Control
Karen’s lithe frame was a blur of luminous running gear in the Manchester morning gloom. The path flew beneath her feet as Beethoven’s Symphony Number 6 resounded in her ears. She barely registered the park surrounding her, or the soft February rain cooling her face as she concentrated on keeping pace with the music.
She left the park behind and ran along the busy road outside. Spotting a gap in the traffic, she raced across without breaking stride. Her iPod was set to shuffle and, as she powered up the hill, the track changed to Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, spurring her to increase her speed. She arrived at the clinic and went around to the side entrance before checking her time. Fifteen minutes, twenty. ‘Excellent’, she murmured. As she began stretching to warm down the door opened and her receptionist’s head appeared around it.
‘Morning Miss Ashley. Do you need anything?’
Karen shook her head, hiding her annoyance at being spotted. She liked to keep her staff on their toes by arriving unannounced. ‘James in yet?’ she asked curtly.
‘Yes, he’s been here since eight. First patient’s in at nine.’ The door again as Karen smiled to herself. Anthony had looked nervous and that pleased her.
**********************************
James heard Anthony’s footsteps coming down the corridor towards the staffroom. ‘I was right. She’s in,’ the receptionist affirmed as he entered. James rolled his eyes, took a big gulp of coffee and puffed on the inhalator in his left hand. He withdrew it from his mouth in disgust.
‘God I need a real bloody fag!’ He threw it on the floor and crushed it with his shoe. His face fell as he realised what he’d done. Have to get another one now, he thought.
James hadn’t wanted to give up smoking but Karen had given him an ultimatum. Give it up or find another job. That was three very long weeks ago. It wasn’t the first change she’d forced him to make either. During the past two years of working for her he’d come to realise what a manipulative bitch his boss could be. His friends wondered why he put up with it but the truth was he was in love with her and had been since she’d interviewed for the job. Unfortunately for him, Karen knew it and used his feelings to control him. She also paid him much better than any other dental hygienist he knew. He’d become used to the lifestyle that his income allowed and didn’t want to give it up. ‘S’pose I’d better get ready for another day in paradise,’ he grimaced.
He slouched down the corridor to the glass door of the surgery. He pulled the door open and went in. The walls were stark white, as were the units that lined it. In the middle of the speckled blue and grey floor was the chair, big, blue and imposing. As James set about ordering everything as Karen required, he turned the radio on. Radio bloody Three! He had to put up with classical music all day long. In a small act of rebellion he re-tuned it to a pop station.
**********************************
Karen swiped her keyfob over the security lock, opened the door to the clinic and made her way to her private rooms at the back of the building. She went into the bathroom, stripped and stepped into the shower. There she allowed the hot water to purge her body of the combined sweat of her recent exercise and the previous night’s sex. As the water cascaded over her, memories of that night flickered through her mind.
It had begun with the nightmare dinner she’d endured with her parents. Even after all this time they insisted on maintaining a relationship with her. It was a waste of all their time. She didn’t and couldn’t love them. If they’d just understand that it would be easier for all of them. She’d left early, her mother in tears and her father incensed, and gone to a bar where she picked up a guy. They went back to his flat and she gave him the night of his life. She had no doubts about that. She was very talented and imaginative in bed. At 5 a.m. she left silently to avoid any chance of awkward emotions or goodbyes. The taxi she’d booked the night before while he was in the bathroom was waiting outside. Once home, she’d changed into her running gear and run in to work. And straight into Anthony. The thought of her receptionist pulled her out of her reverie.
She stepped out of the shower and admired herself in the mirror as she dried. She looked nearer twenty four than the thirty four she actually was. Her five foot eight body was toned with an all-over tan and there were no traces of lines on her face. A product of the rigorous moisturising regime she’d followed since she was fifteen. She put on her underwear before blow-drying her expensively cut and coloured blond hair and applying the minimal make-up she wore for work. Then she donned her turquoise scrubs and walked down the corridor, past the Waiting Room, to the surgery.
Her approach was greeted by the awful sound of James’s voice singing along to Westlife. She opened the glass door and n obviously startled James quickly re-tuned the station to Radio Three. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t sure how long you’d be. Karen nodded slightly, acknowledging the apology, as Sarah Walker’s voice introduced Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 21. She checked the surgery was ready for the day ahead. Satisfied, she allowed James a smile.
‘Right. Who’s first?’
She treated a succession of scared adults with their yellowed and broken teeth, fillings, and diseased bleeding gums. Her excellence and skill were reflected in the success of the practice. Once they were in her chair her patients were under her control, she loved that. She manipulated their actions through her commands, she designed their environment, and she educated them by forcing them to listen to classical music. All the while correcting the messes they had made of their mouths.
With the last patient treated she left the surgery, changed her clothes and left the clinic. Her Le Mans blue BMW M3 was parked outside. She opened the door and climbed into the driver’s seat before shutting the door with a satisfying thunk. Luxuriating in the leather seat she started the engine. Its purr combined with Le Nozze di Figaro as the Blaupunkt kicked into life. Then she drove, just drove, cocooned in her beautiful possession.
When she finally got home there was an angry message from her father on the answer machine. In between the expletives the gist of it was that she wasn’t to upset her mother like that again. What did it matter though? In a few years they’d be gone from her life completely. The last ties cut. Everything finally arranged as she wanted it. She went to bed and slept soundly.
*******************************
Karen was running to work. The iPod was set to shuffle and Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 26 in D Minor was playing in her ears. Racing through the park she didn’t notice that the morning gloom was beginning to cede to March’s promise of spring. Approaching the road she spotted a gap in the traffic and ran across without breaking stride.
That’s when the car hit her.
She rolled over the car bonnet unable to understand what was happening. Unable to control what was happening.
She was tumbling. Legs in the air. Body sliding across the car bonnet. Face smashing against the windscreen. The wide eyes of the driver staring back at hers. How had she misjudged it? She felt herself slide off the car, onto the road. Then nothing. Then sirens, blue lights, pain. Then nothing. Then someone talking to her, an oxygen mask on her face, a needle in her arm. Then nothing. Then strip lights passing over her head, figures in scrubs around her. Then nothing. Then blinding lights above her, the beeping of a heart monitor. Then nothing.
*******************************
Jack Ashley sat at his daughter’s bedside. Unable to look at the broken and bruised figure lying in the bed, he stared out of the window at the people lounging on the grass outside in the late July sunshine. As his wife talked with Karen’s doctor, memories of her childhood flooded his mind.
Karen was unexpected, a miracle. They’d been through so many miscarriages. The doctors said there was nothing they could do and they’d stopped trying. Stopped doing it at all, really. Then one night he’d gone to the pub and got pretty pissed. When he came home he’d basically forced himself upon his wife. He was so ashamed. But then Kay got pregnant and all was forgiven. The months of the pregnancy crawled by as they feared the worst at any moment. The birth was difficult but when they saw her it was the fulfilment of their lives. The small, pink figure wriggling in his wife’s arms meant everything to both of them.
Karen’s childhood in Newcastle had been such a happy time. Tears crept into his eyes as he remembered the little girl who used to throw her arms around him and say ‘I love you daddy’. They took so many photographs. Yet the little girl pictured in them, the child who had been so close to her parents, was unrecognisable from the adult she became.
From the outset Kay doted on her. Everything Karen wanted, she got. Did they spoil her? Is that why she turned out this way? When she was fourteen she started distancing herself from them. She became secretive and withdrawn, spending most of her time in her bedroom and developing that weird obsession with classical music.
Still, she excelled in school and college and went to the School of Medicine and Dentistry in Aberdeen. It seemed as though she couldn’t put enough distance between them and her. She came home less and less between terms. By her final years she didn’t come home at all. When she qualified she moved to Manchester to practice and Kay, unable to accept that their daughter didn’t want to be near them, insisted they move to be close to her. So now they lived in this strange city, trying to reconnect with her while she rebuffed every attempt, further smashing her mother’s already broken heart.
He forced himself to look at her. Four months had passed since the accident. Though she was no longer on a ventilator, tubes still fed into and out of her arms. She had regained consciousness but was unable to move or communicate with them except with her eyes. Jack deliberately avoided her gaze fearing what he would find there. The doctor was saying something and he tried to focus in on it. ‘So you see the damage to the spinal cord is permanent. She’s almost completely paralysed. There’s also an issue with brain damage that’s affected her speech. It’s similar to the effects of a stroke.’
‘And there’s no chance of recovery?’ his wife’s voice was surprisingly calm and controlled.
‘She may recover her speech in time but she’ll spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I’m so sorry’
‘We’re taking her home. I’ll care for her’. Jack recognised the tone of delight in Kay’s voice as she spoke.
*******************************
Kay sat in the kitchen of their house in Moston, spoon feeding mashed up vegetables into Karen’s mouth and wiping away the excess each time. ‘There you are dear. Eat up; we’ve got to build your strength up’ she cooed, smiling at her daughter. During the last two months Kay had felt happier than she had in years. Her daughter’s voice answered with an unintelligible squawk. Kay heard what she wanted to hear. ‘Yes, I know love, Mam’s cooking is the best.’
She looked at the clock, a quarter past twelve. Jack would be in work until five, plenty of time to go to the park. ‘We’ll go out soon. A nice walk and some fresh air will do us both the world of good. I think we’ll go and feed the ducks’. She smiled at her daughter, oblivious to the anger blazing in the eyes that stared back at her. Fate had brought Karen back to her. She was Mam again. That was all that mattered.
*****************************
Karen knew the path through they were taking through the park only too well. It was her old running route. This time she was fully aware of her surroundings. The crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels of her chair. The crisp coolness of the late October day contrasting with the way the sun warmed her skin. The skeletons of the trees blackened against the azure sky with their yellowed leaves lit golden by the low sun. Most of all she was aware of her mother’s voice, wittering inconsequential nothings. She had no control anymore.
They reached the lake. Her mother parked the wheelchair by a bench and sat down. ‘There we are. Nothing better on a day like this.’
Karen screamed ‘Let me go. Kill me, if you really love me like you say you do then kill me. I can’t live like this. I can’t take anymore of you, you bitch. Just kill me.’
‘Yes dear, I’ve brought some bread. We’ll feed them when I’ve had a rest. What about some music? I’ve brought the radio with me.’
Kay turned the radio on. Karen listened in growing horror as a voice said ‘Next up, Westlife and Flying Without Wings.’
Karen began screaming again.
