Never Ending Read Free

name-tag says – escorts her into an examination room that smells of antiseptic and is so clean and shiny Shiv feels grubby just setting foot inside. The slender, fair-skinned nurse, with wispy blond hair and ice-blue eyes, barely looks out of her teens.
    “You get to examine me?” Shiv asks.
    “Don’t worry, I wear surgical gloves for the really intimate stuff.”
    Her tone, her smile make it clear this is a joke, meant to ease the tension. Shiv fixes her with a look. Nurse Zena reminds her of a water nymph in a picture book she had as a child.
    “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Shiv tells her. “Physically, I mean.”
    Zena hands Shiv a gown and indicates a changing area behind a screen. “Blood pressure, temperature, heartbeat, weight, blood sample – that’s all it is. Oh, and you pee into a bottle.” She pauses, smiling again. Friendly. “You do that bit in private.”
    After the medical, Shiv is escorted to the main building, to her room on the second floor. She has an en suite bathroom to herself. She’s one of six residents, she’s told: four female, two male, aged from thirteen to seventeen.
    That word again. Residents . Not patients.
    Shiv will get to meet them all at dinner, her escort says.
    Alone in her room, she heaves the suitcase onto the bed, opens it and begins stowing her clothes in the wardrobe and the drawers underneath. She’s always done this whenever she goes anywhere. First job: unpack.
    Her brother never unpacked, content to pull clothes from his case as and when he needed them.
    The suitcase is the one she took to Kyritos. Of course; it’s her only one. She must have known it while she was packing to come here, but the realisation has only just struck her. The flight labels have long been removed but the red ribbon she fastened to the handle for easy identification on the luggage carousel is still attached.
    Shiv considers untying it, throwing it away. In the end, she decides to leave it.
    The room is OK in a functional kind of way. As well as the wardrobe and narrow bed, there’s a not-quite-comfy-looking brown armchair – IKEA, at a guess – and a small chest of drawers. The furniture is pine-effect, the walls and ceiling plain white, while the curtains and carpet are patterned in yellow and brown swirls, to match the duvet and pillowcase. It puts her in mind of chocolate sponge and custard. A print of lollipop-shaped trees hangs on one wall.
    It’s like a room in a cheap hotel.
    Her determination to be optimistic, to go into this with the right attitude, shudders as the “other” Siobhan, the girl who wants to smash things, rears her head again. It’s an effort to ignore her, but Shiv manages. Centres herself. Focuses on the bedroom, on the window, which is ajar, a breeze pushing half-heartedly at the curtains. From some way off comes the plaintive, lonely cry of a pheasant.
    She wants to speak to Dad.
    The loss of her phone, the lack of a signal even if she still had it, only sharpen the urge to call him. Not that she knows what she’d say.
    The phone was switched off the whole way here and she hasn’t checked for messages since breakfast. As usual, there weren’t any. She’s had it a week, since that journalist somehow got hold of the number for the old one, and she has only let a few people have the new number. Dad, Mum, the counsellor, Laura and Katy. Neither of her friends has made contact. OK, so they’re out of the country – Laura, kayaking in Colorado; Katy, touring Italy with her folks in that huge camper van. Too busy having the time of their lives to type: hey shiv how u doin? Those end-of-term hugs and tears and miss-you s; the promises to keep in touch. Yet, when school broke up, Shiv got the impression Laura and Katy were secretly relieved not to have to see her for the summer. Or speak to her.
    But, then, she hasn’t contacted them either. They don’t even know she’s here. Her “best” friends have no idea how she’s doing. All the talking