Never Ending (23 page)

Most of her nightmares are like this, now. A terrifying mix of old dreams and new, garbled flashbacks to her brother’s death and the surreal images of her unconscious, with Declan and Mikey so interchangeable she can’t always tell them apart.

In some of the nightmares, the dogs are there: chained up, barking, snarling, trying to get at Shiv or at whichever boy’s body she’s stooped over this time.

The visions come while she’s awake too. More and more, they come. They’re worse at night though. So bad, so
real
, she’s petrified of letting herself fall asleep.

Dr Pollard has spoken of residents reaching a “tipping point” in this stage of the programme. A point where, instead of staring down into the blackest abyss, their faces begin to tilt – slowly, hesitantly – towards a bright blue sky.

The mind can only take so much darkness before it demands light
.

So she would have them believe.

If this is a tipping point for Shiv, it’s not the kind the Director imagines. No gradual rising up towards the heavens but more like a sudden plunge over the edge, into the depths of hell.

She knows the darkness for what it is now. Knows herself for what she is.

He can’t move
, she puts in her notebook in Write.

He can’t run
.

He can’t swim
.

He can’t throw balls, can’t climb trees, can’t dive off a springboard
.

He can’t see
.

He can’t hear, smell, taste, touch
.

He can’t think, can’t speak
.

He can’t laugh or cry
.

He can’t drink. Can’t eat
.

He can’t feel anything ever again. Love, hate. Pain, comfort. Joy, sadness. Hope, despair. Nothing
.

He can’t breathe
.

He can’t grow up, grow old
.

He is nothing. He is nowhere. For all eternity
.

I. DID. THIS. TO. HIM
.

The passing of time has become difficult to track – she counts the days in “sleeps”, like she did when she was a small child.

Three sleeps since she woke from another nightmare to find her bed soaked in urine. Two sleeps since they showed her the film of Nikos, hands under Dec’s armpits, lifting her brother back onto the boat. One sleep since Shiv retrieved her old Walk jumpsuit from the utility room and started wearing it instead of her regular gear.

Dr Pollard will want to discuss all of this at their next one-to-one. She is concerned about Shiv. “You seem to be straying off course,” she said, the last time they spoke.
Four sleeps ago? Three?

“Whose course?” Shiv asked. “Yours or mine?”

Shiv stops eating.

Once she’s thought of it, the decision seems so obvious she wonders why it has taken her till now. So, from here on, she will eat nothing, drink only water.

Day after day, this is what she does.

There’s something
purifying
about going without food. With each hour that passes, she grows more acutely conscious of the toxins leaching out of her body. Out of her mind too – the poisoned thoughts slowly draining away. Right after Declan’s death – in the days on end when Shiv forgot to eat, or skipped meals, or left food unfinished – she was starving herself out of neglect or inertia, because eating (along with everything else) seemed so pointless. This time is different. Now, she’s doing it deliberately: cleansing herself, emptying herself, focusing herself.

Punishing herself.

It’s tough, at first. Really tough.

But by the third day she is learning to ride out the hunger, and how drinking lots of water can fool her stomach into feeling full. She knows to clasp a pillow to her belly to ease the cramps that sometimes double her over and, when she stands up or moves about, she takes care to hold on to something until the dizziness passes.

She has to be clever, of course. Devious. No clinic lets a patient starve.

At mealtimes, she helps herself to the smallest portions then sneaks some of her food onto Mikey’s plate, or Caron’s, while the dining-room supervisor isn’t looking. She leaves as much as she can get away with or hides bits in her pockets to dispose of later. When it’s OK to eat lunch outdoors, she’ll take a sandwich into the garden, away from prying eyes, and feed it to the birds that gather near her bench. The little food that does pass her lips, she makes sure to puke back up as soon as she can.

At the daily activities, she wears extra layers of clothing to hide her weight loss; rubs her cheeks to make them less pale, less gaunt-looking. In front of staff, she forces herself to act like nothing’s wrong, to move and speak and behave normally.

Mikey understands. But Caron tries to talk her out of it, threatens to tell. So Shiv has to conceal her fasting from Caron too; difficult, but not impossible.

Shiv ought to be wiped out. But she has never felt so alert or so energized. At PTU, the photos and film footage are sharper than ever; in Talk and Write, she gets straight to the heart of things – she speaks, writes, listens
brilliantly
.

“The monks fasted,” she tells Mikey. “The ones who lived here back when this place was a monastery. It brought them closer to God.”

“Is that what you want?” he asks.

“No, I’m just saying.”

“I don’t believe in all that.” Does he mean fasting, or God? “One of my aunts, right, she comes up to me after the funeral and takes hold of my face in both hands and says, ‘Phoebe is playing with the angels now.’” Mikey sniffs, swallows. “Is that what you think – that your brother’s in heaven, waiting for you?”

Shiv shakes her head. Pulls the pillow into her belly. They’ve been in her room most of the afternoon – another Sunday with no sessions, nothing to do. They haven’t spoken all that much. Sometimes it’s enough for them just to sit in silence.

“Day 50 tomorrow,” Mikey says.

“Really?”

It doesn’t seem possible that they’ll be leaving the Korsakoff Clinic in just eleven days. Can she get away with starving herself for that long?

Her head aches. Her
eyes
ache.

She closes them. Leans back, hoping the wall’s cold surface will ease the knot of pain that’s been nagging away inside her skull all day. Bad idea. The thump of her headache grows worse; turns, in her mind, to the
thud-thud
of a tennis ball – so that she can almost believe if she went next door right now she’d find her brother playing bounce-and-catch in Caron’s room.

Four sleeps since she stopped eating.

Today things are not so clear any more, not so sharp. The corridors and rooms of Eden Hall are too gloomy, the daylight from the windows too harsh; a doorway, a banister, a chair, a face float randomly into view then out again – blurred, as though by tears – and she can’t judge their distances. She stumbles on the stairs. Cracks her shin on the low table in Talk. Drops the plastic cup of water when she sets it down. Can’t make out the words she writes in Write…

Was that where she blacked out?

She can’t be sure. She thinks she might have left S-10
after
Write – yes, she did; she was walking along the corridor (or was that during the mid-session break?) – anyway, she was walking, or possibly still sitting down,
somewhere
, when her head went swimmy and her ears filled with the sound of crashing waves.

Shiv doesn’t recall actually fainting, or falling, or her face hitting the ground, or any of that – just the second or so beforehand, and the absolute certainty that it was about to happen. Then, nothing.

15

A smiling face appears in front of her – chalky skin, too-pale blue eyes, flyaway fair hair; the face of a fairy. Of an angel. It takes her a moment to recognize it as Zena’s.

“Where is he?” Shiv asks, panicky, trying to sit up.

The nurse’s smile crinkles into a frown. “Who?”

Shiv can’t recall. She’s in a bed, in a light white room, and the bed is so soft, so comfortable. “He climbed too high,” she says.

“Here, you’re all unwrapped.” Zena tidies the covers, straightens the pillows behind Shiv, helping her to sit up a little. “Drink this.”

Blue beaker, green straw.
Blue and green should never be seen
. Where does Shiv know that from? Mum, she supposes. Or is it red and green? Shiv fumbles with her lips for the tip of the straw and for some reason is reminded of a giraffe’s rubbery mouth as it plucks at a leaf on a high branch.

“Go easy,” Zena says. “Just small sips.”

Fruit juice. It’s so unbelievably
delicious
. Shiv has already swallowed several mouthfuls before she remembers she’s only meant to drink water.

“I shouldn’t be dr—”

“You’re in the medical room,” the nurse says. “
My
rules, not yours.”

The medical room. She looks around. Yes, she knows this room – she’s been here with Mikey. Mikey –
that’s
who she was asking about just now. “He got stuck in the tree,” she says, urgently, batting away the straw as Zena offers her the beaker again. “I went up after him and … I must’ve fallen.”

“You fainted.”

“No, I was—”

“You passed out as you were leaving Write.” The nurse touches her own chin. “Got yourself a bit of a bump – a carpet burn.”

Shiv mirrors the gesture, wincing at the sticky, tender skin. Lowering her hand, she realizes – although it must have been there all along – that an intravenous drip is attached to her hand. The IV stand beside her bed holds a plastic pack of clear fluid.

Zena follows Shiv’s gaze. “We had to get some nutrients into you.”

“Did Caron tell you?”

“You did a very good job of hiding it from us. I’m impressed.”

It’s clear from her tone that the nurse isn’t at all impressed; that she thinks Shiv has been stupid but, also, that the staff have been stupid not to realize sooner.

Shiv examines the tube taped to the back of her hand, where it enters the vein.

“If you pull it out,” Zena says, as though reading her thoughts, “I’ll just sedate you and put it back in again.
Keep
you sedated, if I have to.”

The hours in the medical room drag and drift. Nothing to do but doze, or stare at the ceiling, or lie there watching the fluid bag slowly drain into her body.

Are they trying to bore her into submission?

In an often-repeated family tale, Mum tells of the time when everything went quiet in the delivery room while she was in labour with Declan. A temporary lull in the contractions, that was all. But as it dragged on, her mother, woozy with pain-relief drugs, looked at Dad and the midwife and asked, “What are we all waiting for?”

“For
you
,” the midwife had said, laughing.

Dec took twenty-seven hours to be born. He lived twelve years, six months, seven days.

How Mum was, that’s how Shiv feels: in suspended animation, with everyone (including Shiv herself) waiting for her. To
do
something. Everyone’s waiting to see what she does next.

Right now, she has no idea what that might be.

Towards evening, judging by the failing light at the window, Zena announces that she has a visitor. Not Mikey – they’ve told Shiv she can’t see him – but even so she half hopes he’ll step into the room.

“Hey,” Caron says, smiling, but looking uncertain.

“Oh, hey.” Shiv sits up, manages to smile back.

“Now, I’m a bit out of practice with you,” the older girl says. “
So
, is that your good-to-see-you-please-come-in smile, or your piss-off-and-leave-me-alone smile?”

“Both.”

“’Zuss, girl, you were nowhere
near
this complex when I first met you.”

Actually, Shiv
is
glad to see her. The hours by herself with no one to talk to have worn her down. Her eyes well up.

“Hey, hey.” Caron crosses the room, takes up the hand that isn’t snagged with an IV tube and massages it between both of hers.

After a moment, she pulls up a chair and sits beside the bed. They don’t have much to say at first; at least, they have
lots
to say but leave most of it unsaid. They just sit there like two women working on a patchwork quilt, sharing odd scraps of conversation between bouts of silence.

At one point, Caron says, “I was going to wear my red dress, for old time’s sake.”

In fact, she’s in a navy sweatshirt and her faded, ripped-at-the-knee jeans. She points at Shiv’s pyjamas. “You not wearing your—”

“Underneath,” Shiv says, tugging the pyjama top. “Fifty days out of fifty.”

Even on laundry days, Shiv has got them to tumble-dry the Salinger T-shirt so she could put it back on as soon as possible.

“Was your brother wearing it when he died?” Caron asks.

An image comes to her: yellow T-shirt. “No,” she says. “He wanted to wear it on the flight home, so Mum put it in the wash.”

It was still pegged on the line at the villa the morning after; Shiv took it down, stashed it in her case – to stop Mum from seeing it, more than with the intention of keeping it for herself. That came later, back at home.

“I used to imagine it smelled of him,” Shiv says. “But it didn’t. It smelled of Greek washing powder.” She stifles a yawn.

“Bored of me
already
?” Caron asks. “Or just tired?”

“Bored, definitely.”

They smile. It feels good to share a smile with her. Caron looks better, the shadows under her eyes nowhere near as bad as they were. PTU seems, finally, to have begun working for her.

“Actually,” Shiv says, “you’ve lasted longer than my other visitor.”

“Who was that?”

“Dr Pollard. I totally blanked her and after about five minutes she gave up.”

Shiv frowns. Was that today, or another day altogether? No, it must have been here, because Nurse Zena was changing her IV bag at the time. But then,
Declan
was standing across the room earlier, when she surfaced from a doze – doing his wave, like there was a window between them and he was wiping a hole in the condensation.