‘She was such a live wire, you know, when she was a little one. I wish you could have known her. These last few years, it’s been like a flame going out. Maybe she was just too bright for us … too bright for this world. She just faded away, and there was nothing we could do to keep here … nothing … nothing we could do.’
The short speech subsided into sobs and she leant into her husband’s embrace, knocking awkwardly against the small cardboard box of Bella’s things they’d already collected from the ward staff. Misty fought back a lump rising in her own throat.
People quite often talked of it in that way, their daughters fading away. It sounded quiet, almost holy, echoing the legacy of those wretched Italian heroines who starved themselves to sainthood in the Middle Ages. But Misty knew only too well that the fading was only a part of the story. Even as her patients’ bodies diminished, so the presence of their disease grew – it entrenched itself in families, sucking up everything they had to give and more. Daily routines would turn into battlegrounds, education and prospects would be devastated, siblings would be left confused and neglected, marriages would founder. Anorexia was a tyrant. And, in the case of Bella Durnton, a killer.
After today, she wouldn’t see Alan or Ruth again. They had declined, with their usual dignity, the clinic’s offer to send staff to the funeral. Lyme Regis was too far, they said, it wasn’t right to keep the staff from their work, far less to encroach on their time off. Misty knew that the funerals were often lavish and well attended, the privilege of those who die young.
What would come after that for Ruth and Alan? They had the farm – two hundred head of rare-breed cattle, as Alan had told her proudly when they first met two years earlier, and also the farm dogs that slept in the kitchen though they should be outside. Both were from families long established in the area. There were plenty of relatives scattered around, but no other children. Misty imagined Ruth doing flowers for the church and spoiling nieces and nephews. She wasn’t the sort to let her tragedy define her, but, as Misty knew only too well, it would always be there. Would they blame her? She’d probably never know.
*
By the time the Durntons left for cardboard coffee at Waterloo and a lonely journey on the crowded train home, her afternoon ward round was still waiting for her and she had at least four emails to reply to that wouldn’t wait until tomorrow. It was nearly 8 p.m. when she finally said her goodbyes to the night sister, collected her things, and made her way outside.
The chill evening air bit at her cheeks. It was February, the time of year when winter has long lost its glamour and spring seems little more than a fairy story. There had been an attempted terror attack earlier in the day – she’d caught bits and pieces of it on the news and on her phone through the day. A man with a homemade bomb in a plastic paint container tried to blow up a tube train on the Northern Line. No fatalities, thank God. There had been sporadic alerts and closures on the tube, which wouldn’t affect her directly but meant the bus would probably be even busier than usual. She hoped the Durntons had got to Waterloo without disruption; they didn’t need travel chaos to deal with on top of everything else they’d been through today.
There was a crowd at the bus stop and she decided to walk, at least the first part. The streets seemed to have a skittish, febrile atmosphere as they always did on such days. But then, perhaps it was nothing more than her imagination, filling in what she expected to see. In the waiting room of the clinic, she’d noticed more people watching the twenty-four-hour news channel on the overhead TV than on a normal Tuesday afternoon. The screen showed familiar faces intoning sombre thoughts in front of police cordons and rolled shaky mobile phone footage of smoke and dust and a small crowd rushing from the doors at East Finchley. It was the parents in the waiting room, mainly, looking at the screen. The kids beside them were locked into their phones, so not everything was different.
She strode briskly, shoving her bare hands deep into her pockets, and the bite of the cold weather receded a little. They’d had a mild spell, but it was definitely back to gloves for tomorrow. Still, it was nice to be outside. The air in the hospital always felt stale. She worried that it clung to her – that she had a hospital smell that other people could detect, like some people smelt of their dogs. London air was never fresh but, in the cold, you could at least imagine it might be. It would be more pleasant to walk than get the bus, she decided. It might take forty minutes but it wasn’t as if she was rushing home for anyone.
She lived in Kennington, in a street of rather twee Victorian terraced cottages, which did their best to ignore the roar of the traffic and the ugly jumble of the city that had grown up around them. It was pleasant and convenient and still more affordable than similar spots north of the river. The street housed young professionals and gay couples and a few older residents. The sort of people who bought these houses moved further out if they had children.
Except for the scattering of junk mail by the front door, everything in the house was as she had left it that morning. Eusebio was on an assignment and wouldn’t be back for a week or two. There were some leftovers from a pasta she’d done last night. That would do, with a bit of chopped-up tomato and cucumber she could call a salad. She didn’t like to open wine on a weeknight, but the conversation with the Durntons had taken its toll, so maybe tonight would be an exception.
An hour later she was sipping a pinot in front of a rolling news channel, the debris of her meal still littering her coffee table. It was all about the bombing, of course. There was a still photo of woman in a burn mask leaving the scene. Misty leant forward and squinted at the screen. They’d been using the image a lot, but this time, without her food to distract her, something else caught her eye. That woman in the background.
‘Alex?’
The word escaped her lips even though there was no one to hear it. It was the first time she’d spoken that name aloud in years.
Her mind flashed back, suddenly flooded with images of glossy black curls, champagne, rebellion, extravagance and that million-dollar smile. Alex was the reason she was doing this job, the reason she was living this life. Every time she helped someone recover, it was a temporary salve on the unhealable wound that was Alex Penrith. Every time she lost a girl like Bella Durnton, it was like losing Alex all over again.
The woman fleeing the attack – the dust and filth-covered woman with her determined eyes, frozen in an instant as the backdrop to a horror story – was an uncanny fit with Misty’s images of Alex fast-forwarded through three decades. This woman was older than the Alex she remembered – although the grime and dust that flattened her features made it impossible to tell how old. She shared Alex’s distinctive curly hair, her elfin features and something about the way she held herself. The essence of Alex sang out from the screen. But despite the likeness, it couldn’t be her.
Because Alex had been dead for almost thirty years.
Misty
1987
Misty blinked and blinked again. She’d waited for this moment for two years, perhaps for her whole life. After pouring so much energy into hoping and fantasising and anticipating she was finally here. In her tiny bedroom at home, or out walking through the scrubby fields with Mack, her dog, there had been no space in her imaginings for even the slightest whisper of doubt. Only now, sitting on a narrow lumpy bed, next to the suitcase and two cardboard boxes that contained her possessions, did the doubt start to creep in.
Her mum, Elspeth, had driven her down in their battered Mini Metro; she didn’t like to drive that sort of distance but Misty’s dad couldn’t get time off to come with them. They’d sucked Polos and alternated Ray Stevens and The Cure in the cassette player because the radio picked up nothing but static. Normally, she felt her irritation with her mum’s jangly American country tapes was entirely justified. After all, she had Johnny Mathis to thank for her name, which had caused enough bother through high