The Rosary Garden by Nicola White (best books to read now TXT) 📕

Ali was staring at a metal bin, fixing on it as a still point that would save her from nausea, when the door swung open and the doctor from The Late Late Show walked in, Dr Beasley, a determined smile on his face. This couldn’t be right, thought Ali, her queasiness banished by the shock of seeing him here, the dawning realisation of what an examination might entail. She reached out for her folded clothes, but the nurse was already carrying them to the far side of the room.

‘Hello, Alison. Quite a different setting we meet in this evening.’ He pulled on some thin rubber gloves that the nurse handed him. ‘Did you enjoy your television experience?’

She remembered him stuttering and irritable, under Mary’s barrage.

‘Not really.’

He worked the gloves down between his fingers. ‘I’m surprised. If you would be so good as to lie back and relax?’

‘Wait,’ said Ali. ‘I need to talk to that policewoman.’ But Considine had vanished from the doorway.

‘It’s seven o’clock in the evening, I’m sure we’d all like to go home soon.’

‘I don’t think I want to do this right now. I don’t feel well.’

‘It won’t take long. The Gardaí need the information to do their job, that’s all. Nothing personal.’ He pulled over a curtain, blocking out her view of the door.

She was lying back now, following the nurse’s orders to put her feet flat on the bench, to bend her knees. She felt her will give way, a falling sensation.

Beasley stood to one side of the bench, level with her waist. He kneaded her stomach and asked her about sex. How often she had it. Not if.

‘Not often. Three times is all.’ Beasley raised his eyebrows and waited, as if another answer might follow. Ali said nothing.

‘Okay, so when was the last time you had sex?’

A flash of herself rolling around in the van, Ivor laughing and reaching for her hips. She couldn’t say last night.

‘A while ago – a few months ago.’

‘Hmm.’

He moved down the bench, asked her to part her legs a bit. She felt his cold rubber fingers on her, poking. She looked right into the bulb of the big lamp that hung over her until black blobs obscured her vision. The nurse handed him something metallic. As he put it inside her, she felt it as angular, cold as ice. The blood drained from her head and saliva pooled in her mouth. Then he did something that made it push her apart inside. It wasn’t sore exactly, but it felt wrong, like something that happens just before something very painful. Her whole body felt tense as bone. The stretch became an ache.

She glanced down and saw that he was leaning right over her with a torch, looking inside her, his brows clamped in concentration. Minutes seemed to pass.

‘Please …’ Ali said.

In answer, he raised one rubber-clad finger, indicating she should wait a moment, never taking his eyes from his task.

Ali looked beyond the light to the white tiles that covered the ceiling, the galaxy of tiny holes that perforated each of them. She imagined she could float up and crawl into one of those small holes, hide away in the darkness there.

She was aware of something scraping her inside, of sticks and swabs being dropped into plastic bags and vials.

‘What are you doing?’ Her voice came out shaky.

Dr Beasley sighed elaborately. ‘Alison, if I do a full range of tests now, the police will have all they need and you won’t have to come back to me.’

They left her lying there, a cold draught across her naked thighs, while they went to the other side of the room and muttered together with their backs turned.

At last he came back, released the pressure and took the instrument out of her. He dropped it into a dish on a trolley beside him.

‘You shouldn’t be let near anyone.’ Her words were brave, but her voice still wavered.

The nurse came over to the bench as Beasley retreated.

‘The doctor is just doing his job. If you don’t like it, you should have thought of that before you did what you did.’

This woman knew nothing about her, nothing. Ali stood up, inches from her.

‘What is it you think I did, you stupid cow?’

The nurse looked round, but Beasley had left. She flared her nostrils and clamped her mouth, gathering the roll of paper towelling from the bench.

‘That’s for the Guards to decide, darlin’,’ she said finally, stepping on the pedal of the bin so hard that the lid clanged against the wall.

23

Swan set off for the hospital the minute Considine phoned. He met his wife coming up the garden path, her blue overnight case in her hand.

‘Better?’ he asked.

‘So-so,’ said Elizabeth and bent away from him to tickle the cat who was lying on the hot dirt of the flowerbed.

As he started the car he realised she might have been referring to herself, not Aunt Josie. But there wasn’t time to go back and check.

The hospital was strangely deserted, fluorescent light falling in the empty corridors, dusk pressing at the windows. At last he spotted Considine looking through a door into a room beyond. He called her to him.

‘The gynaecologist’s in with her,’ she said.

‘Did you get the one the pathologist recommended?’

‘No. Goretti Flynn gave me a name, says he’s very well regarded – Donald Beasley.’

‘Beasley. The name’s familiar all right. Well done.’

‘The staff said we could make use of an office down here.’

She led the way to a side room. The lighting tubes rattatted on, revealing two Formica tables and a scatter of chairs. Health-service posters lined the walls: a smiling skeleton with a red heart hovering in its ribcage; an old man sitting beside an electric fire with a Thermos flask on his blanketed lap. Dominating one corner was a humansized cardboard cutout of Postman Pat.

‘How’s our girl?’

‘Looking a bit shook – she said something about a friend committing suicide. I didn’t know whether to believe her.’

‘But she agreed