Chapter 15
My hospital room had mint green walls, pink plaid curtains, and an ever-present scent of boiled cabbage.
I was lucky enough to have a private “balcony,” which was, in fact, just a fire escape with rusting railings and a single potted fern that had long since given up on life.
Most of the time, I stared out the hospital window, counting the minutes as they crawled by.
It was scalp-itchingly boring. No radio, no magazines.
My parents had paid for a private room, which offered a lovely view of the park opposite.
A kindly nurse with thick nylons and a crisp, starched uniform pushed my bed right up to the window so I could watch the tram lines crisscross the streets below.
If I was propped up, I could see mothers pushing their prams through the park, and the odd man in a fedora, tilted just so, as he read the newspaper in the sun.
Occasionally there was a school group playing sport in the park, which was slightly more interesting even if it did make me ache with loneliness even more than I already did.
It felt like a reminder that I’d been removed from society, even more so than I usually was.
It felt a lot like being strangled, very gently.
My mother came to the hospital every morning, dressed immaculately in a perfectly pressed dress or suit, gloves and all, as though she were attending Mass or a ladies’ luncheon.
She always brought her hip flask and a packet of Peter Stuyvesant Lights, which she now smoked constantly at my bedside.
Cess and Ness came every few days, dressed far more casually and holding bags of books from the library or cellophane-wrapped mixed lollies.
They also brought my diary, which I wrote in daily.
My father didn’t visit at all. I didn’t want him to, obviously, but I also hated him for it.
It was funny how that worked. Just as illogical as love, I supposed.
Mum and I didn’t talk about Kitty again, but I suspect that Mum thought of her often, as I did.
The fact that she not only existed, but that my father believed she’d died at my hand was hard to come to terms with, even if it explained a lot.
Was this why my father hated me? Did he have reason to?
Was I, as he’d said to Susan at the dinner party, not quite right? Was I mad?
In the end, all I could do was read to take my mind off the endless cycle of questions.
Despite the vast selection of books Ness had brought, nothing comforted me as much as reading Anne of Green Gables.
It was between its pages that I first stumbled across the phrase “bosom friend.” It made me think of Cess and Ness’s friendship—the way they knew and loved each other so fully.
I’d never desired such a friend more than as I lay prone in the hospital, day after day.
It was the part of the book where Anne was living with Mrs. Thomas and her drunken husband that I kept coming back to.
It was during this time that Anne had felt so lonely that she used to imagine her reflection in the glass door of the bookcase was a girl called Katie Maurice.
Never had I seen my own loneliness articulated and reflected back like that.
One evening, I found myself putting my hand on my reflection in the hospital window.
“Katie?”
Katie, of course, didn’t reply. I should have known that even imaginary friends would be out of my grasp.
I removed my hand from the window.
I was going to find a bosom friend, I decided then and there. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it hadn’t been easy for Anne either. In the end, Anne found Diana Barry. And I was going to find my bosom friend too.
About a week into my hospital stay, I woke one morning to find Mum at my bedside. I could smell cigarettes before I even opened my eyes—and port, mingling with the stale scent of Chanel No. 5.
“Hi, Mum,” I said.
Her gaze was out the window, softly unfocused, and she startled at the sound of my voice. She was still wearing the navy polka-dot dress from the day before, its stiff taffeta skirt slightly crumpled, her stockings laddered at the knee.
“Oh. Hi, darling.”
“What’s wrong?”
She looked surprised at the question, which baffled me. My mother wore her emotions on the outside for all to see—in the way she turned her head, in the straightness of her spine, and, of course, in the strength of the alcohol she was drinking.
“Nothing’s wrong.” She forced a smile, then lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply. “But I can’t stay long. Your father’s going away tomorrow. I need to finish packing his things.”
Ah. So that’s why she was upset. My father had always traveled for work, but until recently, he’d always taken Mum with him.
She loved to travel. Our house was littered with photographs of them on cruise ships, in first-class train compartments, and posing in front of iconic statues and buildings.
But recently, my father had been taking trips alone.
“Where is he going?”
She exhaled smoke. “London.”
“Oh.” I understood that she was upset, but it could’ve been worse. Mum had been to London lots of times. He could have been going to Paris. Mum loved Paris.
“He’s not going alone, Mabel.”
I frowned, trying to catch up. Not alone? “Who is he going with?”
“Susan McGinty.” She said it lightly, casually, as if she were testing it out. But her lips stiffened around Susan’s name.
“Susan McGinty,” I repeated. It felt familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. But suddenly, I did. Susan McGinty was the woman from the party. The one who’d talked about Kitty.
Mum’s gaze snapped to me. “Yes. Do you know her?”
I thought of the noises in the hallway. The platinum-blond hair. The creamy-white legs. My father’s socks.
“I think I met her once, at a party at Rosehill.”
“Oh.”
“Why is she going on a business trip with Dad?”
She stood and walked to the window. “I’m not sure. I found their shipping tickets for the P & O Liner in his bag. I’ll ask him when he’s home from work. There’s sure to be a reason.”
Mum inhaled deeply on her cigarette. I watched the delicate bones of her neck move gently and wondered what kind of reason would satisfy her.
Did it even need to be true? Or did it merely have to be plausible enough to allow her to maintain the status quo of the deeply unhappy life she lived with my father?
“I saw them,” I said, a spur-of-the-moment decision. “Dad and Susan. I saw them together.”
Mum looked at me. Her gaze was somehow unfocused and intense all at once. “What?”
“In the hallway at Rosehill. It was during a party. They were upstairs, near my bedroom.”
Mum’s hand, pale and shaking, reached for the windowsill and missed, brushing empty air. “What were they doing?”
I tried to find words for what they were doing while Mum butted the cigarette out in the ashtray.
“They … her legs were kind of …” I tried to move my legs to show her. “… and Dad was standing up, lifting her … and they were grunting.”
I was still deep in thought, trying to find the right words to explain what I’d seen, so I didn’t see Mum move until it was too late. Her open palm struck my cheek and nose—clumsy, but hard. Hard enough to make me taste blood. The shock of it stole my breath.
“You vile girl. Why would you say such a thing? What is the matter with you?”
She leaned in, forehead nearly touching mine. Her breath was hot, her body trembling. Her eyes were no longer Mum’s—they belonged to something wild, something cornered. She appeared to be waiting for an answer to her question. What was the matter with me?
It was a good question. Certainly there was something. Something very wrong. She felt it, and in that moment, I felt it too.
Mum stood abruptly, standing and moving with such purpose that I thought she was leaving. But instead of walking out of the room, she strode toward the balcony and flung open the door.
I sat upright, tossing my legs over the side of the bed.
“Mum,” I called after her, then petered out because she was moving so fast. Too fast. She didn’t so much as pause or glance back over her shoulder. She simply launched over the balcony railing and disappeared without a sound.