They could have held her if they’d seen it coming, but they were bracing from underneath and Jess was shooting out horizontally. She fell back down the stairs, twisting to land on her side because she didn’t want to break her spine. One arm came up to protect her head, the other clutched her stomach in case the drug pouch came free, but she couldn’t maintain the crash position for more than a second or two.
She rolled and clattered all the way back down the stairs to the soundtrack of Corcoran’s yell of surprise and alarm and Ratner’s blurted “Shit!” She didn’t quite have enough momentum to go head over heels: it was a messy, sprawling slither and a bruising crash on to the ballroom floor.
A whole crowd of women ran over to check out the damage, to offer help if they could, or else just to watch something more interesting than cockroach races.
Ratner grabbed Jess by the arm to haul her upright again, but a couple of dozen voices shouted no. Ratner hesitated and looked over at Corcoran, who was also shaking her head. “She might have a spinal injury,” Marge Todd said. “If you move her, you could fuck her up for life.”
“Call the infirmary,” Corcoran said to Ratner. “I’ll stay with her.”
“She’s fine,” Ratner said.
“We don’t know that. Go call the doc.”
Ratner looked like she was going to say something more, but she swallowed it, whatever it was, and went to do as she was told. Jess lay on the floor trying to look like someone concussed and confused. When Corcoran asked her how she was, she didn’t answer.
Patience DiMarta arrived a couple of minutes later, moving at a fast clip. She studied Jess’s bloodied nose and scraped hand and then started feeling her over cautiously for other injuries.
“What happened?” she asked.
“She fell down the stairs,” Corcoran said.
“Fell?” Ratner was indignant. “The mad bitch took a bloody nosedive.”
“Can you feel your feet?” DiMarta asked her.
“Yes.”
“Move them, then.”
Jess did, evidently to DiMarta’s satisfaction.
“How about standing?” she suggested.
Jess sat up, but she made a big deal out of it, moving slowly with a lot of wincing and gasping.
“All right,” DiMarta said. “I’ll take her.”
“She’s meant to be confined to her cell,” Ratner protested.
DiMarta gave her a blank look, as though a piece of furniture had piped up at her. “That’s nice,” she said. And then to Jess, “Come on, prisoner. Nothing wrong with your legs, as far as I can see.”
She helped Jess get herself upright, with Jess turning in a creditable performance as someone who’d taken enough knocks to forget where the vertical hold was.
Ratner again. “I’ve got my orders. She’s meant to be—”
“I’m not arguing with you about your orders,” DiMarta said across her. “She’s hurt; I’m taking her.”
Ratner was standing between them and the door. She stayed there for a moment or so, scowling, weighing up her options.
DiMarta spoke more slowly and distinctly, as though she was talking to an imbecile. “Go to the rulebook. Look it up. Don’t you know anything? If you break this, you’ll be the one to pay for it.”
It was an unanswerable argument. A big part of the infirmary’s function was making sure that Fellside, its managers and its corporate owners were indemnified if any of the inmates came to harm. As soon as DiMarta arrived on the scene, her jurisdiction was pretty much total. All Ratner could do was step out of the way, which she did now with seething bad grace.
“There you are,” DiMarta said grimly. “Thank you so much.”
66
Sylvie Stock was in the infirmary when DiMarta arrived with Moulson. She didn’t take it well.
“What’s she doing here?” she blurted.
“She took a fall,” Patience said. “It’s all right, Sylvie. I’ll deal with it.”
She sat Jess down in a straight-backed chair, disinfected her scraped wrist and cleaned the blood off her face. Jess’s nose was still bleeding sluggishly so DiMarta gave her a tissue to hold under it.
“You’d better get your clothes off,” she said. “Let’s take a look at you, see whether anything’s bent or broken.”
Jess swallowed bile. The moment of decision had its own peculiar taste, sour and burning. “I need the toilet,” she said.
DiMarta nodded. “All right. You know where it is.”
“And I’d like to talk to Dr Salazar, if that’s possible.”
After Moulson had trudged through into the bathroom, DiMarta gave Stock a look with a big question mark in it. “That was an odd reaction,” she said.
Sylvie shrugged it off. “I don’t like that woman. Sometimes you just take against people. For example, if they murder an innocent child or something. I wouldn’t ever let it affect my professional judgement.”
“No,” Patience agreed. “Of course not.”
“I’m serious,” Stock snapped. “I’m a nurse, Patience. I do my job. When have you ever known me not to do my job?”
“Never,” DiMarta said. “Listen, why don’t you go and tell Sally she’s here and wants a word with him?”
“Fine,” Sylvie muttered. She walked out, slamming the door behind her.
She got ten yards down the corridor and burst into tears. It was just too much. She’d done a terrible thing but it had been an accident and it wasn’t fair that it should keep coming back again and again to torture her. And Sally knew everything. Sally could shake her off into the gutter with a word whenever he wanted to.
That was hard to live with. It made Stock desperate. It pushed her to the brink of an interior precipice, where she stood and waited to see whether chance or fate would push her over.
67
Jess walked into the bathroom, locked herself in and sank back against the wall, eyes closed. She felt so weak, she didn’t trust herself to stand upright. The package of drugs against her stomach reflected back her body’s heat like a baked brick. She was almost afraid to touch it.
But when she pulled up her tracksuit top and peeled the tape away, the plastic pouch was cold and clammy to her touch.
It took a long time to flush away the drugs. The pills in particular refused to surrender, bobbing back up to the surface two or three times over before Jess finally got rid of them by dropping sheets of toilet paper over them like nets.
“Moulson, what’s going on in there?” DiMarta shouted through the door.
“My stomach,” Jess muttered.
“What?”
“My stomach,” she said again, louder. “I’ve got really bad diarrhoea. I’ll be out in a minute.”
DiMarta tutted and went away to make up a glass of ORT salts. “You’re in the wars,” she called out conversationally – the same thing she always said when a patient presented with more than one condition at the same time.
Jess flushed again and again until there was nothing left. She folded up the empty pouch and the zip-lock bags and stuffed them into the pocket of her trousers. Then she ran the tap for a long time, because DiMarta would expect to hear it. She splashed cold water on her face. Stared at herself in the mirror with the water trickling down her cheeks like tears.
She’d done it. There was no going back now. She was at war with Harriet Grace. Only she’d forgotten to bring any weapons.
She unlocked the door and went back out into the infirmary. “Drink this,” DiMarta told her, thrusting the glass of salts into her hand. “It will rehydrate you. And then take your clothes off. I need to see how bad the damage is.”
This time Jess did as she was told. She downed the salts. She stepped out of her clothes as DiMarta drew the screens across, and submitted docilely to an examination. DiMarta was thorough, looking for swelling and bruising – there was a lot of bruising, old and new – testing the rotation of Jess’s joints, making sure her pupils were responsive, and generally exercising due diligence.
While she was still doing all this, Sally arrived and called out to them from the other side of the screens. “It’s me, Patience. Sylvie said—”
“We’ll be right with you, Philip,” DiMarta said. She was the only one at Fellside who ever used Dr Salazar’s first name.
Jess put her clothes back on. DiMarta folded the screens back.