Benighted (38 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

T
here’s only one way to do this.

What I want is to talk to this doctor. No, what I really want is to go back to church and pray for forgiveness, spend days on my knees and beg the saints to intercede for my ruined soul. That’s what I’d like to do, but as long as I have unfinished business, then nothing’s going to help my soul very much. Any sensible saint would tell me to sort out my good works first and save the introspection for a better moment.

I need to talk to him, and I can’t think of any other way.

I don’t want to do this.

The idea, my only idea, takes hold of me early on, and it shakes me so badly I get stupid; all other ideas clot in my brain. I spend a day looking out of my window, walking up and down, a tight, sick knot under my ribs, and every time I think of it the knot twists, and fat white grubs squirm in my throat. I know I can do it if I have to, and that’s worse, though what I’m feeling, for once, isn’t really about guilt. My conscience hurts at the idea, but I’ve done terrible things before now, and this one won’t hurt anyone but me. Me and my daughter up in Heaven. If she’s in Heaven, she’s beyond my reach, I can’t hurt her.

I don’t want to do this.

The first thing to do is ask Hugo to help me get the free-rangers released. I tell him the story, tell him what I need.

“The story won’t work from inside DORLA,” I say. My hands are folded, my face is still. I meet his eyes, gaze to expressionless gaze. He was right all along. If you stay dead on the surface, you don’t get pitied, you don’t get pried into, nobody presumes on you with their judgments. A blank face gives you privacy.

“Everyone will know that they were here.” His voice is as calm as mine, and for the first time I understand it, this quiet, neutral gentleness of his. “They won’t be able to explain it away, such a long absence.”

“They won’t have to. We met in here, there’s no need to hide that. If they’re back in the world, it doesn’t look like duress. If they’re in here, it does.”

He looks at me without aggression. “What do you hope to achieve by this?”

I don’t make a speech. “I don’t know. I’d like to try it.”

“And you’re certain these individuals—they won’t be released unconditionally, you understand, they’ll be charged with loitering and bailed—you’re certain that they have no involvement in the killings?” He says the word “killings” with no inflection, and neither of us flinches.

“Yes,” I say, “I’m sure.”

I’d like it if they could just be released without ceremony, without my having to see them. It isn’t possible. I commandeer an interview room and call up the only ones I need, Carla and Paul. Though really I just need Carla. At the thought of what I’m going to do, my mouth turns sticky and the knot tightens inside my chest, but it’ll have to be done. I must get used to telling this story.

They look better. They’ve been tidied up, given clean clothes, though just the gray track suits we keep to hand out on Day One mornings to the lycos who wake up naked, and they look unfamiliar. They look a little shrunken, but better than they did.

Paul sits in his chair. He looks at me and says nothing.

Carla breathes lightly, holds herself together. “We were told our release was conditional, we had to do something for you.”

I keep the face I learned from Hugo. “That’s not quite right. You’ll be released in any case, but there’s a course of action I need to take that may go a long way toward proving your innocence. If you help me with it, you’ll be helping yourselves.”

They are both innocent, and it’s not much of an inducement, but neither of them says anything. They’ve been in the cells long enough to learn not to make provocative remarks.

“Obviously you could argue your innocence in court, but the best thing for you is if the real culprit is caught. I—we have a suspect, and you can help me gain access to him.”

“Parkinson?” says Carla. “Why suspect him?”

“Do you know him?” I ask.

“Professionally. We work in the same hospital, that’s all.” She stops talking, waits for me to answer her question.

“I think there had to be someone in the hospital who helped our suspect to escape.”

She doesn’t ask why I think it’s Parkinson.

I keep my face still. “I need you to refer me to him as a patient.”

“Why?”

“I can’t arrest him without evidence. I’d like to be around him a little.”

Paul hasn’t taken his eyes off my face.

Carla looks down at her hands. “He does gynecology and obstetrics. Why would I refer you?”

“You say we got talking while you were here, I asked you about something outside your area.”

“What?”

I draw a quiet breath. The air is cool in my throat. “I told you I was having trouble conceiving and I was worried about it.” Paul flinches; his face jerks with a convulsive half laugh.

“You’d see a fertility specialist about that, it’s not his field.” Carla’s lips barely move.

“Tell him I was worried about my past. You say I had a miscarriage a few years ago, and was worried it might have caused permanent damage.”

“He’d check your records, they’d show it wasn’t true.”

I don’t look away from her worn, chapped face. “It is true. The records would show it.” I see Paul flicker in the corner of my vision. I don’t move my head.

Carla’s face pinches at the eyes for a moment, then she folds her hands. “How long ago?”

“Six years.” I don’t have to do the math.

“When you were how old?” The look on her face is familiar—the impersonal autopilot professionalism that takes over when you’ve had too little rest and too many surprises.

“Twenty-two.” Paul keeps looking at me. I should be able to read his face, but it’s still, mute. “After it happened they checked my family records, and there’s a history of miscarriage. “When we were young, we didn’t know our mother miscarried twice before we were born. It only came out after what happened to me. Becca felt sorry for her when she heard the news; after she told me that, we stopped speaking for months. She said she could be sorry for two people, but I didn’t believe her, not then. I’m sorry, now, about Becca, but only about Becca. There were lots of things I didn’t forgive my mother for. Not warning me is the one I can’t let go.”

Carla’s hands twist. “I—I don’t know if I can give him enough reasons.”

“He treated my sister, that’s a start. You know more about medicine than I do. Make something up.”

“Was it Ally?”

Paul’s voice is hoarse, quiet. It takes a moment to recognize it. “What?”

He doesn’t answer.

“You mean was Ally the father?” My throat is pressing tighter and tighter, it’s difficult to swallow. “No. He—we trained together, we trained on dogs. His name is Robert. He’s gone to another city now.”

There are lines around Paul’s eyes. When I first knew him, when things were good, they were just little traces, tiny tracks in his skin, but now they’re deep, sharp. “Were you planning an abortion?”

I stretch my hands, stare at them, keep myself still. “No. I wasn’t. I was going to keep her.”

“Her?”

My fingers bend back as I stretch them out. Little patches of white bloom at the tips of the nails. “They did an ultrasound. She was a girl.” No one says anything. “I was going to call her Ann.”

He stares at me, creasing his face against the light from my window. “Why would you have kept a baby?”

“She was mine.” I can’t explain it, not here, not anymore, I don’t know what to say. Of course he’d suppose I was planning an abortion. That’s what he’d think of me. I thought of it myself, I sat down and looked at the blue strip and read my bank statement and looked around my tiny apartment, and knew what would make sense. I hadn’t counted on feeling anything. But I had scars running up and down my limbs, and I knew what it was like to be torn at. I thought of a suction pump, tearing at my skin, dragging me mangled out into the light, pulpy with blood, and I knew I couldn’t do that to her. And I had a leaflet, a green-printed pamphlet from the pharmacy, talking about giving up smoking and the importance of exercise and eating balanced meals. What I understood then was that she needed me healthy. Whatever happened to me happened to her. Ann was the only person in the world, ever, who was utterly on my side. “Let’s say I went bitter after the miscarriage,” I say aloud. “Let’s say it turned me sour.”

“Did you?” he says.

“I asked you about luning and you couldn’t explain it,” I say. “Don’t ask me to explain this. Let’s say this is the thing I can’t explain.” I worried about luning, I asked him questions he didn’t dare answer. Now he knows: he’s not the only one with an ugly secret. It’s a gift, of sorts, it’s the best I can give him.

“Were you going to get married?”

I shake my head. “No, no. I told him I was pregnant, and I told him to leave. I didn’t want him around.” He just looks at me, wordless. I close my eyes for a moment, screen myself behind the lids. “It was a long time ago. I told him to leave because we’d been going out for some time but he hadn’t been a very good boyfriend. All right? He was fond of making clear what I couldn’t expect from him. Big on boundaries. There are lots of boys like that around. I could take it when it was just me because I thought I was in love with him, but I couldn’t deal with that and a baby as well. I was better off on my own. I don’t think I would have—” I stop, the words hitch in my throat. What I was going to say was, I would have left him sooner if the sex was better. I would have been better able to think straight. As it was, he kept me compliant with little more than sheer, desperate frustration. We don’t discuss this, but bareback men are not good lovers. Any man whose first experiences are furtive scuffles in a locked creche, never knowing when the girl may change her mind and put a knee in his groin, is liable to have difficulties. I was too young. I was still trying to stick with my own kind, then. It was before Paul, before I really understood what I was missing. If it hadn’t been for Ann, Robert might still be in the same city.

Paul stares into his lap, shakes his head. He’s bewildered, lost for things to say.

Carla sits up straighter. “Can you tell me the circumstances of the miscarriage?”

My jaw aches, my teeth are too hot. I must get used to telling this story. “I got knocked over on a moon night.”

“You went out?” she says.

“I hadn’t told many people. It was the fourth month. I didn’t know there was a tendency to miscarry in my family.” She stares at me, and I press my hands down on the table. “I hadn’t talked to any older women about it, and I was twenty-two. I was broke; catchers get bonuses. I thought I could just operate the van. But someone came at us unexpectedly. I got mauled. This lune got me down and worried at me, dug a piece out of my hip.” The scar is still there, a deep hollow in the flesh. Paul asked me about it once, and I wouldn’t discuss it. “It wouldn’t have been fatal. I just lost a certain amount of blood. They patched me up at the shelter, told me to go to the ER next day if I wanted it checked. I didn’t start bleeding till early the next morning.”

My throat closes. I can’t say any more.

I remember lying in the hospital, staring at the ceiling, the plaster rose around the light fitting. That was when I started the twitch. My eyelid jerked and crawled like a hooked worm. I stood up and stared in the mirror till it stopped. When the nurse came in she almost dropped her tray at the sight of me on my feet. I almost remember the pain.

Becca sat by me for a while, but I wouldn’t talk to anyone.

The doctors told me to come in for after-care checkups. I didn’t go. I haven’t been to a gynecologist in six years.

Most days I can look at six-year-olds and feel okay.

I’d like to say some of this to Paul, but I can’t talk. Carla agrees to refer me. It’s unlikely, she says, that Parkinson will insist on seeing my husband or partner; he’d refer me on after a single appointment. She says this without either of us looking at Paul or asking him anything.

THIRTY-NINE

C
arla calls me a couple of days later and tells me she’s gotten me a private appointment with Parkinson. His fees are considerable, but I can get DORLA to pay them. She says she told him various medical details, that I shouldn’t explain much when I go. I just turn up, talk about conception, don’t try to justify myself. She’s done all the work. Her voice is neutral, she doesn’t betray herself. I wish we could have been friends.

I don’t hear from the others. They go back out into the world, probably start piecing their lives back together, see doctors, psychiatrists, friends. Someone. Paul doesn’t say good-bye.

In the days before the appointment, I find a new church. It’s large, Gothic, airy. Blue and red glass shines in its lead-framed windows. There are pamphlets, flower arrangements, charity boxes, dark wooden pews. I sit and look at the beautiful windows; I stand before the black metal racks and light pale ivory candles and drop my coin in the box. Sometimes I pray.

There’s a shop at one corner, selling mostly postcards, crucifixes. When I was younger I used to wonder about such shops, money-changers in the temple, but I suppose the church needs maintenance. I turn the rack of crucifixes and find, at the back, some little medals of St. Giles, round and inexpensive, nine-karat gold or pewter. I buy one, a small pewter disk, and hang it around my neck. It dangles below my collarbone, almost weightless. My reasons are mostly pagan, I’m sure; to give me courage, to bring me luck, to ward off the evil eye, perhaps. I don’t think about it too hard. This cheap, undecorative jewel around my neck makes me feel a little better.

I’m there so long that the priest approaches and asks if he can help me: a man with thick white hair and bright blue eyes in a pink face, tall and bulky but light on his feet. He tells me his name is Father Dominic. It sounds an ominous name to me, but I suppose not everyone thinks of the Inquisition when they think of the Dominicans. He seats himself beside me, heavy and kindly on the bench, and I tell him I’m partially lapsed and haven’t been to Mass for years, and he doesn’t seem to mind. He asks me if I’d like Confession, and I think about it for a while.

“I don’t think I’m ready yet,” I say in the end. “I might be ready a little later on. I don’t know.”

“What will happen later on?” He says this amiably.

I interlock my hands. “There are some things I have to do. Reparations.”

He studies me for a moment. The whites of his eyes are yellowing a little, but the centers are clear blue. “I often think,” he says, “it’s unfortunate the way we divide ourselves. People from your walk of life come here quite often.” He gestures toward St. Giles, pale and steady in his shrine. Then he smiles, showing square, slightly stained teeth. “Though not always to Confession. They always seem more burdened than the rest of our congregation.”

For a moment tears rise in me and I fight them down. I can’t afford them. A line of music comes into my head, Purcell. Paul played it to me one night. “Art thou forlorn of God and com’st to me? What can I tell thee then but misery?” What do I expect this nice priest to tell me? Though I long for salvation more with every day that goes by. “It’s curious,” I say eventually. “Most people who lose their faith say it’s because bad things happen. You know, how could there be a God if such terrible things happen in the world. I seem to go the other way. The worse things get, the more faith I feel.”

“That sounds like a good thing to me,” he says. No solution to the problem, but he’s trying to help.

“Either that, or I only talk to God when I want something.”

“We’re most of us like that, at times,” he says, and I think, when I want something, perhaps, but what I want is a better soul and a better world to keep it in.

I close my hand around the medal. Father Dominic says I’m welcome back anytime, and then he goes off to talk to the choir conductor. I buy some more candles and set the wicks alight, and wait out the time until my appointment looking at the wavering, dazzling shoal of flames.

Parkinson has a private clinic, away from the hospital. The stairs have green carpets, there’s an old-fashioned elevator with bronze doors and wire mesh around the shaft. I make no sound as I walk across the floor.

The receptionist, middle-aged with brown, undyed hair, shows me into a waiting room. There’s a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and, unable to concentrate on the magazines laid out, I stare at it, focusing and unfocusing my eyes. Little spheres of color appear, refracted from the crystals as my vision blurs.

It’s a long wait. I don’t look at the other women. I stare at the ceiling, my hands limp and dormant in my lap. My heart pounds in my chest, the veins in my neck pulse, but I don’t feel any emotions, nothing but the beating of my heart.

Finally Parkinson appears at the door, says, “Ms. Galley?” My hand rises to my throat as I stand, and the medal is there. I pad across the floor, into his cream-walled examination room, and prepare myself.

I’m stripped, exposed, there’s nothing between me and the world. I stand behind the screen and pull on the gown, open at the side, short sleeves, high, confining neck. The last time I wore one of these, I was at the hospital, they put a needle in my arm and I woke up wearing a gown. It had flowers on it, shaped like those stickers old people put in bathtubs to stop themselves slipping. This one is pale blue, plain, a better class of invalid wear. The chain presses against my neck as I tie the gown shut, and I pull the pendant out to stop it pinching.

Parkinson asks me about my past. He’s good at it, he doesn’t lower his voice or look flustered, he’s matter-of-fact and polite, as if he were asking about my feet. I tell him how old I was when I first had a period, I tell him if it hurt, I tell him what contraception I’ve used in my life, I tell him about my lovers and my body and my daughter. I watch him move and listen to him talk, and give him everything I ever was. I trade on what I have.

He tells me he’s going to do a full examination, just to check. He says, raise your arm, lean this way, lie down, legs apart, relax.

For days I’ve been thinking this man could have released a killer back onto the streets.

Be a man, that’s what they used to say. A way of steeling yourself, living up to the best part of yourself, proving that you had the qualities that God intended you to have. Courage, endurance, will. No crying, no excuses. It was a powerful thing to say.

I lie down and set my legs, and be a woman.

I’m afraid of being sick, my throat is hot and my stomach feels displaced, and I’m scared of crying, because I remember too much of the night I lost Ann, but then I say, no, let it happen, be at the nadir if you have to. I close my fingers around the necklace, and stare at the ceiling, plaster roses around the light, and ask St. Giles to help me.

Parkinson sees me lying silent. “How’s your nephew?” he says.

I swallow. “He’s all right. He’s growing well.”

He nods, whether at the thought of Leo growing or at some new discovery in his examination I can’t tell.

“My sister’s been relieved ever since he was born safely,” I say. “There’s a tendency to miscarriage.” My voice drags down at the last syllable, and I lose the rest of what I was going to say, but he nods again.

“I’ve had a look at your records,” he says. “Though I’m not sure that need be a cause for concern. The evidence that miscarriage runs in families isn’t conclusive. And in your case, a traumatic miscarriage is quite possibly an isolated event.” He’s reassuring, confident.

Traumatic miscarriage. I turn my head aside. “Not unlike the chance of having non children,” I say. “You know, no matter how many pamphlets she read saying it didn’t run in families, my sister worried up till the end.”

“Ah, yes.” He glances up at my face, sees my fingers still clutched around my medal. “Now anmorphism, that was considered hereditary for a long time. The Middle Ages had a great many theories on the subject.” Anmorphism, the medical term for my disability. Doctors aren’t allowed to say bareback.

“Really?” All I know about the Middle Ages is the Inquisition.

“Oh, yes. They even conducted experiments.”

I don’t know if I want to hear this. The only experiments I’ve heard of were done in prisoner-of-war camps, captive civilian women in labor. The experiments they did, head-first deliveries, feet-first, should never be talked about by anyone.

“Relax, please.”

I try to relax.

“Midwives claimed to specialize in reversing the position of the baby in utero, turning them around, you know. They were quite in demand, women who claimed they could prevent the birth of anmorphic babies.”

I’ve heard of midwives in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries who specialized in disposing of anmorphic babies. If the head emerges first, place a bucket beneath the woman and it drowns before it’s all the way out: legally not murder, if it isn’t fully born. Or a quick scissor blade through the soft part of the head. Post-partum abortions.

“That wouldn’t work though, would it?” I say. My feet are so cold.

“Apparently it did, occasionally. Very hit-and-miss, though.” He presses down, and I put my teeth together. “It’s a more complicated business than that, of course; chemical changes, oxygen supply to the brain. It’s a subtle degree of brain damage that causes anmorphism. Far beyond medieval technology.”

There’s a silence. He doesn’t look at me, not at my face, his hands keep moving. “I thought it was impossible to affect births one way or the other at all,” I say.

He still keeps examining. “Not to modern technology, no. We understand the process a great deal better, nowadays.”

I open my mouth to say, “Really?” What I say is, “Isn’t there a law about it though?” and it’s not what I meant to say, it was the wrong thing.

He shrugs. This is uncomfortable for me. “An old one.”

“Yes,” I say. I don’t know, I’m guessing, I keep on guessing. “I suppose incompetent midwives kept causing deaths in childbirth by doing it wrong.”

“Indeed.” He nods when I say the word
incompetent.

“Though I suppose nowadays the risks are far fewer.”

“Oh, of course.” He smiles without looking up. “There have been so many technological advances in the past few hundred years, it’s quite astonishing.”

“Curious,” I say. The thought of Ann stabs me for a second, and then the moment passes. I keep my voice light. “If it were possible to prevent anmorphic deliveries, I would have thought we’d have heard about it. You’d think there’d be great demand for it.”

He withdraws his hand, reaches for an instrument. I hear a metal click, it sounds like a speculum, but I won’t look, I stare at the ceiling. “Oh, there would be,” he says. “Not very practical long-term, though. Imagine the chaos if anmorphic individuals suddenly stopped being born.”

I imagine it. DORLA would die off in a generation. Aging catchers against younger and younger lunes, until a new society took over.

“How long have you been trying to conceive, Ms. Galley?”

“N-nine months,” I say, hasty and breathless. I hadn’t thought about it, the answer comes out shakily.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you.” He sounds almost like a grandfather. “It’s quite normal for couples to take up to a year or even two years to conceive.”

“A year?” It doesn’t seem right. It was so easy to conceive by accident.

“Oh, yes. It’s a common mistake. And you seem to be in good shape. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourself pregnant any day.”

“So I might be having a baby soon?” My voice quavers, it’s pathetic, I can’t bear being this way.

“It could be. In a moment I’m just going to give you a quick X-ray, just to be doubly sure.” He turns the speculum a little, I flinch before I can catch myself.

“It’s too bad you can’t really prevent anmorphic babies,” I say, trying to cover, reaching for a subject. “My sister would have been so relieved to know about it.”

“Well,” he says. His voice is quiet. “It isn’t such a disability, after all. We could prevent it, but I wouldn’t consider it ethical. Prejudiced, really.”

It isn’t such a disability. I lie still and let him touch me, and listen to him say those words.

“It can be difficult for anmorphic parents, though.” He speaks quieter still. “They can often feel isolated in an entirely lycanthropic family. And of course, anmorphic children often benefit from having an anmorphic parent.”

I think, against all my principles, against all my defenses, I would have wanted Ann to be a lyco. It would have been better for her, it would have been good for me. She could have been my hope of reconciliation. Maybe I would have liked lycos better if I had mothered one.

“It isn’t altogether conventional,” he says, “but those cases, now, they’re the ones in which a physician feels more inclined to—intervene.”

Cases in which a physician feels inclined to intervene. Cases in which a physician feels inclined to intervene. I play the words over in my head, trying to pull them apart like mesh, looking for what he just said. Cases in which a physician feels inclined to intervene.