One time, when she came back to herself after one of these immersions, she had the strong conviction that she wasn’t alone in the room. It was like her first night out on the main ward, only even stronger. Someone was moving behind the head of her bed. She waited for whoever it was to come into her line of sight, but they didn’t. They just kept moving back and forth behind her – the footfalls light and uneven in a way that made it hard to imagine what the owner of the feet was doing. Skipping? Dancing? Pushing something along the floor with no hands?
She might have risked a hello, but she knew what it would feel like if she moved her ulcerated tongue. She waved instead, a half-hearted ghost of a movement where her hand barely left the sheet.
The footsteps stopped right at her shoulder and the bed-frame creaked as it was touched. The unseen visitor sniffed loudly – the liquid sniff of a nose that needed to be blown – and then there was a chafing sound at the limit of audibility; Jess imagined a hand rubbing a face, or someone scratching an itch.
The longer the silence lasted, the less likely it seemed that the other person would break it. And now the silence was complete, which made Jess wonder whether she’d heard anything at all. Perhaps this whole experience was an artefact of recovering from the oblivious kiss of the painkillers.
But she felt something now: a stirring of air against her cheek. The visitor was still there, and close enough that she could feel their breath on her face.
She turned her head very slowly to lessen the jarring of unused muscles.
There was nobody there, and nothing at all behind the bed. The bed was pressed right up against the wall, the headboard actually fixed to it. The space in which those footsteps had skipped up and down didn’t exist.
21
“So you’re saying she’s running out of road?”
Devlin was sick of Salazar beating around the bush. Sick of standing in the infirmary and sweating his balls off because the admin block had no air conditioning and the heatwave just went on getting hotter. He wanted a straight answer. But Doctor fucking Feelgood here was still shying away from giving him one.
“All I’m saying is that she’s reaching a crisis,” Salazar repeated for about the tenth time with a shrug of his sloping shoulders. “The next forty-eight hours are going to be crucial.”
“Crucial?”
“Decisive.”
“Shit! You’re just using ten different words to say the same frigging thing. Is she going to die or not?”
The doctor winced, his eyes flicking from left to right and back again to avoid focusing on Devlin’s face. Devlin knew Sally for a pussy. The kind of pussy who hated making a stand on anything, even if that just meant stating a categorical opinion. There was an irony in that, because Sally’s huge, potato-shaped bulk made him seem imposing and permanent. And once upon a time there had indeed been some doggedness to him. Now he was a man who mostly ducked out of the way before you could come at him, just like he did now.
“I’m not having that conversation,” he told Devlin.
“Yeah, you are, Sally. Otherwise we’ll have another conversation about dipping your paw into the honeypot. We could bring the governor in on that one.”
Sally had gone through a brief period of borrowing from his own stock. It was when his wife, Leah, was dying from cancer and he’d used the drugs to give her a softer landing than she would otherwise have had. Devlin had found the evidence in the form of an invoice the doctor had thrown away after working up a convincing fake with a bottle of correction fluid and a photocopier. Devlin now had both the original invoice and the doctored copy in a file in his office. He’d kept Salazar’s secret, but he called in the favour on a regular basis. It hadn’t let him down yet. He was confident that it never would because it was only one half of a perfect lock. The other half was Naseem Suresh, who Devlin never mentioned at all because he knew he didn’t have to.
“Speaking of self-medication,” he added, driving his point home in case that needed doing, “what have you got for me?”
Salazar went to the secure cabinet, unlocked it and came back with three pink and white packets of pethidine. Devlin pocketed them without a word. He’d had an intermittent habit ever since he got to Fellside – or rather, ever since he took up with Grace – but he was way too sharp to fall over the diamorphine event horizon. Pethidine, taken half a tab at a time, was like a long, slow fuck, and he got along with it just fine. He knew from daily observation that heroin didn’t have nearly such good manners.
“Okay,” he said, happy that the natural pecking order had been duly established. “Joking aside, give me a time of death for that bitch.”
But Salazar still seemed reluctant to commit himself. “Moulson is weakening fast now,” was all he’d say. “She’s probably going to have a major organ failure in the next few days, and I won’t intervene unless she asks me to. But if she asks…”
Devlin was puzzled. “I didn’t think she was talking any more.”
“No, she isn’t,” the doctor admitted. “It would be difficult for her. Her mouth is in a very bad state. But she’s still aware of her surroundings, at least some of the time. It’s not impossible that she might say a… a word or two, or make some gesture that I could interpret as asking for an intervention.”
“A gesture you could interpret?” Devlin piled the words up high with disbelief and contempt.
“Yes.”
“Well, here’s a thought for you, Sally. Don’t.”
“Don’t…?”
“Don’t interpret. Let nature take its course.”
The doctor stood on his dignity, but it didn’t add as much to his height as he might have hoped. “I’m the best judge of my own responsibilities, Dennis. I’m employed by the prison but I work for my patients, like any doctor does.”
“Well, that’s what I’m asking you to do, you fucking idiot. This is what she wants, right? And the governor told you not to interfere. I’m just telling you the same thing.”
“But if she changes her mind…”
Devlin put his hand on Salazar’s shoulder – a little bit like a father, even though Salazar was ten years older than him.
“Help her to stay strong,” he said.
Sally didn’t say anything. But there was something in his face that looked a little bit like defiance. Devlin didn’t leave it at that anyway. He leaned in close, his hand still gripping tight onto Sally’s shoulder.
“You remember what happened the last time you decided to stand up and be counted?” he growled.
“Yes,” Sally said. “Of course I do.”
“We’re not going to have a repeat of that, are we?”
The doctor blinked very rapidly a whole lot of times. “Well, that would be unlikely,” he said. “This is… this is not a comparable situation.”
That was when Nurse Stock walked into the infirmary, and she walked in softly enough that neither of them noticed her.
“You just remember this, Sally,” Devlin said. “The woman you’ve got in there killed a kid. She fucking cooked him. In a perfect world, she’d get what she gave that little boy. She’d go out baked and basted like a Sunday roast. People like you, all you think about is your own good intentions. You see a pain, you put some ointment on it. You see a disease, you prep a needle.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at, Dennis,” Sally said quietly. His eyelids were still going like a semaphore.
“What I’m getting at,” Devlin said, “is that some people are the disease. You’re not doing any good by keeping them alive; you’re just adding another layer to the shit we’re all walking in.”
“Nobody is a disease. That’s a vile thing to say.”
Devlin shook his head in sorrowing contempt. “Well, never mind,” he said. “If she hangs on too long, maybe I’ll come on over with a plastic bag and close the betting myself.”
He turned then, and saw Stock. He didn’t seem even a little bit worried about being overheard. There weren’t many people at Fellside whose pricked-up ears Dennis Devlin needed to worry about, and Stock wasn’t one of them.
“Hey, Sylvie,” he greeted her. “Talk some sense into this moron, would you?”
He walked out, leaving Dr Salazar gathering up the pieces of his fractured dignity. As he walked away, he heard Sally say, “That man is a bully, pure and simple. Pay him no mind, Sylvie.”
He didn’t hear what Stock said. But he was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking. He thought of her as someone very like himself who wouldn’t bear fools gladly and could always tell one when she saw one.
22