Stags 2, p.25
STAGS 2, page 25
Just as well. After all the trauma, I didn’t really want anything else to do with the play. If it got me into Oxford that was enough. And I supposed that the British Library was the right place for it. I had thought that they should nail The Isle of Dogs into a wooden crate and lock it in some vast warehouse like the Ark of the Covenant, but I supposed now that Henry’s resurrection was all part of my dream, they could do what they wanted with it. It had no power to raise the dead. It was just a dusty old play.
‘The Abbot’s been in once or twice, you know? And he sent the flowers, like I said.’
I looked at the blood-red blooms by my bed. I couldn’t for the life of me place where red dog roses grew at STAGS, but I could see them plain as day growing over the stable arch at Longcross. Henry had said they were from him. My eyes started to prickle.
Shafeen looked at me closely – he could always read my emotions, but luckily not always the reasons for them. ‘Listen,’ he said gently, ‘it’s a lot to take in. Let me fetch the nurse. I don’t want you getting all spun out. This confusion is probably totally normal when you’ve been in a medically induced sleep. There’s a lot of time for freaky dreams in two days.’ He got up. ‘I should probably tell someone you’re awake anyway …’
And I got that sense of déjà vu all over again.
Scene xi
A cheerful nurse came bustling in wearing teal scrubs.
She was probably in her twenties, had a north-eastern accent and called me ‘hinny’. I liked her at once.
She picked up my chart. ‘What’ve we got here? Room K9, otherwise known as Greer MacDonald.’
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Partial asphyxiation during school play,’ she read. ‘That’s a new one on me.’
‘Me too.’
‘I’m Annie,’ she said, taking hold of my wrist to read my pulse. ‘You’re looking very chipper.’ She beamed at me. ‘Although if I had a nice young man sitting by my bedside day and night, waiting for me to flutter me eyelashes, I’d be chipper too.’
Did she mean Henry? Had she seen him? ‘Which young man?’
‘The tall, dark and handsome one. Keep hold of him, hinny.’
‘I intend to,’ I said. But I couldn’t shake the crazy feeling of – was it hope? – when she’d mentioned a young man at my bedside. ‘Was there … was there another young man?’
She was doing that thing when they hold up your eyelids and shine a light in your eyes. ‘I never saw one, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t. I’ve only just come on shift and you have been here for a while. You lining them up, hinny?’
I smiled weakly. She wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around my arm and pumped it up until it squeezed. While she took the reading she said, ‘We called your dad. He’s coming back from Mad … Mad …’
‘Madagascar.’
‘That’s the one.’ She released the cuff and it deflated itself with a hiss. As she pulled it off my arm it grazed the dressing on my hand and I winced. My thumb looked like Mr Bump, it was so round and fat and wrapped in bandages.
‘What’s wrong with my thumb?’
‘I’m not sure, pet.’ She unhooked the chart again from the end of my bed. ‘The paramedics wrapped it up at your school. It says minor burn here.’
‘Probably one of the candles,’ I said, more to myself than to her.
‘We’ll know soon enough, hinny. I’ll be back to change the dressing after the doctor’s done his rounds. Don’t worry, though. Your thumb’s still there – you’ll still be able to play PlayStation.’ I was starting to like her very much.
She looked through the little square window in my door. ‘Meantime, you’ve got another visitor. A young lady this time – sorry.’ And she winked.
Chanel held the door for Nurse Annie, and then came right over to the bed and gave me a massive hug. I loved that girl.
‘Don’t ever do that again,’ she said into my hair.
I did a kind of laughing sob thing. ‘I’m not planning to.’
‘I got the fright of my life.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Me too.’
‘God,’ she said, ‘your poor neck. You’ve got a rope-shaped bruise.’
I hadn’t seen it, and was not sure I wanted to. ‘Guess I’ll be rocking the chokers at Christmas.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, I’m fine now. Just fine. A bit croaky. Maybe I’ll set up a chatline.’
She ignored the gag, sat down in the visitors’ chair and looked around the room, anywhere but at me. She seemed twitchy and squirrelly. She fiddled with the petals of the dog roses. ‘These are nice.’
I thought it best not to say they were from Abbot Ridley. ‘Nel,’ I said, ‘are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Fine and dandy. Fine-a-doodle-do.’
I looked at her directly. ‘Nel? Have you got something to tell me?’
She looked like she was going to burst. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I promised I’d wait for Shafeen.’
‘Promised why?’ Then I had a lightbulb moment. ‘Is it about the Abbot?’
Now she met my gaze, eyes round. ‘That’s spooky. Yes.’
‘I saw you kissing.’
‘Oh, that one,’ she said inexplicably, reddening. ‘Yeah, he kissed me after the play.’
‘It looked like you kissed him.’
She shrugged, not quite meeting my eyes. ‘Maybe.’
‘Chanel,’ I said, deliberately using her full name, ‘what are you doing?’
Before she could answer, Shafeen opened the door a fraction and squeezed in. He actually addressed Nel first.
‘Did you find out?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He kissed me and sat down on the end of the bed.
I looked from one to the other. ‘Guys, what’s going on? What is all this?’
Nel took a breath. ‘I’ve been nosing about this place. It’s been pretty boring waiting for you to wake up.’
‘Sor-reee.’
She flapped her hand at me as if to say, It’s OK. ‘So I found a white coat and put it on, and started asking questions.’
I decided to ignore for the moment the nonchalant way Nel had impersonated a medical professional. ‘About me?’
‘No, another patient. The Old Abbot.’ She looked at Shafeen and then back at me. ‘Thing is, there’s no record of him. Nothing at all. He didn’t even come here, let alone die here.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I checked the admissions manifest, and talked to the House Officer.’
A chill goosebumped my skin. ‘So he is alive,’ I whispered.
‘So it seems.’
‘And if he is, that was him putting me on trial.’
Then of course I had to tell Nel about my trial by the Dark Order of the Grand Stag.
‘But even if we accept that the Abbot is alive, that trial can’t have happened,’ she said. ‘We were all there on the stage of the theatre. You were in our sight the whole time.’
‘Except,’ said Shafeen slowly, ‘when the paramedics threw us out.’
‘But those are paramedics.’
‘The same paramedics who brought the Abbot to this hospital, where he never arrived?’ asked Shafeen pointedly. ‘The same paramedics who took Henry’s “body” away from Longcross?’
‘Shit.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you saying that … the trial happened on the stage once they’d thrown you all out?’ I asked.
‘No. Yes. I don’t know. I know it sounds a bit far-fetched …’
‘A bit …’
‘I’m just saying that something’s going on,’ he insisted. ‘Something really grim. Something happened to upset the Dark Order of the Grand Stag and now they’re really pissed off.’
‘It must be the death of Henry. That’s what they told me. They called him one of their number.’
‘Then he must have been a Grand Stag. If the DOGS were avenging him, I mean,’ said Shafeen.
‘I suppose. But this is all guesswork.’
Nel said suddenly, ‘When’s the last time you checked in with mrs_de_warlencourt?’
‘Well,’ I said, indicating my monitor and my drip, ‘I’ve been pretty tied up.’
‘Let’s look now.’ She flipped out her Saros 8S and swiped it open. She passed it to me. ‘Sign in,’ she said.
Slightly hampered as I had only one thumb, I signed into my Instagram. Sure enough, a message from mrs_de_warlencourt popped up. It was a single line.
There is another Place.
‘Another fricking riddle,’ sighed Nel. ‘If there’s another place, what was the first place? STAGS? Longcross?’
I was silent for a moment, looking at the message, letter by letter. Then I said, ‘Remember Friar Skelton?’
‘The old history friar? What made you think of him?’
‘He might have been a kid killer, but he was a helluva teacher. I’ve never forgotten what he said about Hannibal and the elephants. Remember? That Hannibal waged war with elephants and Hannibal waged war, with elephants are two very different things? The comma makes all the difference.’
‘But there’s no comma in this.’
‘No, I meant, he’s the one who taught us to watch out for punctuation.’
‘So?’
‘mrs_de_warlencourt never uses capitals by accident. When she wrote I think you’ll find this Quite Interesting, and used upper-case letters, she was pointing us to the Q and the I, because that’s what the show was called that told us about the neck verse – QI. And the commemorative plaque on the theatre had the name “Gabriel Spenser” in inverted commas, to denote the fact that it was an alias …’
‘I spotted that!’ crowed Nel.
‘And I shut you up. I’m sorry,’ said Shafeen.
‘So if she’s using a capital P for Place, I think she means something by it. I think it’s a proper name.’
At that moment Nurse Annie came in with a huge bunch of cellophane-wrapped florist’s flowers. Much fancier than my bunch of roses from Abbot Ridley. ‘Who’s a popular lass, then?’ She laid them on my lap as if I’d just won an Oscar.
‘Whoa. Who are they from?’ asked Nel.
I read the card. ‘What the actual hell?’
‘What?’
Unable to speak, I showed the little card to Nel and Shafeen. And this is what they read:
To Greer,
Get well soon!
With love and best wishes from
Abbot Ridley, the friars and all the students at STAGS.
‘If these flowers are from the school, who are the other ones from?’ I said.
‘Never mind that now,’ said Nurse Annie, putting her hands on her hips. ‘I’m sure I said one visitor at a time. Greer needs to rest, and you two do too. You look like a couple of zombies. Now go back to your school and I don’t want to see either of you before proper visiting hours tomorrow.’
There was nothing more we could say. She bustled them out of the room before we could exchange another word.
Scene xii
I thought I would never sleep, but I did, and dogs chased me through my dreams, carrying scarlet roses in their jaws.
On 17th December, the day of Louis de Warlencourt’s eighteenth birthday, I woke feeling tired and confused, but stronger. The new flashy flowers were in a vase at my bedside, literally overshadowing the blood-red blooms. I sat up and reached behind the fancy-pants bouquet to touch the mouse-soft scarlet petals of the roses. ‘Who brought you?’ I said.
I’d slept through the morning visiting hours, but Nurse Annie told me that Shafeen and Nel had been there, faithful as ever, only to be turned away as I needed my rest. I had plenty of thinking time stretching ahead until the evening, but lying there in that bed, my own thoughts and theories crowded in on me, driving me crazy. The mystery of the flowers, the mystery of another Place. Was the Old Abbot really alive? Was Henry really dead? Had I been on trial? Was I a manslayer? Henry – or the dream Henry – had told me that only I had the answer. How could I?
I sat up. I needed to get out of room K9.
Much to my surprise, when I asked to get up Nurse Annie said, ‘Yes, once the doctor has seen you.’ I waited impatiently for the doctor, who seemed pretty late, but when he arrived, he seemed about a decade too early. He seriously looked about twelve years old, like Michael J. Fox in Doc Hollywood. Hilariously, according to his nametag, he was called Doctor Kyd.
He looked at my chart first and me second. ‘How’s the throat?’
‘Croaky but fine.’
‘Good.’ He took out one of those wooden lolly sticks and lifted my chin to peer at my neck. Then he said open wide and used the same stick to flatten my tongue and look down my throat. ‘The bruising’s going down nicely and your windpipe has opened back up.’ He chucked the stick in the bin and made a note on my chart. He seemed pretty professional. Maybe he wasn’t such a newb after all.
‘Thumb?’
I held it up in a comedy thumbs-up.
‘Any pain?’
‘Not unless I touch it.’
‘Then don’t,’ he said, and I started to like him too.
He sat down in the chair. ‘Anything else to report?’
I hesitated, not sure whether to bring it up. ‘I’ve had some pretty crazy dreams.’
He put his head to one side. ‘How crazy?’
‘Well, there was this guy – a friend. I knew him from school and he was … in an accident a year ago. Died. And last night, well, yesterday really, I dreamed that he was here.’
‘Here in the hospital?’
‘Sitting in the same chair you are.’
Doctor Kyd studied me for a minute. ‘He died a year ago, you say?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
He clasped his hands together. ‘There’s this thing called the “Anniversary Effect”. It’s when you start getting visions or flashbacks a year after a traumatic event. In your case, your friend’s accident. The anniversary opens up the neurological floodgates, so to speak.’
I wished it were that simple.
‘Would you like to talk to someone?’
‘You mean, get my head shrunk?’
He smiled. ‘If you like. We prefer to call it a post-traumatic psychological assessment.’
I pulled a face. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when I jump off it.’
He laughed. ‘Fair enough. But the option’s there.’
‘Thanks. So can I get up or not?’
He looked at me closely again, in an assessing kind of way. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But take it easy.’
I did. I had a gentle look around, rolling my drip about with me like a skinny metal friend. The cottage hospital was really cute. There was a Christmas tree in the reception area with brightly wrapped presents underneath it for sick kids. The automatic doors swished open and closed as people came and went, and fluorescent ambulances stopped outside. I looked closely at the green-clad paramedics, competently going about their work. I couldn’t believe these breezy professionals would get mixed up in anything to do with the DOGS. I moved quickly past the draughty doors and carried on with my tour.
I found a little chapel where you could pray for the sick. I lit a candle for whoever it was I might have killed – no easy feat with my Mr Bump thumb, I can tell you. I looked at the modern stained-glass window. Without St Aidan and the white stag, it looked sort of wrong. I took a ride in the lift and discovered a little library upstairs. Me and my drip buddy shuffled between the shelves. There was a window with little cushions on the sill and a view that looked onto Alnwick Castle, a grey, grim-looking place with snow on the turrets. I remembered what Friar Waterlow had said about the only surviving reference to The Isle of Dogs, written in Ben Jonson’s hand, being held in the castle collection. I turned away from the view. I couldn’t think about Ben Jonson any more.
Instead I looked along the shelves for Arthur Conan Doyle, and found a whole Sherlock Holmes collection. Henry’s voice rang in my head. He went home to 221b Baker Street. I selected The Adventure of the Empty House, the one where Holmes comes back to life following his grand battle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. I took it to the window seat and quickly became engrossed. It was just what I needed to take me away from my own thoughts. In the story it was Holmes’s brother Mycroft who kept Sherlock’s rooms ready for his return. Had someone in Henry’s family done the same for him? Just as I got to that bit when Holmes reveals himself to a gobsmacked Watson, an orderly came to get me – my dad was on the phone.
He was on a very crackly line from Madagascar airport. Apparently he’d phoned about a million times, but I’d been asleep. Obviously he was properly freaked out and ready to get the next plane home, but I talked him off the ledge, telling him that I was fine, that I’d see him in a week, that we’d have a lovely Christmas together. After that it was time for a pretty disgusting dinner, then when the evening visiting hours finally rolled around I was back in my bed, desperate to talk to my friends.
When the knock came at my door I was all ready to get into it again with Nel and Shafeen.
But I didn’t get the visitor I expected.
‘Not sure if this one’s a boy or a girl,’ said Nurse Annie, well-intentioned but not exactly PC. ‘But it’s very handsome.’
It was Cass.
Scene xiii
Handsome was the word for Cass that night.
She was in a wine-coloured velvet smoking jacket, a snow-white dress shirt and a black bow tie untied at the throat. Her hair was slicked back from her face, and she was wearing a slick of dark plum lipstick. She looked wonderful.
She bent and kissed me on both cheeks in that upper-class way. She asked all the usual questions and then put something small and solid in my hands. ‘I brought you this,’ she said.
It was wrapped in a scarlet (what else?) cloth napkin – no paper serviettes at Longcross. I folded back the cloth, and found a slice of cake. It was one of those heavy, old-fashioned fruit cakes, densely packed with dried fruit and with a layer of marzipan and white icing. I balanced it upright on my lap – there was an L piped on the top. ‘Louis wanted you to have some,’ she said. ‘It’s his birthday cake.’
