Crushed

by Kate Hamer

  She begins cutting through the narrow arcaded street, the shop windows glinting on either side. The huge ancient paving stones cool in the shade.

  I hurry after her.

  ‘Getting to you in what way? How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ We’re out by the Roman Baths now. Pockets of steam drift by. ‘Do you remember my swim there?’

  ‘That was a crazy thing to do. Nutter.’ I manage to make it sound affectionate. We walk for a bit in silence.

  ‘Do you want to know why I really took off just then?’ she asks.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘I saw them, Lucas and his wife with a pushchair. I saw them inside one of the shops. She was trying on an ugly pair of sandals.’

  ‘Lucas?’

  ‘Mr Jonasson.’

  Instantly, my jaw clenches so I have to push the words from behind my teeth. ‘Oh, that’s what you call him now? You haven’t seen him again, have you?’ It feels like a fruit stone stuck in my throat. Somehow we’ve found ourselves down a side alley and she’s leaning up against the ancient stone wall. It’s dark in here. I feel like pressing into her, squashing her against the wall.

  ‘Lucas wanted to …’, she pauses and bites her lip ‘… meet me.’

  ‘What?’ I’m trying to keep my voice down. ‘You can’t be serious, you really fucking can’t. You’re not going?’

  She blinks at me. ‘No, I don’t expect I will. My mother’s in hospital.’

  ‘What?’ It’s all coming too thick and fast for me. I don’t know what to believe and what not to believe.

  ‘She had an accident. A car accident. I made it happen. It was all my fault.’

  ‘Phoebs. I’m sure it wasn’t. That’s what you said about that awful murder and it’s nonsense. I’m sure—’

  ‘No. It was. Things are leaking out.’

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’

  ‘Yes. I think so but not for a week or two. It means I’ve practically got the whole house now, like Rapunzel. It’s wonderful.’ Her face lights up.

  I don’t answer. I guess my response must be in my face, though.

  ‘No, don’t tell me off. She’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. It’s just I’m enjoying being by myself for a while. That’s all.’

  ‘Phoebe, don’t meet Mr Jonasson.’ I don’t trust her at all.

  ‘I won’t.’ She shrugs and balls her fists into her coat pocket and looks over to the baths. ‘D’you remember what we talked about before, about this place actually being hell?’

  ‘Yes.’ I don’t tell her how it’s infected my mind and made me see everything differently – the angels frantically scurrying away from it. How people must’ve felt when they first found that hot spring bubbling from the ground, like it was a portal into another world. The red ruptured rock around it. Only an hour ago everything seemed so crystalline and perfect. A study in beauty. And now I’m seeing hell again.

  ‘Bath is definitely hell,’ she says airily. ‘But since I’ve had time to spend on my own I think I’ll be able to escape. Especially as everything’s working out.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘With our wishing bowl things coming true. I am Queen of the House now, just like I wished for.’

  ‘Phoebe …’

  But she’s started moving away and I can’t help it; I look up to the dangling angels and I feel sick and dizzy.

  ‘Phoebe,’ I call. ‘I think I need to sit down.’ The nausea is the background to my days now, like ever-present static, and I block my mind to why I think that is. The consequences are too awful. I need all this to go away. For a moment I have an overwhelming and pointless urge to flee my own body.

  She turns back. ‘OK. Let’s go to one of those stupid little tea rooms where the waitresses hate us for being so young.’

  We find one, the black-and-white building so old the beams on the front slant to one side and the walls inside are at higgledy-piggledy heights. The tables are all full so we wait in the hallway, peeking through the serving hatch with its boxes of tourist leaflets and dried flower display to see if anyone is near to finishing. The waitresses are all elderly – I’d never have noticed that without Phoebe saying – with formal black-and-white uniforms and curled grey hair.

  ‘Let’s have an expensive cream tea,’ Phoebe whispers. ‘Then we’ll just eat some of it and leave the jam spoon in the cream so it’s all stained red, and crumble the scones over the tablecloth.’

  ‘What’s the point of that?’

  ‘They’ll hate it that we’re so spoiled. They were made to eat everything when they were young. At school dinners they had to eat fish pie that stank, even if it meant staying after the bell rang and having to hold their noses. I’ve heard.’

  Her eyes are shiny and she looks so naughty I can’t help smiling. Soon, though, we begin to get restless. Even though quite a few people have finished they stay put, chattering at their tables, despite Phoebe peering pointedly at them through the stalks of the dried flower display.

  We find an American diner-style place further down towards the railway station and Phoebe orders an ice-cream concoction full of strange colours – blues and purples. Amazingly she digs her spoon in and begins eating. Normally she pushes everything away. I watch as she lifts the long-handled spoon and lets the melting crystals fall on her tongue, the unnatural colours staining there.

  ‘I could live this way forever,’ she says. ‘I don’t even feel any need to enhance it. You know, with substances.’

  ‘Have you done it again?’

  ‘Oh yes. I did an experiment in our house when Mum and Dad were there. I put it on my tongue and just left it there.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was going to whip it out. It was just for the danger of it – knowing what could happen and then stopping it – but it went wrong. It melted really, really quickly and then there was nothing I could do.’

  I put my hand over my mouth. ‘Oh no, Phoebe. That’s crazy.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes are snapping at the memory. ‘I was terrified. Mum can tell if I’ve just been to the toilet, let alone that.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I sneaked out. I knew I’d get a bollocking for leaving the house without telling anybody but what choice did I have? I couldn’t let her see me like that. I walked around town all day.’ She reaches over and lifts my coffee cup to her lips and takes a sip. ‘All day. At one point I was mooching along and I looked over the other side of the road where, where—’ she’s finding it hard to say, ‘the thing where there was, you know, blood on the walls, and there were all these faces in the wall staring at me. It was horrible.’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes, I wonder what’s the point in doing it if it’s not going to be nice?’

  She loops her hair back over her ears and carries on as if she hasn’t heard me. ‘But you know the really freaky thing? I walked the same way about a week later and there really were faces in the wall. Sort of gargoyly things.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Walcot Street where, you know, it happened.’

  ‘Oh God, yes. I know.’

  ‘And I thought, only in Bath. Only in Bath are there really faces in the wall.’ She sits back.

  ‘So what happened when you got home?’

  ‘Nothing. She wasn’t there. Her and The B … Verity, they’d gone out to the theatre or something so I just went to bed and tried not to think about the faces, although I wasn’t very successful because I kept seeing them again all night.’ Her face crumples around the edges.

  A group of boys we know come and sit at the table right next to us even though the place is empty. They are a couple of years younger but I can feel how emboldened they are by being in a group and the emptiness of the place. I sip my coffee, trying to ignore their eyes roving over us while Phoebe sits licking her spoon.

  ‘What shall we do now?’ she says, wiping her mouth. ‘We could go back to mine and drink brandy.’


  ‘What about your dad?’

  ‘He works on Saturdays too. The house is empty.’ She pats her mouth with a napkin with a delicacy that’s opposite to the way she ate the ice cream.

  I hesitate. The chill her house gives me is deep. It takes a couple of hours to defrost back in my own house. I don’t think I can face it. Besides, the brandy would make me feel even sicker.

  The boys next to us have increased in volume. They want our attention but there’s a bullying aspect to it too, as if they want to compete, to crush us. A balled-up paper napkin bounces onto Phoebe’s bare arm and rolls across the red Formica of the table top. There’s crowing, as if a bullseye has been hit; comments, just on the point of being too low to hear but which judging from the reaction of the crowd – the stoppered laughter from the others – are sexual in some way. How easily I feel overwhelmed by it; my cheeks blooming red, I try to turn my face away so they won’t see. But when I glance at Phoebe she looks on fire. She’s staring at them full on and something has happened to her face: it’s transformed, pulled about so I barely recognise her as the girl that was sitting opposite me a few moments ago.

  Then she says this thing that makes me gasp, that makes me sure that if I’m ever seen alone by them they will have their hunted wolf revenge on me.

  She hisses it so loudly even the man behind the counter spins round to look.

  ‘If you don’t shut up right this minute I’m going to make sure your cocks drop off.’

  24

  Grace

  Today at the hospital it is not like before. Today is joyful. Instead of the usual hurt and painfulness of the routine examinations, where everything gradually seems to get a little bit worse, this day Mum laughs and jokes with the nurses. She smiles at the doctors. They look on in amazement.

  I smile calmly as she describes how all the numbness has gone. How she is back on her feet, slowly at first but with increased confidence. She beams as she talks. When the time comes to examine her and she turns to me and says, ‘Grace, why don’t you go downstairs and get yourself some chocolate and a magazine.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. I’m always here for her examinations.

  ‘Go on. I’m perfectly all right to be left, chicken. It’ll be nice to think of you eating chocolate and reading Hello for once.’

  So I smile and say, ‘OK,’ and she takes a tenner out of her purse and gives it to me. And I can see how she enjoys this, this giving me money out of her purse like we’re a normal mother and daughter, and she enjoys all the doctors and nurses seeing her do it.

  I practically float down the corridor.

  I leaf through the magazines in the shop and I am, I’m having a good time. This simple act seems so decadent, so wasteful in terms of both time and money there’s a delight in it, even though I don’t recognise even half of the characters on the covers who have either put on, or lost, great amounts of weight; have cheated on or been cheated on by their boyfriends; or been on a holiday that turned out to be disastrous or the ‘holiday of a lifetime’ or the holiday where husband and wife were finally reconciled and managed to fall in love again after their marriage was on the brink. I wonder what my life would look like plastered across the cover of one of these magazines and I smile at the thought, even though I could barely imagine what it would look like, and at the same time I sense someone next to me and seem to recognise their smell.

  ‘Hey.’ Phoebe leans in.

  ‘Oh. What are you doing here?’ It’s flustered me seeing her here and I’m reluctant to have my little enjoyable bubble burst.

  ‘My mum’s upstairs. She’s had an accident.’ She flips a piece of gum from a packet towards me. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Oh, no thanks.’ I shove the magazine back on the shelf. ‘Oh my God. Is she OK? What happened?’

  Phoebe shrugs and pockets the gum. ‘Want to go for a walk?’

  ‘Um, I suppose so.’ I don’t really want to but I’m pulled by convention because something bad has happened to her.

  She’s wearing an old man’s raincoat that reaches her ankles and it billows behind her as we walk through the main doors.

  There are little eddies of rubbish in the corners of the building as we take the concrete path; cigarette ends squashed flat and crisp packets, their colours faded and bleached. Phoebe is striding ahead and I’m reluctant to follow. The line that attaches me to Mum is getting thinner being so far apart. She might be nearing the end of her examination now.

  ‘Phoebe, hang on a minute.’

  She stops and twirls round. ‘What?’

  ‘I haven’t got long. I need to get back upstairs. Look, let’s sit on this bench.’

  I’m tired. I wonder if I’m unfit. She seemed to race ahead with so little effort yet I feel almost breathless. I suppose I’m stuck in so much and I need to stop smoking.

  ‘So, what happened?’

  She takes a band out of her pocket and sweeps her hair up and snaps it into a ponytail.

  She shrugs. ‘A bump in the car. She’s going to be fine.’ Her face stiffens, then loosens up again. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I can’t help myself. ‘It’s Mum, she’s doing brilliantly.’ I lean forward. ‘Brilliantly. I mean walking and standing and holding.’

  ‘Wow. That’s incredible.’ Her eyes widen. ‘Really, really incredible.’

  ‘I know. The doctors are looking at her now. I don’t think they can believe it. I mean really.’

  ‘Amazing. Amazing.’ She’s muttering to herself.

  ‘Yes, and after …’ I can’t help it – tears clog up behind my eyes. It’s a release of tension I suppose. ‘… after everything, when I thought she could die. I’ve never seen anyone look so broken.’ I dash a few tears away with the back of my hand, angry with myself for giving in like this, especially in front of Phoebe. Weirdly for someone who is usually all eyes she seems to have barely noticed. She’s nodding and leaning towards me. I remember about her mum. ‘Sorry, I should be asking about you. What happened?’

  She sweeps her arm. ‘Like I said, just a bump in the car. Not much harm done really. Mum’s in a neck brace but, you know, she’ll be all right in the end. But d’you know what the really interesting thing is?’

  ‘What?’ I hunt around in my pocket for a tissue, find one and blow my nose.

  She puts the tips of her fingers together and props her chin on the point.

  ‘Really, really interesting.’

  ‘Yes?’ I’m getting fed up with this now. I’m getting that feeling again of Mum being a minuscule bug with tiny, tiny insect breath she’s so far away, even though I know that’s not right and insects breathe out of their backs or something.

  ‘Remember the wishing bowl day? Remember us making our predictions, saying what we wanted?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘No, I mean think about it.’

  I really don’t want to go into that – not with my stupid paranoia after Mum’s accident, where I practically convinced myself I’d caused it by wishing our situation at home was all over and done with. It’s all ridiculous, garbled nonsense. I was in such a state. I believed it was all my fault in ways I couldn’t even start to count.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? And I really am pressed for time, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got to get back.’ I half rise and she puts her hand on my arm and pushes me down again. God, I am weak.

  ‘No, don’t go. Think about it. We made predictions – you wanted your mum to get better and she is. I wanted to be Queen of the House and now I am. We made it happen.’

  ‘So I really did ask for her to get better? You remember that?’

  ‘Yes. Look, and now she is.’

  ‘Phoebe, hang on a minute. We were off our faces that day. It’s got nothing to do with anything.’

  I want to get up again but I look at her with her eyes flashing and think of her pushing me down again. I need to get away from her.

  ‘Hold on.’
She screws her face up. ‘What did Orla predict for herself? I don’t remember.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ I use her preoccupation to stand up. ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘It’s true.’ She waves her arms about. ‘It really is.’

  ‘OK, perhaps it is. We’ll have to talk about it another time, though.’ I turn and walk away as fast as I can because I get the horrible feeling she’s going to run after me and jump on my back like a giant spider or something. By the time I get to the main door I’m panting. I dare to look back for the first time and she’s still on the bench. From what I can see from this distance she’s immobile, staring at the ground.

  Upstairs I still feel jittery from what’s just happened. If only she hadn’t seen me in the shop I’d still be cruising in my serene little bubble. I make the effort to shake her off like a coat and it partly works. There’s the impression left on my arm from when she grabbed it, so I brush it away and that falls off too like a skein of old cobwebs falling to dust on the floor.

  I’m just heading back to the clinic when I see Miss Kinsella hanging around by the nurses’ station. I try to turn round but it’s too late.

  ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Hey, I’ve been waiting for you.’

  There’s sheaves of papers and files shoved under her arm, like she’s got a busy day and she’s squeezed me in between meetings and other appointments. I instantly wonder how I can take advantage of this and hurry her on her way.

  ‘Hi there,’ I say, slowing right down and ambling towards her.

  She shifts the files about under her arm in a bid to make them more comfortable. ‘Grace. I was hoping to catch you.’

  ‘I think I’m needed back now. Mum must be nearly ready.’

  She puts her hand on my arm exactly where Phoebe had hers and I have to fight the urge to shrug it off. ‘It won’t take a minute, honestly, and I have come down here specially and waited.’

  I halt, wondering if she’s been jogging this morning. There’s a healthy glow from her again that shines out in the sickly hospital atmosphere. I wonder if she jogs to counteract this place and I store up the idea, that there’s stuff like that you can do to help things, for future reference.