Chapter Fourteen
Buzzing. Somewhere nearby there was the buzz. I had my hand under Peter’s head as he lay, limp and submerged, in a claw-footed cast-iron bath, the cows’ drinking trough in the field next to the shed. I tried not to disturb him as I cast around to see where the body lay, where the buzz was coming from. I screamed at Charlie to get back to the car, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Joni came running across the stackyard, and I screamed at her to find the buzz. “It’s near here,” I screamed. “It’s right here somewhere.” Joni reached us and stopped a few feet away, staring down into the bath. She raised her shoulders to her ears and folded her arms across her breasts. Shaking her head, she turned away. “No,” I saw her mouth saying, “no, no.”
“The buzz, Joni!” I screamed again. “There’s a body here; where is it?” I was possessed with the idea that it was hidden on the other side of the bath, that I’d failed to notice it when I ran behind Charlie with Peter in my arms and flung him into the cold water. Charlie must be right by it, he might touch it, and the plague will get him. But I couldn’t reach him, and I couldn’t let Peter go or he would sink under the water. “Joni! Joni, for fuck’s sake, is it there? Is the body there? There’s buzz every-fucking-where.” It was loud, so loud in my ears.
Joni was still shaking her head and clutching herself, but she seemed to come to. She took a couple of steps around the bath before inching closer, looking at Peter all the time.
There’s no body, she said. There’s no buzz.
“There’s buzz!”
“It’s in your ears.” She pointed at her ears. I realized I was lipreading. The buzz was in my ears. It pulsed in time with my rabid heartbeat. I lifted my free hand to my right ear, but when it came away I couldn’t tell if the fingers were bloody from me or from Peter’s burnt skin. In the bath, his body tensed rigid, his eyes opened, and he began to shriek again.
Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop. In the twilight of the yurt, I pulled Charlie close to me as his muscles contracted in response to his friend’s screaming. Billy seemed to have opted into a fitful sleep. Maggie was hiding under her hair, scribbling with crayons on a piece of paper alongside the Lost Boy. The yurt offered no escape from the sounds of pain. Peter’s fit went on until our muscles reached exhaustion. Charlie let out a sob, and I kissed his head over and over, as though I could suck up his anguish and swallow it with my own. Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop. Peter stopped, but only for a few minutes. Then he started screaming again.
“Enough,” I said, out loud. My voice still sounded far away, though the buzzing had faded. I almost wished for it back.
Inside the food tent, we had covered the trestle table with cling film and laid Peter on it. He writhed when the fits came, presumably from the discomfort of lying on his burnt back. The slightest movement hurt him so much, it was impossible to imagine driving him around to look for a hospital: that much pain would surely kill him. Besides, what state would the hospitals be in?
So we stayed put. I feared he could slip off the cling film table, but Joni said we had to stop the burns from getting dirty as he had no protection against infection. Already, the skin where we had cut away his clothes was raw and glistening. His limbs were a butcher’s counter of pink flesh.
My hand hung in the air over his body. I thought I could look at him, that I could bear it—that I must bear it—but like I had when we stripped him earlier, I turned away. I stood close by, to catch him if he should fall, but I turned away from the sight of him.
He stopped screaming, but he tried to raise his head, as though looking for me.
“Mama?” he said, his voice soot dry. “Sorry, Mama. I hurt myself.”
He raised his drooling hand toward me.
Make it stop. Make it stop.
I took the hand as gently as I could, letting the less-burnt palm rest in mine, without touching the raw back.
“Mama’s here, Peter,” I lied. “Mama loves you. Sleep now.”
Make it stop.
Joni sat on the cooler beside his head. She hadn’t looked at me even once since I came into the tent. She had on a pair of latex gloves from the first-aid kit. Next to her on the trestle table was a tube of calendula cream, unopened. It didn’t look like she had done anything but sit there since I left her, as she had requested, to see to him. Peter fell still, and even his eyelids stopped moving. I bent to check the slight rise and fall of his chest that showed he was breathing, then I laid his ruined hand back onto the table.
“What do we need, Joni?”
She rotated her head up to me, as though she were the one having trouble hearing.
“What do we need to treat Peter, Joni?”
“Help,” she said. “We need help.” She dropped her gaze to the table, to a spot off to the side of Peter’s head where the cling film was smeared with a runny yellow mucus.
“And failing that? What do we need to treat him ourselves?”
She held up the tube of cream. “I only know calendula,” she said. “‘A topical herbal remedy for the symptomatic relief of sore and rough skin, including light abrasions, chafing, minor burns, or sunburn.’ That’s what it says right here.” She waved the tube at me. “What do you reckon, Marlene, should I rub it into his sunburn, huh? Apply three times a day and hope he doesn’t die of shock first?”
Peter still had his shoes on. The synthetic fabric of his socks had so burnt into the skin around his ankles that we dared not pull them off. But I could see that his legs were swelling, so I reached down to release the Velcro tabs to ease the pressure. Even that slight movement set him off, turning his head and moaning, and I knew it would be just seconds before he started screaming again.
“He needs something for the pain, Joni. Where will I find morphine? Would a GP stock morphine, do you think?”
She didn’t answer but just leaned close by Peter’s ear and started humming a low tune.
“I’m going to take the kids and try to find something. Okay? Joni, do you hear me? The kids are coming with me, okay?”
As I left the tent and gulped down fresh air, Peter threw back his head, and Joni’s song was swept away by the torrent of his pain.
Standing on a plant pot to reach the window, I could see the black shape of a body slumped across the reception desk in the waiting room. The telephone hung on its curly cable in front of a poster urging the elderly to get a flu shot. Before I could tell him to stop, Charlie flung himself in a shoulder charge against the surgery door. It withstood his scrawny assault. The double glazing kept the buzz inside, but the onyx blanket that stretched over the body shimmered as the lock clattered, bringing back the taste of bile, the memory of plump flies spattering my skin.
“Round the back,” I said. We gathered our tools and found a window at the rear of the clinic. I slammed the sharp end of the crowbar into the glass, but it bounced off the surface, ricocheting out of my hands. The clangor of echoing metal joined the din in my head.
“Let me try,” said Charlie, his voice even higher than usual, but he could barely lift the sledgehammer. I took it from him, and his hands flopped down and resumed twisting his jogging bottoms into knots. The sledgehammer bounced away, too.
I knew what I would have to do. We went back to the car.
“Get in, Charlie.” I opened the passenger-side door and waved him in. He stepped away and started banging the heels of his clenched hands against his thighs.
“No.”
“You have to wait here.”
“No.” His arms were a blur as he beat his fists on his legs.
“I’ll only be a moment.”
“Don’t go inside with the buzz!”
“I’ll be quiet so the flies don’t get me. That’s why I have to go on my own.”
“You’ll die, just like Peter!” His eyes were glazed with panic. “And then I’ll die too.”
“Charlie.” I crouched down and held both his hands to stop him from beating his own legs. “Look at me, Charlie, look at me with your eyes into my eyes. That’s it. Peter’s not dead. But he’s hurting, and I need to get him some medicine. I’ll be really careful. Now please stay here.”
Before he started up again, I stepped quickly over to the surgery door and busted the lock with the crowbar.
The buzz rose, more languid than I’d seen it before, and settled again without bothering me. But the smell was like nothing I’d known. Instinctively, I turned to run back outside, but Charlie was there on the pavement, twisting his trousers around his fingers and waiting to pounce. So I forced my gorge down and gave him a small wave to show that I was still alive, not overwhelmed by flies. Then I clamped my hand over my mouth and nose, and edged round the waiting room as far away from the body as possible.
The first closed door revealed a consulting room. I went inside and shut it behind me. In a cupboard over the small sink, I found some cotton wool balls, which I dabbed with hand sanitizer and shoved up my nose. I stowed some basic supplies in my backpack and managed to get into the next room through an interconnecting door. It was a mirror image of the first, except with a stethoscope, which I swiped. I cracked open the door into the hallway and, as expected, faced straight into the reception booth.
The woman’s swollen foot dangled an inch from the ground, a court shoe fallen away and a hole in the flesh-colored tights revealing gaudy orangey-red nails against blackened toes. I wondered if she’d just had them done to go on holiday. Had she missed salvation by a day? I fixed the elastic sides of a mask behind my ears and moved down the hallway.
There was a second waiting room at the rear. It opened into another consultation room that was kitted out with surgical equipment, giant insect-eye lights, and a store of scalpels and syringes. My backpack was getting full, but none of this was what I had really come for. Back out in the smaller seating area, though, I realized what people had waited for here: the dispensary.
The counter was shuttered, and the door, bolted, but my crowbar made short shrift of the security measures. I stepped inside. The walls were lined with cubbies and shelves, the piles of mostly white boxes and jars ordered but not labeled. I turned to the nearest pile: Epilim. Stacks of the stuff—Epilim syrup, Epilim tablets, Epilim coated tablets, Epilim controlled-release tablets in 200s, 300s, 500s. So much Epilim. I picked up a box, turned it round and round, but none of the several printed languages told me what it was for. I ripped the cardboard flap and dragged out the folded paper instructions: Epilim is a medicine used for the treatment of epilepsy in adults and children. Epilim: epilepsy. Of course. I stuffed the box and the instruction sheet back into the cubby.
There were dozens—no, hundreds—of other names, all as strange and exotic and meaningless as Epilim. I ran my hand over the boxes, like a blind person who never learned braille. I muttered their names aloud but still didn’t understand. When I turned, my backpack swept a row of glass bottles to the ground, where one smashed and scattered golden-yellow capsules across the floor. A wet pop beneath my boot, and I tasted a familiar tang on the air: cod-liver oil.
I’d wasted all this time and found cotton wool and cod-liver oil. My heart flipped in my chest, dragging the air from my lungs with it, and I grasped the counter for support. It was stiflingly hot in this tiny room. The green mask blew in and out with my panting. I flung it away so I could breathe.
I had to focus. Focus on pain relief, just pain relief. A pile of little plastic pots stood on the counter, the kind that nurses use to dole out pills. I picked one up, and it took me back to my first C-section, asking for pain relief and being handed a little pot of pink pills. “Hope it’s the strong stuff,” I had said to the nurse, who smiled her seen-it-all-before smile. “Ibuprofen,” she said. I felt belittled.
But it had done the job. Even now, it would be better than nothing. I focused my eyes on the shelves and my mind on the few words of this foreign language that I did speak: ibuprofen, paracetamol, codeine, pethidine. After a few minutes, I found bottles of pink liquid, as well as suppositories. Good, better, I coached myself as I packed them into my backpack. We can do this. Now for the strong stuff.
I scanned the shelves for any names similar to morphine. Nothing. Why didn’t they arrange the drugs in types—painkillers with other painkillers? It made no sense. I stepped round and round until the cod-liver oil was a slick under my feet. I turned once more and noticed a cupboard under the counter. Inside was a large safe. A printed and laminated sign stuck to the outside read, “All opiates locked in safe. Safe is alarmed at night.”
So that was that. At least the drug addicts were protected.
Joni was right: we needed help. Peter needed help.
We drove alongside a cricket ground, and I realized we were about to pass the high street in Wodebury, the village where I had first seen the bodies. It was ages—eons—since I was last here. It was all I could remember. Everything from before had simply dropped away, like rocks down a chasm. I had left Marlene Greene behind on this high street and driven away. Now I was just borrowing her body, wearing her boots.
I sped past the junction, trying to prevent the children from seeing the bodies. Trying not to look myself. The kids were too busy bickering and elbowing each other. But my eyes darted across, drawn like flies, and there were the three corpses. Only now two were on the pavement and one lay in the street. How is that possible? I thought, Animals? What kind of animal could haul a whole body along the pavement? Dogs? I didn’t stop to work it out, but pulled up instead on the stone bridge, just out of sight of the pub, and squeezed the top of my nose until I felt pain in my teeth. Make it stop.
I dropped the hand brake again, and we sped off, the high hedges blurring past my window.
“That helicopter could save Peter.” Charlie didn’t look up from studying his hands in his lap.
“That’s a good idea, but I don’t know where it came from.”
“Maybe it’ll come back?”
“I’m not sure we can wait that long.”
“What are we going to do, Mummy?”
“We’re going to ask for help.”
I pulled in to the camp to pass Joni the liquid paracetamol and suppositories.
“The morphine was locked in a safe. I’m sorry.”
She took the two white boxes and sat with one in each hand. Peter had passed out again, but Joni shook her head when I offered to help give him the drugs.
“I’ll make it right,” she said.
I took a few steps toward the car, but stopped and turned.
“Why do you have to make it right, Joni?”
She opened the boxes and lined up the bottle and packet beside Peter’s head, taking out the instruction sheets and ironing them flat across her thigh with her palm, humming all the time.
“This isn’t our fault,” I said. “We never could have known—”
She turned over the sheet to read the other side. Peter gave a moan and shifted his head. The onslaught was coming. Joni closed her eyes and hummed louder.
“Do you want me to stay with Peter for a while?”
I waited.
“Joni?”
When she didn’t answer, I turned and ran back to the car. I had to find help somehow. We raced up the farm track to the far side of the field where the hermit’s shed hid in the trees.
He was out. I hammered on the door hard enough for the rattling padlock to scare away the roosting pigeons. He must be “doing his rounds.”
“Mr. Tumnus is the world’s worst hermit,” I told the kids.
The creeping sense of unease that I got from the forlorn clearing twisted my gut between its bramble fingers. But as I watched Billy sitting on the sloping stone parapet of the Lonely Steps, bucking his hips to try to get himself to slide, I shook my head. Billy wasn’t scared here. And there was no rational reason why I was.
“Mummy? I said, ‘what’s a hermit?’” asked Charlie, tugging my sleeve.
“A loner. An oddball. Someone who hides from the rest of the world.” And maybe that’s all my disquiet amounted to: a curtain-twitching suspicion of the stranger in our midst.
“So are we hermits?” said Maggie, with her usual scalpel logic.
“No, love, we’re perfectly normal. Get the Lost Boy in the car.”
As I slammed the door behind them, a wraith cry floated across the field. Peter was awake again.
I got in and started the engine, just for the background noise. The kids all looked at me, on tenterhooks for a solution. I bounced my palms gently on the steering wheel.
“Mummy?” said Charlie.
“What?”
He shook his head and gave a tiny shrug. It was bad enough not knowing the answer, but these poor kids didn’t even know the question. I reached over and took his hand.
“We’ll find help,” I said. And I turned the car onto the road to Moton Hall.
Gravel swarmed up from beneath my wheels and stung the flanks of the car. The stately home looked much larger from the side where the mismatched domestic extensions and over-the-centuries additions huddled in the background, trying not to let down the symmetrical perfection of the facade. The layout was as tangled as undergrowth. It was as though every place in the countryside were as densely layered as the forest.
“He could be anywhere.” I was bouncing my palms on the steering wheel again, harder now, so that I accidentally pipped the car horn and made myself jump.
“Ha-llo,” called Billy, waving toward the front part of the house. Framed in one square pane of a sash window floated a white face. It faded back into the darkness.
I was out of the car and across the gravel in a moment. The kids scrambled after me. I held one hand above my eyes to peer through the glass, which was enameled orange by the lowering sun. I glimpsed a hallway filled with serious antiques, and a wide doorway that opened to the next room. I moved along one window. Inside a vast library and music room sat the hermit in a high-backed chair, pretending to read a book. One of his willow-pattern teacups stood on the glossy wood of an ornate side table.
I banged on the glass. He looked up and pulled his glasses down onto the tip of his nose, peering at me over the top.
“I need your help,” I shouted.
He cupped a hand around his ear.
I licked my finger and wrote backward onto the glass, one letter in each of the small panes: HELP.
He folded down the corner of his book and slipped it underneath the teacup. Then he came over and jiggled the lock until it released, letting the massive window roll up on its pulley.
“What happened?” he asked.
“One of the kids got burnt. Badly. He’s in pain, and I can’t find any morphine.”
“I don’t have any morphine.”
“Of course not. But you mentioned a radio. Can you contact anyone? Can you call out?”
He was already shaking his head.
“What about these broadcasts then? Do they say anything about helicopters? Because we saw one earlier over the hill fort. If I could get them to come back for Peter, he might have a chance.”
Now he was at the chair, slipping the book into one pocket and wiping the teacup on his handkerchief before dropping it into the other. I carried on talking to his back.
“Any idea where they might be based? If I could drive to them? Or anyone else I might find who could treat Peter?” I glanced behind me to see if the kids were in earshot. Charlie was there, his fingers twisting his trousers again. I leaned in through the window and lowered my voice. “The boy’s going to die if we don’t get help.”
He waved at me to move back so he could climb up and out of the window.
“If this helicopter has seen you, I rather think we’re all going to die.”
I cut the engine and we freewheeled down to the camp. The tires thrummed over the hard-packed dirt like a hearty soup plopping on the stove. But there would be no home comfort for us. The sun shattered into rictus fingers as it slumped behind the hills. If the hermit was correct, the helicopter that circled right over us had “nefarious intentions.” “Otherwise,” he had said, “why didn’t it land and pick you up?”
The old man was paranoid, ranting and raving about long-past wars—neighbor against neighbor—and how Europe had been waiting for a chance to turn on the outcasts. As the hermit had scurried away from Moton Hall with his teacup in his pocket, Charlie had tugged at my elbow—“What about Peter, Mummy?”—so I’d let the old man go. He was a nut. Even so, I couldn’t stop asking myself: Why didn’t that helicopter land?
“Look,” said Billy. An owl sat on a fence-post, its feathers backlit to form a white aura, and watched us with sunset eyes as we passed. “Buh-bye, little owl,” called Billy. “Buh-bye,” we echoed around the car.
The camp was mercifully quiet. Even the kids hushed as we stepped up the slope to the tents. Charlie slipped his hand into mine, and I squeezed it three times. He squeezed back.
Joni sat by the empty firepit. She stood as we reached her, forcing her torso up from the ground by pressing down on her thighs. She said something as she turned toward the yurt, as stiff and flat as a figure in a cave painting.
“Joni?”
“I’m done.”
My legs carried me into the food tent where Peter lay on the trestle table, covered with a thick sleeping bag. Joni’s sleeping bag. I laid my hand on his chest, but there was no rise and fall. His stillness spread up my arm like creeping anesthetic, until we were suspended in silence, stuck in the pause between breaths. A long groan rose from inside me, as though my last breath were also being sucked away. I snatched my hand from the body and hugged it to my chest, spinning round to see a row of questioning eyes behind me.
“Go,” I said to the kids, pointing in the direction of the stream. “Get some water.”
Billy and Maggie shot away in obvious relief, dragging the Lost Boy with them. Charlie dithered, building up to saying something.
“Sit down, Charlie.” In the dirt beside the log where Joni had been sitting was a pillow. We both sat down, and I laid the pillow over my knees, letting Charlie’s head rest on top. My hand settled into the cool hair of his nape. Up close, my parched skin stretched in a fine web of triangles across my knuckles. Like toughened glass under pressure, it had shattered. Charlie was tracing the pillow with his fingertips, the butterfly-wing shapes of brown stains. I finally let myself focus on the blood and mucus that smeared the white cotton.
“Is this Peter’s blood, Mummy?”
I agreed that it was Peter’s blood on the pillow.
Joni. What have you done?
For a second I thought I might cry.
That must have hurt, Joni. It must have hurt you so much.
But like a lost sneeze, nothing came.