by Annie Murray
And there was the sky. She watched the sky in all its moods, through the long windows. She refused to talk, to think. She took the pills. Everything outside was gone from her, was beyond her. She would not think about anything, anyone. She had crawled in here, into this shut-away place, and here she would remain.
‘Who do you have outside?’ they asked her, wanting names, addresses. ‘D’you have a job somewhere?’
‘… … …’
‘Is there anyone who might visit you?’
‘… … …’
They knew her name, from Selly Oak Hospital, as Evie Harrison. She had not told them whether Miss or Mrs.
They must have got other information from Melly when she came, because they started saying, ‘You’ve got relatives, haven’t you? Why don’t you tell us where they live?’
‘… … …’
Eventually, when they kept on, she told them she had nothing, no one.
‘I’ve just come back from Canada.’
‘Canada?’
‘Yes.’
Dr Rose sat beside, rather than behind his desk, his right arm resting on a pile of folders. She noticed he had a nice fountain pen, a gold signet ring. One of his legs was crossed over the other and they were very long. He had black, tufty hair, black-rimmed spectacles and his hands were huge with wide, oval nails.
‘When you stepped out into the road, was it your intention to take your own life?’
‘… … …’
‘You are feeling depressed. Sad?’
‘… … …’
‘Can you look up at me, Miss Sutton. Miss? Mrs? That’s better – well done. Have you ever tried to commit suicide before?’
Dr Rose kept running his finger under the bridge of his spectacles as if they were giving him discomfort. There were red marks each side of his nose. His face was saggy and long. She found she liked him.
‘… … …’
Evie looked down into her lap again. She was wearing loose brown slacks that did not belong to her and a sour-yellow blouse. Her hands looked strange to her.
‘No? I’ll take that as no, shall I?’
‘... … …’
‘We’ll give it some time, Miss Sutton. I do hope you know we are all here to help you. Perhaps after a bit of rest you’ll feel able to talk to us.’
Evie raised her head again. Dr Rose had taken off his spectacles and was rubbing his face. He looked weary and his weak eyes were watery grey.
‘Whatever’s troubling you, my dear’ – the corners of his mouth twitched at the ends, almost into a smile. She felt it was a kind look – ‘there are people you can talk to. It’s safe here and it’s very often the best remedy.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see you in a few days, all right?’
She managed a tiny nod, to her own surprise, before leaving the room. She felt beckoned into something that she was not yet ready to enter.
A letter arrived for her, the envelope addressed in blue ink, in careful looped writing.
Dear Evie,
I realize you don’t want visitors at the moment and I’m sorry I didn’t manage to get back to you again before you left the ward. It was really nice to see you. I’m sorry you’re having a rough time of it at the moment, but I’m sure the hospital will help.
We’re all thinking of you. When you’re better – and you will be, Evie, I’m sure, even if things feel very dark now – it would be lovely to see you.
With love from Melly
Evie wondered who ‘all’ meant. It was peculiar and warming to feel that anyone was thinking of her.
Days later, another note arrived.
Dear Evie,
I’m sorry if coming to the hospital was the wrong thing to do. I suppose I’m quite good at putting my foot in it. In fact, it feels as if whatever I do will be the wrong thing. So this is just to say I’m thinking of you. The firm isn’t the same without you around and I do hope you’ll feel better and be back soon. I shan’t bother you again but I hope to see you when you’re back.
All best wishes, Alan
It all felt so far away, Kalamazoo, the world outside, the family – everything. It was kind of him to write, she thought, in an abstract way. Kind of this man she hardly knew. But she didn’t dwell on it.
She watched the days rise to reach the bright, baking height of summer. The pills made her mouth dry, made her constipated. Her legs and waist felt fatter and there was a new little wad of flesh under her chin. She asked if she could stop taking them. Maybe soon, they said. We think you need them a bit longer.
The sky arced blue and there were light, drifting clouds. They were allowed to sit outside sometimes and the sun on her face startled her. It stroked her as if it cared about her. This was July – the first time she felt anything. It brought tears to her eyes, feeling a breeze and the fingering warmth on her cheeks.
‘Evie?’ Sandy Hoskins said to her. It was August. She had stayed blank and quiet for weeks, but she had started to notice flowers and bright leaves outside. ‘How about coming to the OT room today. It’s time you started doing something.’
They tried everything, these nurses. They asked if she wanted to go to the chapel. They put on music and got everyone to dance, slow and stiff as corpses trying to breathe life into themselves. You could do things and not do them at the same time, Evie discovered. You could comply – and she wanted to please them, to make them feel they were helping – but if your mind is not with your body, it’s as if someone else is doing it. They were not drugging her heavily – what would the point have been? She was quiet enough as it was. She was awake; she was just in hiding. They put on shows, encouraged those who could find it in them to do basket-weaving or draw pictures. Evie could not – not then.
Sandy took her to Occupational Therapy that afternoon. They asked her what she would do – a basket, some sewing?
Evie looked round the room, at its tables of coloured offerings and a tangle of stuff for weaving. She saw some squares of coloured felt.
‘I’ll sew something,’ she said.
‘Good! That’s a great idea!’ Sandy said with jubilation in her voice. Evie could feel her looking at the OT lady over her head, their eyes saying progress. ‘I’ll leave you in their capable hands,’ Sandy said, giving Evie’s shoulder a squeeze.
Next to her Phyllis, who was a grey, sad-looking lady, was stitching two rectangles of cotton together. Evie looked at her long, plain face and felt sorry for her. She looked like someone who had worked hard and done as she was told all her life and been kicked in the ditch for it.
‘What’re you making?’ she whispered, wanting to be kind.
Phyllis’s gaze swivelled slowly in her direction. She looked back at the material in her hands and said, ‘I don’t know, exactly.’ Her voice was deep and well spoken. She stopped sewing and, staring ahead of her, said, ‘I suppose it’s a bit silly stitching this when I don’t know what I’m doing. Just silly.’ Her eyes filled with tears and she bowed her head to hide it, wiping her eyes with her knuckles.
Evie felt sorry for her. This was new. She had looked at the others before and seen their pain, but it had not touched her. ‘It could be something nice to go on a table?’ she said.
Phyllis looked gratefully at her. ‘Yes. I suppose so. What’re you making?’
Evie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Nothing yet.’
Some people talked, others just sat, mute and shut in on themselves. Evie, for the first time, found herself looking round. She liked the colours in the room. She had chosen some felt – scraps of red, green and yellow and coloured threads.
‘You’ve got something in mind then, have you?’ the OT lady said brightly. ‘Some little toys perhaps? I’ve got some shapes you could cut around if you like.’
Evie shook her head, relieved when the woman had to hurry away to help someone else. She had never done much sewing but she had something in mind, something precious, which made her heart beat faster. Mary Bracebridge had taught her a little bit when she was very small an
d she had done some repairs on the children’s clothes. The feel of a needle in her hand, the act of squinting to push the end of the thread through the hole, brought a rush of memories so overwhelming that she had to stop for a moment.
Sitting at the table in the house in Rosette, white glare from the snow outside, edging napkins for Tracy before she was born; sewing a button back on Jack’s shirt; fixing a snag in the table cloth . . . She closed her eyes and breathed in and out, feeling the rise and fall of her chest. It was her turn to lower her head.
Who am I? Give me something to hold on to . . . Please . . .
She felt someone nudging her. Looking up, Phyllis was staring at her, then at the OT lady, as if to say, She’ll notice in a minute. She’ll be back. Sew something, her eyes instructed, so she doesn’t ask why you’re sitting there with your eyes closed.
Evie nodded back, grateful. She picked up a scrap of buttercup-yellow felt and with the blunt-ended scissors cut a square, about three inches by three. With the dark blue thread, she started stitching.
By the end of the session she had three creations, like tiny mats, two square, one round. Blue thread on yellow – she had sewed a T. It was rough and wobbly running stitch, but somehow she loved what she had done. Yellow thread on red – A. And on the bright, grass-coloured circle, in bottle green – J.
‘Oh, those are lovely!’ the OT lady said when she saw them. ‘Aren’t they colourful!’
Evie didn’t like the woman holding them. She almost snatched them back off her and the lady noticed.
‘So,’ she said gently. ‘Who are they, Evie?’
Head down, gripping the coloured squares in her lap, she said, ‘These are my children.’
Sandy Hoskins came and sat beside her on her bed the next morning. They were facing away from everyone else. She felt that having Sandy sitting there was like having a hillside or a big dog beside her.
After a pause, she said, ‘D’you know what I do, at home? I’ve got kids – two boys. Not that they take any notice, not now, but I want them to remember it. I always get flowers and put them in the house. Cheap ones – anything. Daffs when they’re in season. Bluebells from the Lickeys if we go out. Or off that lady in the Bullring if I’m in town. My husband sometimes says, what’re you spending money on them for? They’ll only die! But I always try and have them in the house. We can’t manage a puppy or anything like that, although Kev and Danny would love one. But at least I can do flowers. Anything that brings life and makes you happy just looking at it, see?’
Evie sat listening. Tears waited behind her eyes, and her throat squeezed tight. All these things she had stopped herself thinking about. About how they had won. Mom, Rita, Shirley. She’d let them win. They had her children, the children she never deserved to have, who were better off without her.
She knew now, she wanted to be asked.
‘Children, Evie?’
It was all pushing up, coming to the surface like a cork from underwater. Evie felt a sensation for a moment as if she was going to be sick. Instead, she began to cry.
She felt Sandy Hoskins put an arm round her shoulder and pull her close.
‘I’ve done a terrible thing, Dr Rose,’ she wept. She was like a one-woman flood now, couldn’t stop. ‘I’ve abandoned them. They’ll be with my mom because they would’ve been at hers after school, when I didn’t come home. And it’s the worst place they could be.’
‘Do they know where you are?’ Dr Rose said gently. ‘No? I suppose not. Well, of course we can let them know and find out for you. But why would your mother’s house be the worst place for them?’
She could stop neither talking nor crying. Everything poured out, over several meetings with Dr Rose, under the tired, tolerant watch of his eyes. How Mom had always hated her, shut her out, taunted and belittled her. About giving Julie up, about Jack and Canada. About how she was hopeless, not a fit mother to look after her own children.
‘I don’t know why Mom hates me so much,’ she said one day in a pool of calm between bouts of tears. ‘I mean, I do – it’s because I wasn’t a boy and our father was playing away with someone else. And she had a boy – his.’
‘A tough situation for your mother,’ Dr Rose observed.
‘I know.’ Evie looked at him. She wiped her eyes. ‘It was our father’s as fault as well – he never stood up for me. Never did anything ’cept please himself. Least line of resistance, that’s the old man. Long as he could pour something down his neck and do as he liked he didn’t give a monkey’s. That was the two of them – all our lives, to be honest. Doesn’t sound very nice, does it?’ she said, filled with shame. ‘But she turned my sisters against me – especially Rita. Shirley’s never known if she was coming or going really.’
‘But you were the one who felt left out on the doorstep?’
‘I was left out on the doorstep! At night time sometimes. She just shut me out and wouldn’t open the door.’ She was surprised at the rage which raised her voice. ‘She’s a horror, my mother is. Of all the families to be born into. There are nice people out there – why did I have to get them?’
Dr Rose watched her in silence for a moment.
‘What do you know about your mother? Her own life?’
‘Not much. She hardly ever told us anything.’ Evie tried to remember. ‘She came to Birmingham from over in the Black Country. Netherton, I think. She never talked about family and we never met any – not once. I never met my grandmothers – not on either side.’
‘Why do you think that might have been?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked at him. ‘Maybe it was bad? I don’t like telling people about bad things.’
Dr Rose nodded, twizzling his nice pen between his fingers. His question came out haltingly.
‘Would you say that your mother . . . is capable of sympathy . . . fellow feeling towards others, I mean . . . in general?’
Evie thought. She struggled, tried to be fair. This was her family after all. How good it would feel to be proud of her family, for there to be hope of being embraced and loved. She had come home with hopes of something new. But in the end she shook her head.
‘No, doctor. I don’t think I would.’
VI
Fifty-Four
November 1972
‘She looks ever so pale. She all right, d’yer think?’
Evie was gripping one of the railings near the school gates, clenching its cold roughness so hard that her hands ached. Her breath came fast and shallow, as if she had been running.
‘Are you all right?’ The woman ventured closer, kind, but wary.
‘Yeah,’ Evie managed, keeping her voice under tight control. She didn’t turn to look at the woman. ‘Ta. I’m fine.’
‘Right then. Just asking.’ The woman returned to her friends, sounding affronted.
Evie didn’t meet anyone’s eye. She was afraid they would recognize her, even though she had seldom been to the school, and it had been such a time since she was there. They didn’t seem to. Do I look different? She felt like another person altogether. Her hair was lank, had not been cut in months. She let it fall forward to hide her face. On the way here she had felt the rub of her thighs, thick and white, against each other as she moved, in bobbly grey slacks. They had given them to her because she had put on weight. All that time indoors. She did not feel like the person they might have remembered. So far there seemed to be no sign of Shirley.
Six months, six months since she had seen Tracy and Andrew. The full impact of this was only now coming home to her. She was appalled at herself. Six months was a big slice of Andrew’s whole life. Would he even remember her? She had missed both of their birthdays. Tracy was eight now and Andrew six. All this had happened without her. She had deserted them, disappeared . . .
The hospital had been in touch with the school in Weoley Castle and established that Tracy and Andrew were living with their grandparents. The school had passed on the information that their mother was in hospital. Not once had any of
the family set foot through the door of Rubery Hill Hospital to see her.
A baby was crying in a pushchair. Smoke whorled out from cigarettes. The voices swirled on behind her.
Clutching the railings until her hands hurt, the fragile flames of hope which she had carried from the hospital began to gutter and bend in the cold wind. She had kept each lit – each a phrase from Dr Rose or Sandy Hoskins or some of the other patients, like Mavis: ‘Go and be a mother to your children, Evie . . .’ Or Sandy: ‘You can have a life, Evie – just like anyone else . . . Your kids will forgive you, bab – in the end, anyway. They know you’ve been poorly. They’ll just be glad to see you back.’
Dr Rose, towards the end of her time in there, had taken off his glasses once more and swung them by one arm between his long finger and thumb.
‘I wouldn’t say this to many people – though I’m sometimes tempted. But in your case, Evie, I will. I would advise you, very strongly, to keep away from your mother if at all possible – for the sake of your health. Some things are redeemable. From what you’ve said about her attitude to you, your relationship is one of the most destructive I have ever seen. Save yourself, Evie – and your children. I’m sure you can.’
She had come away full of this hope and support. Some of the others who were there when she first came into the hospital were now gone, but she said goodbye to the women on her ward, all of them wishing her well.
The first thing she would do would be to go and find Tracy and Andrew, tell them she was back, that she had been unwell but she was better now, that she had thought about them all the time, that they were going to go away – she had no idea where at this moment; they would leave Birmingham, start a new life . . .
For now, the hospital had given her the address of a hostel in Edgbaston where she could stay as she had told them she had no address in Birmingham. She could not face Mr and Mrs Grant after vanishing for six months. Not yet, anyway.