Sweet Harmony Page 11

  But if she didn’t go down the pub, and was careful with what she bought at the shops, that could be nearly £50.

  And if she was very careful indeed, and got a promotion to the shop in Virginia Water, she might even be able to pay the credit card back by 2041, at a cost of only £102,865.

  These numbers – these ideas – had seemed terrifying to her, once upon a time. She had run away from them, too frightened to even give them a name.

  The recommended treatment course for Karen, to get her out of hospital and self-sufficient, was £670 a month, and that was even without some of the upgrades that the occupational therapist felt would speed up her mother’s recovery.

  Karen’s pension didn’t cover it, and neither did Harmony’s pay. Not unless Harmony had been willing to make a lot of sacrifices, a lot of choices which would have been, as Karen put it, not living your life.

  You have to live your life, she’d say. You have to make these choices.

  The hospital released Karen after a month and a half, and the local church organised a cupcake bake to help raise money to refit her home.

  This is Harmony, thirty-one years old.

  She is

  Only herself.

  Normal.

  A woman who knows herself, neither fat nor thin. She quite likes her wrists, though she can’t get her thumb and little finger round them yet in a loop. She has practised her smile in front of the mirror, and thinks it is wise.

  She sits by her mother’s bed, as Roman, the chipper young man from Lithuania with the gelled-back hair, spoon-feeds Karen cold porridge through her drooping, dull lips. Karen doesn’t speak, as Roman scrapes a line of dribbled, half-chewed food off her chin. Sometimes she makes little grunting noises, and seems to recognise Harmony. Sometimes her right hand clenches and opens, as if looking for a sensation that isn’t there, but you can hardly see the dent where her ring once was, and if Karen has noticed the absence, she doesn’t have the language to express it.

  There had been choices to make, of course. The Meads women were good at making difficult decisions. The necessary upgrades would have been financially crippling; there would never have been any chance of Harmony paying off her debt or achieving anything with her life, even if they’d taken the minimum package. Whereas paying for Roman to come and visit Karen three times a week could just about be covered by Karen’s pension and disability allowance, if they were careful. He was a nice man. He seemed perfectly happy to talk inanely at Karen, even if she didn’t seem to understand. Sometimes he put Karen in her wheelchair and tootled round the neighbourhood, rattling over loose flagstones and huffing and puffing up the hill to the roundabout. Or he parked her in front of the TV in the downstairs living room, which they’d converted to a bedroom so she didn’t have to do the stairs.

  When Karen wanted to pee, she could usually make it to the toilet by herself, shuffling and huffing on her Zimmer frame, left leg dragging hard behind her. Sometimes she’d get stuck there, or drift off to sleep on the bog, and Harmony would find her when she got home, half-sagged into the bowl, knees sticking up and chin drooping down. Then she’d tut and sigh and help her back up, and plonk her down in front of the TV again with some microwaved spaghetti hoops, and let her do her thing.

  Karen didn’t seem to mind.

  She wasn’t a complainer.

  This is Harmony Meads, thirty-two years old, applying for a job at the estate agents in Ascot.

  She should get it. She’s the strongest candidate of anyone there. She’s a good saleswoman, a confident and funny personality, and she really knows her stuff. The other candidates are just kids, straight out of college. She’s got drive, experience, personality. She’d be ideal. When people ask her where she gets her positivity, she exclaims that the colour red and the smell of coffee in the morning are gifts to be savoured, and everyone nods and smiles like they understand what she means, and has just said a very important thing.

  This is Harmony Meads, staring at herself in the mirror.

  She has £50 a month spare if she’s very, very careful with her money. More if she gets the job.

  Downstairs, Karen Meads goes, “Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . ” and her voice is language without meaning, just a movement of audible air.

  Harmony strips off in front of the mirror and examines her body. She isn’t skinny, no, but isn’t anything extraordinary or grotesque. The secret is to be happy with yourself, with who you are – to find your inner confidence and beauty.

  Her arse, though – her arse is a bit much, and it’s got these weird stretch marks on it now, like tiger stripes, and the texture of damp goats’ cheese. One day she’ll meet someone who loves this backside, but until then she’s got a career to fulfil, opportunities to grasp. There is a fire and she intends to start it; she intends to make something of herself again, wiser, enlightened by her past.

  And if other women are getting a leg-up, then why shouldn’t she?

  She picks up her mobile phone, and opens the app.

  Nothing ridiculous, this time.

  Nothing too far-fetched.

  Something for her arse.

  And maybe a little something for that flab of fat underneath her arms.

  She will make the choice for herself, for who she wants to be.

  She shall begin again.

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  Meet the Author

  CLAIRE NORTH is a pseudonym for Catherine Webb, a Carnegie Medal-nominated author whose debut novel was written when she was just fourteen years old. She has fast established herself as one of the most powerful and imaginative voices in modern fiction. Her first book published under the Claire North pen name was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which became a word-of-mouth bestseller and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The follow-up, Touch, was described by the Independent as “little short of a masterpiece”. Her next novel, The Sudden Appearance of Hope, won the 2017 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and The End of the Day was shortlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Her novel 84K received widespread critical acclaim and was described by bestselling author Emily St John Mandel as “an eerily plausible dystopian masterpiece”. She lives in London.

  Find out more about Claire North and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.

  if you enjoyed

  SWEET HARMONY

  look out for

  THE PURSUIT OF WILLIAM ABBEY

  by

  Claire North

  A hauntingly powerful novel about how the choices we make can stay with us forever, by the award-winning author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and 84K.

  South Africa in the 1880s. A young and naive English doctor by the name of William Abbey witnesses the lynching of a local boy by the white colonists. As the child dies, his mother curses William.

  William begins to understand what the curse means when the shadow of the dead boy starts following him across the world. It never stops, never rests. It can cross oceans and mountains. And if it catches him, the person he loves most in the world will die.

  Gripping, moving, and thought-provoking, The Pursuit of William Abbey proves once again that Claire North is one of the most innovative voices in modern fiction.

  Chapter 1

  France, 1917

  The truth-speaker was tall as a stretcher, thin as a rifle. He wore a black coat that stopped just above his knees, a tie the colour of drying blood, a black felt Derby hat and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles on a string. He carried a brown doctor’s bag in one hand, and a military-issue shoulder sack. Behind him the sky popped with cannon, the sound rolling in half a minute later like the wash of the sea. His curse can’t have been too near then, because he looked me in the eye and lied.

  “My name is Dr Abbey,” he said. “
I’ve been sent by HQ.”

  I never asked to check his papers. Matron was so relieved, she babbled.

  Sister Beatrice had to move from her room. A doctor needed better quarters than a nurse. She, being senior to me and Helene, immediately claimed ours. The window was small and let in the winter air, but it was in a good position on the south side of the building and there had been no rats seen for nearly three months.

  Me and Helene was pushed into a tiny, lime-washed, spider-scuttling den in the eastern corner of the house. We dragged my bed on its side through the corridors, shuffling in socks, trying to keep the scraping of metal on wood from waking the patients below. In whispers we grumbled about this new intruder on our routines, and Helene wrote a letter to her Ma saying it were all terrible and she wanted to come home, but she never sent it, and I put my head down on my pillow with resentment in my heart, and slept badly, and woke for a moment frightened, and was surprised I could still be scared.

  When I went down for the afternoon shift, I found Dr Abbey about his rounds, drifting from bed to bed with the same expression on his face for every patient, whether they were hopeful of recovery or waiting for death. He did not smile, did not frown, but with every man he stopped, looked into their eyes as if he were staring down the barrel of a gun, asked a few questions, nodded at a couple of replies, then moved on without a word.

  In this way – cold, almost bored – he was just another typical bloody doctor. On the battlefield the surgeons only saw flesh, never the men they cut open. We were all getting good at not seeing eyes. It were the sisters who carried the bodies to the carts, stripped the beds, put the unfinished letters to family in a bag, trimmed off the corners that were stained with blood. We picked up the limbs the surgeons cut and put them in a box: an arm without a hand; a leg hanging together by a stitch of muscle at the knee. We cleaned brain off the knife and picked out bone from between the teeth of the saw, held the boys down when the ether ran low.

  When I first came to the battlefield, I would listen to the cannon and think I heard the end of the world.

  There was one other doctor at the house. Dr Nicolson had been sent to us at the Jardin du Pansée, six miles back from the line, after being caught inhaling ether. Matron kept the cupboards locked tight when Dr Nicolson did his rounds. The arrival of Dr Abbey at last let Nicolson indulge in his love of Indian gin, shipped to him by his mother every six weeks via a small Portuguese man who he called “cousin” and who had not a word of English. When the gin came late, he would stand vigil by the garden gate; if it came early, he might share the smallest of drams, and then look immediately regretful as we drank it down, and hide the bottles after.

  If Abbey cared, it didn’t show. He arrived in shadow, and in shadow he stayed, and in silence we performed our duties, numb to neither cannon or the cries of men to pull us from our thoughts.

  Chapter 2

  On his second night in the Jardin, Lieutenant Charlwood came down with a fever. We sisters took turns by his bed, waiting. I had been trained by the Nightingale sisters, and back in Manchester I could tie bandages, staunch bleeding, prepare saline and spoon-feed a mother and her freshly born babe; but here only God chose which man with his face burnt to a plum or what soldier with his gut ripped out might by a miracle live or die. We were powerless before pus and poison, and when the blind men came off the field, faces burst with mustard gas, blisters the size of apples popping from their skin, what could we do? The Jardin was a place for men to die, or if they did not, they would be sent back to England, no longer fit to fight.

  I knew there was little I could do except pray for Charlwood as he clawed at his sheets, bloody eyes bulging, tongue pushing in and out of snapping yellow teeth as he groaned at the night. I knelt by his side and prayed, and knew I didn’t believe no more, and that there weren’t no God listening, but felt as how I should try. We all liked Charlwood. Like many men, he neither looked at nor spoke about his injuries, but laughed and smiled and joked that he was in a bit of a pickle, and wondered if the ladies would mind – all the usual talk of brave boys who didn’t know that we had heard this bravery from a thousand other broken ones before.

  That night, the truth-speaker came, no knock at the door. In socks, his black coat pulled over striped red flannel pyjamas, right arm wrapped tight across his body against the cold, left carrying an oil lamp by its curved brass handle. His dark brown hair was combed back from his face, turning up long streaks of grey from beneath the surface. His beard was trimmed and flecked with the same pallor – was he old before his time, a man in his forties marked by war? Or was he a slow ager, already into his sixties and hiding beneath hat and hair? He had eyes the colour of my grandad’s dining table, all polished and gleaming in the light, which vanished beneath thick eyebrows when he looked down, then popped wide like an egg when he raised his head. Like all of us, he had no real meat on him, and the skin hung loose beneath his jaw, and there was nothing – not hook nose nor protruding ear – that gave him any feature that was remarkable. If the men who drew the caricatures of native peoples of the world had wanted to draw an average Englishman, they could have drawn him.

  I stood when he entered the room, but he gestured me down with a finger to his lips. Putting his lamp on the nightstand by Charlwood’s head, he examined his eyes, felt for his pulse, the temperature of his skin, smelt his breath and his sweat, rolled back his gown, examined the edges of the bandages around his hips, sniffed at stumps, nodded, returned the gown and pulled the blankets back up again, pushing the edges in around his torso like a parent tucking in a child.

  Then he sat.

  And watched.

  And waited.

  I didn’t know what to make of this. The silence of the lonely night was a ritual for every sister who kept vigil, and we did not share it. We waited alone with the dying men; the doctors never came, and only the women watched.

  Yet now he sat there, and in his silence it seemed that he was admitting the thing that the nurses all knew, and the doctors never said – that we were powerless.

  The cannon were quiet that night. Sometimes they were quiet because they were out of shells, or the generals had lost interest, or there were other battles somewhere further down the writhing line from sea to mountain where the bigger guns were blasting. Sometimes they were quiet because the men were climbing into the dark, crawling towards the machine guns. You never could tell, unless the wind blew right to carry the sound of the dying.

  We sat by lamplight watching the soldier groaning in his bed, and neither me nor Abbey said a word, until after an hour, or perhaps two, he left as quietly as he had come, and closed the door behind him.

  Chapter 3

  When this war began and I were in the field hospital, I would gossip with the sisters about the latest pretty young doctor come to the tents, though Lord knows I couldn’t have cared less for them. It was a ritual we performed for every young man who arrived with his bones intact and light in his eyes. We giggled like we were home in England, laughing at private jokes and fantasies, forgetting for a little time where we were.

  There was none of that in the Jardin. Those of us sent to this place were just performing functions, without feigning life, without noting death. It were meant as a kind of respite. In the Jardin, Matron said, there was no struggle. There was no terror, no expectation, no story to be told. There was just the day passing, and the morning truck to deliver the living and the evening truck to take away the dead.

  Once, it had been a stately home, a place where French maidens had picnicked in the summer sun while artists in berets and white smocks painted the lilies on the water. In spring the garden was a quilt of pale violet and lavender, pinks and pockets of creamy yellow. In summer the shrubs broke out into wine red and royal blue, and we would sit and watch the evening primroses open on the quietest nights, when you could imagine the war was some other place.

  It was winter now, felt like it had been winter for ever.

  On the next night I sat wi
th Charlwood, waiting for him to die, Abbey came again. I was holding the soldier’s right hand, squeezing it tight at the moments of the worst pain. Then Abbey took his left, and I nearly let go. There was something inappropriate about the thing, like through the injured man we were sharing an unclean, intimate touch.

  We waited.

  I wanted to ask questions, but they all seemed inane.

  I thought I might cry, and hadn’t realised how much harder it were to sit with someone else than to sit alone.

  I held on to Charlwood’s hand, and found that I wanted him to live, and didn’t know as how I had that sort of feeling in me no more.

  And after a few hours, he seemed a little quieter, and the doctor went back to bed.

  On the third day, the fever broke, and on the fourth, as Abbey made his rounds, Charlwood opened his eyes and looked up into the doctor’s face and said, “I know you, don’t I?”

  Abbey simply shook his head, and walked on.

  Chapter 4

  We were having dinner when Captain Fairchild died. It happened so fast; Helene ran in on the verge of tears, and though Matron insisted that a sister never run, Abbey was already out of his chair and sprinting down the hall before Helene had finished rattling her words. Fairchild was gasping, his lips turning blue, eyes rolling from side to side in search of remedy. Even Nicholson was roused at the fuss, and stood in the door watching as we tried raising him up to breathe better, Matron wheeling in the heavy gas mask and gas cylinder. But Abbey just shook his head as Matron moved to fix the mask over Fairchild’s face, and the Captain saw it, and he like everyone else knew he was going to die. I don’t know if that made the next three minutes in which he gasped for life easier; perhaps it did. He passed out before his heart stopped, and we laid him back down. He had been due for discharge back to England the next day.