The Lives of Women Read Free Page B

the man, though, and his safe brown arms with their mane of fine silver hair.
    The man whispered words into her ear – right down into it. The words were small, warm shapes made of air. She could feel them entering her head, winding their way around and nesting in herbrain. She knew they would always live there, that they would grow strong and never leave. They would become part of her. She also knew she would never quite hear them, never mind understand their meaning.
    Â 
    When she came through to the other side, there wasn’t much flesh left under her skin, her hands were crippled and her legs were two hockey sticks that showed no interest in walking. She was in quarantine, in a small square room with a glass wall on either side. There had been a baby in the room to her right. Beyond it, similar rooms that seemed to go on forever: layers of glass and the movement of nurses. Hers was the second-last room on the row. On her left, in the last room, was a man in paisley-print pyjamas.
    Â 
    Three months later the doctor said she was in recovery.
    She had wanted to ask what that meant exactly, but the doctor’s back was turned to her, and he hadn’t been speaking to her anyway, he’d been speaking to her mother. Over his shoulder she could see her mother nodding away, touching her hair and looking up at him sideways as if she’d been expecting him to ask her to dance.
    In his opinion the girl was greatly improved but by no means completely recovered. Nonetheless he would consider discharging her, depending on the results of a few last minute tests.
    â€˜Well, of course, Doctor,’ her mother was saying. ‘If you think that best, of
course
…’
    For a young girl to be stuck so long on her own… The loneliness– you see? It gets to them. ‘She is what now?’ he asked then, reaching for the chart at the end of the bed.
    â€˜Seventeen in December,’ her mother said.
    He lifted the chart and squinted into it. ‘Sixteen,’ he corrected, ‘and a young sixteen at that – would I be right?’
    â€˜Well, yes, Doctor, indeed. Like myself, she’s an only child and, well, we are inclined to be a bit reserved.’
    Â 
    The previous few months had been the loneliest of her life. Days had gone by without a single visitor and only the baby seemed to make sense to her – the two of them lying on their sides and gazing at each other through the glass wall. Different sized nurses had passed through her illness, night into day and back again, but there’d been no conversation beyond a few generalities that only seemed to concern the weather or her bowels. There had been little or no interest shown in her at all, except by the man in the paisley pyjamas who had made her skin crawl, the way he sometimes stared in at her.
    For all that she had grown used to the hospital. She liked being on her own. She liked, too, not having to put up with her mother’s habit of asking endless questions about everything and anything that happened to wander into her head. Or being nagged into constantly eating just to keep her company. She liked the small portions they served here. The little silver bowl of jelly and ice-cream for dessert every day, and the way she was given her own little pot of tea. She liked that she didn’t have to share. She had her radio and her two pillars of books – one short, the other tall– and knew she could rely on Mrs Hanley to keep them coming.
    Her mother, for all her suffocating ways, had only come to see her twice a week: once when her father drove her after church on Sunday, and for an hour or so every Wednesday afternoon when she came by herself. For the week-day visit she took a taxi and it had been clear from her jigging about that she couldn’t wait to get back to her housework. On Sundays, she put in more of an effort, bringing a bag of homemade buns along with a compendium of games. Elaine always looked