Gordon #2
Cora takes the woman in properly now. She has that look of dog-tiredness that seems to subsume some mothers, as though their children continue to leach vitamins and minerals from them long after they’ve finished breastfeeding, leaving a rice-pudding complexion, cheeks yearning for rosehip.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” Cora says. And she means it, but as she walks away, she wants to cry, because she has no idea what to do next.
So she walks. She doesn’t know where she’s heading, only that she has a need to be moving, putting one foot in front of the other to stop her thoughts from overwhelming her.
Her mother’s face edges into her mind—her hands, her profile.
But she cannot let herself go there and each time an image of Sílbhe appears, Cora blinks, squeezing her lids down hard like the jaws of a dustbin lorry, compressing, crushing, until it disappears.
Instead, she thinks of Gordon. About what to do next.
She has no key to get back into the house.
And she realizes she has left the discarded envelope on the sofa.
If she had kept all the mail out, she could just say the postman had handed it to her and she’d seen something addressed for her.
He wouldn’t like it, but perhaps it would pass.
But the fact that half the mail has ended up in the mailbox and one piece has been opened will suggest she was trying to deceive him.
“Damn,” she mutters as she walks along a street she’s never encountered before. “Damn, damn, damn.”
It is this, rather than the fact he has omitted to tell her of her own mother’s passing, that makes her feel she can’t return home.
But she has nowhere else to go. She doesn’t know Maia’s phone number.
She has no money. The police don’t even register as an option after their visit all those years ago.
She can’t go to the library where Gordon regularly borrows books and where, sometimes, on a Saturday morning, they return them together.
So, she goes to the only place she can think of where they have no links, where she hopes Gordon will be unknown. Where they might have some code of ethics around confidentiality. Where there might be people who care.
Inside the vet’s, she tells the receptionist that her dog is unwell, that its eyes are rolling back in its head, and asks if she might speak to a vet for a moment.
“But you’re not registered with us?”
“I’ve just moved to the area,” she says quietly, even though she doesn’t recognize the people sitting on the gray plastic chairs in the waiting room. She scans the faces, watches the door and the car park beyond.
The curly haired vet calls her forward between patients, his elbow resting on the ledge of the receptionist’s desk, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows.
“Could we, erm…could we go—” and Cora nods to the consultation room he’s just come from.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he says, perplexed. “We won’t keep you waiting too long,” he says to the elderly woman sitting with a cat basket at her feet.
They stand to either side of a rubber-topped metal table, where a creature would normally be coaxed from its carrier for treatment. What she needs to say seems dramatic, like something sensationalist from a film or a book. But she’s here now and has no other choice.
“I need help,” she says and feels her bottom lip begin to go.
He reaches for a tissue box on the windowsill, practiced in dealing with his clients’ emotions.
She takes the tissue but doesn’t use it.
If she stops, she won’t go on. “I have no money, no phone, no friends. And my husband is…”—there is the feeling of driving over a humpbacked bridge, with no road on the other side to catch her—“he’s not kind.
” She sees the vet does not understand and tries again.
“I mean, I think he is an abusive man. To me.”
“Just a moment,” he says. And he opens the door a few inches and says to the receptionist, “If you could fit my patients in with Carolyn, please. I’ll be unavailable for a while.”
She does not feel the time passing, but when she looks at her watch it marks out the hours and the things Gordon may be doing a few miles away.
Calling home after his appointment with the rep.
Afternoon surgery. A fifteen-minute break at 3 p.m. The vet leaves the room briefly to make phone calls and returns to update her.
He brings her a blanket. He’s apologetic—it’s one they use for the animals—but he reassures her it’s clean.
She hadn’t realized she was cold, but when he wraps the fabric around her shoulders, its weight and warmth feel like something she’s been craving.
“We all feel the cold more when we’re in shock,” he tells her.
Is she in shock? she wonders. Yes, perhaps she is.
“Are you more of a cat or a dog person?” the vet asks, while they wait to hear back from an organization he hopes might be able to help. And she realizes she doesn’t know. That she has no idea of her likes and dislikes, of who the person in her own body might be. She is barely a person at all.
“My mother had a cat,” she says, feeling her eyes begin to tear.
The receptionist buzzes and he leaves the room to take a call.
When he returns, he is holding a small gray cat.
“This is Smokey,” he says. “She’s been with us for a few days, but she’s all ready to go back home once her owner has finished work this evening.
” He places the cat on Cora’s lap and, almost reflexively, it starts purring.
She lowers her hand to its thick coat and it’s like sinking her fingers into velvet.
It is nearly 5 p.m. when a woman comes into the room, the vet behind her.
At first Cora thinks it’s Smokey’s owner, come to reclaim her, but then she introduces herself.
“Hello, Cora, I’m Della. I’m from the Bowen House Women’s Refuge.
You’re safe now.” And Cora slumps with relief, because she believes her, because she looks both soft and hard all at once, as though steel-capped boots and fearlessness hover around the edges of her warmth.
It’s this that gives her the courage to walk through the empty waiting room and out to Della’s car.
It’s only as they pull away and she sees the vet’s face disappear from view that she realizes she hasn’t thanked him, doesn’t know his name, cannot remember when the cat was lifted from her knee.
She looks down and sees her clothes are carpeted with its hairs.
She touches her hand to them and remembers her school skirt, threaded with fur in exactly this way.
How old would she have been? Fourteen, the last year she wore uniform, before coming to London to study ballet.
Maia is at the end of a shift that has eaten into her evening, forcing her to text friends to first say she’ll be late, and then not there at all. She sits on the bench in the center of the room, her locker open, trying to muster the energy to change out of scrubs, when her phone rings.
The number is withheld, and she almost doesn’t pick up, until she remembers the plumber who said he’d call her or Kate with a time to fix the shower that leaks water onto the hall ceiling below, its stain blooming in size each morning.
But when she taps the green button to accept the call, it is her mother’s voice she hears. “Maia?”
“Mum?”
Her parents no longer have a landline and, lately, when Maia’s gone to call her father’s mobile, the lead weight of the dial tone has sounded in her ear, and somehow, she hasn’t been able to bring herself to jump through the hoop of asking to speak to her mother.
It’s him she has spoken to more recently.
She’d rung during the workday to ask his advice about how to deal with one of the consultants, and he’d been so pleased to hear from her, so generous in sharing his knowledge, she’d almost let herself forget the monster he’d been when she’d lived at home.
She can’t remember the last time she spoke to her mother.
But now, she’s on the other end of the line—unbidden, unexpected—and her voice sounds shaky and unlike her own.
“Are you okay, Mum? Dad’s number didn’t come up—I didn’t know it was you. ”
“Yes, I’m okay. Can I—can I put you on the phone to—to Della? It’d be easier,” her mum says, her voice catching on the shape of the final word as though each syllable is a mountain to climb and fall around.
“Yes, but who’s Della?”
Maia hears the muffle of the phone being handed over and then a woman’s voice. Solid, trustworthy, but with no soft edges. “Maia, this is Della. I’m calling from a women’s refuge. Are you somewhere we can talk?”
Maia straightens. “I think so,” she says, glancing up at the empty locker room.
“I understand from your mum that you’re aware of the abuse she’s been receiving at home.
” Maia swallows—it’s like washing down a stone.
Because, yes, at some level, she is aware; does not believe the abuse stopped the moment she left home.
“We’ve been called in today because things have escalated.
Your mum’s out of immediate danger, but I do have some difficult news to share. ”
Maia swallows uncomfortably again, shields her eyes, even though the unlit room is steeped in gloom.
“We believe your grandmother died several months ago, and—”
“No, that’s not right.” Relief. Vindication. “I spoke to her last week—”
“Sorry, Maia, I mean on your mother’s side.
Your Grandma Sílbhe,” Della says. Maia’s heart flip-flops at the unexpected name.
She sees the flame in it—í—and then, as she processes Della’s words, feels it wavering, as though a gust of wind has rushed in.
There is a long pause. A silence where Maia almost forgets the woman is on the other end of the line. “Are you still there, Maia?”
“Yes.”
“I’m aware I’m not giving you much time to take all this in, but I’m about to go home for the night and I don’t want to leave you in the dark if your father gets in touch.”
“My father?”
“Yes. I’m afraid he’s hidden this news from your mother, and we believe diverted any inheritance to get around the issue of her becoming financially independent in any way.”
“Have you spoken to him? Do you actually know this?” Maia asks, aware even as the words are leaving her mouth that she is siding with him. And that this woman, Della, will be judging her for it.
“Maia, I’m going to let you absorb all this overnight. I’m guessing you’ll have some questions tomorrow, so if you’d like, I can put in a call at some point during the day?”
“Oh. Yes. Thank you.” She thinks about her schedule tomorrow, surprised to find she still has a life and commitments beyond this phone call. “Midday? That would give me time before my next shift. I’m a doctor,” she adds, unsure what this woman already knows about her.
“I can try for that, but my days can be unpredictable. So if I don’t call then, I’ll be in touch as soon as I get the chance.”
“Do you have a number I can call back on? If I miss you?” Maia asks, taking the phone from her cheek before seeing again that it’s a withheld number.
“I think it’s best if I phone you for now.” And Maia understands the subtext. That Della isn’t sure she’s on side.
When the call has ended, Maia sits in the rubble of her crumbling reality.
She feels the weight of not meeting the woman’s expectations.
Or perhaps, worse, proving her expectations right.
And as she absorbs the news about Sílbhe, her father, her mother, she becomes aware of her own role in all this too.
She, Maia, is a helper. She is tireless in the care she offers her patients.
Admired by colleagues for always taking the time to see the bigger picture.
Respected for the way she will connect the dots to treat the whole person, rather than just the symptom they present with.
And yet, in her own life, she has pretended what she knew wasn’t real, because it felt too big and hard to deal with.
At eighteen. And in all the years since.
The door opens and when Maia glances up, it’s Kate’s face she sees, her thick red hair still holding onto the kinks of having been tied back all day. “Are you okay?” Kate asks, her expression making it clear she can already see Maia is not.
And it’s then that Maia receives another shock.
One that whips around her body, infecting every cell with shame, even as Kate unwittingly wraps her arms around her and places a nicotine kiss on her cheek.
Because laid out before her is the realization that she has not only hidden her relationship with Kate from her family.
She has also hidden the facts of her family from Kate.
She has edited away all the unsavory parts of herself, to leave a version that is nowhere near the truth.