Sin City Read online

  Six used to be my lucky lucky number until it let me down. It was September 6th they caught me. I’d noticed the first dead leaves, just that morning on my way to the supermarket, even picked one up, held it limp and faded in my hand. Yet it was summer still for all the normal world – girls in flimsy dresses, the ice-cream man in shirt-sleeves dishing out his Soft-Whip, the smell of rotting peaches. I didn’t have a summer, not at all, not this year. I was crying in the shop, sniffling up and down the aisles without a Kleenex. It was Kleenex I took first – a mini-pack. I meant to pay, honestly. It was just that I had to use them straight away, to wipe my eyes. The other things I didn’t even want. I don’t know why I did it. I still feel frightened if I think about it – not just the police-station and the court and the psychiatrist, but the fact it was me sitting on that bench with a great burly policewoman beside me in a room with khaki walls and a “WANTED” poster just above my head – a smiling rapist. Imagine smiling in your “WANTED” photograph.

  All I took was a packet of Kraft cheese slices and a small swiss roll. The swiss roll was past its “sell by” date, and marked down to half price. If I’d really meant to steal, then why take cut-price things, instead of caviare or gin or something? I love swiss rolls – unrolling them and scraping out the filling, eating it first with a spoon. I never did with that one. They caught me at the door. We had swiss roll at school every Tuesday dinner. Cold with tepid custard. I was Somebody at school – even did my A levels. Then my father died, just two weeks afterwards. Molière and Hamlet, then a funeral.

  I smoke Players No.6 because my father died. That’s true, in fact. He smoked himself, Rothman’s Kingsize. We also shared noses and the same colour hair. (I’m nothing like my mother.) I’d been accepted by Southampton and he was so thrilled with me, so proud. His child at university! His nose and hair and mouth at university. They never went, in fact. I turned down Exeter as well. And Keele. I smoke Players No.6 as a substitute for Keele. I smoke Players No.6 because I loved my father best in all the world and he went and died of cancer, killed the summer. Died of Rothman’s Kingsize. The doctor said perhaps I want to die as well, subconsciously. With Dr Bates, everything’s subconsciously. I smoke Players No.6 because they’ll kill me in the end, help me join my father. Want a ciggie, Dad?

  God! It’s hot in here. Really sweaty hot. They could use it as a sauna if it wasn’t for the boiler and those great fat lumbering pipes. It’s even got the slatted wooden benches. I hide here every morning, use it as a bolt-hole. The library was hopeless. They wouldn’t let me smoke there, and Miss Barratt kept tiptoeing up with books, dropping them on my desk like a dog with an old slipper. Next, I tried the flower-room which at least smelt better than the ward, but those stiff bouquets in cellophane reminded me of death again, and someone always found me anyway. Bathrooms are all right for half an hour, but after that, they always flush you out, make you clean the bath when you haven’t even used it. This boiler-room is perfect, if you can stand the killing heat. It’s down some steep stone steps, so you feel extra safe, and can use the slats to write on, or lie flat out and doze.

  I just can’t stand that ward. People wouldn’t believe it if they saw the wrecks they keep there. Some of them have been patients since the early 1920s – except patients is the wrong word, since they weren’t even ill when they came in. Martha Mead was frog-marched here in 1906 because she stole a loaf – just one loaf and eighty years in hospital. She’s ninety-seven now. I could still be here in 2067, a dribbling hump like she is, with my tongue lolling out and my fingers bent like claws.

  It was really only chance I landed here at all. Jan went away for just three measly days, and the social worker chose day three to call. Okay, I’d let things go a bit, but I’d planned the tidy up that evening, do my washing, clear away the mess. And I only wasn’t dressed because I haven’t got a job. What’s the point of putting all your clothes on when you’ve nowhere to go and nothing to get up for? Old Frog-Face just assumed that I was cracking up. I admit I cried and shouted, but if she hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have. I hate the way she pries, looks in all the cupboards, lifts up fraying edges in your mind. I don’t think she believed in Jan at all. The other twice she visited, Jan was out again. It was just bad luck, but she thought I was lying, or confused. I’d hardly invent my best and oldest friend, one I went to school with, one who offered me a home when my father died and my mother went to pieces. If you can call Jan’s bedsit home – one crummy room in Vauxhall.

  Anyway, Frog-Face dried my tears and helped me mend the Hoover, then went and ratted on me, reported back to someone, so I had to see the psychiatrist again and he suggested Beechgrove. Suggested, hell! You can’t argue with psychiatrists. I did, in fact, for half an hour, but the more I ranted on, the more he said it proved I needed help.

  Help?

  I miss Jan, actually. It seems centuries since I’ve seen her, though it’s only just ten days. She’s frightened of the hospital, won’t come near it, not a second time. She was meant to bring me in, but she panicked when she got here. She saw two patients just outside the gates. One was male, old male, with his flies undone. He had bought a paper, The Sun, I think it was, and he was slumped on the ground, not reading it, but tearing it in strips, very neat and careful strips, all the same shape and size and laid out in a row. The other was female – foreign, obviously, with white hair straggling down a dark and pitted face, and coarse hairs on her legs. The legs were bare. She wasn’t doing anything. That was the trouble – there was nothing left of her. No mind, or thoughts, no hope. Just a framework toupéed with white hair.

  Jan stopped, right where she was, started tugging at a button on her jacket. It was loose to start with and she’d been worrying at it all morning like a wobbly tooth. “Carole, you can’t come here. Over my dead body.”

  “Don’t be silly.” I sounded sharper than I meant to. “Dr Bates is expecting me at ten.”

  “Well, ring him up or something. Say you’re ill. They should never have sent you to a place like this. They’re all mad and old and …”

  “What d’you mean ‘all’? You haven’t seen them yet. Those two are probably staff.” With Jan, I’d always been the joker. It’s hard to break a habit, even when you’re about to join the dead.

  Jan didn’t laugh. “Come on, love. I’ll take you back. I’ll even take the day off. We’ll go to a flick or something – my treat.” The button had come off now and Jan was mauling it, poking it with a finger, chewing on it, flicking her nail against it with a maddening pinging sound. I snatched the button from her hand, cradled it in mine. It looked so weak and sort of hopeless, with no purpose left, no longer one of four, a useful member of a team keeping out the wind; just a bit of bone hanging from a thread. “Okay,” I said. “The flicks it is. I’ll just tell Dr Bates, though. He won’t mind.”

  Of course he’d mind, but I didn’t want Jan’s terrors (or an argument) on top of all the rest. I wasn’t feeling all that bright myself. In fact, when those gates clanged shut behind me, all I could think of was my father’s funeral – that really choking moment when the coffin slides downwards and the trap-doors close over it, and there’s nothing left but floorboards and the flames. I ran up Beechgrove’s steps – ran for Jan’s sake (I could see her watching anxiously from the iron grille of the gate), even whistled. The whistling is a trick. You can’t cry when you whistle. I’ve proved it scores of times.

  I’m whistling now. I can feel that awful pricking in the eyes, my face unstitching, mouth loose on its hinge; that dreadful shameful feeling that if I don’t hold tight, I’ll just dissolve in floods again. It’s stupid to keep snivelling, but I’m so scared of everything. I mean, how long will I be in here? And when I do get out, will Jan accept me back? Or go off me somehow, which she seems to have done already? And will I ever get a job?

  Footsteps on the stairs. I sit bolt upright, snatch up my sheets of paper, pray it’s not Nurse Sanders. She’s the worst.

  It’s not a nurse, it’s male
– young good-looking male, with tattooed arms.

  “Hallo, gorgeous. Lost your way?”

  I grin. I’m not gorgeous, actually, but I suppose compared with what he sees around …

  “No,” I say. “I’m hiding. And you haven’t seen me. Right? They’ll kill me if they find me here.”

  “You’re not a patient, are you? Can’t be. Not a cracker like you.”

  I like him. “No,” I say. “I’m the heating engineer.”

  He laughs, offers me a fag. I’m close to tears again. Just to be treated as a normal person, noticed as a woman. He’s looking at my legs, admiring them. His own are long and thin. We don’t have men in Florence Ward, though there’s a woman with a beard and one who thinks she’s Churchill.

  I wish he’d hold my hand, call me Carole, invite me out for a coffee or a beer. I feel so horribly alone here. I haven’t made a friend yet, hardly talk to anyone. They keep pushing me on Sandy, but we’ve nothing much in common except we’re both eighteen. She frightens me, to tell the truth. She’s been on dope and her eyes have great black holes in them.

  “Hey, wait!” I shout. He’s checked the boiler and is making for the stairs again.

  He stops. What in God’s name do I say now? Take me with you? Hide me in your van? “Er … have you any change?” I ask. “10p’s for the phone?”

  He fumbles in his pockets, hands me three. I get my purse out, find it full of tens, pray he hasn’t seen them, hold up a lone five.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t seem to have …”

  “Don’t worry. Have the call on me. Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Pete,” I say. I’ve never met a Pete.

  “I’m Paul.”

  “Hi, Paul.” Perhaps he’ll stay now. “I’m Carole. Carole Joseph.”

  “Ta-ra then, Carole. Don’t burn your bum. Those pipes are bloody hot.” He laughs, takes the stairs in three huge leaps, is gone. I hear the door crash to.

  I tip out all my change. I’ve got thirteen tens, counting mine and his; could hog the phone till lunchtime. Except I’ve nobody to ring. I try to flesh Pete out, turn him into Paul, but with no tattoos and darker hair, snuggle up to him. It doesn’t work. He wouldn’t want me anyway, not a chain-smoking cry-baby grizzling in a nuthouse. I mooch over to the boiler, examine my face in its shiny metal top. Am I really gorgeous? I always feel rather sort of ordinary and when people say I’m pretty, I never quite believe them. My face looks blurred, distorted, so I fill in all the details just from memory, frowning at myself. I suppose no one’s really happy with their looks. Okay, my eyes are nice and my complexion’s fairly decent and I go in and out at roughly the right places, but there are still a lot of things which aren’t quite right. My left front tooth is just a fraction crooked, and my hair’s the wavy sort instead of stylish straight, and you can’t be really elegant when you’re only five foot two. I’d love to be a model, one of those half-starved ones who stand six foot in their stockings, yet still look frail and boneless. My father was quite small.

  I trail back to the bench, spread out all the forms again. Safer to keep busy. I smoke Players No.6 because they stunt you.

  Steps again. It’s Paul. Come back. Come to ask me out, take me for a spin. I finger-comb my hair, prepare a dazzling smile.

  “Carole, what are you doing down here?”

  Nurse Sanders! Paul must have sneaked on me, called me gorgeous, then rushed straight to Sister’s office.

  “I’m … er … writing, Nurse, writing letters. Writing to my Dad.” She’s not much older than I am. Thinner, though, and taller. Perhaps I’ll start a diet.

  “You should be in the Day Room, not skulking off in corners. I told you that last week.”

  “I hate the Day Room.”

  “We have to know where patients are. Can’t you understand that? And Art Therapy starts in half an hour.”

  “I don’t like Art. I like being on my own.”

  “You won’t get better that way.” She’s pouncing on my things, seen the competition forms.

  “Hey, d’you smoke, Nurse?”

  “Don’t change the subject, Carole. You come back with me now.”

  “If you had to give a reason why you smoke – you know, sort of official on a form, what would you say?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Yeah, but if you did, why would you?”

  “I wouldn’t. And nor would you if you’d worked on a cancer ward.”

  “My father died of cancer.”

  “And you’re writing to him?”

  “Mm.”

  “Well, you can finish writing letters after Art. There’s a nice big desk in that Crafts Room just next door.”

  “Yeah, covered with jigsaw puzzles.”

  “We can always clear them off.”

  That’s typical of Sanders. Those jigsaws are people’s lives. Can’t she understand that? A world where all the pieces fit, and where the picture you end up with is mercifully the same as the picture on the box, the picture you were promised. That’s rare outside a jigsaw. Norah Toomey’s doing one with five thousand pieces, all the same colour, more or less. She’s been doing it for years. Someone lost the box-top, so she’s forgotten what she’s making. It could be anything.

  I turn on Sanders. “We can’t do that. It’s bad enough with people losing pieces. Or eating them. Or dropping them down toilets. Poor Norah’s got great gaps in hers already.”

  “You like Norah, don’t you?” Sanders pushes me in front of her, up the steps and out. I blink in the harsh light.

  “Not specially. I think she quite likes me, though. She’s always hanging round.”

  “Well, it’s nice to have a friend.” Sanders is still marching me along. Right, left, right.

  “I’ve got friends, thanks.” Have I? Jan could have come, just once.

  “Not here, though. You’ve got to make an effort, Carole. You’ve been here a whole fortnight and you’re still not co-operating.”

  We’ve reached the ward now. Nurse Sanders heaves the door as if it’s another bolshie patient who needs firm handling. I feel almost sorry for it as I walk on through; brave the now-familiar smell of pee and cabbage.

  “Right, then, Nurse, I’ll sit next to Norah in the Crafts Room and help her with her jigsaw.” Darling Daddy, I didn’t go to Southampton, but I got Honours in my Jigsaws. Hey, that might work! Players No.6 are the last piece in your jigsaw, the jam in your swiss roll.

  Chapter Three

  “Coffee, Carole?”

  That volunteer again, the one in tweeds and Hush Puppies with a badge on her lapel saying “Hospital Friend”. I wonder why she asks me? I always have coffee and she doesn’t ask the others. They just get theirs, weak and sweet, pushed into their claws. The volunteers make it in the kitchen, mix the milk and sugar in a saucepan, boil it all up together with a liquid coffee essence, also sweetened, then pour it from a chipped enamel jug into stained brown melamine. They probably drink from Spode at home, grind their own coffee beans.

  She passes me a biscuit, frowns when I take three. My jeans are so tight now, I can hardly do them up. Who cares? Norah gives me all her biscuits and saves me things from meals. She even bought me chocolates from the shop here, pricey ones, when she’s hardly got a bean. She seems to really like me. God knows why. Actually, I’ve got quite fond of her. At least she’s restful, doesn’t keep on jabbering like Alison, or clutching me with bony hands like Peg. And she’s not a nutter like most of the long-stay patients. She’s also clean, which is saying quite a lot here. I mean, look at that woman with her dress on inside-out, coffee-stained both sides, and Ethel Barnes taking off her knickers in the middle of the room – white interlock and wet. No one even bothers. They’ve seen worse before, much worse.

  I’m not that shocked myself now. I’ve been here six whole weeks and the pills have sort of numbed me. Might as well live here as anywhere. At least it’s warm and the meals are free. I don’t even cry for my father any longer, hardly cry at all. I suppose t
hat’s just the drugs again, but isn’t crying human – proof you feel and care? He’s been dead four months. Four centuries.

  Another volunteer bounces over to take my empty cup. I haven’t finished, but I expect she’s keen to start the washing up, get back to her whist. She’s the bossy one with Teeth who runs the letter-writing class. Norah dragged me to it once because she’d heard I was having trouble writing to my father. News spreads fast in Beechgrove. It’s really meant for old folk and those who can’t read or write, or who have forgotten who they are. But I went along in any case, just to kill an hour. I can turn out better letters than all those tweeds-and-twinsets put together, but I didn’t let on; just acted dumb and let them write “Dear Daddy” on their prissy pale blue notepaper. They asked about my mother and would I like to write to her, too. I said yes, later please, though that would have been even harder than writing to a father who’s just a jar of ashes on a mantelpiece.

  My mother is in hospital herself, the other side of England. Drying out. Recovering from the death, when it was her who helped to kill him. She was always more concerned with him than me. In fact, I doubt if she remembers who I am. “With love and kisses from your little Carole.” I wouldn’t kiss her now. Her face is sort of loose, as if it’s lost contact with the bone beneath. Her lipstick doesn’t fit her mouth. Her hand shakes when she puts it on, so she ends up with four lips. She always wore too much make-up. Foundation like a mask and gunge and glitter on her eyes. Norah scrubs her face with soap. I’d like a mother like that. A face so clean and shiny you could see yourself reflected, recognise your features in it; feel that you belonged, were made of the same fabric, had actually curled up in her womb for nine long and cosy months, shared her blood supply. Sometimes, I think my mother grabbed me from a supermarket shelf, to avoid the pain of labour – probably never even paid for me, just slipped me in her pocket before the days of TV cameras watching from the ceiling. Mind you, it was she who got me off. A paralytic mother impresses them in court. The social workers drooled. My mother made the difference between prison and a hospital, though perhaps there’s not much difference.