Authors: Cath Staincliffe
Cheryl
V
inia was back within the hour. The ambulance had taken Danny to the hospital, his mum and Nadine had gone with him. They’d turned up at the recreation ground, the whole congregation.
‘Your nana’s sitting with Rose. She said to tell you.’
‘Why’d they do it, Vinia?’
‘I don’t know!’ Vinia got all moody, flashing her eyes. ‘And I don’t want to know.’
‘There’s no good reason,’ Cheryl said.
‘It’s not our business,’ Vinia said flatly.
‘He was just a kid.’
‘Leave it.’ Vinia’s face was set.
‘So it’s all right to gossip and go over there all big eyes like some ghoul but we don’t ask why?’
‘Not unless you got a death wish.’
Cheryl shook her head.
‘What,’ Vinia demanded. ‘You judging me?’
‘No. But Carlton—’
‘Shh!’ Vinia hissed. ‘Don’t mess with it.’
The unfairness lodged like a weight in Cheryl’s chest, like a hand tight round her throat. She knew Vinia was right. Carlton and Sam were not to be messed with. She knew nothing, had seen nothing, would say nothing. It was a senseless tragedy. Everyone would suck their teeth at it, shed tears, keep quiet.
Cheryl’s phone went off. Nana.
‘The boy passed.’ Her voice sounded old, creaky. ‘The Lord has taken him.’
‘No,’ Cheryl moaned.
‘I’m going to stay with Rose.’
‘What can I do, Nana?’
‘Nothing, child.’
‘Some food, the casserole?’
‘You have that. The church will be bringing food for the set-up. Paulette is still at the hospital. You could get some flowers. There’s money in the ginger jar.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sign my name as well.’
‘Shall I bring them to Auntie Paulette’s?’
‘No. Leave them where he fell.’
‘Yes.’
‘God love you, child.’
Cheryl’s hand shook and her eyes stung as she ended the call. She sniffed hard. Turned to Vinia. ‘Danny died. I have to get flowers.’
‘I’ll come,’ Vinia said.
Cheryl felt trapped, wanting to shake free of her. ‘No need.’
‘I can’t go home.’
Vinia was scared, Cheryl saw, couldn’t face Carlton and his boys.
‘Okay.’
Cheryl bought the biggest bouquet she could with Nana’s £20 note. White and red: lilies and carnations, gypsy and ferns. Milo wanted to hold them but she was worried he would try eating them or crush the delicate blooms, so she bought him a piece of red ribbon from the woman and gave him that.
She had no idea what to write on the card. Everything was either tacky or pious:
You are with
the angels now
or
At peace with the Lord.
Vinia was no help at all:
Rest in peace
her only suggestion. Cheryl didn’t know any poems and there wasn’t much room on the card anyway.
She printed
For
Danny.
She thought of his music, his smile, the way he greeted Milo. Wrote
A bright star
. Pictured Auntie Paulette and Uncle Stephen, Nadine and Nana Rose without him. Added
Beloved.
Signed it
Nana T., Cheryl and Milo.
Back at the rec, Cheryl made Vinia go on ahead and check there was nothing to upset Milo. Vinia came back, said it was all sectioned off. A tent up, you couldn’t see anything. Loads of police around. He lost a lot of blood, Vinia added. Cheryl didn’t want to think about that. Wished she hadn’t said that.
They didn’t know what to do with the flowers. There weren’t any others. They stood for a while until a policewoman came up. She took the flowers from them and put them by the lamp-post on the corner. Milo protested, held out his arms and kicked his legs, threw his piece of ribbon down.
The policewoman came back over to them. ‘We’ll be setting up a mobile incident room, here,’ she said. ‘If anyone has any information, anything that might help us, in complete confidence. And there’s Crime-stoppers too, just ring the number. Completely confidential as well.’ She smiled. Cheryl could tell she’d had her teeth whitened. Some patches glowing brighter than others. ‘Were you girls around earlier?’
‘Nah.’ Vinia shook her head. ‘Just heard about it.’ Cheryl nodded in agreement.
‘Did you know him?’
‘Knew of him, that’s all,’ Vinia said. Cheryl felt her jaw clench. Milo arched his back and yelled again.
‘And who’s this?’ The policewoman bent to speak to Milo.
‘Better get him back,’ Vinia told Cheryl, ‘must be his teatime.’
‘Yeah.’
The woman straightened up, gave them another smile.
Cheryl swung the buggy round and they set off. Milo’s cries got more frantic as the chance of him getting the flowers receded. Fat tears streamed down his cheeks. His crying drilled into Cheryl. Boring into her bones. He was enraged and desolate. She knew exactly how he felt.
Fiona
F
iona was dazed. The world, its minutiae, swam in and out of focus, at times hazy, then cast into sharp relief. Too harsh. Her mind was scrambled, thoughts jumbled like old sticks tangled on the river bank. On the Tuesday evening when Owen got back from school she was bewildered to find herself putting towels in the deep freeze.
She went over her memories of Danny’s death, anxious that they might fade and wilt like wildflowers brought into the house. Then she would be of no use when the police took her full statement.
She reassured her manager Shelley, who was also her close friend, that she was capable of returning to work as scheduled. Fiona couldn’t bear the thought of taking sick leave, of wandering round the house like some spare part: she needed to be busy, occupied, productive.
Tuesday teatime brought fresher weather. As she walked Ziggy the first full drops of rain fell, making little craters in the dusty footpaths. The river was hungry for rain, already the level had sunk with just a few dry days. The smell of mud, brackish and chemical, was pungent in the air. They walked along the river to the east. Fiona remembered her shoes, how the police had taken them, her cardigan: she’d have to get to a shoe shop, her trainers would do for tomorrow but they were pretty tatty.
On the walk back the sky darkened, huge bruised clouds hung low overhead and the first throaty rumble of thunder sounded. Fiona increased her pace, keeping up with Ziggy: the dog hated storms.
The deluge hit before they reached home. The rain, tropical in its intensity, flattened nettles and grass, bouncing off the hard earth. It soaked through the seams in her jacket and drenched the front of her trousers, making her limbs damp and cold.
Ziggy raced ahead, waited trembling at the gate. Fiona stood a moment, turned her face up and felt the cold, fresh water drumming on her cheeks and her eyelids, sliding down her neck. Lost in the sensation.
She was all right that first day back. More or less. She accepted the words of sympathy, the shared outrage of her colleagues, with a nod and a shake of her head.
It must have been awful. That poor child. And his mother. A twin as well. Is it right you’d delivered them?
Hands on her arms, on her shoulders, a hug.
She felt a little teary but once she was back doing her visits it passed. One of her mums-to-be showed signs of pre-eclampsia and Fiona organized a hospital admission. Another had worrying levels of sugar in her urine and Fiona recommended she see her GP: it happened to some women and not others, but they needed to consider whether there was any risk of diabetes. She went about her work: changed four nappies on newborns, dressed umbilical stumps, comforted a toddler, gave an anxious mum some help getting the baby to latch on properly and removed stitches from a tear. At each house there were papers and charts to complete. She called at the office at the end of the day. Shelley had checked her schedule and asked for a word.
‘Do you want to swap Carmen Johnson for another second-weeker?’
Carmen Johnson was the woman whose house overlooked the recreation ground. The woman Fiona was with when she saw Danny fall. Carmen was in her second week of motherhood and now only receiving visits every other day. Soon the midwives would stop calling and the health visitor would take over.
‘No, I’ll be fine,’ Fiona said.
‘Just yell,’ Shelley told her.
‘I will.’
Nothing had prepared her for the impact of returning there. As she drove closer she felt her guts cramp and her palms grow hot and sticky. She admonished herself. ‘It’ll be fine. Don’t be daft. Take it easy. It’s just a place.’ Fiona tried to empty her mind, let it fill with grey fuzz.
She turned off the dual carriageway alongside the rec. The tent and the police tape were gone but there was a police Portakabin at the northern side of the rectangle. And a splash of colour by a lamppost. Flowers. She should have bought flowers! Her thoughtlessness cut at her. She parked outside Carmen Johnson’s, gathered her bag and case, got out and locked the car.
She knocked on the door. Her face felt rigid, a mask. She tried to rearrange her features as the door opened. ‘Hello—’ The word caught in her throat, husky. She coughed.
Carmen looked perplexed, she wouldn’t meet Fiona’s eye. ‘We’re fine,’ she said. She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbed at her upper arms with her hands. ‘We don’t need a visit.’
‘It’s every other day now,’ Fiona explained. Not understanding. ‘We’ll be handing over to the health visitors soon, all’s going well.’
‘Look.’ Carmen’s eyes were everywhere, her mouth working. ‘I just don’t want any trouble. That’s how it is.’ She closed the door.
Fiona stood there, her knees weak, feeling humiliated, shamed. Her cheeks aglow, her pulse hammering. Aware at first only of the bald rejection. The door closed on her. There had been times before: women resistant to visits, not wanting interference, women with things to hide or a damaged view of professionals. But this sudden switch …
Then she got it.
She
was ‘the trouble’. Because of what she’d seen, what she’d done. Much had already been made in the media of the community living in fear, afraid to speak out. Carmen lived here. She might have a good idea who was behind the shooting and how they ensured people’s silence. Carmen was simply protecting herself and her baby.
Fiona was back in the car, still smarting, when the pain hit. A band crushing her chest, impossible to move or breathe properly. A huge weight. She could feel her lungs contracting, the terror of a vacuum developing. Like drowning. No air, no way of moving. Sweat bathed her skin, her tongue felt huge in her mouth, her mouth chalk dry. An overwhelming sense of danger, animal-keen, consumed her, urging her to flee, but she was pinned down by the pain. She was dying. Everything went dark, then red. There was a roaring in her ears and her hands and feet were nettled with pinpricks. Her knees were juddering, heels drumming in the footwell.
She gulped and found a breath, then another. The pain dimmed, her vision cleared. Trembling spread through her body. She felt sick. Her heart hurt, thudding irregularly in her chest. She couldn’t possibly drive. Her eyes filled with tears.
Opening her phone was awkward but she only needed to press one button for Shelley’s number.
‘Please can you come and get me,’ she told her when she answered. ‘Get a cab.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t drive, Shelley.’ She reeled off the address.
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘I need to get to the hospital. I’m having a heart attack.’
The shaking wouldn’t stop, and the waves of nausea. Every time she closed her eyes, with each blink, she saw a still from Sunday: Danny prone, his leg twisted at an odd angle,
blink
, the fear in his tawny eyes,
blink
, the blood in the creases of her knuckles.
When Shelley arrived she was alive with concern. ‘Why on earth didn’t you call an ambulance?’
‘I don’t know.’ Because the ambulance was too much like Sunday? ‘It’s much better now. Perhaps it’s just angina.’
Of course A&E was busy. It always was. She spoke to the triage nurse, filled in the form and took a seat in the shabby waiting area, all lumpy green gloss paint and scuffed linoleum. There were two dozen people on the chairs.
‘No point in you waiting,’ she told Shelley.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m fine. Honestly. The pain’s all gone.’
Shelley took some persuading but they both knew enough about hospitals to realize it could be a long time before Fiona was seen. ‘Can you do me a favour, take my car home?’
‘Of course, and let me know what they say.’
She had nothing to do. Nothing to read. She passed the time examining her fellow casualties, trying to work out what accident had befallen them. Some were easy: the schoolboy in his PE kit with a makeshift sling and the elderly woman with a grazed knee complaining to all and sundry about the kerbs. But others had hidden traumas.
The time inched by. Patients were called through to the examination bays and others took their places. They would have brought Danny here. Through the other double doors straight into the resuscitation suite. And then to the mortuary.
‘Fiona Geary.’
She stood and followed the nurse to a bay. ‘You’ll know the drill,’ the woman joked. A reference to Fiona’s uniform. ‘You at St Mary’s?’ The maternity hospital was nearby.
‘Yes, on the community.’ Some of the midwives worked all their shifts in the hospital. The community midwives made the home visits before and after birth, carried out home deliveries, worked with women on the domino scheme, where they only went into hospital for the actual birth. Fiona preferred work in the community. There was more freedom and greater responsibility. Less intervention. The consultants held less sway.
The nurse handed Fiona the thermometer, which she tucked under her armpit. She tested her blood pressure. Both readings were a little high. ‘Any symptoms now?’
Fiona shook her head. ‘Just a bit tired, a bit dizzy.’
‘Any breathing trouble?’
‘No.’
The nurse checked through her form. No history of asthma, allergies, no pre-existing medical conditions. No regular prescriptions. Any family history of heart problems? Yes, her father. Fiona felt the prick of irritation. It was already all down there in black and white, she’d filled the form in today, did they think she’d developed diabetes or epilepsy in the meantime? She knew she was being unreasonable. She double-checked the same details with her own patients. She answered all the questions as reasonably as possible. The nurse left her for a few minutes and then a doctor appeared. The doctor looked at the form and listened to her heartbeat. Then she was sent back to reception to wait.
Another half-hour passed. Fiona knew that a lot could be done with heart disease. She was a little overweight but nothing excessive. They might put her on statins to lower her cholesterol, or do a bypass. A nurse brought Fiona a form and asked her to take it to Cardiology. The hospital was a maze: annexes and prefabs had been bolted on to the old Victorian buildings, sprawling in all directions and now connected up to a spanking new extension. Complicated colour-coded signs were there for navigation.
She handed the form in to the receptionist at Cardiology and took a seat. There was a water cooler there and she was thankful to drink a cup, to clear the stale taste from her mouth.
The ECG took ten minutes. The cardio guy attached the stickers to her arms, legs and chest, and she lay down on the curtained bed while the machine took its measurements.
There was nothing wrong, no arrhythmia or palpitations, no indication of any heart trauma. No echo of myocardial infarction. The cardiologist, giving her the results, asked her to describe again the symptoms she’d had. As she did, she felt her mouth get dry and her pulse speed up, a sense of dread creeping up her spine.
‘The tingling,’ he asked, ‘where was that?’
‘My feet and my hands.’
‘Any cramping in the arms?’
‘No.’
He nodded, pleased with her answers. ‘I think the good news is that there’s no sign of a heart attack. But there is an explanation that accounts for all the symptoms you describe, and that’s a panic attack.’
Fiona stared at him.
‘Have you been under any particular stress recently?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. Felt her tongue stick to the roof of her mouth.
Another nod. ‘Your GP will be able to help,’ he carried on, ‘discuss the treatment, ways of managing it. It may be a one-off. Some people have an attack once and that’s it.’
But the rest? She was appalled. It could happen again.
She went to the walk-in clinic at her GP’s practice the following morning. Dr Melling wasn’t her regular doctor but she couldn’t wait for an appointment, she had to see someone straight away. When Fiona tried to explain what had happened, starting with Sunday, the words clotted in her mouth and she was alarmed by tears in her eyes.
‘Take your time,’ the GP said.
‘The boy that was shot on Sunday,’ Fiona said.
Sympathy rippled across the doctor’s face. It made Fiona feel worse. She gave the gist of the story. ‘Then when I went back I had this, erm, this panic attack.’ She felt small and frail as she spoke. ‘The doctor at the hospital said sometimes it just happens once. But it was so awful …’
‘Have you heard from Victim Support?’
Fiona nodded, a letter had come yesterday.
‘They can help. Or we have a counsellor here, if you’d like someone to talk to. Just let me …’ She turned and hit some keys on her computer. Read up a bit. ‘Cognitive behaviour therapy can be very useful, that’s what Hazel’s trained in, good success rate reported. The other usual treatment is antidepressants. Some patients find a dual approach most useful.’
Fiona listened to her talk about side effects and the need for gradual withdrawal. ‘It may be that you’d prefer to wait and see if there is any recurrence.’
‘No,’ Fiona said quickly. The prospect of that terror clawing through her again, the flailing fear, the feeling that she was dying, was untenable. She asked for a prescription and said she would like to try the CBT. Dr Melling said there might be a wait but Fiona would get a letter as soon as an appointment was available.
Fiona filled the prescription at the pharmacy next door to the surgery.
To be taken with food
, it read on the label. She wasn’t hungry but she wanted the medicine so managed a couple of oatcakes and cheese.
She prayed the drugs would work quickly to protect her from the panic returning. She also hoped they would stop the pictures that were lodged in her skull. The relentless carousel of images shuttering on and on.
Blink
, Danny’s palm on the grass.
Blink
, his eyes rolling back in his skull.
Blink
, his mother on her knees, her face torn wide with grief.