Poppet

The Dream

AT LUNCHTIME AJ gets a call on his mobile to say two night staff have gone sick again – that if there is to be any cover for that night it’ll have to be him. He has to change everything, all his plans. Instead of having twenty hours to adjust, he now has precisely six. He goes to bed with a mask strapped to his face. He falls asleep thinking about Zelda Lornton. He dreams, not about the unit, but about a place his dreams have taken him before. It’s a cramped, enclosed room or cave with shining, carved walls. Small faces seem to be sunk into the surfaces around him, watching him thoughtfully. But they’re not threatening faces. If anything, they are peaceful. Somehow he knows he is safe here – it’s a place where only good can happen. He gets thinner and thinner to the point he feels he’s going to stop breathing altogether and become so insubstantial that he will slip through a pinhole. He will emerge in a place of perpetual sun, where all the fruit on the trees is sweet and ripe, where the pathways are pale gold, the grass is green. He’s sure Mum is there, somewhere among the rolling hills.

It’s always at the point where he is about to go through the pinhole that AJ wakes. He lies there, breathing hard, feeling something beautiful has just been snatched away from him.

He’s at home. There is a very dim lit coming through the thin curtains. He rolls over and looks groggily at the clock. Five fifteen. Wearily he throws back the covers. Drops his feet on to the floor. He’s got to be at work by seven.

He showers, shaves and drinks lots of Patience’s coffee. Then he heads off, stopping in Thornbury to do some comfort shopping for the night – stuff like crisps and chocolate and little-kid treats. All the staff do it – easy comforts to push them through the tedium of a night in the unit. The shop’s got Forager’s Fayre jam on the shelf – it’s a locally made line and the only store-bought preserves Patience will allow in the house. She actually takes inspiration from Forager’s Fayre instead of scoffing at it. He throws a few jars into the basket to give to her in the morning.

It’s an ordinary late-autumn evening in a rural town – a couple of express supermarkets still open, the pharmacy and a gift shop. The off-licence and the Indian and Chinese. But as he’s leaving the supermarket loaded down with bags, he notices something out of the ordinary. On the opposite side of the road two or three people have gathered around someone who is kneeling on the ground.

The Good Samaritan in AJ died a death many moons ago – he’s so used to picking up messes in his job his instinct is to walk the other way – but he’s got basic first-aid skills, so morally he can’t pretend not to see. He crosses the road. As he gets nearer, he realizes the person on the pavement is a woman. She is apparently unhurt, apart from her hand – which she is pressing hard with a white handkerchief. She is wearing the white lace blouse she wore this morning, and lilac leather Mary Janes, from which rise her delicate ankles and her strong calves. He recognizes the calves instantly – God knows he’s studied them often enough. It’s Melanie Arrow. Ice Queen.

‘Really,’ she is saying to the onlookers, ‘I am absolutely fine.’ Next to her is a carrier bag surrounded by a pool of clear liquid – a few pieces of broken glass lying amongst it. ‘I mean it – I’m absolutely fine.’

‘You don’t look fine,’ someone says. ‘You’re bleeding.’

She is indeed bleeding – the handkerchief is already soaked. A woman is rummaging in her handbag, pulling out handfuls of tissues that drop like petals on the ground. AJ puts down his shopping and nips across the street to the pharmacy. It is quiet and the assistant hurriedly pulls out all the bandages she can find. He pays and trots back outside.

The group of people is still there and so is his shopping, but Melanie Arrow is gone.

‘What happened?’ he calls to them. ‘Where did she go?’

The woman with the handbag nods in the direction of the car park. ‘Said she was OK.’

AJ turns and crosses back over the road. The car park is small – quite empty at this time of day – and he spots the familiar black VW Beetle immediately. It is perfect – the alloys sparkling, the sun glinting off it. It’s a few years old, but the bright plastic flower that was the finishing touch when it rolled off the production line still sits perkily in its holder. In the driver’s seat is Melanie Arrow. She sits with her head bent slightly, her hair covering her face. Her hand is bleeding copiously; it is running down her wrist and the tissues aren’t containing it.

‘Hey.’ He taps on the window. She looks up, shocked to see him. He rolls his hand, miming the action of undoing the window. She shakes her head.

‘I’m OK,’ she mouths. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not fine.’ He tries the door handle – it’s locked. He knocks on the window again. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘I’m fine,’ she yells. ‘Honestly. It’s nearly stopped.’

‘Bollocks. Open the door.’

‘I’m fine.’

AJ doesn’t know what takes over – maybe a memory of the look she gave him in the office that morning – but instead of walking away he pulls out his phone and jabs in the numbers 999. He doesn’t press call but holds the phone up to the window. Melanie looks at it and he raises his eyebrows at her.

‘OK? Now open the door?’

She shakes her head, resignedly. The central-locking system clunks and AJ goes round to the passenger side and gets in. The car stinks of alcohol. On the back seat is the carrier bag that was earlier on the pavement – a little blood on it. It’s got one bottle of vodka in it and the remains of a second, smashed.

‘AJ, I’m absolutely OK. I tripped coming out of the shop, that’s all.’

He tugs the bandages out of the packing and reaches for her hand. She flinches when he touches her. Pulls away, her expression defensive.

‘Come on.’ He shakes his head. ‘You are an adult. Aren’t you?’

She sucks in a breath to reply. But instead of speaking she holds the breath, holds it and holds it as if she can’t decide what to do with it. Then she lets it all out at once and relinquishes the hand, the bloodied tissues falling into her lap.

‘Oh God,’ she mutters, staring out of the window. ‘Just get on with it.’

Maybe AJ is too well trained, or maybe he finds a long-forgotten empathic spark, because while he is inspecting the damaged hand and wrapping it, he hears himself saying, almost confidently, as if this is a patient and not the super-organized, mega-sorted clinical director: ‘You know, Melanie, it seems to me, as an outsider, that you’ve got a really tough role. A really tough role. And if you want me to be honest, it looks as if the world is asking an awful lot of you at the moment.’

The comment provokes a shiver. She turns her head away, her uninjured hand pressed hard against her mouth. AJ holds the wounded hand and stares at the back of her head. He can’t quite believe this – that she hasn’t smacked him in the face – that he’s forced his way into the car – that he’s daring still to speak.

‘No,’ he continues. ‘I can see it’s not easy – not easy at all.’

She drops her head then. A faint current runs through her muscles – a contained spasm, but he can’t tell if she’s actually crying or not. His memory opens suddenly on the drunken night years ago, and he wonders again why he didn’t respond then to her come-on. At the time he had a girlfriend, but there was something else stopping him. Melanie somehow seemed in a different world – as if she belonged to a grown-up league of dating he had no right to trespass in. She was just too … too sensible somehow. Serious. When he and the girlfriend separated a few weeks later and he made a tentative approach to Melanie she froze him out, saying something short about the Trust and its dim view of relationships between staff. Since then their only interactions have been the cool, professional ones. Like this morning. Now he concentrates on bandaging her hand. It should stop bleeding if it’s dressed properly. He’s glad he didn’t dial 999; they don’t need a hospital visit.

‘You know what,’ Melanie says quietly, ‘I spent five hours today talking to the review team. Five.’

He glances up, surprised by her tone. Her face is still turned away, her blonde hair covering her expression. ‘About Zelda, you mean?’

‘It’s like they’re accusing us of doing something to her. Her post-mortem has finally been done. Did you know that?’

‘What did they find?’

‘Nothing.’ She shrugs. ‘At least, nothing you can hang a hat on. It said she died of heart failure, but they couldn’t pin the cause on anything, except possibly her weight. So now the review team can’t make up their minds whether to walk away or to keep on at us. They’ve gone over and over everything – the staff logs, her care plan. Every time they turned up as much as a spelling mistake in one of the meds logs they looked at me as if I had horns.’

For the first time it dawns on AJ that Melanie’s feelings about the unit run really deep. Yes, it’s her professional reputation on the line, but she actually seems to care. Really care. In his experience genuine commitment beyond a pay cheque is thin on the ground in Beechway.

He clears his throat. ‘You’ve carried the can for the rest of us. We wander around whingeing about overtime and night pay, but at least at the end of the day we can walk away from it.’ He finishes tying the bandage and gently pushes the hand back at her. ‘There you go. You’ll live.’

Melanie fumbles up one of the blood-stained tissues from her lap and blows her nose noisily. She lets the hand sit in her lap and stares at it blankly. She has been crying, there are mascara trails on her face. ‘Everyone’s going to say I’m suicidal. They’re going to say I cut myself. What’s the expression? Eventually the system will turn in on itself?’

‘I don’t know.’

She sniffs again and looks at him. ‘AJ?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry about the professional-bitch demeanour this morning.’

‘That’s OK. You’ve got a job to do.’

She gives a small, tearful laugh. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way I know how to be.’

‘Like I said, it’s OK. It’s fine.’

There’s a short pause. He wonders where this is going. Then she says, ‘We’ve known each other a long time. Tell me honestly. This delusion they have – the you-know-what.’

‘The Mau—’

‘Please don’t say it.’ She looks at him with a watery smile. ‘Sorry – it’s just, I … AJ – you’ve never seen anything, have you? Something you couldn’t explain.’

He gives a scoffing laugh. ‘Oh, all the time. People walking through walls.’

‘Seriously. What is it about this delusion?’

‘That depends,’ he says, ‘on whether I’m Scully and you’re Mulder.’

‘I’m definitely Scully.’

‘No – you can’t be. ’Cos I’m Scully.’

‘Then it’ll have to be two cynics. Two cynics in a Beetle. They should make a film about us.’

They both give a half-hearted laugh. AJ sits back and stares out of the windscreen to where a drunk woman is picking a fight with an equally drunk man in camouflage trousers. There’s a long silence, then he says: ‘You’ve got to admit, she was a bloody nuisance.’

‘Who?’

‘Zelda.’

‘No, no – AJ, you can’t say that. Every person on the unit has a right to our care. We shouldn’t let anyone down.’

‘But she was a nuisance. I know it’s taboo to say it, but out of all the people it could have happened to, aren’t you glad it happened to Zelda? I certainly am.’

There’s a pause. Melanie keeps her eyes on the two drunks. Her mouth is moving slightly – as if she’s suppressing a slight smile. ‘We never had this conversation,’ she says, not meeting his eyes. ‘I never heard you say that and you never saw me nod. OK?’

‘What conversation?’

‘And last but not least, you never saw …’

‘What?’

She tilts her chin over her shoulder at the vodka bag on the back seat. ‘You never saw what was in that carrier bag either.’