The Weight of Angels Read online

  ‘What’s that?’ Hinny said.

  ‘Computers,’ said Lars. ‘The skull’s getting sent to Dundee to have the face reconstructed. All the cheap disguise in the world’s not going to help when they put his face back on, is it?’

  ‘Egads, just the skull?’ Hinny said. She shuddered and put a third spoonful of sugar in her coffee. ‘That’s not nice, whacking his head off and taking it . . . What are we saying? They take it up on the train in a biscuit tin?’

  ‘Ali?’ said Belle, her voice a soft stroke. ‘Are you okay? Are you still feeling poorly?’

  I took a few deep breaths, in and out, and felt my pulse begin to settle again, the humming that had started as faint as a breeze in tall grasses already dying away. Belle’s face was puckered with concern. Lars, leaning against the sink twitching the stretchy bandages over his nasty tattoos, gave me half a smile, just one side of his mouth hooking up and his eyes as sad as Sundays.

  Hinny checked both of them before she glanced back at me. ‘Tell us,’ she said. The kitchen worker as wise as the nurses, like before. Although I couldn’t remember what we’d been on about that time.

  One more deep breath, right down into the pit of my stomach, and held until my fingers tingled. I had never said it. I never even said it when I was ill. There was no point dwelling on what was past unless you could change it.

  ‘I had a stillbirth,’ I told them.

  ‘Oh, love,’ Belle said. ‘I’m sorry. When was this?’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘No, don’t worry. It was years ago. It was ten years ago.’

  Lars and Hinny shared a look. ‘It doesn’t matter if it was fifty years ago,’ Hinny said. ‘Your baby died.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. I knew something was coming. I thought it was a howl but when I let it out and heard it I could almost think I was laughing. ‘It wasn’t a baby and she didn’t die. It was tissue. It was . . . I never saw it. I mean, they could tell it would have been a girl but it wasn’t a girl. It wasn’t a baby.’

  ‘Like a miscarriage, you mean?’ Lars said. ‘How early?’

  ‘A week,’ I said.

  I thought I saw all of their shoulders drop.

  ‘How could they tell it was female after just a week?’ Hinny said, glancing at the nurses.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘No, I mean she was a week early. But so deformed, you know. She had anencephaly. Severe anencephaly. She never lived. Couldn’t have lived. Wasn’t. Didn’t.’ I wrapped my fingers, icy suddenly, round the cup Lars had handed me and felt the good solid burn of the hot tea through its side.

  After a silence, Hinny spoke up. ‘Sorry, Ali, I’m just the cook: what’s anencephaly?’

  ‘She didn’t have a head.’ Again the cry that came out with these never-spoken words sounded more like laughter than I could believe. ‘She had no brain. She had no face.’

  ‘Aw, shite, the rag dolls!’ Lars said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m a basket-case but not a very complicated one,’ I said. ‘My baby had no head to put a face on and faceless things just . . . headless things just . . .’

  ‘You must bloody hate those poxy china angels,’ said Lars. And why would that make the tears start to fall? But here they came, surging up and dashing down my cheeks and, with the first sob, snot bubbles too. I roared. I sounded like a sea lion, but Belle put her warm hand on my knee and Lars stood behind my chair and put both hands on my shoulders and held me tight like that and I didn’t care. I blew my nose on the tea-towel Hinny handed me and I didn’t care one single shit.

  ‘That actually feels a lot better,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think you can do the change?’ said Hinny.

  ‘And do you think you could answer a question?’ Belle said.

  I nodded, meaning it to cover both of them.

  ‘Because that’s very severe anencephaly,’ Belle said.

  I blinked a couple of times and blew my nose again. ‘Eh? Well, it’s okay. I had my tubes tied. We decided it was best. There’s no danger.’

  ‘Ten years ago?’ Belle said. ‘At Dumfries?’

  Lars had let go of my shoulders and walked round so he could see me. ‘That was a big decision to make at a time like that,’ he said.

  I nodded, but it hadn’t felt that way. I barely remembered it, except that it was one more thing my mum could have helped me through if she’d been willing to. I couldn’t even remember, now I thought about it, where the idea had come from. Marco, probably. He was thinking for both of us back then.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ I said. ‘You used to work in Maternity, didn’t you?’ Belle grew very still. ‘Sorry. I know it wasn’t very happy when you left. Lars said it was kind of hard at the end. But you might be able to tell me.’ Now it seemed that all of them were still. A drip fell from the cold tap into the shallow basin of bleachy water Lars had laid the dishcloth in and the plink sounded like someone hitting a triangle, a pure note in the silence. ‘It was just this,’ I said. ‘Is there any way I can name her? Now. We didn’t name her because of how she was and now I wish we had. Can we do that? Is that something people ever do?’

  ‘I don’t know if people ever do,’ said Belle, speaking slowly, ‘but I think it sounds like a good idea. Where is she? Is she buried or did you scatter her ashes?’

  ‘We didn’t do anything. She just got . . . It wasn’t like that,’ I said. ‘Hospital waste.’

  ‘You could put a bench somewhere nice that you like to go,’ Lars said, jumping in. ‘You could put her name on a nice bench or a picnic table. Even if you can’t register a name. What’s to stop you?’

  ‘So what were you going to call her?’ Hinny said. ‘What would you put on the plaque on the picnic table?’

  But there was only one name I could even think of and I couldn’t say it to them. So I just shook my head. ‘I don’t think I can face the staff meeting, actually,’ I said. ‘If you think it would be okay for me to skip it, I’ll go and see how Sylvie’s doing today.’

  She was in bed, propped up on her pillows with her eyes closed. I crossed the room quietly and looked down at her, at the thin, colourless hair and the pale, dry skin, feeling my heart go out to her. It’s a strange expression until you’ve felt it, but after the first time it happens nothing else can sum it up so perfectly. My heart left my body, slipping in wisps from between my ribs, and drifted over to settle on Sylvie. As if she had felt it, she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

  Now I could hear the hirstle in her chest as she breathed. She had caught a cold out there in the gardens. I put the back of my hand to her head and thought I could feel a fever, her skin clammy.

  ‘Next time we go outside, I’ll wrap you up better,’ I said. ‘And we’ll wait for a sunny day.’

  She closed her eyes in that way that does for nodding, like a cat.

  ‘But we had a good time, didn’t we?’ I said. ‘It was good to see you smiling, Sylvie.’

  Still with her eyes shut, she pursed her lips, then let them fall loose again. ‘Ju,’ she said. And again, ‘Ju.’

  ‘That’s right!’ I said. ‘Julia was there. Oh, you clever girl. You met someone called Julia yesterday. You clever, clever girl. They’ve all made a big mistake about you.’

  ‘Ju,’ whispered Sylvie. ‘Ju.’

  ‘Do you want to see her?’ I said.

  Sylvie only breathed out but something about the way her mouth relaxed sounded like a yes to me. ‘I won’t be long,’ I said, dropped a kiss on her damp brow and left.

  Julia was in the shower, which was a step forward. Her room was littered deeper than ever with discarded clothes and ripped-open mail-order. I skidded on a slippery bag and had to grab at the top of her chest of drawers to stop myself falling.

  ‘Who the fuck’s that?’ Julia shouted. ‘Ryan, if that’s you again you can fuck the fuck off. Byron, if it’s you, you can join me.’

  ‘No luck,’ I said. ‘It’s Ali. And you’re joking, aren’t you? The boys don’t come waltzing in and out of your room?’

 
; The water turned off and Julia opened the shower screen. She was bright red down her front as if the water had been too hot or she’d stood under it too long. ‘Fling me a towel if you’ve finished gawping, pervy.’

  ‘You’ll get thread veins if you blast yourself with scorching water like that every day,’ I told her. ‘And you shouldn’t be using that apricot scrub either. It’s far too harsh. If you could look at your skin under a microscope you’d see it’s lacerated. All those shards of apricot stone are like little daggers.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You think we should let all the sea life fill their bellies with plastic micro beads just in case we ever see our skin under a microscope? Pretty goddamn shallow, if you ask me.’

  I smiled. It was good to hear her sounding eighteen for a change. For some reason teenage girls always cared a lot about sea life. I blamed The Little Mermaid.

  ‘What do you want, anyway? Have you come to rub my naked flesh again? What team do you play for anyway, Ali? Your husband’s pretty tasty for a geriatric but you don’t half like to get your hands on the girlies.’

  ‘I’ve come to see if you’d like to visit Sylvie again,’ I said. ‘And how the hell do you know what my husband looks like?’

  ‘Small world,’ said Julia. ‘Why would I want another thrill-a-minute visit to Sissy?’

  ‘Sylvie,’ I said. ‘She’s asking for you.’

  Julia had been bent over towelling her head but when she heard that she straightened up. ‘The zombie’s asking for me?’ she said. ‘I thought she was supposed to be lobotomized.’

  ‘Catatonic,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to bend double to dry your hair now it’s short, you know. In case that hadn’t occurred to you.’

  She gave me a screwball look, then let out a shout of laughter. ‘Ha! You’re right.’ Being told she’d done something stupid seemed to cheer her up in a way that didn’t seem like a teenager. I thought of how Angelo grew red and mulish if I caught him out in the slightest dip in his cool.

  ‘Yeah, okay, then,’ she said. ‘Why not? I’ve got nothing better to fill the aching void today. Sissy and Juju ride again. ‘Let’s go.’ She marched out of the bathroom. Then, halfway across her bedroom, she looked over her shoulder and winked at me. ‘Ha!’ she said again. ‘You win the game of chicken. Well played. I’ll put some clothes on, shall I?’

  The shift change was finished. From the landing window as we made our way downstairs, I saw Yvonne and Marion tramp wearily over the gravel to Marion’s car and watched Yvonne unbutton the waistband of her uniform trousers before she dropped into the passenger seat. The door to the acute side opened and closed with a beep from the keypad and a soft swish of its pneumatic hinge. Then silence.

  ‘This place,’ I said to Julia, ‘isn’t at all how I thought it would be.’

  ‘It’s exactly how I thought it would be,’ she said. ‘It’s a joke and I knew it was a joke. I just don’t know why.’

  ‘Why what?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know that either,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Me?’ I turned and searched her face. The strong morning light was streaming through the high window at our side. ‘Why would I know anything?’

  ‘Well, what are you doing here?’ said Julia. ‘I had to say I’d killed a squirrel to freak my mother out enough to put me in. How did you talk your way past the bouncer?’

  ‘I answered a job advert,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘Christ, you’re gullible,’ said Julia. ‘You really think they’re paying you to scoof about with me and squeeze Ryan’s blackheads all day?’

  ‘What else?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Julia. ‘What else?’

  Even as late as that, though, I couldn’t take the final step to admitting it was real so I deflected her. ‘You didn’t kill the squirrel?’

  Julia took my arm and started barrelling me down the half-flight to the ground floor, cackling. ‘It was roadkill. I just bashed it about a bit more, then stuck it through with some of my granny’s earrings and hid it in a shoebox under my bed till the smell brought my dear mama. Then the smell of piss in the bed hit her when she knelt down to drag the shoebox out. And when she went into the en suite to puke, she saw my little bonfire in the bath.’

  ‘Nicely done,’ I said. ‘And with an eye on safety, doing it in the bath like that. What did you burn?’

  ‘Family photographs,’ Julia said. ‘My birth certificate, my passport, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Photographs?’ I couldn’t help the note in my voice. That was a meanness I hadn’t expected.

  ‘It’s all shit anyway,’ she said. ‘So much bullshit in my mother’s version of our saintly family. And anyway I made copies. Why do you think I’ve got snaps of my various stepfathers all over my phone? I made copies first and the rest of it you can get new ones, can’t you? Register House?’

  We had arrived at Sylvie’s room and I shushed her before we entered. Thankfully, as it turned out, because Sylvie was deeply asleep. Someone had been in and taken one of the pillows out from behind her head and she was lying flatter and snoring gently.

  ‘Another action-packed morning coming up,’ said Julia, but she said it softly.

  ‘Come and sit in the armchair,’ I said, beckoning her. ‘Let me do a scalp massage and you can talk to me. How about that, eh?’

  I really hadn’t done too bad a job with her hair, considering what I had had to work with. I lifted it, half dried, and let it run through my fingers, thinking no one would know it was a fix-it number unless you told them.

  ‘So you didn’t kill your father?’ I said, once I had settled into rubbing small circles over her scalp with the tips of my fingers. I watched her shoulders drop and heard her breathing slow.

  ‘Honestly?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. My mum says he left but I know he died. What I don’t know is why she would lie about it.’

  I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. Why would she lie about it? When I bumped into Julia’s mother in Tesco, the redoubtable Mona Swain, she had said ‘late lamented’ and told me he’d left her his whole estate in his will. Why would she lie to a stranger she’d never meet again?

  Then suddenly I wondered if there was a simple explanation after all.

  ‘Which one of them are you talking about, though?’ I said. ‘Show me the pictures again.’

  Julia fished out her phone and started scrolling. ‘I sprang from his loins,’ she said, showing me the red-eyed, snaggle-toothed man holding the horse’s nose. ‘Ralph. But he left when I was tiny. He got a fancy woman and started spiffing himself up for her. He’d already begun when this was taken, actually. He’d scrapped his Coke-bottle specs and was trying contacts but they made him look like even more of a drunk than he really was so he gave them up. But that was what alerted my mother to the fact of him getting ready to dump her. Going to the optician and all the rest of it. Suddenly taking more baths and clipping his horny toenails.’ She shuddered. ‘So you can imagine what she thought of Garran’s gym membership and tooth-polishing regime?’ She flicked the screen until the tanned man in the pink cashmere appeared. ‘Poor Mother. They keep deciding that all her money isn’t worth waking up to her face on the pillow beside them every day. Well, maybe she’s wise to settle for this grunter. Good old Perry Uving.’ Another swipe and the red-faced man in front of the wall of glass was laughing out at us around his cigar again. ‘Can you actually think of a more bogus P. G. Wodehouse name than Peregrine Uving? I think he must have made it up. I bet he was Keith McGurk before.’

  ‘But it really is her money?’ I said. ‘Is she an heiress or something?’

  ‘Uuuh,’ said Julia. ‘Jesus, I don’t know. It’s se-ew terribly vulg-ah to talk about money, you know.’

  ‘Humour me,’ I said. ‘I’m the vulgar sort, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Well, I know the land was my dad’s,’ Julia said. ‘My real dad, I mean. Ralph. It was his family estate, before the army got their fing
er in the pie. So I suppose she just got it in the divorce. The new place and what’s left in the way of policies and all that. I’ve never thought about it.’

  It was a different world. She was probably speaking no more than the truth; she really hadn’t ever questioned the fact that she lived in a posh house on a huge chunk of land that used to be even huger before they sold it off for a hospital and army training. I raked my fingers back from her forehead to the nape of her neck – once, twice, three times – and felt the last bit of tension leave her. The phone dropped into her lap and went to standby.

  ‘Julia?’ I said very softly. ‘Do you remember saying to me that you hurt your daddy’s middle?’

  ‘No,’ she said. She sounded drowsy. ‘His middle? What does that mean? His stomach?’

  ‘I don’t know. You said it one night when you were almost asleep.’

  ‘No, that’s not right. I heard it one night when I was almost asleep. I didn’t say it.’

  Maybe that was how it seemed to her, if she was groggy. Maybe the words didn’t feel as if they’d come from her. I had never taken the drugs Dr Ferris had her on and I couldn’t say what they might do to perception.

  ‘Which daddy was it, though?’ I said. ‘Ralph or Garran or Perry?’

  ‘Ralph,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation. Then she jerked upright in the chair and turned to face me. ‘Are you fucking hypnotizing me? I didn’t say you could hypnotize me.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. I put out a hand towards her shoulder but she made a fist and knocked my arm away, hard enough to bruise me.

  ‘I’m not doing some bullshit regression to a past life,’ she said. ‘It’s bad enough pretending to be a nutter. I’ve got no intention of going off my rocker for real.’

  ‘I’ve no idea why you’re so upset,’ I told her. ‘I’m not trying to regress you to anything.’ I flashed on Angelo telling me he remembered seeing me in the hospital. ‘You said it yourself, you were a toddler when your dad left. You were old enough to remember.’

  And, of course, we had woken Sylvie. She didn’t sit up but she turned her head and blinked slowly. ‘Ju,’ she whispered. ‘Ju.’