Quicksand Read online

-- Like a wild animal being lured into a cage, terrified beyond reason but equally afraid to fight back against enemies it doesn't understand. I hope it's not a symptom of claustrophobia; she's bound to have to go into a security cell until she's been properly examined.

  She gasped wben the engine started. Then, paradoxically, she craned forward to watch the driver's movements at the controls as be engaged reverse and swung the car to face the other way. She followed every action, fascinated.

  Paul glanced at Hofford and read on the inspector's face puzzlement as great as his own.

  -- What's the good of guessing? We'll find out soon enough. People don't just drop out of nowhere into a strange country, without clothes, without a word of the language. A girl like this, tiny and lovely: someone's bound to have noticed her and will remember.

  Facile jargon seeped up in his mind.

  -- Hysteria, perhaps. The effect of attempted rape on sensitive personalities is . . . But there were no clothes to be seen bar that tweed cap, and with his arm broken Faberdown couldn't have got rid of them. . . . Oh, stop it. As Hofford said, people are damnably complicated and it's ridiculous to expect solutions with a snap of the fingers.

  At least she seemed to have relaxed a bit. She was gazing first out of one window, then another, as though desperate not to miss anything the car went past. He caught her attention and tapped his chest with his free hand.

  "Paul!" he said.

  "Pol," she echoed docilely. The vowel was wrong, but then the sounds she had uttered earlier had been wholly alien to English. He turned his hand and pointed at her.

  "Arrzheen," she said.

  "Did she say 'urchin?'" Hofford chuckled. 'That's appropriate enough. I thought 'gamin' myself when I first saw her."

  -- All right. "Urchin." It does fit.

  Paul smiled, and after a short pause she tried to smile back, but the expression wouldn't come.

  *7*

  "Evening, Doc! What have you got for us?"

  The speaker emerged from the porter's office: deputy charge nurse Oliphant wearing his forehead scar like a campaign medal, relic of a pub fight in which a drunk broke a bottle on his head. He was given to letting people assume that one of the patients had done it. Paul disliked him for that.

  -- But it's my own sin: "letting people assume." Maybe that accounts for my strong reaction against it in others.

  "An emergency admission, I suppose," he answered wearily. "Where's Dr Rudge?"

  "Coming, Paul!" Natalie hurried down the last few steps of the staircase leading to the staff quarters. "Just went to see if Phil had come back, but you'll do just as well."

  She saw the girl for the first time, and stopped dead.

  "Her?"

  "Apparently. Oh -- this is Inspector Hofford. Dr Rudge, Inspector . . . Where do you want her put, Natalie?"

  "I told Nurse Kirk to get a cell ready in Disturbed Three because I was expecting some hefty Amazon running amok." Natalie hesitated. "Well, let's examine her in the duty office and make up our minds after that. Oliphant, ring Nurse Kirk, will you, and ask her to join us right away?"

  Constable Edwards appeared in the doorway, jingling the keys of Paul's car. He took them with a word of thanks, his full attention on the girl's reaction to her surroundings. As she had done in the car, she was studying everything with an expression that mingled fascination with horror.

  -- Why should she find ordinary things so peculiar? Is she high on a psychedelic, maybe? Oh, stop trying to guess!

  "Come along, dear," Natalie said. The girl gave a blank stare.

  "I should have told you," Paul said. "She doesn't seem to understand English."

  "Hysterical aphasia?"

  "No, she spoke to me. But it was in a foreign language."

  "Hasn't she even told you her name?"

  "It's Arrzheen," Paul said, framing the unfamiliar sounds with care. The girl responded instantly.

  "Urchin," Hofford muttered in the background, still pleased with his own joke.

  "Well, she's taken to you okay," Natalie said tartly. "You'd better come along and keep her quiet. Do you mind, or do you want to dash off?"

  "No. . . . No, I've nothing else to do. Inspector, do you want to hang around, or would you like me to phone you and tell you if we've learned any more about her?"

  "Yes, ring me up, please," Hofford said. "I might have something to tell you, too; I sent a man to Blickham General to interview the salesman, and he should be reporting in pretty soon -- What on earth is that on your hand, Doctor?"

  Paul turned his palm up numbly. Where the girl had been grasping his hand so tightly in the car, a smear of almost dry blood. He took hers and examined it. Yes: under three of the nails, traces of more.

  "That clinches it," Hofford said with satisfaction. "Thank you, Doctor . . . Dr Rudge . . . good night!"

  "How do you spell this name of hers?" Nurse Kirk demanded, looking up from the table at which she was completing the admission record. She was a wiry Scotswoman of definite lesbian tendencies and extreme Calvinist morality; Paul had sometimes wondered why she didn't shatter to bits like an overwound clock-spring. And she added, seeing the girl laid out naked on the examination couch, "Scrawny little thing, isn't she?"

  -- No, actually she's built perfectly for her height.

  But that response rather shocked Paul. Mirza would no doubt already have made half a dozen obscene cracks and reduced old Kirk to a state of hysteria herself, but Mirza lacked the English reluctance to admit the existence of sex.

  "Put down a case name," he said tiredly. "No, I have a better idea. Put down 'Urchin.' The police inspector suggested it."

  Nurse Kirk frowned at the levity of it all, but did as she was told. Natalie, engaged in reading the thermometer which she had eventually persuaded the girl to keep under her tongue, glanced up and grimaced at Paul. He relaxed a little.

  -- There are human beings in this world, not an endless string of Mrs Weddenhalls.

  "Temperature barely subnormal," Natalie said. "She's not significantly shocked, is she? You noticed, I'm sure."

  "Of course, or I wouldn't have let her ride here in the car." Paul hesitated. "I mean, she's not shocked in the ordinary sense -- circulation's normal at the extremities as far as I can judge, and I managed to count her pulse while she was holding my hand in the car, and that seemed okay too. But she's not a well person, is she? Have you done the blood-pressure yet, by the way?"

  "Next on the list." Natalie shook down the thermometer. "Why don't you attend to it while I get on with the rest? She'll probably take the . . . ah . . . intimate details better from me than from a man."

  Paul complied listlessly, unfolding the bandage of the sphygmomanometer while Natalie drew on a rubber glove and proceeded to palpate the girl's abdomen.

  "I'm damned," she said after a few moments. "She doesn't like it at all. Look at her, squirming away from my hand. You try!" She stripped her glove off with a snapping sound.

  Unwillingly Paul proceeded with what was necessary, and the girl objected less to his attentions than she had done to Natalie's, lying still with her almond eyes fixed on his profile.

  -- Nothing about this makes sense. If Faberdown did assault her, and it was traumatic, you wouldn't expect her to prefer a man poking about like this. . . .

  "Any traces?" Natalie inquired.

  "Mm? Oh -- no, he didn't get at her. Nothing worse than this mud on her bottom. No bruising, either. Soft ground. Did you -- ? Oh yes. I didn't notice you dressing her foot."

  "You're only half here, Paul," Natalie said. "It's unfair to dump this on you after last night."

  "I don't mind. If I went home I'd only lie awake puzzling about her."

  "As you like. Oh -- intacta , by the way?"

  "No. But for a long time, and quite normal."

  "What Mirza would call well reamed," Natalie commented caustically, and Nurse Kirk scowled.

  So to completion: reflexes checked, eyes and ears inspected, scratches washed, mud rinsed aw
ay. . . . Finish. They sat her up and clad her in a cotton nightgown, heirloom of who could guess how many previous wearers, and a towelling robe with CHENT HOSPITAL stitched around the hem, which was at least snug. They put a chair beside the couch and she moved to it apathetically.

  "A cup of tea," Natalie said briskly. "And . . . Nurse!"

  "Yes?"

  "Bring the sugar and the milk separately."

  -- Neat. I should have thought of it.

  "Are you any the wiser after all this?" Paul said aloud.

  "Not a sausage." Natalie took out a packet of cigarettes and gave him one. Watching as they lit up, the girl suddenly giggled.

  -- Breakthrough! But it only makes the mystery murkier. There is something comic about people sucking smoke from a white stick. Only . . . Like the cars, isn't it?

  "Did you turn up anything on the physical?" he asked.

  "If she were up for a life assurance policy I'd offer her optimum terms. She's downright bloody fit. Feel that biceps muscle? I did, when I was putting the sphyg on. Hard as a boxer's. Whatever's fouled her up mentally, it hasn't affected her physique."

  "I suppose she is fouled up." Paul hadn't meant to speak the thought, but it leaked out past defences lowered by exhaustion.

  "You're joking, of course. Granted, her lack of goosebumps indicates she doesn't mind walking around starkers in winter. But most people simply don't behave that way." Natalie cocked her head, listening to footsteps outside. "Ah, here comes our tea."

  The girl accepted her cup and saucer -- from sheer professional obstinacy, Nurse Kirk had brought one cup without a saucer "for the patient," but Paul left it on the tray -- but seemed at a loss what to do with it. She waited for the others to set an example.

  Paul offered her sugar. She hesitated. Then she licked the tip of a finger and dipped into the white mound, withdrawing just enough to taste.

  -- Not so crazy, that, on the assumption that she literally doesn't know what we're giving her. But that's crazy.

  He showed her what the sugar was for, spooning some into his own cup, and added milk from the bottle the nurse had brought.

  -- Why the hell didn't the kitchen send up a jug? Kitchen? No, of course not. Not at this time of night. Christ, it's past ten o'clock.

  And on the realisation, heard the familiar gurgle of the plumbing as it coped with the staff-supervised evacuations of the patients preliminary to their bedding down.

  -- What else doesn't she know about? Toilets, maybe?

  Tea, excessively spiked with milk, sweetened, she sipped and eventually drank down. They all three watched her intently. Abruptly Paul realised they were doing something he normally objected to in principle: treating a patient as a thing instead of a person.

  -- Simply because I can't talk to her. Hmmm . . .

  He turned to Natalie with an exclamation. "Chuck over a notepad and a pencil, will you? Let's try and get her to write something down."

  -- Is she going to have to have this explained too? No, thank goodness.

  With something approaching briskness, the girl set aside her empty cup and took the pencil and paper. She examined the point of the former and made a tentative mark with it as if to be sure that was the way it worked, then wrote quickly. Paul noted that she was right-handed but preferred the rare, though not remarkable, grip between index and middle fingers.

  She showed him the result, saying at the same time, "Arrzheen!"

  He found confronting him four symbols like a child's incomplete sketch for two Christmas trees, a fishhook and an inverted spear.

  *8*

  All the way home Paul kept shivering, although the car's heater was switched on full.

  -- The way hope seemed to leak out of the girl's face when she realised I didn't understand what she'd written down. My imaginary terrors have come to life in her; she's stranded in a world where nobody can speak to her and nobody knows who she is!

  -- The curious greedy "ah-hah, they're locking you up too" expressions of the patients as we took her through the dormitory to her cell. Maybe I should have experienced that instead of being protected and isolated. But it would probably have broken me into little bits.

  -- She can't be under any illusions about where she's wound up. Things may baffle her but people she does appear to understand. Packed in head to foot to head in what were once fine stately rooms but now stark with chipped plaster, faded ugly paint, bars at the windows and locks on the doors.

  The keys in his pocket jingled, not audibly but in memory.

  -- And I told Natalie this afternoon we had eighteen free bed-spaces. Whose word am I taking for that? Every ward so crammed we only have room for a poky little locker too small to hold a kid's toys alongside each bed. Anything too much or too numerous for the locker to hold: taken and shut away. How do people reassure themselves of identity? Belongings, possessions, mementoes: the solid proof that memory doesn't lie. And bit by bit we chip away the mortar of their lives. Christ, how did I ever wander into psychiatry for a living?

  The lamp-post standard outside his home appeared around a bend, and he slowed. There was no need to get out in the rain and unfasten the gate; he'd left it open this morning.

  -- And that's something Iris won't let me do when she's here. Being with Iris has turned into an endless series of-having to get out in the rain because an open gate "looks bad." And might let dogs into the garden.

  He halted the car and switched it off. As darkness rushed in, so did fatigue, and he sat thinking along the same lines for another few minutes. This car was a Triumph Spitfire, not because Iris hadn't had cash for something more ambitious but because the car she originally chose was four inches too long for the gate to be closed behind it and there was only a narrow verge -- no pavement across which it could have been rehung to open outwards. Moreover, fitting a modern gate that folded by sections would mean sacrificing the present one of stout oaken bars which the daily woman warranted to have been made by a joiner in Blickham with such a reputation that antique dealers from London brought him valuable furniture to restore.

  -- Funny how one thing leads to another. Suppose the man who made our gate when he was an apprentice had dropped dead before becoming famous; no prestige would attach to it and we could throw it away. . . . I wish to God the events which culminated in Paul Fidler had followed another course.

  He ordered himself out of the car, mind buzzing with conflicting visions of the way his life might have turned out: if he'd chosen another career than medicine, if his breakdown had been permanent, if he'd failed to get the job here at Chent.

  -- Why can I never visualise things turning out better as clearly as I can visualise the catastrophes I scraped past by a hair? "Everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds!" Hah!

  Key poised to let himself in, he hesitated and scanned the house's façade by the light of the nearby street-lamp.

  -- Façade is the right word and no mistake. How pleased I was when Iris fell in love with it and decided a couple of years at Chent wouldn't be as bad as all that. And it's much worse. Behind the façades -- the house's and mine -- rot, woodworm, death-watch beetle.

  He slammed the door and made the windows rattle.

  There was nothing very special about the house in this part of England. It was inarguably handsome to look at, with its black-and-white half-timbering. On the inside, though . . .