The Lives of Women Read Free Page A

the same eyes as mine. The same blood and bones. Her name is my name. I know she’s supposed to be me. But no matter how many times I pick up the photograph and no matter how long I stare into that bleak, adolescent face – all I can see is a stranger.

 
    2
    Summer Past
    May
    HER NAME IS ELAINE . She writes it on top of a page in one of the journals she keeps under her bed. My name is Elaine Nichols.
    It physically hurts her to write these few words, but seeing them crawl out from under her twisted fingers – that brings her pleasure too.
    The doctor has said writing will help her hands come back to full use, and so her father brought up to the hospital a block of unused legal journals, parcelled in smooth brown paper.
    Each morning, as soon as she wakes, she reaches for the rubber ball on her bedside locker. Her hands will have clawed overnight and be stubborn as steel; the ball will help coax them back to life.
    The first words of the day are always the toughest. As the day moves on and her hands start to loosen, the words will become easier to release, less measured. No matter which journal shehappens to be on, no matter how many pages she uses in one day, she always starts with the same thing. My name is Elaine Nichols.
    Whatever else she may forget in her life, she knows it won’t be that name.
    Â 
    She has been sick for months. At the end of January she went down with a virus and now it is almost summer. One Saturday morning she’d felt a bit off. By afternoon, she’d had to cancel a babysitting job for the Jacksons – something she hated to do, knowing full well that Junie Caudwell would be in like a light, making the Jackson twins love her more with her bag of sweeties, her big blonde curls and crolly-dolly eyes. For a while she had tortured herself with images of Junie up in the bathroom sniffing Mr Jackson’s after-shave, or twirling around in his big leather chair, or even kissing the photograph of him on the mantelpiece with his tanned face and rolled up shirtsleeves, taken in some far away place like Saudi Arabia.
    By Sunday morning she’d forgotten all about the Jacksons and June Caudwell. By Sunday morning she’d hardly known her own name. She’d woken to find a three-headed version of her mother at the end of the bed, asking if she fancied scrambled eggs for breakfast.
    It seemed only a few seconds later when she’d opened her eyes to a different light. Thick grey dust at the window, a globe of red from the silk lightshade above, and her mother, back to the one-headed version, standing by the bed holding a plate, in a voice, slightly hurt, asking why –
why
had she eaten nothing all day?
    â€˜Even the eggs, you haven’t touched. And just how?
How
do you expect to get well if you won’t even make the smallest of efforts?’
    And then her mother, scooping cold eggs onto cold toast, had begun eating them herself.
    At some stage an ambulance was called. Later she would remember being wheeled out to it; night sky above and the voices of strangers.
    She would remember, too, Doctor Townsend coming from across the road and climbing into the ambulance ahead of her, a hem of pyjama leg showing under the end of his trousers along with a hard knob of ankle. After that she had gone down a hole and disappeared into a delirium.
    She was gone for a long time. She crossed a desert and was almost drowned in a crimson sandstorm. It filled her eyes, nose and throat.
    A man pulled her out of the storm. He wore a large scarlet turban and had a big silver moustache. When he spoke, it was through a hole in his neck. When he smiled, there was an arc of gold-speckled teeth instead of an Adam’s apple.
    There were goats on the journey. Sometimes in a herd, but mostly alone. She hated the goats. The way they shot out of nowhere, nudged her nightdress back with a cold, damp snout, gave a few bleats, before biting down on her buttock and disappearing again. She liked