The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [128]
‘Go on, then.’
I watch her shuffle into her room. Before she closes the door, she peers out and gives me an apologetic smile. For a moment her face is lit with the ghost of the old Frannie. ‘Lysol, cabbage and pee,’ she says. She watches my face for a reaction. Clearly this is supposed to mean something, but I haven’t a clue what. ‘Sorry,’ she adds, looking disappointed. ‘Don’t mean to be a trouble.’ Her refrain.
There’s a choking feeling in my chest. The tap thunders in the kitchen sink as John tackles the washing-up. The letter from Social Services, with Adele’s telephone number, must be somewhere…It’s on the dining-table along with the gas bill, which I’ve forgotten to pay.
The switchboard answers immediately, but Adele is not in her office. While I’m waiting for them to track her down, I plug the mini-DV camera into the television so I can play back the film shot this afternoon, belatedly, of the badger sett on Windmill Hill. Martin refused to dig into the spoil heap again–’Sorry, petal, not even in the interests of reconstructive telly’–so I made do with wide shots, and a piece to camera as he crouched by the side of a yawning hole under the tree roots.
John sticks his head round the door. ‘I’m off…sorry, didn’t realize you were on the phone.’
‘It’s OK. Thanks for everything.’
‘Would stop, but I’ve a client due in twenty minutes…’
‘Adele Kostunic,’ comes a voice in my ear. I wave goodbye to John, who is backing out of the room.
‘I thought you’d phone,’ Adele says, when I tell her who’s calling.
‘So what happened?’ I ask.
‘Can’t get to the bottom of it–I wasn’t there at the time. I gather Frannie took against–’
‘I know about the tulips.’ On the television screen, a close-up of the mouth of the badger sett wavers in and out of focus. ‘But was there anything else that upset her?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Adele. ‘Bob reckons she’d wandered off into the other room. Which is fine–we encourage them to amuse themselves. Then suddenly she’s screaming her head off.’
‘Shouldn’t Bob should have been keeping more of an eye on her? Wasn’t assessment the whole point of today? Besides, she says she didn’t scream.’
‘Well, I know for a fact she did because I heard it. I was in an office down the corridor–it was that loud.’
On the rushes, Martin begins his piece to camera. ‘What did happen at Avebury, five thousand years ago?’ I grope for the remote to turn down the volume. ‘This badger sett, on the slopes of Windmill Hill, could hold some of the answers…no, dammit, start again–’
‘Frannie isn’t a screamer,’ I say into the phone. ‘She’d become angry and shout, perhaps–though she’s far too polite to do that among strangers. But she’d never scream. Not unless something really bad happened. Have you asked the other old people what they saw?’
‘It’s a geriatric psychiatric centre. Most of them are confused.’
‘She says there were old men in there playing cards. They can’t be that doo-lally…’
‘“Doo-lally”,’ says Adele, sternly, ‘is not a term we use.’
‘So how did people live here in the past?’ The piece to camera blares out again.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Need to turn the telly down…’
‘This badger sett, on the slopes of Windmill Hill, is about to give up some of its secrets…’
There’s a strange noise on the tape: a thin, high, breathy keening sound.
‘India, have you considered the possibility that your grandmother has been concealing from you how disturbed she is…’
‘In the spoil heap, dug out by a young badger searching for somewhere to live, ancient flint and bone…’
‘Sorry, what did you say?’
A movement reflected on the TV screen, a white flicker like a ghost, makes me glance over my shoulder. Frannie is standing in the doorway, transfixed by the picture on the screen, tears running down her cheeks. If there was more breath behind the sound she’s making, you’d call it screaming. Screaming that comes out like a whisper.
CHAPTER 32
1941
Lysol, cabbage and pee: the hospital always has the same smell, winter or summer. In the almoner’s office we giggle about it, tell each other if we had a music-hall act that