Night Mares

by Manda Scott

  ‘Pretty bad.’ Like an angular, ascetic, wire-haired scarecrow that’s been left out in the field over winter. Except that scarecrows don’t smell that bad. Not the ones I’ve met. ‘Have you been bathing in horseshit?’

  ‘Only by default.’ She failed on the first boot and slid down the wall to a more stable position on the floor. ‘If you make me something decent to drink, I promise I’ll go and have a shower. How does that sound?’

  ‘Delightful.’

  Essential, in fact. And soon. The smell was marching across the room towards me like a column of starving soldier ants. Thick, gassy waves of it. The basic, organic stench of horse manure run through with nasty toxic lowlights. It smelled very much like the day Gordon Galbraith’s slurry tank caved in and the whole ten thousand gallons of liquid pig manure flowed out on to the high land above the village. The difference being that I wasn’t required to sit in a kitchen the size of a small telephone box with Gordon or any of his lads afterwards.

  I filled up the kettle and then moved back to sit on the stairs, as far out of olfactory range as possible while still keeping within reasonable conversational distance. Not that there was any significant amount of conversation. For a while, the only significant sound was the rising hush of the kettle and a string of single-syllable curses emanating from the floor as Dr Nina Crawford, a woman with more letters after her name than in it, sat on the sanded oak floor of her kitchen and did her best to remove her own boot.

  Last time I tried it wasn’t that hard. I curled up my feet in the corner of the stairwell and watched for a while, trying to work out how much of the chaos was on the surface and how much was coming from further inside.

  It’s not easy to tell that kind of thing with Nina. More than most folk, there’s a difference between interior and exterior. What you see is very rarely what you get.

  She’s not beautiful, Nina, not on the outside. She’s too angular to be beautiful, too asymmetric, too scarred in places that show. But when she’s well, she radiates the kind of magnetism that keeps her residents running round the clock because they’d rather run themselves into the ground than let her down. And even when she’s been up all night with a colic and spent all day in theatre with the students, she still manages a brilliant combination of the quick, quirked smile and the tilt of the head with its tousled mess of hair that grows on you within the first five minutes of meeting.

  The odd thing is, in all the time I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her filthy before. Untidy, perhaps. Wild, frequently. Tangled, often, mostly by intent. But never filthy. Particularly her hair. She’s got a thing about hair, like a second millennium Samson except that in Nina’s case, Delilah was some bitch of a nurse in the intensive care ward at the Western who shaved it all off for a scan in the late-night panic after the first time the lass tried to kill herself.

  To the best of my knowledge, there is no real need to shave anyone’s scalp for any kind of scan and I never found out exactly who did it or why, but it made one hell of an impact on the girl’s psyche. It was short, apparently, before they took her into hospital. Short and curled and wild. Afterwards, she let it grow longer. It took almost two years to grow out to a length she was happy with. Somewhere around the time it passed her ears, she turned it a deep, henna red and has kept it that way ever since. Part of the mask that stops the world from seeing too much of the real woman underneath. The real woman has hair the colour of horse chestnuts straight from the shell and with the same kind of shine. Henna is not what it needs but I am hardly the person to tell her that.

  Either way, she has cut it a bit shorter now so that the terrier-curls make a dark, shining halo around her head. And it does shine. Every time I’ve seen her, straight out of the operating theatre, straight out of a consultation or straight out of bed, it has shone.

  Except now. The woman who sat on the floor in front of me wrestling with her boot had hair clogged with sweat and wood shavings and other unnamed, unspeakable bits of animal debris as if taking care of herself had somehow dropped off the list of personal priorities.

  Not a good sign.

  The hush of the kettle rose to a boil and failed to stop when it should have done. I leaned over the counter and switched it off at the plug. The woman on the floor showed no sign of having heard. She wasn’t showing much awareness of anything beyond her footwear. I sat back on the staircase and reached out, prodding her with my toe.

  ‘Nina, what’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She won the war with the boot. It spun across the floor, spewing fragments of wood shavings and straw in its wake. She scooped at them half-heartedly with the edge of her hand and then gave up and leant back against the doorframe. ‘I guess I’m cracking up. Had to happen sometime.’

  Maybe.

  I needed to look at her eyes to know for sure and she wasn’t about to let me.

  Nina’s eyes, when she is not driven by the nightmares, are a shade deeper than her hair; more walnut than chestnut, and with that rare glitter of real intelligence that takes her beyond the masses even in a profession where they think they’re all beyond the masses anyway. When she is living in the nightmares, her eyes change first. If I were thinking in medical terms, I would know all about the size of her pupils and the effect of altered blood flow on the iris. Since I do my best not to think in medical terms unless I have to, all I know is that the shade of her eyes changes as she walks closer to the depths of her own private hell and the darker they get, the worse it is. She knows this and she knows that I know. And the times when she avoids eye contact are the times when she thinks things are bad.

  Sitting there watching her undress on her kitchen floor, I realised that I hadn’t seen her eyes since the moment I slid down the stairs into the living room. Which meant things were worse than bad.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘Not really.’ She stood up, slowly, using the door-frame for leverage. ‘But I probably should.’ The other boot came off without resistance. Suddenly and with a soft, unpleasant, sucking noise. Her foot and the leg of her overalls were wet with fresh blood.

  She saw me looking and lifted one shoulder apologetically. ‘It’s not mine.’ Her second shoulder joined the first. ‘We had a nose bleed.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and Steff. We were tubing the horse. Nasogastric tube. To decompress the stomach. Caught a vessel on the way in.’

  I don’t think I want to know.

  ‘I came in for a shower.’ She said it more to herself than to me. ‘Coffee and a shower.’ She looked at me, almost directly. ‘Coffee in the shower?’

  I think she just might. ‘Coffee after the shower,’ I said. ‘And you tell me what’s happening.’

  The bathroom in the cottage is of relatively recent origin but it still manages to conform to house style in terms of its furnishings: there is no heater, the bath takes over an hour to fill, the white tiles on the wall grow green mould in three days if you don’t wash them and the lino on the floor has ripples cunningly placed to stub the toes of the unwary.

  The only new addition to the entire ensemble is the shower, put in by Nina on the very reasonable grounds that anyone who comes home covered in blood and gastric contents at two in the morning after a late-night colic needs to be sure there’ll be enough hot water to get clean before morning. She got the lads from the engineering department to put in something industrial with the jet pressure of a power hose, and standing underneath it for any length of time does terrible things to your skin.

  By the time I was ready with two cups of coffee, the place was full of pine-flavoured steam, there was condensation running down the walls and a force four gale angled in from the open window above the sink. The offending overalls were soaking in a bucket of water near the door. The smell barely penetrated the fog.

  I dried off the lid of the toilet with a spare hand towel and sat down out of the draught. The steam acquired a new flavour. A kind of odd, citrus mix of lemongrass and ging
er but without the culinary overtones. It’s Nina’s smell, at least at the times when she doesn’t stink of horse excreta. A signature scent. Something to do with what she uses to wash her hair although I’ve never found out what it is. The smell of it filled the room, billowing out of the open window. Oddly peaceful for someone who spends their life in such turmoil.

  The coffee began to cool. I pulled the cord twice, flicking the lights on and off to let her know I was there. ‘Coffee,’ I said, above the noise of the shower. ‘You want to come out while it’s still hot?’

  ‘Sure.’ The noise of the water slammed off and a hand emerged from behind the plastic screen. ‘Towel?’

  ‘Here.’ I threw her a towel from the rail beside me and heard her mutter further small curses at her hair. She emerged faster than I’d expected, with the towel wrapped round her head and the rest of her dripping wet. Naked, she looked more vulnerable than before. Everyone looks disarmed when they’re unclothed but in Nina’s case it was the towel on her head that made the difference. Red hair and vulnerable don’t go together even if it’s not a real red. With her hair covered and the colour gone, she looked smaller; thinner, more exhausted. The scars on her neck stood out whiter against the faded tan of her skin: two arrow-headed vampire bites where they ran the drip lines into her jugulars because they couldn’t find any veins left on her arms that worked. The time she grew her hair long, it was specifically to cover the scars. It took the best part of five years in therapy before she came round to the idea that people see the woman first and the scars second. Her entire wardrobe changed in the months after that. Polo necks to open shirts in the space of one season. It took longer to get her to give up on long sleeves but then the scar on her arm is altogether more spectacular than the ones on her neck; a long albino snake coiling up and around from wrist to elbow, the remnant of four hours in theatre with the Western Infirmary’s top reconstructive team trying to rebuild something useful from the mess left by the pentobarbitone she’d put in her death-wish cocktail.

  It was the pentobarbitone that did the most obvious damage, at the start. They put horses down with pentobarb. It’s not meant to go in human arms, especially not outside the vein. The ambulance team did what they could with subcutaneous injections of normal saline but the damage was done by then. In the twenty-four hours it took them to get her stable, the skin had sloughed off her forearm and the muscles beneath had turned to molten cheese. A reconstructive nightmare. She’s lucky to have an arm at all and the fact that she can make a living as a surgeon is the kind of miracle that goes a long way to restoring my faith in modern medicine.

  If they could have repaired the damage to her mind at the same time, I would live the rest of my life a believer. But it took a lot longer than a month in intensive care to patch up the holes left by the ketamine, and hospital doctors aren’t really cut out for that kind of thing, even the ones with psychiatric leanings. And so, when they let her out of hospital, they sent her to me; an ex-medic turned therapist with connections in all the right places. She was the first of my die-hard suicides. And the last.

  It’s nasty stuff, ketamine. I’ve no idea what made her slip it in the bag except that it was there when she opened the drug cupboard and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of overkill when you’re desperate. Either way, it saved her life. Hit her brain before the barbiturate and triggered a series of twitching convulsions that were enough to jerk the catheter from the vein.

  The gods balance these things. Give life with one hand and take sanity with the other. For a long time it seemed she was never again going to have both together. When we first started together, an hour in session with Nina felt like a month in a war zone and I went home to Bridget in desperate need of emotional resuscitation afterwards. It blows open the doorways to your unconscious, ketamine, and that’s not a kind thing to do to anyone.

  For the best part of four years after they let her out of hospital, Nina lived in a world haunted by the dark, tangled monsters from the depths of her own private hell. Things that stalked her days and made massacres of her nights long after the pentobarb and the morphine worked their way out of her veins and her liver. It was hell. Every step of the way was hell and there were times when both of us thought she was going right off the rails. But even so, she got her act together and worked her way through a Masters and a PhD and picked up the exams she needed to become a surgeon and there was a day, nearly five years after we first started work, when she stood in the doorway of my office and told me she had just slept a whole week of nights without a single solitary nightmare. We went out for a drink to celebrate that night and to hell with the proprieties of professional and client. We thought we had it cracked, both of us. And we carried on believing it. Until last September, when the whole bloody cycle started again.

  That’s the thing about nightmares. Like gravity, they never really go away.

  She caught me staring vacantly into space and slid another towel off the rail beside her.

  ‘If you tell me I’ve lost weight,’ she said, ‘I’ll throw you out.’

  ‘Hardly.’ I wouldn’t dream of it. ‘I’ll wait until you’ve finished telling me what’s going on down at the ranch. Then I’ll throw myself out and let you get some sleep.’

  She wrapped the towel round at arm-pit level and sat down on the edge of the bath.

  ‘If I knew what was happening, Kellen, I’d be out there doing something about it.’ For someone on the edge of crisis, she sounded uncommonly stable.

  I handed her the coffee. ‘So tell me the basics,’ I said.

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know.’ She sunk half a mug and then started rubbing absently at her hair with her free hand, as if sitting still had become impossible. ‘The horses are still dying, Kellen. There’s one in the end box now. We cut him on Monday morning. He keeled over Tuesday night and he’ll be dead by tomorrow, barring miracles. He came in for a tie-back. Ordinary, straight-forward elective surgery. Nothing that couldn’t have been done in general practice except that the owner’s one of the staff and so the practitioner fought shy of the anaesthesia, wanted somebody else to take the risks. There shouldn’t have been any risks. He should have been home by now, bumbling around in his paddock with nothing better to do than decide on the best patch of grass to mow next.’

  ‘But he isn’t?’

  ‘No, he isn’t. He’s flat out in the ICU box with a wire in every orifice and a desperate look in his eye that knows death is coming and wants to know what’s keeping it away.’

  ‘And you’re the one keeping it away?’

  ‘I am. I’ve had the gun in my hand twice now and not used it.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because I don’t know what’s going on. Because I don’t want to admit defeat. Because this is the third one to go the same way since Christmas and there were another four before that and we still don’t have a handle on what the hell is happening. I’ve been in there since he went down, Kellen. That’s two days and two nights watching him die, trying to find out what’s going on and all that’s happened is that I can’t walk straight, I can’t think straight and I don’t know if it’s better to slug him with something else out of pharmacy or walk across the corridor, pick up the gun and give him the peace he needs.’

  She ran out of steam suddenly, like a car without fuel. She took a long drink of coffee, chewed at her bottom lip, stared hard at a fixed spot on the wall. ‘What would you do?’ she asked. As if I could possibly know anything she didn’t.

  ‘I’d go to bed and get some sleep and let someone who knows what day it is make the decisions,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to sleep, Kellen. Really. There are more dead horses in my sleep than there are in the wards.’ She put her mug on the floor and devoted both hands to drying her hair. Coiled springs of it leaked from the enfolding towel, spiralling darkly around her fingers. ‘I only came back to have a shower and get a decent cup of coffee. The crap they make over there is undrinkable.’

  Anything’s
undrinkable if you drink it for three days in a row.

  ‘Nina,’ I asked, ‘what day is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She reached up to a cupboard over the sink and pulled out a small electric hair dryer. The kind that should never, ever be used in damp, mouldy bathrooms. ‘Thursday?’ she offered.

  ‘It’s Friday,’ I said. ‘Seven o’clock, P.M., not A.M. And you’re telling me you haven’t moved out of that box except to pee, shit and make coffee since Tuesday night. That’s three days, Nina. Not two. No one can make rational decisions on seventy-two hours without sleep.’ I took the dryer from her hand and led the way back into the safety and relative warmth of the kitchen.

  She followed me through, leaving wet footprints on the clay tiles of the floor. ‘Hospital doctors do it all the time,’ she said. ‘Staying up all weekend without sleep and then writing out prescriptions on Monday morning.’ She cocked her head at what was supposed to be an appealing angle. ‘I know, you told me all about it.’

  Very funny.

  ‘I was an intern, not a consultant surgeon. That’s what juniors are for. Get some sleep, Dr Crawford. Leave it to the resident. Steff will shoot your horse if he needs shooting. She’ll dope him if he needs doping. She’ll throw the entire contents of pharmacy at him if that’s what she thinks he needs. That’s what she’s here for. She’s the gopher, you’re the boss. Just get on the phone and pretend that you’re a real consultant …’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘… and then dry your hair and go to bed. I’ll get someone to wake you up sometime next week. Later if it’s all still peaceful.’

  2

  Dr Stephanie Foster, DVM, is tall—taller than most of the men she works with—and she has bright blonde hair cut into spikes that add another two inches to her height. Underneath that she has the kind of lean, square-edged features that never give yes for an answer and diamond-grey eyes that tell you attack is the best form of defence. A silver nose-stud glitters aggression in one nostril and there are two or three hoops in different shades of gold ranged up each ear. And she has a Chicago accent which does nothing to soften the impact.