Chapter 25
Shadows crept across the floor.
Day blended into evening. Evening blended into night. The house grew quiet.
The radiator ticked quietly, and somewhere, an owl screeched.
Gravel crunched under the tyres of a car. The letterbox slapped against the metal fitting.
“Post’s here,” Dad called from somewhere in the house.
Mum’s voice came from outside my door, muffled through the wood.
“Love, is the heating on? It’s a bit nippy.”
And then-
“Ky, are you up? Good grief, it’s like a fridge in here, why’s the window open?”
She moved across the room and pulled the window shut.
“Why are you still in bed? Are you sick?”
I pulled the duvet over my head.
“Okay, baby. I’ll leave you to it.” Her voice was quieter, the voice you used on the convalescent. A gentle hand pressed briefly to my shoulder. My door closed.
Shadows crept across the floor.
The radiator ticked quietly.
Gravel crunched under the tyres of a car. The letterbox slapped against the metal fitting.
“Post’s here,” Dad called from somewhere in the house.
A knock at my door.
“Ky? Are you awake?”
The door creaked open.
A noise of sympathy.
“Okay baby, I’ll get you some breakfast.”
I forced myself to drink the juice. The tea was stone cold, but I drank it anyway. I threw the toast to the crows.
I went back to bed.
When I opened my eyes, it was dark again.
Shadows crept across the floor.
The radiator ticked quietly.
Gravel crunched under the tyres of a car. The letterbox slapped against the metal fitting.
“Post’s here,” Dad called from somewhere in the house.
No knock today. The door creaked open.
A whispered conversation took place, hurried, in the space between here and out there.
“Love,” Mum’s voice bled from the doorway, the warmth in it burning.
“Rebecca called. She told us about… about your fella. I know you don’t feel like it now, but I need you to eat and drink something, okay? I’m going to leave this here. It’ll stay good for a while. But you need to get something in you. I won’t crowd you, but I will be back later.”
Dad mumbled something, but from the muffled ‘omph’, it sounded like Mum had elbowed him in the stomach.
The door shut and the snick of the lock echoed throughout the stillness like a gunshot.
I blinked, watching the sharp lines of the sun as it drew borders across my carpet, seeing with detached interest as the warmer delineation stretched across the floor the longer I stared.
I closed my eyes.
The lines across the carpet had moved halfway across the room when I opened them. The tray Mum had set inside was firmly entrenched in no-man’s land.
Recalling that she’d be back, I pulled myself out of my bed and over to the tray. Muesli. Juice. Another cold tea. No telling how long it had been there, but I drank it because she had made it for me.
I chewed mechanically, the muesli crunching in my mouth, despite the milk. An admirable amount of implacability of texture that drowned out the thoughts in my head. I was grateful for the muesli. I had no idea what it tasted like. Nothing.
I went back to bed.
The nights were worse.
They say that, don’t they? Nurses, and doctors.
They say that patients feel pain worse at night, and as I lay there in a dark that was so dark that I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed, I considered this as a way to ignore all the ways I hurt.
Maybe it was the sensory deprivation that came from the night.
The world was quieter than the thoughts in your own head.
Though it hurt, I found a kind of solace in the ache. It reminded me that it hadn’t all been a dream, because really it also had been a dream. The sort of story you made up. The story of the prince who falls in love with the ordinary girl and whisks her off to his kingdom in the clouds.
But I was still just an ordinary girl. And he was still gone.
And it hadn’t been a dream.
Shadows crept across the floor.
The radiator ticked quietly.
Gravel crunched under the tyres of a car. The letterbox slapped against the metal fitting.
“Post’s here,” Dad called from somewhere in the house.
A void.
That’s how it felt.
In a strange, detached sort of observation, I knew that it would be normal to cry; to do those things they did in the movies – sit on the sofa in my pyjamas, eat a tub of ice cream, not wash my hair, or maybe even sing into a hairbrush.
Most of all, it would be normal to cry.
Once, when I was a kid, I fell in the garden of our old council house.
I had somehow managed to get a rotten, old piece of wood lodged in my ankle.
We went to the hospital to get it taken out but because it was rotten, it was too fragmented to take out in one piece.
The doctor had needed to cut into my ankle to remove the splinters, so he’d numbed the entire area, and I’d been able to watch as he methodically pulled out shards of wood from an ankle that only distantly felt like mine.
That was how this felt.
I saw the source of the pain. I understood that somewhere, it must hurt, but I couldn’t feel it.
I didn’t feel much of anything. I was… removed.
I was like a passenger in my own body, disconnected from my feelings. Instinctively, I knew it wouldn’t last, knew it would hurt more the longer it went on.
Mum sat next to me on my bed and tentatively, she put a hand on my knee.
“Kaiya,” she started, speaking softly, as if she was trying not to scare me away. “I know this hurts and if you want to t-”
“I don’t.” My voice was rough, like a strip of wool dragged over splinters.
“Okay, love.” She nodded. “You should call Rebecca, though. She keeps calling the landline phone. It must be costing her a fortune.”
How could I tell her that I couldn’t? Because Becka was a part of the story about the prince and the castle, and if I called her… maybe… maybe I would start to feel it.
“Where is your phone, anyway?” She asked, looking around. “She says she’s been trying to call you for days.”
I looked over to the bedside table where it sat, a blank piece of glass, where it had been since… since.
Mum picked it up. “Oh. It’s off. Is it broken?”
How could I tell her I haven’t bothered to charge it in days? How could I explain that turning it on meant seeing… nothing? Meant understanding there would be no messages, or missed calls?
Absently, I rubbed my chest and my fingers brushed against my necklace, the little golden swallow. All of me froze, except for my fingers which clenched around the little bird as if it were a lifeline in a turbulent sea.
Mum’s eyes flickered over my face before her mouth pinched, and she put the phone down.
“Okay, baby. How about I run you a bath, hmm? I have some nice bath oils in that hamper I won in the raffle last week. How does that sound? Here, you take off those pyjamas and put them in the basket for the wash and I’ll run you a bath, yeah?”
It was all posed as a question – a series of options amidst the chatter of an ongoing life – but it was clear there was no real choice in any of the words she used, so mechanically, I nodded.
When she left, I did as she asked and took off my pyjamas.
Dimly, from the bathroom down the hall, I heard the pounding rush of the water filling the large, claw-footed tub, but having received no further instructions, I just stood there, paused.
It could have been minutes or hours later when Mum came back into the room.
“Oh! Okay baby, let’s just-um, here,” she thrust a fluffy, white towel at me, and I obligingly wrapped it around myself before allowing her to lead me to the bathroom.
The small room was fragrant with warm, scented air, but I couldn’t tell what smell it was supposed to be.
“Come on, love. You’ll feel much better after a nice bath, hmm?”
She guided me towards the full tub. Tendrils of steam coiled in the air above the water. Like a child, I allowed her to take my towel, and I stepped into the bath, sitting down in the water.
“There now, doesn’t that feel nice?”
I tried to muster up the answer I knew she wanted, but even thinking about what she wanted me to say felt like too much. I hummed noncommittally.
She sighed.
I felt warm, strong hands on my scalp. The unexpected touch coupled with the scent of shampoo broke through the fuzzy layer of incomprehension that had been wrapped so tightly around me, and the sudden intrusion through my layers of grief made me yelp.
“Hush,” Mum soothed, lathering the shampoo into my hair with gentle, intentional movements that seemed to transport me back to childhood. She hummed, a lilting, but nonsensical tune.
The smell was different, but everything else… it was the same. Suddenly, I was a little girl again, getting my hair washed in the bath by my mum.
That’s all it took.
My shoulders caved inwards, pulling the air from my lungs as a sob tore its way up my throat, spilling into the warm water.
Silent, wrenching cries I had no breath to give noise to.
“Ssh, I’ve got you.”
Mum ran her hands down from my scalp to my neck and shoulders, moving her soft hands in familiar, comforting circles, at once gentle and firm.
“It’s okay, my love, you’re going to be okay.”
I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but by the end, I was leaning against my Mum, throat aching, a headache blooming between my eyes.
She was cascading warm water over my head, and she had been doing it for so long that surely no trace of shampoo remained, but she kept at it until eventually, my heaves gentled into quiet shudders.
“I’m here, baby,” she murmured.
I realised she was soaking, either from me pressing against her so tightly, or from the water she’d poured over me. She didn’t seem to care, as she gently rocked me in her arms.
Mum stayed with me the rest of the day. Dad made us soup and cheese toasties, and we sat on the floor of my room eating. I was wrapped in a robe as Mum gently brushed my tangled hair.