Authors: Caro Ramsay
He sat back down, anger burning inside him, knocked the cup of tea down his throat and handed it back to the nurse.
Pregnant? Acid in her face? He shuddered at the cruelty of it.
With the warmth of morphine in her veins, she imagined the pain waving to her as it went, floating away on a sea of blood. It left her senses so sharp she could hear water gurgle in the pipes next door, could distinguish between the different phones at the end of the corridor. She could hear the policeman outside, stirring a cup of tea, the spoon tapping against the side of the cup. She could hear her daughter, breathing beside her…
In… out… in… out….
She could listen to that for ever.
They were talking about one of the policemen outside. ‘He’s lovely,
isn’t he, even though he’s so short? Kind of bite-sized? Huge kind brown eyes, like pools of–’
‘Sewage?’ the older voice suggested. ‘He’s not a Labrador. ’
‘He doesn’t have a girlfriend, you know.’ There was a slight giggle. ‘I bet I get a date with him before the end of the week.’
‘Too good-looking for his own good, that one,’ the other voice warned. ‘It’ll be tears before bedtime.’
She heard the creak of the door opening, a bump as it closed, then silence. She tried to imagine his face, a noble handsome face, eyes of burnt umber, hair the colour of sun on mahogany, and tried to give him a smile before he faded away to a cloud of morphine.
It was quiet in the hospital in the hour of the dead, that slow hour between 2 and 3 a.m. It reminded McAlpine of the night shift at the station. The clock clicked round, its tick ominously loud in the silence of the corridor, and music floated through from the IC station, where a nurse had a radio on quietly. He’d been sitting here, on and off, for the best part of four days. For something to do, he got up and went to the coffee machine down the landing.
The door of IC 2/3 opened; the red-headed nurse and the older one came out and returned to the station.
McAlpine also walked to the station, where he sat and sipped the vile coffee, deep in thought. He knew there was something nagging at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite touch it. He crushed the cup in his hand and chucked it in the bin. He heard a noise, a faint squeak. The door of IC 2/3 had been left open, and it moved slightly to and fro in the draught.
He looked up and down the corridor. Nobody was paying the slightest attention to him. The older nurse was on the phone, and the redhead was looking at her knee, picking something from the skin.
He got up, placed his hand on the steel handle of the door.
The room was a tomb of dark silence. He looked round, giving his eyes time to adjust. He had a vague sense of freshness, the smell of sea salt, not the stale air of his mother’s room. In the dull light he saw the incubator in the corner, empty, the white cellular blanket rumpled at the bottom. They must have taken the baby away for a wee while, to do whatever nurses do to babies.
She was lying in state. She could have been in a sarcophagus, the only movement the slight rise and fall of her stomach as the ventilator hissed and sighed life into her. He was unable to pull his eyes away, transfixed by the gauze that covered her face, her death mask, tantalizingly opaque, lines of blood beneath it like butterflies trapped in a web. He knew she was beautiful.
He stood back and took a deep breath.
He crossed himself.
Her feet looked cold in the blue light. He picked up each foot delicately by the heel and smoothed the white cotton underneath. Fine delicate feet with long elegant toes, a dancer’s feet, fragile and cold under his hands. Chilled. His finger traced the length of a vein on her instep, then caressed a little flaw round the base of her toe, a perfect white smile of a scar.
She was being pulled from sleep, up to the light. She lay quietly, listening to the silence, listening to the breathing at the end of her bed. She knew she was being studied. All her life men had looked at her, and she knew this too was a man.
She heard a deep sigh, felt a hand touch her foot. She waited for the prick of the injection.
Nothing, only the soft stroke of flesh against flesh. Slow, soothing A grip on her heel, firm yet delicate, almost a lover’s caress
…
‘You’re not supposed to be in here!’ The redhead was standing behind him, the look of a dispossessed wife on her face. ‘You could infect her.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Not that it’s going to make any difference.’
‘You don’t think she’s going to survive?’ McAlpine asked. ‘Why? Surely it’s only her face?’
‘Her face, her neck, her arms, her hands, her tummy.’ The nurse’s voice softened a little as she approached the bed, folding the yellow blanket over the bare feet. ‘Poor lass. She was pregnant and lying in acid. It burned deep. It’s sad. Come on.’ She gestured to him to follow her to the sluice room, where they kept the spare kettle. He had to hurry to keep up. ‘It’s the depth of the burn that matters. You know your body is basically water? If your skin comes off, as hers has, you leak, leading to dehydration, leading to failure of all the major organs. There’s nothing we can do for her, except wait.’ She pulled two mugs from a cupboard. ‘Sometimes they get an infection that glows in the dark. Gives them the heebie-jeebies in the morgue if they don’t wash the body properly.’
‘If she’s as ill as all that, why keep her tied up? Hardly likely to do a runner is she?’ asked McAlpine.
The nurse sighed, tilting her head to one side, as if forming an explanation for a slightly stupid child. ‘Her instinct would be to claw the dressings off, and that would allow infection in, so she’s tied for her own good.’
‘So she lies there in frustration?’
‘But safe from nasty bugs as long as daft cops don’t keep going in and out, touching her.’
McAlpine ignored the jibe. ‘She was pregnant. She would have attended a clinic. Where would she go, do you think, in the West End?’
‘You not from round here?’ she asked, fishing.
‘No, Skelmorlie.’
‘Now that’s a one-horse town.’
‘And the horse died of boredom. What prenatal clinics are near here, then?’
‘Might be the Dumbarton Road Clinic, but women like that, you know, they don’t exactly look after themselves, do they?’
‘Women like what?’ McAlpine bridled.
‘Well, you know, that end of Highburgh Road, down on her arse. She’s a hooker. Must have been.’
McAlpine shook his head. Vice would have had her on file. She had no phone numbers, no… He shook his head again.
‘And you’d know?’ The redhead licked her lips slowly. ‘She was a hooker, I tell you.’
‘You talk to her when you’re in there? Do you think she can hear anything?’
The nurse blew on her coffee, pursing her lips and looking at him through the steam. ‘It’s never been proved that people in coma have any awareness of anything, but we put the baby in there just in case she can hear or sense something. She’s probably brain-damaged, deaf, dumb and blind.’
‘Should play a mean pinball,’ McAlpine muttered.
Every day that passed her sense of smell got stronger. She knew he smoked. He wore aftershave, he smelled nice.
And she could smell the sweet milkiness, the soft breath of the little person, the little bit of herself who lay by her side, so close but too far away. More than anything she wanted to touch her baby, to cuddle
and caress her. She needed someone to lift her up and place her daughter in her arms.
She thought about the policeman, the young one with the kind brown eyes, sitting just beyond the door.
Kinstray, the landlord at 256A Highburgh Road, was blind and hunchbacked. He stood in the narrow crack of the door, wearing a beige cardigan that was more holes than wool, one red hand held up to protect rheumy eyes from the sun, the other feeling the card carefully between his thumb and the palm of his hand.
Would that be more polis?’ he asked.
Two minutes of monosyllabic conversation revealed that Kinstray had little to add to his statement. His speech was so Glaswegian McAlpine found himself subconsciously translating everything the man said. It was a sin what happened to the lassie, he said. She was quiet; he’d heard she was a looker, but he wouldn’t know, would he? She paid her rent in advance.
‘How far in advance?’
‘Right up tae the end o’ July. Paid it aw up front, the minute she arrived. Wisnae too bothered when ah said she wouldnae get it back if she left early.’
‘And she’d been here for…’
The bony shoulders shrugged. ‘Months.’
McAlpine sighed. ‘How many months? Look, I’m not interested in how much she paid you, but I need to know when she came here.’
‘April, it was. Four months.’
‘You didn’t know she was pregnant?’
‘If I’d known that, she wouldnae’ve got her foot in the door. That’s just trouble. I foond oot later, though.’ He sniffed in disgust.
‘And you didn’t know her name?’
‘Don’t know she ever told me, son. Paid cash. No need for references, ah ask nae questions. It’s no’ against the law.’
McAlpine thought it probably was against some law somewhere, but continued, ‘No visitors?’
‘How would ah know, son? She wis in the top room, she’d her own bell. Came and went as she pleased.’
‘But you did see –
meet
her, at some point?’ McAlpine probed gently. ‘You must have gained some sense of her, some impression? Tall? Thin? Fat? Clever? Thick?’
Kinstray’s tongue probed at the side of his mouth, thinking. ‘Slim, young, she moved light on her feet, even heavy with the child. She wore a nice scent, like spring flowers. She was polite…’ He sighed slightly.
‘Local?’
‘Wouldnae’ve said so, son. She was polite but’ – he considered – ‘she wis carefully spoken, like, you know? Not stuck up but polite, like a lady. Well brought up now, that’s what ah would say.’ He nodded as if the answer was the best he could do and he was pleased with it.
‘How long have you been here, Mr Kinstray? In this house?’ McAlpine asked.
‘Thirty-two years, thereabouts.’
‘Could you place her accent?’
Kinstray smiled, a sudden rush of humour lightened his face. ‘Wisnae English, she spoke it too well.’
‘I know what you mean. You don’t mind if I look around?’ McAlpine chose his words carefully – this wasn’t an official visit.
‘Dae what ye want. You boys took a load o’ stuff away. Told them, end o’ the month, any’hing in her room is in the bin, unless ye can get somebody tae claim it. Shame.’
He tutted, arthritic fingers feeling for the door handle. ‘Shame.’
The building was tall, narrow, stale and dark, and uneasily silent. As McAlpine reached the second-floor landing, someone came out of one of the rooms and locked the door behind them. McAlpine registered the prime example of Glaswegian manhood immediately: dirty-haired, undernourished, hardly out of his teens and scared of his own shadow.
‘Just a minute,’ McAlpine called, as the youngster made to scuttle past him to the stairs. ‘Number 12A, up on the fourth floor – did you know her?’
McAlpine stood in his way, receiving a nervous flash of stained teeth.
‘Did you?’ he repeated.
‘No. No… I wouldn’t be knowing about that. She never spoke to me, but she would pass a smile on the stairs. That’s all.’
McAlpine noticed the Highland lilt. Not a Glaswegian, then. ‘Pretty girl?’
The ratlike teeth flashed again, the thin fingers grasped the leather book he was holding even more tightly. McAlpine saw a glimpse of compassion, a slightly pained expression, before the young man dropped his eyes to the book he was holding, his thumb riffling the gold-edged pages. McAlpine recognized the Bible.
‘I wouldn’t be knowing about that,’ he repeated, eyes still downcast.
McAlpine was about to ask him if he was blind as well, but the young man stood back, gave a slight bow and turned to go down the stairs. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be late for a lecture.’
‘But you know she was badly hurt? Sunday? 26th of June. Teatime? Do you remember – ?’
‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’ The blue eyes looked more troubled, guilty even.
‘Look, pal, one question.’ McAlpine’s voice whiplashed down the stairs. Where would you say she was from?’
The other man stopped, shrugged. ‘I couldn’t tell you that. But I saw her with an
A to Z,
so she wasn’t from round here.’ He sighed and looked up to the ceiling. ‘I’m sorry, I never spoke more than two words to her.’ And he was gone, taking his guilt with him.
McAlpine lit up a Marlboro on the top landing after the four-flight climb, leaning outside the single toilet, flicking the cracked terracotta floor tiles with the toe of his boot. The smell of stale urine seeped out on to the stairwell. He tried to see those little feet padding their way through there, and couldn’t. He pulled the nicotine deep into his lungs, kissing a plume of smoke from his lips to freshen the air.
The door of bedsit 12A opened with the touch of a fingertip to reveal a room frozen in time, circa 1974. The fluttering of the tiny drawings around the bed gave McAlpine the impression somebody had just walked out of sight. The air was heavy with mould and dampness; the chill in the air had been hanging there for years. McAlpine ground his cigarette underfoot and took a deep breath before going in. Going through dead men’s stuff was one thing. This was something else.
A narrow single bed with a white plastic padded headboard under the cracked roof. The bedding had been dumped on the floor in a routine police search, the mattress left crooked on the base.
Everything was brown, beige or mouldy, and the room
stank of depression. He shivered. He couldn’t imagine those beautiful feet treading across that filthy carpet, creeping down the cold stairs to the smelly toilet. He couldn’t place
her
in this room at all; it was all wrong.
The smell was getting to him. He opened the door of the fridge and closed it again quickly. The meter had run out, the fridge had stopped chilling, and mould had launched biological warfare. He took a deep breath, opened it again and had a closer look. Nothing he could identify, but the botanical garden where the salad tray used to be suggested a healthy diet. Another thing that didn’t add up.