Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

Glasgow, Scotland

May 2024

CLEM

Clem is watching the birds when the landline rings.

The raven that visited the garden yesterday is back, an ominous presence on the fence dividing Clem’s little plot from next door. But today, it seems to have fallen foul of a gang of jackdaws. It’s mesmerizing, this sudden standoff on her patio between the large, black birds, and even though the baby is sleeping she lets the handset burr, plucking her mobile phone to record the raven backing away from the feeder as the five jackdaws squeal and lurch at it. Suddenly it unfolds its magnificent black wings and flies off to settle on next door’s roof.

Clem hits stop and makes for the landline bleeping by the sofa. It’ll be one of her bosses calling, either the school office where she works during the day or the café where she works at night, asking her to do overtime. Or maybe it’s her daughter, Erin, calling home. Erin is nineteen and is currently hiking in the Orkney Islands with her boyfriend, Arlo, and her best friend, Senna. Erin is a prolific sender of WhatsApps, usually in the form of TikToks that she shares with Clem to make her laugh. But she’s not sent anything since Monday, which was four days ago, and the WhatsApp message Clem sent yesterday morning ( hey love, you OK? ) is still unread.

“Hello?”

“Am I speaking with Clementine Woodbury?”

“Yes?”

It’s not Erin, nor is it either of Clem’s bosses. The caller is a man. Probably someone trying to sell her broadband. “Who’s calling?”

“My name is Dr.Miller and I’m calling from the Burns Unit at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Can I check that I’m speaking with Clementine?”

The Royal Infirmary? Burns Unit? Why would they be calling? “Yes, yes it is,” she says, the heat in her neck rising. “Why are you calling, please?”

“It’s about your daughter, Erin. Can I ask if you have someone with you just now?”

Her stomach clenches. “What’s happened?” she says. “Is she okay?”

“Erin is in the Intensive Care Unit,” he says, his tone shifting, steady, authoritative. “I’m sorry to say she has suffered extensive burns on her arms and legs.”

“Oh my God,” she says, reaching out to the wall to steady herself.

“The air ambulance delivered her here earlier this morning. We’ve placed her in a medical coma for now.”

This news lands like a pickax to Clem’s heart. “But she’s alive?”

“Yes, she is.”

It feels as though the frame of the house is tipping toward the core of the earth. In the small box room at the end of the hall she can hear the baby stirring, calling out Mama! Mama!

“Just a minute, Freya,” she calls, before turning back to the handset. “What happened?” she asks. Then, hastily: “Can I come and see her?”

“Of course,” he says. “But…please be prepared. It can be a huge shock seeing someone after they’ve experienced burn injuries. I’ll meet you at reception and take you to her.”

···

The Glasgow Royal Infirmary is where Erin was born on a wet September morning in 2004. Clem races blindly now through the front entrance, fifteen-month-old Freya bouncing on her hip. Clem is wearing odd shoes, forgot to put on her glasses, didn’t lock the front door, or the car door. None of it matters, none of it. The world has fallen away once more, distilled entirely to the length and breadth of her daughter’s life.

The man waiting at the reception of the ICU is younger than she’d envisaged. He doesn’t offer a handshake, calls her Clementine, looks at the baby, puzzled.

“Where is Erin?” she asks, breathless and numb.

He nods at a small room to their left, and she follows, her confusion mounting when she finds it is a storeroom. He hands her what looks like a yellow bin bag. “Burns victims are at a high risk of infection. This is for her protection.”

Now she realizes—the yellow bag is a plastic gown which he ties for her at the back before handing her a pair of blue latex gloves.

A nurse appears, her eyes settling on Freya. “Shall I look after the little one while you go in?” she asks.

Clem nods and passes Freya to her, who fusses. Usually she would console her, but her focus is too fixed, elsewhere. As she snaps on the gloves she feels a fierce tightness in her chest, as though her ribs are being pulled together like a corset. She stops, taking a moment to breathe, breathe.

“Are you okay?” the nurse asks, and she nods, pressing a hand to her chest, feeling the stuttering of her heart.

“I’m on medication,” she says, feeling the tightness begin to ease. “For my heart.”

“Which medication?”

The names of her prescription pills slip and slide through her mind, muddied with panic.

“Um, Entresto and metoprolol.”

“Well, you’re in the right place, darling,” the nurse says. “You want to make a note of your dosage and I can fetch it for you?”

Clem takes a breath, holds it, willing her heart to be calm. This is exactly the kind of nightmare that her cardiologist said she must avoid. No smoking, booze, or stress . There is no avoiding this, however.

She tells the nurse her dosage, and they proceed hastily down the corridor. “Has she woken up yet?” she asks, forgetting what Dr.Miller said on the phone about the medically induced coma. Everything’s mashed together, confusing and too real to grasp.

“We’ve placed her in a medical coma for now,” Dr.Miller says, nodding at the stretch of corridor ahead of them.

“Why?”

“Anesthetic sedation is beneficial for pain control.”

“When did this happen?” Clem asks, glancing at Freya in the nurse’s arms to reassure her. “Where was the fire?”

“Yesterday, in Orkney. A ranger found her in the early hours of the morning.”

Clem reels. “Yesterday?”

“About four or five in the morning,” Dr.Miller says. “On one of the islands. They took her to the hospital in Kirkwall, then air-ambulanced her here by this morning.”

Clem can’t get her head around that. “So she was found over twenty-four hours ago? Why did nobody call me?”

“She had the number for a Chinese takeaway listed as her next of kin,” he says. “Which unfortunately led to some confusion…It delayed us reaching you.”

An odd compulsion to laugh blooms beneath her horror. A Chinese takeaway. Typical Erin. Clem wants to explain to the doctor that Erin does things like that, just for laughs. Erin’s defunct Facebook profile has her listed as married to Bilbo, their late family dog.

“One last thing,” Dr.Miller says, coming to a stop midway along another corridor. “Erin has been assigned a police officer to be present in the room with her at all times.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s part of the investigation, a formality. Until we know she’s safe, Constable Byers is with her.”

Clem’s mouth falls open. “Until you know she is safe?” she repeats. “That doesn’t sound like a formality. Was she attacked? Are you worried someone might come and attack her again, here in the hospital?”

A door opens in front of them and Dr.Miller falls silent, beckoning her into a hospital room with chirruping machines and snaking tubes and a single metal bed in which Erin lies, swaddled thickly in bandages and heart-wrenchingly still.

“I’ll be right outside,” the nurse says, still clutching Freya.

In a corner, a man—Constable Byers, Clem realizes, the promised protector—stands somber and gowned as she is, his uniform just visible through the transparent sheet. He gives a polite nod which Clem returns, but her attention is pulled to Erin in the bed, horror yanking her up out of her body. “Hello, sweetheart,” she attempts to say, but her words are strangled, stolen by a sudden flourish of shock that rushes throughout her body.

Her bravery crumbles, the whirring of the ventilator, the rustle of the plastic gown, the sound of distant traffic a jarring mash of impossible realities.

Clem stands a little away from Erin, though her impulse is to rush to her, cradle her in her arms. But she registers how delicate she is, how the IV and the ventilator are working hard to keep her on the side of the living. There is barely an inch of her that isn’t swaddled by bandages and dressings. Her pink curls have been shaved. Erin will be livid—it took three boxes of bleach and then a costly visit to the hairdresser to get her hair that shade of pink. A green toenail flashes at the end of her left leg dressing, but the other foot is an odd shape—truncated, smaller.

It’s only when she sees Erin’s hands—pawlike, a black hook peeking out from the bandage that turns out to be a badly burned finger—that she realizes the toes of that foot are missing, gone completely. And Erin’s eyes—why are they like that, like a doll’s, swollen and fringed by long black lashes? Clem stares, realizing with a gasp that they’ve been sewn shut, a macabre seam of black stitches running along the skin beneath her eyes.

The room seems to dissolve around her, the walls bleeding into the floor.

Dr.Miller appears beside Clem, and when he starts to speak she realizes that she had not heard the door or seen him enter; in fact she seems to have blacked out for a moment, coming to midway through his sentence.

In low, measured tones, he says words that she can barely comprehend. Fourth-degree burns on 20 percent of Erin’s body, third-degree burns on another 20, mostly the arms and legs. Some of Erin’s digits were necrotic, requiring urgent amputation at the hospital in Kirkwall to reduce the bacterial load on the wound surface. The burns team in Glasgow will monitor the level of injury to her deep tissue, which means that Erin may yet lose more fingers, more toes.

Clem hears herself ask about legs, arms, ears, whether her face will remain as relatively uninjured as it is, and then she feels her knees giving again, and a nurse materializes at her right, steadying her, with Dr.Miller on her left.

···

Somehow Clem finds herself in a chair, in a different room entirely, her protective robe and gloves removed.

The room feels icy cold, her body numb from head to toe. Where is Freya? Is this all really happening? She lurches in and out of confusion and back to the too-realness of this situation, of the hospital with its signs of neglect and echoing corridors. Dr.Miller and a nurse from the Burns Unit, Nurse Lewis ( but call me Biola, or Bee for short ) sit opposite, telling her things that she registers are important, things she is supposed to be taking in. A cup of water sits on a table alongside a vase with plastic peonies.

She has so many questions, but they lag in her brain, snared by the maelstrom of this vicious new reality.

“Her eyes?” Clem says finally. It’s as much of the question that she can bring herself to speak. She looks up at Erin’s nurse, Biola, who nods sympathetically.

“Erin’s eyes have been sutured for protection,” she says. “Infection after a bad burn is an extremely high risk. And the eyes can dry out. We suture them until that risk has passed.”

“Will she be blind?”

Bee glances at Dr.Miller. “We don’t know yet.”

“Will she be able to walk?”

“We just don’t know.”

“But…how did this all happen?” she asks. “The fire, I mean. What happened ?”

“The police will be here soon,” Dr.Miller says. “They’re investigating the area as we speak.”

“Can we call anyone for you?” another nurse asks from a corner. Clem starts—she hadn’t realized the nurse was there, holding Freya, who is fast asleep.

“No,” she says, confused for a moment why she should want to call anyone.

“Is Erin’s father in touch with her?” Dr.Miller asks. “Perhaps we can call him for you so you don’t have to answer questions…”

She wants to scoff at the question of Erin’s father, but is too numb, too shattered, to do anything but stare at the space on the floor by her odd shoes. Quinn, in touch with Erin? Barely. But he’ll have to be made aware of this. And Heather, Erin’s stepmother, and their boys, Erin’s half brothers. Siblings Erin yearned for and barely knows.

“It was a hiking trip,” she says in a thin voice, mentally trying to answer her own question. “Just…just a hiking trip. Up north, around the Orkney Islands. Turns out my side of the family is from there and she wanted to explore, maybe see if she could find some ancestors. She…she had friends with her, where are they?” Clem straightens up, her hands dropping from her face. “She was…was with her boyfriend. His name is Arlo, Arlo McGrath. And a girl, Senna, Erin’s friend. Were they injured?”

Dr.Miller frowns. “I’ve not heard anything about the girl,” he says, glancing at his colleague. “But I’ll note that name down for the police. Senna, you said her friend’s name was?”

Clem is finding this very difficult to comprehend. “She wasn’t with Erin when they found her?”

“I don’t believe so. Do you have her parents’ number?”

She shakes her head. “What about Erin’s boyfriend?” She adores Arlo. He is nerdy, sporty, polite, funny. Everything she could have wished for her daughter. “Arlo McGrath. He’s twenty, into sports, really strong. Wears glasses. Do you know where he is? Is he okay?”

Bee leans forward, her dark eyes creased with concern. She reaches out to take her hand. “I’m afraid Arlo was already dead when they found him.”

Clem slumps back in her seat, all the air pushed sharply out of her lungs, the walls of the room seeming to fall in. She can’t believe it. Arlo, dead? It’s unbearable. He’s too young. He’s in his first year at university, has a part-time job in a café just around the corner, where Erin also worked. He always offered to do the dishes when he visited their flat. He’s about to take his driving test, had showed her pictures of the car he was saving for. What was it? A Ford something, a decade old. She had sympathized with him about the cost of the insurance, over a thousand pounds. But it’s worth it, she had told him. To get your own set of wheels. Your own freedom.

“Where is he?” she asks, an invisible curtain of ice sweeping across her skin. “The…body?”

Dr.Miller lifts his eyes in a dark look. “He’s at the mortuary in Kirkwall.”

“Oh my God.” She begins to tremble from the shock of it. “Did he die in the fire?”

“From what the police have said, yes—it seems he was killed by the same fire that injured Erin.”

“Do his parents know?”

“Yes. They are with him.”

There is no processing it, no accepting the horror of it.

Erin will be absolutely ripped apart.

Freya starts, as though the stunned silence in the room has bothered her, and Clem motions to the nurse to pass the baby to her. The nightmare pauses.

“Is she your youngest?” the nurse asks warmly, lowering to settle Freya into her arms.

“She’s not mine,” Clem says, feeling the tightness in her chest begin to ease as Freya curls into her. “She’s Erin’s baby.”