A Strange Fire (Florence Vaine) (18 page)

 After my soak I dry off and get into bed for an early night. I know it’s
wrong, bad and wrong in so many ways it doesn’t even bare thinking about, but
before I slip under the covers I seek out my pill bottle. I take one, two,
maybe even three. I can’t quite recall. And fall back into my pillows. Into a
sleep so calm, so uninterrupted by any bad dreams, it is a blessing and welcome
respite from the confusion of my ever present meandering thoughts.

Beep, beep, beep.

 My alarm clock rings out like a particularly irritating fly buzzing in
my ear. Pulling me head first out of the euphoric calm that had been my
slumber. I glance at the time, eighty-thirty. Caroline will be here in just
over an hour, so I hop up and go about readying myself. I don’t know what a
person normally wears when volunteering at the local loony bin, so I go for the
old reliable. Baggy jeans and a t-shirt.

 It’s sunny out again so I decide I probably won’t need a jacket. I
simply stuff my wallet and keys in my pocket after I’ve brushed my teeth,
washed my face and tied my hair into plaits, and then head downstairs to grab a
bite before going out for the day.

 Gran is already up and has prepared breakfast. Fruit salad, wholemeal
toast and a pot of tea with a knitted cosy on. I smile. But my cheer doesn’t
last too long, because as I sit down at the table to eat, my leg muscles ache,
feeling particularly weak. This isn’t from Ingrid’s kick yesterday, it’s a
symptom of my over-using the medication last night. I also feel slightly
light-headed, another common symptom. Damn. I’m going to feel like hell all day
despite my full night of sleep.

 I suppose it serves me right, I trade a night of bliss for a day of
agony. I ignore the voice of my conscience in my head murmuring, “Slippery
slope Florence, a very slippery slope.” I tell myself it won’t happen again.
But I did say that the last time. And the time before.

 A honk from outside at nine-thirty-five lets me know that Caroline has
arrived. Gran again insists on a kiss and a hug before I leave. I give them
both shyly, still not used to the affection. Caroline is definitely one of
those early bird kinds of people, always up at the crack of dawn, no matter if
it’s the weekend. She has a grin on her face, and she’s wearing a bright yellow
“tweety bird” t-shirt.

 “Cute hair!” she exclaims, eyeing my plaits.

 “The same goes for your top,” I reply with false cheer, though I’m not
sure I could pull off that kind of kitsch. My dizzy headedness still hasn’t
faded.

 Caroline makes a swift left turn off my Gran’s road and continues
driving until we get to a big sprawling housing estate, with neat lawns and
chestnut trees lining the paths. She stops outside a house identical to all the
others and beeps the horn. Five minutes later Lia emerges, slightly worse for
wear at the early hour. Thank God I’m not the only one. She gets in the back of
the Volvo and yawns.

 “Sorry I’m late Car,” she says in apology. “Marley and I went bowling
last night and then we went back to his place because his parents are away and
we drank a whole bottle of Malibu. I’ve got a splitting headache.”

 Caroline tuts humorously and laughs. “Serves you right.”

 As we drive, I discover that the Chesterport Psychiatric Hospital is a
good five minutes outside of town. Caroline pulls into the winding open
driveway of a big, imposing looking building that appears to date back to the
eighteen hundreds. It’s fronted by a rambling field of unkempt grass, and
behind it you can see the lush forest that is also viewable from my bedroom
window at Gran’s.

 Chesterport is surrounded by dense green forest on its Southern-facing
side. Funnily enough, one of the first things I notice about the building is
that it hasn’t got any walls or fencing around it. Nothing to keep the crazies
penned in. I know, it’s a terrible thought to have, but it’s been and gone
before I have time to censor my political in-correctness. At least I didn’t say
it out loud.

 The building itself consists of old grey stonework, five storeys in all.
It had probably been a stately home in its time. Caroline parks around the side
of the hospital with the rest of the cars, and then we get out and make our way
over to a small side entrance. A nurse meets us just as we walk in, a woman of
limited attraction with short cropped brown hair and a face only a mother could
love. Judging from her agedness, that mother has long since gone to her grave.
She immediately notices me as a new recruit and, in a stern voice, introduces
herself as Gerty Smidt.

 Gerty’s the kind of woman you’d call “Matron” rather than “Nurse”, you
can tell she runs whatever establishment she’s employed by with a strict
authority never questioned by her inferiors. She leads us out of the main
entrance area and through a common room where there are mostly elderly people
reading books, watching television, playing board games or staring off into
space.

 They all seem sane enough to me. But maybe this is one of those places
that houses people with Schizophrenia and Bipolar Personality Disorder side by
side with old people who’ve either got Alzheimer’s or are just too old to take
care of themselves any more. Making it more of an old people’s home/psychiatric
hospital, instead of simply the latter. We all go a little crazy with old age,
mostly it’s inevitable.

 Once we’ve passed the common room, Gerty takes us up to the third floor
and down several corridors before we finish our journey in a big office at the
end of a long hallway where there are rows upon rows of filing cabinets. Each
drawer has a sticker on the front, A-B, C-D and so on. There are a couple desks
in the middle of the room, all piled high with big brown folders, some with
green stickers on the front, some with yellow, some with blue and some with
red.

 “Now girls,” says Gerty, gesturing toward the stacks on the desks. “All
of these charts need to be alphabetised and put into the proper filing cabinet.
As in, all the A’s in the A cabinet, all the B’s in the B cabinet etcetera, are
we clear?” Jeez, she doesn’t mess around old Gerty, does she? She hasn’t once
cracked a smile.

 “Clear as crystal,” says Caroline, grinning as always, already taking a
seat at one of the desks.

 Gerty nods. “Good. I’ll be back to relieve you for lunch at
twelve-thirty,” then she turns and leaves the room, closing the door tightly
behind her. I almost expect her to lock it, but thankfully she doesn’t.

 “What a charmer,” says Lia with a certain degree of sarcasm as she goes
to sit down opposite Caroline.

 “Gerty’s okay,” says Caroline. “At least with her you know what to
expect, simple administration work, minimal contact with the residents. Do I
have to remind you of the last time we were here and Nurse Margaret mistook us
for trainee nurses and put us on the fifth floor?”

 “No – no you don’t,” Lia replies with a shudder, then she yawns again.
She probably should have stayed in bed today.

 “What’s on the fifth floor?” I ask curiously, while sitting down at the
table to join them and make a start on the folders.

 “Well, I don’t know what the correct medical term is,” says Caroline,
“but it’s basically where all of the highly psychotic residents stay, you know
like the ones who are more likely to punch you in the face than to mistake you
for their granddaughter Olive who never visits.”

 “I’ll be staying away from the fifth floor then,” I say in earnest.

 “You do that,” says Caroline with a wink, before flicking though several
folders and re-shuffling them into the correct order.

 There’s silence for a couple minutes as the three of us get to work, and
a question begins to hover on the periphery of my brain, pushing to be put into
words. I try to resist, but my curiosity gets the better of me.

 “S-so,” I begin casually, looking from Caroline to Lia, “how exactly did
you two get involved in this volunteering business?”

 The two exchange a look, and then Caroline answers, “A cousin of mine
had some,” she pauses a second, “mental health problems, she died two years ago
and I decided I’d volunteer at this place as a mark of respect to her. Lia had
been her friend and wanted to do it with me. So - here we are.”

 “Oh, that’s – that’s really good of you, both of you,” I tell them, not
knowing how to respond. “W-was she a patient here?”

 “No,” replies Caroline in a sad voice. “Her Mum wouldn’t have her
admitted, she wanted to keep her at home, tried to ignore the problems, and
then it was too late.”

 “I’m sorry,” I say solemnly, feeling her sadness though not knowing how
to relate. I’ve had a shit life but I’ve never lost anyone close to me,
probably because I’ve never
been
close to anyone.

 “It’s okay, sometimes it feels good to talk about her, means I have
forgotten her. That would be worse.”

 “How did she die?” I ask.

 “She,” Caroline goes quiet, as though having trouble containing her
grief. Suddenly I understand the sadness I saw in her aura the first time we
met. After a minute, she finds her voice. “Nobody knows exactly what happened
to her. She just went missing from the house one evening. My Aunt didn’t even
hear her leave, then a week later the police found her bones in the woods
outside of town.”

 “Her
bones
?” I ask with alarm, all of a sudden not finding the
forests of Chesterport quite so charming.

 “I know,” says Caroline. “That’s what’s so horrific about it all. The
police found her bones completely stripped of any flesh, even,” she puts her
hand to her stomach, as though to keep herself from retching, “- even the
marrow hand been taken from them, nothing had been left of her but a few
cracked bones.”

 “Oh Car,” says Lia on a shiver. “Don’t go into detail, it frightens me.”

 “I’m sorry, I just thought Flo should know about it. I mean, she has to
be careful living in this town. The police still haven’t found the killer. Not
even a lead.”

 “That
is
frightening,” I say, agreeing with Lia, and at the same
time wondering why Gran never mentioned the fact that a young girl from the
town, very near to my age, got horrifically murdered not very long ago. Perhaps
she wanted to spare me the worry.

 “But – so her death had nothing to do with her mental state, she was the
victim of some sick murderer?”

 “Well yes, but my mum and my aunt have themselves convinced that if it
weren’t for her “instability” then she wouldn’t have wandered off on her own,
and if she hadn’t wandered off she never would have walked into the hands of
whoever it was that killed her. My aunt will never forgive herself for not
keeping a closer eye on her. She even regrets not having sent her here to the
hospital, that way she would have been kept safe.”

 “T-that’s horrible, living with that kind of guilt for the rest of your
life. I can’t imagine how your aunt feels.” I say quietly.

 “She’s still so torn up, even now,” says Caroline. “But we try to keep
her busy, anything to keep her mind off it.”

 “What was your cousin’s name?” I ask, for some reason I feel a sudden
and strong urge to know her. I feel a strange kinship with this dead girl,
probably because in my own way, I’m a victim just like her. Or at least I was,
things have been looking up for me since I moved in with Gran. But Caroline’s
cousin will never have a chance at survival, I should count myself lucky.

 “Lauren,” Caroline replies. “She was two years older than me. Short
blond hair, blue eyes, loved German musicals from the twenties and thirties,”
she smiles, remembering her lost cousin.

 “She sounds really nice.” I add.

 “She
was
nice,” says Lia. “She just, well, she had some problems.
She was paranoid all of the time, convinced she was being followed, that she
was going to die, said she could see evil women coming for her. And it just
makes you feel all the worse that you never tried to help her when you had the
chance. I mean, she was always telling us she was going to die and then she
did,” she looks down, as though ashamed. Caroline places a hand on Lia’s arm,
by way of emotional support.

 “What happened is nobody’s fault,” Caroline speaks up after a moment of
silence. “There’s no sense living with regret, it’s pointless.”

 “I know, you’re right,” Lia agrees, glancing meaningfully at Caroline
before returning to her stack of files.

 Caroline lets out a long breath. “God, I never get used to it,” she says
in a whisper, speaking only to herself. I don’t reply because I know she isn’t
expecting me to, she just needed to get the words out.

 For the next two hours we work quietly, somewhere along the line Lia
gets up and turns on the radio. I also fall into the mechanics of alphabetical
filing, my hands working on autopilot and resisting the urge of my curiosity to
peek inside and read the patient reports that lie within.

 And as the minutes pass by, I drift away from the voices coming through
the radio speakers, no longer paying attention to the meaning of the words. My
head is somewhere else completely, following the story of Caroline’s cousin
Lauren and the many possible ways she might have come to her gruesome death.
How scared she must have been. How alone and how petrified. What kind of a
death leaves nothing more than a pile of broken up bones? My body trembles all
over at the thought of it. But then I feel angry. Angry at how normal life can
resume after such a horrendous thing has happened. Then again, I suppose that’s
human nature, we adapt.

 We move on.

Gerty arrives back at twelve thirty bang on the nose, not a second too
late.

 “Right you three, down to the canteen for lunch. You have forty
minutes,” she instructs, without so much of a “Hi how are ya?” not even a
“Thank you” for all the filing we got done.

 In only two and a half hours we worked through almost two thirds of the
bulk we had to contend with, and I’m telling you, that was
a lot
of
folders. I don’t know the building so I simply follow Caroline and Lia as they
make their way back down the well-worn marble staircase, though the trek is not
half as tiring as it had been coming up.