by Gwyneth Rees
Martha waited until we got to the entrance to the departure area before she started blubbing. She kissed him goodbye nicely enough and then, when he started to walk away from us, she ran after him and Mum had to go and prise her away while she wailed, ‘Don’t go, Daddy!’
I was the only one who managed not to cry.
Martha was still sobbing as she walked between Mum and me back to the short-stay car park. ‘Martha, listen . . .’ I said, putting on my most grown-up voice ‘If Dad was going to die soon, you’d want to go and see him again, wouldn’t you?’
‘Is Daddy going to die?’ Martha gasped.
‘For God’s sake, Daniel!’ Mum snapped. She turned to Martha. ‘Of course not, darling. Nobody’s going to die.’
‘Except Grandma,’ I reminded them.
Mum glared at me again.
On the way home, Mum tried to cheer Martha up by offering to stop and get her an ice cream. When that didn’t work, she suggested we went to the pet shop right now to choose the goldfish Dad had promised to buy Martha when he got back.
Martha stopped crying pretty quickly and started to choose names for her goldfish.
I started to feel worse, though. Now that Dad was gone, there didn’t seem much point in being brave any more, since I’d mainly been doing it for his sake. I waited for Mum to come up with an ice-cream-and-goldfish equivalent to cheer me up, but she didn’t. I guess she thought I was too old to need it.
A few days later I had my first close encounter with Mum in school. So far I had seen her only in assembly. The Year Sevens had assembly twice a week. Sometimes Mum took it and sometimes it was the deputy head. I had cringed in my seat the first time Mum had taken it, but she hadn’t said much except welcomed us to the school and read out some announcements. A few of the kids in my class had looked at me when she started speaking and I was glad I’d persuaded her to wear her soft green woollen suit instead of the horrible brown one which makes her look frumpy. I had reminded myself to tell her that she didn’t look fat at all in that green suit, except for maybe just a little bit round the hips.
The day started off badly when Mrs Lyle gave us back the essays we’d handed in at the start of term – the ones we were supposed to have done over the summer. I had spent forty minutes on mine the night before it was meant to be handed in – I’d just never been able to take it seriously right from the start – and I should have known I’d live to regret it.
‘Daniel MacKenzie!’ Mrs Lyle paused as she sailed up and down the aisles dropping English exercise books on desks with a flick of her big bony wrist. ‘This is not what I would term – or indeed what most teachers in this school would term – an essay.’ The way she said most made me wonder if she was having a dig at Mum – insinuating that Mum must have let my essay pass as an essay in order for me to have given it in like that. ‘I would call it a paragraph,’ Mrs Lyle continued, as some of the other kids started to snigger. ‘And a fairly short paragraph at that. Would you care to read it out to us, Daniel?’
I froze. My mouth had gone dry. I felt like my throat had turned into a huge lump of concrete and I didn’t see how I could squeeze any words through it even if my life depended on it.
‘Well?’ From the look Mrs Lyle was giving me I was starting to think that my life did depend on it. After what seemed like an eternity, she said, ‘All right then. Perhaps it might be a good idea if you redid it and this time wrote something that you wouldn’t be too ashamed to read out to the rest of the class.’
I nodded, gratefully closing my exercise book as she picked on someone else.
At my old school we’d once had to write essays imagining we were loaves of bread and my teacher had joked that my imaginary encounter with a bread-slicer was the most spine-chilling of the lot and that maybe I should become a writer of horror fiction when I grew up. After that she’d always written little encouraging comments at the bottom of my essays like, ‘Well done! Another surprise ending!’ or ‘Great story but I could hardly read some of it – watch the handwriting!’
I felt like I had turned into a different person here – someone who wasn’t popular with the teachers at all and who couldn’t write anything.
‘Right, all of you,’ Mrs Lyle said loudly. ‘I have to leave the classroom for about twenty minutes and while I’m gone I want you to read quietly. No talking. Those of you who haven’t got books can choose one from the reading box at the back of the room. Our new head teacher, Mrs MacKenzie, is in the room next door, filling in for Miss Barnes, who’s off sick today. I’ve asked her to listen out for any noise. So make sure there isn’t any!’
I felt like my stomach had been yanked upwards and rammed against the lump of concrete in my throat. Mum was next door. Mum was going to come in and tell us off if there was any noise. The thought of it made me want to throw up. Especially as she was wearing her horrible brown suit today – the one that made her look really strait-laced and schoolmarmish. And I hadn’t checked this morning to see if she was wearing some decent shoes or the clumpy ones she sometimes wears when she thinks she’s going to be on her feet all day.
As soon as Mrs Lyle had gone, lots of people in the class started to whisper. Some pulled out books to read. I started flicking my rubber about my desk. Calum – the boy who had asked me about Mum on my first day – came and stood directly behind me. I froze, feeling my lips go dry as I waited to hear what he was going to say now. But he wasn’t there to speak to me. He was after Abby.
‘Hey, Abigail . . . What did you write for your essay? On the first day of my summer holidays my mum said, “I know, let’s go to the pub. You can have a can of Coke while I knock back a bottle or two of whisky . . .”’
‘Shut it, Calum,’ Abby snapped, jumping up and heading for the back of the room to join the people who were congregating around a large cardboard box full of books.
I got up quietly and followed her. I know it was pretty cowardly of me, but I couldn’t help being a bit relieved that Calum was picking on Abby instead of me.
‘Hey, I picked that up first!’ Abby protested as Calum slipped up behind her and snatched the book she was holding from her hand.
‘So?’ Calum teased. ‘You should’ve held on to it tighter, shouldn’t you? The way your mum holds on to her whisky bottle!’
Some of the others sniggered and Abby’s face went bright red. ‘GIVE!’ she snarled, trying to grab the book back.
‘MAKE ME!’ Calum was laughing. A few other people started to laugh too. I secretly prayed for them to be quiet. The last thing I wanted was for Mum to hear us. Why had Mum promised Mrs Lyle that she’d listen out for us when she knew this was my class? It wasn’t fair! She’d promised me she wouldn’t embarrass me! How did she think I’d feel if she marched in and started yelling at us?
‘Hey, Daniel, get out the way!’ Calum was shoving me to one side to get back to his seat.
‘That book is really boring,’ I told him, which was the truth. I’d got it out of the library last summer and it had taken me ages to get through it because there were loads of boring descriptions of mountains and stuff, and hardly any bits where people said things. Those are my favourite bits in books – the ‘direct speech’, Mum calls it. I can just whizz through books when I like the characters and they talk a lot.
‘Oh yeah?’ Calum obviously didn’t appreciate my piece of advice. ‘Why are you saying that? Are you Abby’s boyfriend or something?’
I blushed. ‘No . . . It’s just—’
‘Hey? Is your mum a boozer too? Is that why you’re palling up with Abby?’ He grinned. ‘Oh no – your mummy is the headmistress, isn’t she? All prim and proper but a bit fat, I reckon.’ He looked round for support. ‘What do you lot think? Could our new head teacher do with losing a bit, do you reckon?’
I blushed even more. I was about to say something back when I suddenly noticed that the rest of the class had gone silent.
I looked up. Mum was standing at the front of the room, staring straight at me and Calum. ‘
IS THERE A PROBLEM BACK THERE?’
I froze. I found my eyes focusing on her tummy, which is the bit of her that sticks out the most.
Everyone rushed back to their seats. I headed for my desk too. Mum shifted her gaze to encompass the whole class as she began to lecture us about the noise. Her tone of voice was just like the one she uses at home when she’s telling me off about something. It felt weird. I don’t know why, but somehow I hadn’t expected her to seem like the same person in school.
‘. . . so if anyone here can read and talk at the same time, I’d be more than happy to see a demonstration!’ she concluded briskly. ‘Well? Any takers?’
Nobody made a sound.
‘Right then! I want to see all noses in books! Next door we’re in the middle of reading a very romantic scene from Romeo and Juliet, and I won’t be in such a good mood if I have to interrupt it to come in here and tell you again!’
At least she didn’t seem to have a problem controlling the class. She was being pretty cool as a matter of fact. Much cooler than I’d expected. Even if her tummy was enormous.
5
It was the following day when Mum woke up with a rash and said she thought it was a side effect of the lithium so she was going to stop taking it for a few days.
‘But maybe it’s measles or something,’ I said when she told me at breakfast time. I was swinging on my chair again, which Mum usually hates, but this morning she was too distracted to notice.
‘Don’t be silly, Daniel. This is an allergic rash. I’ve been thinking I should cut down the number of tablets I take anyway. If you ask me, this is a sign that I was right.’
‘Let’s phone Dad and ask him what to do,’ I suggested, banging my chair down and looking at my watch. It would be eight in the evening in New Zealand, so it would be all right to phone.
‘He won’t be able to tell me what the rash is, if he can’t see it,’ Mum snapped. ‘No, I’ll just stop the tablets and see if it goes away.’
‘Shouldn’t you ask the doctor before you do that?’ I asked. ‘Maybe it’s not the tablets. Maybe you’re allergic to something else. Mark’s dad came out in a rash once after he’d eaten lobster.’
‘I haven’t eaten any lobster.’
‘No, but you might have eaten something else.’
Mum sighed. ‘I suppose I could phone up and ask if that doctor I saw at the clinic could fit me in.’ She meant the psychiatry clinic.
I nodded encouragingly.
She came off the phone looking a bit fed up. The doctor had told her she should not on any account stop her lithium and that he’d take a look at the rash himself if she could just pop up to the hospital where he was going to be spending all day doing a ward round.
‘It must be a really big ward if it takes him all day,’ I said.
‘Psychiatrists take all day to do everything,’ Mum said, sounding irritated. ‘They don’t go round the ward seeing everyone. Oh no! They summon you into a room and ask you loads of questions and it’s not just you and them either. Everyone else in the team is there gawping at you and reporting on every movement you’ve made in the last twenty-four hours. Do you know, they have a thing they call a sleep chart? The nurses come and stand at the end of your bed every hour during the night to see if your eyes are open or not. If you close them, they tick you off as being asleep. Isn’t that pathetic? I used to lie awake all night sometimes, with my eyes closed, and the nurses would tell the doctor that I was sleeping very well.’
‘Did you tell the doctor you hadn’t really slept?’ I asked, listening with interest. Mum had never told me anything before about the times she’d been a psychiatric patient. It was sort of like a taboo subject in our house. Dad always got really stony faced if I brought the subject up, and he’d told me a number of times that it was grown-up business that he didn’t think I needed to know any more about than what he’d already told me. Which wasn’t much.
‘Sometimes,’ Mum replied. ‘Sometimes it suited me not to tell him anything.’
I suddenly registered something. ‘Mum, you’re not sleeping very well now.’ Ever since we’d moved here, she had been complaining on and off about having trouble getting to sleep.
‘Oh, don’t you start, Daniel!’ Mum walked away from me huffily.
Since it was a school day Mum had to phone up and say she would be late in. She also told her secretary to tell my registration teacher that I would be late in too. ‘I want you to come with me, Daniel,’ she said. ‘You don’t mind, do you? We can drop Martha off at school on the way.’
‘You usually go to outpatients on your own,’ I replied, surprised. Normally, Mum doesn’t like me taking time off school for anything.
‘I know, but this isn’t outpatients in the general hospital, Daniel. The only way the doctor can see me today is if I go up to the psychiatric hospital. I don’t like going into those places on my own.’
I stared at her. I was remembering now, years ago, when she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. That was before Martha was born, a couple of months before Mum was due to have her. I couldn’t remember much about it. We’d had a nanny, whose name I can’t remember, come and live with us for a while after that. I don’t know how long it was before I saw Mum again, but I know it was a pretty long time.
After we’d dropped Martha off at school, I started to read out the directions Mum had been given by the doctor’s secretary. The psychiatric hospital was an old building which looked a bit dilapidated from the outside.
‘God, it’s one of those old bins,’ Mum said as we drove in though the gate.
I asked her what she meant.
‘Bins – like rubbish bins. Where they put mentally ill people. At least, they did in the old days. Do you know, Daniel, years ago people used to live their whole lives in these places and never be let out?’ She shuddered.
‘Yes, but they let people out now, don’t they?’
‘Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?’ She laughed, but in a hollow sort of way as if she was only joking to cover up some other feelings that she had inside.
I wished Dad was here.
After we’d parked the car, I followed Mum up to the main doors. ‘It looks a bit like the library,’ I said, trying to cheer us both up. ‘The building, I mean. Maybe they were built at the same time.’
Mum didn’t reply. She didn’t look like she was listening. She walked up to a man who was sitting at the reception desk behind a glass window in the entrance hall.
‘I’m here to see Doctor White,’ she said. ‘Isobel MacKenzie.’
‘If you’d just like to take a seat over there.’
We went and sat on some chairs which had cracked plastic covering with the foam showing. While we were sitting there an elderly man whose clothes looked too big for him shuffled past smoking a cigarette.
‘It says, No Smoking,’ I whispered to Mum, pointing to the sign on the wall.
‘Shush, Daniel,’ Mum said. There were little beads of sweat above her top lip, even though it wasn’t hot.
I can never sit still in waiting rooms for very long, so I stood up and went to look at the pictures on the opposite wall. They had been painted by patients. They weren’t very good.
‘Mrs Mackenzie.’ The receptionist called her over. ‘Doctor White will see you now if you’d like to go up to his office. You go up those stairs to the first floor, turn right and follow the signs to Elizabeth Ward. His office is just through the swing doors.’
Mum nodded. She came back over to me. ‘I think you should stay here, Daniel. I won’t be long.’ She leaned in closer and whispered to me, ‘Did he say turn right after the swing doors?’
‘Up the stairs, then turn right, then go through the swing doors,’ I told her. ‘I’ll come with you if you want.’
She didn’t need much persuasion to let me take her, which was just as well, because when we got to the first floor she couldn’t remember which floor he’d said. I reckoned she must have forgotten because she was nervo
us. There were two seats outside Dr White’s office, so I sat down while Mum knocked on his door. I heard him say, ‘Come in!’ and Mum disappeared inside.
I started to look round. The corridor where I was sitting led to the ward. I knew that the patients here didn’t lie in their beds all day like they do in ordinary hospitals. Their bodies were OK. It was their minds that were sick.
The doors of the ward swung open suddenly and three women – who could have been patients except that they looked too normal – started walking towards me. They were talking and smiling. One of them glanced at me as they passed, but that was all.
I sat staring at the sign on the wall opposite. It said HOSPITAL CHAPEL, with an arrow pointing down the corridor away from the ward. I remembered Mum saying once that even though she wasn’t very religious, churches always made her feel safe. I wished I could feel safer than I did right now. I know it was silly, but I kept having to fight the urge to look right and left all the time in case some mad person came running up to attack me. I couldn’t believe that Mum had once been a mad person, though I’m sure she wasn’t ever the sort of mad person who attacked people. I had never been allowed to see her when she was like that. Dad had only taken me to visit her in hospital when she was nearly better and I couldn’t even remember much about that.
‘Gotta light?’
I jumped. A woman with long grey hair was approaching me from the ward. She was wearing her cardigan inside out and she had a green hat on her head that looked like it came from a jumble sale. It was difficult to tell her age. When she smiled at me, her teeth were all missing. She had a wrinkled face and she kept coughing. She was clutching a plastic bag.