LITMIR.BIZ

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the wee darlin’. She’s along in the baby unit for now – we’ll bring her in to you in a wee while –’

       A harder voice, interrupting from the door. ‘What do those police expect?’

       ‘To question her, I suppose. She didn’t do this to herself.’

       ‘How’s she going to tell them anything, the state she’s in?’

      The softer voice remained with her, droning on, confusing her. It was like a badly edited film: she was watching herself from a distance, closing the door, coming down the stairs carrying her bag, then clutching the handrail outside the door as a contraction hit her.

       And?

      On the street, falling...

      Her skin on fire, her eyelids burned through, the pain in her eyes, the world going dark.

      Then nothing.

      The red-headed nurse squeaked along the corridor, a cup of tea in her outstretched hand. PC McAlpine took it, knocking her hand slightly, spilling a wave of tea down her white uniform.

      ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, getting to his feet. He smiled: he knew how to use his charm. ‘Have there been any phone calls about her? Anybody asking after her? Any visitors? Anything?’

      ‘No. No one. The hospital chaplain came immediately, and his assistant’s been in a few times to see her and the baby. Just doing the usual. Apart from that, nothing.’

      ‘So who is she? Any ideas?’

      ‘Is that not what you’re supposed to find out?’ She raised a saucy eyebrow.

      ‘You must have some idea.’ He smiled again.

      ‘She has no face,’ replied the nurse, all sauciness gone, and McAlpine’s smile faded.

      ‘And when she was admitted? Was there nothing on her, no wee bit of paper with a phone number, a contact-in-the-event-of-an-emergency?’ He gave her the full benefit of his charm.

      ‘I was on when she was admitted, and she had an overnight bag, that’s all. There was nothing that said anything about her.’ She began to sense his frustration. ‘Honestly.’

      ‘But has she a name?’

      ‘We gave her a number. She was in labour when they brought her in, so we did an emergency section, just past midnight. It was a wee girl. We’ve put her in with her just now.’

      He sat back down, anger burning inside him, knocked the cup of tea down his throat and handed it back to the nurse.

      Pregnant? Acid in her face? He shuddered at the cruelty of it.

      With the warmth of morphine in her veins, she imagined the pain waving to her as it went, floating away on a sea of blood. It left her senses so sharp she could hear water gurgle in the pipes next door, could distinguish between the different phones at the end of the corridor. She could hear the policeman outside, stirring a cup of tea, the spoon tapping against the side of the cup. She could hear her daughter, breathing beside her...

      In ... out ... in ... out...

      She could listen to that for ever.

      They were talking about one of the policemen outside. ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he, even though he’s so short? Kind of bite-sized? Huge kind brown eyes, like pools of –’

       ‘Sewage?’ the older voice suggested. ‘He’s not a Labrador.’

       ‘He doesn’t have a girlfriend, you know.’ There was a slight giggle. ‘I bet I get a date with him before the end of the week.’

       ‘Too good-looking for his own good, that one,’ the other voice warned. ‘It’ll be tears before bedtime.’

      She heard the creak of the door opening, a bump as it closed, then silence. She tried to imagine his face, a noble handsome face, eyes of burnt umber, hair the colour of sun on mahogany, and tried to give him a smile before he faded away to a cloud of morphine.

      It was quiet in the hospital in the hour of the dead, that slow hour between 2 and 3 a.m. It reminded McAlpine of the night shift at the station. The clock clicked round, its tick ominously loud in the silence of the corridor, and music floated through from the IC station, where a nurse had a radio on quietly. He’d been sitting here, on and off, for the best part of four days. For something to do, he got up and went to the coffee machine down the landing.

      The door of IC ⅔ opened; the red-headed nurse and the older one came out and returned to their desk.

      McAlpine also walked to the station, where he sat and sipped the vile coffee, deep in thought. He knew there was something nagging at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite touch it. He crushed the cup in his hand and chucked it in the bin. He heard a noise, a faint squeak. The door of IC ⅔ had been left open, and it moved slightly to and fro in the draught.

      He looked up and down the corridor. Nobody was paying the slightest attention to him. The older nurse was on the phone, and the redhead was looking at her knee, picking something from the skin.

      He got up, placed his hand on the steel handle of the door.

      The room was a tomb of dark silence. He looked round, giving his eyes time to adjust. He had a vague sense of freshness, the smell of sea salt, not the stale air of his mother’s room. In the dull light he saw the incubator in the corner, empty, the white cellular blanket rumpled at the bottom. They must have taken the baby away for a wee while, to do whatever nurses do to babies.

      She was lying in state. She could have been in a sarcophagus, the only movement the slight rise and fall of her stomach as the ventilator hissed and sighed life into her. He was unable to pull his eyes away, transfixed by the gauze that covered her face, her death mask, tantalizingly opaque, lines of blood beneath it like butterflies trapped in a web. He knew she was beautiful.

      He stood back and took a deep breath.

      He crossed himself.

      Her feet looked cold in the blue light. He picked up each foot delicately by the heel and smoothed the white cotton underneath. Fine delicate feet with long elegant toes, a dancer’s feet, fragile and cold under his hands. Chilled. His finger traced the length of a vein on her instep, then caressed a little flaw round the base of her toe, a perfect white smile of a scar.

      She was being pulled from sleep, up to the light. She lay quietly, listening to the silence, listening to the breathing at the end of her bed. She knew she was being studied. All her life men had looked at her, and she knew this too was a man.

      She heard a deep sigh, felt a hand touch her foot. She waited for the prick of the injection.

      Nothing, only the soft stroke of flesh against flesh. Slow, soothing. A grip on her heel, firm yet delicate, almost a lover’s caress...

      ‘You’re not supposed to be in here!’ The redhead was standing behind him, the look of a dispossessed wife on her face. ‘You could infect her.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Not that it’s going to make any difference.’

      ‘You don’t think she’s going to survive?’ McAlpine asked. ‘Why? Surely it’s only her face?’

      ‘Her face, her neck, her arms, her hands, her tummy.’ The nurse’s voice softened a little as she approached the bed, folding the yellow blanket over the bare feet. ‘Poor lass. She was pregnant and lying in acid. It burned deep. It’s sad. Come on.’ She gestured to him to follow her to the sluice room, where they kept the spare kettle. He had to hurry to keep up. ‘It’s the depth of the burn that matters. You know your body is basically water? If your skin comes off, as hers has, you leak, leading to dehydration, leading to failure of all the major organs. There’s nothing we can do for her, except wait.’ She pulled two mugs from a cupboard. ‘Sometimes they

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