Chapter 60 Phyllida
PHYLLIDA
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
Phyllida focuses on each stroke as she brushes her hair.
It is the mindful practice of everyday tasks that helps her through life.
She regards her hand as it places the hairbrush onto the sink; she buttons her shirt with deliberate care.
The bathroom is square and bare. A shower curtain hangs beside the toilet, a shower chair in the corner.
A bright overheard light is beaming down onto her head.
She sits on the edge of the hospital bed in her slacks and a Liberty print shirt, and she waits.
Gretchen is returning to talk to her about going home, about her health (mostly the mental variety) and her worries.
Phyllida has read up on this discharge process and how they must muddle through it.
Risk assessment, safety planning, support coordination.
She and Gretchen have again discussed the pills she took.
She is interested that the girl is still worried, because Phyllida is not.
With her health on the mend, and news of Francis, she will go home and live.
It was those two burdensome things that had put her here: the lump, which she took to signal an end, and thinking Francis would be compromised when Lottie’s DNA led to him.
It had always been her worst fear that Francis might be forced to speak about the killing of Edward.
If she had been charged, no doubt he would have spoken the truth, to his own detriment.
Phyllida is sorry she cannot tell Gretchen about Francis and the tragedy of that time. But Gretchen seems to think David’s traumatic illness was plenty to trigger the PTSD, so that’s handy.
Fear had ruled Phyllida’s early life; fear that with one wrong move her sons would suffer further.
It can destroy a person—fear that you have done wrong by an innocent child, that you are living in the wrong moment, in the wrong skin.
As she went on, she met her fear with curiosity and the courage to act.
The pills were not a failing. Nothing is forever.
But she is still alive for a reason. There is more to understand. She must stand beside her fear and they must walk together.
A text arrives from Lottie: Be there to collect you at midday. xx
Phyllida replies: Thank you, my dear. Whatever time suits you is fine.
She closes her eyes, ponders the gift of Lottie.
The DNA test had not linked Lottie to David.
Of course it hadn’t. Phyllida should have trusted herself and her knowing.
Lottie is now in touch with a man named Lars.
He had emailed her through the DNA website to say he appears to be her biological father.
Which brings Phyllida to the one thing that had almost stopped her from taking the pills.
She’d known Lottie was pregnant, but as the girl rarely drank alcohol or did anything else that might harm a baby, Phyllida hadn’t liked to mention it.
Fate was in charge there. Let these things unfold.
She had thought about staying around for Lottie and yet David had been calling to her, each night in her fitful, awful dreams—since that discussion with Miriam in the carpark, and since she found the lump.
She thinks Gretchen is onto something with this PTSD and how it disrupts the brain.
She had thought she was cured in that psychiatric hospital thirty years ago, but Gretchen reminded her that she had been fundamentally altered by the trauma of David’s death.
And all the previous traumas, Phyllida thinks wryly.
She picks up her phone and swipes, opens the photographs Roddy has sent.
Francis sits on the edge of a bed next to an old woman.
She is small; almost nothing beneath the bedcovers.
In the silent freeze of the photograph, Edith Wilson looks oddly luminous.
Phyllida is grateful to the woman for the energy she once had, for her cool head and her devious plan.
And most certainly that she cared so well for Francis.
The second photograph is of Roddy and Francis inside a lovely living room. A selfie of two smiling men. She has an inkling they have much to discover. Something wonderful is coming.
She ponders the joy of life and the people she has been blessed to share it with. But her time will eventually end. She will not cling. She feels the grace of her acceptance. Health and sickness, life and death.
Phyllida has read widely about what happens to a soul when a body dies.
She’s worked hard to meld Eastern ideas with the remnants of her Christian faith.
She still likes the Christian hymns and the pleasant liturgical repetition in the Lord’s prayer, and the commandments are a pretty good road map; although the one about not making a carved image of God seems idiotic; there are lots of Jesus statues about the place, so it’s amusing how it’s all been interpreted and justified by the menfolk down the line.
Phyllida also quite likes the idea of reincarnation but hasn’t settled on any special reckoning.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism—they all say a lot about it.
She enjoys the idea that one day you might meet your favourite souls again.
With each incarnation, as one lives then dies, one further masters the lessons of the world.
Each time, a chance to meet again. She smiles to herself as she thinks how this might be.
Cyclical evolution of the soul until you are basically a sage with a pure and perfect heart taking tea with your darlings. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Well, perhaps, she thinks, looking back at the photograph of Roddy and Francis. Perhaps. Phyllida is keeping an open mind.