Nineteen

Lin lay looking at the door of her hospital room, her fists clenched on the top of the sheet, her body rigid.

It was mid-morning. She was deep in a thickly gathering web: a space filling, inch by prolonged inch, with steadily thickening sound. It had a physical texture, a corrugated, wave-like motion, lapping inexorably closer to the bed, voice over voice, whisper over whisper, echo over echo, no tremor ever entirely finishing, but leaving the ghost of its remains in the air. It was like being inside a sound box, an amplifier, where the initial sound was forever multiplied.

She tried to make out individual words, but couldn’t. Some voices, muffled and repetitive, sounded insistent, instructive. Their impatient authority coated every syllable, but she couldn’t match the notes together to make sentences. Other voices drifted far in the background, ethereal and plaintive, occasionally breaking into hopeless soft sobbing and weeping. In between, the crowds mingled and rippled.

‘Lin?’

She stared at the doorway. She knew this person’s sound. Another voice replied. Lin forced herself to focus, terrified she would lose this one intelligible coupling of words. Her knuckles whitened with the concentration. ‘Please God,’ she murmured, ‘make it stop.’

Edith Channon’s face appeared. She nodded a couple of times, looked back along the corridor as if to reply to the invisible other party, and then bustled into the room.

‘Now then, dear,’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

Lin stared at her.

‘Can you hear me?’ Edith asked. She stroked Lin’s face briefly.

‘Yes,’ Lin whispered.

Edith rummaged in her straw bag and brought out a crushed bag of fruit. She looked in the locker, pulled out a dish, tutted over it, and took it over to wash in the sink. ‘Dusty,’ she said. ‘You see, a nurse would have done this automatically once.’ She turned, brought the dish back, and began to fill it. ‘Do you know what they’re all doing down there at that desk? Filling out forms. Discussing who’s going to some counselling seminar.’ She clicked her tongue disapprovingly against her teeth, gave a nod of satisfaction at the filled bowl, then sat down at Lin’s side.

‘You’ve got a high colour, dear,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Strange,’ Lin murmured.

‘A headache?’

‘No … not that.’

Edith’s eyes ranged over Lin’s face. She leaned forward, arms crossed and balanced on the bed. ‘I had such a shock when that woman came racing back with Theo,’ she said.

Lin’s glance trailed away, trying to fix on the source of the noise.

‘What is it?’ Edith asked.

‘You’ll think I’m mad,’ Lin said.

‘Why should I?’

‘Voices.’

‘Oh?’

‘Hundreds.’ Lin’s mouth trembled.

‘Well, tell them to go away.’

Lin’s eyes fixed on the old woman’s. ‘What?’

‘They don’t know you can hear them, probably. They talk all the time you know, trying to get someone to listen. When someone does, they just pile in, like water rushing through a crack in a pipe. Tell them to buzz off.’

Lin stared at her silently.

‘No,’ Edith said, ‘you’re not crazy, and neither am I.’ She sat back, and looked around her. ‘I believe in them. I sense them, and I see them occasionally, but I can never hear them.’ She looked back at Lin. ‘How long have you heard them? Just today?’

‘Yesterday …’

‘And before?’

‘Before what?’ Lin was struggling to make sense of the conversation.

‘Before you felt so ill.’

‘No, no …’

‘Never heard noises in houses, people talking to you?’

‘No.’ Lin was frowning deeply.

‘Not in the flat?’

‘No.’

Edith smiled. She stroked Lin’s arm once, very gently. The sweetness of the gesture, and the fact that Edith had turned up at all, suddenly made Lin want to cry. She bit the inside of her cheek, willing herself not to start again. She was not the crying kind, but these last few hours seemed to have rewritten that particular character trait. The tears came pouring out for no reason. Unless this constant apprehension was a reason. The fear that something uncontrollable was happening. Something inside. Something outside. Something in her perception, her ability to order and understand the world.

‘I don’t understand. I can’t fathom it,’ Lin said. ‘It frightens me …’

‘What do the doctors say it is?’

Lin brought one hand to her forehead. ‘They tested for meningitis, but it isn’t that. They just told me so, an hour ago: no traces at all.’

‘I see.’

‘They’re talking about a scan.’

‘To try to find where the noise is coming from, the pictures?’

Lin looked hard at her. ‘Yes.’

Edith seemed to consider for a second. ‘What do you think it is?’

Lin bit down hard, her mouth in a wrinkled line of self-pity that she hated and willed herself to eradicate. These tears, these feelings: they were like clutching, dragging hands. ‘I had postnatal depression last year,’ she said. ‘I had it for a long time. Maybe this is a mental problem. I don’t know anything about schizophrenia …’

To her surprise, Edith began to laugh. ‘Schizophrenia?’ she echoed. ‘What makes you think you’ve got schizophrenia?’

A flicker of anger at Edith’s rebuff swept the threatening tears away. ‘Because I can hear bloody voices,’ Lin retorted. Raising herself onto one elbow brought on a sharp spike of pain. She immediately dropped back onto her pillow. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Edith wasn’t in the least ruffled. ‘You think far too much,’ she said.

Lin opened her tightly shut eyes. ‘What?’

‘Far too much—always did.’

Her air of disapproval made Lin, for the first time that day, smile. ‘I think too much?’ she repeated.

‘Bad, bad thing.’

Lin shook her head slightly.

‘I’ll tell you why,’ Edith said. ‘Because we think too much, we rationalize, we pretend we’re kings of the world, we reduce everything to an equation.’

‘Edith,’ Lin said, quietly. ‘I’m a maths student.’

‘Are you?’

‘Don’t you remember?’

‘No,’ Edith said firmly, ‘but it proves my point. We forget to feel. To feel. We don’t trust our feelings. Feelings are all that count, and yet we want chapter and verse. We’ve lost the art of faith. Then we start to wobble, like you’re wobbling.’

Lin looked at her with a subdued, weary affection. ‘Some wobble,’ she said.

‘Exactly. One heck of a wobble.’ She smiled at Lin with a smart glint in her eye.

Lin started to laugh; it lasted moments. She flattened her palm against the top of her head.

‘Pain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you hear the voices?’

Lin listened. ‘Drum … drum … drum …’

‘It’s the spirit world,’ Edith said.

‘It’s what?’

‘Spirit.’

There was a silence. Lin took several long, deep breaths. ‘You think I’m seeing dead people?’ she said.

‘And hearing them. Don’t you think so, too?’

‘I wondered.’

‘There you are, then.’

Lin sighed deeply. ‘I said I wondered. I didn’t say I thought so.’

‘I see,’ Edith responded.

‘Edith,’ Lin said. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘That’s all right, dear,’ Edith told her. ‘They believe in you.’

‘Oh God,’ Lin murmured.

Edith continued regardless. ‘I’ve been going to my church for twenty-two years, and I can tell you they are as real as you or I. More real, in fact. We live at the bottom of a murky pond. When we go back to spirit, we explode back into light. These voices come from the light, like soundings, like sonar.’

‘What church?’ Lin asked.

‘My spiritualist church.’

‘Oh, those places,’ Lin said.

‘Now there’s something you forgot.’

‘What?’

‘I used to attend when you first lived in the flat. I used to tell you I went there.’

‘You’re right,’ Lin said, ‘I forgot.’ She shook her head a little. ‘Edith, those aren’t churches. They’re a trick—magic tricks.’

‘And your voices are a trick, I suppose? Not real?’

Lin paused. ‘They must be.’ She frowned helplessly. ‘It’s a chemical somewhere, an imbalance …’

‘Have they given you anything for it?’

‘They gave me something this morning. An anti-epilepsy drug.’

‘Did it help?’

Lin swallowed hard. ‘No.’

‘You see?’

‘It’s an illness,’ Lin replied tonelessly and almost inaudibly. ‘I don’t know what it is. Something in my head. Some virus. I don’t know.’ She paused, looked away, turned her head towards the window. ‘I want to see Theo,’ she said, grief in her voice.

‘Ruth took him home,’ Edith said.

‘Kieran came, but he didn’t bring him. He said he thought it was better if Theo stayed at home yesterday—so as not to upset him.’ Her tone was jagged with unease. ‘He mustn’t be with Ruth,’ she said. ‘Not at all. Not for a minute.’

Edith looked down at the bed and momentarily closed her eyes.

Ruth had come storming back into the shop yesterday afternoon, Theo wailing in her arms. She told Edith that Lin had been taken ill, taken to hospital in an ambulance, and that Lin had asked her to pack his things.

‘Where are you going with him?’ Edith had asked, following up the steep stairs at half Ruth’s pace.

‘To my flat,’ Ruth had replied.

As she ascended, Edith could hear Ruth pulling out drawers in the room upstairs, then lifting the suitcase down from the top of the shaky wardrobe. Theo had begun to scream in earnest, a one-note torrent of anguish and panic.

‘Shut up,’ Edith heard Ruth say, as she finally reached the head of the stairs.

Theo had been standing in the centre of the room, rigid, paralysed, tears streaming down his reddened face. Edith had rushed towards him.

‘Come on, now,’ she had said, trying to soothe him, stroking his face. ‘Mummy is going to be all right. You’ll see. You can go and see her right now. She’s only been taken to a bed for a lie-down. We’ll take you right now …’

Ruth had turned on her, grabbing Theo’s hand, her other hand still occupied with the hastily filled case. ‘He’s coming back with me. I shall ring his father,’ she said.

Edith had stood up from her crouching position at Theo’s side. ‘You’re not going to the hospital?’

Ruth had lowered her voice. ‘Do you really think that’s any place for a child?’ she had whispered savagely.

Edith had stared at her as Ruth shouldered her way past. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask what was wrong with Lin, what could be so terribly wrong that her son wasn’t allowed to see her. All kinds of visions flashed through her mind. Lin bloodied and lying still. Lin in pain and alone. She had no idea what had happened, only that there had been some sort of accident, some sort of collapse. God only knew what nightmares flitted through the child’s mind at the same moment.

‘You’ll see Mummy tomorrow … very soon …’ Edith tried to say, as Ruth bundled him down the stairs. By this time Theo had stopped screaming and had gone white with horror, silent with shock.

‘Don’t worry about Mummy,’ Edith called after him. ‘I shall go and see her. I shall see she’s all right.’

Theo glanced at her, just once, as they turned the corner of the stairs. It was a look of helpless terror that struck her to the core.

‘Be careful with him,’ she had called to Ruth.

There had been no reply.

Edith looked up now at Lin, not knowing what to say. Certainly not the truth. She looked in Lin’s eyes, mentally crossed her fingers, and said, ‘I’m sure she’s looked after him wonderfully. I’m sure he was all right.’

Lin looked back at her. Silence fell between them.