Of course he hasn’t. Why would he? Because I haven’t quite finished my story, haven’t quite finished laying out all the facts and dates and key information. I haven’t told him the last worm-ridden, maggot-infested nugget of truth.
‘You know, Michael, on this day above all others, I wish this hadn’t happened. I wanted to remember my mum fondly. To look back on her life with love, knowing she wasn’t perfect, but also knowing she did her best for me. I wanted to do that on the day of her funeral … but, well, I don’t think I’m going to be able to.
‘I still know – part of me knows, anyway – that everything she did, she did because she thought it was for the best. To protect me. But she lied to me – and so did my dad. Both of them lied to me.’
He frowns, and finally forces himself to ask: ‘What about, Jess? What did they lie about?’
Chapter 8
Summer 2003
There is a tiny garden outside the hospital. More of a courtyard, really, with bushes that are failing to thrive in this small, shaded space, and cracked paving stones where ever-hopeful shoots of weeds bravely reach for the sky.
It’s mainly used as a smoking area, even though smoking isn’t allowed. The staff turn a blind eye, and both patients and visitors sneak out here, surreptitiously skulking beneath the draped curtain of the sole weeping willow, puffing away.
Jess is sitting on a metal bench, next to her mother. Ruth is perfectly turned out in her tweed skirt and small-heeled shoes and matching handbag. Her hair is sprayed into place, and only her grey eyes give any indication that she is distressed.
By her side, Jess is small and shrivelled and pale. Her hair is flat to her head, greasy and lifeless, and she wears over-washed jogging trousers, bra-less beneath her baggy T-shirt and the dressing gown she has wrapped around herself. It’s a warm day, but Jess always seems to feel cold – always trembling, always weak, like a vampire snuck into her bed at night and drained all her energy.
Ruth glances around, eyes widening at the woman in the corner of the courtyard, who is standing with her face to a bleak concrete wall, talking loudly to herself.
‘It’s OK,’ says Jess, seeing her expression. ‘That’s Martina. She’s all right.’
‘You’ll be moving soon, Jess,’ she says, briskly, averting her gaze from Martina’s bobbling head and frantically waving arms. ‘We’ve found somewhere nicer for you.’
Jess understands what she’s being told, but it doesn’t provoke any kind of reaction. She still has a flimsy grasp on the world around her, and isn’t entirely sure if it’s not all a dream. Everything feels hazy and unreal, seen through a mist of cotton wool and strange colours.
Sometimes she thinks her legs don’t work any more, and has to stay in bed as she will fall to the floor if she tries to walk. Sometimes she watches the repeats of Frasier on the television hoisted high up on the wall of the ward, and thinks Dr Crane is her psychiatrist. Sometimes she thinks perhaps she is a ghost, and nobody can even see her.
What she rarely feels is upset, by any of these things. She is a dream patient on a busy and demanding ward: she does not fight, she does not self-harm, she does not scream through the night or urinate in public or attack the nurses or accuse them of carrying out government-sponsored drug trials on her. The loudest thing she ever does, barely registered by the staff, is quietly sing a sad-sounding song to herself: something with the words ‘Baby, I Love You’ over and over again.
She has been in this place for two months now, and the anger at being brought here by the strange people who invaded her home has faded. Everything has faded, and she has become resigned to the routine of her days.
She takes her medications, and listens to the doctors, and silently survives. She accepts that she is swaddled in her new world, that it’s wrapped around her so tight it’s almost smothered her memories of the old world, and that for the time being, maybe that’s for the best. The old world hurt too much.
Then, every week, her mother comes to visit. She brings Jess perfume she doesn’t use and magazines she doesn’t read and snacks she doesn’t eat. What her mother never brings is the answer to the question that she asks repeatedly.
‘When is Joe coming to see me, Mum?’ she says, feeling the familiarity of words she has used before, like a muscle memory. She’s asked this question already, she knows – possibly weeks ago, possibly minutes ago, she’s not sure. It might be that she’s never asked, just thinks she has. Or that it’s all she has said for years. Time doesn’t seem to work the same way now.
Ruth’s mouth purses tightly, her lipstick running into tiny wrinkles in the stretched skin around it. She takes her daughter’s hand.
‘Oh, my beautiful little girl,’ she says, stroking her lank hair back from pale skin, assessing her in the way that mothers do. Seeing the dullness in the eyes, the cheekbones piercing through weight loss, the slow blinking of a person twice-removed from the world around them. ‘What have we done to you?’
Jess accepts her touches, feeling neither comforted nor repelled by them. She licks dry lips, and says again: ‘When is Joe coming to see me, Mum?’
She thinks she might have asked this before, but she still isn’t sure.
Her mum composes her face into a look that even now, Jess recognises as her Serious Talk face. It’s good that she can recognise the Serious Talk face. Or any face at all.
When her mum first started visiting, it was harder than this. Everyone was sad or angry or scared and nobody knew what was going to happen next. Some days Jess didn’t know who her mother was, and other days she did know, but still wouldn’t talk to her. Wouldn’t talk to anybody, still furious with them all, sure they wanted to hurt her.
Now, she’s told by her psychiatrist, the crisis point has passed, and from now on things will start to get better – she will start to get better. There will be a lot of work to do, though. The doctor keeps saying this, as though it’s something Jess can solve by simply being more industrious and trying harder.
So now when her mother visits, she knows who she is. She knows there is a lot of work to do. She knows her mother is going to tell her something important. She knows she needs to pay attention, to drag her sluggish and bruised mind awake. Her mother has put on her Serious Talk face, and she must listen.
Her mother starts to speak, and in that moment Jess remembers that she thinks she saw Joe, some time before now. Perhaps a day ago, or a month. She thought she saw him outside a window, outside her new world, trying to get in. She thought she saw him dragged away by the big men who guard the portcullis, who operate the drawbridge, who feed the crocodiles that live in the moat. But she can’t be sure.
‘I think he came, Mum,’ she says flatly, staring at the weeping willow. ‘I think he came but he couldn’t get into the castle.’
‘No. Joe didn’t come, Jessica. And Joe isn’t going to come,’ her mother says, looking at Jess, staring into her eyes, as though she is willing her to understand. Sit up straight, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention – this is a Very Important Announcement.
Jess sits up straight, stabbing her fingers into the fleecy fabric of her gown, wrapping them up to keep them warm.
‘He isn’t coming?’ she asks, to prove that she’s alert. That she’s being good, and doing what she should. If she’d always been good, she wouldn’t be here, would she, in this place?