Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Oh.’

‘Grip like a monkey-wrench, my dear. Thought I’d never get fooled again. You understand now why we wanted a male priest?’

Surely, what you wanted , Merrily thought, was a male nurse . ‘Look, Nurse… I’m sorry?’

‘Nurse Protheroe. Sandra.’

‘Sandra, this is a dying man, OK? He knows he’s dying. He’s afraid. He’s looking for… comfort, I suppose. That doesn’t make him possessed by evil. I don’t know what his background is. I mean…’

‘Farm-labourer and slaughterman. Been in a few times before, he has. When he wasn’t so bad – not so seriously ill, that is.’

‘Farm-labourer? So his idea of comfort might be a bit… rough and ready?’

Sandra snorted. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s more than that , girl. You’re not getting this, are you? I’ve dealt with that type more times than you’ve done weddings and funerals – rough as an old boar and ready for anything they can get. But Mr Joy, he’s different. Mr Joy’s an abuser, a destroyer – do you know what I mean? He likes causing pain and death to animals, and he likes doing it to women, too. Hurting them and humiliating them. Degrading them.’

‘Yes. That might very well be true. But it doesn’t—’

‘That smell… that’s not natural, not even in a hospital. That’s his smell. That’s the smell of all the things he’s done and all the things he’d still like to do. We even put Nil-odour under his bed one night.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Undertaker’s fluid. They put it in coffins sometimes, so it’s less offensive for the relatives.’

‘You put undertaker’s deodorant under a dying patient’s bed?’

‘It didn’t work. You can’t remove the smell of evil with chemicals. You spend a night in here with that man, you can’t sleep when you goes home. You keep waking up with that…’ Protheroe hugged herself. ‘As for young Tessa – white, that girl was. This was after his wife come in this afternoon.’

‘Sandra, look…’ Merrily moved to the door. This wasn’t how state-registered nurses were supposed to behave. She needed to talk to the duty doctor. ‘You say I don’t get this. You’re dead right, I don’t get this at all. All right, he might not be a very nice man, he may not smell very good, but that’s no excuse to make his last hours a total misery. I mean, what does his wife say about all this?’

‘Mrs Joy don’t talk,’ said Sandra. ‘Being as how you’re a priest, I’ll tell you about Mrs Joy, shall I?’

‘If you think it’ll help.’

Sandra exhaled a sour laugh. ‘About twenty years younger than him, she is, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her, state she’s in, the poor miserable cow. No, not a cow, a rabbit… a poor frightened little wretch. We left them alone for about half an hour, as you do at times like this. Then Dr Taylor comes on his rounds and he has to see Mr Joy, obviously, and Tess goes in to ask Mrs Joy will she come out for a couple of minutes, and—’

Footsteps outside. Sandra stopped talking, looking at the door. The footsteps passed. Sandra lowered her voice.

‘The chair’s pushed right up next to the bed, see? That chair you were just sitting on?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily found her hands were clasped in front of her, rubbing together. She wanted to wash them, but not in front of Sandra Protheroe. ‘Go on.’

‘So Mrs Joy’s standing on that chair, leaning over the bed. She’s holding her dress right up above her waist. She’s got her knickers round her ankles.’

Merrily closed her eyes for a moment.

‘And Denzil’s just lying there with his tubes up his nose and all the spittle down his chin, wheezing and rattling with glee, and his little eyes eating her up. But that’s not the worst thing, see.’

She swallowed, backed up against a sink, looking down at her shoes and shaking her head.

‘The worse thing is her face. What Tessa said was that woman’s face was completely blank. No expression at all – like a zombie. She’s just looking at the wall, and her face’s absolutely blank. She knows Tessa’s there, but she don’t get down. Showing no embarrassment at all, though God knows she must have been as full up with shame and humiliation as it’s possible to be. But she just stands there staring at the wall. Because he hadn’t told her she could get down.’

Merrily’s mouth was dry.

‘This is a dying man,’ Sandra said. ‘And he knows it and she knows it, and she’s still terrified of him. In his younger days, see, he thought he was God’s gift. A woman who knows the family, she told me about all the women and girls he’d had, and the way he abused them but they kept coming back. He charmed them back, he did. Not by his looks, not by his manners, he just charmed them. And then he got older and he got sick and he got married, and he controls the wife by fear. And he’s lying there delighting in Tessa seeing the poor little woman giving him an eyeful of what he owns. If that’s not evil then I don’t know what evil is.’

What is evil? Huw Owen had said. It’s the question you’re never going to answer. But when you’re in the same room with it, you’ll know .

Merrily said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can do.’

‘Protection. She wants protection.’

The door had opened. Sister Cullen was standing there, the darkness behind her.

‘She’s right, he’s a bad man with a black charm. But he’s just a man, and that’s where it ends as far as I’m concerned. I’m from Derry, so I’ve seen what religion does to people, and I want none of it. But this is one patient where I’m more concerned about his nurses.’

‘It’s getting stronger the nearer he comes to death,’ Sandra said. ‘Tell her.’

‘Sandra’s convinced the smell’s getting worse.’

‘And if you don’t do something, when he dies this ward’s going to be polluted for ever. And I’m not coming back tomorrow. I’m out.’

‘Let me get this right.’ Merrily looked from one to the other, the believer and the atheist, but both essentially of the same mind. ‘You’ve called me out in the middle of the night, not because you want comfort for a distressed terminal patient but because… you want protection from him ?’

Cullen said with resignation, ‘If there’s anything you think you can do about it, feel free, but I’d strongly advise you not to touch the evil bastard again.’

‘Sister…’ The young nurse Tessa in the doorway. She was crying. ‘Can you come, please?’

MERRILY THOUGHT OF the almost-poetic abstraction of imprints and visitors and weepers and breathers .

She thought about the hitchhiker – the disembodied spirit which took over someone’s body for a period, usually for some specific if illogical purpose, and then went away.

She considered probably the worst of them all – Huw had discussed this in detail over the last two days of the Deliverance course – the squatter .

And then thought about the pathetic, stinking, wheezing, nasal-cathetered reality of Denzil Joy, who fitted into none of the slick categories which Charlie Headland had said reminded him of the fictionalized world of espionage. What was Denzil Joy other than an unpleasant man coming to the end of his run? Was he, indeed, any of her business?

There were several tests you had to implement before a subject could reasonably be considered possessed by an external, demonic evil – most importantly, the psychiatric assessment. Now, how could anyone assess a man apparently in the last hours of his life, a person unable to speak? It was an impossible situation.