Huts41

The rain had stopped and the sun came out. It couldn’t get much better as long as I stayed down wind. As we walked, Mary Russell started prodding me in the back, with her slim steely fingers. They were the kind of fingers that should have been giving recitals on a piano; not needling me, to keeping me ahead of her. It started off as a kinda joke, but quickly became played out and boring, but she kept doing it.

I grabbed at her wrist, but she was too quick, and poked me square in the chest. My nostrils flared. I thought about poking her back in her bony little no chest.

‘What age are you about five?’ I asked in exasperation.

Mary blew a raspberry sound, speckling me with spittle, and laughed in my face.

I took a deep breath, shook my head and had to laugh too.

‘Have you any fags?’ asked Mary, sitting down suddenly, as if all that poking at me had exhausted her.

I’d only bought a pack of ten, as I was trying to cut down. I balled the cellophane up to put in my pocket, but just dropped it at my feet. It wasn’t worth the hassle. The council had taken away the swings, slide and roundabout over some dispute with the hospital. The park that wasn’t a park had been replaced by a breeding ground for empty bottles and cans.

I slumped down beside her, as close as I could get, without her moving away. But Mary didn’t look at me as she dragged desperately on her fag. She looked longingly up at the glen, with its picture book sylvan glade and babbling brook alive with carp. But I’d eyes only for her.

‘What you want to do?’ I finally said, as the silence between us stretched to a place I could no longer hold onto.

‘Don’t know.’ Mary said. But it sounded little more than a rote answer, learned long ago and put in the right place.

There seemed little point in me being there. I’d bumbled into her room and dragged her out, for no known reason.

‘I’m going to go,’ I said.

‘Ok,’ she nodded. Then what seemed to be an afterthought she added, ‘can you just leave me a fag and a match?’

I’d heard that phrase that many times, during my working days, that I stood up and towered above her. ‘What do you think I am a cigarette machine?’

But a laugh escaped from her lips like a cough, even though her eyes watered and she tried to hold it in.

‘Oh Sweetie,’ Mary said, reaching for my hand and pulling at me, like a nervous colt, back down to sit tethered beside her once more. I was immediately stilled no so much by her actions, but that word: sweetie. She’d said that same thing to me that other time. And I couldn’t help thinking about it, and her and me, as if they were separate things, but bundled together by that one word and my hard cock, beating like my heart.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mary said, her soft eyes, meeting mine, so that for a desperate moment I was going to kiss her, but like a cloud passing, that time was gone. ‘There’s lots of things happening, that I’m not sure about. But I know something is going to happen.’

‘What’d you mean?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mary, lighting another fag, ‘it’s just a feeling.’

I knew exactly how she felt. I’d a feeling. As this rate she would smoke all my fags and I’d need to buy more. But I played the cynic to her Gypsy Rose Lee. ‘Em, don’t know,’ I said, as if it was my turn to use her phrase, with my head down, in case she saw me smiling.

Mary looked at me out of the corner of her eye. ‘They’re going to move me to the challenging behaviour ward,’ she said coldly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

The challenging behaviour ward was human landfill for Glendevon Hospital. Whatever, and whoever, didn’t fit in the other wards got squeezed in. It was notorious. Staff prided themselves on being able to handle the challenging behaviour ward and come back for more. Barry Ferguson had been a charge nurse in that ward before he’d got his current job. And I think he still acted in an advisory manner. I wasn’t sure where that left the patients, but it was no place for Mary Russell.

‘They can’t do that,’ I said simply.

‘You’re such a baby,’ said Mary, looking at me curiously, ‘you think because it isn’t fair that is shouldn’t happen. The men in white coats don’t need to come and get me. I’m already there. They just need to move me along a bit. And they can keep me as long as they want. And do anything they want. You should know that.’

And, as Mary looked through her long lashes, searching and sifting through me, I was ashamed. I did know, but she knew that mazy path far better than me.

‘What are we going to do?’

Mary caught her breath. She suddenly seemed to tighten up, be more herself, and her smile was like summer sunshine after a cold snap.

I handed her another fag. ‘Why don’t you go to London? You could stay with Norean. She said she’d get you a job.’

‘I’ve not got any money. Not even enough for the fare. She doesn’t know I’m coming,’ said Mary, taking a long drag on her cigarette and rhyming out a list of reasons, as if she’d been practicing them. ‘And if she doesn’t know I’m coming she might not be able to put me up. And then where would I stay?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘maybe you could stay in a tent.’ But then I remembered she was a girl and the thought of mildewed flaps and earwigs in the sleeping bag might put her off.

‘A caravan.’ That was the solution revealed to her, in a fit of inspiration. ‘They’re pretty cheap! All they are old wooden pallets for the basic structure. And you assemble the beds from cushion with those gingham covers that you can swab down. And there’s a toilet and something to cook on.’ I made it sound like some kind of outlandish Lego project I’d been involved in. I already had her moved in and living in that caravan quite comfortably.

But the way she looked at me and shook her head I knew that she was being picky and didn’t like the idea.

‘London’s got one of the highest population densities in the world.’ She was just a parrot with these kind of useless facts.

I should have shut up, but I turned into my dad and continued to defend the indefensible. ‘What was that book you were reading earlier, the London Telephone directory?’ I asked cattily.

She smiled at that. And I smiled back. We were like too idiots looking at our reflections in each other’s eyes.

‘Yes,’ Mary said, ‘and you’re name was in it. Under P, for Plonnnnnker.’

‘No seriously,’ I said, trying to establish which one of us was the adult. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, her body once more slumped in that swamp of uncertainty, ‘I suppose I could hitch it down to London. And just hope for he best. It’s meant to be pretty easy. Just go down to Scotch Corner and hold up a sign.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said. ‘But what happens if you get some stranger or weirdo picking you up.’

‘I’ve never had to worry about strangers,’ said Mary picking apart my argument strand by strand, ‘and so called friends can be weirdoes too.’

My leg moved a fraction of an inch away from hers. They no longer touched and with every word the distance between us seemed to be lengthen.

I was already missing her and she wasn’t even gone. ‘When you thinking of going?’ I asked.

‘Soon,’ she said, like a sigh, toying with my clasped hand and fingers, like a Cat’s craddle

‘Here,’ I said, working my other hand, like an ambidextrous magician, and handing her my unopened wage packet out of my back pocket. ‘Get the bus down. It’s safer. And you’ll be there first thing. And you can…’ I didn’t want to say anything else because I was suddenly all choked up.