Grayle shook her head. ‘Don’t Show the Folks. Pain of death. We used to put it on cards and letters when we were kids.’
‘When you were kids is one thing-’
‘Listen, it’s bad enough we haven’t had a letter or a phone call in five weeks. No, I didn’t show it to them then and I don’t plan to. My father would be acutely embarrassed on his younger child’s behalf and blame it on my mother’s genes, like he does with me. Mom would be spooked all the way to the cocaine cupboard. No, hell, this is down to me. Time for Crazy Grayle to get her shit together.’
‘OK.’ Lyndon leaned back. ‘What are your own personal conclusions here? That Ersula blew out her mind under some old stone and went native? Among the primitive Brits?’
‘I know … you don’t believe, any more than my father would, that my sister could be psychically damaged by any of this. You don’t believe for one second that she’s messing with awesomely powerful cosmic forces. You think more likely she got laid inside a stone circle, fell in love, lost track of time …’
‘OK,’ Lyndon said. ‘What do you plan to do about it?’
‘Well … I already called this University of the Earth summer school. Spoke to a guy who was very helpful. Surprised we hadn’t heard from Ersula, on account of the course ended a month ago and they presumed she’d flown home. He didn’t sound like a fruitcake …’
Lyndon’s expression said he wouldn’t trust Grayle to identify a fruitcake at knife-swinging distance. She averted her eyes.
‘So, I … I called the police department. I guess there’ll be some kind of hook-up with the English cops. But …’
‘The English police are very thorough,’ Lyndon said. ‘If there’s anything wrong here, they’ll find out.’
‘You don’t think I should fly over there?’
‘How would that help?’
‘Well … it would help me, I guess.’
‘Grayle, you yourself admit that Ersula is the balanced one.’
‘And, yeah, she went to Africa, just out of high school, and we didn’t hear from her for close to two months. But that was when the folks split. Her way of coming to terms with all that. This is different. She’s a grown woman. Also she knows that if the very last letter I get from her is as weird as this …’
‘OK,’ Lyndon said. ‘You have a point. See what the cops come up with. They may not be too enthusiastic about finding a grown woman who’s only been missing a few weeks, but being she’s a professor’s daughter and all … Leave it to the cops.’
‘Right.’ Grayle’s voice a little too high. ‘You’re right. That’s sensible.’
Lyndon nodded. He folded the blue airmail letter, tucked it under Grayle’s coffee cup. He hadn’t read the other pages.
Because she hadn’t given them to him.
About Ersula’s dream. The page with the disturbing details of Ersula’s dream lying out on the burial chamber.
So Grayle went home to her windchimes and her crystals and her tree-of-life wallchart. Tried to meditate, gave up and half watched an old John Wayne movie on TV until she fell asleep and dreamed uneasily about dreaming.
III
Around two-thirty a.m., Sister Anderson, scenting smoke, slid quietly into the sluice room. The young Nigerian houseman, Jonathan, bounced off the wall like a scared squirrel, tossed his cigarette out of the window.
When he saw who it was, Jonathan looked no less intimidated. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’ His face no longer black but grey with fatigue in the white lights.
These kids. He’d have been hardly born when Sister Andy, red-haired then and vengeful, had first hunted down wee nurses and sprog docs who’d risked a ciggy in the sluice or the lavvies. Been a good while now since she last chewed the leg off a junior housie — no fun terrorizing some hollow-eyed kid at the end of a sixteen-hour shift. But reputations stuck.
‘Jonathan,’ Andy said wearily. ‘Daft sod y’are, wasnae likely to be the chairman of the bloody hospital trust this time of night. Here … have yourself a replacement.’
Jonathan looked surprised and then smiled tentatively, still unsure whether it was a trap. Getting the cigarette to his mouth, his hand shook, poor wean. Twenty-six years old, veteran of three weeks in A and E, two on the slaughterhouse shift.
‘Aw, come on, son.’ Andy flashed the ancient Zippo. ‘It happens. You did your best, no?’
‘Is that what I am supposed to keep telling myself every night for the next forty years?’
‘It’s what I’ve been saying to young guys like you the last thirty.’ Andy sighed. ‘Aye, you’re right, it’s a trite wee phrase.’
She lit up too, having a good idea what was coming next.
‘I honestly don’t think I am going to stick it,’ Jonathan said bleakly. ‘It’s like working in some sort of meat-processing plant. By midnight, one gets so one doesn’t want to go back out there.’
If she’d had twenty Silk Cut for every time an intern said that to her, she’d have gone down with nicotine poisoning years back. What the hell was she supposed to say? If she told him the truth of how bad it became, he’d just think she was stir-crazy. The truth was you grew to love it. The stink, the drips, the bedpans, the old guys who drooled — you loved it all and, when you took a holiday, your heart ached to get back.
This was how bad it became.
‘But I mean,’ Jonathan said, ‘does anyone ever surprise you? You know, by suddenly responding to treatment? Does that happen any more? And is anybody ever, ever grateful?’
‘Oh, thank you, thank you, doctor, you saved ma life.’ Andy assuming a geriatric quaver. ‘Stayed awake long enough to administer the right drugs in the right order. A credit to the hospital trust.’ She sighed. ‘Ah, Jonathan, in my own worst moments I figure if you manage to save a life you must’ve beaten the system, y’know?’
The same way you loved the whingeing patients and the underpaid nurses and the thirty-year-old doctors looking fifty, so you hated the suits, the admin guys, the caring, cut-glass quango ladies with their spectacles on gold chains and clipboards full of rationalization plans. It was all a business now and the last thing businesses were about was healing.
She became aware that Jonathan was looking down at her in some kind of awe.
‘Sister Andy! My God, it’s true, isn’t it? You really are leaving us.’
‘Where’ve you heard that?’ Knowing — dammit — that with the sharpness of her tone she was confirming it. Although it wasn’t certain, by no means.
‘Well, I … somebody said you accepted a retirement package. But someone else said it was just a vicious rumour and they’d never get you out … out …’
‘… alive? Never get me out of here alive? Bloody hell, Jonathan, I look that old and ruined?’
Jesus God, were the damn sprogs beginning to pity her? Maybe it was time to start dyeing the hair again. Bring back the old red. Fiery red and halfway down her back when she came down from Glasgow in sixty-five. Faded ginger seven years ago when she and Mick were divorced. Straggly grey now.
‘Well, you know, a lot of people nowadays are taking early retirement,’ Jonathan said, embarrassed. ‘To do the things they always promised themselves. Travel the world …’
‘Sod off,’ said Andy. ‘You’re just digging yourself in deeper.’
‘Sorry. Another job, then? It’ll go no further, I promise. It’s just that if even you are getting out-’
‘Look, son.’ Andy glared up, smoking no-hands, pushing the words out the side of the ciggie. ‘If anybody wants to know, I’m gonny marry a brilliant heart surgeon and fly out to his private clinic on Paradise Island, OK?’
‘Sorry. None of my business.’
‘Right,’ said Andy.
Paradise. Sure. Paradise stripped down to a stone and timbered village huddled under the Black Mountains, which were the lower vertebrae of the Welsh border. A paradise called St Mary’s. A grand wee place, in its way, a haven, a sanctuary …