Lonie 65

Lonie phoned once a day, usually in the evening. Audrey's mother, in response, had taken to hovering near the phone in order to pick it up first. This gave Grace the satisfaction of saying, ‘it’s that drunken lout on the phone for you,’ before handing her daughter the receiver. Very quickly Audrey ran out of things to say on the phone. She’d wave shamefaced at her mother to tell him she wasn’t in.

Audrey decided to go back to work on Monday. It would give her something to talk about with Lonie. It was easy as falling off a ladder. The fatman and Bresslen let her ease herself back into the job by giving her the kind of small- fry work of births and deaths that she’d done when she’d first started in the Glasownian. Her fingers found the keys on the Olivetti easy enough, but after about fifteen minutes her pinky began to cramp and she took a break. With no real friends she brought her cup of coffee back to her desk. Her hands warmed by the mug, she sat staring at the fog coming in from the Clyde. With another Old Firm game coming up the Goldenwell Case had lost front page status. She asked herself what Lonie would do, in this situation, and laughed like a dafty through her nose, when she came up with the answer –he’d get pissed. She drew baffled glances from Ward, the janitor, who was nearby, hitting a radiator with a hammer, his idea of fixing the heating, and sending everyone else wild with the noise.

‘I’m going to visit Carol Peters.’ Audrey cupped her hand over the telephone receiver so Bresslen could hear her.

‘What was that?’

The clanking noise got louder like the beating of war drums. Audrey repeated herself several times. The janny wandered away, leaving his hammer beside the radiator, and silence hung in the newsroom like a new set of curtains, but she still wasn’t sure Bresslen had heard. Audrey picked up her bag, checking she’d enough money to get her to and from Goldenwell.

Finding a taxi in the fog coming off the Broomilaw wasn’t easy. Audrey berated herself for not phoning one from the office. But she didn’t want to go back. Eventually, she spotted a black Hackney parked outside the café and waited for the driver to come out and jumped in the back of his cab. It was still early morning. Cocooned, whizzing through streets, the noise of the traffic muted by a sterile greyness, she felt as if she was running away and plonking school.
Only the jolt and jarring gear changes of the cab alerted Audrey to where they were. The Gothic face of Goldenwell Hospital seemed like a mirage that appeared and disappeared as the vaporous land rose up to meet the sky. Diesel fumes hung in the air as Audrey paid the taxi driver.

‘I had to come back and interview Carol Peters.’ Audrey tried to keep her voice steady. She was in Father Campbell’s office speaking to the priest. Lorna had greeted her like an old friend taking her hand and looking into her eyes. Even Jim had given her a gruff welcome.

‘Sure. I’m sure she’d like that.’ Father Campbell’s comment was also an invitation for his workers to give their views. His glance took in Lorna and Jim.

‘Sure.’ Jim shrugged his shoulders.

‘I think she’d love it.’ Lorna jumped up from her chair, clasping her hand together. ‘I’ll go and make sure she’s ready for you.’

Audrey thought that made her sound ancient, but said nothing. Jim followed Lorna out into the hall.

Left alone with Father Campbell Audrey didn’t know what to say about the scandal. But he broke the silence, looking over the desk at her, his lip curving up and inviting a conspiratorial smile.

‘I see you are troubled my child.’

‘No. I’m fine…I’m sorry to hear you may be closing.’

‘Tsk. There has been something of a kerfuffle.’ He shut his eyes and shook his head. ‘It’s in God’s hands…Come tell me about the car crash.’

His eyes were a whirlpool of compassion and his voice that of a concerned father. As she was telling him, Audrey focussed on a matchstick on the carpet, near the bin. He skirted around his desk to take her two hands in his and stroked her under the chin, when she begain howling, so that she would look up at him.

‘You’ve been very brave.’ Father Campbell let her hands fall into her lap. He put his hands about two inches above her head, and closing his eyes muttered some prayer in what sounded like gibberish.

‘Something happening.’ Audrey’s voice was unsteady. She started laughing. ‘It’s like getting tickled from the inside.’ Soon she was giggling and could hardly get off her chair.

Lorna stood in the doorway, waiting for the prayers to finish. She clapped her hands together, infected by Audrey’s laughter, and laughing in turn.

Their hands almost touched as they walked along the corridor side by side. Audrey no longer felt scared. She carried her notepad and pencil for shorthand in her other hand. Jim stood guard at the door, but the woman she saw sitting, wearing blue-striped men’s pyjamas near the window seemed so changed that Audrey started to make sure it was Carol Peters.

Carol’s face was the colour of larvae and Audrey could have sworn she’d no lips. It was only when she came closer she could see she’d a mouth. Her body seemed a shrunken ampoule folded in on itself and, up close, she smelt of talcum and body rot. Her eyes when they rose to meet Audrey’s still held something of the same glitter and her voice was steady. ‘I’m a well watched woman.’

‘We all are.’ Lorna stood behind Audrey, her words had a lightness the other’s lacked. She pulled a plastic seat from near the wall for Audrey to sit on. Jim, in turn, gave up his seat at the door for Lorna to sit on and he stood outside in the hall.

‘I’m so glad you’ve returned.’ Carol sounded sincere, and her lips twisted into a grimace, which could be interpreted as a smile. ‘As you can see, dear, I’ve had a bout of catatonia.’

‘You make it sound like a bout of the flu.’ Lorna laughed.

‘Aye, you’ve no’been yourself,’ quipped Jim, deadpan, from the door.

Audrey looked from one carer to the other. Then at Carol. A great wave of pity washed through her body for this old woman and she asked in a small voice. ‘Are you better now?’

‘Yes dear. Thanks to this pair. They’ve been marvellous. Simply marvellous. I don’t know what I’d have done without them.’

‘Well, that’s something.’ Audrey looked down at her pad and Carol followed her gaze. ‘It’d be a great pity then if the secure unit closed…’

‘That’s unlikely.’ Lorna edged forward in her chair. ‘It’s all hooey.’

Carol lit a cigarette her eyes sparkling and darting from one woman to the other. ‘Well, I’m not going anywhere special.’

Audrey made a note on her shorthand pad, more to put a mark on the white sheet, to get back into the swing of things, rather than anything memorable had been said. ‘What was it like when you first came here?’

‘Much the same. I drooled like a dog and my tongue didn’t seem to fit into my mouth.’ She took a draw on her fag, leaning over and knocking ash into the ashtray beside her. ‘That may have been due to the medication I was on.’

‘And what was that?’ Carol’s head sagged and she looked out into the corridor. ‘Procyclidine for epilepsy. Largactil syrup for psychosis, for auditory and visual hallucinations. Later I was given injections instead. And, oh, a whole pharmacopeia of anti-depressants, for migraines, mania, for fear, for anger, for just about everything, including bedwetting. I carried on as normal, of course. I guess I’m just that kind of girl.’ She started laughing and Lorna joined in.

‘What medication are you on now?’

‘Oh. Much the same.’ She waved her hands about as she choked on fag smoke and coughed.

‘No, she’s not.’ Jim butted in from the doorway. ‘She’s on hardly anything unless she kicks off. Then we might need to jag her.’

Audrey turned to face him. ‘With what?’

‘Librium.’ Jim grunted, before returning to the shadow between the door and the corridor.

‘When did you start taking medication?’ Audrey flipped a page in her pad, as she waited for Carol to answer.

‘Well, where did that little question come from? I was about seventeen I was at a girl friend’s house, in her living room, with her parents. We were very much taken with amateur dramatics and I had a grand mal seizure. At first they thought I was overacting, which I did have a tendency to do.’ She shifted in her seat and she looked at her through her eyelashes coyly. And her voice took on the aspect of a younger self. ‘But then snot, blood and foam are very difficult to fabricate.’ She sighed, and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘One day normal. The next a mess. A crazy woman! The world is so, so unfair.’

‘How did you get involved with Chief Inspector Bisset?’ There was a catch in Audrey’s voice.

Carol face flinched. She rubbed in a circular motion up above her eye and to the left hand side of her forehead. ‘I didn’t get involved, as you put it, with Bisset. He got involved with me. When I first had a fit he came with the ambulance crew.’

‘Unfortunately,that’s standard procedure in this case.’ Lorna’s voice had lost its brightness.

‘What one has to understand about people like Bisset.’ Carol sighed and reached for her packet of cigarettes. ‘He’s like a creepy-crawly, all hands, touching you up, feeling your breasts, sticking his hand down your pants. Trying to put his mouth in yours. He’s always been like that. His uniform is a passport. He’s plausible and he can get in everywhere.’

‘Apart from here.’ Jim suggested.

‘Yes. Apart from here. Most Catholic institutions are better that way. They’ve got an institutional distrust of our policemen.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘You do understand dear? I wasn’t always a Catholic. I had to change my religious affiliation. He’d come to that other place and rape me almost every day. As sure as we’d get porridge for breakfast he’d turn up and take me to a room on the ward for “questioning”.’

Audrey’s brows creased. ‘What ward? When was this? Was this before the trial?’ Her questions came out all jumbled together.

‘Yes dear. I was a pretty young thing.’ She snorted and briefly covered her mouth with her hand. ‘I never really recovered. My mother was so grateful to everybody, always thanking everyone, singing their praises. I was a virgin, you know.’ She considered this, cigarette smoke twisting and turning up around her brow. ‘Technically, I still am.’

Carol closed her eyes and shook her head. Her cigarette dropped onto the table and bounced onto to the floor. Lorna bent down and scooped it up. Audrey noted similar burn marks on the dresser.

‘You had a child.’ Lorna spoke quietly and offered Carol a gentle reminder. ‘A little girl.’

‘Yes. A beautiful little girl…She died. They took her off me.’

Audrey glanced at Lorna, trying to make out if what she said was true. It seemed to be. She had no way of knowing. ‘Did you know a boy called Archie…?’ She couldn’t remember his second name.

Carol treated her to a smile. ‘Yes. Such a lovely boy. It’s a great shame what they did to him.’

Audrey’s pen dug into the paper. ‘Who? Who? Who?’ She didn’t look up although she could feel Carol’s eyes on her.

‘Do you know what a panderer is?’ Carol leaned forward to get a better look at Audrey. She sounded as if she was suddenly enjoying herself.

‘Yes.’ Audrey bit at her lip.

‘Well dear, Bisset was a panderer to a group of very wealthy men. That’s why I’m here dear. That’s why I became a Catholic, to get away from them. So they can’t get me.’

‘Can you give me some names?’ Audrey whispered.

‘Yes dear.’ She pointed at Jim standing at the door.

He snorted.

Carol laughed. ‘He’s always trying to get my pants off.’ She shook from side to side. ‘Even though he’s got a beautiful wife.’ She looked at Lorna and shook her head again and cocked her head to listen. ‘Your boss and the fatman. They had sex with lots of children. They are going to burn, burn, in hell. Like you.’ She slumped down, as if asleep, her cigarette rolling onto the floor.

Lorna picked it up and put it out in the ashtray. She signalled to Jim. ‘Let’s get her into bed.’ She pulled off her shoes.

For a few seconds Audrey felt forgotten. Then Lorna half-turned to face her and put on her cheery face. ‘Can you find your own way back to the office?’ She dismissed her with, ‘won’t be a jiffy,’ and turned back to the task of getting Carol undressed. Jim brushed past Audrey as he went to help.