Never Ending

by Martyn Bedford

  She shares a rug with Caron and Lucy. Sits with her back to the lake.

  But it’s right there, on the other side of that fence. She can hear it lapping. Can smell its odour of damp earth and vegetation. Can picture its bluey-pewter surface stippled with sunlight and a scattering of coots and mallards. Her mind conjures another version too: rocks and crashing waves, the stink of salt and seaweed, the terrifying darkness of night. Her own screams.

  “Ew, tuna.” Caron peels back the top of her sandwich.

  Mikey is the only absentee. Unwell is the official explanation; but he seemed OK at breakfast. And he was fit enough to strip his room bare again. Shiv wonders if he hates water as much as she does and has snuck away somewhere, or simply did a better job than Shiv of saying no. She recalls that time she saw him from the window, down here, gripping the fence, staring at the lake. Shiv figures he wanted the sight of the water to remind him of his failure to keep Phoebe safe. Confronting the lake was another self-inflicted punishment. Or maybe he wished the fence wasn’t there so that he could throw himself in. Did he hate himself that much?

  There was a time when Shiv’s counsellor worried that she might be suicidal. The woman was cautious in raising the subject – presumably, for fear of planting the idea in Shiv’s head. Her line was to find out if Shiv had ever thought ending her life would free her from having to cope with the enormity of what had happened. Suicide as a release.

  Suicide as a means of self-punishment didn’t seem to occur to the counsellor.

  “It’s a flooded gravel-pit, actually – not a natural lake,” she overhears Dr Pollard telling Helen, the words drawing Shiv from her thoughts. “Very cold and very deep.”

  “No good for skinny-dipping, then?” Caron calls over.

  The Director laughs. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  Somehow, this spins off into a discussion about the Loch Ness Monster.

  Shiv focuses on eating, not looking at the lake or thinking about it. Or about Mikey and suicide. She listens to a monologue from Lucy about how homesick she is, and how she’s going cold turkey from two weeks without texting, Facebook or phone calls. Shiv doesn’t miss any of it. She thought she would, but she doesn’t. If they relaxed the rules and let the residents phone their parents, Shiv isn’t at all sure she’d make the call – or what she’d say to Mum or Dad if she did. It’d be Dad she phoned; no point talking to her mother these days. How’s it going? Dad would ask. Meaning, Are you getting better? What would she tell him? Yeah, I talk to Declan all the time. Hey, and guess what! He held my hand at Walk!

  When everyone has finished eating, Assistant Sumner produces a Frisbee and organizes people into a circle on the grass. Shiv goes to join Dr Pollard on her rug.

  “Frisbee not your thing?” the Director asks.

  “No. I mean, yeah, but … not just now.”

  She used to love throwing a Frisbee with Declan – they’d stand further and further apart, competing to make the most acrobatic catch. Her brother split his lip one time on a beach in Sardinia, trying to catch the disc in his mouth like a dog. Shiv is about to share this memory with Dr Pollard but decides not to.

  “Am I making progress?” she asks.

  “Progress?”

  “Am I getting better?”

  The woman looks at her appraisingly, like she’s searching for clues. For once, Dr Pollard is not in a business suit but a pink polo shirt and white chinos. No glasses. Her bare arms are stick-thin and freckly.

  “Do you think you’re getting better?” she asks.

  “I’m asking you. You’re the expert here.”

  Dr Pollard gives a slight nod. “Your response to the programme is pretty much on track.”

  “What, you think I’m improving?”

  “Ah, now, ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’ aren’t necessarily the same thing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Take your friend.” Dr Pollard points to Caron, bending to retrieve the Frisbee she’s just dropped. “At Make, her collection of artwork is progressing but there’s no obvious improvement in her artistic ability.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you saying I’m—”

  “But, in your case, Siobhan,” the woman continues, “yes, I do believe you are progressing and improving. In your treatment, I mean.” Then, smiling, “And in Make, as well, as it happens. You have quite a talent for art.”

  Shiv ignores the compliment.

  She plucks at the rug beneath her, works a fingertip into a small tear in the material. “Sometimes,” she says, after a deep breath, “I think he’s here.”

  “Your brother?”

  “It’s like I have him back again. All to myself.”

  “And you like that?”

  Shiv nods. “My other therapy, it was all about learning to let him go.”

  The woman studies Shiv, her expression unreadable. Shiv is cross-legged; Dr Pollard, her legs stretched out, is massaging her knees. “Poor circulation,” she explains, catching Shiv watching. Then, “So, tell me about it.”

  About having Declan back, she must mean. So Shiv does.

  “How is that ‘getting better’?” Shiv says when she’s through. “It’s not exactly normal, is it? Seeing someone who isn’t there. Holding their hand, talking to them.”

  “Hmm, normal?” The Director gestures towards the rest. “I’m sure you know you’re by no means alone in experiencing these … let’s call them ‘encounters’.”

  “Oh, so I’m as normal as every other patient in a psychiatric clinic. Great.”

  Dr Pollard laughs.

  It’s true, what she said. Caron speaks every night to the friend she lost; Lucy says that when she’s sculpting her niece’s face in Make, the modelling clay feels like flesh – that the baby girl smiles at her; Helen has confessed to being “visited” by her dead father. If the therapy is meant to reunite the living with their dead, it’s working.

  Except for Mikey, if he can be believed.

  Shiv shakes her head, serious again, still picking away at the rug, widening the rip. “I’m not entitled though. Why should I get to have Declan back?”

  As she says it, she realizes she has pretty much repeated something Docherty said at Talk the other day. He’d been telling the group about Natalie, his girlfriend he killed in a car crash: how the re-creation of her likeness at Make is messing with his head; how he has tried to quit thinking about her at Walk or writing about her at Write; how he can’t bear to look at the pictures of her on his wall any more.

  “I don’t deserve to have Nat back.”

  Shiv glances over at the game, locates Docherty just outside it – half turned away, head down, hands in pockets.

  “Shall we go for a stroll?” Dr Pollard says, reclaiming Shiv’s attention.

  “A stroll? Where?”

  “Just round the lake.” She pats her stomach. “Work off some of that lunch.”

  Shiv fixes her with a look. “You can’t make me go round the lake.”

  “No, I can’t make you.” She pauses. “But I’d like you to come. Please.”

  Dr Pollard uses a key to let them through a gate in the fence and onto a dirt path that follows the shoreline. Beside them is a wooden post hung with an orange-and-white lifebelt, one of several around the perimeter of the lake. Shiv fixes her gaze on the ground. With Dr Pollard keeping to the inside of the path, closest to the water, Shiv could almost make-believe the lake isn’t there at all.

  She is shaking.

  From nervousness? Anxiety? Fear? What she feels is cold – as though she’s in the water. Her hands are numb, her fingers icy-stiff.

  It brings to mind her “tree” nightmare, sitting on a high branch, no way to climb down or for anyone to reach her; those vicious dogs circling, waiting for her to lose her grip.

  Shiv relates the dream to Dr Pollard, aware that she’s talking to distract herself.

  “Ah, dream interpretation.” Does she notice Shiv shaking, the voice tremor?

 
“It felt more like a memory than a dream.” She tells the Director about Mum rescuing Dec from the sycamore and how that morphed into her nightmare.

  “Was your brother there, in the dream version?”

  Shiv is about to say no, because she’s fairly certain he wasn’t – not at the end, anyway – but, picturing it now, she sees him at the base of the tree, waving to her. Signalling, though she can’t tell what. The two dogs weave back and forth, ignoring him, raising their heads to howl.

  “I’m not sure if he was or not.”

  They’re halfway round the lake and she realizes she has lifted her eyes to look ahead, along the path. Still not letting her gaze stray to the water but conscious of it at the periphery of her vision. She isn’t as cold now and the shaking has almost stopped.

  “Your friendship with Mikey,” the Director says, out of nowhere.

  “What about it?”

  “What draws you to him, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I just like him. When he hurts himself it reminds me of me, when I smash stuff.”

  “You want to help him. Protect him from himself.”

  “You made us Buddies.” Then, with a shrug, “He just needs a friend.”

  “A friend? Or a surrogate sister?”

  “Feebs was way younger than me,” Shiv says. “That’s not how he sees me.”

  “What about Declan – was he way younger than Mikey?”

  Shiv flicks the woman a look. “I’m not looking for another brother.”

  They fall quiet, continuing round to the side of the lake where an old wooden jetty – rickety, missing a few planks – extends ten metres or so out over the water. Although the setting could hardly be more different, it reminds Shiv of standing on the jetty at Kyritos, waiting to board Poseidon IV.

  “You OK?” Dr Pollard asks.

  “Yeah … yeah, I’m fine.”

  The Director gives Shiv a moment. Then, “I’m thinking of un-Buddying you.”

  “Me and Mikey? Why?”

  “His attitude towards what we’re trying to do here – it’s not helpful. Not for him. Or for you. I might have to keep Mikey apart from all of the other residents.”

  “So you lied when you said he was ‘unwell’ today.”

  She turns to face Shiv. “Siobhan, it’s vital that you want to be helped.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if—”

  “Because, you see, Mikey doesn’t. Not yet. Possibly, he never will.” Dr Pollard goes to put a hand on Shiv’s shoulder then seems to think better of it, letting her arm drop to her side. “If he derails his own treatment, that’s one thing. But I won’t allow him to jeopardize yours.”

  “I do have a mind of my own, you know.” Even as she says this, Shiv knows the seeds of some of her doubts about the clinic have been planted by Mikey.

  Dr Pollard smiles. “Mikey is a force of nature,” she says.

  Having paused by the jetty, they continue on the final short stretch along the path towards the gate where they started. As their stroll comes to an end, the Director asks Shiv how she has found being so close to the water. The question catches her by surprise. Shiv has been so preoccupied with her friendship with Mikey that she’s forgotten all about the lake or Dr Pollard’s purpose in inviting her to walk round it.

  Her eyes are drawn to the surface of the water. Smooth and calm. Even so, she begins to tremble and has to look away.

  “Two steps forward, one step back, eh?” Dr Pollard says, kindly.

  “My counsellor used to come out with crap like that too.”

  The Director seems taken aback. “Is it crap? Sometimes, you have to—”

  “My treatment,” Shiv says, cutting in. “How is that taking me forward?”

  “This is only Day 14, Siobhan. Be patient with us. Please.”

  “Can you fix it for me to take Declan with me when my sixty days are up?” Shiv goes on, her fists clenching and unclenching. “’Cos that’s really going to make me well again, I reckon – going home, going back to school, and right through the rest of my life, tricking my head into believing my brother’s still around.” She glares. “Do you give us a lifetime’s supply of paint and modelling clay to take with us? A pile of those exercise books? Am I meant to go down the park every morning for a couple of hours’ walking meditation? Do I get to keep the projector so I can have a slideshow of Dec on my bedroom wall every night for the next sixty years?”

  “Have you finished?” Dr Pollard asks, once Shiv’s breathing has steadied.

  Shiv just wheels away and makes for the gate.

  Kyritos

  The message said, Can i see you this pm 7+?

  Shiv replied to say she’d sort something out and text him back.

  “Laura or Katy?” Mum said, indicating the phone.

  “What? Oh … Laura.” Shiv pressed “send”. “Boyfriend trouble.”

  “Which one’s Laura?” Dad asked.

  “The one you always call Lorna,” Mum said.

  “I thought Katy was the one I call Lorna.”

  “Oh, wow,” Declan said, swirling honey into his third bowl of yoghurt, “did I just teleport to an old people’s home?”

  They were on the balcony, finishing breakfast. Shiv watched a red-and-white ferry cross the bay, trailing a long arc of surf like a rip in a turquoise dress.

  “Are you going to finish that?” Declan said. Her toast, he meant. He was wearing the green-and-yellow basketball vest Nikos had given him. Dec hadn’t taken it off; he’d even slept in it.

  Shiv smiled inside at her own gift – the baby turtle – carefully rewrapped and concealed in her socks-and-knickers drawer.

  “Shiv?” Declan pointed. “Your toast.”

  “Help yourself.”

  She met Nikos outside the minimart where he’d “bumped into” Dec that time.

  He was sitting on his moped, sipping beer from a bottle and chatting to a couple of guys – one, Vassos, she recognized from the football. Nikos instantly switched his attention to her and gave her the broadest of grins. The others looked at Shiv too. Vassos smiled and said hi and the other guy spoke a few words of Greek to Nikos that made Vassos laugh. Nikos said something sharp to them.

  “I was at school with them,” Nikos said, as the two guys drifted away.

  He produced another Mythos from a bag looped over the handlebars and popped the cap with the bottle-opener tool on a Swiss army knife.

  “What did that one say to you?” Shiv asked.

  “Andreas?” He handed her the beer. “He said you’re very pretty.”

  “No, he didn’t.” She could tell from the way Vassos had laughed that the remark was something crudely sexual. “You don’t have to protect me,” she said, taking a slug of beer. It was startlingly cold and fizzy. “I know what boys are like.”

  Boys? Why did she say boys?

  “Andreas is OK. Don’t think badly of him.”

  Unsure how to respond, she drank more beer. This might be their last chance to be together; the tension was making Shiv edgy.

  “Officially, I’m on an emergency mission to buy milk,” she said. She’d caused the emergency by tipping a carton down the sink while no one was watching.

  Nikos frowned. “That doesn’t give us much time.”

  “Ah, but now I’m going to text them to say the shop has sold out and I’m off to the big supermarket along the main road.” She grinned. “That’s got to be twenty minutes there and twenty back? Longer if I stop to admire the view.”

  Nikos laughed, chinked his bottle against hers and leaned in for a kiss.

  “Mm,” Shiv said. “I’d forgotten how nice you taste.”

  They went down to the rocks she and her brother had explored. Scrambling over them with Declan had been like a scene from a Famous Five novel; now, Shiv tried not to wonder how many other girls Nikos had brought to this spot. He was there with her, now. That was the thing.

  “When my grandmother was younger, and my grandfather was still aliv
e, they used to take us here for picnics.” Nikos sat down. “Me, my brothers and sister.”

  Shiv sat beside him. “Is she very old now, your grandmother?”

  “When I visit, she thinks I’m my father. Or shouts that I’ve come to rob her.” He set the carrier bag of beer down carefully. “My grandfather used to catch fish and fry them in a big pan just over there.”

  “Sounds good.” She could picture Nikos as a young boy.

  “The fish were disgusting really. But if I come here I can smell them, and the pipe my grandfather used to smoke. You know?”

  Shiv nodded. “If I smell peaches I think of my gran, from her handcream.”

  They fell quiet. Then they kissed for a while.

  When they broke for air, Nikos repositioned Shiv between his legs, her back against his chest. He had one hand pressed against her belly, the other held his beer. Shiv was pacing herself; she’d started off too fast, out of nerves, and didn’t want to get drunk. His hand felt warm against her stomach. She liked it there, liked when he kissed her cheek, her ear, her neck. She also knew where it would lead, if she let it continue. Preoccupied with how and where they were going to meet, she hadn’t considered what she and Nikos were meeting for – what he might expect of her.

  He’s nineteen. He thinks I’m seventeen.

  Shiv felt seventeen, just then. Twenty, twenty-five; older and wiser than she’d ever felt. Was it because of Nikos, or did it come from inside her? Whatever, she knew no boy her own age would have sat like that for long without groping her.

  “How’d you hurt yourself?” Nikos asked, stroking the bump on her forehead.

  “Volleyball. On the beach today – me and Declan against Mum and Dad.”

  They raised their beer bottles simultaneously, sipped, lowered them again. “Synchronized drinking,” Shiv said. She was gently raking the fingernails of her free hand though the hairs on Nikos’s forearm.

  “You like being with your family?”

  “When we’re like that I do. Even Dad, wanting to win so bad.”

  “Your brother likes to win too. Last night – at the football.”

  “I guess. Not like Dad though. Declan wants to do well to prove to himself that he can. Like with the windsurfing.”