Poppet

Power Cuts

SOMETHING IS BOTHERING AJ, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. Instead of finishing his walk of the wards he goes hunting down the Big Lurch. He has to go into the nurses’ station and out into the admin block and through all the toilets and the kitchens until he finds him in the security guards’ control room – a giant futuristic glass pod in the reception area of the unit. He is sitting on a swivel seat in front of a bank of monitors. His feet are up and his arms are crossed, his head floppy as if he’s sleeping, or on the point of sleeping.

‘Amazing.’ AJ stands in the doorway, arms folded. ‘You’re where you’re meant to be. The last place I’d have looked.’

The Big Lurch lifts his head a little. Frowns.

‘AJ? You look all crazy – like one of those people they lock up in a loony bin. You ought to see a doctor about that – it’s not a good look.’

AJ rubs his eyes. He comes into the room and sits on one of the chairs, running his hands over the soft suede of the armrest. He’s always liked this place – it’s got a comfort to it yet it’s not claustrophobic. You can feel warm in here, and look out on to the world: see the moon or the sun, the city and the trees, the cars and the clouds. It’s like being on the bridge of a ship. The Starship Enterprise maybe. The glass shield between here and the outside world is bulletproof. A lot of money has gone into this operations room. A lot of money and power and wealth. The Trust can find finance for this sort of thing, but they can’t stop people like Moses ripping out their own eyes in the breakfast queue.

‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘Do you think our director knows how unhappy we are? Hmm? Does she think we’re happy, or does she know we’re unhappy? What do you sense?’

The Big Lurch lowers his chin and scrutinizes AJ with hauteur. ‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly.’

‘She’s too unhappy herself to care what’s going on with us. A person can only see suffering when they’re not suffering themselves. Caring? It’s a luxury, if you want the honest truth.’

AJ nods slowly, appreciatively. The Big Lurch doesn’t speak much – but when he does, his words are premium-rate gilded.

‘So? What’s making her unhappy?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Am I supposed to?’

The Big Lurch turns and faces AJ full on. Surprised. ‘You really don’t know?’

AJ stares at him, mystified. ‘What? What am I supposed to know?’

‘About Jonathan?’

‘Jonathan? Jonathan who?’ He fumbles around in his head for a face to connect to the name. A patient? No – no Jonathans in the unit. The only person he can think of is Jonathan Keay – an occupational therapist who left the unit last month. ‘Jonathan Keay, you mean?’

‘Of course Jonathan Keay.’

‘The ocky therapy guy who left? What about him?’

The Big Lurch gives AJ an amused half-smile. He lets a puff of laughter come out of his chest. Aha aha aha. ‘AJ, seriously, my man! For a switched-on person, you occasionally lack perspicacity.’

‘Then tell me, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Melanie and Keay? You didn’t notice?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Oh please, mate. Please.’

AJ lowers his eyes to the smooth arms of the chair – moves his hands up and down, up and down. Melanie and Jonathan Keay? Seriously? Until now he’s always imagined he was the one who knew the secrets. That he walked around with the knowledge of the world on his shoulders. Apparently not, though. Apparently he is the last to know. OT staff giving it the old jiggety-jig with top-drawer management? If it’s true, that’s fairly scandalous stuff – the biggest taboo, like incest, or staff sleeping with a patient. Montagues and Capulets. Melanie herself said it – the Trust takes a dim view of it.

And meanwhile her and Keay? Jonathan is someone AJ has never given much thought to. A normal enough guy – late thirties, a lot of experience under his belt. If AJ recalls rightly, Keay and Melanie had worked together in another unit in the north of England before they came here. They’d both started on low grades and had worked their way up the ranks. No one quite knows why he left Beechway last month. Word had it, he’d left on medical grounds. It was all very sudden, he didn’t even say goodbye – one moment he was there, the next he wasn’t. AJ vaguely remembers a card arriving – written in very formal handwriting – from his mother: Thank you for being such generous colleagues to my son – he will miss you all. It had a kind of funereal aura to it.

AJ had always assumed, without particularly focusing on it, that Keay had some sort of secret private life he didn’t want to talk about. At the time, AJ hadn’t much cared, but now he’s combing through every word the guy ever said – putting it in the context that Keay’s secret may have been an affair with Melanie. Maybe her frantic little episode with the voddy had something to do with him. Everything AJ thought he knew about Melanie jack-knifes and amplifies and turns itself somersault over somersault and his estimation – and jealousy – of Jonathan Keay takes a quantum leap.

His attention is dragged away from his speculation by one of the CCTV monitors. He wonders what it was that brought him down here – it certainly wasn’t to speculate about the love lives of the other staff. It was something that was bugging him about the camera system in the unit. But what?

The monitors show nothing. Empty, motionless corridors. The outdoor-training Astro court. The pinch point in the stem corridor. Even a view of the security pod from behind and above – him and the Big Lurch sitting there, the backs of their heads barely clipping into the bottom edge of the frame.

And then it hits him. He sits forward a little, peering at the images. He thinks he knows what it is. The thing that’s been bothering him, the reason the word ‘delusion’ has always seemed so inaccurate. He stays where he is, staring at the screens, his thoughts turning slow cartwheels. The smell in the nurses’ station earlier – the burning-fish smell of a fused kettle. The smell in Moses’ room that morning. Something in the building had fused that day too.

‘Hey,’ he says slowly. ‘These cameras – you log the footage you take, don’t you?’

The Big Lurch throws him a sarcastic look. ‘No – they’re there for show. I use them to play my porn on the long dark nights. Of course we log it, bro. I mean, it only stays on for two weeks, but we log it.’

‘The night Zelda self-harmed – when she did her arms – you lost that because of the power cut.’

‘Uh huh.’ He nods. ‘I told you there’s something weird going on in this place – the power cutting out all the time, and it’s always some different reason.’

‘And the night Zelda died?’

‘Yeah – same thing that night. And the—’ He stops. He takes his feet off the desk with a bang. Twists the chair to face AJ. ‘You know what – you’re right. Every single time there’s been a power cut.’