Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  “Hey, miss, come away from there. Back up now, back…” He hesitates when he sees the bruise on my cheek and then my bump, but he’s good at his job, and manages to catch my wrists without coming close to my abdomen.

  “It’s his!” I scream it into his face, like I’m screaming into the 400 x 400 pixel face of every mocking, sniping coward who laughed while the police ground my face into my living-room carpet. “It is. It’s his!”

  Through the muddle of tears in my eyes I see the lift doors open. The reception girl’s there with my stolen suitcase. She freezes in shock when she sees me. I sound insane, the very archetype of a delusional fangirl, I know I do, but all the rage and humiliation is bursting in me and I’m hacking out massive sobs from my chest and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

  “It’s his! It’s his, it’s his, it’s his!”

  “Come away, miss,” Jeff says, his tone as patient and immovable as a granite cliff. “Or I’ll have to call the police, and nobody wants—”

  “Jeff.” A familiar voice cuts him off. “Let her go.”

  I turn, pulling off my glasses and dashing tears angrily from my eyes. Ryan’s standing in the now-open doorway of the room across the hall. He eyes me sullenly, tying the belt on his regulation fancy-hotel white dressing gown.

  “You didn’t come,” I say, my voice broken.

  He just looks at me. When he opens his mouth to speak, I scream at him. “YOU DIDN’T COME!”

  “Look,” he says. “I know you’re upset, and I understand, but please—”

  “NO SHIT I’m upset. Do you know what they did to me?”

  “I didn’t know they were going to swat you,” he pleads. “I just thought they’d…”

  He tails off, but it’s too late. I stare at him, and he stares at me.

  “Oh my God, you do know what they did to me,” I breathe. “How do you know, Ryan? You acted like you didn’t realize I’d gone ahead with the stream, but you did, didn’t you? How? Were you watching?”

  He doesn’t meet my eye.

  “Were you watching as they tore me apart?”

  I almost launch myself at him, but Jeff’s there, one girder-sized arm blocking my progress. Something, a question in his bulldog-like eyes, stops him from touching me again, though.

  “Ryan, do you know this girl?”

  It’s when Ryan hesitates that I know the worst is true. Management hasn’t talked him into anything. Management doesn’t even know about me. He was never going to tell the world about our baby. He hasn’t even told his best friend.

  It’s like a stone crashing through me, demolishing everything. He doesn’t want our child. He never did.

  “Yeah,” I snarl. “He does. And I’ll prove it.” I pull my dead phone out and thumb the power button. “I’ve got message after message, a whole string of them showing exactly who I am to him.”

  But the moment my phone boots up, a barrage of electronic bleats erupts from it, like the squawks of a flock of startled seagulls. Seventeen missed calls? I think, What the… I only turned the damn thing off ten minutes ago. I check them and they’re all from… Evie? There are half a dozen texts as well, all identical. Call me. Now.

  I’m still staring at the last of these, when my phone starts to vibrate in my hand. It’s her.

  “Cat! Thank God.”

  “Listen, E, if you want to gloat about last night, this isn’t the—”

  “No! Listen, Cat!” She’s yelling down the phone; there’s a droning sound rising and falling on her end of the line and she’s shouting to be heard over it. “I don’t know where you are, but you have to get back, right now. I saw it on the news.” And it’s only then that I catch the note of panic in her voice, and the commotion in the background behind her snaps into focus – shouting, and engines, and something crackling – and suddenly I recognize the droning sound: sirens.

  “Cat, it’s your house; it’s…”

  But I don’t hear the rest because I’m already trying to run, skipping and stumbling and waddling as best as I can towards the lift, Evie’s panic-stricken voice buzzing indistinctly like a trapped wasp from the handset as it pumps up and down in my hand. I only turn back once I’m in the lift, gasping, already winded, and I watch the doors close on Ryan, the man I hoped – thought – would become my family. His guilty, fearful expression lingers behind my eye-blinks as I lurch out into the freezing night, flailing to flag down a cab to take me back to my real family.

  The London night has too many sirens in it. They swell and then fade in my ears and each one quickens my pulse. Is that it? Is that my house? Or that? Or that? Or that?

  As it is, I see the emergency at our little terraced maisonette before I hear it, as we swing around past the Tube station onto the Broadway. The light from the fire glimmers a dusty orange against the clouds.

  “Evie!” I shriek, stumbling out of the taxi. “What, wh…” I tail off weakly and fall into her arms, staring over her shoulder at my home. Every window is a blast furnace, a black mouth gouting flame that surges into the night sky. It seems impossible that the sagging plumes from the hoses of the fire engines could ever make a dent in the blaze.

  “M-m-m.” My lips are numb, my teeth chattering, my tongue clumsy and lumpen in my mouth. “M-M-M-Mum, w-w-where’s M-M-Mum?”

  Evie stiffens in my arms. I pull away.

  “M-M-M-Mum,” I insist, even though I can barely form the word. “Where’s M-M-Mum?”

  She just looks at me helplessly. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. The neighbours said the fire alarm went off.”

  I shake my head dumbly, like a dog who can’t get a ringing out of its ears.

  “M-M-Mum?” I stumble here and there between knots of gawpers and neighbours in their dressing gowns, ashen-faced, waiting for the fire to lick over the boundary to their houses. I pull on shoulders, tug on sleeves, look into every scared, sympathetic face, all glimmering with the flames, but none of them are hers.

  “Hey, are you OK, sweetheart?” A coarse, male voice. I spin unsteadily. Battered high-vis-trimmed overalls, a beard and a hard hat. A fireman. “Is this your house?”

  I nod, dumbly.

  “Were you inside?”

  I shake my head.

  “But your mum was inside?”

  “Y-yes, I think so.”

  “She didn’t have mobility issues or anything? Not in a wheelchair, bed-bound, nothing like that?”

  I shake my head again, but then freeze as the implication of his questions hits home. “Y-Y-You haven’t g-g-got her out?”

  “We haven’t been inside yet. Need to get the blaze under control first. But I’m sure she would have got herself out. It was the neighbours who phoned the fire in, that’s why there was a delay in getting here, but they say the alarm was loud enough to wake the dead.”

  It was the neighbours who phoned the fire in.

  My legs go out from under me, but the fireman catches me under my arms and lowers me gently to the kerb.

  “She … she took pills.” I stare up at him, and an unnameable, impossible panic fills me up. “To sleep. I don’t know if she would have woken up.”

  His face goes grey and he hustles off to talk to the men manning the hoses. I slump forward on the kerb, feeling my baby’s heartbeat trip inside me, like it’s sensed my fear. I can hear the roar of flames and shouted orders, something that might be Evie’s voice calling my name, getting closer like she’s rushing towards me, but the one thing filling my mind is the fireman’s last question, muttered half to himself as he turned away.

  “And there was no one else in the house to wake her?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Amy

  For the first time since she came in here, she’s crying. It’s stupid, but for a split second, the way the kitchen lights glimmer off the water in her eyes makes me think I can see the reflection of the fire.

  “It was all some stupid prank. They found scraps of paper and carbonized organic material when they finally picked o
ver the wreck. Their best theory? Some Ricker with an axe to grind had shoved a burning envelope with a dog turd in it through our letter box; the fire caught on the carpet and then the wallpaper, and then really accelerated when it hit the insulation. The smoke alarm went off, of course, but we were on the end of the terrace and the Singhs next door were away. All whoever it was wanted was for me to stamp shit into my carpet, but there was no one there to do that, because I…”

  Then she sniffs, wipes her tears away with the back of her wrist and the moment’s gone.

  “Now,” she says, her composure reasserted. “If you’re done with your little interrogation, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me how you knew my name.”

  I don’t know why I do it. Perhaps it’s pity, or fellow feeling. After all, I know what it’s like to lose a mother. Perhaps it’s deeper than that: she’s given me a secret, and I owe her one in return, and after a year of hanging all my secrets out in public for everyone to see, I finally have one to trade.

  It’s a handful of footsteps back into the hall to the little downstairs loo. She follows me like a curious puppy. I pull the cloned phone out from under the loose tile, blow the flakes of enamel off it, and hold it out to her.

  She hesitates, then lunges at it, like a starving woman with a loaf of bread. Her legs fold under her and she sits on the floor, muttering to herself as she scrolls.

  “She stole … no, she cloned his phone. Clever, clever.” She shakes her head as though in admiration for my mother’s ingenuity. Her thumbs flicker as she interrogates the device. “You little bastard, Smith. You spineless shitting coward… You…”

  Her face is cut between the glow from the phone screen and the flicker of the green light on the bomb vest in the hollow of her throat; her eyes flicker rapidly as she scans the handset. I find myself pressing back against the cold bowl of the toilet, away from the intensity in her gaze. A helicopter chops the air overhead, dulled by the walls of the house.

  Then, abruptly, she slows. Her jaw locks; she chokes out a little sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. She drops the phone in her lap.

  “I knew it. I knew it was her.”

  The way she says her leaves no room for doubt.

  “Mum was Mad Hatter,” I say.

  “Of course she was.” She exhales heavily. “Not that she left any conclusive evidence to that effect, by the looks of things. I don’t suppose you’d be prepared to testify, by any chance?”

  “She … she was my mother.”

  One half of her face twists into a smile, but the expression never gets north of her cheekbone.

  “Shame.” She plucks at the bomb vest. “I don’t think my credibility will be up to much as a witness, even if I do change my clothes and dress the part.”

  She stabs a few letters into the phone, then flicks her wrist, and it skitters over the tiles to my feet.

  “There,” she says. “Want to know what your mother did to me? What she was really like? Read that.”

  With some trepidation, I pick up the handset. She’s put Catherine Canczuk into the email’s search bar. 87 results, the OS proudly proclaims. I glance at one of them.

  From: Halaholo, Karen

  To: Smith, Benjamin P.

  Sent: 31/03/2024

  Ben,

  Hope you’re feeling better. Had to write a prescription for this patient, Catherine Canczuk, while you were out. Occurred to me she’s been here rather a long while. Isn’t it time she was up for review?

  And the reply:

  Karen,

  She’s under review; snafu with the file, leave it with me.

  Thanks for the heads-up.

  B.

  Karen, it seems, did leave it with our dear Dr Smith, since she never asked about it again. I scroll down.

  From: Fitzgerald, Michael

  To: Smith, Benjamin P.

  Sent: 01/12/2024

  Hi Ben,

  During a consultation this morning, one of my patients (Alexander Chariotis – see attached) claimed he’d been talking to a Catherine Canczuk, who I believe is one of yours? Apparently she’s going around saying she’s been held here against her will for years? I checked her file, and turns out she’s a self-referral from three weeks ago! Anyway, just thought I’d mention it to you.

  Mike,

  Cheers. CC’s a special case: acute psychotic episodes. Appreciate the note; will ask the nurses to make extra sure she’s keeping up with her meds.

  Best,

  Ben

  A self-referral from three weeks ago? But the email from Karen was sent eight months before the one from Mike Fitzgerald.

  Then I remember the dick pic, and the almost sing-song threat from Hatter, Mad.

  Our agreement. Adherence advised. I advocate absence of activity.

  “He doctored the file. He kept changing it so your review date never came up.” I must mutter it loud enough for Polly to hear, because she snorts.

  “Oh, almost certainly. But it was about the only thing he doctored the whole time I was in there. Christ knows how that man came by a medical licence. Maybe he forged that, too.”

  “But … but…” I find myself wanting to protest. It’s too appalling. My brain wants to refute it, find some reason it couldn’t happen. But as I flick through the eighty-seven hits for Catherine Canczuk’s name, I see the same story over and over again: people highlighting the case of the woman now smiling sadly opposite me in her explosive waistcoat, and Dr Benjamin P. Smith smoothly fobbing them off, blaming clerical mistakes and IT errors for any anomalies, and then kicking her deeper into the bureaucratic weeds.

  For seventeen years.

  “Where did they keep you?”

  Polly peers at the narrow window. The dirty grey of pre-dawn is leaking through the cobwebs.

  “See for yourself,” she proposes. “Our Ben was always an early riser. I’m sure he’ll be at work by now.”

  I close out of the emails and open the maps app. Sure enough the happy little blue dot is glowing at a large building in Primrose Hill, which Google’s label helpfully informs me is the acute inpatient wing of the Granby Hall Psychiatric Clinic.

  “But he … he couldn’t.” I say it because I want it to be true, not because I believe it.

  “Why not?” Polly asks. “He was my doctor. He wrote my file. My file said I was psychotic. If your file says you’re psychotic, why would anyone listen to you?”

  She sucks her teeth, as though considering. “Really, no matter what clever systems you try to put in place, it all, always, comes down to who you trust. I must say, there were lots of times when even I was tempted to trust him. Even though I knew what he was doing to me; after all, he had a white coat and a stethoscope…” She made a face. “Actually, a golf jumper and nicotine teeth, but metaphorically you take my point. He was the expert and he said I was crazy; who was I to argue?”

  “But … others, in the hospital, they must have…”

  “They did. You can see they did. But they only needed fobbing off for so long. Busy people, assuming the best about their colleague. Once you’ve been in for a while, they only need to review you every six months; that’s plenty of time for them to forget about you if they don’t have a reason to remember.”

  It’s like a bunch of needle-sharp icicles are being fed, one by one, into my spine.

  “Mum stole a naked picture of a psychiatrist and used it to blackmail him into trapping you in a mental hospital.”

  “So it appears.”

  “Why?”

  For the first time since I’ve met her, Polly’s smile turns nasty. “Well, I suppose because she was a very determined woman, wasn’t she?”

  That’s not what I asked, and she knows it. She scoots forward on her bum until her face is a few inches from mine. Her breath still smells of tea.

  “Do you think he was right? Do you think I’m crazy?”

  It’s all I can do to hold her unblinking gaze.

  “Do you?” I counter.

  She barks a
delighted laugh. “Ha! Now you sound exactly like he did! Ever consider a career as a shrink, Amy? Never give an answer when a question will do.”

  “But do you?” I press, because the little green light is now close enough that, if I cross my eyes, I can see it reflecting off the end of my nose, and it suddenly matters very much to me what the woman holding the trigger believes about her own mental state.

  “Interesting question. I suppose, statistically, I must be. Funny thing about mental wards, they’re a bit like prisons – if you don’t belong when you get there, the place has a way of making you fit in. Same with the ward: locked up, given plastic food and weird drugs, and the only people you get to talk to are either diagnosed themselves or doctors who probably ought to be. I tell you the worst part, though – it’s the consultations. They make you pick over your thoughts again and again until the most banal ones seem spectacularly psycho. You know how if you stare at a word for long enough, it starts to look weird, like you’ve misspelled it? It’s like that, but with your whole brain.”

  She takes a long breath. “I’m just saying, the place changes you, you know?”

  I think of the chirpy, bespectacled redhead in the photo I found on the Tumblr site, that the woman in front of me was somehow hewn from. What on earth could have driven Mum to put her through that?

  “Yes,” I say. “I see.” I hesitate, then ask, “How did you get in there then?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mum was blackmailing your doc to keep you in, but how did you get in there in the first place?”

  “Ah.” Polly’s smile turns a little sickly. “Well, that’s another story.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Cat

  “Dubs? Horse Girl? Cat? Cat!”

  I blink. The flames vanish and the world comes swimming back. The first thing I become aware of is the cold around my belly and aching back, and I remember that the pyjamas I’m wearing were borrowed from a woman half my size, even before I became house, home and supply depot for a whole other human being.

  The second thing I become aware of is the sickening way my left foot dangles over nothingness.