Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

clear skies and sunshine. They’d camped out in a barn quite similar to the Whalsay Bod. The team was full of oddballs and eccentrics and Hattie had felt wonderfully at home. Here, she was no weirder than the rest of them. In the evening they went to the pub and drank pints of beer and rolled home singing.
    The site had been surrounded by fields of ripening corn and her first view of Paul had been of him striding down the side of a field towards them. He’d been wearing a yellow T-shirt, slightly ripped at the neck. Because of the angle of the field she hadn’t been able to see his legs. He was a bull-necked, blunt northerner quite different from anyone she’d ever met before. None of her mother’s friends were so forthright or so rude. So this is what all the girls at school were going on about, she’d thought. Paul Berglund had become her obsession. Later, when she returned to London she lost her mind completely. She found herself unable to sleep. The events of the summer continued to haunt her. Images flashed into her head with the jagged brilliance of a drug-induced trip. Again she couldn’t bring herself to eat.
    She’d been admitted to an enlightened NHS psychiatric hospital that ran a residential unit for teenagers. She supposed her mother had pulled strings to get her in. By that time she was hardly aware of what was happening. The stated cause of admission was the eating disorder, which had become the focus of her mother’s concern. An eating disorder was fashionable, almost commonplace among the children of the high-powered women with whom Gwen James worked. But quite simply, Hattie thought she’d been mad. She developed paranoia, heard voices again, this time loud, controlling, battering into her brain. She couldn’t trust anyone.
    The unit had twenty-four beds and had an old-fashioned emphasis on talking and shared activity. They took pills too, of course, but the other treatments seemed just as important. The place was run by a nurse called Mark who was a little overweight, with a soft doughy face and thinning hair. Perhaps his unappealing appearance was part of his strategy. He was so sympathetic that if he’d been at all good-looking all the young women would have fallen in love with him. As it was they could treat him as a favourite uncle or adored older brother. Hattie had regarded the unit as her sanctuary. She still considered some of the other patients as her friends. She had few others.
    Mark had taught her strategies for avoiding stress and for taking control. He told her she wasn’t to blame for what had happened, but that she found harder to accept. He encouraged her to put her thoughts into words. When she first left home for university she’d developed the habit of writing a weekly letter to her mother. A letter was less demanding than a phone call, but it still kept Gwen off her back. Now, in the unit, she continued the practice. There was nothing of any importance in the letters – certainly she didn’t confide in Gwen as she had in Mark – but she enjoyed passing on the details of life in the hospital. Her mother replied with chatty notes about the House, anecdotes about the neighbours in the Islington street where Hattie had grown up. Letters seemed their most effective means of communication. In their letters they could persuade themselves that they liked each other. Stranded in the unit, Hattie looked forward to receiving them.
    She was discharged from hospital in the middle of the autumn and came home to prepare for her return to university. Her tutor was understanding – she was so bright, he said that she’d have no problems catching up with the academic work. On the last day of October her mother drove her back to the hall of residence and left her there, Hattie thought, with some relief. Now Gwen could return to her real passion, politics. She convinced herself that the stay in hospital had cured Hattie for ever. The illness would never come back.
    Now Hattie knew she had developed another obsession. She’d returned to Whalsay full of hope and dreams. Then Mima had died and everything had become more complicated. Perhaps she was ill again, though she didn’t recognize this as depression. She was suffering from the same symptoms as before – the difficulty in sleeping, a reluctance to eat, the inability to trust her own judgement – but it didn’t feel at all the same.
    It had been very different when she’d first arrived back in Whalsay. Then the summer