Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [17]
Thomson chuckled. ‘You forget, I’ve seen that bookshelf of yours.’
‘ How to Bluff Your Way in Psychiatry hardly makes me an expert,’ she countered. ‘It doesn’t compare to seven years at med school, including a one-year degree in archaeology and an elective in Uganda.’
‘You’re very well informed – as ever.’
‘You know what they say – knowledge is power. I was hoping to find some skeletons in your closet. For blackmail purposes, you understand. Unfortunately. . . ’ She sighed. ‘Pure as the driven snow.’
Thomson shook his head. ‘Sleet, more like.’
‘Dr Thomson, you surprise me.’ Laska cooed like a grandmother discovering that the local vicar has a secret passion for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Thomson glanced down at the notes in front of him. ‘You know we have a patient review coming up?’ he said.
‘So my spies tell me,’ said Laska, nodding. ‘My eyes are everywhere, watching the evil and the good.’
Thomson glanced up, his face puzzled.
‘The Bible,’ explained Laska hurriedly. ‘I think. That’s what my dad used to say, when I was being naughty.’ She began to laugh, almost uncontrollably.
‘How very Freudian of me to suddenly say that!’
Laska stopped laughing and glanced away, as if concerned she’d said too much.
Thomson studied her for a moment. She was slim – though thankfully less skeletal than when Thomson had first seen her – and disguised her height well, often pulling her knees up to her chest when she sat down. He wondered if 29
that wasn’t her default position – a foetal ball, offering maximum protection against the world.
Her hair, cropped short and showing porcelain-pale skin beneath, was blue this week. A few weeks ago it had been bright green, and she’d tried to shock Thomson, saying she’d done her pubes the same colour, and had tattooed a sign on her stomach that said ‘Keep off the grass’. Thomson wouldn’t put it past her – every week seemed to bring a new piercing, or a new way to shock –
but Thomson prided himself on being not easily surprised. He’d been there, done that, and got the T-shirt and matching underpants.
Perhaps that was why he and Laska got on so well – two damaged people with little bar a white coat to separate them.
Before he began working at the Retreat Thomson saw mental illness as a simple branch of medicine, with its own raft of logical diagnoses and prudent treatments. Psychiatric hospitals were, to him, no different from working in an institution full of people with cancer or broken bones. Now he wasn’t so sure. Especially since the arrival of Dr Smith, the place had seemed to develop a brooding, unpleasant atmosphere – recounted delusions felt like a threat to Thomson’s own peace of mind, whispered conversations suddenly sounded like conspiracy. Every trip back to town, back home, felt like a relief, a return to remembered normality.
He couldn’t understand why Smith and the two young researchers were so keen to live on site. There’s dedication to your work, thought Thomson, and then there’s something unhealthy that smacks of obsession. And perhaps it was this unhealthy fascination with the past – in the history of the Retreat and the awful lives of the people once incarcerated here – that had been picked up by the patients.
Thomson remembered an uncle once showing him how to milk cows – and warning, that as a thunderstorm was coming, they wouldn’t be themselves.
Sure enough, the usually docile and obedient creatures resisted every encouragement to move, nervously fidgeting all the time. Huge white eyes, usually so beautiful and compassionate, darkened as the creatures became nervous and angry.
When the storm finally broke, like a wave bursting through a great, dark dam, everyone was relieved, and a beautiful calm descended, for all the pum-melling of rain on the corrugated roof. The trouble with the Retreat, thought Thomson, was that the storm never came, and it left the patients nervously waiting