Vicky came round to the sound of something beeping.
It sounded like a smoke alarm – the one in the back room at work. The one that always went off when she or Leanne tried to use the crappy toaster.
Or the alarm by her bed. On and on and on, it went. Shit. She had overslept. She should wake up and get the fuck on with it. She’d be late otherwise, and Lee would give her so much shit.
But she couldn’t seem to do it. She felt sick. Dizzy as well. As if she’d downed too many vodkas. And her head hurt. She frowned. Which made it hurt even more. Enough to make her cry out in pain.
‘Hush, sweetheart.’
She nearly had a heart attack – who the hell was that? Not her mam. Her mam never called her sweetheart. She tried to open her eyes, so she could see who was talking to her. That hurt as well. But she couldn’t seem to get them open, try as she might. And then the memory – and the horror, and the terror – all flooded in.
Scared witless now, Vicky tried to put her hands to her face, but one was jerked back immediately, as if restrained. And the other was immediately grabbed between strong hands. ‘Shhh,’ said the voice again. Female. One she recognised. Then, ‘Nurse, nurse, can you come, please? She’s awake.’
Imprisoned in darkness, Vicky felt her fear writhe inside her like some parasitic animal trying to escape. She felt suffocated as well as blind, aware, even as she tried to cry out, that her mouth wasn’t working properly. She could only writhe herself, and moan, unable to form words.
‘Shhh,’ the kindly voice soothed. ‘You’re going to be okay, love. You’re in hospital,’ she added, to Vicky’s as yet unasked question, ‘being taken care of, okay? There’s nothing to be scared of. Try to lay still. The nurse is on her way.’
Vicky recognised the voice. Or thought she did. Was it Miss Teague? The friendly prison officer? She rattled her restrained hand, and heard a metallic rattling close by.
‘Shhh, love,’ came the voice again. ‘Don’t get yourself in a panic. It’s just a restraint. I’ll see if I can get it taken off for you, okay?’
Vicky, remembering more and more now, heard a grotesque wail come from somewhere deep inside her. The smell of hairspray. The heat. The violence done to her. What had been done to her?
And how did she get here? She didn’t even know what day it was, let alone what time of day. Had no memory of anything bar the violence that had been done to her. The monsters who had come in and attacked her in her own bed.
She gulped in air, painfully, through lips that were cracked and dry. Then felt a touch on her cheek and a dabbing of something cool. ‘There you go,’ came another female voice. ‘Here, open your lips a little. That’s the way. It’s a straw. Have a suck, it’s just water.’
She tried to suck, but it was as if there was some strange swollen growth where her lips had formally been and it was hard to keep them tight around the straw. She knew she was dribbling, because she could feel it dripping down her throat, but over a chin she couldn’t feel, like she’d had an injection at the dentist. The fear writhed inside her again. What had been done to her?
‘You’ve been attacked,’ said Miss Teague later on. How much later? She’d been aware of waking up, being given something, then drifting off again. And had no concept of day and night. But here Miss Teague was, at her side again. She could smell her too-strong and musky middle-aged perfume eddying around her. And, now she’d been given more painkillers, could at least get her mouth around the things she wanted to ask.
It had been two nights ago. ‘In your bed,’ said Miss Teague, ‘while you slept. They set fire to your hair, love,’ she added, patting Vicky’s arm as she said that. ‘It was pretty bad.’ Pretty bad. How did you work out what pretty bad meant? Did she have any hair left? Was she blind? Was she horribly disfigured?
‘Your eyes are going to be fine,’ Miss Teague reassured her. ‘That much I can tell you. You’ve just got to keep the dressings on for a bit while the skin heals. I expect they’ll change them later on, then you’ll be able to see for yourself. And yes, you’ve got some nasty burns, I’m afraid. And your hair …’ She stopped talking.
‘Has it all gone?’ Vicky whispered, slurring through her unwieldy lips.
‘For now,’ Miss Teague told her. ‘But it’ll grow back, they think, in time. And, really, thank God it was just your hair. You could so easily have been blinded …’
She seemed almost as upset about it as if she was Vicky’s mam, and Vicky wondered if she had a daughter herself. Or, well, perhaps not her mam. Did her mam even know? Did anyone know? Lucy? Paddy? Christ, who’d done this to her?
She could feel her panic rising once again, and heard Miss Teague click-clacking off to ask the nurse to come and see to her. Heard the words ‘more morphine’. But she didn’t want morphine – she wanted to know who had done this. Who had she upset? Who had she annoyed? Why had it been done to her? She knew bad things happened in prisons. Had heard all kinds of lurid stories about bad things happening late at night, in dark corners and secret places. Knew too that the correct course of action if it was happening to someone else was to act like it wasn’t. Her former room-mate Susan had told her that right at the start, hadn’t she?
So did they stand by and listen? Could they have even been involved?
Miss Teague returned, and confirmed, having listened to Vicky’s slurred entreaties, that, yes, she did know what had happened, and that the perpetrators had yet to be found and ‘dealt with’. ‘But you can be sure they will be,’ Miss Teague said, more briskly. ‘And, once you’re feeling a little better, perhaps you can help us out with trying to piece together something from what we do know.’
‘What do you know?’ Vicky whispered.
‘Not now, love. You need some painkillers. We can deal with that once you’re feeling a bit more up to it,’ Miss Teague said.
‘I’m fine,’ Vicky managed to say, though she couldn’t have been feeling less fine. ‘Tell me – what do you know? Please, Miss Teague. Tell me.’
There was a pause, then a sigh. ‘Only that you had a piece of paper stuffed in your mouth.’
Vicky gasped, remembering it. Remembering that particular piece of violence. Being unable to speak. Of gagging on it. Suffocating. ‘What did it say?’
Vicky could hear footsteps. The sound of one of the nurses approaching, in their sensibly quiet shoes. She was becoming attuned to it now. Then Miss Teague cleared her throat.
‘Vicky, love, we need to talk to you about Patrick Allen.’