The Shadows in the Street (3 page)

‘You OK?’

Marie sounded odd. She had her head turned away.

‘Nothing that won’t go away. I’m off, Abs, I’ve had it. You walking back a bit my way?’

It was a couple of miles to the field and Marie’s caravan. She carried flat shoes in her pockets, put them on instead of the heels once she was ready to go, and as she bent down to pull one on, Abi caught a glimpse of her face.

‘You want to get that bash seen to, Marie. Did you take his number? You don’t have to put up with that stuff – you can go to the cops, you know, if you get their number.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘You can.’

‘That’s what you’d do then?’

‘Only saying.’

‘Well, fuckin’ don’t.’ Marie wobbled as she put on the second shoe.

‘I don’t mind going to the top with you, only I’ve got to get back to the kids.’

‘Nah. You’re all right.’ Marie waited.

‘What?’

Marie pointed to the carrier.

‘Yeah.’ Abi picked it up. Reached inside.

Two Hundred Tea Bags. Full Flavour. Economy size.

Three

Nothing happened for a day, sometimes, miraculously, even a couple of days. Everything went on as usual; she got up, made breakfast, drove the children to school, did her job, shopped, collected the children, made supper. It was dry or it rained; it was cold or mild. The world turned. And then the grief roared up towards her again quite without warning, hit her so hard it took her breath away and left her sobbing or shaking, sick or terrified, a tidal wave of recollection and misery and hopelessness.

Cat Deerbon opened the door of her car and then leaned against it for a moment, head on her arm, trembling with tears that seemed to come from somewhere in the depths of her body, another wave with the power to knock her off her feet. Behind her, the lights of Imogen House fanned out onto the tarmac. It was twenty to ten.

She had been fine for the past half-hour or so, altering the dosage of a patient’s pain relief, talking to a family, even fine while she had been examining Cassie Porter and sitting by her bed, listening to her, holding her hand. Fine discussing Cassie and another two cases with the night sister. Fine having a cup of tea with Lois, the receptionist. Fine. And all the time knowing that she would not be fine once she had left the building and stopped being a duty doctor and could let her guard drop. Fine, until she was alone.

Cassie Porter was twenty-seven and dying of a brain tumour.

People did. This was a hospice. Cat was a doctor.

A year ago, her husband, Chris, had died of the same type of brain tumour, though not here but at home, in their bed, as she lay with her arms around him. He had sent plenty of his own patients into Imogen House, he was hugely supportive of the place and encouraged Cat to do more palliative care work. But he had refused to be admitted there himself, refused to die anywhere but at home. Cat did not know whether the fact that at least there were no memories of his death held forever in the hospice made it easier to work there or not. Nothing affected her either more or less. It got worse. That was all. Time passing made it worse. People told her it got better and people were wrong.

She wept on, tears running down her arm and onto her hand. Tears were infinite and the well was bottomless. She had learned that now. In a few moments they would cease, but there was always, always, the next time, in an hour or a day. Tears were exhausting, uncontrollable and ultimately pointless, but now they were as much part of her life as hunger or the need to breathe.

The only thing time had done was teach her to accept that.

A car turned in through the gates and parked in the visitors’ area. Cat had encouraged Cassie Porter’s family to come in now. She didn’t think Cassie would die that night but it was better to doubt her own clinical judgement, have the relatives there, ensure that there was time for things to be said before a patient slipped into a last unconsciousness. Better to be wrong, better that they had time to talk again, to say the loving words over and over, than that the chance was missed forever. Because Chris had died at home it had been easier. She had been there most of the time, the children in and out. Yet not everything had been said. They had talked, but last things had been left unspoken because Chris had preferred it, cut her short if it had seemed she was trying to say what he refused to hear. In the end, she thought now, Chris had never been able to face the fact that he was dying. That was why he had not allowed her to say some of the things that she would now never be able to say. It had been his choice, his right, but it was unfinished business and somewhere half buried within her, Cat knew, was anger and frustration because of it.

Perhaps that was partly why she was crying now, why the tsunami of grief had swamped her so that she would have to wait in the car until she felt sufficiently in control to drive home. Perhaps. Or perhaps there was never a specific reason. Missing Chris, feeling totally bereft of him, wanting him back, sinking to the depths every time she remembered that he would never come back, longing for him so that she felt ill and incapable of functioning as a human being – all of it needed no prompting, like some memories that were touched by a piece of music, or a chance remark, or going into a particular building. All of it was now part of her, wrapped around her like a second skin. The best she could hope for were some periods when she was occupied and preoccupied enough to be unaware, as one can sometimes be unaware of pain for a short time during sleep.

She watched two women and a man walk through the entrance. The Porters. At the moment, every bed in the hospice was occupied, and the day unit could barely cope. This was how it ebbed and flowed, though the place was never really quiet. Too many people dying, Cat thought, too many people in pain. Too many.

The car smelled faintly of disinfectant. Felix had been sick on the way home from nursery and she had had to scrub out the back seat. Disinfectant, ‘the horrible hospital smell’, Hannah had once said. When Chris had been dying, Cat had made sure there was no ‘horrible hospital smell’ in the house and kept his drugs in a separate locked cupboard in the bathroom, not wanting the paraphernalia of illness and dying to invade the house because he had so desperately needed to remain ‘home’. She had succeeded. The one pain she did not have to endure was that of having to send him to die anywhere else – even this hospice.

She wiped her eyes. Felt quieter. For the time being it was over. She was better able to save her bouts of grief for when she was on her own now, concerned above all not to distress the children. At the beginning, they had cried together – save for Felix, who had been too young to understand what had happened, and that had been nothing but good, she was sure. But after a few weeks, Sam did not cry at all, or if he did it was, like her, in private, and Hannah’s tears, though they still came, were short-lived. Hannah responded to comfort, some cheerful words, an assurance that sadness about Chris’s death was right and good, but that she did not have to feel guilty about allowing this sadness to pass.

‘I don’t think I’m worried about Hannah, you know,’ Cat said, talking to Chris as she reversed out of the car park. She talked to him all the time, asked his advice, told him this or that, as easily as she had done when he had been physically present. She had often reassured bereaved patients that, no, they were not going mad, yes, of course it was fine to talk as if the person were still alive, it was a good thing – how could it be otherwise? She was taking her own advice. She had taken it when her mother had died too. Sometimes, even now, she caught herself asking Meriel Serrailler what she would do about a patient or a concern with one of the children.

‘No,’ she said now, ‘it isn’t Hannah, is it? She’ll be fine. Oh, Chris, it isn’t Hannah, it’s Sam, you know it’s Sam. And I have no idea what to do about him.’

The streets were quiet. As she stopped at a traffic light a pair of girls ran across in front of her, miniskirts, high heels, bleach-blonde hair, and as Cat glanced after them, she saw two others on the far corner. Lafferton had never had a visible prostitute presence until the last year, but then the drug dealers had moved in from Bevham and started to target the clubs and pubs in the centre of town. There had always been a few, peddling in the underpass leading to the Sir Eric Anderson Comprehensive, but they had been small fry and local. The new ones were more serious dealers, linked together and also to trafficking. She looked at the girls again as they stood by a street lamp lighting cigarettes. They were probably no more than twenty, thin, hollow-eyed, their legs without tights under the short strips of skirt. Sexual disease. Drug-related illnesses. Every sort of violence. Even just exposure to the cold. Those were only a few of the risks they ran every night. But they went on running them, hooked on crack and heroin, or in thrall to the men who controlled them. The lights changed to green. Cat wanted to pull in, tell them to go home, protect them, but she knew it would do no good, they would be back in ten minutes unless she gave them money, which would go straight on the next fix. The street lighting threw hard shadows, but when they turned their faces to it, they were the faces of children.

‘What should I do?’ she asked Chris. ‘Somebody needs to do something for them. Help me out here.’

When Simon got back she would talk to him. He was not directly involved with the vice squad but he had a vested interest in containing the drug and prostitute problem that was spreading so fast through Lafferton. He might know of initiatives that were taking shape.

She thought of Hannah, bright, chirpy, almost nine and living in a fluffy cloud of Barbie pink, in spite of her beloved father’s death.

Hannah. Those girls had been Hannah when Hannah was born. She sped along the bypass towards the country road and home, anxious, angry and lifted for the time being out of grief.

Ground-floor lights were on in the farmhouse, but the bedrooms were dark, the children long asleep. Judith had switched on the porch light to welcome her back. Thoughtful, kind, practical Judith. Every Friday night for the past few months, when Cat was on call to the hospice, Judith had come over to help, hold the fort if she had to go in, or simply be company for her if she did not. She slept over. On Tuesday nights, when Cat went to the St Michael’s Singers practice at the cathedral, the children went to Hallam House. Usually, Cat slept there too, after choir. It had helped. Her father, Richard Serrailler, never a natural family man, seemed surprisingly sanguine about both arrangements. His new marriage, which Cat welcomed and Simon still resented, had changed and softened him. But why? Cat asked herself again now, why was it so different with Judith from with her mother? She understood why Judith had had the effect she did, but not why her father and mother had been so distant from one another and, she now knew, so unhappy.

‘Hi.’

Judith was curled up in her dressing gown watching the late news. ‘Doom and gloom and pestilence,’ she said, ‘so I shouldn’t think you want to watch.’

‘No thanks. I feel like a drink – they won’t call me out again tonight. Glass of wine?’

‘I’d rather a whisky.’

Judith followed her into the warm kitchen, where the dishwasher was humming and the cat, Mephisto, had made the corner of the sofa his own. Nothing changes, Cat thought. Nothing changes. But everything has changed.

A finger painting was pinned on the cork noticeboard. F.E.L.I.X done in bright blue across the bottom. He could paint the letters of his name and Chris did not know, would never know, would not see this stage, or later his son’s name written in pencil and then, gradually, other words and then paragraphs of writing, the small, brown-haired boy leaning over the paper, his hand moving carefully, his head the same shape as Chris’s own head.

She drew in her breath.

Judith touched her arm briefly.

‘He brought it home today,’ Cat said. ‘It’s a JCB moving a dinosaur. I think.’ She pulled the cork hard out of the wine bottle.

‘How was IH?’

Cat shook her head. ‘Cassie Porter,’ she said, ‘twenty-seven and she has Chris’s sort of brain tumour.’

She sat down next to Mephisto and scratched his ears. The cat curled and uncurled his front claws briefly but did not deign to open an eye. Judith leaned against the fridge, swirling the whisky round in her glass.

Judith did not mouth platitudes, did not try to give hope and consolation when they were not to be had. Her first husband, a medical colleague of Richard and Meriel’s, had died suddenly while out fishing. She knew. She was probably the only one who had never said the wrong thing, or left the right one unsaid. Cat had liked her very much, before Chris was ill. Now, she loved her.

Simon, of course, thought differently. His attitude to Judith had got even worse since she and their father had married, and the fault was entirely his own. Whenever Cat thought about it, she forced the thought to swerve off the kerb of her anger and fall away. There was no room for it. Nothing else had ever cast a real shadow between her and her brother, nothing in their lives until this.

‘This was always going to happen,’ she said now. ‘I don’t think it makes any difference.’

‘Of course not. You don’t need a patient with a brain tumour to bring it all back.’

‘If anything – it’s better. Better walking in through the doors of Imogen House than walking into the surgery. Every day, in the surgery I see the door to Chris’s room and the plate says Dr Russell Jones and I want to kick it down. Russell has rearranged things – of course he has, why wouldn’t he? I want to scream at him to move it all back because it’s pushing Chris out. It’s making Chris not exist.’ She gripped the stem of her glass. ‘I know this isn’t rational.’

‘Since when did any of it have to do with reason?’

Cat leaned back and closed her eyes. This is what happened. Grief. Tears. Rage, sudden rage at what had happened. And then exhaustion as the wave rolled away, leaving her beached and drained of feeling.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice,’ she said after a moment. ‘It hasn’t got easier, it’s got harder. I like Russell, he’s a good doctor. He just isn’t my sort of doctor, and general practice has changed so much. I don’t feel part of it. But when I go into the hospice … the moment I walk through the doors something happens. I do feel a part. I feel I belong and I can still make a difference.’