Free This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell Page A

closed-end pyjamas, they pose with their gloved hands clasped cutely under their chins, they gambol about on lawns, apparently unaware that they have been buttoned into a paediatric strait-jacket, from which they will be unable to free their hands without adult assistance.
    ‘I mean,’ his father is saying, as he gives the grinning girl patches of dermatitis around her mouth and down her neck, ‘how difficult would it be to find a model with actual eczema? To feature a kid who genuinely needs this stuff?’ He moves on to the children on the lawn, adding hives and infected staphylococcus spots 20 all over their legs. ‘Instead they insult us by implying the condition is unphotogenic, unpalatable. It’s hypocrisy of the most heinous kind. Why should we, of all people, be forced to look at this crap?’
    He is working fast, graffiti-ing each poster in turn. He does it methodically, working from left to right. The boy in the buttoned scratch sleeves is acquiring a nasty inflammation on his torso, reaching right down to the wrists; a baby next to him now has oozing lesions on its neck and ankles.
    Niall sits on his chair, clutching his gyroscope, riveted, appalled. ‘Dad.’ He whispers this to his father’s back, terrified that a nurse might hear him, stick her head out of the door and see his father engaged in this activity. What would happen if he was caught? Would he go to jail? Did that happen if you graffitied hospital posters?
    ‘Yeah?’ his father booms, without turning, evidently unworried about alerting any passers-by.
    ‘Dad,’ Niall whispers again, the word barely formed in his mouth. ‘Don’t.’
    ‘Relax,’ his dad says, pen lid gripped between his teeth. ‘There’s no one about. These things have had it coming, they really have.’
    ‘Please don’t.’
    At the sound of footsteps in the corridor, his dad steps away from the wall, hops over the table and sits down. Niall is finding he can breathe again when a nurse opens the door. He sits upright, alert, ready to rise. Help, is all he can think. Help is here, at hand, on the way.
    But the nurse walks through the room without glancing at them and disappears into the corridor.
    Niall feels his eyes fill, feels the burn take hold. His hands spring upright of their own accord and begin to tear at his neck in a sawing motion, back and forth, across the skin of his throat. The feel of it is an exquisite, forbidden, torturing release. Yes, he tells himself, you are scratching, you are, even though you shouldn’t, but how good it is, how amazing, but how dreadful it will be when he stops, if he stops, if he can ever end it.
    Next to him, he can hear his father searching his pockets for something, lotion or spray, whatever he can reach first. Then he is putting his hands over Niall’s, getting his fingers between Niall’s nails and his neck, but Niall is not letting go, not permitting him entry, he cannot stop, he cannot, his neck is clasped by a ring of fire, a dementing ruby necklace, and he must tear it off or scratch down, until there is nothing left of his skin, until he reaches bone and sinew and maybe then, only then, will the itching stop.
    His father has forgotten the posters. Niall feels this. His father is holding him tight. Niall can smell his aftershave, feel the soft blue of his shirt. It is half embrace, half armlock. His father is getting control of his arms, his hands, forcing his fingers down. Niall can feel this happening and he is strong, he knows, especially when the itch is upon him, but his father is stronger. Niall is fighting, kicking, struggling. He can hear a voice somewhere, crying, no, no, let me go, get off me. His father is saying, it’s OK, it’s OK, over and over, into his hair, and at the same time he is manhandling Niall across the room, kicking open the door to the treatment ward and calling out: can somebody help us, please, my son needs to be seen, he can’t take it, he can’t take it a minute longer, please, can