by Josa Young
‘I know, darling. But you’ve had me and I hope I’ve been able to do some mothering. Remember, I wasn’t mothered either. My mother was hopeless. Sat about all day being grand.’
Damson had heard all about her great-grandmother and her unwanted advice about what ‘ladies’ did and didn’t do. She held her grandmother’s hand up to her lips and kissed it. ‘We ought to think about going downstairs now. Have you seen the twins yet?’
‘I think the hairdresser’s still with them. He’s done your stepmother. Alexei did mine in London this morning.’
‘Yes, I saw. She’s wearing a tiara too. Where did that come from? Munty doesn’t have one.’
‘I think she hired it,’ said Granny. ‘Not the sort of thing you go out and buy anyway.’
Not even Margaret.
Granny could be quite disapproving if she was openly disrespectful of her stepmother. Damson went back to the dressing table and sprayed on a bit more scent.
‘I think I’m ready. You?’ Picking up a little gold, purse-shaped evening bag that she had also found in the dressing table, she popped in her lip gloss and powder compact while her grandmother left the room, following her along the corridor and down the stairs.
Only family and the catering staff were present, there was time for a quiet celebration before the guests arrived. There would be a dinner for thirty, and then about three hundred guests coming on afterwards, having been entertained to dinner at their house parties in the district.
Having known no one when Damson was little, the Mount-Heys now had masses of friends within a twenty-mile radius, all of whom were only too delighted to entertain house parties. Particularly as it meant an invitation to what sounded like the most exclusive private dance of the Season. Sarah was rustling off in the direction of the drawing room when Damson spotted Greg Owen from Society magazine waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She slowed down.
Greg glanced up and took several pictures in quick succession as she processed towards him. She raised her chin and dropped her lids, pulling her spine up and her shoulders back, flinging him a smile. He shot again, but then made a gesture with his hand, looking past her. She turned and there were the twins above her on the stairs. Her heart sank. They were dressed for a change completely differently from each other. Noonie wore smoky draped silk spattered with dark green embroidery, one white shoulder bare. Her hair was silvery blonde and caught up with a diamante crescent. Clarrie’s strapless mermaid dress was dusky pink, embroidered with a grey, geometric pattern, a mist of tulle springing out below her knees, tiny crystals trembling in the folds.
They looked like embodiments of Castle Hey, the bricks and mortar and Margaret’s new fountain in the lake.
This party was nothing to do with her.
She moved to one side, dipping her head, so Greg could get good pictures of them. Then she heard him say, ‘The three sisters together, please. Damson in the middle. Arms around each other. That’s great.’ She was pulled forward and wrapped in her stepsisters’ sweetly scented arms, their soft curls tickled her shoulders. She glanced at each in turn to see their identical faces smiling back at her.
‘You look like the sun and the moon and a pink sky at sunset,’ said Munty, coming out of the drawing room carrying glasses of champagne. Margaret’s care had undoubtedly cheered him up. He was so much more noticing and loving now than he used to be. Damson should be grateful, she supposed.
Twenty-five
Damson
October 1987
With her fellow first-year medics Damson trampled through golden leaves to the gross anatomy labs, only half listening while they spooked each other with stories about the guy who hid under a sheet on an empty table, and sat up when the other students came in. Another prankster had put some prunes in his cadaver’s abdominal cavity, extracting them with tweezers and eating them. They repeated the perennial medics’ myth about the student’s ghastly discovery, at the very end of the course when he finally reached his cadaver’s head and face. Damson couldn’t go on listening.
The students entered the building and their nervous chatter died away as they shared a sense of dread and awe in the face of imminent contact with mortality. Damson’s super-sensitive sense of smell could detect formaldehyde seeping through the lab door, and salty liquid erupted in her mouth causing her to swallow hard. The overwhelming scents of India – jasmine and lavatories, joss-sticks and rot – had made it a relief when she had had to come home early. She must develop a method of not-smelling if she was ever to be a successful doctor.
A boy close to her whispered, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
Damson walked briskly away from him and stood beside a sensible looking Chinese girl, who turned and smiled at her.
‘I’m Mary Wong,’ she said.
‘I’m Damson Hayes.’
‘Tamsin?’
‘No, it’s like the fruit. D-A-M-S-O-N.’
She often wished she was called Annabel or Catherine. What was her mother thinking of?
‘Oh, I see.’
They were directed to the female changing room, and told to bring only notebooks and biros with them. Damson slipped on the green scrubs she found in her locker, tied a face mask loosely around her neck and grabbed a pair of rubber gloves from the box marked non-allergenic. Then she shuffled with the others through into the anteroom for the preparation lecture.
Charles Godwin, professor of anatomy, was beginning to speak as he moved through the group to stand by the door.
‘Hands up who’s already seen a dead body?’
About a third of the students raised their hands. Damson wasn’t sure if she qualified, so kept hers down.
Years before, an Army friend of her father’s had brought back a head from Borneo in a woven basket. Aged ten, she’d taken a long time to pluck up the courage to go into the billiard room and look. She’d imagined a skull, shining like an ivory billiard ball, grinning with perfect teeth, comfortably ensconced in something like Pauline’s wicker shopping basket.
‘It’s probably a Jap,’ Sidney Faulkes had said. ‘The Dayak headhunters were given tacit licence to go after Japs during the war. A relief after we’d forcibly got them out of the habit of beheading the neighbours to decorate their homes.’
She’d waited until the house was quiet, and peeped round the door. A grey thing sat on the window seat and she crept towards it. In a kind of woven ball of what looked like creepers, sat a dusty-looking rounded object punctuated with black holes where its eyes had been. She’d shuddered as she saw that there were bits of black and kippered skin and hair still stuck on in patches. It had no lower jaw so could not grin. To her relief and Pauline’s, Faulkes took the head with him when he left the next day.
‘Now, it is important that you understand why you need to work with cadavers before we enter the dissection room,’ said the professor. ‘It has been said that we need to learn to heal the living by first dismantling the dead.’ And he was off on his well-honed speech to first-year medical students, designed to stop as many of them as possible from fainting and cluttering up the floor.
‘It is impossible for you to imagine the normal variations and three-dimensional qualities of human anatomy from diagrams and models alone. It helps if you have seen a cadaver before, but this is not essential. If you are fulfilling a vocation to become a doctor, you must have prepared yourselves mentally for this moment.
‘It is vitally important that you rapidly develop a coping mechanism that allows you to depersonalise the cadaver in your care. It is also vital that you treat it with the utmost respect.’
Damson had felt sick with nerves ever since she’d arrived in Cambridge. Could she keep up with her fiercely intelligent and hardworking fellow medics? Already some of them were boasting of all-nighters, and the jump from sailing through science A levels to absorbing several chapters of her medical textbooks each day was beginning to tell on her.
The prospect of what she had to do now was not going to help keep her corn
flakes down. She had assumed a strict, self-imposed diet of macaroni cheese, baked beans and peas, the only items in the buttery she could stomach, and it was having a bad effect on her digestion.
‘Please understand that all the individuals whose cadavers you will be dissecting,’ went on Professor Godwin, ‘have donated their mortal remains to medical science for your benefit. This is a great gift to society and to you as future doctors, and I don’t need to tell you to treat these fine, public-spirited people with the respect they deserve. In Thailand, the first person voluntarily to donate his body to science was a professor of literature. Teachers are held in very high esteem over there’ – he paused for polite laughter – ‘and it seems he wished to maintain his teacher status after death. So, think of these people as your teachers. You may believe they cannot speak, but every tiny nerve and sinew will be telling you something vital. So listen.
‘When you enter the room, you will be shown to your table. Starting with the arm, you will work on your cadaver, with your dissection partners and under the direction of your tutors. When the year of learning is over, the remains will be returned to relatives for a funeral and burial.
‘Now, let us proceed.’
Damson held back a bit, trying to keep her nausea under control. But she had to go in eventually. The room was brightly lit, and each workstation was in the form of a steel bed with a drain at one end, sitting on a thick steel pillar. There were two stools at the head end of each one. The bodies lay under coverings, with just the left arm exposed, palm up. Each student had been assigned a partner, and Damson’s, a spindly boy called George, leaned forward to touch the fingers of their person as if in greeting.
She liked George for doing that. In fact she clung to the idea of liking George altogether. He seemed less driven and efficient than some of the others, which appealed to the quailing inner Damson that she hoped to conceal.
Before she had any more time to think, the coverings were removed by the professor’s assistants and she could see the whole cadaver. A man lay before her on his back. Not old, his hair was still brown, smoothed back from his forehead. The colour of the skin was greyish, and the nose stood out sharply, the nostrils looking very dark and cavernous.
‘Pork,’ she thought desperately. ‘It’s like pork at the butcher.’
But pork was not grey like this. Like a fungus in the shape of a man.
The professor was speaking again. They would start by reviewing the bony landmarks and osteology. Then they would abduct the arm, and remove fat and lymph nodes from the axilla. If they could come over here he would show them all where to place the first incision. Damson reached into her pocket for her glasses, and walked across to the cadaver of a very old and thin woman.
The professor took his scalpel and made a first incision down the full length of her forearm. There was no blood of course, but the violation of the skin was too much for Damson.
When she woke up she was sitting back in the anteroom with her head between her knees. Two of the lab assistants were with her.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she muttered.
One of them helped her up by the elbow and into the Ladies, where she just got into the cubicle before throwing up.
The underlying beat of panic that seemed to infect everything she did now grew more insistent. When she emerged from the cubicle, Mary was waiting and offered to take her back to St Bennet’s but she refused, muttering about food poisoning, only dimly aware of the kindness. She didn’t want to disrupt anyone else’s first day.
When she felt steadier, she walked back from the labs pushing her bicycle. There was a chemist on Silver Street, and she stopped, looking in at the coloured glass jars and stacked arrangement of laxatives, trying to get her breathing under control. Then she propped her bike against the railing, locking it up. Inside the shop, she was relieved to find no one beside herself. The pharmacist came out from behind a glass partition and asked her what she wanted.
‘I would like a pregnancy test, please.’
The pharmacist said nothing, just turned and took a long package off the shelves behind her, putting it on the counter.
‘That’s five ninety-nine, please,’ she said.
Damson was resentful for a moment. Money that would have kept her fed for at least three days. She put the money on the counter and tucked the test into her bag.
The jaunty pink packaging had given her an intense jolt of anger as she had to face up to what was happening inside her, the sickness, the tender breasts, the intense exhaustion. Why had he done this thing to her? Whose fault was it anyway? What the hell did she think she had been doing? She was furious with herself all over again.
In some closed-off place in her mind she’d known for weeks but, as denying the rape had swiftly become a mental habit, denying its consequences followed. She didn’t pay much attention to her periods, but had become aware that she had not had one since she got back to England six weeks before. She had vaguely imagined that the mild dysentery that is the fate of all backpackers had temporarily put paid to her cycle. Denial with a big dose of false logic, she realised now.
Maybe if she stopped looking like a woman, she would somehow avoid the immemorial fate of raped women. Her wardrobe now consisted of stuff picked up in the men’s sections of charity shops: big old collarless shirts, army surplus trousers held up with a leather belt, corduroys, tweed jackets and baseball boots. As a concession to going to university, she’d visited a barber and had her chewed mess of hair tidied up. She had to wear a bra, particularly as her breasts seemed to be getting bigger, and so chose a very plain sports bra like a tight vest that squashed her flat. Luckily other students were dressed in all kinds of extreme ways, so no one said anything – except for one guy, cheerful at a King’s Freshers’ Week party, who’d insisted on calling her Mellors.
When Munty and Margaret had come to fetch her from Heathrow on her return from India, Margaret did not comment on the way home, but Damson knew that it would only be a matter of time. Margaret’s often expressed approval for the way the twins presented themselves told Damson all she needed to know. But it was already September and she was busy getting ready for Cambridge, so she didn’t need to put up with Margaret’s ‘helpful’ comments for long.
In her bedroom at Castle Hey, which she had insisted was not touched by the ever-present decorators, her wardrobe was still exuberant with strapless taffeta ball gowns in bright colours, whispering the ghost of Rive Gauche. The fact that Granny had made all her dresses caused her to hesitate for a moment. But the desire to reject colour and prettiness and femininity was very strong. She also did not, for the first time in her life, want to see or be seen by her grandparents. She feared her grandmother’s sharp eye might seek out her shame. She knew her grandparents never worried about her. She didn’t want them to start worrying now.
She left the dresses where they were, deciding not to think about the dancing and flirting, the high heels and glamour. She drove herself into Canterbury and scoured the charity shops for a replacement wardrobe, and that was when the comments started.
‘I understood when you got back from India that you might be looking a bit scruffy, but you don’t need to dress like that now, do you? There’s no need these days to look like a man to do a man’s job, dear,’ said Margaret one morning over breakfast. Munty hid behind his Daily Telegraph.
Damson was defensive but determined. ‘It’s comfortable and practical if I’m going to be in the labs all day. Don’t want to wear heels and stuff. Anyway, I like dressing like this. Like Annie Hall,’ she had trailed off. Margaret said nothing more to her relief.
When she got back to St Bennet’s, she made straight for the women’s lavatories and peeled the wrapper from the wand. She read the instructions, her hands shaking so much she could hardly focus, let alone hold the stick still enough to pee in the right place. When she had managed it she wrapped the fateful stick in loo paper and crept back to her room to wait ten minutes for the result.
The future that had seemed so exciting and defiant, that would mark her out from the tide of obedient helpless women, was in danger of being ripped away, leaving a jagged edge that she could not confront. Her mind veered and tacked wildly across a grey and stormy sea of blame, regret and visceral pain, trying to find any kind of safe harbour. What would she do if she couldn’t be a doctor, if she had to be a single mother instead? She couldn’t keep a baby conceived in that stupid way. Flirting, kissing, going too far, giving him the wrong idea. All her fault. No one would force her to keep it, would they? Her mind shied away from the shameful scene in the Indian stable. It wasn’t her choice to be a mother. It wasn’t even carelessness that had led to this conception. She was raped, wasn’t she? What would people think? She couldn’t see a way back to the person she had been before. The person her grandparents never worried about.
After ten minutes she went over to the loo paper bundle on the window sill and unwrapped it. There it was, the big purple positive splodge.
What to do? Who on earth could she talk to who wouldn’t either judge her or be unbearably upset? How could she tell Granny, the person she loved the most in the world, that she was pregnant? And in such a compromising way? There might be fear that Damson would die as well of whatever it was that had killed Melissa. After all, Melissa hadn’t been much older. Damson knew with piercing certainty that her grandmother would want her to keep the baby. But she could not imagine herself wanting to hold on to a reminder of the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She had never disagreed with Granny about anything. How could she now? At all costs, she must never know.