Hush (11 page)

‘You do realise, don’t you, that everything is just meaningless? Life, I mean. There’s no point to any of it.’

Lily looked up from the page that she had been working on. Esmeralda, the girl with the scars on her arms, was curled up in the armchair opposite Lily. She was supposed to be reading, but she kept putting the book down and looking out of the window, or looking around the room and sighing loudly.

‘Of course,
you
know. That’s why you don’t talk.’

Lily wondered if she was being given permission to get back to her work, and decided that she probably wasn’t. She continued to watch Esmeralda, until the older girl turned to look at her directly.

‘The nurses know as well. They’re just trying to brainwash you. Like they were brainwashed when they were younger. It’s all just some big fucking… conspiracy. It’s crazy. The whole world’s a conspiracy. And we’re all just robots.’

Lily watched as Esmeralda chipped the purple polish off her nails, flicking tiny flecks of colour on to the table between them, revealing the bare nail colour beneath. Esmeralda’s skin, Lily had noticed before, was paler than anyone else’s she had ever seen. Almost translucent. As though she was gradually fading out of the world, ceasing to exist in stages.

‘I mean, take this place. They’ve got us all in here to make us better, but there’s not even a name for what’s wrong with us. We’re just… casualties of life, or some shit. There’s nothing
medically wrong. They can’t actually make it better. They’re just keeping us here so we don’t infect the rest of society. I mean, like you, for example. What’s wrong with you? You don’t talk – so what? Lots of people would be better off if they didn’t talk. The world might be a better fucking place if people did a bit less fucking talking.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Lily saw one of the nurses sit up, take notice. They didn’t like swearing.

‘But no, just because you’re not like
everybody
else
, there’s something
wrong
with you. You need to be fucking
fixed
. It’s just – it’s fucking –’

‘Okay, enough.’

One of the nurses – taller than the rest, with thick eyebrows and a mouth that never smiled – appeared next to Esmeralda, and took her by the hand. ‘I think it’s time you came with me.’

‘That’s ridiculous. We’re just talking. I was going to start reading my book in a minute.’

‘I heard you. Swearing. Lily’s only nine; you think she needs to hear you swearing at her? No, I don’t think so, either. Come on, we’ll take you somewhere quiet. You can have a rest.’

Esmeralda tried to pull her hand away from the nurse’s. ‘I don’t
want
to fucking rest, I feel better in here, with people, I don’t want to go –’

But the nurse was unrelenting. ‘Up you get, dearie.’ The cheerful tone could have almost obscured the forcefulness of her pull on Esmeralda’s arm. Another nurse joined the first, and together they left the room, Esmeralda’s smothered protests stalking their progress.

Lily watched the door for a moment, until the sound of Esmeralda’s voice had faded completely. Then she returned to the worksheet in front of her. She had settled into a rhythm now. It had been nearly six weeks – she had been counting
the days off on a chart on the bedroom wall. A nurse had suggested that she might like to do that, to know how she was progressing.

They only had a limited supply of maths worksheets; after all, it was not a proper school and children were not supposed to stay in residence for long periods of time. She had started with the ones designed for eight-year-olds; although Grandma had been teaching her, her maths was patchy and Lily was lacking in some areas of vital basic knowledge. In a week she had progressed to the nine-year-olds’ worksheets, and a week later she’d completed those. She worked on little else. The nurses insisted that she spend at least an hour each day doing something other than maths, so she rotated between art, science and music, all of which she could do without having to speak. They didn’t like the fact that she wouldn’t read aloud to them, so she left the books alone for the most part, though she missed reading.

Esmeralda usually sat next to her while she was working. Often she read; sometimes she would draw, or play guitar. While she drew she would talk constantly, quietly, whispering the incomprehensible secrets of the universe into Lily’s ear. Lily rarely understood, but she liked the company all the same.

In the past week Esmeralda had been taken away on three separate occasions for talking too much or too loudly. Lily had been to visit her in her room after one of the occasions, to make sure she wasn’t lonely. She had managed to stay there for almost an hour before a nurse tracked her down and took her back to the common room.

The institute was a strange place, full of unstated rules and unspoken schedules, but Lily didn’t mind it. She liked the feeling that there was some kind of order to everything that was done: someone, somewhere, knew what was supposed to be happening and directed things accordingly. There was a plan, and someone other than Lily was co-ordinating things.

All that was required of her was that she exist.

The corridors had come to seem familiar over the course of the last few weeks, the black and white tiles casting comforting patterns that resonated warmly in her mind. The windows looking out over the courtyard were glimpses of a world that she spent no time in, but liked all the same. Occasionally she managed to sneak out of class when one of the other children was being particularly difficult, and she always came to the same corridor, where all of the windows looked out on to the same view.

She didn’t like the windows on the other side of the house. They looked out on to fields, trees. A view which stretched out into the ether, infinite and unstoppable. When she walked past those windows with the nurses, she kept her eyes on the floor and counted tiles until they’d passed.

She had no memory of how she’d got outside. Usually the doors were locked. Only allowed out at break times, in groups, with supervision. That was the way things were. Some things were so intrinsic to the running of an institution that they didn’t even need to be classified as rules; they were just the laws that operated beneath everything, the underlying ecosystem upon which the organisation lived and breathed.

Yet, she was outside.

The driveway at the front was gravel, all crunch and no spring. The courtyard was dried-up grass, oft-trodden mud, flowers that didn’t die easily. She’d never been out the back before; had no idea how she was here now. Her bare feet sank into the grass, but not through. Like walking on a cold, slightly damp trampoline.

Walking away from the building, she felt rather than saw its looming presence, its many eyes on her back. The sun was
setting behind it, and so she was in its shadow. Paling into even further insignificance.

There was no sound. Or at least that was how it seemed. Deafness, numbness all around. Like being in a dream, where nothing existed except for what was immediately visible to you, and even that could never be trusted, was liable to disappear, transmogrify, with no warning whatsoever.

The woods, which skirted around the right-hand side of the house, sneaking up on the windows and reaching out branch-thumbs to graze the panes, sloped downwards away from the house. There was an expanse of neatly cut lawn directly in front of them, like an ocean which Lily must cross in order to get to the safety of the other side. She ran, bare feet thudding on open lawn, but once there she found there was no safety.

When the nurses found her, she was curled up on one side, eyes closed, thumb in mouth, and she would not open her eyes when they said her name. She shook violently for hours, long after she’d warmed up, and the only sound she emitted was the tiniest of murmurs, with not a hint of language underlying it.

Nathan always said he hated going to parties without Connie. It was the polite thing to say, he assumed; it would hardly be right to admit that actually he preferred going alone. Enjoyed the chance to speak to people who weren’t her. Enjoyed the opportunity to feel like someone other than a husband, a father, and a doctor.

Of course, it was a party full of doctors. But they were doctors pretending not to be doctors. Just as half of them were husbands pretending not to be husbands. Middle-aged men pretending to be young men.

Relatively sober men, pretending they were still capable of drinking a bar dry.

It was someone’s retirement do, and all the local practices had combined to give him a good send-off, despite the fact that the majority of them had never worked together and rarely socialised together. The result was that the room was full of people Nathan didn’t really know, and he found that he was actually enjoying himself.

‘I bet you earn a fortune,’ one girl was saying, laying her hand on his arm, practically panting the words in his direction. He laughed, feeling somewhat uncomfortable in the position of Attractive Rich Available Man. Perhaps because it was so utterly ridiculous that he should have been placed in that position.

‘No more than anyone else here,’ he replied easily, shifting himself slightly so that he could drop her arm from his
without causing offence. He managed it, but probably only because she was drunk enough to be struggling to stand up, let alone notice the subtleties of body language.

‘Oh, but I’ve heard of you,’ she said. She sounded as if she was barely aware of what she was saying. ‘You own your own practice, don’t you? You must be
loaded
.’

‘Well, there are other things in life. And I’m not sure “loaded” is quite the term.’ He looked around the room for an exit from the conversation. The girl was pretty, well turned-out, vacuous – exactly the kind of girl he didn’t find remotely interesting. He briefly wished for Connie’s presence at his side: she had a certain way of turning a phrase, vicious and yet sugar-coated, so you couldn’t quite tell where the sting had come from. She would have been rid of this girl in a second.

‘Of course there are other things in life.’ Her hand was back on his arm again, blood-red fingernails – talons, he couldn’t help thinking, such a striking difference from Connie’s neat red toes – and he was less subtle in removing it this time, shaking her off impatiently.

‘Sorry, but I have to go to speak someone over there.’

He left too quickly for her to formulate an objection, walking swiftly to the other side of the room.

He got a whisky from the bar – his third, and he was starting to feel the effect, a pleasant buzz just beneath his skin. He leaned back against the bar, scanning the room for people he recognised. There were a few people from his surgery by the buffet table, but no one he particularly wanted to talk to. A couple of people on the other side of the room, but they were too close to the girl he’d escaped from. She was still standing in the middle of the room, scanning it determinedly, presumably for a glimpse of him. He noticed the door to the balcony, and slipped out of it as surreptitiously as he could, closing it gently behind him.

The night air was warm for November, and his suit was just about sufficient to keep him at a reasonable temperature. The balcony was bigger than he’d expected – by the looks of it, it stretched around the entire building. They were only seven or eight storeys up, but it had the feel of an American tower block: very cosmopolitan. Or perhaps that was just his conception of such things. He preferred life on a smaller scale.

‘Nate.’

He turned to the right, and spotted his only real friend from work, waving a cigar in his direction, beckoning him over. He obliged, reaching out for a handshake as he approached.

‘James. Good to see you.’

‘You too. Enjoying yourself?’

‘Mmm, actually, I am.’ Nathan grinned, and raised his whisky glass by way of explanation. ‘Some girl in her twenties has just been propositioning me. How about you?’

‘Yeah, not too bad.’ James waved his cigars in Nathan’s direction, and he took one with a nod of thanks. ‘Which girl?’

‘In there.’ Nathan gestured in her direction. ‘Blonde, fingernails like talons, can barely stand up on her own.’

‘Oh, her. Yeah, she’s been chasing people around fairly indiscriminately, I believe. As long as you’re rich and not physically disfigured she’ll give it a go.’

‘I thought she might be one of those. It was the repeatedly asking if I was loaded that gave her away.’ Nathan grinned, and lit his cigar with a flourish.

‘Subtle. So where’s Connie tonight?’

‘Oh, she’s not been feeling great recently. You know, with her mum dying, and her sister being a nut job, she’s not had much of a break.’

‘Oh, come on – Lily’s not a nut job. She’s always seemed normal enough whenever I’ve met her at your place.’

‘Maybe not. But she’s going to turn Connie into one if she carries on the way she’s going.’

‘That bad?’

‘Well. Maybe. Where’s Angela?’

‘We split. About two weeks ago. Didn’t I mention it?’

‘Oh, you might have done. I’ve been pretty distracted… not that that’s an excuse. What happened?’

‘The usual. We liked each other, we had a nice time, she brought up marriage, I stopped having a nice time.’

Nathan laughed. ‘That does sound pretty standard. Maybe you need to address your commitment issues, or whatever it is that women refer to them as?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe I just need to find a girl with no fucking interest in getting married. Is that really too much to ask?’

‘Apparently so.’

They stood in silence for a minute, smoking, looking out over the town below. They could hear the music from inside, and the dull murmur of conversation from around them, but despite that the night felt strangely peaceful.

‘Maybe you should take that girl home,’ Nathan suggested, only half-joking.

‘Which girl?’

‘The one who’s been propositioning everyone in the room.’

‘Oh, no. I couldn’t bear to steal her away from you.’

‘Funny.’

‘Seriously, you’re not really worried about Connie?’

Nathan paused for a moment, considering. ‘Yeah, I suppose I am.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Well, she doesn’t get out of bed. She doesn’t talk about anything, except Lily and how worried she is about her. And that blasted house.’

‘What house?’

‘Her mother’s house. Connie’s childhood home, actually, but she moved out when she was young and never went back.’

‘How come?’

‘Oh, some weird stuff happened there. I never really got to the bottom of it. Connie just said there were bad memories. Lily doesn’t speak about anything unless she has to. I assume it has something to do with their dad dying – they never really talk about that either.’

‘Sounds mysterious.’

‘It’s mostly just irritating. I don’t think there’s any huge mystery there. Just a general refusal among everyone to talk about things in a normal way.’

‘So you don’t think maybe there’s a reason they don’t talk about it?’

‘I think Connie would trust me enough to tell me, if that was the case.’

‘Hmm.’ James raised a knowing eyebrow. ‘Don’t be so sure. Women are strange creatures. They work in mysterious ways.’

‘Huh. I doubt it.’ Nathan took a long slug of his whisky, and winced slightly. ‘As far as I can tell, they just like us to believe they do, so they can get away with more.’

Another hour and a half, and Nathan was drunk enough to be pleasantly unsure of where he was or who the people around him were. He’d gone inside for a while, but found the crowds and the noise confusing: people kept veering out in front of him when he was trying to walk in a straight line. He grabbed two drinks at once to save himself a second trip inside, and retreated back to the balcony, where James was talking to a redhead in her early thirties. She smiled warmly when Nathan approached, and he couldn’t help but smile back.

‘Nate, this is Andrea. We used to work together at the Park Surgery. Andrea, this is Nathan, one of our more esteemed doctors.’

‘Nice to meet you.’ Nathan went to hold out a hand for her to shake, realised that both of his hands were full and, shrugging apologetically, offered her one of his drinks instead.

‘Thanks, but I don’t do whisky.’

‘Why ever not? Nectar of the gods, you know.’

‘Mmm. My stomach doesn’t agree.’

‘How unfortunate. Can I get you something more palatable?’ He grinned, fully aware that he was going out of his way to be charming, but feeling no particular inclination to stop.

‘Actually, I’ve got a drink. But thanks.’ She was polite but firm – a gentle rebuke, he felt, and took the hint.

‘Fair enough. I think I might go in search of a bathroom. I’ll catch up with you later.’ And with a nod to them both he retreated inside.

Once inside, he found that there was nothing for it but to actually go in search of a bathroom. He wasn’t having too much difficulty walking, though putting his drinks down when he got inside proved something more of a challenge. He exchanged cheery nods with a man who was leaving as he came in, and took advantage of the empty room left by his retreating back to check his reflection in the mirror. He nodded approvingly while straightening his tie, and almost winked, though held himself back just in time. He wasn’t sure he was drunk enough to excuse that sort of behaviour.

He was aware that he was having a good time, and that he should probably be heading home fairly soon. He knew it was nearly midnight, and that Connie would be pissed off. Also, he had work in the morning. And he didn’t want to wake up the boys by coming in too late.

On the other hand, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been wifeless. Childless. It wasn’t an opportunity he allowed himself very often.

He checked his phone, and realised that Connie had tried to call him over an hour ago. She’d then sent a text, which simply read,
Going to bed now. Don’t wake me up xx
. The kisses were a good sign, he assumed. She’d sounded annoyed earlier, but she was obviously somewhat more cheerful now. Or, if not cheerful, at least slightly more forgiving.

With a mental shrug, he downed the remainder of one of his drinks. Sod it. He would go home soon. What was the point in having an understanding wife and not using it to his advantage?

He arrived home around three am. Connie didn’t wake when he came in; didn’t even stir when he almost fell over trying to take his trousers off, though he knocked several items off the dresser while doing so.

He crawled into bed beside her. Slipped a hand around her waist, under the T-shirt she chose, unfathomably, to wear to bed. Marvelled, as always, at how soft her skin was, how delicate she felt. Kissed her neck, and felt her murmur, almost inaudibly, in her sleep.

Never another like you,
he thought, drunkenly, not entirely sure where the words had come from. Then passed out.