by Rob Ewing
Elizabeth goes and sits on the floor. There’s a dirty mess on my bed. Heaps of stones and dirt from the garden. A teddy covered in blue paint. This isn’t so terrible. But my pencils: snapped. My pillow: jam spilt on it.
This is enough to make me sad – but then I see that Elizabeth is staring at something else. For the first time, for me, a bit of good news. They got my bed, but the wrong bedside cabinet. Alex must’ve left his book – there it is, Dr Dog – on my cabinet. Thinking wrongly, they tipped up and smashed all the stuff in his instead.
Me: ‘It’s better news for me.’
‘Shut up,’ Elizabeth hisses. ‘Shut your face up.’
This shocks me: she never talks like this. I want to tell her how sad she makes me feel by saying that, but she’s just staring at the floor beside Alex’s cabinet.
‘There’s red on the floor,’ I say, taking my chance to talk again. ‘It’s a very bad thing to spill the food dye for our water, isn’t it?’
Elizabeth: ‘You know what this is? On the floor, over here?’
Me: ‘No.’
Elizabeth: ‘It’s Alex’s insulin.’
Me: ‘But what’s it doing down over there?’
Elizabeth: ‘It’s smashed that’s what!’
Me: ‘Well … but did you not keep it in the cool box?’
Elizabeth: ‘I did. But that was before I brought it here for safe keeping.’
She doesn’t want to hear me say he might be all right without it. She isn’t interested when I act brave and start to clean my pillow. Instead, Elizabeth looks furious.
‘Of course he needs it,’ she says. ‘This is bad, this is very bad … Have you any idea why they’d do this?’
‘I – no.’
‘So here’s something you should know. There’s only one vial left. That’s in his pen, and that’s only quarter full. You know how long a quarter lasts?’
‘Twenty days?’
‘Two days.’
Alex is standing by the door. He looks at the mess. More than that, he looks at the glass. Elizabeth hurriedly kneels down on the floor to try and hide it, but he sees and understands completely.
‘Someone has done a bad thing,’ he says.
We find them at the big ferry pier. They’ve tipped out a pot of white paint on the tarmac. Both of them are cycling their bikes through it, making bendy lines like a cartoon road or planes flying circles in the sky.
Calum Ian stops short of Elizabeth. At first he thinks she’s going at him for making a mess with paint: then his face changes. Duncan stops, too. He has spots of white all up the back of his trousers, on his hands, on his face. It makes his scarred bits look even stranger.
‘Why?’ Elizabeth asks.
When they don’t answer she says, ‘Know something? Right now I hate your bloody guts.’
Calum Ian starts to say that it’s just a bit of jam, that it was just a bit of food dye.
He stops when she tells him about the insulin.
Duncan begins to shake and tries to brush all the white dots from his jeans, but they only smudge into fingerprint-lines.
‘He made me do it,’ he says.
The first thing we do is go to the hospital. We go back to the room with the broken white cupboards. Calum Ian checks inside the fridge, even though it stinks. Then Elizabeth goes through every single drawer and cupboard – twice. Me and Alex do all the cupboards in a room called The Sluice. We don’t find anything.
Next door is the nursing home. Nobody wants to look in these rooms, but we have to. Their cupboards are empty. Each bed in every room has an old dead person in it.
Alex doesn’t want to look, and neither do I, but we can’t stop ourselves.
I see one old lady whose face is like rotten bark on a tree. I shut my eyes, try to unsee. Too late.
In the hall of the nursing home there’s a big trolley with wheels. Inside the trolley are lots of packets of tablets. Elizabeth makes a bingo! sound, but then goes quiet when she doesn’t find any kind of injection.
Feeling gloomy we return to the hospital corridor. Elizabeth puts on her perfume-hanky and Calum Ian tears off the BIOHAZARD tape and clear plastic from the doors.
She goes in quick, checks the bedside cabinets, cupboards, then comes out quick again, before the smell gets onto her, before she has time to take even one breath.
‘Think, think, think,’ she says.
We all go outside to sit on the craggy stones at the edge of the car park. It’s a place where the wind skirls around. Elizabeth tucks her hair down inside her jumper.
I sit several steps behind her, because it feels like the safest place to be: not too close to anyone who might think to blame me.
Me: ‘Why are we waiting?’
Elizabeth: ‘Because I don’t want to think about what needs to happen next.’
‘What needs to happen next?’
‘We need to get into the practice.’
This means the doctor’s practice: that’s all. Big deal! We went in there once before when we were looking for bandages for Alex, after he cut his arm. The practice wasn’t too spooky, plus it didn’t have a smell. The main doors had been broken open by the adults, and we found bandages in a box in the nurses’ room.
When I tell Elizabeth how easy it’ll be she hisses, ‘Not easy. This time it’s the dispensary we need to get into.’
‘We couldn’t open that door.’
‘Great memory.’
She stands with her arms folded, looking between Calum Ian, Duncan and me. I nearly don’t recognise her: with her scars gone red, her eyes narrowed.
‘There was one door,’ Calum Ian says. ‘But with three locks. Only we didn’t have any key. An adult must’ve tried to break it – the door was splintered all up one side, remember?’
‘So since you have all the best ideas, how are we going to get in when the adults couldn’t?’
‘It was an accident with Alex, I never—’
‘I don’t care about anything you say. I wouldn’t care if you jumped off a cliff. I only want an answer.’
Calum Ian looks away to the sea: sad then angry then sad again. Finally he puts his head down on his lap for not knowing.
With a too-calm voice Elizabeth says, ‘When it happened, Dad wouldn’t let anyone in. There were too many people trying to get in: they were all banging on the main door, shouting. So he kept the keys on a chain. And the keys must still be with him.’
Alex chews the neck of his jumper.
‘We need to go inside the gym,’ she says. ‘And I’m sorry, but I’m not doing that. No way. I’m not going in there.’
Nobody wants to go. It would usually be Elizabeth but that chance is broken. We argue about ways of choosing, but all of them are unfair for Alex or me.
‘Why does he need insulin anyway?’ Calum Ian asks, now looking as big with regret as Elizabeth.
‘He can’t be healthy without it.’
‘Why?’
‘He needs it for his sugar to stay normal.’
‘Then he shouldn’t be eating sugar. No more sweets or treats. What can he have instead?’
Yet Calum Ian sounds tired by his own words, as if he didn’t really want to be asking them.
He goes to the rocks, beyond. He’s gone for a moment, and I think he’s sulking, but then he comes back. He’s holding something in his hand.
‘We’ll draw straws.’
He’s got four bits of grass. Reluctantly, Elizabeth takes them from him.
She holds them up in her hand so they all stick up the same way, with the same thickness showing.
We each have a turn. Elizabeth doesn’t want Alex to draw at all, but Duncan says he has to.
No surprises then, when Alex chooses the shortest straw straight away.
He starts to cry.
Elizabeth shouts and grabs the straws back and throws them away. ‘Stop it, it’s not his fault.’
Duncan gets up and begins walking alone back on the road to the school.
‘
I’ll do it,’ he says, turning around. ‘It can be me, right? Nobody else needs to bother about trying.’
Calum Ian points at me.
‘No, she should. It’s her fault. You told them what you did to our house, Gloic? Go on then! Tell her what you did to the pictures of our mum!’
Elizabeth doesn’t want to look at any of us.
‘It was you, you made me do it!’ Duncan shouts at Calum Ian from the road. ‘I never wanted to do it!’
We all wait on Calum Ian.
Finally, he bends down to pick up the straws.
He throws away the longest, one by one, until he’s left holding only the shortest one.
‘Me then.’
This time we don’t go in between the primary and the big school. Instead, we go straight through the main entrance, then in by the assembly hall. There’s a link corridor, then after that the door to the swimming pool. I remember from when we came before that its cover was left half-on, half-off.
The cover is still the same, only now the water’s gone pongy, stringy, grey-green.
From the lifeguard’s box Calum Ian borrows goggles. He already has a nose-clip on. He wraps his head and hair in lost property towels, then puts two lots of plastic bags on his feet, rolling elastic bands on top.
Lastly, he ties a perfume-hanky to his face.
‘Where are they.’
This is how he says it: not a question. Elizabeth has a firm mouth like she wants to stay calm.
‘OK. Go in. Right in, to the end. Dad’s in the last row. There’s a card to tell who he is. Remember I said about the orange plastic bags with clothes beside? Look inside his. You might get away with just looking there.’
‘Fine.’
‘I could draw you a map. Of the people. A plan?’
‘I’ll watch. For names. Where’s your mum?’
‘She’s on a side bed. At the side of the room. She’s not … in a bag, her clothes are still on. But it might be—’
‘I’m not scared. You don’t have to warn me about anything, I’m fine.’
‘Keep looking mostly at the ground. The flies might get on you so just keep your mouth—’
‘Stop bothering, I’m fine, I can do it myself.’
But truly, he doesn’t look fine. Calum Ian checks his nose-clip, then his goggles, at least ten times. After this he fusses with the plastic bags, breaking the elastic bands holding them on and having to put on new ones.
Before going through, Elizabeth gives him flowers to take in.
Then we all stand on the other side of the double doors and say good luck.
There’s a very bad smell: then an even worse smell as he passes through the two sets of doors. I don’t hear the sound of flies until he opens the second set.
Afterwards, he says it wasn’t hard, not really, though he’s gulping for air and forgot to leave the flowers.
‘That’s definitely the way to do it, definitely,’ he says. ‘If we ever needed, next time. Three plastic bags each foot would be better, remember that. It’s a long way to the end. There’s so many! I forgot about that man, sitting in the chair, he’s weird! Didn’t scare me, though! Then I thought someone had moved, but they couldn’t actually move, could they? I was only imagining, right?’
The flowers are crushed in his hand. He’s twisted them to shreds by holding them too tight. In the end he looks down and remembers what they are, were for.
‘Sorry,’ he says, to Elizabeth.
He keeps speaking fast: on and on about how crucial it is to keep on the goggles, though he could just as easily have done without. Finally he just sits and won’t stand up, not even when Elizabeth tries to help; instead, his eyes go sharp as he tells her to leave him alone.
‘You’ll want to know,’ he says, ‘there was a list of all the mums and dads. Saw my mum’s name.’ He does a so-what shrug. ‘Knew that, anyway. Knew she was there. At least Dad isn’t. At least Dad escaped, he’s out in the world, I know it. What? Stop all your bloody staring!’
We go back to the pool to wait.
When he comes out his face is red. Even so, he’s trying to smile, trying even harder to laugh.
He empties out a plastic bag at our feet.
Two sets of keys and a purse fall onto the tiles.
He still won’t look at me. Not even when I praise him for today’s top bravery. He’d usually say something, anything, even if it was just bad, but he doesn’t.
Around the front of the doctor’s practice there’s a lot of swirling dandelion clocks. The metal shutters are broken. Someone forced them up: with maybe a stone, or an axe, or a hammer. There are dents in the shutters where the silver’s been jabbed, but no right-through holes made.
Elizabeth stops at the sign by the door. Drs B & W Schofield. Her mum and dad, her dad’s letter first.
She touches the sign, rubs some of the salt-rust off. I touch the sign on my way past, too, to add my own respect.
I went in to see Elizabeth’s mum once, when she was a doctor. It was with a sore ear. She was busy, though not too fussy. Tall, with hair that smelt of perfume. When I saw her dad later for a cough, he showed me how his stethoscope worked. I only pretended to understand his instructions.
The air in the practice got old. Cobwebs stick to our faces as we walk in. The waiting room has signs, pictures on its walls: Nutrition in Pregnancy. SEE OUR NURSE FOR SMOKING CESSATION ADVICE. What’s pneumococcus? BREAST IS BEST! Our counsellor holds her clinics every Tuesday Evening. STAYING ACTIVE IN OLD AGE.
But then other signs, over the top of these, about what happened. They’re mostly in small letters, black and white. The advice in them never mattered. Or it came too late to matter.
The little play area’s in the corner. Coloured beads on wire. Train blocks. Books. The play area looks too tiny for anyone. There’s a yellow wooden stool, plus a green table, hardly big enough for one baby, let alone two.
The seats are shiny wood all around the walls. I remember sitting here before my injections.
I remember the other time me and Mum came, near the end. But I don’t want to remember that right now. It would only worry or upset Alex.
Someone – one of the adults – had tried to break into the dispensary. The wood of it got splintered around next to the lock, but it looks like they didn’t get in.
The keys work: first time.
We wait to see if there’s a puff of air, or a bad smell, but there isn’t.
Calum Ian goes first. There’s bits of crumbly wall, from where they tried to break the door. Apart from this, it’s like a new tomb in Egypt, with zero mess.
On shelves, lots of boxes of tablets, with strange names. AMITRIPTYLINE. BISOPROLOL. DETRUSITOL. IMDUR. MICROGYNON. ZOPICLONE. Alex says they sound like characters from Star Wars. For me, it’s more like ghosts or spooks from Howl’s Moving Castle.
We look through the cupboards. Elizabeth goes straight to the fridge. It doesn’t have much of a bad smell.
Also, it’s empty.
The cupboards have things like soap, or cream, or paper towels, or tubes of medicine or stockings. Everything has a clean smell, though, which is a relief.
‘Don’t see any,’ Elizabeth says.
She sits on a footstool, bent right over, looking down at the floor. Calum Ian kicks at the wall behind her.
‘I went in that gym for nothing?’
Her face goes bright red. Already, before anyone else can move, she’s next door, opening cupboards.
‘None of us are giving up.’
Only we don’t find anything. We do find two more fridges. One has an old can of juice in it, which we share out after wiping off any invisible badness. The other fridge is just empty. It doesn’t even smell, which is this day’s newest mystery, maybe without a solution.
Then Elizabeth has another idea. She decides we should look through all the patient records. When I ask what these are, and where, she says, ‘All around us.’
She’s telling the truth. There’s shelves in a clanking me
tal cupboard, and on the shelves are hundreds and hundreds of brown folders. Then loads more, in an ordinary cupboard that doesn’t move and doesn’t clank.
All of the people: families together, with names I forgot until now. There’s even the kids from my class, even the teacher, even the priest. I want to think that these bits of paper might bring the people back: but they don’t, of course, and so I deliberately don’t look for Mum’s notes.
Calum Ian grabs a record. He reads the first pages then throws the record away. ‘Just scratchy bloody writing,’ he says.
I think he’s being daft, but when I collect one it’s true: I can’t read it either.
Elizabeth pulls out a stack, then begins to go through them. Even doing three takes her ages.
‘There must be a faster way,’ she says. ‘This will just take us for ever.’
We make a plan of choosing ten each, doing them carefully. Pretty soon, though, my ten gets mixed up with Alex’s ten; plus I get bored after six and want to look around for quicker ways.
Me: ‘Make your eyes go special for that word. How do you spell that word?’
Elizabeth spells D-I-A-B-E-T-E-S.
Me: ‘Look for it like you’re looking for a colour. Then it jumps out. I’ve done that looking for shiny packets with sweets. It really works, try it.’
We make our eyes go sharp for DIABETES. Except it doesn’t work: they go sharp for other words like FIRE EXIT and DISPENSARY and AIR AMBULANCE CALL and YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE BUT IT HELPS. Never for DIABETES.
Then Elizabeth has one more idea. She looks for a single record. The records go by alphabet – A, B, C, D – until it gets to M. Then there’s a whole wall for Mac, and a shelf for MacNeil. After this, the letters go back to normal, until the end, when there’s no X or Z.
She has Alex’s notes – Alex MacLeod. Elizabeth turns them over, upside down, inside out. When Calum Ian asks her what she’s looking for she says, ‘A sign, a label, anything to say his illness.’ But there isn’t one.
Calum Ian gets fed up. He kicks the footstool Elizabeth sat on, hard enough for it to flip over.
‘Looks like you’re facing your worst enemy,’ I say to him, when he decides to calm down.
With eyes narrowed into slits he looks at me and says,
‘So I am.’
