Brigid, baffled, consented to be led upstairs to her room, but she did not stay in bed. Once the door was closed, she slid down as quietly as she could to the floor, walked on careful tiptoe to the window, and looked out at the seven trees, shedding in slow spirals their last few leaves. There was the Friday Tree, its poor arms bare, and underneath, Brigid’s hazy sight could just make out the same thin trail of smoke she and Francis had seen in the summer.
Chapter 7: Cannonball
If Brigid had thought she would be quizzed about George Bailey, she was wrong. As it happened, she did not think much more about anything that evening. Waiting in her room for the doctor, Brigid became slowly conscious of something surrounding her, something that was like a headache, yet not quite. She could not describe it to the doctor when he came. She heard him sigh and tell her mother that the child was suffering from strong imagination and mild shock. It was a good thing, he said, that she was able to find her way home, but she must learn not to talk to strangers. Then he snapped his bag shut, turned to her mother, and said: “When’s the Boss in? I must have a yarn with him,” and left the room without another word. For some time, she could hear his voice downstairs, low and comforting like the men in the night, but she could not hear what was being said, and it hurt her neck to crane.
Isobel brought up tea and toast, and said she should thank her stars she was alive, if only she knew, but Brigid found she did not want to eat, and as for the stars she was to thank, they could wait. The smell of toast, even of tea, made her – or the person who was wearing her pyjamas, the Not-Brigid who was somehow beside her – want to vomit. She could not speak of this. It was all outside her, all at a distance. Even when Francis came in, smelling of the open air, she could not tell him how it was with her. Sitting on the chair close beside her bed, he seemed a long way away, his voice nearly an echo. She began to describe what had happened, about George, yet he drifted, his edges shimmering, and she soon stopped trying.
The headache grew round her, as though the whole room had become a state of pain, and she was locked inside. The light from the window grew harsh, almost blinding, but she could not remember how to get up and pull the blinds. When the light darkened to purple, and shadows played like water on the wall, there was some relief. When the purple became grey, then nearly black, she was almost glad that even Francis had disappeared, and she was to be left a little while in peace.
It was when the room became fully dark, the pain at bay as long as she did not move, that she heard a key turn in the door. Her father’s voice travelled through the stairwell, low and deep. A long time later, she heard the doctor leave, his old car rattling, spreading out in the air, then fading away. Brigid was only too willing to stay in bed as she had been told, and as she sank slowly into sleep her last thought was that nobody was interested in her morning with George, and that her father had not come up to see her.
That night she could not stay in her own sleep. Miss Chalk did not come, but others did. She heard the screaming of witches above the house, and voices spoke together, hoarse, high, singing and growling. They hurt her ears and her eyes like hot needles. Wires twisted in her head and her neck. The sheets on the bed grew wrinkled, damply writhing, an angry sea: she was a ship tossed about, and voices blew like the wind, lamenting and moaning. She tried to escape, and the floor came up to meet her. She was almost steadied by its cold, and the steel restraints of the pain: anything to be out of the terrible boiling bath her bed had become. Holding first on to the chair and then the door handle, Brigid inched her way from her bedroom. In her parents’ room, she groped her way around the wall until she reached the side of their high bed. She could see her father’s face, familiar again without his glasses, the curving arch of his nose. Her mother turned over with a sigh, her pale profile composed, even in sleep. Everything was still, except for a slight sound, a sliding, hissing sound. It was coming from the corner, the tallboy in the corner, but they did not hear. They did not waken, even when, to Brigid’s silent horror, the sound took form: from the tallboy in the corner slithered an old woman, the witch whose scream she had heard in her nightmare, and she was making her bent way through the polished wood of the drawers as if they were water, tapping with her black stick as she slid towards Brigid who, inching backwards through the pain in her neck and her back and head, somehow managed to get to her own room, back to the drunken ship in the writhing sea. Too frightened to open her eyes, she kept them shut until, at last, she dropped into a black, troubled sleep, where German aeroplanes dropped bombs from the lightshade, and the bed was no longer a wrinkled sea but a burning building in which she, the last person alive, stood helpless as the world fell away.
When she woke, she was not in her room. She heard traffic, car horns and brakes. She was in her parents’ room, at the front of the house. It was day, warm yellow light coming through the Holland blinds, all three pulled down to shade her eyes. Brigid could not look at the light. Everything hurt. Then, she saw Francis, sitting by the window with his cat’s cradle of string, but there was too much pain to speak, and her eyes wanted to close, and the light had changed when she opened them again. The sounds were quieter, and it was no longer morning. It was an evening room, and she could see the tallboy, clear now: there was no witchwoman at the moment, but her mother was there, and the square man with his snapping bag who was the doctor. He had wakened her with cold metal on her chest, and now he lifted her up, gently, to put it on her back. He wanted her to breathe, and it hurt. He had to lift her; he told her she was a rag doll. She was very tired. He bent her neck over and over until it touched her chest, and she could not tell him how it hurt. Then he wrote on his pad, and put a wooden stick in her mouth until her throat came up to meet it. She could not breathe. Her throat closed over the stick, and she began to retch. Her mother, quiet, watching, suddenly reached forward and held her at her back. The doctor took the stick away, and her mother eased away her arm. Brigid fell back on the pillows, and all the pain of the night shot through her shoulders and her head.
“Well, Doctor?” her mother said, and her voice was a whisper.
“Not meningitis, anyway,” he said, “or she’d squawk when I move her head. Not measles or mumps. Unspecified respiratory infection. Keep her in bed for a few days and don’t let the other one catch it. Watch her neck. If you can’t make it reach her chest, and if she complains about the light, call me at once.”
He left. They both left, still talking low, voices fading on the stairs, and Brigid slid back into darkness.
When next she woke, she was not in her bed or theirs. All round her there were yellow flowers, and cool darkness, and the air smelled sharp, like the taste of medicine. She thought perhaps she had slept through the winter, like a squirrel or a bear, waking to sunshine and spring flowers, but when she reached out her hand to touch the flowers, they were just a curtain. Then she felt more. The aching of last night was stronger, deeper, and every movement, even lifting her hand to try to touch the flowers, sent pain all through her. Frightened, she lay still. The flowers parted. Tall people appeared. A man stood over her in a white coat. Round his neck hung a tube of rubber, and a circle of bright steel. Beside him was a person like a teacher or a nun, in blue with a white hard square behind her head, who moved towards Brigid. She lifted Brigid’s wrist, not gently, and Brigid cried out.
“Gently, Sister,” said the white-coated man and his voice, though low, was reproving. “The child is in some discomfort.”
“Of course, Doctor,” said the blue woman – was she a nun? – but her grip stayed hard.
Brigid thought for a second of Isobel, then the stone-faced nuns in school, then she thought of nothing, because the doctor was pushing her head towards her chest and the pain was exquisite. It was a white light that screamed through her, and it said: “Mama!”
The blue woman said: “You can’t see your mama yet,” and the doctor, looking away from her with his medicine-smelling hands still on her burning head, said across her: “Lumbar pu
ncture, Sister, straight away. With luck it may be viral.”
They went through the curtains and disappeared. Perhaps, Brigid thought, this is another dream. There are so many. This may stop and I will be at home in my own bed. She kept her eyes closed to help this happen, but opened them suddenly as harsh light again intruded, the yellow flowers swishing away from her and two men in shorter white coats lifting her, not ungently, on to a trolley. The pain seared through her once again, and she could feel the hot wetness on her face.
“Poor lassie,” said one of the men, and he stroked her arm, which made the tears worse.
Then, she was in a grey, cold room. One of the men put a white blanket on her, and turned her, slowly, on to her side.
She heard a soft padding behind her. “Hello, Brigid,” said a voice, but Brigid hurt too much to answer. “I’m going to put a little pinprick in your back now,” said the voice, “and it may hurt for a moment. Just hold still, like a good girl.”
Brigid felt a cold that was different, and inhaled a sharp brightness, but she felt no new pain. The whole place, everywhere around her was already so full of it that there was no room for any more. When the voice said, “There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?” Brigid did not even try to speak. Then there was silence, and someone, two someones, brought her back through the grey spaces to the room with the yellow flowers, and she was able to close her eyes again in semi-darkness.
When next she woke the doctor was standing above her. He had papers in his hands.
“Well, Brigid,” he said. “You’re a lucky little girl. You have what is called meningitis, but it is viral, and the pain will soon go. Meanwhile, look!”
A miracle happened. The doctor swept back the curtain, and above her stood her parents. She looked for Francis, but he was not there. “Where is Francis?” she said.
“Hello, Brigid,” said her mother.
“Hello, girlie,” said her father.
“Where is Francis?” asked Brigid again.
“He’s at school,” said her mother, “but he will come, now that we know it’s not as serious as . . . it looked.”
“Will you take me home?” asked Brigid. “I want to go home.”
Her parents looked at each other.
“When the doctor lets you, we will,” said her father.
Then Brigid closed her eyes, and when she opened them no one was there.
She drifted in and out of sleep in the yellow-flowered cocoon. Sometimes it was darker, sometimes lighter, but she did not leave it again until the day there came a young blue person, with a hat not stiff and square like the first one, but pleasantly rounded on soft curls.
“Come on, now, Missy,” said the young person, “let’s get you up,” and very gently she slipped Brigid out of the bed and set her on her feet.
To Brigid, her legs seemed to belong to someone else. They were impossibly long and white, and her slippers were very far away. She swayed and buckled, but the blue person said: “Hold on to me. Once you can walk, you might even get home.”
Brigid tried. She moved one foot and it bent, then the other, and it gave way. The wall tried to come over to her. There was bright spinning in her head. She tried again. She told her foot to move. She told the other one and, this time, they both listened. The pain came with her but she could walk, and after a time, past blank doors, past other blue-and-white people, studying her, watching her curiously, almost rudely, she found she was back again at the yellow flowers and she did not know if she was glad or sorry. The next day, she was propped up to eat, and she was hungry as she had not been before. That night, she slept without dreams.
The following morning, after the white coats and the blue dresses and the new normality of examinations and conversations that did not include her, Brigid saw at last the face she was looking for. Francis had come.
“Hello, you,” he said. “Have you taken up residence?”
“Francis,” she said. “Why haven’t you come before? I’ve been here for . . . I don’t know how long. You didn’t come.”
Francis laughed his quiet laugh, and shook his head. “Oh, foolish Brigitta,” he said. “You have been here for over a week, and they wouldn’t let me come, till they knew you couldn’t pass it on. But,” and he stood up, “I’m here now. It’s Saturday. They’re on their way up the stairs right now – and we’re all going home.”
The miracle continued. In clothes too heavy, on legs too light, Brigid finally left the yellow-flowered place and the people in blue and white who had no names and, though she still had pain outside her head and was very tired, when she lay back on her own cool bed, not wrinkled or hot any more, and watched on the wall opposite the window familiar shadows of the trees in the plot, she knew that this was bliss. Blissful too was the slowly dawning realisation that she did not now have to go to school. Perhaps she might never have to go to school again. There was a half-heard conversation that she thought was real, one night soon after she came home, drifting towards sleep. She thought she heard her parents outside her door, talking softly. She thought she could see tall shadows where the door angled to the wall, in the shaft of the landing light they left on for her since she had become afraid, and her father said, “Fifty children in that class, Grace. Fifty!” and her mother’s voice said, with a sigh, “Private, then?” Brigid understood that: it meant not to be disturbed. Perhaps, after this, she need not be disturbed by school. She did not hear any more but a dim sound, like the men downstairs, and maybe it was the men downstairs, back after all. She drifted quite easily that night into a calm space, with no dreams, and a gentle sensation of floating.
Despite their doctor’s advice, Francis came every day and sat with her. He even brought in his own wireless for her, and she listened in soft darkness, lit only by the glow from the wireless. Inside the green box, tiny people sang, played music, acted plays and read aloud. They became her friends. In those nights, Miss Chalk stayed away, the witch from the tallboy did not come back, the pain receded and she began to be happy again. She was given her father’s wooden chessmen to play with, and as she lay back they climbed hills and danced with each other and hid in the eiderdown. The people inside the wireless got on with their busy lives. Sometimes they sang, of scarlet ribbons, or runaway trains, or her favourite, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.
It was a time of quiet happiness, until Brigid grew restless, and nothing made her happy. When at last she was allowed to get up, she could not wait: she felt lighter and taller, but she was giddy, and her clothes were loose. Her legs did not quite work: downstairs seemed a long way away. That first day, she was glad to sit watching pictures in the fire, and at five o’clock, she climbed gratefully back up to bed.
Yet, next morning, with quiet but sudden certainty, she knew she was better. She sat up slowly, walked with care to the end of the bed, and looked out of the window. The Friday Tree had almost no leaves. From somewhere, faintly, there was the smell of smoke. It was time to be well again and, slowly, Brigid stayed downstairs for longer periods. She found she could support the weight of her head by herself, and sit in a chair. She could hold a book, without real pain.
Only then, as she sat occupying herself, did she notice that Isobel was not in the house. Brigid thought she heard her parents say she had gone for a holiday, but it was not summer. Still, she was more glad than sorry. Her mother did all the things Isobel had done, and did them with more care and more kindness. She even let her look at her own book of photographs, brown pictures where she herself was a child, then a girl, laughing with her friends.
The clock on the mantel ticked away the autumn days. When Francis came home he sat with her and at five o’clock they watched television, and all the while the year darkened down toward Hallowe’en, and every night the smell of woodsmoke rose in the air. Waiting for Francis to come home she watched caverns and mountains in the fire. Sometimes she fell asleep. Often she took down the books from her father’s shelves to look at them, or to smell the old paper, or see what was in
the pages – a photograph, or a postcard, in writing like stitching, or a square of newspaper, yellow, and soft, like cloth, too small to read. There was one book she liked, with photographs of a small boy in a sailor suit. He was David: he grew up, now he was a king, and he was Edward. In other books, other photographs, she discovered tribes in Africa, Russians in the snow, Italians in the sun, warriors in wooden ships. In her own world, far away from everyone, the days went past too quickly.
One morning, her mother woke her with the words she had almost forgotten. “Up you get, Brigid. School.”
Brigid was stunned. She thought that was all finished. In a dream, she got out of bed, washed and dressed, but her clothes seemed shorter, and the heavy shoes pinched. Downstairs, the things she had left behind her forever were laid out for her: the leather schoolbag smelling of pencils and rubber and the prickly coat with the flat hood. She hated them all.
“Growing fast, girlie,” said her father and she looked up at him.
Behind his thick black glasses, his face in the morning light looked thinner, whiter than she remembered. When he took off the glasses to clean them, she saw that his eyes had brown shadows beneath, and the kind creases, always at the edges when he smiled, were still there when he was not smiling. Without resentment, she saw that the concerns of the family were no longer directed towards her, but once more to her father. It was right it should be so. She was well again; he was not.
Looking about her in the frosty morning, seeing even Dicky in his cage huddled beneath his own wing, Brigid, in her warm home, felt cold – surrounded by her family, she felt alone. She did not need to ask whether her father would be taking her to school in the car. She saw that he would not, that she and her mother would brave the bus together. Something had gone from him. Brigid who, before her own brush with illness, would have asked why, or what, said nothing.
She went back to school, because there was no choice, liking it even less, saying even less about it at home. She did not see George at the school again, and she did not talk about him. Her mother took her on the bus and collected her in the afternoon, and there was still no Isobel. In the shortening days, her father did not leave her again at the end of the road. He did not take her to school at all, even in the wet, even in the cold. Most days, he stayed at home. Sometimes, in the evenings, as he listened to the wireless, and she asked him about her sums or her spellings, it seemed that he had not heard her. When those times happened, she climbed on his knee, and listened to his heart as he tapped pale fingers to his music.
The Friday Tree Page 8
