What Lies Between Us(60)

‘Homeopathic medicine has been used for thousands of years,’ I counter. ‘Native Americans have always used fungis, herbs, lichen etcetera to treat themselves.’

She reaches out to touch my arm, but I pull away from her before she connects. I don’t understand why she’s not keeping an open mind and it’s annoying me.

Maggie must see she’s upsetting me because she takes another look at what I’ve bought her. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I’m grateful, I really am.’ A small part of me wants to pull her into my chest so that we can cry together. I dismiss it. There’s too much water under the bridge for that to happen. Instead, I stand firm, rise to my feet and move all the boxes back into my bag.

‘I’ll call you when dinner is ready,’ I say. And from the corner of my eye, she nods.

I leave her door open behind me and make my way downstairs, reminding myself once again that she is locked up there for a reason. I can’t let this health scare ride roughshod over everything she’s done to me. However, I am not ready for another person in my life to leave me.





CHAPTER 51





MAGGIE


I don’t think I ever really appreciated how much I missed having a bath until the luxury was taken away from me. Until recently, I was only allowed to fill it with lukewarm water and bathe twice a week. But with Nina allowing me to keep my longer chain attached, not only do I get to use the toilet instead of a bucket, I also have the use of my beloved bath again whenever I like.

I’ve started taking baths during the day after Nina leaves for work, filling them up with as much hot water as is left following her shower downstairs. As a precautionary measure, I normally wait until I’ve seen her disappearing up the road before I start to run one. Not that she has forbidden me; in fact, she hasn’t said a word about it. I just don’t want it to be used against me in the future.

As I kneel naked by the bathtub waiting for it to fill, I turn to look at the day’s worth of food and alternative medicines she has left in Tupperware boxes outside my bedroom door. I can’t say I’m not disappointed. A handful of almonds and some green teabags aren’t going to rid me of my lump. But a doctor might.

I sink into the bath, my leg raised and resting on the side so that I don’t wet my chain. Nina has replaced the orange-scented bath foam with one that smells of lavender. It’s much more pleasant. I lie back, placing a folded towel for a pillow behind my head, and locate the lump in my breast again. Perhaps I’m hoping for a miracle and that it might have miraculously vanished overnight. It hasn’t, of course.

I honestly don’t know how I am supposed to react to Nina’s remedies. I believe there’s certainly a place for complementary medicine, but it is alongside, not instead of, modern medicine. I am someone who has spent more than three decades working at a doctors’ surgery and witnessing how medicines can prolong lives and fight cancer. Nina is clutching at straws. And I don’t know what I can do to make her understand that.

I can still taste the garlic in last night’s chicken Kiev in the back of my throat. It was so overpowering and I wonder if, going forward, that’s how every meal is going to be – crammed or coated with some ‘miracle’ cure. Throughout dinner, each time she brought up something she had read online that might help, I wanted to grab my plate, hurl it at the wall and scream at her to shut up. But I don’t, partly because I don’t want to hurt her feelings and partly because I need to keep her onside.

I struggle to relax so I climb out of the bath and dry myself, slip a dress over my head then return to my room. Too wound up to sit, I pace up and down instead.

I’ve counted them and there are three potential directions I see my future heading in. The first is that I am going to leave this house in a wooden box. The second is that I’ll persuade her into allowing me a proper professional diagnosis and, if necessary, treatment. Presently, the former seems more probable because Nina has inherited many of her dad’s traits, one being his stubbornness. The third is that I am going to help myself. To date, each of my escape plans has been thwarted. So I need to be smarter.

As I scan the walls, floors and ceiling with a fresh perspective, I’m distracted by the photograph of Alistair that Nina glued to the wall just under my bedroom ceiling. With my extended chain, it’s no longer out of my reach. I balance on the ottoman and tear at it. It comes off in two strips. I take it to the toilet and flush him away.

I know every square inch of my bedroom, but not so much the bathroom. I look around. I don’t even know what I’m searching for or how it might help me get out of here. But Nina has taken precautionary measures. The mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet has been unscrewed and removed, as has the heavy lid of the porcelain toilet tank.

Suddenly I start to cry. I don’t want to die at sixty-eight. If my time is up, I want it to be out there, not stuck in here. I don’t want to spend my remaining days mimicking my mother’s final moments in a hospice deathbed, mourning a life I never had the chance to finish properly.

And what will I have to apologise for when my day of reckoning comes? Will I be sorry for what I did, or for what I didn’t do, in the name of a mother’s love? Will I be forgiven for how I let my daughter down, for my sheer bloody ignorance? How can I ask for forgiveness when I truly believe that what I did was the right thing to do?