Still Bleeding (A Jack Nightingale Short Story) Read Free Page B

kitchen
table while she made tea. It was covered with a white plastic cloth
and there were half empty bottles of Heinz ketchup and HP brown
sauce standing in the centre.
    ‘How is Ben?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘As right as rain,’ said Mrs Miller. ‘Dr
McKenzie says he’s never seen anything like it.’
    ‘Dr McKenzie?’
    ‘Our GP. He’s taken care of Ben since he was
a baby. Lovely man. He’s Tracey’s GP too. He says it’s a miracle,
what happened to Ben.’
    ‘It sounds like it,’ said Nightingale. ‘But
he was treating Ben, right? Giving him medication and stuff?’
    ‘He was, and he
was helping us deal with the hospital,’ she said. ‘But Ben was
getting worse. He’d lost all his hair, bless. Then…’ She shrugged.
‘It was a miracle. It really was. There’s no other word for
it.’
    ‘Can you tell
me what happened, Mrs Miller?’ said Nightingale. ‘I only know what
I read in the newspaper.’
    Mrs Miller
turned away from the kettle and folded her arms. ‘It sounds crazy
when I tell the story,’ she said, ‘A lot of kids wouldn’t play with
Ben when he was sick. They thought they could catch it from him.
Ignorant parents didn’t help either. But Dave and Carla were
different, they were more than happy to let Ben play at their
house. He used to spend hours over there. Tracey would go through
her schoolwork with him, helping him make up for the lessons he’d
missed. She’s an angel.’
    The kettle
switched off and she poured hot water into three mugs and popped in
teabags. ‘Then about two months ago, the thing happened.’ She
prodded the teabags with a teaspoon.
    ‘The thing?’
said Jenny.
    ‘The stigmata.
Ben came back and said that Tracey was bleeding. I thought maybe
she’d hurt herself when they were playing so I went around. She had
these wounds on her hands and her feet and another in her side.’
She patted her own side. ‘There was blood but not a lot. And Tracey
said they didn’t hurt.’ She fished the teabags out of the mugs,
dropped them into a bin and took a carton of milk out of the
fridge. ‘Dave and Carla were frantic, of course. They rushed Tracey
to A&E and they bandaged the wounds and gave her antibiotics
but other than that they didn’t seem to know what to do. The doctor
said she’d never seen anything like it. I think Carla was worried
that they might call in social services.’
    She put the
mugs down on the kitchen table with the carton of milk and a bowl
of sugar cubes. ‘Help yourself,’ she said, sitting down. She used
her fingers to drop four sugar lumps into her tea and then slowly
stirred it with a white plastic spoon. ‘The next day, Ben went
around to play. I said he should leave her be for a while but he
didn’t have anyone else to play with so he just kept on nagging.
Well, that evening when Ben came back he was all excited and saying
that Tracey had seen an angel.’
    ‘An angel?’
said Nightingale.
    ‘I think she
meant the Virgin Mary but the family isn’t religious and I think
Tracey was just confused. Ben said that the angel had cured
him.’
    ‘He said
that?’
    Mrs Miller
nodded. ‘He said that the angel had told Tracey that the cancer had
gone. We thought it was ridiculous, of course. Maybe they’d been
watching a DVD that had given them ideas or something. We told Ben
not to be so stupid and to go to bed. But from that day on he
started to get better. It was as if the leukaemia had gone into
remission, Dr McKenzie said. Then it was gone. Like he’d never been
sick. Dr McKenzie said he’d never seen anything like it.’
    ‘You said Dr
McKenzie also treated Tracey?’ said Nightingale.
    ‘He went around
to their house every day after the surgery closed to change her
dressings,’ said Mrs Miller. ‘But the bleeding didn’t stop. That’s
when a journalist found out about Ben and came around to write an
article. The paper printed the story and then all sorts of
journalists started coming around. TV, radio, the papers. They