Chapter Text
The mirror in the staff bathroom had rust growing into it from one corner, and Isabel had learned where to stand so that the rust covered the left side of her face. It did not help very much.
A year ago her cheeks had been round. The patients had called her the student because of it. Now the bone came through at the top of her face and the skin fell away underneath, and when she looked at herself she did not see herself.
The whites of her eyes were pink around the edges. She had stopped counting that as a symptom about four months ago.
Her stomach turned over and made a long wet sound, and the sound went up into the tiles and came back louder. She stood still and waited for it to finish. She turned the tap. The water came out smelling faintly of the pipes. She drank it out of her cupped hand, because there were no cups on the ward anymore, not since February, and while she swallowed she held the edge of the sink with her other hand until her knuckles went yellow.
Her right leg hurt. It had a wire in it. That was the only way she could describe it to herself, a wire that ran from her heel all the way up to her hip and pulled tight whenever she put her weight on it. She had not told anyone. Telling someone meant filling in a form, and the form went to Occupational Health, and Occupational Health meant sitting in a small room across from a woman with a laptop who would listen to her and nod and then write down that Isabel was tired.
Above the towel dispenser hung the shift roster in a plastic sleeve so it could be wiped clean. It still had last year's date on the top. Nobody had fixed it because nobody read the top. You read your own name and the column next to it, and Isabel's column had been full since spring.
Eleven minutes of her break left. She wiped under her eye with the bottom of her hand. The Isabel in the mirror did it half a second late. Or seemed to.
Then she went back out onto the floor, where the noise was, and let the door shut behind her.
The corridor smelled the way it always smelled. Bleach on top of something the bleach had not reached. Lemon cleaner. Underneath that, boiled starch from the kitchen, and unwashed hair, and the sharp sweet ammonia smell that came off the men who had stopped drinking water because they had decided something had been put in it.
Isabel clipped her lanyard on so the alarm button sat where her thumb could find it without looking. That was the first thing they taught you here. It was also the only thing they taught you properly.
The floor was vinyl the colour of weak tea. It had been laid down in one long sheet with the joins melted shut, so there was nothing to pick at. Everything in the building worked the same way. The taps had no handles, just buttons that ran for nine seconds and then stopped. The doors had no hooks. The window frames sat flat against the wall. The televisions were behind thick plastic that had gone cloudy from being cleaned so many times, so every programme played like you were watching it through a bad eye.
The building did not want to hurt anybody. That was the thing. The building had just taken away every single place where a person could get a grip, and it had taken them away from the staff too.
Achilles had four wards, and someone who was long dead had named them all out of the Iliad.
Myrmidon was for the men who could not be around other men. Phthia was long stay, and some of them had been in Phthia before Isabel was born and would still be there after she left. Skyros was assessment, which meant new.
And there was Patroclus, which was three rooms at the far end of a short corridor with its own door, and which nobody ever called Patroclus. Staff said down the end. Even the paperwork said down the end.
The paint on the walls was a green that no person had ever chosen. It had gone on over an older green, and then someone had put a washable coat over the top of that, so at the door frames where it chipped you could see all three layers stacked up like rock in a cliff.
There was no ward round on Sundays. On Sundays there was the count, four times, and lunch, and one hour in the day room, and then nothing at all for eleven hours. The men knew this better than the staff did.
At the day room door Isabel did the count. She did it twice. The second time she did it on her fingers against her thigh, because Rennick was hard to see when he sat behind the pillar, and because getting the number wrong meant a written report.
Eleven. Eleven was right.
Vasquez was at the window doing what he always did, standing at an angle to it so his own reflection stayed out of the glass. In 2019 he had killed his stepfather with a length of scaffolding pipe. The report said the blows were to the head and that there were a lot of them, and that the pipe had bent. He remembered driving there. He did not remember anything after that, and nobody had ever got him any closer to it than the driveway.
He was here because the prison doctor wrote three pages about him and the secure hospital wrote back two words.
Not acute.
He had been at that window for eleven months.
Kovac was playing cards against himself and losing, and he talked himself through the losses in a low steady mutter that never once turned into a word Isabel could use. Ferris was asleep sitting up with his mouth open. Cheung had the good chair. Cheung always had the good chair. And Rennick, behind the pillar, watching the door.
Rennick was the one who was fine. That was the phrase people used about him. He is fine. He was polite and he spoke well and he remembered which of the staff had children and asked about them by name, and he had been refused a transfer twice, both times because he was doing so well where he was.
He was the one who had found Marchetti in February. He had walked out and got a member of staff, calmly, and everything he said had turned out to be exactly right, and afterwards he had asked whether the family would be told the truth or a lie.
That was February. That was also why the cups got taken.
Isabel wrote the count in the book. The book was the only record the ward kept that never stopped, and if you read backwards through it you could see what the place actually cared about, which was numbers and times and nothing else at all. Eleven at two. Eleven at four. Somebody in April had written down a sentence that was longer than eight words, and somebody else had drawn a line through it in a different colour pen.
The board above the desk had the admissions for the week. Isabel closed her mouth and breathed in through her nose and copied the lines into her own notebook. Then she shut the book, signed off, and went to the staff room.
She put her coat in the locker. Not her locker. There was no her locker. They did not give you your own until you had done a year, and Isabel had done a year in April, and nobody had updated the list, and she had never asked. Asking would have meant saying out loud to another person that she was planning to stay.
The monitor in the corner was on with the sound down.
...advising residents in the area that the individual is considered dangerous...
The locker shut with a bang.
"I told ya to clean the tables."
Hui was small and bald and had a moustache he had grown in some other decade. He stood in the doorway holding his mug against his chest. He cleared his throat down into it, a long wet pull, like something being dragged out of a drain, and then he turned his head and spat on the floor next to the bin, missing the bin.
Isabel looked at him.
"I did," she said.
"No, ya didn't. I looked. Spots were still theah." He drank from the mug. "Did ya clean 'em with the cahtains shut again? Ya cahn't see nothin' with the cahtains shut. That's the whole point of the cahtains."
"I'll do it tomorrow. My shift just ended."
"Do it again." He pointed at her with the mug. "We ain't havin' Rennick go off 'cause the spots turned into a buncha ninjas comin' to kill him. That's on you, kid. Not me. I ain't writin' that one up."
Isabel put a hand through her hair. It was weak now. More of it came away in her fingers than used to.
"Okay," she said. "I'll clean."
"Good," he said. "Rookie."
Nobody liked Hui. But Hui had been at Achilles for twenty-two years, which made him a veteran, and you respected the veterans, and that was the deal, and there was no version of this ward that ran without him in it.
Well. Achilles was not the place people were frightened of. People were frightened of the wrong building. When they heard about a place like this they thought of thick walls and murderers and a man behind glass being asked clever questions by a detective.
Achilles was not that. Achilles was the waiting list.
It was where the state of Massachusetts put the men it had run out of words for. The courts would not keep them because they were considered ill. The other institutions would not take them because they were not ill enough, and because they were full anyway. Their families could not be found, or could be found and did not answer. So they came here, and here they stayed, and their paperwork moved from one desk to another desk at a rate of roughly nothing per year.
The rejects. That was the word. Staff said it in front of them.
Isabel pushed open the day room door and started on the tables, and behind her, down the end, somebody was awake and knocking.
Isabel’s apartment had two rooms, which was one more than she needed. She was twenty-eight and single. She did not have children and she was not going to have any.
The phone rang as she came off the ramp and she put it through the car.
"I thought you were going to ghost me."
His voice was not high and it was not low. It sat in the middle and stayed there, and it was restful, and she had noticed that about him before she noticed anything else.
Isabel laughed. "I was thinking about it."
She turned left. Her right leg did not like the pedal and had not liked it for months now, so she took the corner with her heel down and her toes lifted, which was how she did most things these days.
"Ouch. So when are we going on another date?"
"I don't think I'm nice company for you, Conrad."
"That's for me to decide. When are you free?"
She breathed out through her nose. "I'm not. I've got monstrous shifts all week, and Saturday I have to clean my apartment, and Sunday..."
"Sunday?"
"Sunday I work."
"That's unfortunate."
"How do you even have this much time? You're a doctor."
"Lucky for me I don't work at Achilles."
She laughed, and it came out drier than she meant it to, and then it turned over into a cough she had to hold down with her fist against the wheel until it went away.
"It's good to hear you, though. Isabel."
"I told you that you can call me Belly."
He tried it out. She could hear him doing it, the small amused hum.
"Okay. Belly. I'll leave you alone. You sound tired, so sleep well. Good luck tomorrow."
"Thank you. Goodnight, Conrad."
She hung up.
She had met him three months ago in a bar in Boston. They had kept texting and they had gone on one date two weeks back and she had not kissed him, although she had watched him decide four separate times to try. She had no reason to. She was not looking for anything.
At the apartment she went into the bedroom and put everything on the bed. Keys, lanyard, bag, coat, the notebook with the gap in it. Then she stood there for a while with her hands empty and did nothing at all.
She showered because she had to, and not for long. The water came off her grey for the first few seconds. There was a rim of something under her nails that she had not seen go in, and it came out soft and pale and she did not look at it before it went down the drain. Her hair came away in her hands in a way it had not used to. She gathered up what was in her palm and pressed it flat against the tile so that she would not have to lift it out of the drain later, and it stayed there, a dark comma on the white.
Then the mirror, for the second time that day.
She looked awful. There was a joke in it somewhere, that a man like Conrad wanted to date her, because she was not the woman he thought he was dating. If he had met her a year ago he would have been ruined about it. He would have been ridiculous. Obsessed.
She touched her lips with two fingers.
Then she thought about Hui, and her stomach came up under her ribs so fast that she had to put her hand flat on the sink and wait for it to go down.
At seven the next morning the staff stood around the ward desk for the day start, and nobody was talking, and Sister Amara had her hands flat on the book and had not opened it.
They were stressed and Belly could tell that from the doorway. She went round the seats, sat down and started taking her things out of her bag for the locker. The day start should have started. Nobody had opened the book.
Then Jo lifted her chin at her. Jocelyn, but nobody called her that.
"Belly. Come here."
She left the bag and went over.
"We are not putting somebody with under a year on that intake," Gideon was saying.
"It has to be one of us." Sister Amara said it gently. She said everything gently. It was how she got her way.
"What are we talking about?"
Jo turned to her. "Amara's got a hospital appointment today. We've got a transfer coming in at ten."
"Yeah, and Jo's been shitting herself about it since half six," Martin said.
"Fuck off."
"A transfer?" Belly looked between them. "I didn't know about a transfer."
"Because Hui sat on it." Jo spat. "They contacted him. He decided today would do. It was fucking funny to him. On his fucking off-day, asshole.”
"We do not know that he meant it that way," Sister Amara said. "And please, for the love of God, do not curse. We are going to need His blessing today."
Jo rolled her eyes at the ceiling and left them there a second longer than she needed to, which was for Amara's benefit, and Amara pretended not to see it, which was for Jo's. They had been doing this for months. Belly had once worked out that they must actually like each other quite a lot to have kept it up this long.
She licked her lips. "I can do the intake. I don't mind."
They all looked at her. Four faces, and every one of them moved the same way at the same time. That was the part she would think about later, in the car, with the radio off. Not one of them had needed a second to decide.
"That would be unethical," Gideon said.
Belly had to hold her own face still, and she was not sure she managed it. She wanted to laugh in their faces.
Unethical. Sure. She thought about the shifts that ran past what the state allowed and got written into the book as something else, and about last winter, when the skin split at the bottom of her fingers and she kept scrubbing anyway, and the bleach found the splits every single time, and not one person in this building had ever said the word ethics about any of that.
She was twenty-eight years old and her own joints woke her up at night like a baby would. They had spent a year handing her the jobs nobody else would touch, and now there was finally one that would go on a form with her name printed on it, one that would count, one she could take into an interview at a better place and say, I did this. And now, this morning, suddenly, they wanted to protect her.
"I can do it," she said. "I've assisted Sister Amara loads of times."
"Dear, this is different."
"How?"
Sister Amara paused. It was a small pause and it changed the temperature of the room.
"Because he is for one of the down the end."
So it was a he.
Well. They were all he. That was the whole building, floor to ceiling, a building full of he.
Belly ran the numbers instead, the way she ran everything. Jo could not do it, because Jo was soft with the men and Martin had made sure everybody knew that, and Jo had never got out from under it. Martin could do it and would be fine right up until the moment he was not. Gideon was kind. Sister Amara was leaving.
Which left her.
"I can do it," she said again. "I promise you I can."
Nobody answered. Sister Amara took her hands off the book and folded them, and that was how Belly knew she had won.
"His name is not on the board," Amara said.
"I saw."
"It is not on the board because it is not to be discussed. Not with the men, not with the other wards, not in the day room." She waited. "Say yes to me, dear, do not just nod."
"Yes."
"You will read the file in the office with the door shut and you will not take it out of the office."
"Okay."
"At ten." Amara picked up her coat and put one arm into it and then stopped, half in it, which was not like her. "You will do the intake in Skyros. You will not take him down the end yourself. Somebody else does that. Do you understand me?"
"Yes."
"Say it back to me."
Belly said it back to her. She felt about eleven years old doing it, and she thought Amara probably knew that and had done it anyway, which she respected a bit and resented more.
"Good." Amara got the other arm in. She stood there for a moment with her hand on the back of the chair, and she looked at Belly the way she sometimes looked at the men, from a long way off, from behind glass. "Day start is done. Any remarks?"
"No," they all said at once.
Then she was gone, and the room emptied, and Belly was on her own at the ward desk by nine minutes past seven.
She kept coming back to their faces.
Because here was the thing. They were not frightened of the men. Nobody who had lasted a year here was frightened of the men. The men had episodes, and the episodes were bad, and then they finished, and afterwards somebody sat with them and everyone had a cup of tea, except there were no cups anymore, so everyone had nothing.
And there was nothing in this building to do harm with. No cords, no glass, no hooks. Even the tables were round, because in 2011 a man smashed his head against a corner, and after that the state bought forty round tables and considered the whole subject closed.
You could get hurt at Achilles, but you had to really commit to it.
It must’ve not been a patient they were frightened of. It must be a folder, which would be worse, and also slightly ridiculous, and she was aware of that as she went and got the key out of Amara's drawer.
The office was cold and smelled of paper and old coffee. She shut the door.
The file was thick, which annoyed her before it worried her. Nineteen months of a man's life should not weigh that much, and it turned out most of the weight was the same forms filled in three separate times by three separate places, which told her something before she read a word of it. He had been moved twice already. This was the third.
Underneath the patient’s name, on the line where the form asks what other names a person is known by, somebody had typed two words inside quotation marks, and next to them in brackets was a note saying the words came from the newspapers and were not to be used by staff, in writing, or anywhere he could hear them.
The butcher.
Belly read it twice, which was one time more than she needed to. Then she put her thumb over it and read the rest of the page with her thumb where it was, and she felt slightly silly doing that, and she did not move her thumb.
The rest of the page was nothing. That was the problem with it.
He was oriented. He was cooperative. His speech was normal in rate and volume. He denied hearing things, denied seeing things, denied wanting to hurt himself or anybody else. He slept. He ate. He turned up to what he had to turn up to and to nothing else. Two doctors, six months apart, who had never met each other, had written down the same two words about him.
Not acute.
Which were the same two words somebody had written about Vasquez, and were the reason Vasquez had been standing at that window ever since. Belly had a small private theory that if you took those two words out of the English language, half the men in this building would be somewhere with a garden.
The old risk score, the one they work out from your history, was as high as the scale goes. The current one, the one they work out from the man in front of them, came back low, low, and high. The woman who wrote high had put a line underneath saying the test was not designed for this and that she was not prepared to sign a low. She did not write down what she thought instead. Belly read that line four times. On the fourth time it said exactly what it had said on the first, which was nothing.
Nineteen months. No incidents. No restraints. Nobody had put a hand on him in nineteen months, which for this population was not just unusual, it was almost unheard of. Even Rennick had been held once, years ago, and Rennick was fine.
The reason given for moving him this time was management considerations. That was it. No episode, no report attached. Somebody at a place with more money than Achilles had decided they were done with him and had written it in three words that meant absolutely nothing and could not be argued with, and Belly had to admire it a little, the way you admire a good lie.
There had been press. Enough that the form had a whole paragraph reminding staff that public interest is not medical information, which meant somebody somewhere had needed telling that, probably more than once. A television company still wanted to interview him. So did a documentary. Both had been refused and both had asked again this month.
No next of kin listed. No approved visitors. He had stopped his own mail, both directions, in writing, twice. It was the twice that got her. They had made him do it twice.
Then the last page, and the last page was where it went wrong.
There were five conditions on how he was to be kept, marked mandatory, and Achilles was supposed to sign every one of them before he arrived.
One. Single room, always. Never on an open ward, never in association.
Two. His name on no board, no rota, no handover sheet, no door.
Three. Two members of staff for all contact. No exceptions. Never one member of staff alone with him under any circumstances. Somebody had put that last part in bold, and nobody bolds anything on a form like that unless the form has already failed at least once.
Four. Every contact written down, the time and how long and both names, in the book, at the time and not afterwards.
And the fifth.
The fifth said that any member of staff who reported difficulty keeping a professional distance from him was to be taken off him the same day, with no penalty, no process, and nothing on their record.
And underneath it, in the flat way those forms note anything at all, it said that this had been used at each of the three previous placements.
Belly sat back in the chair.
She read it again to make sure she had it the right way round, because she had come down the whole page assuming she was reading a list of ways to keep staff safe from a man. And she was. And she was not. Four of them were about his body. The fifth was about their heads.
Somebody had been taken off him in every single building he had ever been in. Not one of them. All of them. And it was written into the paperwork as calmly as bedding, which meant that by the third time nobody had been remotely surprised.
She wanted, badly, to know what those people had actually said when they went to their supervisor. There would be no record of it anywhere. That was the entire point of the fifth condition, and she understood that, and she resented whoever had designed it, because it was clever.
She went back to the front, to the box where Achilles was supposed to have signed before he came.
It was empty.
Then she went to the very back, where they staple the photograph, because by now she wanted to see him, and there was a clean rectangle of paper and four little holes where the staples had been.
Somewhere across three places and nineteen months, somebody had taken it out. It was not marked missing. Nothing anywhere said it was gone. There was just paper.
Belly sat with the folder open on her knees in a room with the door shut and no clock in it, and she understood that she had read the whole thing and had never once found the part that said he was dangerous. Nothing in the file said it. Everything in the file was built around it.
At twenty to ten she read the fifth condition again.
At ten to, she understood that it was not a warning about him.
At five to, the buzzer went on the outer door, and she jumped, which she was embarrassed about, and there was nobody in the room to see it.
So. A killer.
She had worked that out somewhere around the sealed schedule and the newspapers, and the file had never once had to use the word, which was very Achilles of it. A killer who in nineteen months had not raised his voice, missed a meal, or been touched by anybody.
And now she was going to sit down opposite him and take his history. Tick the boxes. Insight, remorse, mood, affect. There would be a word for him at the bottom of the form and the word would be clinical and it would go in a box and the box would be filed, and the filing was the entire point. That was what this place did. Belly had once watched Amara file a death.
Alone. Which was the one thing the file had said in bold that she must not do.
She stood up, and her right leg came up half a second after the rest of her, the way it did now.
Out in the corridor Gideon pointed at the interview room without saying anything, and past his shoulder she watched the two transport officers walking away already, fast, not talking to each other. One of them was peeling his gloves off as he went and pushing them into his coat pocket instead of the bin, which is a small thing, and which is also not a thing anybody does unless they have decided to be somewhere else very soon.
Gideon put his hand on her arm.
"I mean it. If you can't do it, I'll do it." He would not look at the door. "Peer pressure is real, Belly."
Peer pressure. Like she was fifteen and being offered a cigarette behind a gym.
She looked at him and thought, not for the first time, that she had no idea how Gideon had survived six years in this building. He was kind and he was soft. An idiot.
Then she noticed his hand on her arm was shaking, only slightly, and that he had positioned himself so that he would be standing directly outside that door for the entire hour whether she wanted him there or not. So she revised her opinion of him by about a degree, which she would forget again by lunchtime, and which she would remember properly in about six weeks.
"I'll be fine," she said, and went in, and pulled the door shut behind her.
The room was the same as every room in the building. A round table. Two chairs bolted through the floor. A window with the frame flat against the wall, grey even light coming through it.
He sat with his head down.
All she could see was hair. Curls, blond, dark at the roots and dirty at the crown.
She could smell him from the door. Not filth. It would have been easier if it were filth. It was institutional, which is worse, because it is not the person's fault. Laundry washed too hot too often until the cotton goes sour and stays sour. Sleep on skin. The flat metal breath of a man who has been in a van since six in the morning with nothing to drink.
His hands were on the table in front of him, open, palms down, fingers spread apart. Somebody had taught him to sit like that. To show the other person he was harmless.
"Good morning. My name is Isabel Conklin and I'll be doing your intake today."
Nothing.
She went to the table and sat down and put the notebook in front of her and the file next to it, and squared them both up.
Then he spoke. Quietly, and in no hurry at all. He did not lift his head.
"You read my file."
"I did."
"When?"
"I finished it a few minutes ago."
"That isn't what I asked." Still down at the table. "When did you start?"
Belly's eyebrows came together. "Why does that matter?"
"Because I need to know how prepared you are."
"For what?"
And he looked up.
His face came up out of the curls and she got all of it at once, the jaw and the mouth and the eyes, and the eyes were blue. Blue enough that her mind, stupidly, supplied sky.
Belly heard her own breath go in. And half a second behind it, cold, all the way down her back, came the fifth condition.
Any member of staff reporting difficulty keeping a professional distance is to be reassigned the same day, without penalty and without process.
She opened the notebook to a clean page and clicked the pen and did not answer his question, and she was fairly sure he noticed that she did not answer it, and she went on anyway.
"I'm going to ask you some questions. Some of them are going to seem obvious. I have to ask them anyway."
"Okay."
"Do you know where you are?"
"Achilles." He paused. "Is that what it's actually called, or is that just what people call it?"
"It's what it's called."
She wrote oriented to place and did not look up.
"Do you know what day it is?"
"Tuesday. It was Monday when they came for me. They kept me overnight in a holding suite in Worcester and there was a window in it." He said it the way another man would give you directions to a petrol station. "Second window in six months. First one was in a van."
Belly put the pen down.
"You don't have to give me the extra details."
"You'll want it eventually. Trust me."
The heating came on behind the wall with a knock and then a long sinking sigh, the way it did four times a day, and the smell in the room moved with it.
"Any thoughts of harming yourself?"
"No."
"Any thoughts of harming anybody else?"
"No."
"Do you hear or see things that other people don't?"
"No."
"Do you take any medication?"
"They stopped it fourteen months ago because it wasn't doing anything. Nobody has restarted it. I think nobody will."
"Why not?"
"Because the only reason to restart it would be to have something to write down." He tilted his head a little. "You can put no."
She put no.
Her handwriting had gone small. She noticed it and could not make it go back to normal size, and after a moment she stopped trying, because trying was worse.
Belly had done eleven intakes. All of them next to Amara, none of them on her own, and every single one of those men had come off the form inside the first minute. They wandered. They refused. They answered a question she had not asked. They cried, or they got angry, or they told her about a dog they had when they were nine, and it was always a dog, she had never once had a cat.
This was the first intake she had ever done where the form was being filled in from the other side of the table.
"Can I ask you something?" His hands had not moved once since she came in. "Did they tell you to do this, or did you ask?"
"I don't see how that is relevant."
"You asked."
The heating knocked again.
"Mr Fisher."
"Jeremiah."
"Mr Fisher. There are two more sections and then somebody will take you down to your room."
"Down the end," he said.
Her pen stopped. "Where did you hear that?"
"One of the men who brought me in."
He watched her take it. She could not tell, and she means this honestly, she could not tell whether he was answering her question or showing her something.
"He said it to the other one on the way through the doors. He said, that one's for down the end. The other one said, thank Christ."
"That isn't what it's called officially."
"I know. He didn't say what it's called." He looked at her. Patient. "That's why I said it. And you confirmed it for me."
Belly's stomach turned over, and made no sound, thank God.
"I'm not doing anything to you, Isabel." He nodded slightly at the card clipped to her chest with her name printed on it. "I'm going to be here for the rest of my life. I'd like to know the name of it."
Her leg had gone. She had been sitting with the right one folded under the chair without noticing, and the wire pulled tight from her heel all the way up to her hip, and she shifted her weight, and he saw her shift. His eyes went down to the level of the table where her knee would be, and came back up.
"Section two," Belly said. "Family."
"None."
"I have to ask it properly."
"I know you do."
He settled back a fraction. The chair did not move, because it was bolted through the floor.
"Ask it properly and I'll answer it properly," he said.
Belly looked down at the form.
Section two. Family and social history. Parents, living or deceased.
"Your mother," she said.
"Dead."
"When?"
"When I was six." He said it without any weight at all. "You'll want to know how, and I'm going to tell you, because if I don't tell you now somebody will read it to you out of a summary in three weeks and it'll sound worse. She had an aneurysm in a supermarket. I was with her. She was buying bread."
Belly wrote that down in detail because it wasn't in his file.
"Your father."
"Alive, probably. I haven't seen him since I was eleven." A pause. "You can put unknown."
"Section two continued," Belly said. "Siblings."
"None."
There were nineteen more questions in section two. Belly asked them all, and he answered every single one of them properly, exactly as he had promised, and at no point in the next twenty minutes did he say anything she could have written down as a concern.
At twenty past ten Gideon knocked twice on the door and did not open it, which was the signal, and she said "one minute" through the wood, and Gideon said "okay" and stayed where he was.
Belly closed the notebook.
"That's the end of the sections. Someone will come and take you down."
"Down the end," he said.
"Yes."
"Not you."
"No. Not me."
She stood up and she gathered the notebook and the file and turned to the door.
"I'll be in confinement," he said, behind her. "Will the schedule be explained to me, or am I going to be left in there like a madman waiting for a human being to come to the door. Isabel."
She did not turn around. She stood with her hand near the door and she hummed once, low, the way she did when she was buying herself a second.
"In confinement the seniors bring you your food and they eat it with you."
"Interesting."
She could hear him smiling. Then she left.
Gideon was exactly where she had known he would be, half a step from the door with his back not quite against the wall, and he came off it too fast when she came out.
"How did it go?"
Belly looked at him.
"It went perfectly fine.”