The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(30)
“Family therapy may be available,” she heard Dr. Bhattacharya say. “Had you thought of that?”
* * *
DECEMBER: Merry Christmas.
* * *
JANUARY: “YOU’RE GOING to send me back to the unit,” Morna said.
“No, no,” her mother said. “Not at all.”
“You were on the phone to Dr. Bhattacharya.”
“I was on the phone to the dentist. Booking in.”
Morna had lost some teeth lately, this was true. But she knew her mother was lying. “If you send me back I will drink bleach,” she said.
Lola said, “You will be shining white.”
* * *
FEBRUARY: THEY TALKED about sectioning her: that means, their mother said, compulsory detention in a hospital, that means you will not be able to walk out, Morna, like you did before.
“It’s entirely your choice,” their father said. “Start eating, Morna, and it won’t come to that. You won’t like it in the loony bin. They won’t be coaxing you out on walks and baking you bloody fairy cakes. They’ll have locks on the doors and they’ll be sticking you full of drugs. It won’t be like the unit, I’m telling you.”
“More like a boarding kennel, I should think,” Lola said. “They’ll be kept on leads.”
“Won’t you save me?” Morna said.
“You have to save yourself,” their father said. “Nobody can eat for you.”
“If they could,” said Lola, “maybe I’d do it. But I’d charge a fee.”
Morna was undoing herself. She was reverting to unbeing. Lola was her interpreter, who spoke out from the top bunk in the clear voice of a prophetess. They had to come to her, parents and doctors, to know what Morna thought. Morna herself was largely mute.
She had made Morna change places and sleep on the bottom bunk since new year. She was afraid Morna would roll out and smash herself on the floor.
She heard her mother moaning behind the bedroom door: “She’s going, she’s going.”
She didn’t mean “going to the shops.” In the end, Dr. Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning.
* * *
FEBRUARY: AT THE last push, in the last ditch, she decided to save her sister. She made her little parcels wrapped in tinfoil—a single biscuit, a few pick’n’mix sweets—and left them on her bed. She found the biscuit, still in its foil, crushed to crumbs, and on the floor of their room shavings of fudge and the offcut limbs of pink jelly lobsters. She could not count the crumbs, so she hoped Morna was eating a little. One day she found Morna holding the foil, uncrumpled, looking for her reflection in the shiny side. Her sister had double vision now, and solid objects were ringed by light; they had a ghost-self, fuzzy, shifting.
Their mother said, “Don’t you have any feelings, Lola? Have you no idea what we’re going through, about your sister?”
“I had some feelings,” Lola says. She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don’t want your dinner. So she had begun to leave it, or surreptitiously shuffle bits of food—pastry, an extra potato—into a piece of kitchen roll.
She remembered that night in November when they went barefoot down to the computer. Standing behind Morna’s chair, she had touched her shoulder, and it was like grazing a knife. The blade of the bone seemed to sink deep into her hand, and she felt it for hours; she was surprised not to see the indent in her palm. When she had woken up next morning, the shape of it was still there in her mind.
* * *
MARCH: ALL TRACES of Morna have gone from the bedroom now, but Lola knows she is still about. These cold nights, her Mr. Men pajamas hitched up with one hand, she stands looking out over the garden of the small house. By the lights of hovering helicopters, by the flash of the security lights from neighboring gardens, by the backlit flicker of the streets, she sees the figure of her sister standing and looking up at the house, bathed in a nimbus of frost. The traffic flows long into the night, a hum without ceasing, but around Morna there is a bubble of quiet. Her tall straight body flickers inside her nightshirt, her face is blurred as if from tears or drizzle, and she wears no readable human expression. But at her feet a white dog lies, shining like a unicorn, a golden chain about its neck.
TERMINUS
On January 9th, shortly after eleven on a dark sleety morning, I saw my dead father on a train pulling out of Clapham Junction, bound for Waterloo.
I glanced away, not recognizing him at once. We were on parallel tracks. When I looked back, the train had picked up speed, and carried him away.
My mind at once moved ahead, to the concourse at Waterloo Station, and the meeting which I felt sure must occur. The train on which he was traveling was one of the old six-seater carriage-and-corridor type, its windows near-opaque with the winter’s accumulation, and a decade of grime plastered to its metal. I wondered where he’d come from: Windsor? Ascot? You’ll understand that I travel in the region a good deal, and one gets to know the rolling stock.
There were no lights in the carriage he had chosen. (The bulbs are often stolen or vandalized.) His face had an unpleasant tinge; his eyes were deeply shadowed, and his expression was thoughtful, almost morose.