Rawblood by Catriona Ward

Author:Catriona Ward
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780297609667
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2015-09-23T23:00:00+00:00

1916

I’m seventeen.

My lids part to grey light. Drifts, flurries. I am moving in spirals, in drifts of snow.

A whoosh of rich mossy smoke. A pipe. The click of teeth on the stem. The scent of lemons, his careful, diffident tenor, like water running over rock. The sound of a thumb, quickly licked.

I feel the pressure of his attention. Teeth click on the pipe. Tiny sounds of coins, cloth, paper. He’s standing over me. Hands thrust into pockets, tinkering beneath the cloth.

‘Hello Martin,’ I say. ‘The defective is awake.’

‘Ah,’ he says. A hand on my eyelid, pulling it upwards. Flash of white light, pink thumb. ‘We can do better for you,’ he says. He sounds very sad. ‘I think we must try.’ Money rattles in his fingers. A hand on my head. I hold still.

‘Doctor Goodman,’ I say. ‘Please don’t make me sleep. No more. Please.’

He takes my hand. ‘Only a little more, perhaps,’ he says. ‘Listen.’

I say, ‘How long have I?’ I try to sit. My limbs are wet string.

‘It is Monday, September the seventeenth.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s June.’ I taste the air. It has mould and swallows and bonfires in it.

His hand light on my head. Papa waves at me from the lavender garden. I cough. My throat is coarsely chopped wood.

‘Tube feeding,’ he says kindly, ‘can be rough on one. Here.’ The water is cold shards of iron in my throat.

I’m not in the ward. I’m in some green place I don’t know, with metal studs binding metal walls together. A basin in the corner. Drips from somewhere.

‘I need to go outside,’ I say. ‘Let me go to the garden.’

He sighs. ‘May I speak frankly? I have tried, with you. I have instituted an intensive regime of healthful exercise, of improving pastimes, of electric therapy, of water therapy, of talking cure. In the course of these you have injured four nurses, two with fairly serious bites. You have repeatedly attempted to enter my office and remove property. Letters, which as your behaviour shows, you are not in a fit state to receive. You have attempted to leave the hospital on three separate occasions. This has resulted in you receiving,’ he ticks them off on his fingers, ‘a punctured trachea from a pencil, serious avulsions on your fingers and shoulders from a blunt knife and various lacerations about the neck, from objects such as drinking mugs, the unscrewed leg of a bed and the toe of a hobnail boot – and these wounds heal slowly and badly because you are malnourished through tube feeding while sedated.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I say. ‘I don’t recall.’

‘Precisely – this is the familiar refrain. You do not recall. You do not remember your actions, and more specifically you say you do not remember the act which brought you here. You insist that you are wrongly incarcerated. Your behaviour towards me and my staff remains violent, troubling. As I am sure you must see, it is impossible to leave you in the general population at Earlswood.

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