The moment she moved, her mind began to reorientate itself. She knew, as she stood on shaky feet, that this wasn’t Muswell Hill but somewhere else. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was Alex who was crying and that he still needed her even though she’d let him down so badly.
The journey to the next bed was only two steps. The hardest part was lowering herself down without falling. She could see the outline of a body in the dim glow that was filtering into the ward from the lighted reception area. She stroked Alex’s hair and whispered reassuring words. Just sounds really, just telling him she was there. When that didn’t seem to help, she took him in her arms and held him as he sobbed. She even sang to him. Whatever came into her mind: snatches of lullabies and hymns and pop songs.
The realisation that it was a woman she was holding came slowly. She might have pulled away, but by that time Shannon’s gulping tears were slowing and the convulsive movements of her chest were coming at longer and longer intervals. It seemed she was taking some comfort from the embrace.
So – even though this still didn’t quite feel real – Jess held the other woman until she slept. Then she lowered her back on to the bed as gently as she could. Her hands were shaking from the unaccustomed effort, barely able to take Shannon’s scant weight.
She had to sit for a minute or so, gather her strength, before she returned to her own bed and pulled the covers back over herself. The room still seemed too big, and too open. A breeze drifted through it: a breeze that carried no scents but was heavy somehow with the weight of its own journey. She could see the walls, but they looked as thin as curtains.
Shannon was aware of everything that had just taken place – of the singing, the warmth of an adjacent body, the soft hands stroking her hair. She had no idea who was doing it, and she accepted it mainly because it had to be a dream. A sweet voice shining through the hazy half-light of the fentanyl, wrapping itself around her pain so the sharp edges of it didn’t cut her any more.
A woman’s voice? Or a boy’s?
14
Sylvie Stock missed this show because none of her furtive glances into the ward coincided with it. There were a lot of glances though. She’d already seen Jess Moulson’s face when she brought McBride on to the ward, but she kept wanting to see it again. She was drawn to it by a prurient curiosity.
She’d followed Moulson’s case in the tabloids, on the TV news and on the Daily Mail website, where it had sparked dozens of discussion threads. The prevailing opinion there, which Stock had both expressed herself and “liked” when other people said it, was that Moulson’s face being burned off was proof that God cared about the fate of little children and that his justice was always working.
But she hadn’t really meant that even when she said it; it just seemed to be the right language to use when you talked about evil. Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.
If anything, that little boy’s suffering proved that there was nothing. Nobody watching over us or giving a shit. A loving God wouldn’t let that happen to a child. Stock’s husband Ron, who was Catholic, said that we were sent down into this world to make our own souls, which was why Jesus was a carpenter. Only our souls were made not out of wood and nails but out of the good or bad things we did. Stock wanted to know how that could work when some kid could be burned to death in his sleep before he had a chance to do anything, good or bad.
No, it was all just words. You lived. You died. You chose whether to be God or the devil to the people around you. By becoming a nurse, Stock had declared her allegiance. So had most of the people she treated here at Fellside, only they’d made the opposite choice.
Finally she gave in to the nagging impulse and went through into the darkened ward with her pocket torch, moving as quietly as she could. She didn’t shine the torch directly into Moulson’s eyes, but on to the pillow beside her face. Moulson was deeply asleep by this time, her features twisted into a slight frown, as though she was trying to remember something.
Seen from this close up, her face was deeply disconcerting. There was no one feature that stood out as ugly or wrong, but the assemblage just flat out didn’t work. And Stock had read that Moulson had had seven operations to get her to this state, so it made her mind reel just a little to think of what she must have looked like before. She noticed the high-gloss shine, so unlike the look of real, healthy skin. She felt an urge to touch it and see what the texture was like.
She suppressed that urge with difficulty. She suspected that if she were to touch Moulson’s face, the next thing she’d do was punch it.
She went back to her desk and her eventless vigil. But she was imagining the Inferno Killer sunk in peaceful, painless slumber.
It’s not right, she thought. It’s not right at all. Somebody should do something about that.
15
Liz Earnshaw didn’t dream.
She didn’t even know, really, what dreams were. When other people talked about all these stories that played out in their heads while they were asleep, she thought it sounded like bullshit. But any time when she was particularly troubled, she saw Naseem Suresh’s face behind her closed eyelids. It wasn’t a dream because Naz didn’t say or do anything. She was just there. And she seemed to still be there, somehow, after Liz woke up.
On the night of Shannon McBride’s punishment beating, this happened three times. Each time, Earnshaw sat up in the overheated dark, staring at the wall until the image faded. Each time, she muttered, “I’m sorry, Naz,” then lay down and closed her eyes again, trying to find her way back to the imageless void that was where she went to at night. It wasn’t McBride she was apologising for, obviously. And she didn’t kid herself that Naz could hear her.
Either way, when the wake-up sounded, Earnshaw’s eyes were already wide open.
She was very comfortable with violence, but mostly she hurt people in quick, furious, focused ways. The protracted torture of McBride had been unusual, unsettling, and now it was hard for her to put it out of her mind. She could summon the memory into the muscles of her right hand, like the ghost of a real sensation: the solid, shuddering impact of the hammer into McBride’s flesh and bone, again and again, changing gradually as the bones broke and the flesh was tenderised.
She kept her ears open at breakfast for news of how McBride was doing. A word or two would be enough. That she was coming back on block. That Dr Salazar had fixed her up and passed her as fit. That her pulped hands had been perfectly, seamlessly restored.
But there was no talk at breakfast. Not in Earnshaw’s vicinity anyway. Whenever she approached a table, all conversation muted, as though she was a living, walking volume control.
She had better luck in the yard, where earshot went further than eyeline. She could hear drifting clumps of conversation as she threaded her way through the crowd, but the clustered, informal debating groups seemed to have other things on their minds. Picking up a word here and a sentence there as she lumbered around, Earnshaw eventually pieced the story together – if you could call it a story.