Teeth of the Wolf

Teeth of the Wolf ebook-9-2

At the third floor, he pushes through the smoke door and looks both ways. To his right, the lift doors, nurses’ station and a little waiting room. And there’s Mum, standing at the desk arguing with a charge nurse. Good old Mum, always able to find someone who should be doing something for her. According to the signage, Mārama’s ward is to the left. Slipping through the door, Matiu slinks down the hallway without giving himself away. When Pandora steps from the lift, she won’t have a chance. That’s good. Mum’s sure to tie her up for a bit, give him a bit of time alone with Mārama. Just don’t mention the car, sis, whatever you do.

Opening the door to Ward 312, Matiu scans the beds and drawn curtains. Mārama is in the corner by the window, her privacy curtain pulled around to block out the room but allowing her a view over the greensward and carpark below. Matiu crosses the room and pauses at the edge of the curtain, looking her over. She’s resting, pillows laid back, eyes shut. She’s not hooked up to any machines, just a drip that might be saline or some painkiller. The sight of her there, so thin and vulnerable, tears something inside him. It’s worse, somehow, than watching her potter about her cluttered little flat in a daze, or paralysed by tormented memories of things she can’t speak of, and completely wrong on another level entirely. She’s strong, not this frail thing before him. Hers is a strength he has depended on, clung to. Knowing she would always be there, one way or another—even if most the time her there was some other place, some hiding hole where she would bide her time against the turning of the tides—has been one of the pillars that holds him up, above the dark.

He lowers himself into the chair beside the bed, the sun through the window warming his back. Takes her hand in his. It’s cold, but she grips his fingers in return. She rolls her head, cracking her eyelids to regard him.

“Matiu,” she croaks, and squeezes. A thin smile flickers on her lips, then fades.

“Mārama,” he forces a smile, glad she’s alive and cogent. Just recognising him is a good sign. “How are you feeling?”

Her eyes drift closed again, her grip firm. “He was here.”

The warmth on his back drains away, like a curtain of ice has dropped across the sun. He sits forward, tension spiking. “Who? Who was here?” But he knows. There’s only one she can mean, only one who would bring that chill to her voice.

“He said he will find you, Matiu. Said…it’s your turn.”

Her breaths become slow and deep as she sinks away, a stark contrast to his own sharp, shallow inhalations. His turn. What the hell did that mean? His thoughts skew from one dreadful possibility to another, each worse than the next. He pushes back the chair and stands, reaching out to grip the windowsill, holding onto something solid, something that won’t fall away beneath him.

He will find you.

The pieces fit together with a sickening thud. Hanson gone, Mārama falling ill. Kingi hunting him, corrupted by something from beyond the veil. And now this insidious little message. This threat. His arm itches and a memory flashes by, a landscape of black sand and boiling clouds, a creature vast and twisted curling against the sky, all tooth and jaw. The eternal, echoing cold.

It’s your turn.

Matiu pushes away from the window and hurries out of the ward, head down, heart thundering. He needs to get out of here. The room feels tainted, crawling with unspent anger. A feeling he remembers so well, that itch in his spine when Makere used to hang there on his back, taunting and tempting him, urging him to bend, to break. He needs to breathe.

- Pandora -

The lift doors ping open. Penny steps past the security guard onto the third floor Mental Health Ward to the smell of…nothing. No melange of cabbage and disinfectant, not even the slightest hint of plasticizers. Well, that’s a surprise. Sensing an odour is a complex matter, dependent on the concentration and solubility of the hydrocarbon in question, the pH and hence the relative volatility of the substance, and its partition coefficient with the surrounding air, as well as the number and functionality of Penny’s own olfactory receptors. To sense nothing, either Penny has a dreadful cold, or the hospital’s using advanced membrane filters to ensure its air quality, since any aerosolised hydrocarbons are well below odour detection limits…

“Pandora!” The elevator doors have barely closed before Mum runs to meet her, her vintage Manalo Blahniks clacking on the polished linoleum. “Darling!” Mum wraps her in a cloud of custom perfume. Penny suppresses a smile. Even a hospital-grade membrane filter has no answer to Kiri Yee’s signature scent of mānukā and mint. “Thank God, you’ve come,” Mum murmurs over Penny’s shoulder. “I’ve been so alone.” She waves her hand in the direction of the nurses’ station. “The nurses are no help. It’s hopeless.”

A creep of fear steals up Penny’s back and the hairs on her nape stiffen.

Please, no. Don’t let it be hopeless.

She pulls away to search Mum’s face, noting the dark smudges under her eyes, and the mesh of hair at a tangent from her normally perfect bob. “Hopeless? What have they said, Mum?”

“Nothing! I can’t get anything out of them. Well, nothing I can understand. Your aunt hasn’t woken up all morning, Pandora. She’s not just sleeping either, she’s unconscious. I can’t bear to watch her—she’s hardly breathing.” Mum clasps her hands together under her chin in a muted prayer.

Gently, Penny surrounds her mother’s hands in her own. “Let me see what I can find out, shall I?”

Mum bites her bottom lip, then nods. “I’ll wait over there.” She points to the wide bench seat intended for visitors. Made from bright yellow leather, it’s the sort of furniture you see all over hospitals, intended to be cheery and welcoming but only accentuating the hopelessness of the place. The Manolo Blahniks clack away.

“OK, I won’t be long…” Penny trails off.

The nurse behind the counter has blue-black hair and a nose stud in the shape of a unicorn. “Can I help you?”

“Good morning. I’m Dr Yee. I got a call…I’m here about Ms Mārama Ngata.”

“You’re the GP?” the nurse asks, the unicorn breaking into a trot as she speaks.

Penny gives her a broad smile, inclining her head just a little, but says nothing.

“Of course, let me get you her chart.” The nurse passes Mārama’s patient tablet over the counter. Well, Penny can’t help it if the nurse got the wrong end of the stick, can she? She didn’t actually say she was Mārama’s GP. Anyway, no point looking a gift unicorn in the mouth. She’s closing her hand over the tablet when the nurse frowns. “Sorry, I have to ask you to read it here, though,” she says. “You know, regulations.”

Penny rolls her eyes in empathy. “Rules. Of course.”

Her back to the nurse, Penny brings up Mārama’s chart. Ignoring the patient history, she jumps straight to today’s event:

Female, 55 years, admitted 6am by ambulance following severe psychotic panic attack during which patient reported hallucinations of demons. Mr Visser suggests possible bi-polar disorder with psychotic features. Long-term history of schizophrenia.

Ah. Looks like it’s more of the same. Poor Mārama. Penny searches the tablet for a list of current meds—risperidone, venlafaxine, and clonazepam, and in doses sufficient to tranquilise an elephant. No wonder Mum said Mārama was out of it. A full raft of physiological and psychometric tests had been ordered for when her aunt is stable.

When has she ever been stable?

Penny returns the tablet to the nurses’ station, thanks the unicorn girl, then makes her way to where Mum is waiting.

Mum stands up. “What did they say?”

“It’s nothing to worry about. A severe panic attack, that’s all.”

Crossing her arms over her heart, Mum runs her hands up and down the sleeves of her cashmere cardigan. “But why? I don’t understand. Why would she suddenly have an attack? What’s changed?”

“I don’t know. It might not be anything much. She might have forgotten to take her meds.”

Mum stops mid-rub. “Not taken her meds? That’s unacceptable. Un. Ac. Cept. Able.” She paces the length of the bench, shaking her head, then turns and stalks back. “I can’t believe it. The money we pay for good care. I’ll have to hire a new nursing service.”

“Mum, I said she might have forgotten, not that she did. I don’t know what happened. It doesn’t really matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Mum’s voice rises.

“I didn’t mean doesn’t matter. Of course not. That’s not…” Penny takes a deep breath. Why does Mum always make Penny so tongue-tied? It’s as if she’s a kid again, explaining the accidental ink stain on her white duvet cover. Who gives a white duvet to a nine-year-old anyway? “What I meant was, the important thing is for us to focus on getting Whaea Mārama better, and right now she’s in the very best place to get the care she needs. Mr Visser and his staff are going to do everything they can to get her back on her feet.”

“How can you say that, Pandora? My poor sister is lying in that room, unconscious. Unresponsive. She’s so…so…floppy! For all I know, she might never wake up.”

“Now, Mum—”

But once Kiri Yee is on a roll, she’s like a marble let loose on Dunedin’s Baldwin Street. “You know she could die in that room and no one would be any the wiser. They’ve just left her there. Left her!”

“They’ve left her to rest, Mum. The specialist has her sedated, so she can recover from the trauma of the attack. As soon as she’s stabilised, they’ll reassess her and make an ongoing treatment plan.”

“But Pandora…” Mum sits heavily on the bench, covering her face with her hands so Penny has to crouch to hear her speak, “you weren’t there. It was horrible.” She closes her eyes. “My baby sister wanted to kill herself. Mārama wanted to die!”

“Mum, please, don’t.”

Her eyes fly open. “I think she means it. Really. I think she intends to kill herself. You should have seen her, screaming and scratching at herself with her fingernails. Tearing at her hair. I’ve never seen her that way before. She was hysterical—beyond hysterical.”

The yellow leather whines as Mum drops her head to her knees. “She kept saying it was my fault for not looking after my family better. How can she say that, Pandora? How can she possibly accuse me of neglecting her? She knows I’ve done everything I could. Everything.”

“Of course you have, Mum. No one could reproach you. You’ve been the best sister anyone could want.”

Penny rummages in her satchel for a tissue, but Mum’s quicker, getting one out of her own handbag. She dabs at her eyes, careful not to smear her make-up as she continues her soliloquy.

“I tried to comfort her. I put my arms around her and pulled her to me, and that’s when she told me she would rather die. She said the demons were already haunting her, she might as well go to hell. She kept saying it over and over. How we’d be better off if she were underground. Pandora, it was as if I’d been stabbed in the heart. I was so scared for her.”

Sitting on the bench, Penny places her hand in the middle of Mum’s back and rocks her gently. Certain studies suggest invoking a person’s parasympathetic nervous system can be as effective as a tranquiliser. “I think that’s what the doctors meant by a severe panic attack, Mum. Whatever Whaea Mārama might have said, you mustn’t take it to heart. What she’s saying isn’t real, it isn’t rational. It’s just part of her psychosis.”