His sagging back and bent head make a perfect arc, as if the weight of his worry is forcing him into a slow dive. How much this man has had to endure. All Giles’s work colleagues are already moving on to their second and third children, those sunny, capable women who juggle budgets and meetings, complicated childcare and transatlantic flights. Giles has invested hugely in his family for such little return, and yet so has Ruth, the fault in her brain as much outside her control as his. Giles is the onlooker, but Ruth inhabits the horror.
‘We’d like to encourage you to talk to us,’ Dr Fraser says, ‘let us know what’s really going on with you.’ Without Bess to hold on to, Ruth grips her elbows, forcing her shoulders close to her ears. Both Richard and Maggie’s smiles are fixed. Only the psychiatrist’s stare is serious as she continues. ‘We have you on what is usually a pretty effective dose of medication, so we’re a bit concerned if it’s not doing its job. Perhaps the time has come to consider another avenue of help.’
‘I’m not going on the psych ward.’
‘It’s highly unlikely you’d need to go to a hospital, Ruth.’
‘I won’t let you take Bess away.’
‘No one’s saying that, Mrs Woodman. We’d do everything in our power to find a bed at a mother-and-baby unit, even if it meant you going out of area. From your experience of spending time there before, I hope you can remember how supportive the staff were, and how they can assist you with any issues you might be having around medication or attachment.’ She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms. ‘When I visited you in the unit last time, it struck me as significant that you said you’d been terrified the place would be like some kind of Victorian asylum, but the reality was more like a hotel.’
‘Look.’ Ruth scans the faces in the room, her options falling away by the second as the likelihood of being sent away looms closer – whatever’s going on with what she’s been seeing and hearing, it’s nothing like her illness was at the beginning, when the delusions had been her total world view. Her current state of mind is fixable by far simpler means than treatment at the mother-and-baby unit. Like sleep and logic, and avoiding neighbours who put ideas in her head. These things aside, she fears, however irrationally, that if the wheels were put in motion and there were no beds, there’d be no other option but to put her on a psychiatric ward where they have no facilities for babies. The chance is small, minute even, but it’s still a possibility, and possibility is risk, a risk they’d take Bess away. Her voice falters. ‘I’ve just had a couple of blips recently, just silly things bothering me. My sleep’s been all over the place, but I’m totally back on track now.’
‘If you’re not sleeping, we need to know about it,’ Richard says. ‘Insomnia and feelings of increased anxiety are in your care plan as early warning signs that might trigger a relapse. So being alert to these is part of the responsibility of looking after yourself, as well as your daughter, especially if there’ve been instances of hallucinating again.’
‘I was just dreaming, OK? That stuff I said to Giles was nonsense, I know that now.’
‘Well,’ says Dr Fraser. ‘A mother-and-baby unit might get you over this hump and help you find a better routine. We’d like to encourage you to consider this option very seriously. There’s no shame in your illness, Ruth, but there’s a possibility it might be growing bigger than you again, and none of us, yourself included, want to let it take any more control.’
‘I told you, I had a bad dream.’ A fleck of spit lands on her thigh as she speaks. ‘If you want me to take the antidepressants, fine, but I’m not mad any more. I’m perfectly capable of looking after my baby.’
‘No one’s saying you’re not, Ruth, but we do think it might be wise to adapt your care plan to incorporate another stay at the unit, before things escalate any further.’
‘Right.’ Ruth stands. ‘I’m not staying here and listening to any more of this rubbish.’ She grabs Bess from Maggie’s arms and tries to strap her wriggling baby into the buggy. Bess hasn’t had enough warning and she arches her back as Ruth wrestles the harness over her frantic little arms. One of the safety clips pinches the baby’s skin and a scream bursts through the room. A blood blister inflates on Bess’s hand. ‘Oh God, oh no! Sorry, Bessie.’ Ruth kisses the little girl’s hand over and over, almost as if she could absorb the pain herself. She turns to the other four in the room. ‘Look what you made me do!’
She wrenches open the door, the buggy too close, and the door jams on the front wheels before thumping shut again.
‘Ruth, what are you doing?’ Giles is at her side. He tries to take the handles. Ruth bumps him out of the way with her shoulder.
It takes several attempts to swing the door wide enough to get out. She turns briefly to see Maggie and Richard standing together, heads almost touching, frowning at each other across folded arms. Giles is speaking to the doctor. He grabs a prescription from her hand and breaks away to chase after Ruth as she speeds through the waiting room of judging eyes. She races down the road, trying to outrun Giles, who’s drawn along by Bess’s howl.
By the time they get off the bus, the school they passed earlier is emptying. A sea of parents and children surges towards Ruth. She struggles to get through the crowd without ramming the buggy into shins. The end-of-school bell is high and clear in the playground, and a backwash of memory hits Ruth: her sister waiting at the gates at the end of the summer term, Ruth fifteen, her sister sixteen, the two of them running to the park they used to play in as younger kids, grabbing the swings they’d grown too big for and swinging so high the chains went slack and their bodies became weightless. Tam’s voice coming in and out of hearing as they passed mid-air, like opposing metronomes. ‘When you reach the top,’ she said, ‘if you let go, you’d fly. Just for a few seconds before you hit the ground, you’d be totally free. What do you think? Shall we give it a try?’
When they finally get home, Bess has calmed a little, but she’s still crying. Ruth focuses on this tiny machine of noise, her own hands frozen at her sides, overwhelmed by the multitude of things she needs to do in opposition to the one she wants, which is to cover her ears and block out the crying. The noise fills Ruth’s brain, scouring her to the bone. There isn’t enough room inside her head for all her fears as well as this shrieking.
Giles lifts his daughter from the pushchair and puts her over his shoulder. ‘Hey, munchkin,’ he says to the little girl. ‘It’s OK.’ He kisses her as he goes to the downstairs loo. Bess’s cry softens to a whimper.
Giles makes no attempt this time to disguise the creak and slam of the medicine cabinet door. He returns to Ruth with crackling foil and plastic, and as she turns he’s standing next to her with a tablet in his open palm.
She says, ‘But I’ve already—’
‘No. You. Haven’t.’
Her fingers falter over the pill without picking up, desperation propelling her into dead ends. ‘I just forgot. It’s not happened before. I was planning to take it, honestly.’
‘This is how it’s going to be from now on.’ The whites of Giles’s eyes are bloodshot. ‘There are more people in this family than you, Ruth.’ His voice grows louder as he spaces his words. ‘I’ve done every bloody thing I can to help you get better at home, but I have no resources left.’ Bess whimpers. ‘Do you have any idea how hard these past months have been for me? Well, do you?’ He’s shouting now, face shimmering with a rage Ruth’s not witnessed before. ‘I’m at my wits’ end, Ruth. I’m tired, I’m stretched at work, and worst of all, I don’t know if I can trust you. So take the bloody pill or I will force it in your mouth. I’ve got the prescription for antidepressants as well. There’ll be no arguments about taking any of them.’ He shushes Bess with a kiss, holding her head gently towards him. ‘Sorry, little one. Daddy’s sorry.’ He bobs up and down as the baby cuddles into his neck.
Giles hands Ruth a glass of water, and he watches as she swallows. The tablet sticks in her throat. She swigs again, the pill’s impression remaining in
her oesophagus. Giles waits until she’s finished, then says, ‘Open your mouth.’ He peers inside and asks her to lift her tongue so he can check she hasn’t hidden the tablet underneath, then he takes his daughter into the kitchen. With a confident flick of closure, he puts the kettle on to boil and pulls out a packet of processed baby cereal Ruth didn’t even know they possessed.
For better or for worse, but how much worse can this get? An image of water comes to Ruth, of a vast black ocean through which no sound could travel. She helicopters above herself standing at a shoreline, fully clothed, wading into the waves, legs powering forward, not stopping until her head’s totally submerged. The peace of letting go, of giving up.
‘Go and read a book or something,’ Giles calls to her. ‘Take a nap. Do one of those things you’re always complaining you never have time for.’
Ruth crosses to the back window. The sun is disappearing behind clouds and a feeble wind tugs the grass. Beyond their little garden is the back path that runs the length of all the terraces, and after this, the strip of land along the parallel railway fence. Several residents have taken over their share of this space that the street collectively refers to as the allotments, the plots well tended in the summer, their cottage gardens bursting with fat ripe veg, but the winter has stripped the raised beds and toppled the steeples of cane. Trampolines have been squeezed into other spaces and, elsewhere, plastic garden furniture has blown over, exposing black mouldy underbellies. Only Miss Cailleach next door takes care of her patch the whole year round, traipsing over to the rows of neatly planted vegetables come rain or shine, or digging over the bare earth in readiness for spring, refilling the multistorey bird feeder with seeds and fat balls. In these cold winter months, it sometimes seems to Ruth that her neighbour is tending the patch out of nothing better to do, collecting long spindly twigs from a couple of stubby trees near the fence. She winds string round the bunches of sticks to make ugly bouquets.
In Ruth’s allotment, a homemade chicken shed has been left by the previous owner. It’s about four feet tall, made of a collection of mismatched wood nailed together, with a part-felted, part-corrugated roof. The owner must have had a decent-sized chicken empire, perhaps even sold some eggs. When they first viewed the house, Ruth imagined herself taking over this cottage industry before it quickly became clear she wasn’t the homesteader type. Chicken wire is buried deep in the ground to keep out foxes, so it will take more than Ruth and Giles’s strength to dismantle the construction, and the task has slid to the bottom of their list of priorities to merely unsightly.
An intercity train streaks past. Carriages flash colour through the metres of trees on the sidings and the engine’s whoosh reaches Ruth as an afterthought; it’s a lonely echo, the sound of being left behind. A small group of railway workers in the distance move like shadows through the trees, barely visible without the reflective jackets they surely ought to be wearing. They beat the undergrowth with sticks, slashing at the grass and saplings. One of them picks up a piece of fabric and shows it to the others, who shake their heads. The fabric is tossed to one side and they continue through the scrub, shoulders broad, heads down, scanning the ground.
Ruth’s skinny fox slopes along the path, his coat dull and mangy, absorbing the urban landscape he has no choice but to inhabit. He sniffs the entrance Ruth’s made for him into the shed to keep warm, then lifts his head, and there’s a moment when his eyes meet Ruth’s before he wanders off unperturbed. She’s no threat. No friend either. Ruth makes no impression on the world. She may as well not exist.
8
In this novel moment of daytime quiet, Ruth fidgets with what to do. She could use the time to edit her photos, but her laptop is downstairs on the coffee table and she can’t bear to face Giles and be reminded so soon of his disappointment at having married the wrong woman. She turns on the bedroom TV, bringing her feet up from the floor where a draught lurks at her ankles. On the screen, a large dinghy is tossed by waves, then the image cuts to a hill of life jackets. People scramble on shingle, one sits at the water’s edge holding a baby, another has a foil blanket over their back, head in hands. Ruth quickly switches to another channel: a couple relocating to the countryside with a toddler. They’re smiling and walking through a summer field, the season as inconceivable to Ruth, here in the thick of winter, as an afterlife. Her chest constricts with something unreachable, from way back, before Giles, to the beginning of that summer with her sister, when the world had seemed safe because Ruth knew less, and her days had contained the binary simplicity of innocence. If it were possible to somehow transmogrify into her younger self and freeze in that moment, Ruth would clear every detail of here and now unquestionably.
She lies down, head submerged in the pillows. Sleep comes unexpectedly and fast – a fist of exhaustion after the past few days. Paranoia chatters through her dreams. She wakes sometime later to Bess’s cry travelling up the stairs, followed by Giles’s aeroplane noise. Ruth imagines him doing that expression, the way he pushes his lips to one side to make the sound, trying hard to get Bess to eat. Adrenaline kicks in – she knows Bess’s scratchy cry, the baby’s tired not hungry – and it takes all Ruth’s willpower to trust Giles to get on with it and not go down and tell him what their daughter needs. She turns off the still-burbling TV, kicking her feet in a steady thump on the bed frame, cursing Giles’s backhanded gift of an impromptu day off; if she’d had warning, she could have planned to do something concrete, perhaps even gone to the office to have lunch with her old friends. She holds the phone in her hand, wondering who’d be the best person to call, who might tolerate the interruption. Caroline or Sharon who she’d shared desk space with? She has no idea what’s going on with either of them as she doesn’t use Instagram any more – those quick scans of her friends’ social media accounts used to be as good as a catch-up, so maybe they think she’s being rude because she’s no longer joining in – and no one bothers with phone calls these days, no one has the time or energy. But perhaps her old boss, Minnie, might be interested in a quick chat. She presses speed dial before she can change her mind and the call goes through to her boss’s PA. ‘I’ll just check if she’s in,’ the intern says. A painful pause of muzak trickles into Ruth’s ear before the PA comes back on. ‘I’m sorry but she’s in a meeting.’ The assistant’s new to the company, her position created as part of a budgetary and departmental shake-up, one that could see Ruth no longer needed. ‘I’m afraid she’ll be busy all day.’ The young woman’s still too fresh to the job to have learnt how to polish her lie. ‘Can I take a message?’ In Ruth’s sightline, her wardrobe gapes open, spewing clothes like a wooden beast with its belly cut in two. Old work suits and smart jackets lie crumpled from the last time Ruth tried them on, when the pencil skirt had jammed at her chunky thighs and she’d flung it aside.
‘Just tell her Ruth called and that I’m planning to come back to work very soon.’
The intern ends the call, accidentally leaving Ruth’s line open to the office hubbub, as alive in its phone crackle as when Ruth had worked there. Like an interloper, Ruth listens in; impossible to believe this other world exists in parallel to her own, here at home, confined to her room with nowhere to go. She lifts out of herself and temporarily slides back inside the woman she used to be.
How efficient she’d been, how on the pulse and ready to respond to her clients’ needs. ‘You’re so kind,’ they’d said. ‘You always go the extra mile. Promise you’ll come back after your maternity leave.’ Ruth laughed. ‘Of course I will, what century do you think this is? Anyway, I’m only having a baby, not a heart bypass.’
At the beginning of each working day, Ruth would revise the to-do list on her computer, creating tallies of calls to make and schedules to pin down, knowing that all it took to finish those tasks was application and attention to detail. The completed and unnecessary were deleted, the digital rustle of her computer’s trash basket one of Ruth’s favourite sounds. Time to move on, it said, you’ve left nothing unfi
nished, no errors have been found. She’d attempted to translate that work ethic into looking after a tiny baby, but trying harder didn’t correlate to more order at home, and Ruth’s returns were insomnia and anxiety. Then, along with the chemical anomaly of her maternal hormones, the payoff was mental illness.
Ruth presses her ear to the handset. There are voices in the background, laughter too. It sounds like Minnie, who’s supposed to be in a meeting. Ruth paces back and forth, unable to disconnect, guilty that she needs them more than they need her, tense in case something unkind is said about her. She wants to know the truth of what they think, but she’s not sure she could cope with the honesty. The popular narrative for Ruth’s condition is that it has gone from worse to better, though Ruth’s molecular progress has at times been in reverse, the constancy of her needs exhausting everyone around her. Work friends are only good friends when you’re at work, and it’s unfair of Ruth to expect these busy women to be the rocks she needs them to be. She hangs up.
Like magic, the phone buzzes to life in her hand. Ruth’s ready to have it out with the heavy breather once and for all, when the screen lights up with Sandra’s name. Ruth answers immediately.
‘Honey, you OK?’ Sandra says, laughing. ‘You robbed a bank this time?’
Even touching into lightness is a relief. ‘Sandra.’ Ruth relaxes back on the pillows. ‘It’s really good to hear from you.’
‘C’mon then.’ Sandra’s ever gossip-ready, switching out problem for play. ‘Spill the beans. What’s going on?’
There’s no pussyfooting around with Sandra and Ruth takes a heartbeat to summon up the same directness. ‘I’m so embarrassed, but I really thought I saw something this time.’
‘You sure? I mean, was it at night again?’
‘Yes. Yes, it was. I know I need to be careful, but this felt different somehow. It was more crazy than anything I’ve seen before. I don’t know how I could have dreamt it up.’ The air thickens around Ruth, as if the heating’s suddenly come on full blast. ‘Consequently no one believes me.’
The Hidden Girls Page 11
