by Manda Scott
It is the windows alone that make this place inhabitable. The room is set, diamond-wise, into the corner of the building and has windows on two adjacent sides. The right-hand one overlooks and is overlooked by, the Parasitology building. It has permanent screens up as a deterrent to prying eyes. But the one on the left has a clear view out over the cattle byres, across the lambing pens and on beyond that to the screen of trees that marks the edge of the estate. Looking out of here, you could believe yourself in any one of a dozen rural castles and not right on the edge of Scotland’s largest city. It’s probably the only thing that has stopped any of the residents of the last twenty years from calling in the university authorities and demanding relocation.
I stood with my shoulder wedged in the corner hugging a mug of fresh coffee to my chest and watched a gang of week-old lambs wage war for rulership of a pile of hay bales stacked at the corner of the lambing pen. Two feet behind me, Steff Foster juggled a pair of pans above the single, reddened ring of a bed-sit cooker. Flavoured steam filtered across the room. If I thought about it, I could put a name to the thyme and the coriander and the overtaste of hot butter. The rest blended to something more subtle with a warm, mid-Asian tang.
There was a rustle of movement and one of the pans hissed steam in the sink that stood between the cooker and the door. The second followed it. Steff walked past me with two plates and a handful of cutlery. Omelettes. Very nice-looking omelettes at that. I’m not overly keen on eggs these days but I think by then I would have eaten rat-bait and been happy with it. If I bothered, I could probably have counted the hours since I last slept. I couldn’t begin to count how long since I last ate anything you could call a decent meal.
Steff laid the plates on either side of a low table that sat in front of the television. She pulled a couple of cushions from a pile in the corner and tossed them on to the floor, sinking down cross-legged on to the one further from the windows.
‘Breakfast?’ she offered. And then, because I didn’t move: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have any chairs.’
I noticed. If you added chairs to this room, there would be no room for the people. It’s hardly a problem. ‘What about Nina?’ I asked. ‘We could wait a while longer.’
She paused, her fork halfway to her mouth. ‘My mother brought me up not to waste food,’ she said succinctly. ‘You might be able to make omelettes that keep for days at a time. Mine don’t.’
‘You think she’ll take that long?’
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘You probably know her better than I do, but I’d say she’ll keep going till nightfall or until she finds him. Whichever comes first.’
Which was more or less what I was thinking. ‘Then we ought to go down and help.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’ She looked up at me then, and smiled. A dry smile with something close to the quirked edge of her superior. ‘There’s one clear rule of healthy living around here: don’t get between a cat and its mother. Not that cat anyway.’
It’s astonishing the number of people who don’t get on with that cat. ‘I don’t think he’s ever actually killed anyone.’
‘Not that she’s letting on. But on the other hand, if he’s snuck off into the woods, he won’t come out for anyone but her. Going down to help won’t earn you any favours.’
Probably not. If I was less tired, I would have worked that out on my own. I sat down on the spare cushion and picked up a fork. Steff leaned over and fired a remote control at the television. ‘I videoed ER,’ she said. ‘Essential viewing.’ And that, effectively, rendered us both silent.
I got rid of the television the day after Caroline left. Three years of freedom from the box does odd things to your appreciation of modern culture. I watched for a while and then, when my knees and my mind couldn’t take any more, I stood up and finished the rest of the omelette by the window watching while the livestock down in the paddocks made up their own ad-lib soap. We followed up with blueberry crumble. And then coffee. The video ended and whined through its rewind. Three different lambs had held the fort by the time we finished. There was still no sign of Nina.
‘She’ll crack if she keeps going like this.’ I said it quietly, to the lambs, to the sky, to myself.
‘Some of us have been thinking that for the past six months,’ said Steff Foster from the floor. ‘She hasn’t yet.’
‘She needs sleep,’ I said. ‘And she has nowhere to go.’
‘She needs to get rid of the jinx more than that,’ said her resident. ‘And she needs to find something to live for outside of work before she drives herself into the ground. Or someone.’
‘She had Matthew,’ I said. ‘It didn’t help.’
‘She didn’t have Matthew. He had her. There’s a difference.’
Isn’t there just.
Steff sat on the floor. The windows cast overlapping shadows on her face although I doubt if proper light would have made her any easier to read. For someone who came into the picture almost halfway through a four-year relationship, Stephanie Foster had a particularly astute sense of its dynamics.
‘Did Nina tell you that?’ I asked.
‘No. She didn’t have to. It was obvious.’ And then: ‘She didn’t tell me why she tried to kill herslf, either. You wouldn’t like to fill me in, I suppose?’
I wouldn’t. ‘If Nina wants you to know, she’ll tell you.’
‘OK. Let me try this.’ She leaned over and pulled the video from the slot. Her face slid deeper into shadow. ‘She was less than two years out of college and she was working in a two-man practice with a rising caseload where the boss has a reputation for taking two months off every summer. I would guess she had a bunch of horses die while she was on her own and she decided she was responsible. Is that close?’
Frighteningly so. ‘You can’t ask me that, Steff. You’d have to ask Nina.’
‘I did.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She walked out of theatre.’
‘Then I’d say you have as much of an answer as you’re ever going to get.’
‘Maybe. But if I’m right, Kellen, then we aren’t too far off a repeat prescription. I don’t think she’ll blow it a second time.’
And that, too, was frighteningly close. She smiled thinly, and leaned over to tug at the door. Two flights down, a light tread sounded on the stairs. Steff turned back to me, her face clear now, in the light, her grey eyes fixed hard on mine. The jewellery seemed oddly still. ‘Think about it, Kellen,’ she said. ‘She can only take this kind of pressure for so long. Something has to give in the end. I think we’d all rather it wasn’t her.’
‘Right.’
I’m sure we would. But I have no idea at all what I am supposed to do about it.
The footsteps reached the top landing, heading for the Lodge. Steff stood in one fluid movement, and reached forward to open the door. ‘She’s found him,’ she said.
‘No she hasn’t.’ Nina stood framed in the doorway, her face a study in ash and mud, her clothes beyond reasonable repair. Light fell into the dark wells of her eyes and never returned. In one hand, she carried an empty green, plastic bottle. The other hand was simply empty. She carried no cat.
‘I don’t think I can …’ She stepped forward and sank, suddenly, at the knees. We moved, both of us, and caught her as she fell. Laid her out on the floor by the table.
‘What now?’ asked Steff.
She needs sleep. And she has nowhere to go.
‘If I can get enough coffee on board to manage the lorry,’ I said, ‘I can take her back to the farm.’
‘No. You’re no more fit than she is.’ She pulled open a door on the far side of the room. Beyond it, a double bed took up the entire floor space of the converted broom-cupboard bedroom. ‘Jason’s away at Congress.’ She pulled at a crumpled duvet and spread it out across the bed. ‘Matt paged me just before you got here. We’ve got a cocker with a spinal disc coming in right about now. We’ll do a myelogram at the very least. If it goes to theatre
, I’ll be out of here for most of the afternoon so there’s a room free for each of you if you don’t want to share. We can sort something more permanent this evening.’
‘Fine.’
We laid Nina on Jason’s bed, washed the ash off with damp kitchen towels and changed her into a T-shirt of Steff’s. Steff’s pager sent her messages of dogs in need and she left us. I was just about awake enough to take my shoes off before I fell, fully clothed, on to her bed.
‘No … You have to listen … I didn’t mean … Please …’
‘Nina. Nina. It’s me. Kellen. I’m here. It’s all right.’
‘I can’t … Kellen … you can’t … please don’t … no … GET AWAY!’
‘Shhh. Don’t shout. I’m here. You’re safe. Whatever it is, you’re safe. I promise.’
‘No … Kellen. I didn’t … Jesus Christ can you not just leave me alone … please … please … leave me …’
Her eyes are open. Wide, wide open. Totally black. In broad daylight, with a light on by the bed, still they are black.
Her fingers are twisting the sheets. Knotting them. Tearing them. Using them as a shield. From the light. From me. From whatever it is that is eating her soul.
We’ll have to replace the sheets. Jason’s sheets.
God alone knows when these sheets were last washed …
‘Nina, please listen. You …’
‘Get AWAY!’
‘Kellen? What’s up?’
I should have taken her back to the farm. I should have had another coffee and braved the lorry. I should have had the sense to take a taxi. I should have borrowed her car. Anything to get her away from the hospital. Absolutely anything to stop her falling into the pit right in the middle of a working day with people three floors down. People she works with, who have never seen the inside of Hades. People who never need to know.
‘Kellen? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
Hell extends another tentacle. Beckons from somewhere a foot in front of her eyes. Grasps tight in a loving, fertile, crushing embrace.
‘NO!’
The sheet tears. A single straight line down the centre.
She is off the bed and by the window. Anything could happen.
I had no idea it was this bad.
‘Kellen, what’s happening in there?’
‘Steff? I think I might need help. She’s trying to break out of the window …’
I have had less than three hours’ sleep. It is over four days since she last had an unbroken night. One of us has to stay sane.
I’m just not sure I can do it on this little sleep.
‘Jesus. How long does this go on?’
‘I don’t know, Steff. Just hold her. Please? Can you? Just hold her and don’t let her go.’
‘Kellen?’
‘Mmm?’
‘What time is it?’
How the hell should I know? ‘Eight o’clock.’
‘It can’t be eight o’clock, it’s dark.’
‘So my watch is lying.’ I don’t care.
‘Can I look?’
‘Mmm.’
A hand takes my wrist and stretches it out from under the pillow. A light switches on. Bright. I don’t need that. I need dark. And more sleep.
‘You were right. It’s eight o’clock. We’ve slept right through.’
Marvellous. ‘Go back to sleep.’
The light dies. Dark, blessed dark, returns. There is rain muttering on the windows. Not enough to stop me sleeping. The sheets smell of sweat. Age-old sweat. And lemongrass. Very peaceful.
I need a drink but I can’t be bothered to get up. I could dream of drinking. Drinking rain, big drops of rain. Big enough to swim in …
‘Kellen?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I think I’m bleeding.’
‘What?’
My hand found the light. Neither of us needed that. Nina lay beside me in one of Steff’s T-shirts, three sizes too large. It came halfway down her thighs. Almost decent. Decent enough. There were marks on her palms where her nails had dug deep and a long cut on her right forearm that looked as if she had tried to gouge out the scar with a blunt penknife. In reality she used the broken glass from the tumbler that was sitting on the window-ledge by the bed but the effect was much the same. I thought Steff had glued it with wound glue. Clearly, it didn’t work. We should have dressed it at the time. I can’t remember why we didn’t.
‘Here. Let me look.’ There wasn’t as much blood as it looked on first sight. Thin beads weeping in places where the glue wasn’t holding. A trail of red commas on the sheet.
A loose-weave bandage and a VetWrap sat on the bedside table, courtesy of Steff. Between us we made a reasonable bandage.
‘We’ll have to change these sheets,’ she said.
‘We’ll have to change them anyway.’ I showed her the rent in the sheet.
She bit her lip and looked at the tear. At the bandage on her forearm. At the bruises on her other arm where Steff had held her still, to stop her throwing herself out of the window. Steff, who walks on eggshells because she has a grip that could fracture bone and knows it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
I should hope so. ‘How often, Nina? How often is it like this?’ I was angry. More than I had reason to be. But I was also a lot more worried than I had ever been about her state of mind.
‘Not often. Not until now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This is the second time in two days. I was out of it when you came to the cottage the other night. That’s why I came home.’
‘Jesus Christ, Nina …’
‘Don’t, Kellen. I said I was sorry.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Do I have to tell you everything?’
There’s no answer to that. I just lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling and wondered what else there was that I didn’t know. And why.
I turned over, eventually, when the anger had passed and lay on one side so that I could see her properly. ‘I’m supposed to be here to help, Nina.’ I said it quietly, because it was late and it was dark and the walls are plasterboard with a broken layer of posters. ‘I’m not going to tell you to give up work.’
‘I know.’ She lay still, facing me across the pillow, the sheet tucked under her armpit. Her hair, dry now of sweat, sprung across the pillow in bronze knots. Her eyes were walnut brown with pupils that spun down to pinheads in the dim light of the bedside lamp. ‘But you’re on your own there and if I tell you all of it, I might not be able to keep pretending to everyone else that I’m all right.’
‘Someone has to know what’s going on.’
‘Maybe.’ She shrugged, a half-centimetre lift of a shoulder into the pillow. We waited, both of us, while she thought that one through.
‘There isn’t much you don’t already know,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ve been getting flashbacks, that’s all. Classic ketamine flashbacks.’
I really believed we had beaten this.
‘Why, Nina? Why has it come back now?’
‘I don’t know.’ She rolled over and propped her chin on one hand so I could see her better. ‘Stress, I guess. Lack of sleep. I wonder sometimes if it’s hypoglycaemia. It’s always worse when I haven’t eaten.’
Which is most of the time, these days.
‘How long has this been going on? Weeks? Months?’
‘Six months.’ She thought back. ‘Maybe closer to eight by now. Since September, anyway. It only comes on after a long day in theatre. I see things. I hear things. Things that attack, usually … things that tell me it’s all my fault … standard ketamine paranoia. If I get to bed, I have the dreams—you know about the dreams—but I’ve never passed out before. Never. Not since I was in hospital. Since before I met you.’ She turned her wrist over, examining the fingermarks that ran up the length of her tendons. ‘They had Velcro ties there. To hold me to the bed.’
‘That was because you were injecti
ng air into your drip lines. You weren’t trying to throw yourself out of the window.’
‘I think I probably would have done if I’d had the chance. There are bits I don’t remember when they said I was pretty violent. But I knew what I was doing with the air.’
Christ.
Nina was the first of my suicides and I did some serious research before I ever agreed to take her on. I read her case notes from cover to cover, all sixty-odd pages of hospital handwriting. Then I took the junior psychology registrar out for six pints in the Man and pumped him for all the relevant details, the ones they hadn’t committed to paper, so that, afterwards, I thought I had some kind of idea what I was working with.
The case notes were brutal and to the point. Nina Crawford tried three times to kill herself. On the first attempt, she ruined her arm. On the third, she nearly drained herself of blood. But it was the second time, the one in between, that was the most desperate and by far the most frightening. On the day after her admission to hospital, the day after they cut all her hair off for the scan, the young Nina Crawford sat up in her bed and bled a 50 centimetre column of air into the drip line feeding her left cephalic vein. She was watching it slowly edge its way through the catheter when a staff nurse came to see what it was that was holding her attention for so long. Then they panicked, shifted her to ICU for the rest of the night and had round-the-clock shifts waiting for an arrest that never happened.
The case discussion at ward rounds the next morning was alive with debate as to whether she had got a big enough volume of air into the line to create a fatal pulmonary embolism. The physicians went into a huddle in the corner, wrote formulas on the backs of envelopes and decided that, if the whole lot had gone in, she would probably have succeeded in killing herself. The psychologists fought over the authorship rights to the case study. The pathologists would have killed for the chance to examine the body.
According to the registrar, the general consensus was that if she had succeeded, it was probably one of the most painful ways to die imaginable and that she must have known that
