by Dawn French
Ed and Silvia lie side by side, eyes shut, hand in hand on the forest floor …
Ten
Tia
Saturday noon
‘There Mrs Shit! Now you got tasty food to look at, even if no eating. You get more goodness in you to look at this photos than all the bum juice you get given in here called food. I don’t think so, miss nursy nursy. Get it away from her.’
Tia is Sellotaping a menu to the wall. It is from her friends’ Indonesian restaurant and has photographs of the different dishes next to their names.
‘They telling me no food in here, but nobody say no pictures of food! Ha ha, fool you, suckers! You got to go to bed early to catch out Tia. That for sure. Look at this one. Asinan Bogor. Sweet and sour vegetables. One mouth of that make you come awake rise and shine. The peppers put firework in the blood and whoosh, you not sleepin then. Then you one awake mingehead, you sittin up, lookin around, here, there. Hello everybody! Eyes doin open lookin and mouth doin open talking. And sayin sorry to Tia for no pay for two weeks so far.
‘I been there, at your flat, usual days, two times now. I go in, Tuesday Thursday, normal. Same as twenty years. First in the big house, now in the little flat. Much tidier when Mrs Shit asleep in hospital, no dirty pant everywhere with poppin socks all over. But whole flat covered in dirt from dust and old ugly cooking, so I clean all, top in bottom. When you not there, I can use the Mr Jiffy what poison the world but is best cleaner. Gets a lemon smell in and gets grease out. Even if it killin trees and children, it still good. I got it in a hiding place where you don’t know, where I got white sugar and instant coffee kept too! Things from evil, all in shush box in big clothes cupboard. Secret. I make water on all plants and let the new air in window for little time, and make the bed open to have air in. I also do the bad thing I not like and make the taps on, running the water away for no reason like Mrs Shit say to do, five minutes. In my home, no water wasting like this, water very expensive and important, and nobody making taps on for no reason. BUT that what Mrs Shit say, so that what Tia do.
‘So, I doing everything you ask for even when you not there to tell me. So, I thinking for yourself like you say. And one of the have an ideas is happening like this, OK? Let’s say Tia is not getting pay even though the work is done, then it is stealing really, innit? Mrs Shit is stealin from Tia. Tia is doing the cleaning and jizz, but Mrs Shit not paying. Is OK really cos Tia know Mrs Shit is having a sleeping accident, but still, Tia got two boys, well three really with the sitting down husband in a chair, so is not OK for no money.
‘SO Tia is have a brainthunder and thinking of what way to make it so Mrs Shit not stealin work from Tia. Then, Mrs Shit wouldn’t have to be a criminal no more. Cos all this bad enough with the head thump and everything, without Mrs Shit get called thief and stealer. SO, what Tia do … is Tia take one very small old phone Mrs Shit never using any more for more than two years, and do selling on the eBay … that phone just in the drawer making a clutter … Mrs Shit hates a clutter, it very ‘volga’. No clutter thank you. So Tia take away the clutter, and the phone sell on eBay spit-spot, and Tia have her pay.
‘In fact, too much pay, cos that phone get one hundred forty quids and Mrs Shit only stole one hundred quids of work off Tia, so Tia put the forty quids in Mrs Shit special money tin box with the picture on of a girl in Christmas. There is no money for a long time in ’til this, so new startings. OK, Mrs Shit, that all the home news BUT now Tia tells you the big news …’
Tia puts her Boots reading glasses on with the flashy rhinestones around the edge, and retrieves an impressive pile of chatty magazines from her bag.
‘You not going to believe this, Mrs Shit, after all that hard work and time, “Nicola Roberts from Girls Aloud is struggling to find her look”. Well. We was all thinking thankfuck, because “she has embraced her natural pale colouring at last”, and now this. So what is it? She like the white skin, ooo look at me, I’m all pinky white make-up with my face on, for sale? OR ooo don’t look at me I’m a ghostie face scary kids off ? And now she got huge new lips off a fishface as well. What she thinking? What we suppose to thinking? She do like white skin or she don’t? Hurry up Nicola, we want answer! Now! And she decided to do the head extensions. Like we need more hair from her. No thank you Nicola. Stop it now with hair and lips and skin.
‘And aw, look Mrs Shit, lady send in a photo of dog and cat and rat and ugly baby together in basket with big bow on. Like the world should be. All together lovin, no fightin. Strange, cos babies and rats always fightin … Want to know your stars Mrs Shit? The gypsy lady here always right, here’s yours, the Goat, “Juggling work and home is harder than you thought, and travel is costly for you this week. Be aware of everything you say and do, and wear your best outfit on Friday, you’ll be dressing to impress …” OOO, sounds exciting Mrs Shit … what’s goin to happen on Friday … ?’
Silvia keeps on breathing.
And nothing else.
So Tia fills the silence with more and more and more ‘news’.
‘This is good, Mrs Shit, can you see? “A knork, eliminates the need for a knife”. I want that, shall I send off for you too, Mrs Shit? Yes …’
Eleven
Jo
Saturday 2pm
Jo is not relaxed. Decidedly unrelaxed, in fact. She is not a good enough actress to hide her anxiety, so the nurses at the station are on alert. None of them trust Jo completely. They know she is on a mission to revive her sister, and that she will stop at nothing. All the staff have tried to be understanding and helpful, but most have had a gutful of Jo’s New Age ideas. When Jo told them she was going to burn a wreath of white sage and rosemary over a brazier, American-Indian style, so that she might smudge Silvia’s body with the ash, the nurses unanimously rejected the idea. When Jo proceeded to round on them, accusing them of preventing her from protecting her sister against malevolent spirits, they withdrew the metaphorical drawbridge of goodwill.
Today, then, they have their eye on her, especially Winnie who is, after all, Silvia’s key nurse and therefore her chief protector. Unfortunately, Winnie is very busy today and can’t keep as much of an eye on Jo as she would wish.
This is one of the reasons Jo is tense. She can’t block the view the nurses have into the room through the internal window, so she tries to keep her back to the glass in a vain attempt to hide today’s theme for Silvia’s awakening.
Jo has read somewhere that animals have inherent powerful healing powers and, especially in America, they are often used to comfort and inspire the afflicted and infirm. Dogs, apparently, are the most widely used creatures. If an ill person can rest their hand on a dog’s fur for even fifteen minutes, they can absorb up to forty doggiewatts of canine healing energy, supposedly. Jo isn’t entirely sure exactly how much that is, but she feels confident it can only help. She’s not heard of anyone being harmed by overdosing on animal energy, so she has made the decision to go ahead today with a session of animal healing therapy.
Jo doesn’t own a dog. Jo doesn’t really even like dogs very much, but her neighbour Betty, a seventy-year-old bingo freak who owns the only house on the terrace that hasn’t changed at all in fifty years, has an ancient chihuahua called Lady who is presently cowering in Jo’s handbag. Jo is wishing she had chosen a different handbag. This one is an old but still valuable Biba original, and was the only one she owned big enough to fit the dog in with a bit of breathing space. There is a regrettable wet patch forming on the bottom of the tan leather bag. How can such a spookily small dog contain so much liquid? She walked it about in the car park before bringing it in, to try and empty it out, but it obviously prefers Biba leather to prickly yellow grass. Never mind, Jo thinks, however leaky it is, it’s still a dog, with potentially massive healing power, but how is she going to get it on to Silvia’s bed without the nurses noticing?
Luckily Jo judges herself to be no fool and has thought ahead. She owns a host of ‘cuddly’ toys, which live in well-organized, serried ra
nks, in descending order of size on her bed. One of the larger teddies is a sinister creature with its own full-teddy-sized Easter bunny outfit. When wearing it, only the teddy’s face is visible, surrounded by bunny ears and whiskers on a bunny hood. The whole shocking ensemble comes off easily via one long zip down the stomach of the ‘bunny’. Jo thought to bring this outfit as disguise for Lady. So now, Jo is furtling about in the smelly sodden handbag, trying to get the old dog into the teddy’s bunny outfit.
After a short while of muffled yelpings which Jo coughs loudly to cover, the dog is finally, undeniably, in costume. Jo hauls the tiny old mutt out of the handbag and places her on the bed next to Silvia. The bunny outfit is a bit too big for Lady so she seems to disappear inside it, leaving the headspace horrifically vacant as if some invisible wraith is in attendance. When Lady does manage to poke her head through, her appearance is that of an Easter bunny with the face of an alarmed and wizened old rat.
‘Keep still Lady. Sit! Lie! Sit!’
The mixed message notwithstanding, Lady has no option as to how she is positioned since she is utterly immobile inside the roomy bunny husk. She is also completely the wrong shape for the outfit. She is small-dog-shaped and so therefore her legs and … legs don’t fit where a teddy’s would. Jo picks her up and places her on her back, hoping this will make her look more like a stuffed something innocent. She manoeuvres the mutant toy into the crook of Silvia’s lifeless arm. Lady blinks up at Jo from the depths of the deep and empty head. She isn’t a happy actor. She has no idea what is happening to her or what is required of her, so she chooses to take the line of least resistance, and simply lie still, hoping whatever this all is will be over soon and she might be returned to her nice gentle farty old owner with the smelly feet and dog chocolates in her apron pockets. Instead of this … Hell.
‘Good girl, now just stay still and let your … canine … chakras flow out of you and into Sissy. That’s right, good. Heal her, heal her. Health, health. Wakefulness and well-being.’
The veteran mutt stares blankly into the face of the rangy greying woman with the frosted, cheerless curls, whose mouth is constantly moving. Jo is speaking but absolutely no one, especially a dog, knows what she is trying to mean. This is very often the case in Jo’s life. Lots of hectic action in the lips department, usually with good-hearted intent, but no connection to any quiet, thinking head department.
Jo doesn’t want to risk failure with today’s therapy. The dog is the prime player, and she hopes that at some deep human-canine level there will be a kind of holy healing fusion, but she doesn’t want to leave it all to chance. It could well be that Silvia might resist the dog energy, although that’s unlikely because she does actually like dogs, BUT it has occurred to Jo that this very tiny antique dog just might not emit enough power to raise Silvia. Maybe she should have brought two dogs? Or one big one? She simply doesn’t know how to work out the amp-age. So, in the highly improbable event that the dog is underpowered, Jo has brought some other creatures along, and must now try to place them near or on Silvia as discreetly as possible.
She checks through the window to monitor the nurses’ attention, and seeing no sign of the eagle-eyed Winnie, she dives back into the Biba handbag and brings out a plastic exercise ball containing Betty’s granddaughter’s hamster, Justin Bieber. Although only two human years old, Justin is in fact about sixty-five in hamster years and can only do a certain amount of time in the exercise ball without expiring. He’s been in there today for about two hours now and is more than a little hot and sweaty. The hammy stench that comes out of the escape hatch when Jo unscrews the top of the ball is truly unpleasant, in an overheated rodent way. Jo doesn’t want to put her hand into the hole to extract him, so she turns the ball upside down, and along with lots of tiny torpedo poos and cage debris, the shrivelled hamster plops out on to the bed, landing on its back and appearing quite dazed.
‘Oh dear, come on, turn over. Lot of mess, just try to … clear that up.’
Jo tries to straighten up the hamster by poking at it with her glasses and she attempts to wipe the mess from the bed. She only succeeds in making it all much worse, smearing the sheets with fresh hamster poo and causing the little creature to scuttle for safety somewhere behind Silvia’s neck, deep in the crevice of the pillows.
‘No, no, come on out of there. You’ve got to nestle up to her, not hide behind her, that’s no good. Come on.’
Suddenly, the door opens. It is Winnie. Jo hides the ball behind her back.
‘Everyting OK?’ says Winnie, a little bit sternly.
‘Yes, yes, fine thanks. Just … brought Sissy a new … teddy … a bunnyteddy …’
From where Winnie is, she can only see the outline of the furry toy. She is too busy to stop for long. Her checks with Silvia aren’t due just yet. And anyway, it’s best to do them when Jo is out of the way.
‘Oh. Dats nice. Real nice.’
Winnie goes.
‘Right chaps,’ says Jo, addressing her zoo of two, ‘time for the last hope …’
Once again, Jo plunges her hand into the Mary Poppins bottomless bag and brings out a small Tupperware container with tiny holes drilled in the top. She’s not looking forward to this. She prises the lid off. Inside is a big curling leaf of ivy. Jo looks closer. The pet shop assured her they sold her one large Phasmatodea, a giant stick insect. It’s not the cuddliest of creatures, admittedly, but Jo thought that at least she might be able to leave this one in the room after she’d gone, clinging to the blind or something. Even if it only emitted one watt of insect healing power, surely that’s better than nowt? Jo is furious that she has left the pet shop with what appears to be a stack of leaves.
‘Damn!’ she hisses.
The sudden breath of her exhalation wakes up the mighty twig creature who turns out to be the entire contents of the box. It is so surprised that it jumps out and directly on to Jo’s face, where Alien-like, it clamps on. Jo screams at the top of her voice and tries to wipe it off by flapping her arms around wildly. The giant knobbly creature is reluctant to leave its craggy new escarpment home but does a little clinging-on bouncy dance instead. It is positively showing off, wiggling its gnarly bottom over her nose.
The screaming has summoned a couple of nurses, including Winnie, who, bat-like recognized Jo’s undulcet tones from further up the ward and flew down the corridor at a low stealthy efficient speed, to deal with the noisy crisis. What Winnie witnesses as she enters the room is difficult for her to decipher.
Jo is shrieking and panicking, her arms flailing about dramatically. What seems to Winnie to be a small branch goes flying across the room, coming to rest on the side of Silvia’s face, just above her nasal tube. As Winnie approaches to remove it, a small rat-like creature darts out from behind Silvia’s neck and chomps down on the twig which appears to have sprawling legs and be moving, dragging it back into its pillow lair. The other nurses join in the screaming when they see this.
The new volley of screeches persuades Lady, in her dotage and in her quiescence, to quit her suspension and emerge to see what’s going on. She may be vintage, but she’s still a dog, of sorts, and she’s naturally curious. As she shuffles around to right herself, there are loud cries of ‘That rabbit thing!’
‘It’s moving!’
‘It’s alive!’
‘The toy is alive!’
‘Dear God!’
Then Lady pokes her head through the rabbit face hole and the whole room erupts into a cacophony of horrified yelping and high-pitched ululation. It genuinely is a terrifying sight, the skinny hoary old ratty face with the bunny ears. Anyone would be petrified. It makes no earthly sense, what they see, they can’t process it all in any normal, logical way. The only immediate explanation is supernatural devilment. A live branch, a rat and a teddy/bunny aberration from hell. Neither fish, flesh nor fowl.
Two nurses flee the room still yowling. Winnie remains, but is transfixed by the perversions of nature she is confronted with. Now that t
he stick insect is off her, Jo calms down somewhat, but she is still panting with shock when Lady, invigorated with new urgent energy from the shrill squawking, gets the smell in her nose of nearby rodent activity. A small mammal is munching on something, and Lady would like to be munching on that small mammal. She wriggles about and tries to free herself from the costume, but fails. Heroically, she lunges forward, virtually at Silvia’s face, trying to locate the pesky rodent.
She can smell it, smell it, smell it.
She wants to eat it, eat it, eat it.
Somewhere deep inside the generations of inbreeding that Lady is a result of, where virtually all natural instincts have been bred out, there is still the remnant of a dog lurking inside her shivering delicate lappy skin. For a brief instinctual moment, Lady feels the urge to hunt. Her eyes grow dark, her tiny lips peel back, and she starts to slaver. She wants the prey in her jaws. She is growling and snapping and sniffing and straining to get out of the bloody rabbit head.
Winnie starts to make sense of it all gradually, and fastens her furious gaze on Jo, who is watching the carnage with paralysed fear.
‘Sorry nurse. I just thought … animal therapy … might help …’
Winnie wades in and, in one fell swoop, gathers up both the snapping dog and the murderous hamster with the insect still in its mouth, throws them all into the bag and shuts it quickly.
‘Now tek it, you dyam heediat – and go!’
Jo exits hastily, carrying the gladiatorial arena of a handbag, which is thrumming with murderous activity. She would have some difficult news this evening for Betty or her granddaughter.