Poppet (41 page)

He goes through security – running the gauntlet of the local uniforms, the security staff puffing themselves up and acting big because the real cops are here. Some of the patients in one of the wards have come to the window to peer out – wondering what has come to pieces in the unit. He can hear them wailing and giggling.

A face appears at the window, grinning at him. A white woman in her thirties who’s been eating something red and sticky which is now smeared across her face, giving her the appearance of a lioness after a kill. She lolls her tongue lasciviously at him. Makes a kissy face. He continues across the central domed area towards the place called Myrtle Ward, following the two uniformed cops who are escorting him.

The place smells like a slaughterhouse toilet. The walls are covered in hand- and footprints, and every wall corner has a padded strip – like in a boxing ring. There’s an overlying fug of dismay and sadness and fear in the place. It makes him feel even emptier than he did before.

Handel has been arrested – there was a scuffle, but he’s been moved to an empty bedroom on Myrtle where he is waiting for a consultant to give him a psychiatric evaluation before he can be interviewed and charged. Caffery looks through a window and sees him sitting on his bunk, his hands in cuffs. His nose has bled all over the baggy jeans he’s wearing. He’s refused a medical exam, insisting he’s OK.

Melanie Arrow, meanwhile, is still in the seclusion room. Four members of Flea’s team stand at the door, the visors on their riot gear lifted. At their feet is a Stanley knife, bagged.

‘There’s blood,’ Caffery says, looking at it.

‘Yeah, but it hasn’t been used,’ replies one of the cops. ‘It just got in the way. Handel had a clout on the nose when we went in – there was a bit of claret floating around, got on to everything. Including this.’

‘How about her?’

‘Quiet. Compliant. She’s been asked if she wants to come out but says no, so I guess it’s an arrest sitch.’

‘Yes. Yes.’ All the way here Caffery’s been trying to work out what he can arrest her with. Usually in a case like this they’ll start with something easy to prove, then up the charge when the dust has settled and they’ve had time to think. He looks through the window. Melanie is sitting with her head lowered, as if she’s studying her hands. There are one or two spots of blood on her white blouse. More on the floor. It’s still a leap to believe what Jonathan Keay and AJ are telling him about her.

He opens the door. She raises her eyes calmly.

‘Hello,’ she says. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Melanie.’

‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

She lifts her face – a bright smile pasted there. Her eyes are blank. ‘You’re so kind. But I think on this occasion I’ll decline, if it’s all the same to you. I think I’ll just go home now.’

She gets to her feet and walks towards him as if it hasn’t even occurred to her that he might object. He puts a bit of width into his shoulders and moves his foot so he is blocking the door.

She stops a pace away from him and drops her head again. Studying his feet – trying to decide how on earth this obstacle came to be in her path.

‘I’d rather you came to the station,’ Caffery says. ‘I don’t think home is a good idea – under the circumstances.’

There’s a long pause. It is so quiet he can hear the breath whistling in and out of her nose. Then she says, in a voice straight from the Gloucester sink estate she grew up on: ‘And you don’t have any fucking right to be speaking to me like that.’

‘I’m being civil. Do you want to extend the same courtesy to me?’

‘This is my unit.’

‘You haven’t answered my question. Are you going to be civil?’

Melanie lifts her chin and spits at Caffery. It hits him on the eyebrow. Drips into his eye, stinging. He wants to wipe it off, but he doesn’t. He smiles.

‘Thank you for that. I’ve been trying to decide what I was going to arrest you for.’

Teeth

IT’S KIND OF
fitting that Halloween is coming – the time when pumpkins get scooped out and displayed – because that’s the way AJ feels just now. Like someone has ladled out every piece of hope and light and love his body could contain. What’s left in the place he was holding Melanie is nothing.

When Jack Caffery has accompanied her, cuffed and escorted by two cops, to a waiting car, the Big Lurch comes by and puts a hand on AJ’s arm. He squeezes it. Doesn’t say anything, but AJ gets the message.
I understand. When you’re ready to talk, I’m here
.

AJ nods. Mutters a ‘thank you’. The Big Lurch wanders off, leaving AJ standing helplessly in the corridor – not knowing what to do with himself, wishing he could sit down somewhere. He thinks about calling Patience. Then he imagines telling her what has happened. She’ll be sympathetic, but there will be an under-note of
I told you so
in her voice – and he can’t face that. Instead he finds himself back in his office, holding the crude picture Zelda drew – the first thing that sent him on the hunt for Isaac. And now he sees, as he runs his fingers over it, that it has been added to after the original drawing. The paint is higher and fresher than the rest.

He shakes his head. It’s like holding a kaleidoscope to your eye – growing more and more conscious of the intricate possibilities presented. Melanie – sweet, funny Melanie – is like a million different-coloured pieces of glass, reflecting back the colours the observer wants to see. She worked hard to get Handel’s tribunal to release him – hoping he’d walk out of the unit carrying all the stigma of The Maude with him. It never dawned on her that Isaac knew what she was doing.

AJ goes back to Myrtle Ward. Down the corridor to the room where Isaac Handel is sitting, waiting for a psychiatric appraisal before he can be taken into custody. AJ nods at the cop sitting outside, unlocks the door and enters.

Isaac is sitting dejectedly on the bed. He looks up when AJ comes in, but doesn’t speak. He is deathly pale. His jeans are covered in blood and there are twin lines of blood coming from his nostrils. He’s a mess. After they’ve cleaned him up, they’re going to put him through the wringer – drag him in front of a hundred courts and then the system is going to end up putting Handel back in a place just like Beechway. Except this time he’ll be at the head of the chain – in high-dependency Acute, with a very very long wait until he cycles back to discharge. Years, probably.

AJ doesn’t speak at first. Instead he drops back against the wall, his chin lifted, and slides down until he’s sitting on the floor opposite Isaac. He rubs his face a few times. He’s known the guy for years and yet never noticed that actually Isaac is the strangest guy on the planet. He’s tiny. The pudding-basin haircut is freaky and ridiculous. Unbelievable that AJ’s been so nervous about him.

‘Isaac,’ AJ says, ‘tell me something …’

Isaac lifts his head. His eyes aren’t on AJ – they are somewhere on the ceiling, as if AJ’s voice is being projected from up there. His hands are clenched. There is so much blood. Everywhere.

‘Yes, AJ?’

‘The dolls,’ he says, almost not wanting to hear the answer. Because he thinks he can answer this himself. ‘Tell me about the poppets.’

‘I lost my poppets. I did lose them. From being bad.’

‘You were bad?’

He nods. His face is so pale it’s almost blue. He is shivering. ‘And so she took them off of me. The Maude.’

AJ stares at the side of Isaac’s face. He flashes back to Melanie’s bathroom. The broken panel. The missing bracelet. Could she have planted the notion of the broken panel as a way to focus AJ’s attention on the bath – just so he’d find the dolls in Handel’s room? The biblical scripts – she could have written them out herself. She’s been so clever pinning this on Isaac – looking back it’s been as dizzying as watching a circus acrobat.

‘OK. And something else. Why did you do what you did to your parents? To your mother and father?’

Isaac answers the question as automatically as a child answering the question
What’s one plus one?
‘I didn’t like them biting. Didn’t like their teeth.’

‘Biting?’

‘Uh hmmm,’ he says, nodding. ‘Used to get teeth when I didn’t play the games they wanted.’

AJ is silent for a long time, picturing this. What other cruelty is locked away in Isaac’s head? He wants to say sorry – he wants to touch Isaac, but before he can, Isaac draws in a long, shaky breath. His voice is very small, very distant. ‘Something else, AJ,’ he murmurs. ‘One more thing.’

‘What?’

‘It’s only going to last another few minutes. That’s all it’s going to last. You are going to think it’s finished then. But it hasn’t. The end isn’t here yet.’

‘Isaac?’ AJ tilts his head on one side. Frowns. ‘The end? What are you talking about?’

Isaac doesn’t answer. He’s smiling, but his eyes are glassy. His expression fixed. AJ levers himself up and away from the wall. Stands and crosses to the bunk.

‘Isaac?’

AJ is long experienced. He should have picked up on this like an eagle. But it’s passed him right by. Blood bubbles from Isaac’s mouth. His lips are grey.

‘Isaac.’ He grabs him, but Isaac falls against him, suddenly heavy. His eyes roll back. ‘
Isaac – Jesus
. HELP!’ he yells. He fumbles for the alarm cylinder on his belt. ‘
Paramedics
– get the fucking paramedics in here now.’

2 November

MONSTER MOTHER HAS
given birth to some of the worst beings, yet each and every one is her offspring. She has responsibility for them all, good or bad. The Day of the Dead is here – All Souls’ Day – the day when the souls of the departed come back to visit their loved ones. It is a time of turmoil for Monster Mother. She is pulled to and fro by the voices of her departed children.

Dressing is a particularly confusing problem. How can she put a colour to a day which is so varied – so striped with good and bad – peppered with sadness and happiness? She has the overhead light on as she goes through her wardrobe, choosing what to wear. The curtains are closed – the spirits are all out there, wanting to be let in – zipping back and forth outside the window. She doesn’t dare look yet – if she does, her head will be pulled from one side to the other, so fast it will come loose from her neck.

Her missing arm has a spirit – a spirit that is dark pink. Crimson. Like the sex and the anger that made her cut it away. So for her dead arm she chooses crimson shoes. Pauline, poor Pauline – her spirit is so thin it can’t be heard above the others. She is the pale, leached-out yellow of the camisole that Monster Mother chooses. Zelda was a bad girl – so bad and so alive – she was a firecracker and the red headband at the back of the wardrobe is for her.

Next to consider is Ms Arrow. The Maude.

What colour for her? She is patchwork, light on dark. When she was happy the hospital was a safe place. When she was unhappy, The Maude slid along the corridors. Found ways through locked doors in the dark. Goosebumps pop along Monster Mother’s arms just thinking about The Maude. The greed and the anger, the cleverness. Melanie Arrow is gone from the hospital – but her anger, her power and her need reach out from the police cell like radio waves and search for Monster Mother. She plucks out a pair of gloves. They are of a purple velvet that appears almost black in some lights. From other angles it’s a radiant violet. As pretty and deceptive as deadly nightshade.

Lastly she chooses her skirt. It takes some time, because the skirt represents Isaac and Isaac is so many things. So so many things. So clever and so sad. So unpredictable.

The skirt she chooses is flesh-coloured crepe under a white net into which have been stitched a million silver sequins. Isaac was the colour of nothing – no one noticed him. But for those who saw him in the right way he was also a million points of light. From the moment he was discharged from the hospital, Monster Mother knew he’d be the one to deliver justice to Melanie Arrow.

She holds the skirt up to her face, the sequins rough nubbles on her skin. Isaac is dead but he isn’t gone. He isn’t finished. He is clever and he is a universe of stars.

She slips the clothes on. And when she is quite sure she is ready she opens the curtains. The spirits see her and they are cowed. They bow, lamb-like. They sit obediently on the grass. She smiles at them, blows kisses to some, shoots fond but warning looks at others.

‘Gabriella?’

She startles. Someone is knocking at the door. Lately there have been strange people in the hospital, asking questions. Making notes. People she doesn’t recognize, all wearing suits, carrying clipboards. She doesn’t want one in here. She searches the room for a place to scuttle to.

‘Gabriella? It’s me – it’s AJ. Can I come in?’

AJ. The finest of her children. She relaxes. She floats to the door and opens it. There he stands. She loves him so.

‘Dear AJ,’ she says. ‘Dear son.’

‘I’m knocking off shift now, Gabriella. Thought I’d come in and say …’ He trails off, taking in her clothes. ‘Nice. You look … nice. Are you OK?’

‘Yes. I am, thank you. And I am here – inside my skin.’ She smiles. ‘Today is an important day. Today is the day I care for my children. And you, AJ? You need caring for. I can see.’

‘Do I?’

‘You do. No one else knows, but I do. I know you so well, I gave birth to you, and I know. There’s a hole in you now. A giant hole and you think it can’t be filled.’

AJ lowers his head and touches a finger to his forehead. ‘I’ll be going,’ he says, his voice tight. He turns hurriedly for the door. ‘Have a lovely day, Gabriella, you look wonderful.’

‘AJ?’

‘What?’

‘Be careful, AJ. Be careful. We all love you.’

Eden Hole Cottages

ACONSULTANCY TEAM FROM
the Trust is busily reviewing care procedures at Beechway and several of the security staff have been suspended pending investigation. Some of the patients have been moved to a secure intensive-therapy unit outside Bath.

Beechway is already getting back on its feet – but AJ isn’t.