The girl looked terrified. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t take sleeping pills.’
‘It’s understandable to be wary,’ said Evi, ‘but we’re very careful to guard against addiction.’
‘It’s not that,’ said Jessica. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘No, I don’t. Please try and explain to me.’
‘The interruptions, the imaginary phone calls and the voices, I think they’re my brain’s way of protecting me, of stopping me falling into too deep a sleep.’
‘Why would your subconscious do that?’
‘Because of the real dreams, the ones I have when I’m so deeply asleep I can’t wake up.’
‘And what are those like?’
‘Unimaginable. Like I’m in hell.’
I DIDN’T GO back to my room after leaving Dr Oliver. I’d found the box-like space, stripped of all traces of its previous occupant, oddly depressing. So, instead of returning to college, I headed for my car and drove to the hospital on the edge of town where I knew I’d find Bryony Carter.
The nurse in the burns unit indicated a private room about three-quarters of the way down the corridor. I paused for a second at the open door. I’d seen the photographs. I knew what to expect.
So much worse than I’d expected. I couldn’t go into that room, I just couldn’t.
I’d imagined something clinical: clean, neat, white and sterile. I hadn’t realized there would be blood and other fluids seeping through the dark-stained bandages. I hadn’t expected that the skin covering her face and her hairless head would be open to the air and would look like something I’d only ever seen before on corpses. I didn’t know that her left arm had been amputated just above the elbow.
The room was so hot. And the smell … oh, Christ, I couldn’t do it.
‘She’s not in any pain. She’s very heavily sedated right now.’
I’d been transfixed by the sight of the lifeless figure under the transparent tent. I hadn’t noticed anyone else in the room. The man speaking to me was standing by the window, dressed for the outdoors in a thick blue woollen sweater and blue jeans.
‘She had a bit of a setback earlier,’ he went on. ‘They’ve been weaning her off the ventilator over the last few days but her oxygen levels plummeted. They’ve put her back on it for twenty-four hours, just so she can stabilize again.’
I swallowed hard. The smell would be tolerable if I breathed through my mouth. I’d come across worse.
‘Are you a friend?’ he asked, and I looked at him properly for the first time. In his mid-thirties, he could have been a model in a country-living magazine: tall and slim with curly hair the colour of a wet fox. ‘If you are, you’re the first to make it through the door,’ he went on.
Without noticing, I’d crossed the threshold. ‘I’ve just moved into her old room,’ I said, having cooked up a cover story on the way over. ‘And I found this tucked under her bed.’ I pulled the book from my bag. ‘There’s a page corner turned down. I think she must have been reading it before it happened.’
‘
‘I didn’t think of that,’ I admitted, feeling stupid. ‘I should just take it away again.’
‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Let her parents decide, when they come back.’
I made myself take another look at the girl in the clear plastic tent. ‘Why does her face look like that?’ I asked. ‘Her skin looks dead.’
‘That’s not her skin,’ the man replied. ‘And it is dead. That’s cadaver skin covering her face. Tell you what, I was just about to get a coffee and you look like you need one. Come on.’
‘CAN YOU TELL me about the dreams?’ Evi asked.
Jessica had left her chair and was at the window. Two weeks ago, she’d been a young girl with a history of anxiety and eating disorders who’d been struggling to cope with being away from home for the first time and the rigorous academic demands of the university. Now she seemed a seriously disturbed young woman, exhibiting behaviour that was making Evi think about hospitalization.
‘We all have bad dreams, Jessica,’ she said, when her patient didn’t reply. ‘I’m not going to get all Freudian on you, but I do think they can point towards what’s worrying us.’
‘Do you?’ asked Jessica, without turning round. ‘Have bad dreams?’
The question caught Evi by surprise and she answered without thinking. ‘You have no idea,’ she said.
Jessica had turned on the spot and was looking Evi full in the face now. ‘What do you dream about?’ she said.
‘Something that happened to me just over a year ago,’ said Evi. ‘I can’t give you details, because other people were involved, other patients, but it was a very difficult time. It became a very frightening time. And although it’s over now, I still dream about it often.’
‘Do you ever want to talk to someone about it?’ asked Jessica.
‘I do talk to someone about it,’ replied Evi. ‘And you have very cleverly turned this conversation into one about me. I’m going to turn it back again, if that’s all right with you.’
The girl seemed calmer now. She sat down again, her hands rubbing her upper arms, as though for warmth. She really was horribly thin. Evi waited.
‘I’m scared of clowns,’ said Jessica, after a moment.
‘A lot of people are,’ replied Evi. ‘It’s a very common phobia.’
‘But really scared,’ said Jessica. ‘I can’t see a picture of one without feeling cold.’
‘And are clowns what you dream about?’
‘I think so.’
Evi waited. Nothing. She raised her eyebrows. Still nothing.
‘You think so?’ she prompted.
‘I can’t really remember,’ said Jessica. ‘That’s the weirdest thing. I know I’m in a fairground. I can remember the lights spinning and the music. I was lost in a fairground, you see, when I was about four. I just got separated from my parents in the crowd. When they found me I was beside one of those mechanical laughing clowns in a big Perspex box. I didn’t speak for a week.’
‘That would have been a terrifying experience for a four-year-old,’ said Evi. ‘Being lost in an unfamiliar place that was noisy and crowded, and then coming face to face with a clown. And, you know, coming to university is putting you in an unfamiliar place, away from your parents for the first time. It’s not surprising that your mind is harking back to a scary experience you had as a child.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s just … not knowing what happens in the dreams is the worst thing.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I remember lights, music, laughing and bright colours. Swirling things like those horses on poles … but nothing else.’
‘Perhaps that’s all you can remember from what happened to you as a child.’
‘So why do I wake up exhausted?’ said Jessica. ‘And sore, like I’ve been beaten up in the night. Why do I wake up screaming?’
