Sandra didn’t sack her. Either Graham hadn’t rung, or he had thought better of telling the manager what Bee had actually said, because Sandra didn’t even mention him when Bee clocked back in that night. Sandra had other worries: the boiler pressure was dropping, snow was forecast heavy again after midnight, and Arthur Kell was dying.
Bee knew it the moment she walked into Room 4 at quarter past eight.
Arthur’s eyes were half-open, fixed on the ceiling plaster, his breathing long and bubbling with ten-second gaps between each draw. His niece from Skipton had been there in the afternoon, Sandra said, and had gone home at six before the moor road closed, promising to come back at first light.
“He’ll not see first light,” Bee said, wetting a pink foam swab in water to moisten his cracked lips.
His pocket watch on the table had stopped at four-fifteen; nobody had wound it. Bee picked it up, gave the crown twelve slow turns until it ticked again, and laid it back by his water jug.
She stayed with him whenever the other bells allowed. At two in the morning, the snow came down hard, blotting out the security lights in the car park. By three, Lauren was down on the ground floor settling Mrs Vance, who was wandering the dining room looking for her school satchel.
At 03:08, Bee stood up from Arthur’s bedside to go to Room 9.
Arthur’s fingers, cold and light as bird bones, twitched against the cotton sheet and caught the hem of her tunic pocket.
He didn’t open his eyes, couldn’t speak around the rattle in his chest, but the grip on her pocket held.
Bee looked at his grey face on the pillow. Then she looked through the door glass towards the nurses’ station down the corridor.
03:10.
Click-buzz.
The orange 9 lit up on the board.
And in the same breath, without Arthur’s hand moving an inch from her tunic, the switch above his own head gave a sharp snap. The amber light over Room 4’s door flared on. On the panel outside, 9 and 4 blinked together.
Bee stood between the bed and the door. If she left him to sit in Room 9 for forty-two minutes, Arthur would die alone in the dark while she was fifty feet away talking to an empty mattress. If she stayed here and left Room 9 unanswered, Edie would come down the hall to fetch the company he had promised her.
Bee looked down at Arthur’s spotted hand holding her pocket. Nobody died alone on her shift. Not while she had two feet under her.
She didn’t press the cancel button above his bed. She let the buzzer drone, pulled the plastic visitor’s stool up tight against the mattress, not the green vinyl chair in the corner, which she left where it was, and sat down, taking Arthur’s dry hand between both of hers.
At 03:15, the strip light outside in the corridor flickered twice, buzzed like a hornet, and went out.
Only the emergency bulkheads remained, casting a sickly, underwater green glow along the ceiling coving. Out at the desk, the call panel began to click.
Click-buzz. Click-buzz. Click-buzz.
Not one every five seconds tonight. Fast, like fingers drumming on a table. Eight, seven, six, five, ten, eleven, twelve. Within half a minute, every number on the board was burning solid orange, the buzzer screaming in a flat, unbroken chord that vibrated through the floorboards.
At the end of the landing, the heavy fire doors swung back against their magnetic catches with a simultaneous thud. In its brick shaft, the hydraulic lift began to whirr. The iron rope groaned as the empty cage rose slowly from the ground floor, stopped at the top landing, and slid its doors open onto the dark passage.
The cold came down the corridor.
Bee heard it before she felt it: the wooden doors of Rooms 8, 7, 6, and 5 creaking fractionally in their frames as the air pressure dropped outside. The glass in Room 4’s vision panel clouded over with condensation on the corridor side.
Arthur’s breath hitched. A long gap: ten seconds, twelve, fifteen. His chin tipped back on the pillow, his eyes rolling towards the corner where the green vinyl chair sat waiting.
“No, you don’t,” Bee said aloud. Her voice sounded loud over the scream of the panel. She gripped Arthur’s hand harder, rubbing her thumb across his knuckles to keep the warmth in them. “You stay right here, Arthur Kell.” She looked up at the half-open door, where the smell of lavender talc was pouring into the room like smoke. “And you, Edie. You cannot have him! He’s not yours to take! I rang your lad, do you hear me? Somebody’s coming!”
The door of Room 4 swung slowly inward, pushing against the carpet pile until it touched the rubber doorstop. Nobody stood on the threshold, yet the green emergency light from the ceiling seemed to bend around a small, stooped space in the doorway, four feet eleven inches high.
In the corner, the vinyl of the armchair gave a slow, quiet creak, as if weight were settling onto the cushion.
Arthur let out a thin, rasping sigh. His fingers slackened in Bee’s palm.
Then two white beams swept across the ceiling plaster.
They came through the uncurtained top half of the sash window, swinging wide across the snow-covered conifers on the drive, throwing the wet black bars of the window frame right across the empty vinyl chair and the foot of Arthur’s bed. Outside on the steep hill, tyres spun and caught on the salted grit, an engine revving hard in second gear.
The creak of the vinyl chair stopped.
Down the hall, Bee heard the front security buzzer go, three frantic presses, and then Lauren’s hurried footsteps running through the downstairs hall to let someone in. A minute later, heavy shoes came pounding up the main staircase, taking the steps two at a time, bypassing the open lift.
Graham Garside came through the landing fire doors with wet snow melting in his thin grey hair and his overcoat open. He looked sixty-five and tired, his face blotched red from the wind and something worse than the wind. He stopped dead under the green emergency lights, staring at the screaming orange panel at the desk, then down the long corridor to where Bee leaned out of Room 4’s doorway.
“Down the end,” Bee called out to him over the buzzer. Her voice was steady. “Last door on the left. Go on.”
Graham didn’t argue. He didn’t ask where Sandra was or why the lights were out. He walked past Room 4 without looking in, his wet coat brushing the dado rail, and his breath came out in ragged white clouds as he walked right through the bank of cold outside Arthur’s door.
He pushed the door of Room 9 wide open and went inside.
Bee didn’t leave Arthur. She stayed on her chair with his hand in hers and listened.
From the far end of the corridor, through two open doors and sixty feet of freezing air, she heard the springs of the bare profiling bed give a heavy squeak as Graham sat down on the edge of the blue waterproof mattress.
For a moment there was only the whine of the call panel and the wind in the chimneys. Then came a man’s voice, muffled by the walls, thick and broken and years too late.
“I’m here, Mam,” Graham said into the cold room. “I’m sorry. I’m right sorry.”
Above Arthur’s bed, the amber light went out.
Out at the nurses’ station, the orange bulbs on the call panel died one after another. Twelve, eleven, ten. Four, five, six, seven, eight. The screaming buzzer dropped to a single note, held for three seconds on Number 9, and clicked off into silence.
In the ceiling outside, the strip lights gave a dull ping and flickered back on to their normal yellow hum.
Bee looked down at the bed. Arthur’s chest rose under the blue striped pyjamas, took a long, steadying draw of warm air, and let it out without a rattle. His fingers closed weakly around her thumb.
“Thought that was the down train,” he whispered, barely audible.
“Signal’s against it,” Bee said, and wiped her cheek on her shoulder before he could see. “Go to sleep, love. It’s only half-past three.”
* * *
Arthur didn’t die that night. By Friday morning he was sitting up enough to complain that the day-shift porridge had lumps in it, and he lasted right through into the second week of March, when the snow had gone off the lower fields and the rooks were building in the sycamores by the gate. He went on a Tuesday afternoon at twenty past two, with the window open an inch to let the spring air in and Bee, who had swapped a night for a day shift to cover sickness, sitting beside him reading the cricket scores out of the paper. He went easy, between one sentence and the next, with his watch ticking on the table.
Joan Pickles moved back into Room 9 two days after that night and slept like a log until her fortnight was up. The bell never rang on its own again.
On that Thursday morning in February, though, before Bee put her coat on to walk down the slushy hill to the bus stop, she had waited until Graham Garside came out of Room 9. He had stayed in there until quarter to five, sitting on the bare mattress with his head in his hands. When he walked past the desk, his eyes were red-rimmed and dry, and he gave Bee a single, awkward nod without speaking before he went down the stairs into the dark.
At seven o’clock, while the day staff were putting the toaster on, Bee had taken the grey hardbacked Night Shift Communications & Bell Log book out of the desk drawer. The agency lad three weeks ago hadn’t bothered filling in the manual book; he had just left the computer printout to speak for itself.
Bee clicked her black biro, turned to a clean line at the bottom of the page, and wrote in her neat, square hand:
Room 9. Bell rung 03:10. Answered.
Before she left the corridor, she walked down to the end and looked through the open door of the empty room. Grey morning light was coming through the tall sash window off the moor. The radiator under the sill was knocking softly as the heat came back up through the pipes, and beside the bare headboard, the white nylon cord hung straight and completely still against the wall.