The Winter Sickness

  He monitored her breathing, felt her warmth against him, and wondered when he had last been that close to someone whom he hadn’t been fighting. She whimpered in the voice she used the rest of the year, quite free of the mania that had consumed her. A soft, breathy voice, mumbling about horses, horses, jumping horses. It was a shared moment, if nothing else. Toby would be sorry when he reached his destination.

  Toby had no one to talk to, nor any way to speed the journey up. So, for distraction, he re-told himself of the history of the town. The town that now moved around them in murky misty black-on-black silhouette. The night seemed distant. Reality had been reduced to the gravel under his feet and signs on telegraph poles as he passed close by them. His mind wandered...

  The Stockton-Overbury Pass, to give it its full name, was named after those who first surveyed it. Though not as vital to the young nation’s Manifest Destiny as the taming of the Rockies, it nonetheless provided a link to coastal areas once only reachable by sea.

  Since then, tunnels, train lines and coastal roads had meant that traffic through the Pass had fallen to a trickle. Yet, in Nineteen sixty-four it was alongside the twisting, treacherous mountain road that the newly-formed Stockton-Overbury Company decided to run their oil pipeline.

  Questions had been asked at the time: why go through the hills? Wouldn’t that require extra engineering? Why not make the line as flat as possible?

  Some answered that the road tunnel companies wanted too much money to run the line down their tubes. Others that carrying the pipeline overground would be easier to maintain and be less calamitous in the event of a breach. Whatever the reason, it meant that refineries could now share their product much more easily with industries and tanker ports along that stretch of coast. It would go on to be a great success.

  The difficulties of pumping the oil up one side of the mountain range, and then hindering its rush back down the other, would be handled by a pipeline station. This was sited on a handily flattish area near the highpoint of the Pass. The Stockton-Overbury Station would require workers, and they would bring their families. And these families would need facilities, shops and schools. And so, like a market outside a Roman fort, over time all of these appeared. A town emerged, Stockton-Overbury, nicknamed Stove for ease – perhaps the only ease the town would ever know.

  The Stockton-Overbury Pass had been known further afield before the town arrived. In the summer, when the snow had melted and the mist receded, the views its altitude afforded were a marvel – distant ocean one way, endless plains the other, snow-capped mountains either side of you. The town would come to call these summer views ‘our reward’.

  And the tourist attractions didn’t end there. The ‘flattish space’ that became Stove was in the fulcrum of two of those mountains, their dark rock dominating the views in each of their directions. The Pass had long been a perfect base for day climbers, when it was summer and the grass was out. You could camp there, though this was only for the hardy; and in winter no one dared to make the trip.

  On one occasion in the Fifties there was even an attempt to cross between the two peaks on a high-wire. It passed two-hundred yards over what would become the town. Toby, like all the town’s children, had seen the photographs of this feat, without which he wasn’t sure he’d have believed that it had actually happened. He could still remember the image of the speck of a man with his pole balancing all the way up; and a second photo of the high-wire artiste reaching the far end, his spangly white suit catching the sun, and he and those applauding him all smiles and relief.

  Yet you didn’t need to be quite such a daredevil as those climbers and the tightrope walker to reach the area’s most famous landmark. Compass Point was only a hundred yards up the slope of one of the mountains, barely in the foothills, and could be gained in most weathers with no equipment beyond a pair of good boots.

  As children, he and Janey would go there after school. There was never much privacy, as the rest of their classes would have the same idea – having different schools, the girls and boys were always glad to mingle after.

  There, they would look out from a little crest that protruded from the hillside, like a commentary position above the goings on of the town. And all the classmates would bring a compass. Each would walk with it held in front of them, never tiring of the moment when the needle would start spinning.

  Toby looked out in the darkness for Compass Point. He wasn’t sure if he saw the dark of the mountain against the dark of the sky, or whether it was an optical illusion. But it was out there, somewhere. It had been one of the places he’d hoped to revisit on his sentimental journeying, before the early snow put paid to that. He wondered if Janey ever went up there still? He guessed she did, and this cheered him, for it kept the memory alive for both of them.

  Toby looked up then into the sky, almost suffering a bout of vertigo as he imagined the ghost of the high-wire walker somewhere in the inky ocean above him. He would always be there, no matter that the wire had been dismantled sixty years ago.

  Toby regained his bearings. With his tender load, he trudged on. And as he neared his destination, so his inner narrator capped off the story: for the pipeline was successful, and in this untamed cradle a community developed, and sustained. Long enough for children to grow up there, for parents to age and be buried. Long enough for myths to develop, for history to form, for several generations to reinforce their forebears’ codes of behaviour. And all that time there was the secret.

  Chapter 24 – The House of Women

  ‘Picking up or dropping off?’ asked the Junior House Mistress who answered the door. She was barely past the sickness age herself, thought Toby. Wither the doughty matrons he remembered calling at their house each November to take his sister away? Toby wouldn’t see her then for three months, though in his own fugue state was only intermittently aware of her absence. They never spoke of it each springtime after she returned.

  Toby looked at the young woman facing him. She had asked her question jovially and utterly respectfully, just trying to inject a bit of fun into what could be a tough time for the staff. A male visitor, and a Deputy to boot, might have caused a rush to see who could get to open the door first. He answered,

  ‘So there’s someone to collect as well?’

  ‘Yes, she’s in the Head Mistress’s office. This way.’

  Toby had hoped he might be able to quickly drop his charge at the door and be away. Yet the Head’s office was through the school hall, which during the winter became a dormitory for their seasonal residents. As he walked along the central aisle, dark-suited, booted, without a free hand to remove his cap, and with a swooning waif across his shoulder, Toby wondered if he could have made a stronger impact on the hall’s residents if he’d tried.

  The room was full of iron-framed beds, made up with white sheets and brown blankets. In or on each was a girl dressed like the one he was carrying, in a floor-length nightdress. Though it was night time, he knew they would be dressed like that all day and for all winter. Most of them had long hair too and wore it down, for brushing it would calm them, it was believed. This and board games and reading were about the only things the girls could do together when the sickness didn’t have them too badly.

  When it did take them, it was often to the deepest depths of despair. Where in boys it found out their frustrations, so in girls it found out their sadness. Alone, or held by a Mistress or holding each other, for hours they could weep and weep.

  It was the single saddest sight of the Stovian winter season, and Toby had wondered whether the town didn’t use the whole side-show of wild boys and Deputies to distract them from the sorrow of the School for Girls. The impression he was left with, on the rare occasions when he saw this hall, was always of a roomful of doomed heroines from Romantic novels.

  As Toby passed by them, those conscious of his presence became rapt, while those not would regret it when they came around to the fact of what they’d missed.

  ‘This way, Deputy,’
said his guide loudly, just in case anyone who was able to be was not yet aware of him. She flashed smiles at the girls who now sat up alert, or who clambered to the foot of their beds. There were murmurs of excitement and even a wolf-whistle from somewhere in the room.

  ‘If you’ll just tell me where to drop her,’ asked Toby, his back killing him.

  ‘This way,’ said the Junior with relish, winking at every girl who caught her eye. Eventually they passed through a door into a corridor, and then through another door to a smaller room, again filled with beds.

  ‘Which was hers?’

  ‘Just put her down on that one, thank you.’

  He leaned forward, and let his charge half-drop onto the springy mattress with its folded-back sheets. The Head Mistress wasn’t there. This was her office year-around, but wasn’t used as such in winter. Then it became a space for special cases, those who might upset the other girls.

  Once on the bed, the girl’s nightdress was arranged and her hair brushed straight by one Mistress, and her bedclothes tucked in around her by another. Amid all this she murmured, a picture of innocence and pre-womanhood. Over the bedclothes then came leather bands, which were joined in iron buckles like giant’s watch-straps – this time she wouldn’t get away.

  ‘Thank you for bringing her back.’ In all the activity, Janey had crept in unnoticed to stand next to Toby. ‘And so unharmed. How did you manage it?’

  ‘More by luck than judgement,’ he stammered out. ‘Though I did catch her face.’

  ‘That will heal,’ said Janey, who seemed only happy that nothing worse had resulted.

  Maybe it had been the weight of all his carrying that had Toby’s knees nearly give just then? That would be his retirement excuse for next year, he suddenly decided. Bad knees. You couldn’t be a proper Deputy if you couldn’t stand up straight.

  ‘Just her cheek, ’ marvelled the House Mistress. ‘And a few grazes on the arms... She took us by surprise, fairly leaping out of bed before we could contain her. She went right through that window.’ Janey pointed to the boards now filling the frame. ‘It was pure fluke she made it. And then to run barefoot all the way home...’

  ‘The snow can leave small cuts on the feet,’ said Toby in Public Health Advisory mode. ‘You’ll want to check.’

  ‘Thank you, we will.’

  Sometimes a girl got the fever, which was only their name for what the boys usually had. Unprepared for it, the Mistresses could be caught out. And such a girl could be a handful, as Toby had just seen. He looked at this smaller number of young women bound and etherised, and he considered that if the girls outside in the hall were Romantic heroines, then the ones in the office were the mad first wives who their husbands were keeping locked in the loft.

  Toby watched the girl sleeping,

  ‘Will she be calm when she wakes?’

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ said Janey, sadly.

  Toby was glad he’d be away before she woke. He hoped the blankets would protect her as she tore against the straps.

  As the women worked, he drifted off into his own thoughts. Just as a girl could get the fever, so a boy could sometimes get the sadness – Toby remember one year when he just couldn’t stop crying. His watching Deputy was so baffled that he resorted to beating it out of him, and leaving him his eyebrow scar. Did it work? Toby only remembered falling into darkness, and not being conscious for what might have been days or weeks. Maybe he’d never been right since? Wasn’t that the old joke, when someone was odd or different – that they must have been dropped on the head when they were a baby? Toby wondered what it did to the brain to have a cosh across the head at twelve?

  Janey brought him back to earth,

  ‘You had to knock her out. I understand.’

  He flinched.

  ‘It must have hurt you more than it did her. You always hated it, didn’t you? The job.’ She said this so lightly that no other would hear. ‘I can’t believe you came back. But you were always brave.’

  He turned to her, but the House Mistress had already moved to the next bed along, and was talking loudly again,

  ‘And if you could also take Claire here to the Doctor, we’d be very grateful.’

  ‘What’s up with her?’

  ‘She’s inconsolable. She won’t take her food.’

  Sometimes that happened too, a girl who got the sadness so badly that she didn’t eat for days, and needed to be taken to be put on a drip. She’d be sedated also, maybe for a week. The winter sickness – sometimes it could be a pig.

  Toby knelt down beside this second girl, and tried to get her slumped form over his shoulder. There was really no way to do it elegantly. She was bigger-boned, and would be a heavier load. Once he had her, he turned around but Janey was gone.

  Toby’s guide led him back the way they had come, every girl in the big room now watching for his return. His cap had been knocked askew, and he hadn’t the hands available to set it right. He imagined that he looked like a drunken milkman.

  ‘Here, let me,’ said the Junior House Mistress. She stood in front of Toby to tend to his hat. This blocked his progress, when he really wanted to get going. As she raised her hands to his head she flashed him a smile, and every girl in the room saw it, some again wolf-whistling or cooing. His back was screaming, he had a drugged child over his shoulder, he’d just been speaking to the lost love of his life for the first time in however many years. He really didn’t need this carnival going on around him.

  ‘Right, isn’t that better? We couldn’t have you facing the world looking like that, could we.’

  At last she turned around and they resumed their journey.

  ‘Bye, Deputy,’ the girls called as he left, and Toby turned his head and gave the best smile he could manage.

  As Toby reached the entrance hallway, he re-threw his charge over himself to gain a better grip. As he did so an arm fell free, and for the first time he noticed the word Strength inked across the inside of her wrist in Gothic script.

  ‘She has Hope on the other,’ his guide advised.

  ‘She’s not old enough.’

  ‘She got them on a school trip to the city last summer – can you believe it? She kept them covered all the way home. Her mother was fit to weep.’

  They were at the door now, the young Mistress opening it. Toby said,

  ‘I’ve never seen a woman with a tattoo in this town.’

  As they faced each other at the open door, the Mistress teased down the front of her brown dress, to reveal a heart and cupid’s arrow nestling in her cleavage, the names Lana and Eric contained within.

  ‘Lucky Eric,’ he responded.

  To which she giggled, as she adjusted herself, flashed him one last smile, and finally shut the door. As she did so, so the cold wind bit Toby’s neck and hands, and the new girl on his shoulder reminded him of all his aching. Displaying Strength but never Hope, he began his return journey.

  Chapter 25 – A Call to the Emsworth House

  After a while every winter became the same, Toby knew – call upon call coming through to the guest house that served as the Mountain-side base of operations. It was rare that there wasn’t someone somewhere needing something, or that there wouldn’t be another call waiting once that one was complete. Deputies could take to sleeping in the houses they were working in, or hiding out at a friend’s place for an hour’s peace. Yet the message always seemed to find its way to them; as had this latest call that Toby was now following up. It has been taken by Sarah, an assistant at the Sheriff’s Office, and fed to Toby especially, even though it fell in the heart of Town-side territory.

  ‘Top priority,’ had repeated the landlady as she’d relayed it to him. ‘They asked for you by name. Come at once.’

  Toby now approached the house in question. If Stove was big enough to qualify for a town centre, then he was nearing it, a street of tall houses just behind the main shops. It was coming up to noon, townsfolk passing in their daily activities,

  ‘Morni
ng, Deputy,’ greeted one.

  ‘Surprised to see you this far south,’ joked another, to which Toby smiled. Yet he couldn’t pretend that being that close to the Sheriff’s Office, and so to Crawley’s base of operations, didn’t bring him out in hives.

  ‘Why did they ask for me?’ muttered Toby to himself, as he found the gate of the fine upstanding house and turned down the garden path. ‘Why not walk around the corner to Main Street and collar a passing Deputy there?’ Had he not been so tired, he might have questioned this before.

  Knocking on the door, he found it open – not uncommon in a house driven to distraction with a sick child.

  ‘Hello, is anybody there?’

  Toby pushed through into an open-plan sitting room and hall, and knew a joke had been played upon him. For sat on the stairs was Jake, the instigator of trouble, the Holy thorn in his side.

  ‘If you wouldn’t make such a racket?’ the prankster asked quietly.

  It was bright outside, and Toby’s eyes adjusted. In the centre of the room stood a woman.

  ‘Mrs Emsworth?’ he asked, remembering the name he’d been given in the message.

  She didn’t answer, but rather held him in a cold stare.

  Emerging from the kitchen then was another woman, who Toby stupidly took a whole second to clock as Sarah, the Sheriff’s Office administrator.

  ‘What are you..?’ he started to ask.

  But what really shook Toby was that, if Mrs E seemed chilly toward him, then Sarah held him in a look of such contempt that Toby felt himself shrinking under her gaze.

  She ignored his question though, as she walked to the gaping entrance behind him.

  ‘Shut the door, would you Sarah?’ asked Jake from the stairs. ‘It’s cold out there.’

  It wasn’t that cold outside actually, but certainly not as warm as in the snug, well-appointed house. All three of the greeting party were also wearing cardigans and sheepskin slippers, and the scene of bucolic wintertime could only have been made more complete with the arrival of Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing The Little Drummer Boy.

  Toby remembered how he’d felt that first evening, standing outside the School for Girls, watching the House Mistresses preparing meals in their warm rooms, and asking himself: why was he the only one not allowed comfort?