gray desk beside her that’s covered with rubbish and clutter. I pause before trying to attract her attention, feeling undeniably nervous. Wait. She’s talking. Is someone in there with her?
Scott looks exhausted. Her face is flustered, her cheeks bloodred, and she’s smoking a cigarette, flicking ash onto the dirty terra-cotta-colored carpet. I’ve spoken to her (rather, she’s spoken at me) on a few occasions before today, and I don’t relish the prospect of having to talk to her again. She’s a foul-tempered woman at the best of times, and I’m tempted just to turn around now and go back to the house rather than face her. She suddenly gets up, moving unexpectedly quickly, and I step back to stay in the shadows, keeping out of sight but still able to see her through the glass. From my new position I can see that the room is actually double length, and the far end is in almost total darkness. There’s a concertina-like folding wall across the middle, which has been left half open. Scott strides purposefully through the gap and disappears out of view.
“Do something, you useless little prick!” she yells at someone unseen, her bellowing voice muffled but still clearly audible even through the closed door. “For god’s sake, come on!”
The hostility in her voice is unnerving, and I actually start to edge back toward the stairs before telling myself to get a grip. She reappears again and mooches through the clutter on the table. She picks something up—looks like an open glass jar—then moves back into the shadows.
“You know you want it,” I hear her shout. “Come on, react! Don’t just sit there, you pathetic piece of shit.”
She walks back this way, the jar held out in front of her; then she looks around. Damn, she’s seen me. I try to get out of the way but it’s too late. No backing out now. She angrily yanks the door open.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“Sorry,” I stammer, immediately on the wrong foot. “I didn’t mean to disturb you—”
“Yes you did,” she bawls at me. “No one ever comes here unless they don’t have any choice. You didn’t come here by accident, so you did mean to disturb me.”
“Hinchcliffe said I should—”
“You McCoyne?”
“Yes, I—”
“He said you’d probably turn up at some point. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be with you.”
When she stops talking I become aware of a faint whimpering noise coming from elsewhere in the room. Scott moves away from the door, and I follow her inside. At the far end, strapped to a chair by ropes tied across her tiny torso and around her ankles and wrists, is an Unchanged child. It’s one of the kids from the council depot nest we cleared out earlier this week, I’m sure it is. When she sees that someone else is in the room, she starts moaning in fear, tugging at her restraints to try to get free. The effort’s too much, though, and she gives up and slumps forward sobbing, letting her bonds take her weight, her long, greasy hair hanging down and covering her dirty face. Poor little shit. What the hell has Scott been doing to her?
“Interesting,” Scott says, watching both the girl and me, her eyes flicking between us.
“What is?”
“The way she reacted when you appeared,” she says.
“She recognizes me, that’s all. I helped catch her.”
“I just need one of these little cunts to show a bit of backbone and start fighting. Get Hinchcliffe off my back for a while. It wasn’t so bad when Thacker was in charge. Hinchcliffe’s got no patience. He wants results or he wants them dead.”
The little girl, shaking with cold, cries out again. In a sudden fit of rage that takes both me and the child by surprise, the doctor spins around and hurls the glass jar at her. It hits the wall just above her head and explodes, showering her with sharp shards of glass and sticky globules of food.
“Jesus, what the fuck are you doing?” I shout, forgetting myself.
Rona Scott leans back and looks at me disapprovingly. “Looks like someone’s been spending too much time around these things.”
“It’s not that. I just—”
Scott’s not interested. She runs toward the girl again, grabs her shoulders, and yells into her face. The child screams back at the top of her voice, tied tight but still straining to get away. “That’s better,” Scott says, taunting the kid, slapping her cheek. “Now that’s more like it.” She turns her back on the still-screaming child and looks at me. “Right this way.”
She shoves me out of the room and locks the door, muffling the little girl’s cries but not blocking them out completely. She stops in the middle of the corridor, preventing me from going any farther, waiting expectantly. I realize what she’s waiting for and reach into my inside pocket and pull out a half-full packet of cigarettes I’ve been holding on to for a while. She studies the packet for a moment, checks how many smokes are inside, then grunts her approval and heads for the staircase.
We climb another flight of steps up to the third floor, which looks identical in layout to the second. She takes me into the room at the far end of the corridor, double the size of the others. There’s a wide window on one wall that gives Scott a virtually uninterrupted view out across Hinchcliffe’s compound. On the opposite wall, a smaller window overlooks the sea. Driving rain clatters constantly against the glass. There’s more light in here than in any other part of the building I’ve been in so far, but that’s not a good thing. This is Rona Scott’s clinic–cum–living- quarters, and I’d have preferred not to be able to see anything.
“Over there,” she grunts at me, pointing across the room. I walk across the cluttered space, picking my way through the rubbish that covers the floor. There are unpleasant stains and used swabs and dressings everywhere, crusted hard and brown. Discarded strips of bandage lie around the place like gruesome, blood-soaked paper-chain decorations. This place makes me realize just how much the role of a doctor (if Rona Scott ever really was a doctor) has changed. No longer concerned with the ongoing well-being and general health of their patients, they’re now here just to patch people up and keep them fighting as hard as possible for as long as they can. As with any war, countless numbers of people have suffered horrific injuries over the last year. Fortunately for them, most died quickly on the battlefield or later as a result of radiation sickness, infection, or malnutrition. Doctors like Rona Scott are rarely bothered by people like me, and it shows. This room, although still having the faintest smell of antiseptic, now has all the dignity and class of a back-street vehicle repair shop.
Scott walks over to where I’m standing, drops her cigarette, and stubs it out on the carpet. I’ve never been this close to her before, and I pray I never am again. She looks even worse than I do, as if she’s been personally collecting samples of all the diseases and conditions she might still have to treat. Her breath is foul. The bottom of one of her earlobes is missing and has been patched up with adhesive tape that’s covered with blood. I hope that little girl downstairs did it.
“Okay, make it quick. What’s wrong with you?”
“Where do I start?”
“What hurts most?”
“Everything hurts,” I answer honestly. “No appetite, lost a load of weight, fucking awful cough, sometimes there’s blood when I piss…”
“You look bad.”
“Thanks.”
She picks up a flashlight and shines it into my eyes, sighing with effort every time she moves. I don’t know whether she’s as unfit as I feel or whether she just resents every second of time she’s wasting on me. Is she like this with everyone? Is it because I’m not a battle-scarred soldier or one of Hinchcliffe’s precious fighters?
“Strip to the waist,” she orders, and I immediately do as I’m told, starting to shiver even before I’m done. I catch a brief glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror in the corner, and I have to look twice to be sure it’s really me. I stare at my skeletal reflection. Christ, I can see every individual rib. I’m hollow chested. My chest goes in instead of out like it used to …
“Stand still,” she says but I can’t stop shaking. She peels off her grubby fingerless woolen gloves and starts touching me. I recoil from her unforgiving, icelike fingers. She roughly pushes and prods at my skin, working her way around my kidneys and belly with the bedside manner of a butcher working in an abattoir. I wince when she jabs her fingers into me, just below my rib cage, then wince again when she pinches my gut. Is she actually doing anything or just using me for stress relief? Finally she unearths a stethoscope from under a pile of papers and used dressings on a window ledge and presses it against various different parts of my back and front. Examination over, she tells me to get dressed.
