Poppet

  No one acknowledges him. The woman on screen is, evidently, in the middle of a drawn-out orgasm. She is yelping and squealing and acting her heart out. Massaging her breasts. The Big Lurch and the other nurse are agog. AJ hopes he’s never fallen for a fake orgasm in his life. The odds are, he supposes, pretty high.

  ‘I said, I’m going to do a walk-through.’

  Neither of the other two men break away from the screen. ‘Hey!’ Suddenly he’s irritated. ‘Hey. Look at me.’

  Both of them turn, startled. The Big Lurch fumbles with the remote and clicks the TV off. Holds his hands up. ‘Sorry, AJ, my man. I’m sorry.’

  ‘OK – well, now I’ve got your attention, can I enquire what that fucking disgusting smell is? Have the bins been emptied? Has the washing-up been done? You aren’t being paid to sit around here all night.’

  ‘It’s the kettle – it fused.’

  ‘The kettle is fused? Then what do you do about it? Do you a) ignore it and watch more porn? b) ignore it, hope it will go away, and then watch more porn? or c) try and fix it?’

  The Big Lurch gives a long sigh and gets up. ‘Don’t worry – I know the rest. If we can’t fix it, then we put in an order to Accounts. I even know the right forms.’

  ‘Great – that’s a result. Gold star, mate.’ He shakes his head resignedly. Puts his hands on his knees and pushes himself painfully to his feet. ‘Now I am going to walk the wards – actually work for a living.’

  ‘Jesus,’ murmurs the Big Lurch as AJ walks past him. ‘Who puffed sand up your backside?’

  He ignores that comment, trudges out of the room, to the staircase, his mood getting progressively worse. He doesn’t want to be here; he’s tingly and amped, but at the same time he’s tired and he’s fed up with it all. He passes Zelda’s room – casts a quick glance in there. Everything is exactly as it was last night, paint roller still up against the wall. Plus ça change. That’s just the way things happen around here – at a snail’s pace.

  He goes first to Monster Mother’s room and opens the observation hole – peers through. The room is quiet, she is asleep in bed. The curtains are closed and on her chair hangs a dark kimono-style dressing gown, the light reflecting off its fat folds. While it’s impossible to know if Monster Mother is skinless tonight, at least she is sleeping. He closes the hatch and goes quietly back down the corridor.

  On Buttercup Ward something isn’t right. It’s just a small noise, a creak of a bed, a breathing pattern that’s fallen out of sync. He crosses the corridor to room 17 – Moses Jackson’s room – and turns the little spigot in the pane. He sees immediately this is where the noise is coming from.

  Moses is sitting on his bunk, rocking himself to and fro, holding his head. He’s a completely different person from the arrogant one The Maude attacked. Ever since his ‘auto ennucleation’ he’s been nervous and self-effacing. He is so changed. Tonight he’s dressed in his vest and underpants and he hasn’t noticed AJ because he’s too caught up in his own internal battle. Batting his face, and screaming silently. Rocking and rocking.

  AJ opens the door. ‘Moses. Moses, it’s me.’

  Moses instantly stops moving. He freezes, lowers his arms.

  ‘Moses? It’s AJ. You OK, mate?’

  He blinks with his one good eye. ‘AJ?’

  ‘I’m going to come in.’

  ‘Yes,’ he mumbles. ‘AJ, help me.’

  AJ closes the door and comes into the room. On Buttercup Ward the colour theme is, unsurprisingly, yellow. Even in the dim light you can’t get away from the yellow – the curtains are yellow with grey diamonds and the floor is a sickly yellow linoleum flecked black. It is one of the rehabilitation wards reserved for patients who are considered to be less of a danger, and the rooms have some movable furniture. AJ goes and sits on the very edge of the bed. You’re not supposed to sit on the beds – it opens you up to all sorts of possibilities of abuse accusations. But Moses is shaking like a leaf.

  ‘Moses? Hey, hey, mate, come on. What’s up?’

  ‘AJ, AJ AJ.’ He grips his curled hair tightly. ‘AJ, help me.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. Now let’s take deep breaths. You’ve had your meds, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Usual time?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘Good. So what’s the problem?’

  Moses shakes his head. He moans and tightens his hands against his scalp. When he speaks his voice is almost inaudible. ‘I’m scared, Mr AJ. Moses is scared.’

  ‘Hey, hey.’ AJ gently untangles his fingers from his hair and holds them. ‘Moses, old man,’ he says, keeping his voice well modulated, ‘calmly now. Some more of those deep breaths. That’s the way …’

  Moses nods. He takes a long shaky breath, lets it all out.

  ‘Don’t make me say what’s scary, Mr AJ, or mention that name. I bin told I ain’t supposed to say it so I ain’t even going to whisper it and you’ll excuse me for that, but though you are my deep and most respectful of friends, I am just going to keep my piehole shut at this moment in time.’

  He nods to himself, as if to confirm those were the exact words he meant to use. He says nothing more. The doctors spent a long time putting Moses back together, working on his eye implant, but if you know what to look for you can still see his face is misshapen. What actually happened to Moses that night? AJ wonders. They can go on putting The Maude down to hallucinations and fantasy, but something happened that night. And whatever it was was powerful enough to make Moses gouge out his own eye.

  An Apple Tree

  WHEN SUKI HAS been dead for so long that she’s cold, Penny starts to move. Outside, everything is ready – she has lived with herself for forty-two years and she knows herself well enough to have already prepared what she’s going to do next. She’s been out already this morning and dug the hole. It’s under the apple tree, the one that Suki as a baby – not much bigger than a guinea pig – used to chew at. Growling and leaping at it. Her own play-monster.

  Dressed in the same sweater and skirt and socks she’s been wearing for almost two days, Penny carries the dog out into the main part of the mill – her home for the last sixteen years. The lights are all low, just a faint glow from the big log burner in the centre of the floor. Even wrapped in the old chewed blanket she used to drag around the house, there’s nothing of Suki – she’s no heavier than a feather.

  At the back door Penny realizes she needs her boots on. Instead of putting Suki down on the mat – she doesn’t think she can bear that – she leans her shoulder against the door frame and jams her feet into the wellies, wriggling her toes around. It’s sort of comic, this middle-aged woman with all her scarves and her coloured hair and her jingly bracelets, standing there like a drunk in the doorway with a dead pet in her arms. She has to smile. Suki would be laughing. Wherever she is now. Up in the dark slipstreams.

  It’s very, very dark. Very cold. Her breath is in the air. Winter is moving in. It has moved in. She gets to the bottom of the garden, in spite of all the slippery terraces. It would be better to be drunk or stoned or high, but there hasn’t been the chance. It would be better to have washed and changed – she’d like to feel cleaner and prettier for something this important, but she’s not young and no one is going to watch.

  She crouches and lowers Suki into the hole. She’s lined it with dried flowers and fruit and blankets and Suki’s tennis ball – covered in dog spit and hair. The dog seems to sigh as her body settles, as if this is a relief. Penny moves her hands out from under the blanket – takes a step back, closes her eyes and rests her hands in a light clasp at her waist. She drops her face and tries to be respectful. She tries to wish good things and think about where Suki is going to go, but she can’t do it, so in the end she just takes the shovel and pushes frozen earth into the hole. Quickly, before she can change her mind.

  Power Cuts

  SOMETHING IS BOTHERING AJ, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. Instead of finishing his walk
of the wards he goes hunting down the Big Lurch. He has to go into the nurses’ station and out into the admin block and through all the toilets and the kitchens until he finds him in the security guards’ control room – a giant futuristic glass pod in the reception area of the unit. He is sitting on a swivel seat in front of a bank of monitors. His feet are up and his arms are crossed, his head floppy as if he’s sleeping, or on the point of sleeping.

  ‘Amazing.’ AJ stands in the doorway, arms folded. ‘You’re where you’re meant to be. The last place I’d have looked.’

  The Big Lurch lifts his head a little. Frowns.

  ‘AJ? You look all crazy – like one of those people they lock up in a loony bin. You ought to see a doctor about that – it’s not a good look.’

  AJ rubs his eyes. He comes into the room and sits on one of the chairs, running his hands over the soft suede of the armrest. He’s always liked this place – it’s got a comfort to it yet it’s not claustrophobic. You can feel warm in here, and look out on to the world: see the moon or the sun, the city and the trees, the cars and the clouds. It’s like being on the bridge of a ship. The Starship Enterprise maybe. The glass shield between here and the outside world is bulletproof. A lot of money has gone into this operations room. A lot of money and power and wealth. The Trust can find finance for this sort of thing, but they can’t stop people like Moses ripping out their own eyes in the breakfast queue.

  ‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘Do you think our director knows how unhappy we are? Hmm? Does she think we’re happy, or does she know we’re unhappy? What do you sense?’

  The Big Lurch lowers his chin and scrutinizes AJ with hauteur. ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘She’s too unhappy herself to care what’s going on with us. A person can only see suffering when they’re not suffering themselves. Caring? It’s a luxury, if you want the honest truth.’

  AJ nods slowly, appreciatively. The Big Lurch doesn’t speak much – but when he does, his words are premium-rate gilded.

  ‘So? What’s making her unhappy?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Am I supposed to?’

  The Big Lurch turns and faces AJ full on. Surprised. ‘You really don’t know?’

  AJ stares at him, mystified. ‘What? What am I supposed to know?’

  ‘About Jonathan?’

  ‘Jonathan? Jonathan who?’ He fumbles around in his head for a face to connect to the name. A patient? No – no Jonathans in the unit. The only person he can think of is Jonathan Keay – an occupational therapist who left the unit last month. ‘Jonathan Keay, you mean?’

  ‘Of course Jonathan Keay.’

  ‘The ocky therapy guy who left? What about him?’

  The Big Lurch gives AJ an amused half-smile. He lets a puff of laughter come out of his chest. Aha aha aha. ‘AJ, seriously, my man! For a switched-on person, you occasionally lack perspicacity.’

  ‘Then tell me, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Melanie and Keay? You didn’t notice?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Oh please, mate. Please.’

  AJ lowers his eyes to the smooth arms of the chair – moves his hands up and down, up and down. Melanie and Jonathan Keay? Seriously? Until now he’s always imagined he was the one who knew the secrets. That he walked around with the knowledge of the world on his shoulders. Apparently not, though. Apparently he is the last to know. OT staff giving it the old jiggety-jig with top-drawer management? If it’s true, that’s fairly scandalous stuff – the biggest taboo, like incest, or staff sleeping with a patient. Montagues and Capulets. Melanie herself said it – the Trust takes a dim view of it.

  And meanwhile her and Keay? Jonathan is someone AJ has never given much thought to. A normal enough guy – late thirties, a lot of experience under his belt. If AJ recalls rightly, Keay and Melanie had worked together in another unit in the north of England before they came here. They’d both started on low grades and had worked their way up the ranks. No one quite knows why he left Beechway last month. Word had it, he’d left on medical grounds. It was all very sudden, he didn’t even say goodbye – one moment he was there, the next he wasn’t. AJ vaguely remembers a card arriving – written in very formal handwriting – from his mother: Thank you for being such generous colleagues to my son – he will miss you all. It had a kind of funereal aura to it.

  AJ had always assumed, without particularly focusing on it, that Keay had some sort of secret private life he didn’t want to talk about. At the time, AJ hadn’t much cared, but now he’s combing through every word the guy ever said – putting it in the context that Keay’s secret may have been an affair with Melanie. Maybe her frantic little episode with the voddy had something to do with him. Everything AJ thought he knew about Melanie jack-knifes and amplifies and turns itself somersault over somersault and his estimation – and jealousy – of Jonathan Keay takes a quantum leap.

  His attention is dragged away from his speculation by one of the CCTV monitors. He wonders what it was that brought him down here – it certainly wasn’t to speculate about the love lives of the other staff. It was something that was bugging him about the camera system in the unit. But what?

  The monitors show nothing. Empty, motionless corridors. The outdoor-training Astro court. The pinch point in the stem corridor. Even a view of the security pod from behind and above – him and the Big Lurch sitting there, the backs of their heads barely clipping into the bottom edge of the frame.

  And then it hits him. He sits forward a little, peering at the images. He thinks he knows what it is. The thing that’s been bothering him, the reason the word ‘delusion’ has always seemed so inaccurate. He stays where he is, staring at the screens, his thoughts turning slow cartwheels. The smell in the nurses’ station earlier – the burning-fish smell of a fused kettle. The smell in Moses’ room that morning. Something in the building had fused that day too.

  ‘Hey,’ he says slowly. ‘These cameras – you log the footage you take, don’t you?’

  The Big Lurch throws him a sarcastic look. ‘No – they’re there for show. I use them to play my porn on the long dark nights. Of course we log it, bro. I mean, it only stays on for two weeks, but we log it.’

  ‘The night Zelda self-harmed – when she did her arms – you lost that because of the power cut.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ He nods. ‘I told you there’s something weird going on in this place – the power cutting out all the time, and it’s always some different reason.’

  ‘And the night Zelda died?’

  ‘Yeah – same thing that night. And the—’ He stops. He takes his feet off the desk with a bang. Twists the chair to face AJ. ‘You know what – you’re right. Every single time there’s been a power cut.’

  The Secret of Flying

  FARTLEK MEANS ‘SPEED play’ in Swedish. It is a training method designed to place stresses on the aerobic and anaerobic systems, stimulating the heart and discouraging it from falling into a steady rhythm. It can be adjusted to suit the individual, and is therefore ideal for anyone wanting to recoup their fitness after a long period of inactivity.

  The football ground behind Avon and Somerset police’s northern operations centre has its own mini-‘Fartlek hill’, a man-made mound at one end of the pitch with three polyurethane tartan track lanes snaking up and over it. At seven a.m., just as the sun is rising above the city, thirty-year-old Sergeant Flea Marley pushes herself up the hill. She passes the bases of the three wind turbines mounted along the crest, runs down the other side. Keeping her pace hard and fast, she executes a speed turn at the foot of the hill and races back up it. Her black, wicking force T-shirt – ‘POLICE’ embossed on the deltoids – is saturated with sweat. It evaporates off her in clouds. With Fartlek you have to push through the lactic-acid build – the bleed of pain in the long muscles. The nausea. You have to want to do it.

  Flea wants to do it. She wants to get back to fitness. She is sergeant of the force’s Underwater S
earch Unit – the police diving team. A woman in a man’s world and above everything she needs her body to be in tune. Over ten months ago she was hurt in an explosion in a tunnel which left her with muscle injuries to her thigh and a burst eardrum. It’s been a long haul getting fit again. But she’s made the most of it – she’s worked it and worked it. She is, quite simply, a different person from the one she was last year. In control – and things in her head are nicely spaced. It’s all been about putting things in boxes in her head. Closing lids. That’s the secret of flying – you never look down or over your shoulder.

  She abandons the hill and enters the pitch, moving into the easy running phase. She pounds along – the ground dry and cold underfoot. The turf pitch is unlit – the only luminance comes from the floodlights over on the Astro where a youth-alliance football team are doing morning training. The compression sleeve she had on her thigh for months is off now, and the air on it feels good. The burst eardrum got infected and held her back longer than she expected – she’s been at work but on restricted duties for eight months – she probably won’t be able to dive for another three weeks, after a visit to the barotrauma specialists in Plymouth to be formally ticked back into work. But her body feels organized, and for the first time in ages she thinks she looks nice too. She’s gained weight and her skin is healthy.

  As she transitions into the final minute of fast pace she realizes she’s being watched. A man is sitting on a bench in the arbour that leads to the car park – under a sweep of autumnal branches.

  She circuits the full five hundred metres, monitoring him with small glances as she does. The leaves are on the ground around him, and he wears a dark-blue gabardine jacket, the collar up, his elbows on his knees. His face is hard, set – he has a wide neck, intense blue eyes and thick dark hair kept very short. If he got up it would be a calm movement – one that people, especially women, would notice. Flea knows this because she knows who it is. It’s DI Jack Caffery.