Sin City (3 page)

Of course he'd mind, but I didn't want Jan's terrors (or an argument) on top of all the rest. I wasn't feeling all that bright myself. In fact, when those gates clanged shut behind me, all I could think of was my father's funeral – that really choking moment when the coffin slides downwards and the trap-doors close over it, and there's nothing left but floorboards and the flames. I ran up Beechgrove's steps – ran for Jan's sake (I could see her watching anxiously from the iron grille of the gate), even whistled. The whistling is a trick. You can't cry when you whistle. I've proved it scores of times.

I'm whistling now. I can feel that awful pricking in the eyes, my face unstitching, mouth loose on its hinge; that dreadful shameful feeling that if I don't hold tight, I'll just dissolve in floods again. It's stupid to keep snivelling, but I'm so scared of everything. I mean, how long will I be in here? And when I do get out, will Jan accept me back? Or go off me somehow, which she seems to have done already? And will I ever get a job?

Footsteps on the stairs. I sit bolt upright, snatch up my sheets of paper, pray it's not Nurse Sanders. She's the worst.

It's not a nurse, it's male – young good-looking male, with tattooed arms.

“Hallo, gorgeous. Lost your way?”

I grin. I'm not gorgeous, actually, but I suppose compared with what he sees around …

“No,” I say. “I'm hiding. And you haven't seen me. Right? They'll kill me if they find me here.”

“You're not a patient, are you? Can't be. Not a cracker like you.”

I like him. “No,” I say. “I'm the heating engineer.”

He laughs, offers me a fag. I'm close to tears again. Just to be treated as a normal person, noticed as a woman. He's looking at my legs, admiring them. His own are long and thin. We don't have men in Florence Ward, though there's a woman with a beard and one who thinks she's Churchill.

I wish he'd hold my hand, call me Carole, invite me out for a coffee or a beer. I feel so horribly alone here. I haven't made a friend yet, hardly talk to anyone. They keep pushing me on Sandy, but we've nothing much in common except we're both eighteen. She frightens me, to tell the truth. She's been on dope and her eyes have great black holes in them.

“Hey, wait!” I shout. He's checked the boiler and is making for the stairs again.

He stops. What in God's name do I say now? Take me with you? Hide me in your van? “Er … have you any change?” I ask. “10p's for the phone?”

He fumbles in his pockets, hands me three. I get my purse out, find it full of tens, pray he hasn't seen them, hold up a lone five.

“I'm sorry, I don't seem to have …”

“Don't worry. Have the call on me. Who's the lucky guy?”

“Pete,” I say. I've never met a Pete.

“I'm Paul.”

“Hi, Paul.” Perhaps he'll stay now. “I'm Carole. Carole Joseph.”

“Ta-ra then, Carole. Don't burn your bum. Those pipes are bloody hot.” He laughs, takes the stairs in three huge leaps, is gone. I hear the door crash to.

I tip out all my change. I've got thirteen tens, counting mine and his; could hog the phone till lunchtime. Except I've nobody to ring. I try to flesh Pete out, turn him into Paul, but with no tattoos and darker hair, snuggle up to him. It doesn't work. He wouldn't want me anyway, not a chain-smoking cry-baby grizzling in a nuthouse. I mooch over to the boiler, examine my face in its shiny metal top. Am I really gorgeous? I always feel rather sort of ordinary and when people say I'm pretty, I never quite believe them. My face looks blurred, distorted, so I fill in all the details just from memory, frowning at myself. I suppose no one's really happy with their looks. Okay, my eyes are nice and my complexion's fairly decent and I go in and out at roughly the right places, but there are still a lot of things which aren't quite right. My left front tooth is just a fraction crooked, and my hair's the wavy sort instead of stylish straight, and you can't be really elegant when you're only five foot two. I'd love to be a model, one of those half-starved ones who stand six foot in their stockings, yet still look frail and boneless. My father was quite small.

I trail back to the bench, spread out all the forms again. Safer to keep busy. I smoke Players No.6 because they stunt you.

Steps again. It's Paul. Come back. Come to ask me out, take me for a spin. I finger-comb my hair, prepare a dazzling smile.

“Carole, what
are
you doing down here?”

Nurse Sanders! Paul must have sneaked on me, called me gorgeous, then rushed straight to Sister's office.

“I'm … er … writing, Nurse, writing letters. Writing to my Dad.” She's not much older than I am. Thinner, though, and taller. Perhaps I'll start a diet.

“You should be in the Day Room, not skulking off in corners. I told you that last week.”

“I hate the Day Room.”

“We have to know where patients are. Can't you understand that? And Art Therapy starts in half an hour.”

“I don't like Art. I like being on my own.”

“You won't get better that way.” She's pouncing on my things, seen the competition forms.

“Hey, d'you smoke, Nurse?”

“Don't change the subject, Carole. You come back with me now.”

“If you had to give a reason why you smoke – you know, sort of official on a form, what would you say?”

“I
don't
smoke.”

“Yeah, but if you did, why would you?”

“I wouldn't. And nor would you if you'd worked on a cancer ward.”

“My father died of cancer.”

“And you're writing to him?”

“Mm.”

“Well, you can finish writing letters after Art. There's a nice big desk in that Crafts Room just next door.”

“Yeah, covered with jigsaw puzzles.”

“We can always clear them off.”

That's typical of Sanders. Those jigsaws are people's
lives
. Can't she understand that? A world where all the pieces fit, and where the picture you end up with is mercifully the same as the picture on the box, the picture you were promised. That's rare outside a jigsaw. Norah Toomey's doing one with five thousand pieces, all the same colour, more or less. She's been doing it for years. Someone lost the box-top, so she's forgotten what she's making. It could be anything.

I turn on Sanders. “We can't do that. It's bad enough with people losing pieces. Or eating them. Or dropping them down toilets. Poor Norah's got great gaps in hers already.”

“You like Norah, don't you?” Sanders pushes me in front of her, up the steps and out. I blink in the harsh light.

“Not specially. I think she quite likes me, though. She's always hanging round.”

“Well, it's nice to have a friend.” Sanders is still marching me along. Right, left, right.

“I've got friends, thanks.” Have I? Jan could have come, just once.

“Not here, though. You've got to make an effort, Carole. You've been here a whole fortnight and you're still not co-operating.”

We've reached the ward now. Nurse Sanders heaves the door as if it's another bolshie patient who needs firm handling. I feel almost sorry for it as I walk on through; brave the now-familiar smell of pee and cabbage.

“Right, then, Nurse, I'll sit next to Norah in the Crafts Room and help her with her jigsaw.” Darling Daddy, I didn't go to Southampton, but I got Honours in my Jigsaws. Hey, that might work! Players No.6 are the last piece in your jigsaw, the jam in your swiss roll.

“Coffee, Carole?”

That volunteer again, the one in tweeds and Hush Puppies with a badge on her lapel saying “Hospital Friend”. I wonder why she asks me? I always have coffee and she doesn't ask the others. They just get theirs, weak and sweet, pushed into their claws. The volunteers make it in the kitchen, mix the milk and sugar in a saucepan, boil it all up together with a liquid coffee essence, also sweetened, then pour it from a chipped enamel jug into stained brown melamine. They probably drink from Spode at home, grind their own coffee beans.

She passes me a biscuit, frowns when I take three. My jeans are so tight now, I can hardly do them up. Who cares? Norah gives me all her biscuits and saves me things from meals. She even bought me chocolates from the shop here, pricey ones, when she's hardly got a bean. She seems to really like me. God knows why. Actually, I've got quite fond of her. At least she's restful, doesn't keep on jabbering like Alison, or clutching me with bony hands like Peg. And she's not a nutter like most of the long-stay patients. She's also clean, which is saying quite a lot here. I mean, look at that woman with her dress on inside-out, coffee-stained both sides, and Ethel Barnes taking off her knickers in the middle of the room – white interlock and wet. No one even bothers. They've seen worse before, much worse.

I'm not that shocked myself now. I've been here six whole weeks and the pills have sort of numbed me. Might as well live here as anywhere. At least it's warm and the meals are free. I don't even cry for my father any longer, hardly cry at all. I suppose that's just the drugs again, but isn't crying human – proof you feel and care? He's been dead four months. Four centuries.

Another volunteer bounces over to take my empty cup. I haven't finished, but I expect she's keen to start the washing up, get back to her whist. She's the bossy one with Teeth who runs the letter-writing class. Norah dragged me to it once because she'd heard I was having trouble writing to my father. News spreads fast in Beechgrove. It's really meant for old folk and those who can't read or write, or who have forgotten who they are. But I went along in any case, just to kill an hour. I can turn out better letters than all those tweeds-and-twinsets put together, but I didn't let on; just acted dumb and let them write “Dear Daddy” on their prissy pale blue notepaper. They asked about my mother and would I like to write to her, too. I said yes, later please, though that would have been even harder than writing to a father who's just a jar of ashes on a mantelpiece.

My mother is in hospital herself, the other side of England. Drying out. Recovering from the death, when it was her who helped to kill him. She was always more concerned with him than me. In fact, I doubt if she remembers who I am. “With love and kisses from your little Carole.” I wouldn't kiss her now. Her face is sort of loose, as if it's lost contact with the bone beneath. Her lipstick doesn't fit her mouth. Her hand shakes when she puts it on, so she ends up with four lips. She always wore too much make-up. Foundation like a mask and gunge and glitter on her eyes. Norah scrubs her face with soap. I'd like a mother like that. A face so clean and shiny you could see yourself reflected, recognise your features in it; feel that you belonged, were made of the same fabric, had actually curled up in her womb for nine long and cosy months, shared her blood supply. Sometimes, I think my mother grabbed me from a supermarket shelf, to avoid the pain of labour – probably never even paid for me, just slipped me in her pocket before the days of TV cameras watching from the ceiling. Mind you, it was she who got me off. A paralytic mother impresses them in court. The social workers
drooled
. My mother made the difference between prison and a hospital, though perhaps there's not much difference.

“Lil! Wakey-wakey, dear. Your coffee's getting cold.”

I jump as well as Lil. Those Friends have piercing voices and I was miles away. Lil is the headmistress. She used to run a private school in Hampshire for over a thousand girls. Now she dribbles both ends, asleep and awake. They ought to let her sleep. That's what I dislike about the Friends. They're so busy being bountiful, they can't see that oblivion is more precious than their coffee, especially for patients in pain. Lil has emphysema and osteoarthritis, as well as being senile. She frightens me the most, in fact. All that education couldn't help her, not even two degrees. You always think it won't be you. She thought that, no doubt, when she was taking Assembly in her cap and gown, or sipping Tio Pepe with the Mayor on Founder's Day. She's broken up her biscuits into a rubble of fine crumbs, dropped them in her shoes.

“Now be a good girl, Lil.”

That volunteer could have been her pupil once, carrying her books, cowering at her door. “Yes, Miss Evans. No, Miss Evans”, certainly not Lil. Lilian E. Evans (MA Oxon, FRCM) is dressed in a pink flowered cotton dress in mid-November, with thick lisle stockings wrinkling round her knees. Half of them wear summer frocks, with cardigans. Maybe it was summer when they entered, a hundred years ago. Winter ever since.

I think I'll go to Art. I can't take too much of Florence Ward, not without a break. The smell of lavatories, that woman who keeps chewing when there's nothing in her mouth, the one who pulls her hair out and has bald patches on her scalp. It's not that I'm superior – not like those damn Friends. That's the trouble, really. I know it could be me. It
is
me, isn't it? Six weeks, six years, six aeons. Or Norah. There's nothing wrong with Norah, not that wrong. Her mother was Irish, Catholic, pregnant and unmarried – a fatal combination. She ran away to England, had the baby (Norah – the name was pinned onto her shawl, with a tiny silver shamrock), left her on an English convent doorstep, and went back to another part of Ireland where she took a different name. They caught her in the end, but she cheated them by dying. It's like a fairy story without the happy ending. Nurse MacDonald told me the whole saga. She's been here almost as long as Norah has herself.

“Norah …” She's helping with the coffee, holding the cup for Lil, mopping up the dribble and the spills. She pauses, turns to face me. She may be slow, but she never says “Not now”, or “Wait, I'm busy”.

“Fancy Art this morning?”

“I don't mind.”