Never Ending (2 page)

Just then, a break in the rhododendrons to their left brings a surprisingly large lake into view in the lower part of the grounds, a flash of sun silvering its breeze-chipped surface before it disappears again behind a conifer hedge.

The sight of the water is so fleeting she can almost believe she imagined it.

It’s a lake
, she tells herself.
That’s all. Nothing to be afraid of
.

Even so, by the time Dad slows the car to a halt in the courtyard, her breathing is only just beginning to return to normal.

He kills the engine and they sit quietly for a moment. If he spotted the lake as well, he doesn’t say so; but her reaction can’t have escaped him. He’s busying himself with paperwork from the folder in the glove compartment, although there can’t be a document in there he hasn’t checked five times today. A couple of cars are parked here already and Shiv wonders if they belong to the parents of some of the other new arrivals and, if so, when she’ll get to meet them. And what they’ll be like. And why they’re here.

Shiv swallows. Dries her palms on the legs of her cut-offs. They’re both still wearing their seat belts, she realizes. Like they’re ready for a quick getaway if either of them changes their mind.

“You’d think someone would come out to greet us,” Dad says.

As though his words have caused it to happen, a door opens in one of the buildings across the yard and a woman emerges – no more than a silhouette, in the glare – her footsteps clicking on the brick cobbles as she approaches the car.

Behind her, fixed to the wall, is a sign, neat blue text on a grey background:

Welcome to the Korsakoff Clinic

1

The formalities of Shiv’s admission fill the rest of the afternoon. Dad is with her initially – signing papers and so on – but (too soon) it’s time for him to leave.

They say their goodbyes in the parking area, her suitcase propped beside them like an obedient dog. Dad draws Shiv into a hug, crushing her, kissing the side of her face. He smells of tuna mayo and sugary tea.

“Bye,” she manages to say.

“Bye, love.” He whispers the words in her ear. “Take care of yourself, eh?”

She wants him to call her
Shivvers
again, but he doesn’t. When they break apart she sees that one of her hairs has come away, snagged in the bristles Dad missed with his razor. It looks as though someone has written the letter C on his jaw in thin black pencil. His eyes are pink, moist.

“You can
do
this,” Dad says.

She can’t tell whether he’s trying to reassure her, or himself. From his tone, he might almost be pleading with her.

Back in the clinic’s reception suite Shiv composes herself, dries her face, tries to concentrate on the next stage. They show her a list of “forbidden items” which she must hand in for safekeeping. Cigarettes, lighters, matches, scissors, razors, drugs (recreational), drugs (medicinal), alcohol – that sort of thing. Along with just about every kind of electrical equipment. No iPod while she’s here then; no phone (although there’s no signal round here in any case, she’s told). Money is on the list, too – cash and cards (debit and credit) – and she has to give up her young person’s railcard.

No distractions. No self-harm. No running off.

The fact that she doesn’t have any prescription drugs raises an eyebrow. She was on sedatives for a few weeks right after it happened, she admits … but, no, she’s not taking anything now. Her counsellor, her GP think she should be. But she isn’t.

They check her case to make sure she hasn’t tried to sneak anything through.

Next, a medical. A young nurse in a blue tunic –
Zena
, the name-tag says – escorts her into an examination room that smells of antiseptic and is so clean and shiny Shiv feels grubby just setting foot inside. The slender, fair-skinned nurse, with wispy blond hair and ice-blue eyes, barely looks out of her teens.

“You get to examine me?” Shiv asks.

“Don’t worry, I wear surgical gloves for the really intimate stuff.”

Her tone, her smile make it clear this is a joke, meant to ease the tension. Shiv fixes her with a look. Nurse Zena reminds her of a water nymph in a picture book she had as a child.

“There’s nothing
wrong
with me,” Shiv tells her. “Physically, I mean.”

Zena hands Shiv a gown and indicates a changing area behind a screen. “Blood pressure, temperature, heartbeat, weight, blood sample – that’s all it is. Oh, and you pee into a bottle.” She pauses, smiling again. Friendly. “You do that bit in private.”

After the medical, Shiv is escorted to the main building, to her room on the second floor. She has an en suite bathroom to herself. She’s one of six residents, she’s told: four female, two male, aged from thirteen to seventeen.

That word again.
Residents
. Not patients.

Shiv will get to meet them all at dinner, her escort says.

Alone in her room, she heaves the suitcase onto the bed, opens it and begins stowing her clothes in the wardrobe and the drawers underneath. She’s always done this whenever she goes anywhere. First job: unpack.

Her brother
never
unpacked, content to pull clothes from his case as and when he needed them.

The suitcase is the one she took to Kyritos. Of course; it’s her only one. She must have known it while she was packing to come here, but the realisation has only just struck her. The flight labels have long been removed but the red ribbon she fastened to the handle for easy identification on the luggage carousel is still attached.

Shiv considers untying it, throwing it away. In the end, she decides to leave it.

The room is OK in a functional kind of way. As well as the wardrobe and narrow bed, there’s a not-quite-comfy-looking brown armchair – IKEA, at a guess – and a small chest of drawers. The furniture is pine-effect, the walls and ceiling plain white, while the curtains and carpet are patterned in yellow and brown swirls, to match the duvet and pillowcase. It puts her in mind of chocolate sponge and custard. A print of lollipop-shaped trees hangs on one wall.

It’s like a room in a cheap hotel.

Her determination to be optimistic, to go into this with the right attitude, shudders as the “other” Siobhan, the girl who wants to smash things, rears her head again. It’s an effort to ignore her, but Shiv manages. Centres herself. Focuses on the bedroom, on the window, which is ajar, a breeze pushing half-heartedly at the curtains. From some way off comes the plaintive, lonely cry of a pheasant.

She wants to speak to Dad.

The loss of her phone, the lack of a signal even if she still had it, only sharpen the urge to call him. Not that she knows what she’d say.

The phone was switched off the whole way here and she hasn’t checked for messages since breakfast. As usual, there weren’t any. She’s had it a week, since that journalist somehow got hold of the number for the old one, and she has only let a few people have the new number. Dad, Mum, the counsellor, Laura and Katy. Neither of her friends has made contact. OK, so they’re out of the country – Laura, kayaking in Colorado; Katy, touring Italy with her folks in that huge camper van. Too busy having the time of their lives to type:
hey shiv how u doin?
Those end-of-term hugs and tears and
miss-you
s; the promises to keep in touch. Yet, when school broke up, Shiv got the impression Laura and Katy were secretly relieved not to have to see her for the summer. Or speak to her.

But, then, she hasn’t contacted them either. They don’t even know she’s here. Her “best” friends have no idea how she’s doing. All the talking they’ve done, or not done, since she returned from Greece has only made Shiv see how far apart they’ve been driven by what happened.

Shiv goes to the window. It’s after six and the day is still full of light. Her room overlooks a vegetable plot to the rear of Eden Hall and, beyond that, an apple orchard, then rough pasture that rises to meet the wooded hill she saw from the drive.

No view of the lake, then. That’s something to be glad about.

A droning noise snags her attention. She spots the plane, high overhead, the sound seeming to come from somewhere else altogether. Shiv wonders where it’s headed. Not Kyritos, she supposes. She pictures the passengers, watching a movie, eating a meal, peering down at a miniaturized landscape – oblivious to her, thousands of metres below.

It seems a lifetime ago, that flight. Or something that happened in another life, to someone else. A pretty stewardess, handing out boiled sweets to people to ease the discomfort in their ears during take-off; her brother asking for two, one for each ear. The stewardess laughing, like it was the first time she’d heard that joke.

The tears come. So often they come, these days. Great gulping sobs that escape from her throat faster than she can breathe.

At last, the tears stop. She stands there, braced against the windowsill.

“Jee-
zuss
, what is this
carpet
all about?”

Startled, Shiv twists round to see an older girl in the doorway, her scarlet mini-dress a shocking gash of colour.

“Yellow and brown?
Really?
” the girl continues. “Is the decor sponsored by the Brownies or something?” She gestures at the window. “No wonder you were going to
jump
. Although, hmm, second floor – is that gonna be high enough, d’you think?”

Shiv laughs, despite herself. Wipes her cheeks with the cuff of her hoodie. She’s cried in front of too many strangers to care about adding another to the list.

“I’m
Caron
. With a C.” The girl points at the wall with the lollipop-trees picture. “I’m next door. We can tap messages in code to each other in the night.” She smiles in the pause that follows. “OK, this is where you say
your
name.”

“Oh … Shiv.”

The older girl frowns. “That’s not a name, that’s a
syllable
.”

Another laugh escapes Shiv. “It’s short for Siobhan.” She does the it’s-Irish-but-I’m-not explanation.

“Well, hi, Shiv-short-for-Siobhan.”

Caron steps further into the room and performs a pirouette in the centre of the swirly carpet. She has jet-black hair down to her bare shoulders and a fringe cut on the diagonal. Shiv watches her slip off her shoes – high-heeled, scarlet, to match the dress. Her lipstick is the same vibrant colour and so are her earrings.

“These are
killing
me.” She flicks the shoes away with her toes. “But if I pack them in the case they crush.” Then, indicating the bed, “D’you mind?” She flops down.

Shiv ought to feel invaded. She’s not usually keen on people with what Mum calls “big personalities”, but she can’t help liking this girl. After a few minutes with Caron, she feels a hundred times better than when she was sobbing at the window.

“Seven bloody
hours
,” Caron groans. She’s lying on her back, legs dangling off the end of the bed, arms raised, performing tai chi-type movements, as though painting the ceiling with an invisible brush. “Where’ve you travelled from, Shiv?”

Shiv sits in the armchair. Names the town where she lives.

Caron stops mid-brushstroke and eases up onto her elbows. “Siobhan who?” She stares at Shiv. Serious all of a sudden.

Shiv could make something up but decides not to. “Siobhan Faverdale.”

Caron sits up properly, eyes still fixed on Shiv’s face. Almost in a whisper, she says, “My
God
, you’re the sister of that boy.”

It’s Caron’s idea to take a stroll in the grounds before dinner. After a day on the road, a walk and some fresh air will do them both good. Shiv suspects the real reason is to jolt them out of the sombre mood that’s taken hold.

Caron heads back to her own room and reappears in a pair of crimson sandals.

“D’you only wear red?” Shiv asks.

“Nooo, because that would be weird, don’t you think?”

Outside, they wander aimlessly along the gravel paths of a rose garden. It’s a mild evening, the day’s warmth leaching from the ground, the air fragrant with roses and wood smoke and cut grass. The distress that overwhelmed her at the window is spent; in its place, calm has settled on Shiv, so total she can’t quite believe how upset she’d been. It’s always like this afterwards. After her violent outbursts too.

“You nervous about all this?” Caron asks.

“Yeah,” Shiv says. “Me and therapy don’t really get on.”

“Jee-zuss,
tell
me about it.”

Shiv wants to ask why Caron’s here but isn’t sure how she’d take it. She doesn’t know what to make of her. The clothes, the brash self-confidence, it’s not how she’d expect someone to be, checking into any psychiatric clinic, let alone this one.

As soon as they’re out of sight of the main building, Caron hoiks up her dress and shoves a hand in her knickers. “’Scuse me,” she says, producing a lighter and two cigarettes. “
Some
things they can confiscate, some they
can’t
.”

She lights one of the cigarettes and offers the second to Shiv.

Shiv gapes at her. “OK, one, I don’t smoke; and, two…” She gestures at where the cigarette had come from.

“Oh, right. Fair point.”

They continue out of the rose garden, passing through an arch in a hedge and up some stone steps, to find themselves in a kind of grotto around an ornamental pond.

“This place is meant to be different though,” Shiv says, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. “It’s supposed to
work
.”

“So they
say
.” Caron draws on the cigarette; exhales, directing the smoke away from Shiv. She nods at a weathered wooden bench. “You want to sit down for a bit?”

“I thought you wanted to walk?” Shiv says.

“We
have
walked.”

“We’ve only come about two hundred metres.”

“Shiv, ’
Zuss
, what are you – some kind of
fitness
freak
?”

“No, I just—”

“A triathlete or something. I mean, how
old
are you anyway?”