as if someone else had said them. Persey flinched, pushed herself upright in the armchair.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I am eight weeks late.’
Persey reached for Annie and lifted her onto her lap.
‘What should I do?’ I was tired of trying to make decisions. I wished for someone to give me a straight road to follow.
‘Get rid of it.’
Her words made me shiver. ‘I have been trying.’
She stared at the ceiling. ‘He is a funny man.’
‘Who?’
‘God. I had four miscarriages before James, all gone in the first two months. I did nothing at all when I knew I was carrying, too scared to even walk outside in fear of jolting it loose. I lay in bed every day. I remember putting my hand to myself as if I would plug the hole. And still, the morning would come when I woke to blood on the sheets, to the sense of emptiness.’
‘But with James it was different?’
‘I could feel his strength from the start.’ She rolled her head towards me. ‘This one wants to live.’
My hands drifted to my stomach. It was still flat, my corset pulled as tight as it always has been, but everything was different.
‘I cannot keep a child who has no father.’
‘Tell Bertie it is his.’
Had I heard her correctly? ‘But it cannot be Bertie’s.’
‘You do not know whose it is. Better to be Bertie’s than someone else’s.’
‘But we didn’t…’
‘But you have. That is all that matters.’
‘He is engaged.’
‘He is a coward for what he did to you. He loved you.’
‘I thought he did.’
‘Then he must do this for you. Make him do it. Make him marry you.’ Her eyes were black and fierce. I could not look at them.
Woman on Ward 13: A haunting gothic novel of obsession and insanity (Iris Lowe Mysteries) Page 21
