Nikos and the man spoke to each other in Greek.
“My brother!”
Nikos said something else and, grabbing the man’s torch, stood up and approached the barrier, the guy from the house taking over with Joss. Nikos was shining the torch along the verge, along the cliff edge, standing right by the barrier and peering over, aiming the torchlight down there.
“No, Nikos, he must’ve fallen off bef—”
“I saw him, Shiv.”
She picked her way over to him. “Saw him. Where?”
Nikos leant out dangerously far over the barrier. “I saw him go over.”
“No. No. He must’ve … nonono.”
Shiv clutched at Nikos’s arm, trying to make him come away from the edge and help her look for Declan in the road. He didn’t move.
“There.” That was all he said.
She looked where the torchlight had settled – a shelf of rocks at the base of the cliff, right at the foaming water’s edge.
Declan lay on his side, as though asleep, his yellow T-shirt and the silver crash-helmet stark against the wet black rock. The shirt was rucked up under his armpits, one arm was bent grotesquely behind him, and there was blood.
But he looked perfectly comfortable. Perfectly peaceful.
“We have to go down there,” she said. “We have to get—”
Just then, a wave broke over the shelf – a roiling froth that shimmered in the torchlight, covering Declan and the rocks completely for several seconds.
When the water dispersed, her brother was gone.
Shiv was over the barrier before Nikos could stop her.
The cliff wasn’t sheer just there but the slope was plenty steep enough and – but for the flicker of the torch overhead – she half scrambled, half slid in the dark down the scree of mud and rocks, dislodging a shower of debris as she went. The last bit, she fell altogether; maybe a four-metre drop onto the slab where Dec had landed. Shiv’s hands and knees were cut and she’d done something to her shoulder. But she was down. She was there, standing up and yelling her brother’s name.
Another wave cascaded over the rock, almost sweeping her off her feet.
“Declan!”
She peered into the dark, frantically scanning the surface of the sea, trying to make out something – anything – that might be her brother. Screaming at Nikos to hold the torch steady, to search the water with it, when she realized he was scrambling down after her. Stones and bits of earth rained down.
“Give me the torch,” she said, as he dropped heavily beside her.
Nikos was winded, struggling to his feet. “Shiv—”
“Quick, we have to find him. I have to get him out.”
Shiv grabbed at the torch but he wouldn’t let her have it. “You can’t help him,” he said, panting. His hands were slick with blood; his own or Joss’s, she didn’t know.
“He’s in there!”
“Shiv, you’ll drown. You’ll be smashed to pieces. Look at it!”
She turned to the sea again as yet another wave crashed onto the slab, Nikos clutching her arm to keep her from being washed over the side. The water was black and furious all about them, rising in huge swells and thundering into the rocks and the base of the cliff like it wanted to bring the whole lot tumbling down on top of them. They were soaked through already, blasted by spray, barely able to stand up.
Nikos yelled in her ear, “Even if Dec was still alive when he—”
“No. No.” Wrenching her arm free, pushing him away, Shiv went to the edge of the rock, set to jump in. To find her brother. To pull him out of the water.
But Nikos grabbed her again, wrapped her in a bear hug – dragging her away, back towards the foot of the cliff where the water couldn’t reach them. Holding on, no matter how hard she shouted and swore and fought. Holding on. Holding on until he no longer needed to. Until she was spent. Until she slumped, sobbing and defeated, to her knees and released Declan’s name into the night with one last, almighty bellow.
16
For the next few days Shiv is mostly confined to her room.
No PTU sessions, no Talk or Write. No Rec time. No visitors. Her meals are brought by an orderly who stays to watch her eat them. She is given calorie-loaded fruit drinks. Someone checks on her every hour. Once a day, Nurse Zena weighs her. They must build her strength back up, Dr Pollard says. Mental as well as physical. The clinic has to make sure she’s fit and ready if her treatment is to resume in the final week of her programme.
The Director stresses the word “if”.
“Were you trying to starve yourself to death?” she asks Shiv, at a one-to-one (they meet every day now). “Or just punish yourself?”
“Maybe.”
“Which?”
“Maybe both.” Shiv exhales. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It just felt right. Like I was taking control.”
“And now?”
Because that’s the thing, of course – Dr Pollard needs to know that Shiv still wants to be helped.
Shiv shakes her head. “I won’t starve myself any more.”
One morning, they have the conversation: What next?
Dr Pollard sets out Shiv’s options. One, they can scale down her therapy – go easy on her in Talk and Write, make the images in PTU less full-on. Two, she can carry on with the daily activities at the same level as before.
“Alternatively, we can end your treatment altogether.”
“Discharge me?”
“Just say the word and I’ll arrange for your father to come and collect you.”
“You’d do that?”
“At this stage, it’s pointless keeping you here if you’ve given up on us.”
Shiv imagines it: packing her case; hauling it downstairs and along the gravel path to the parking area; Dad, standing by the car chatting to Dr Pollard; catching sight of Shiv and breaking off, moving towards her; white open-necked shirt, moist-eyed smile; ready to enfold her in his arms… Just say the word. They’d head down the drive and through the gates and the gates would swing shut behind them, a summery breeze murmuring through the half-open window.
That’s it. She’s going home. She just has to say the word.
Fifty-three days. For what, though?
Pointless keeping you here if you’ve given up on us. For “given up on us” read “given up on yourself”. Can she do that? Simply leave this place and say, Oh well, I gave it my best shot. Sorry, Dad, but you’ve no idea how tough it is. Sorry, Dec. Can she? Go home, back to her life, with one more reason to hate herself?
Shiv looks at Dr Pollard. “What if I don’t choose any of those options?”
“Is there a fourth option, you mean? Would you like there to be?”
“The images in PTU…” Shiv falters, unsure of what she’s trying to say.
“I know how distressing they were for you.”
Shiv waves the remark away. That isn’t what she meant. “If I hadn’t stopped eating – you know, if you hadn’t had to pull me out of treatment for a bit – would you have kept on showing me more of the same?”
The woman hesitates. “No,” she says.
“What, then?”
This time the pause lasts so long Shiv wonders if the Director’s ever going to answer. Finally she does. “Siobhan, the images would have got worse.”
Shiv nods. It makes sense. More photos and footage must exist, beyond what the clinic has used so far; if they obtained those from Dad’s lawyer, why wouldn’t they have the others as well? Of course, the treatment would escalate. It’s the way of things here, the ethos: you get worse before you begin to get better.
If she hadn’t starved herself; if they hadn’t had to protect her from herself—
“I want you to show them to me,” Shiv says. “I want to start PTU again and I’d like you to use the images I haven’t seen yet.”
Dr Pollard studies her. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I have to see my treatment through to the end.”
“Look what it did to you before.”
“No. I did that to myself.”
The Director gives that some thought. Then, “I have to warn you, they’re—”
“I don’t care how bad they are.”
The first is a set of stills the Greek police took on the beach where her brother washed up. The photographs taken after the removal of the tarpaulin covering his body.
The second is a film from the news showing Declan’s flower-bedecked coffin being carried from the hearse to the chapel. Dad is one of the pall-bearers; Shiv and Mum – ashen-faced, tear-streaked – walk arm in arm at the head of the procession.
The third is an audio. No images, just white walls and the whine of moped engines in five-minute bursts, once every half-hour for four hours. Shiv couldn’t say which is worse: listening to the noise or waiting for it to start up again.
Day 58. Shiv is sitting with Caron on beanbags in the Rec Room. Docherty is playing pool by himself, robotically potting balls until the last one clunks into a pocket and he racks them up again. Helen sits cross-legged on the floor in one corner, dealing hand after hand of solitaire. Lucy no longer comes in here. Marking time, Shiv supposes, until the sixty days are up.
In their own ways, the residents are withdrawing, knowing that in a couple of days they have to face whatever lies ahead without one another.
Side by side on their beanbags, Shiv and Caron talk inconsequentially. The undercooked potatoes at dinner; the chances of sunshine tomorrow after two days of rain; the state of Caron’s hair, Shiv’s nails. They don’t discuss PTU this morning or Talk and Write. None of the patients does now. The sheer brutality of the treatment has stunned them into silence. At mealtimes and at Recreation, they sit in a collective daze; like a team of rescue workers resting up after a long shift digging corpses from the rubble of a collapsed building.
“Two more days,” Caron says.
“I know.”
“It’s weird, but I can’t imagine being anywhere else but here.”
“On that beanbag?” Shiv asks.
“Yeah, exactly that.”
“Take it home with you when you leave then.”
“The beanbag is purple,” she says, like she can’t believe how dumb Shiv is for not realizing why that’s an issue.
They do this a lot – silly conversations, mock-bickering banter. It has reached a point where they no longer need to laugh, or even smile, to show each other how amused they are. After a moment, Shiv asks, “Are you going to take up smoking again once you’re out of here?”
“I hope so,” Caron says. “I’ll be very disappointed in myself if I don’t.”
Once you’re out of here.
It hangs over them. It barely seems possible that their stay at the Korsakoff Clinic is almost at an end – that it wasn’t just a few days ago when Shiv turned from the window that first evening to find a girl in a scarlet dress breezing into her room. Will they stay in touch after they’re discharged? She doesn’t ask. It’s another of those topics the residents don’t discuss. “Out there” has too many unknowns.
Shiv swivels sideways, rests her bare feet on Caron’s lap. Caron gently massages them; starts up another bizarre line of conversation.
“You have the toes of a pianist.”
“Mm.” Shiv closes her eyes. “I hope she lets me keep them.”
Another voice. “Shiv.”
She snaps her eyes open. Mikey, standing over them. She didn’t hear him come in. As though she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t, Shiv swings her feet off Caron’s lap and sits up, arms clasped around her knees.
“Hey, Mikey.”
She can’t recall the last time he appeared in the Rec Room.
He remains there, perfectly still – strangely still, like they’re playing musical statues and he desperately wants to win. His eyes don’t stray from Shiv’s face; Caron, right next to her, might as well not be there for all the notice he pays her.
“I need to speak to you,” he tells Shiv. Not here, he means.
“Mikey—”
“It’s not about nothing or anything.”
Caron lets out a snort. Mikey ignores her totally. Still looking at Shiv, he gestures at the door. “You coming, or what?”
Since she returned to the treatment, she has avoided Mikey. Not because Dr Pollard advised it but because Shiv has come to realize he isn’t good for her. She doesn’t know what he wants from the clinic but it isn’t the same thing she wants. It has taken her all this time, but she finally understands that. From the little he reveals in Talk and Write these days, Mikey seems to be pretending to participate while actually not giving a shit. Like he has a programme of his own running in the background, undetected. Shiv can’t figure him out. At least when he was bashing his head against a tree and cutting his hands to shreds hauling a log up and down a hill, his anger was plain to see.
“Mikey, why don’t you—” Caron begins.
“It’s OK,” Shiv cuts in, getting up and following him out into the corridor.
“What’s up?” Shiv asks, her voice whispering off the blank walls.
“Nothing’s up.”
“Then … what?”
She’s aware of a hardness in her tone with him that wasn’t there before. She knew it would be tough, shutting him out after she’d gone to such lengths to win his trust. She expected him to make it harder still for her. But he hasn’t. When he saw the way it was between them after she resumed treatment, he appeared to accept it as the natural order of things.
She apologized; told him she had to look out for herself from now on. He just nodded and said he had to do the same.
Now, here they are in an echoey corridor, the reflection of the light off the walls casting a sickly green veneer over Mikey’s complexion. The jumpsuit is more grey than yellow. He looks at her as though she is the one wanting to speak to him.
She’s about to ask again what he wants, when he says, “Don’t tell nobody nothing.”
At first she thinks he’s misquoting the Salinger T-shirt. “What d’you mean?”
“Don’t tell about me. The stuff we talked about – before, yeah? About Feebs.”
“Tell who?”
“Anybody.”
Shiv frowns. “Mikey, why would I—”
“You can go back now.” He nods at the Rec Room door. “I’m all done.”
With that, he peels away and walks off down the corridor. At the end, before he rounds the corner and disappears, she’s sure he’ll turn to give her a small wave.
He doesn’t.
“Don’t think about him,” Caron tells her, as they say goodnight outside their rooms.
“It was like he was trying to tell me something important.”
“Shiv, you’re not responsible for Mikey.”
“No. OK.”
“You and Declan is all that matters.”
“I know.”
They hug. “See you tomorrow, yeah?” Caron says.
Tomorrow. Their last full day here. Forty-eight hours from now, this clinic, these people, will be part of her past. As though each day she lives, everyone she knows, every place she leaves, everything that happens to her – everything she does – can be switched off like a light.
17
When the alarm jolts Shiv from sleep, her first thought is: Wake Up. But it can’t be morning already, can it? The room is still pitch dark.
Not yet fully awake, she fumbles on the bedside table for her watch, squinting at its luminous hands. Ten past ten? No, ten to two. Jesus.
The alarm continues to ring out. That isn’t the Wake Up buzzer – it’s too shrill – and it’s coming from outside her bedroom. In the instant she notices this, the sound changes to a much louder, intermittent two-tone wail she recognizes right away from the weekly test.
Fire alarm.
Emergency lighting comes on. A dull, greenish glow from a panel above the door – enough for Shiv to see what she’s doing as she stumbles out of bed a
nd yanks on jeans and a top. The voices start then. Shouting. Banging doors and hurried footsteps. She shoves her feet into her shoes and heads out into the corridor, half expecting to find it filled with smoke.
It isn’t. What it’s filled with is people – Caron, Helen; she can see Docherty and Lucy too, and a night-duty orderly jogging towards them from the head of the stairs. He’s calling to them. But it’s impossible to hear a word above the fire alarm and, now, the additional din from all the alarms tripped by the residents opening their bedroom doors during Shut Down. The orderly has to yell in their ears to tell them to evacuate the building.
They assemble in the yard behind Eden Hall, rows of blank windows looking down on them like so many expressionless eyes. Assistants Hensher and Sumner have joined the residents outside. Nurse Zena is here, and a security guy. The cacophony of alarms is loud even out here, overlapping like some piece of experimental music. Docherty is shirtless, Lucy and Helen still in pyjamas and slippers; Caron’s dressed but pretty much asleep standing up.
Sumner, her frizz of blond hair a mess, face greasy in the wash of security lighting, organizes everyone and begins a headcount.
“Where’s Mikey?” Shiv asks.
At this moment, Assistant Webb appears from round the side of the Hall, out of breath, speaking into a walkie-talkie. He lowers the handset. “There’s—”
“Mikey’s still inside,” Sumner says.
Shiv, like everyone else, is looking up at the building, as though expecting the boy’s face to appear at a window wreathed in flames and smoke.
“I’ll go in,” Hensher says, making for the rear door.
“No.” This is Webb. “There’s no fire. It was Mikey who triggered the alarm.” He indicates the walkie-talkie. “I just spoke to Steve in the CCTV room.”
Apparently, Mikey tripped the first alarm by leaving his bedroom, then could be seen sprinting to the end of the corridor, where he smashed the fire-alarm panel on the wall. By the time everyone else started emerging from their rooms, Mikey was already downstairs and letting himself out through one of the emergency exits, setting off a third alarm.
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