Silly Girl

Pet wheels the trolley. It’s what she does. It’s not everything she does, but the patients follow a Pavlovian instinct to open their mouths and swallow their pills when Pet comes rattling through.

She is thirty but she looks fifty. When she is fifty, she will carry on looking fifty until she dies. Some people are just like that. Born to middle-age.

Pet is devoted to religion, but there is no evidence that religion is devoted to her. There is no room in her head for allegory, and so she sucks up the contradictions through a single straw. She does not have the mind to distinguish between the blood and thunder of the Old Testament or the esoteric teachings of the New. They are simply rhymes and rhythms she chants, beneath her sallow breath, as the wheels squeak along the magnolia corridors.

In the mass of book, chapter and verse, Pet has emerged believing that there are no sinners, only the misunderstood. The inmates, doped to perdition, who open their mouths and expose their scurvy tongues to her, are loved and have been pardoned by God. In His grace, the obvious conclusion is that the contents of her little tablets are merely placebos.

In her own little world of duty and dosage, Pet is far more insane than any of them.

In the confines of the hospital, Pet is a godsend. She works almost every day, rarely takes a holiday. She’s a little odd, for sure, but normalcy is not a prized requirement here. The caretaker, the sanest of all, belies his stereotype by reading history books from the library. He watches the afternoon quiz shows in his cluttered office. He is a clever man, he really is, but that is all lost in the overalls, the broom and the sarcastic whistle. The woman who wheels the trolley, by dint of a white collar and not a blue, is better than him. But he sees Pet for what she is. A scrawny weirdo. A scrawny fucking weirdo who gets some pleasure out of all this sickness, like Joan of Arc smiling when the flames licked her flesh.

In the confines of her other life, those days when Pet is contractually obliged not to work, she is nobody’s saviour. It is a life of bitter pickings. She switches her churches. Catholic, Church of England, Methodist, Lutheran, Evangelical. She is fervent in the uptight white congregations and conspicuous in the black ones, for she cannot sing and she has no gospel swagger.

There is no man, there is no woman, she is just too ‘off’ for any of that business. Her life is her work, but despite the regular training sessions and the modular updates, she will not understand that it is the contents of her trolley, and only those contents, that keeps evil at bay.

The day room is where it’s at. Pet’s favourite patient is a woman called Alison Speed. She is in her fifties now, and the talk is that she was incapacitated by obesity when she arrived. Pet's stubbornly incurious mind has never considered that to achieve such a goal, to satiate such a need, requires charisma.

When she could no longer walk to the food providers, Alison found enablers to walk there for her. The enablers, waning in efficiency as the need arose - people off the streets, people never missed in a thousand million heartbeats, were now all dead. She kept them around her, these nameless acolytes, until the suspicion, and the odour, carried on the breeze.

Killers like Alison Speed are essentially banal. Not as interesting as they ought to be. But Pet found her fascinating all the same. In Pet’s vanilla mind, Alison had not killed them, those poor people. They were already diseased and Alison had cared for them until they died. And then, lonely, she had kept them for company. The part of Pet’s brain the caretaker took umbrage with was the part that Pet cherished the most. Caring for the dead was a tenet of all religions. Alison Speed was an innocent in the eyes of God and the laws of men.

Alison Speed was doing a jigsaw. A difficult one of an old map of Somerset before the Mayflower set sail for the Americas. She had completed the bottom left quarter, which was a row of noble escutcheons, and the top left corner which was an inset of the city of Bath.

All else was an impossible tangle of place names in tiny italic script. Pet believed that it would take a wing and prayer for Alison to finish it. And yet since she had last looked, Alison had completed another area too. The liminal borders between Somerset and neighbouring counties were blushed with a rosy, ambiguous hue. A bleeding smudge of disputed territory. The space the residents argued over. The distance of a meadow between one state of occupancy and the next.

But those pieces had been easy enough to find. Alison was now starting on the hard part, the interior, using a magnifying glass. Two weeks in, and all the days spent on it.

Pet leaned towards her, palms together and slipped between her thighs, putting on a particular voice. The caretaker walked past and thought, Sweet Jesus!

Alison found the last rosy blush piece which fitted against another. It spelled Sherbourne. Just into Dorset, just over the border line. ‘My village,’ she said in a sleepy monotone. ‘My place.’

‘Yes,’ said Pet, uncertain of her words. ‘Before you came here.’

‘When I was little,’ said Alison. ‘And when I was really big.’

Alison Steed was nothing like the fat woman they had wheeled in. She was now thin, although unclothed, all that skin hadn’t gone away but lapped against her knees and her ankles like candle wax. When Pet occasionally bathed her she had to carefully lift great slaps of puckered flesh in order to reach the deep creases. Alison would sit sphinx-like in the tub, gazing at nothing, occasionally humming nursery rhymes and whispering riddles, lifting her arms when she was asked.

Alison Steed had not been taking her meds of late. The foolish nurse, Little Miss Pity-Pet, never asked for proof that she had swallowed them. She just left them on the side with a plastic container of weak squash. At first, the chemical lobotomy had suited Alison, but she had grown tired of the comatose charade. The jigsaw, arduous as it was, had unleashed a part of her mind that recalled a devotion to detail, something from the past, from a time when she knew exactly what she was doing. Something about when she was a very particular and demanding little girl. An only child, and then an only orphan when her elderly sires had passed away, leaving her with just one cousin who found her distasteful. She had resented every breath her parents took, but the loss of them was ruinous. Without the focus of hating them she had found herself floundering and adrift in a prison of multiple and well-appointed rooms, without regular meal times or the comfort of their criticism. At times, she rather regretted killing them.

Schizoid personality disorder is how they put it. They couldn’t prove whether she’d killed them, or the others, but it circumstantially seemed rather obvious. Attachment disorder was another vague diagnosis at which Alison had inwardly rolled her eyes. The killing part was simple, just a little suffocation in an alcoholic stupor, and it was always prompted by a guest not doing as they were told. Not getting her enough food, for instance, or not tidying up after themselves. But she was not attached to their corpses. It was merely a matter of practicalities, that she, a fat and unfit woman, did not have the strength or the means to dispose of them.

Still, water under the bridge. Pet leaned towards her, pretending to take an interest in the jigsaw, her voice high-pitched like she was talking to a poodle.

‘Freak,’ said Alison, when Poodle-Pet left her to attend to whatever the hell the woman did all day.

The caretaker though, he saw and heard everything.

An unwanted side-effect of flushing her meds was that Alison’s hunger grew. Perhaps somewhere in the mix was an appetite suppressant, because three meals a day were no longer enough. Not nearly enough, in fact. She grabbed at the loose folds of her redundant skin and thought how much better it would be if she was all filled out again.

As she looked at a jigsaw piece through the magnifying glass, she thought some more about pathetic Pity-Pet.

Pet knocked on her door when her shift ended. She offered to read to Alison, who had adjusted her position on the bed so that Pet could see her gazing into space with her mouth open. ‘Hungry,’ she said, looking to the right of Pet’s searching eyes. ‘Hungry, Pet.’

Alison had never used her name before and Pet felt a surge of jubilation.

‘Now you know I can’t,’ she chided.

Alison forced a tear from her eye. ‘Please, Petty-Pet. A hamburger ..’

And so it began. A white sheet was now draped over the lower tier of Pet’s trolley. A questioning mind might have noticed it. More so, they might have noticed the occasional grease spot, and the smell of cooling meat and damp starch; bread and potato, buns and fries, all trussed up in a little white bag.

Two people had noticed. The caretaker, of course, and the head nurse. Alison Steed was gaining weight, which either meant that her meds needed to be tweaked, or that she wasn’t taking them at all.

During her hours at home, Pet prayed. It was not the sort of home she would want anyone to see, but squalor is inevitable when no one is looking. It is why she likes the hospital so much; the ritual of the placebos, the shiny corridor floors, the crispness of her uniform, which was laundered in-house. She prayed in front of a dressing-table mirror, beset with tea lights, like the ones they use in church. She saw an age spot on her left cheek, just beneath her eye and spent some time trying to scrape it off until she realised that age was a blessing, and that if she looked much older than she was, it was because the wisdom of old age had blessed her with its mark.

She tried to pray for Alison Speed, but something more immediate was plaguing her. An atmosphere at work. A change in tone towards her. She might have struggled to express the feeling in words, but her gut was more forthright about it.

*****

In her room at the end of the corridor, Alison Speed licked her lips and then wiped her hands on her clothes. A bargain bucket of fried chicken, decanted into a bag so the bucket would not arouse suspicion of Pet’s trolley. She was already thinking of her next meal.

In her room on the ground floor, the head nurse ordered a blood test for Alison. It was a routine procedure, but this command was out of step, because something was out of step with Alison. She wasn’t about to wait another two months to find out why Alison was getting obese again and why the calculating look was back in her eye.

In his room, the caretaker was reading his history books, and if there was one thing he had learned it was that it always repeats itself. The lunatics were always in charge of the asylum.

He wasn’t thinking of Alison Speed.

*****

Alison had ordered Chinese. Pet was worried by the sharp smell of the sauces as she wheeled her trolley down the magnolia corridor. It was costing her a fortune, all of this. Alison was a wealthy woman. Because she had not been convicted of murdering her parents, she was entitled to their wealth. In addition, (and this was something Pet did not approve of), Alison got a small stipend from the government, as if comfortable lodgings, her placebos, and her three meals a day were not enough.

And now she was wheeling her fifth meal of the day.

But Alison is quite mad, God bless her. Pet is doing His work, but He will not pay the gas bill.

There is a finance office on the first floor where patients can withdraw cash. Alison has never availed herself of their services. As her trolley rattles towards her room, Pet wonders whether she can be inveigled to withdraw some to pay for all these takeaways.

The caretaker walked by and smelled the lemon chicken. He had thought long and hard about it, and now he leaves a note on the head nurse’s desk.

Alison was as she always is. Mouth agape, sitting on the edge of the bed. And yet there was an increasing urgency to the meal, something porcine in the way she went at it. Pet, a little hungry herself, was not offered a slice of chicken or a fork of rice. And the sense of unease rose.

Two days later the results of the blood test were in. Alison had not been taking her meds. MSGs and high levels of cholesterol were found in her blood. The head nurse called Pet into the office and read her scripture and verse. Pet denied it all, and because Pet was too useful to fire, she was simply taken off the med trolley and put in charge of tea, coffee and recreational activities. She was sent home for the rest of the day, bearing the unwarranted shame of a first verbal warning.

The following day, Pet dismantled Alison’s jigsaw. The table was needed for other projects she had in mind. And fuelled by a sense of outrage she was entirely unused to, she made her way to Alison’s room. She didn’t knock.

Alison was reading a book, perfectly relaxed, with her drooling lips closed. She looked entirely different, and the pity-penny dropped.

‘I nearly lost my job over you,’ Pet said.

Alison looked at her, long and hard. ‘What can I say, Pity-Pet. You are a very silly girl.’

‘What?’

Alison rose. Loomed over her. ‘I know what I am, Pity-Pet. Do you know what you are?’

‘A good person!'

‘No. You are a just stupid one.’

Pet's outrage grew. She had been duped, played, conned, and all of her muddled beliefs suddenly felt like nothing more than a puddle of piss on a decent carpet.

‘I want you to pay me back!' she demanded. 'I have spent a fortune on your food!'

She circled the room like a boxer before a bout, taking in the new Alison Speed who did not move a muscle but stood regarding her, bemused, like she already had the KO in the bag.

'I believe that a single good deed requires no reward, but what I have done for you deserves gratitude! What is my reward for all the good I have done you?’

Alison came towards her and pinned her to the wall, took her by the throat, and raised her two feet off the ground.

‘Your reward,’ she said, ‘is that you are still alive.’