by Sam Hayes
Grace slowly turns her head and her empty eyes connect with Mum’s just as I lead her away. ‘No time for visiting now,’ I tell her, realising that Grace and my mother are both locked in the same silent world, at opposite ends of their lives. I sigh and wonder what they are trying to say to each other.
After I strap Mum safely inside my car, I have a breathless word with David. He is having a private chat with the neurologist, Mr Radcliffe, about my mother.
‘The outcome must be conclusive,’ David says quietly but firmly. I think that’s what he says, but his back is turned so I can’t be sure. ‘Mary Marshall is—’
‘David,’ I interrupt, ‘I’m going now. I found Mum in the trauma ward.’ He turns suddenly, smiling at me, melting my heart like Murray once did. ‘What were you just saying about Mum? Do you have the results yet?’ Mr Radcliffe and David stare at me blankly, as if they don’t know how to tell me bad news.
‘There are dozens of images for the radiologist to report on. It will be a day or two before we have any idea of what’s going on inside Mary’s brain.’ David puts a hand on my arm. ‘This isn’t my speciality field, but Andy and I go way back, so no doubt he’ll give me the heads up when there’s news, won’t you, Andy?’ David raises his eyebrows at Mr Radcliffe and for a second there is a moment of silent tension between the men. ‘I trust the results will be what we are all hoping for.’
‘We’ll see,’ Mr Radcliffe says.
‘You will call me if there’s any news, won’t you, David?’
‘You have my word,’ he replies, and leans down to kiss me on the cheek. It turns my bleak day into one filled with sunshine, and as I’m walking away, I hear the voices of the two doctors knitted together again in deep diagnosis.
MARY
I’ve heard that when you die, you travel down a long tunnel with such a bright light at the other end you can hardly stand to look. For me the tunnel is dark, noisy and the second most terrifying place I have ever been in my life. There are no guardian angels or harps or trumpets, just the banging and whirring of this great metal machine, the guts of which I am stuck inside. Getting into it was like being fed through a drinking straw.
They gave me headphones with music and said that the test would take a little over half an hour, so to pass the time, I count in time to the beat. I only get to forty-three before my mind wanders away from the numbers and vague notes, perhaps dragged off course by the massive amount of magnetism that is passing through my body. A film reel of my life flashes before my screwed-up eyes. They say that happens, when you die.
I was pretty back then. So pretty, with a figure to match, and oh, didn’t I know it. I was going places, or so I thought. Looking at me back then, knowing who I am now, you’d think I was a different person.
Take the hair, for a start. It was halfway down my back and screamed out at least as much as the rest of my body. It was the way I wore it, half covering my face and spilling over my shoulders in a semi-coy, semi-provocative manner. Then there were the clothes – not so much concealing my body as showing it off – the purple, yellow and brown mini-dress with a plunge neckline, and knee-length boots. I was a stunner, for sure, and mostly cheerful even though my dreams had veered somewhat off course. At eighteen, I’d been desperate to go to university, become a zoologist, a marine biologist, a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist or a professor of modern languages.
I was smart, too smart perhaps, and even though my excellent school results reflected my determination, I never made it into university. I applied to Cambridge – it was on my doorstep. They rejected me at the first round, crossed me off their list. I tried to tell them what they were losing, that there must have been a mistake, that I was better than Rupert and Tarquin and Jeremy and whoever else had been offered places from public school. They slammed the door in my face.
In the mid sixties, the quota of female places offered at such a prestigious institution didn’t stretch as far as a farm girl who had bothered to do her homework. A country bumpkin made good. Perhaps they were worried I would turn up in my wellies or smell of cow muck. Or end up getting pregnant.
There I was, armed with grade A results in mathematics, physics, biology and English, and absolutely no prospects. I could speak three modern languages, had read classic literature from an early age, was taught Greek and Latin by my grandfather, and I was an accomplished dancer. After Cambridge, I applied to a dozen more universities. None of them accepted me.
My father suggested a secretarial course. My mother hinted she could use the extra help around the house, and because I could drive a tractor, I was invaluable at harvest time. Besides, she said, a nice boy with his own farm would soon come along and whisk me off my feet.
Resigned to temporarily giving up on university, I moved into the city. Living where we did – Northmire Farm was stuck between waterways, blankets of green, gold and brown fields, and absolutely nowhere – meant an hour-long round bus trip to Cambridge every day. But it was where I needed to be if I was to get a job, the only option left to me if I wasn’t to become someone’s wife within a year. I would work and save and study and reapply. They couldn’t ignore me for ever.
The bus service to the city was unreliable and would have eaten up most of my wage, once I was lucky enough to find a job. Besides, I didn’t want to live at home. Life at Northmire was not what I aspired to. Everyone else was having fun in the city – it was the sixties – and I wanted a piece of it too.
I resume my counting . . . fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven . . . and the technician’s voice suddenly comes to me through the headphones inside the machine. ‘Just relax, Mrs Marshall. There’ll be more noise but we’ll soon be finished. Keep very still, now.’
Miss Marshall, I mouth silently.
It was freedom and adulthood and fun mixed with regret and anger and jealousy that I wasn’t one of the students strutting around the city with a pile of books clutched to my chest. Some days I would do just that to make everyone think I was one of the lucky ones, that I was studying medicine or science at Cambridge. I visited the trendiest cafés, bent over my books while chewing on a sandwich, blending with all the other students who had gone there to study and socialise. I frequently trekked to the city library to harvest the most challenging reads I could find – both fiction and non-fiction. I discovered a love of psychology and read everything I could get my hands on. I meshed with the other students flawlessly and considered, once or twice, slipping into a lecture, just to see if I was noticed.
At eighteen, I was congruent and didn’t stand out at all as I loitered around Newnham College, my mouth watering as I followed a group of girls to the dining hall. It wasn’t the food I was after. It was their company, the prestige, the knowledge that whetted my appetite. Oh yes, I was hungry. Starving to be educated. But I stopped at the door, let them carry on without me, and as the years rolled by, I became too old to be credible. As my late teens finally flowed into my twenties, as the sixties turned into the seventies, I was no longer a viable student. People didn’t think my clutch of books or the fake glasses I wore were symbols of student life; rather they took me to be a schoolteacher or someone’s secretary, or really saw me for what I was. What I’d always been since leaving school. A café waitress.
Suddenly there is noise, as loud as roadworks, and it’s not so much through my ears that I hear it – even though I am wearing headphones – but through my body that I feel it. The machine is delving deep into my tissues, trying to find out what’s wrong with me. They explained, in language they would use for a child, that the magnets take pictures of my body so they can see if I am poorly; to see if there is a problem with my brain. Because I am silent, they assume I am stupid.
What they don’t understand is that I have read about a hundred science textbooks and already know that the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms in my body are being pulled into alignment with the scanner’s magnetic field. Radio waves then kick my poor nuclei out of kilter, and when those waves are stopped, the nuclei effe
ctively pop back into position, releasing their own signals as they do so. It is these signals that are captured and analysed and translated into images of my brain.
If only they’d ask, I would tell them they are looking in quite the wrong place. I’d tell them, if only I could speak.
By the early seventies, I was renting a tiny bedsit. I lived alone, and even though I sometimes craved the company, sharing accommodation with a group of other girls didn’t appeal to me. I was a private, serious person most of the time, intent on achieving academic success any way I could – although that didn’t mean I wasn’t enjoying the social life in Cambridge. I’d soon built up a circle of friends and there was always a party to go to.
Café Delicio was a favourite with King’s and Corpus Christi students. It wasn’t my first job. I’d already lost several of those by daydreaming and reading and writing notes on a thousand subjects I planned to study. But Café Delicio was by far the best place I’d worked since leaving home and so I made sure I didn’t get sacked. Apart from the regular college students, we took in a large lunchtime trade from businessmen and university staff. It was my delight to serve these people, to eavesdrop on their conversations.
‘Can I take your order, sir, and by the way, I think you’ll find that it was in the central part of Plato’s version of Socrates’ Apology that the condemned man antagonised the court. Really, he didn’t stand a chance.’ They chose spaghetti and meatballs and I served them extra-large portions.
‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’ Abe, the café owner, asked me a week after I began work.
‘Yes, but I prefer it here,’ I replied while folding tea towels. My shift had ended twenty minutes earlier. I smiled at Abe, convincing him that I wasn’t unusual or weird or going to scare off his customers if I hung around. I just liked being with them. They were educated. They were who I wanted to be, and I thought if I stuck around long enough, then some of their lives might rub off on me. I would be a scholar by proxy.
‘Make yourself at home, then,’ Abe told me, and paid me overtime as well as a generous share of the tips.
Within three months, I had qualified as his longest-surviving employee. Mostly he’d hired no-hopers or students who couldn’t hack the demands of a busy café, so when I came to Café Delicio, stayed for more than a few weeks, rearranged the interior and – having coaxed Chef to be more adventurous and pasted up new menus – I was suddenly in Abe’s good books.
Before long, he gave me the title of café manageress. It meant I got to wear a badge with my name on. It meant that the customers, after glancing at my chest, would call me Mary.
It meant that when he came in and eyed me up, when we flirted over scrambled egg and rashers of bacon, when he demanded a recount of his change and a cloth to wipe his spilled tea, there was a vague hope that he would remember who I was.
Mary Marshall, the girl with the long blond hair at Café Delicio.
I certainly remembered him from one visit to the next. With his fresh face and white teeth that were always on show, one of them crooked so that sometimes his lip snagged on it. It gave him a quirky appeal; almost roguish in a beautiful way. He had skin that gleamed and light brown hair that fell about his face in a long, slightly tousled style.
Occasionally he came alone, but mostly he herded a posse of fellow students to take up half of Café Delicio with their book bags, their huge egos and their mountains of knowledge. I served and adored every one of them.
Especially him.
After his first visit, he squeezed a fifty-pence tip into the knot of tea towel that I wrung between my palms.
‘Your tea was good,’ he said in a voice that rivalled any movie star. There was something about the way his eyes narrowed, drank all of me in in a second. I was dumbstruck.
‘Thanks,’ I finally managed. ‘Would you like some more?’ The pot shook in my hand.
He nodded and I poured. When his group of friends left, he stayed. Sipping from his white china cup, glancing casually around the café, he watched me work. I felt the heat of his eyes on my back, saw him tracking me in the big gilt-framed mirror. He sat there for nearly two hours, all the while drinking tea and pushing more coins into my hand with every refill. I busied about with other customers but never ignored him. I brought him food when I thought he was hungry and wiped his table so he could lay out his books when he wanted to study.
‘Gray’s Anatomy?’
‘First-year medical student,’ he replied, looking up from his work. His half-smile lit up my life. His outstretched hand made me belong; pulled me into another world. His world. ‘I’m David,’ he said. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you and your teapot.’
It was 1976, and even before it began, I knew it was going to be a long, hot summer.
‘Mrs Marshall, we’re all done now. We’re going to take you out of the machine. Just relax. You’ve done very well.’ The invisible person still speaks to me as if I am a child.
I’m very dizzy after the scan, and the nurse who was looking after me has gone on a break. No one notices as I stumble unaided into the toilets.
When I come out, there is no one around to help me. They have taken what they wanted from me and now I am forgotten; an empty husk with the life sucked out of her by a giant magnet. If only it were that easy.
I am standing in a corridor and there, up ahead, is Julia. A splash of colour in the white tunnel but with a deep, dark shadow by her side. I turn one way and then the other, searching for a way out. There isn’t one, but then, after all this time, I’m used to feeling like that.
‘Dr Carlyle came to see how you got on. That was kind of him, wasn’t it?’ Julia takes me by the arm and pulls me where I don’t want to go.
Suddenly I am a young woman again, and before I have time to think how that feels, I march off down the corridor like I should have done thirty years ago.
JULIA
Nadine and Ed Hallet’s house is neat and tidy and lies on the edge of Cambridge. They like it like this. They like the perfect crescent of their street and the way the birch trees are spaced evenly along the pavement. They like the milk float and the corner shop and the newspaper delivery boy. Nadine once said their neighbourhood reminded her of a perfect heartbeat on a patient’s trace; the perfect life. The life that she and Ed had set out to achieve. They’ve got it all, too, except there’s a hole the size of a planet in their lives.
Alex and Flora go some way to filling the gap, and that is why I am determined that my break from Murray will not separate my kids from their adoring uncle and aunt. It would crumple Ed and Nadine if contact wasn’t regularly maintained – although perhaps not so much when Flora draws a pencil line around the fresh white paintwork of their semi-detached so that she doesn’t lose her way.
‘Oh, Flora!’ Nadine scolds, when she sees the wobbly line going all the way from the telephone table in the hallway into the dining room, through the kitchen and back to the hallway. A map of intent, a dose of good sense, Flora is a survivor and would never set forth on an adventure without leaving a trail to find her way home.
‘What’s she done?’ I say, emerging from Nadine’s living room to find her rubbing a wet cloth on the paintwork.
‘Look at this!’
‘Oh dear,’ I say, amazed at how incredibly straight Flora got the line.
‘Silly girl,’ Nadine pouts, hiding a smile, as Flora trails past with a Lego creation.
‘Nadine,’ I say, placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘Do it this way.’ And I show her the ballet of hand gestures she will need to use if she is to tell my daughter off.
‘I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter.’ Nadine stands up. Is it that she suddenly realises my daughter’s deafness is more important, more tragic than the pencil line on her wall?
‘The final results came yesterday. I’m just a bit tetchy.’
I fold her body against mine. It is conclusive. Nadine and Ed will never be able to have children.
Nadine was my first friend. As Murray’s littl
e sister, she took a fair few knocks and grew up chasing footballs, riding bikes and playing tricks on Murray. Five years younger than her brother, we took delight in letting down Murray’s bicycle tyres, hiding his house key so he got into trouble and putting jelly in his pyjamas. It was all very happy; all very childish – a collage of delicious memories of hanging out with the big boys.
So what I’m saying is that Nadine grew up tough and spunky. She was raised with a coat of varnish, and honestly, with all the tests and trials she’s suffered recently, it was a good job.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I tell her. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She turns her nose up at the tea I made her. ‘Not enough sugar?’ I ask.
‘Too much,’ she says, and watches intently as Flora pulls apart her Lego model. Alex harvests all the pieces for himself. A frantic signing battle then ensues, but Alex turns his head so he can’t see what she’s saying.
‘How’s Mary?’ Nadine asks.
‘Not so good. I’m taking her for the MRI scan results tomorrow. A friend from the village is keeping her company at the moment.’ I sigh. ‘I can’t rely on other people to help with my problems for ever, though.’ I wonder if life will ever return to normal. ‘It’s a relief that Brenna and Gradin are going to school now. It would be hard to cope otherwise.’
I look at my watch. I’d only called in briefly to see Nadine after I’d picked up Alex and Flora from school. The bus would be dropping the teenagers back at Northmire shortly. Besides, I know Nadine’s going to mention Murray soon. She’ll bring him up in conversation any way she can and squeeze glue on to the pair of us. She does it every time I see her.
‘Julia, you look done in.’ Nadine tilts her head and pulls a sympathetic face. She’s right. On the floor, Alex tentatively offers some Lego to Flora. He doesn’t want to give it up but knows he has to.
