Loop - Megan (part 2)

Police Constables Morgan and Flynn were heading back to the station. All but three of the forty-nine missing hospice residents were now accounted for, and it didn't take a great stretch of the imagination to account for the missing.

They were passing the graveyard when Morgan stopped abruptly and called to a woman crouching beside a headstone. She had the look.

She didn't respond, and Morgan elbowed Flynn sharply.

"Is the zapper on?"

Flynn pulled out the stun-gun, and checked that it was set. He'd used it more than enough today.

"Miss?" called out Morgan again, pushing open the cemetery gate, "Miss, can you hear me?"

The woman didn't respond. She was shaking; on another day, beside a fresher grave, Flynn would have thought she was recently bereaved, but the gravestone was heavily speckled with algae and lichen, and the weeds peered undisturbed from around it.

As they drew closer, Flynn became aware that she was rocking, and he and Morgan spread a little further apart. It was all too easy to trip on a partner if you were unexpectedly attacked - if Officer Macintosh had stood just a couple of feet further back yesterday afternoon, Detective Grimes might not be having surgery on her trampled ribcage today.

"Ma'am?" Flynn called out cautiously, "would you be so good as to turn around?"

She turned, and Flynn's grip on the stun-gun relaxed. The woman was in need of help, by the look of her, but not restraints.

"Officer?" she queried in a faint voice.

"Are you in need of assistance, ma'am?"

"I'm - I'm fine, thank you, officer."

She wasn't fine. Her face was pale and tearstained, and her clothes looked like she'd been rained on. She had two carrier bags with her, but she wasn't dressed like a vagrant. She didn't speak like one, either.

"Are you sure of that, ma'am?" Flynn risked putting a hand on the woman's shoulder; her coat was soaked, and she flinched at his touch.

"No," she stood uncertainly, and looked at him more closely, "I'm not fine. Not for a long time. I thought I could cope with it, but -"

"I know you," said Morgan, "You're Mrs. Chase."

"Do I know you?"

"I know your daughter, Megan. She called the station last night saying you'd gone. You've got her worked up something awful," Morgan couldn't have failed to notice the impact his words had on the woman's already fractured state, because he added, more considerately, "Let's get you checked out and take you home to her, shall we?"

 

***

Megan was sick. Last night she'd thought her peaking temperature was just a side-effect of the worry, but this morning, as she opened her eyes, she knew it was more.

It took her a while to realise that she actually was awake through the dizzying disarray that her eyes presented, and even that came sluggishly. The ceiling swum into a distant approximation of focus, and she realised that she was sweltering.

There was a glass of water on the night-stand. She reached for it, but her arms were heavy and unsteady, and even when she managed to get it to her mouth, as much of it poured onto the sheets as into her mouth.

Presently she gave up trying to drink, and was vaguely aware of the glass, still half full, tumbling from her hand and spilling on the carpet. She tried to sit up, but after several failed attempts, drifted back into something like sleep.

Her eyes opened again several hours later. She ought to call the hospital. She managed to sit up, this time, and get to the phone on her desk, but trying to dial was a different story.

She realised she'd passed out when she woke up on the floor. She was still too hot. She rolled onto her belly, and crawled under the bed. It was a little cooler down here.

She peeled back the dressing on her hand, and gazed blearily at the semicircular wound. It was pale and bloodless, quite without signs of infection. She was probably reacting to the antibiotics.

She'd feel better for a little more sleep. And something to eat. Once she could walk, she'd open the windows, get herself feeling a little fresher.

***

"I feel a little silly, really. There's nothing wrong with me - I just got a bit of a scare."

"Better safe than sorry, Mrs Chase," Doctor Farran put the folder down on the desk, "But no, there's nothing wrong with you beyond a slightly elevated heart rate."

"I'd not been out for a while, you see, and I'd forgotten about crowds. I've always had issues with paranoia, as though there's some aggressive element in the crowd, and I'm afraid I got into a panic."

"A lot of people got a bit of a scare around the hospice yesterday," Farran leant forward in a reassuring, almost conspiratorial manner, "Megan will tell you all about it, I've no doubt."

"Is she around?" Chase glanced around the room as though her daughter might be standing behind her, "She usually works on Tuesdays. I thought I'd tell her I was fine before I headed home."

"Oh, no. She's off, today; there was a bit of an issue with an aggressive patient yesterday, and we felt she needed the time away. She's fine, absolutely fine, just a bit shocked."

"I suppose that goes for the both of us, then," Chase laughed nervously, "I don't suppose there's a payphone nearby, is there? Only, I'm not sure that I'm comfortable walking back -"

"I'd leave that in the capable hands of Miss Turner, if I were you," Farran rose and opened the door to his office, "we call her the cab-whisperer."

It wasn't necessary, as it turned out. Constable Morgan had returned, no longer in uniform, and was waiting for Chase in the reception. He asked if she was alright three times before she had a chance to say anything, and then offered her a lift home. She thought that it was adventurous that she'd said yes.

***

Megan hadn't reached the sink. She'd collapsed on the floor almost as soon as she'd managed to stand, and now that she could stand again, couldn't remember why she wanted to.

She couldn't remember much at all. She was giving up trying to, and instead was drifting in and out of a state of consciousness. She had managed to face the almost searing heat of the boiler-room and turn down the thermostat. Even though it had taken several attempts, she couldn't remember any of them right now.

She'd found a cold corner in her mother's room, and as she stood there enjoying a draft from a faulty vent in the wall, she briefly realised that she was slipping away.

And then that slipped away, too.

***

Officer Morgan opened the car door for Mrs. Chase, and she walked to the house feeling as though the world was better than she'd pictured it. It was a strange realisation, especially after the people, barely people, outside the hospice - and after her night alone in the graveyard.

But it wasn't all bad. Morgan held her shopping bags as she unlocked the door, and then followed her in. She was relieved to see the coat hanging on the back of the kitchen chair.

"Megan?"

Her voice echoed through the halls, and in a corner of an upstairs bedroom, something that had once been Megan heard.

Loop - Megan

"Megan!"

Her voice echoed through the halls.

Megan had probably gone out. It wasn't as though she could really ground her any more. Sometimes she was tempted, but since Megan had become the breadwinner for the family, it had always felt awkward chastising her.

She shuffled into the kitchen, and made a cup of tea. There was a postet in Megan's handwriting on the kettle.

Gone to work, back six-ish.

Will get milk and sugar on way home - please do not leave house. Will talk later.

Love,

Megan.

She put the note back down on the counter, and sat down with her tea.

Megan always wanted her to go outside, to confront the crowds that had taken everything from her, and see that it wasn't as bad as she feared. Every note, every day, highlighted something worth seeing if only she would venture beyond the front door.

 It was six years today.

She looked again at the note.

The underline of the 'not' was so heavy that it had gone through the paper. There was a line on the pad where Megan had written it.

Six times three hundred and sixty five. Plus two for the leap years.

Two thousand, one hundred and ninety two days.

Two thousand, one hundred and seventy-six notes begging her to go outside.

One note telling her not to.

Megan had given up on her.

She understood why; it wasn't difficult to see it. It didn't matter how well her daughter had coped having to go from a dependant teenager with a part-time job at the hospice to the fatherless carer of an emotionally crippled mother. It didn't matter that she'd been patient as her mother couldn't even go through the door for the funeral. It didn't matter how many therapists she'd brought to the house at great personal expense, or how her love-life had deteriorated under the pressure of an ever-present and time-consuming live-in patient, but never once led her to show the albatross her mother had turned into.

As for her, she had refused to respond to anything Megan had done for her. As though she was still at home waiting for that call from the hospital. She looked down at the slippers she'd worn six years ago as she clutched the arm of the chair and stared at the phone for six hours.

When Megan came home that evening, she'd told her that there had been no news. That hadn't been true, and on some level Megan had known it back then, even before the funeral director had called and Megan picked up. But on some level, she'd believed her own lie, and here, now, six years later, she was waiting for someone to call and tell her that her husband wasn't dead.

The last thing he'd ever said to her - perhaps the last thing he'd ever said - was that he'd see her at home. He hadn't liked her worrying, hadn't liked Megan being on her own. And she'd gone home, trusting in his certainty that everything would go well, and it hadn't. The anaesthetist had medicated him, the surgeon had opened him up, but nothing could be done to fix him.

And after six years of dwelling on it, she'd forced the last person who still cared about her to stop caring.

She would go to the supermarket. She would buy milk and sugar. She'd walk there across the hospice gardens and see how it had changed.

She peeled her most recent debit card off the letter it had come with, and spent twelve minutes looking for a purse to put it in. She started getting dressed, and thought she ought to shower, but realised that she was putting it off.

She wasn't planning on hugging anyone. She'd brush her teeth, and then she'd go.

Fifteen minutes later, her hand reached cautiously for the door handle. It was difficult, touching it again after so many years. It brought back memories, which was strange.

It was locked. Which, fortunately, reminded her that she needed her keys.

She found his keys while she was looking, and cried for a few minutes. It might be easier tomorrow - or, she reminded herself, it would be just as hard.

She put his keys in her bag, and walked up to the front door. She let muscle memory guide her through unlocking it and opening it, and before she knew it she was walking down the steps and onto the street.

She hurried back up the steps to check that she'd locked the door - she had. Things were familiar, and strange, and somehow wonderful in a way that they hadn't been for the six years they'd been separated by her trusty guardian of wood and brick.

This wouldn't take long.

***

"I'm home," Megan called, "Sorry I'm later than I said - I stocked up on a few items while I was at the shop - Mum?"

The lights were off. She walked through the house. All the lights were off.

Seven bedrooms from which lodgers had gradually become alienated stood empty. The cellar - once a source of dread - was devoid of all life except woodlice and assorted spiders.

It isn't difficult to tell when a house is empty. There's a feeling, even when they haven't made a noise, that someone else is around.

Megan was not getting that feeling.

She went out into the garden. Her mother hadn't gone out of that door, either, for five years, but it seemed like it would be the shallow end.

More woodlice and assorted spiders in the shed.

Megan felt a panic rising in her chest, and sat down at the table. There was the better end of a cup of tea here,  stone cold and with a film on top.

Her note was next to it. She could have smacked herself.

She shouldn't have said anything about leaving the house. She wasn't going to - it was a generally safe assumption that nothing could coerce her mother into the daylight - but it had seemed as though, just in case, she ought to make a note.

If she hadn't been running late, she would have written more, she would have explained that there had been disturbances in the city since last night, and there seemed to be some involvement of drugs or disease.

But she had been late, and after years of staying indoors it hadn't even crossed her mind that her mother would even contemplate leave the house. She'd said not to, just to cover all bases, but instead -

She'd tried reverse psychology once, after about eight months of her mother's seclusion when her social life had begun to evaporate. It hadn't worked; her mother had seen through it and couldn't speak to her for days without weeping. She'd barely been able to coax her out of her bedroom for months afterwards, and the guilt of the attempted manipulation had stayed with her for even longer. 

Her mother had taken the old shopping bag from behind the shoe-rack. Megan's heart seemed to stop inside her chest when she realised where her mother would have gone; the note, in refraining from challenging her, had provided her with an opportunity to prove herself.

She knew which way her mother would walk to the high-street - she'd get to the cathedral through the garden of the old hospice, where Megan had been working the last time her mother had left the house. It took a couple of minutes longer than the streets, but it was usually quieter.

Not lately, though. She'd spent the day working out of a mobile hospital at the mouth of the hospice's cul-de-sac, while the police tried to peacefully prevent a wave of savage violence perpetrated by people who had been at deaths door just days previously.

Odd things had been happening. The doctors were saying that Sylvia Addrey's condition hadn't been as unique as had once been claimed; the papers spoke of immortality and infection in equal measure.

And her mother had walked through the hospice.

Megan was not, as a habit, a ditherer. She hadn't had the time since the accident which had killed her father and emotionally incapacitated her mother, leaving her as the only earner in the household. She called the police to notify them of her mother's disappearance while she found the number for the shop.

The manager had known her mother quite well before her enclosure, and confirmed that she had been in four hours previously, when she had seemed shaken and bought milk and sugar.

Four hours. Megan called the police to pass on the information, and then called work. They'd look out for her mother. She double-checked that she was signed off for the next three days; she wasn't expected back until Friday.

She felt her throat tighten, and paused to take a puff from her inhaler. She hadn't needed it in years, not even with everything that had happened over these last few weeks, but today -

She leant against the refrigerator, and took a second puff before stowing it back in her bag. She'd put it in there for the first time in two years this morning, and now, for the first time in years, she'd needed it. If she'd believed in fate, she'd have thought it cruel.

Megan phoned friends and acquaintances that lived close to her mother's old route to the shop. Rose Tillier lived just beyond the hospice, and had seen her mother passing by after the police cordon had moved. Things seemed to have settled down, Rose said. Megan's mother had seemed a little panicked, but otherwise alright. She'd been heading home, about four hours ago.

Nobody else had seen her.

Megan opted to look for her, but lingered by the front door. It wasn't that she was afraid of what she might find; she knew from experience that she could cope. She also knew from experience that a lot of missing persons headed home. Someone should be present.

She bit her lip until it bled. It felt like cowardice. She told herself that it was just sensible, but even though she knew it was true, she felt like a traitor.