Poppet

Average Joe

THE NIGHT SHIFT seems to go on for ever. AJ’s tried to keep working as normal, completing his reports and doing more rounds of the wards, checking on Monster Mother three times, but he’s hated every minute of it. Especially being alone in his office. It is overheated and the windows make clicking noises as they expand and contract with the changes in temperature. Every time he tried to doze, words echoed like sonar through his head. Paramedic. Get a fucking paramedic … Boing boing boing. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away … A vortex of images crawling over the walls. Gristle and blood on the canteen hotplates. Sizzling and mingling into the waffles.

The paramedics came quickly, but they couldn’t save Moses’ eye. He was returned to the unit after two weeks with an optical prosthetic and a changed, humbled attitude. People avoided him, tiptoed around him. Whispers went through the patient community about what Moses had seen that morning to make him spoon out his own eye. And what about the writing on his walls? They remained only whispers, until Pauline, who had been permitted to rejoin the graduated-rehabilitation cycle and worked her way back to pre-discharge, disappeared one day during ‘unsupervised ground leave’. The police were involved, search teams came and went, an inquiry was set up. To the Trust’s extreme embarrassment it wasn’t until several months later that her decomposed body was discovered, under leaf litter in one of the remotest corners of the grounds, just outside the search team’s parameters. The decomposition was too advanced for the postmortem to pinpoint what had killed her, so the Trust and the police and the pathologist and the coroner decided on ‘unknown causes’.

At that, the whispers went viral. Hysteria spread like wildfire, everyone was talking about The Maude and the hauntings. Hitherto stabilized patients went into crisis, screams rang out through the wards, Control and Restraint teams raced through the corridors. Half the pre-discharge patients got hauled back up to Acute, the rest were denied communal time, leave and privileges. There were staff shortages, long and involved cross-departmental meetings, new directives and general mayhem.

The clinical teams got involved. They had a battle to put a lid on it but, slowly, by targeting individual patients in therapy sessions, gently reinforcing that The Maude was nothing more than a delusion and a rumour, they eventually managed to restore the calm. The unit went back to running smoothly. Four years went by without a murmur. Not a solitary soul mentioned the haunting and it was starting to seem that the legend of The Maude would disappear without a trace. Then three weeks ago Zelda Lornton woke up screaming, her arms covered in writing. And bam – the hysteria took hold again.

The kettle boils. AJ scoops two heaped spoonfuls of instant coffee into the cup, tops it up with water, milk and sugar. He carries it to the window and stands there, sipping thoughtfully, watching the day creep into the courtyard. The storm has passed and the garden is sodden. The spot where the social worker reported seeing the dwarf all those years ago is now covered in broken branches and leaves. To one side, barely visible beneath the trees, is a gravestone – the resting place of a child who died here in Victorian times. An unknown philanthropist at the end of Victoria’s reign put up money for this memorial to ‘an unknown child of God’. It’s the only stone left – the other graves were dug up and moved when the 1980s remodelling took place. That reinterment – according to the mythology in the hospital – is when The Maude’s tomb was moved. Her ghost was disturbed and eventually, years later, found its way back inside the unit.

So, AJ thinks. Time to start the whole process of putting Maude back in her grave.

He gets the tie he discarded last night and clips it back on, using the computer screen as a mirror. He takes a deep breath and runs his hands down the lapels of his cheap suit, studying his reflection. The name on his birth certificate is not AJ at all – the name was given to him years ago by some cocky consultant who used to come in and snap his fingers at the nurses when he wanted something on a patient’s drugs round changed; if AJ didn’t respond, he’d yell across the ward: ‘Hey, you – yes, you – average Joe – AJ – I’m talking to you.’

Average Joe. AJ. The name stuck. He is Average Joe. Average height, average age (forty-three), average salary. AJ LeGrande. It sounds like the name of some rapper. Actually, he has got a little black in him, from his grandmother, though you wouldn’t know it: his dark hair hasn’t got a kink in it, his skin isn’t even coffee-coloured, more of a Mediterranean olive, and he’s got one of those straight European noses. The one thing he’d have really liked is black-guy legs – long, strong footballer’s legs, the kind Big Lurch has got – the sort of legs that make you look forward to summer so you can show them off. But he hasn’t – he’s got ordinary, hairy white-guy legs. What’s the point in having a black ancestor if you didn’t get any of the cool shit passed down? Sometimes people tell him that if he resembles anyone at all it’s Elvis Presley – from some angles and in certain lights. AJ wishes it were true – if he had a tenth of Presley’s looks, talent or magnetism he wouldn’t be employed here. And he certainly wouldn’t be working up a big anxiety about having to explain to the clinical director, in the calmest, most rational of terms, that there’s a ghost in the unit. That he, as senior nursing coordinator, has failed to put a lid on the mania.

Tired and heavy, he makes his way down the corridor, swiping through the various airlock doors. The director, Melanie Arrow, has ruffled everyone’s feathers by insisting that her office space be moved out of the admin block into the clinical area. She has commandeered a room on the mezzanine overlooking the central hall between the wards. It has been renovated and knocked through to provide her with a bathroom and a kitchen, and is equipped with a trestle bed that she often spends the night on. This is a hideous abuse of the unspoken rules, because it means the nursing staff have an eavesdropper in their midst. One who has a habit of appearing at the most unexpected moments to catch them dozing or watching porn.

At the foot of the stairs he hesitates. There’s a light coming through the bottom of her door. He doesn’t know if it means she’s spent the night in her office on the trestle bed, or if she’s just come in mega-early. If there is one person guaranteed to make him feel inadequate it’s Melanie Arrow. She is the only staff member who’s been at Beechway longer than him, and she is notoriously hard-arsed and professional. ‘Ice Queen’ is the name that gets whispered behind her back. Funnily enough, in the days when he was still a nurse, AJ never had a problem with Melanie; he didn’t need to deal with her directly at work and his only face-to-face encounters were at office parties when everyone’s guard was down – there was even a best-forgotten drunken night when he convinced himself she was flirting with him. Now that he’s a coordinator, however, he has to liaise with her a lot more. He’s definitely starting to see where she gets her Ice Queen reputation from.

He climbs the stairs slowly and knocks, a little irritated with himself for his nerves. There’s a long pause, then ‘Yes?’

‘AJ.’

‘Come in, AJ.’

He opens the door and steps inside, smiling confidently, his eyes focused on a point about a foot in front of her face so he doesn’t have to make eye contact. She is at her desk, the computer screen lighting her face, her tiny wire-framed glasses perched at the end of her nose. He knows that she put in a twelve-hour day yesterday – she was at the Criminal Justice Forum with him and went straight to a Trust meeting afterwards – but she shows no signs of tiredness. She’s a cool, cool blonde – ordered and contained. AJ may have African blood in him, but Melanie definitely has a touch of the fjords in her – her hair is liquid silk and her skin is so pale, ethereal, that the sprinkling of freckles over her nose stands out like face paint. As always, she is wearing a simple white blouse and a sensible schoolmistress skirt, giving her a clinical, authoritative look. There is a great body under the clothes – AJ and probably most of the male staff are fairly certain about that – but no one would mention it, even in an off-guard moment. Lightning would strike them – it would be like passing comment on the Virgin Mary’s figure.

‘Yes, AJ?’ When he doesn’t speak – tongue-tied as always – she slides the glasses further down her nose and studies him over the rims. ‘Did you want something?’

She’s not fierce or arrogant or impatient – she doesn’t yell or bark orders like some directors of psychiatric units – in fact, she has a soft, understated voice. It’s more her crispness that makes her seem brisk and professional. She says as little as she needs to get information across, then she stops. For someone as woolly and generally undisciplined as AJ, that’s incredibly intimidating.

‘There’s a problem,’ he says. ‘Regarding Zelda Lornton.’

Melanie nods but otherwise doesn’t react.

He shakes his head, doesn’t know how to put it. ‘It’s the heart attack. People are saying …’ He rubs his neck in embarrassment. ‘People are saying it’s odd – can’t be natural, someone that young, just dying.’

Still Melanie doesn’t react. This is how she always is – she carefully considers everything before she speaks, never worries how long the other person is kept waiting.

Eventually she says, ‘We don’t yet have the results of the postmortem. At the moment heart attack is only what the paramedics told us. In due course the review process will tell us how odd or natural her death was.’

‘But I take it you know what everyone is thinking. You do know the rumours are back?’

‘The rumours?’

‘Yes. About the … well, the supernatural things the patients sometimes entertain ideas about.’

This time, although her face is absolutely motionless, a tiny spread of colour comes to her cheeks. The last time The Maude came to the hospital it proved a long, stressful and complicated process to get things back on track. Melanie was at the helm of that initiative. ‘The delusions, you mean.’

‘Yes. They’re back and the effect is spreading – to the staff. There’s been forty per cent absenteeism on nights this week. It’s a whole repeat process of what happened with Pauline Scott and Moses.’

‘So, AJ, what do you propose to do?’

‘What do I propose to do?’ He opens his hands, helpless. ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe I should just look it up in the protocol – the “Ghost Stalking the Corridors” protocol. Probably it starts with “Include in weekly board report”. Then I guess it’s “Fill in requisitions in triplicate to the council’s Trust-related ethics committee with special reference to subsection 17.” Then I guess it’s—’

‘I didn’t ask for sarcasm.’ Her eyes are as clear blue as the sky. ‘I asked you what you propose to do about the spread of a delusion.’

AJ is silent for a moment. She’s so curt. Her professional mask is genuinely scary, and in her mouth the word ‘delusion’ rankles for reasons he can’t quite define. Maybe it’s the way it seems unfair on Monster Mother to dismiss her fear so lightly. Or maybe it’s his own dream which still feels so real. Little hands, little face. His eyes stray to the window, the trees stark and old, forking up from the frosty ground. Then over to the window where Melanie’s trestle bed is tucked in a gap between the shelves. He wonders if she sleeps well when she’s here at night. If she has dreams.

‘I thought you might tell me,’ he says at last. ‘That’s what I was hoping.’

She taps her finger thoughtfully on the table, taking in his face. It’s like being inspected by the headmistress. ‘OK, OK.’ She pushes the glasses back up her nose and makes a note on the large pad on her desk. ‘Leave the clinical route with me – I’ll deal with the consultants. We’ll do what we did last time – target each individual during therapy – no group meetings. In the meantime I’ll leave it to you to deal with the nursing staff. Fair?’

‘Thank you,’ he mutters. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re very welcome.’

He has his hand on the door to leave the office when he thinks he hears Melanie’s voice behind him. He turns. ‘Yes? Sorry?’

She is studying him. There is something in her face he’s never seen before – something he can’t read. It’s as if she wants to speak but doesn’t know how to begin.

‘Yes?’ he repeats.

‘Do you find the unit spooky?’ Her eyes flicker briefly. They go to the bottom of the door. Then just as quickly she averts them, and clears her throat. ‘By which I mean I hope you don’t ever feel the need to call in sick?’

‘Of course not.’ He gives his shoulders a small, dismissive shrug. ‘I mean, what’s to be scared of?’

‘Exactly. Nothing.’ She turns back to the computer and taps in a few words. ‘Just keep me informed of what happens.’