The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  The woman at the other end of the line sounded young and was unexpectedly friendly. She gave Ellis an address at the corner of two streets in the eastern side of the city past Central Station, and told her to wait there. It would cost somewhere between fifty and eighty pounds, depending, the woman said, and Ellis did not dare ask depending on what.

  On the day, she skipped classes and waited up the street for Ron to pick her up after work. He dropped her off right on time, six pm.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come? I will, you know.’

  ‘They told me no one else. To come on my own.’ She was rigid with apprehension, sitting in the car and trying to calm herself.

  He got out, came around and opened the door for her, and helped her out. A brisk wind whipped her skirt around her legs as she got out of the car. Leaves and lunch papers scooted past on the footpath, and a sheet of newspaper clung to her ankle as she pulled her jacket closer. Kicking it free, she felt dishevelled and dirty already.

  ‘It will be better if you just go, Ron.’ She avoided his kiss, and felt worse about that as soon as he drove off, the tick-tick noise of the VW fading as he disappeared around the corner.

  Ellis was anxious that too many people would still be about, that she would be recognised by someone, although it was many blocks away from the technical college down off Broadway and in an area where she knew no one at all and where she normally never came. But it was quiet by then, most of the offices having closed at five. The workers from the garment factories had knocked off long before. She checked her wristwatch, walked a few yards up the street, then back again. Within two minutes a large black car pulled up and a man wound the window down, calling out her name. He waved her into the back seat where another man sat holding a black scarf. Was that a blindfold? Ellis started to panic, feeling that the friendly woman on the phone had been a fraud. Both of them were wearing hats. Then the driver turned around and told the other not to worry, that it would be dark soon enough.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ Her mouth was dry, the word came out like a whimper. She cleared her throat and spoke again, feigning confidence. ‘No, I don’t. This is the other side of the city I’m used to.’

  The man on her right asked her if she’d brought the money. She opened her handbag. Ron had given her eighty pounds, just in case, and she’d put fifty into an envelope, which she handed over to the man. He counted the notes then slipped them into his breast pocket, nodding. Then she turned away from him and stared out the window, seeing nothing. They drove for what seemed like hours, though it couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes, then pulled up in a suburban street, high up. Treeless and exposed. She had the sense that they were very close to the water and only later on guessed it must have been somewhere in Bondi, or perhaps Dover Heights. The house was one of a duplex, and by now it was dark and there were no lights outside the place. The man who had sat beside her ushered her down a narrow side passage and then into a small room with a bare lino floor and two chairs. If it had contained a table with out-of-date magazines and a pot plant it could have been the ordinary waiting room of a suburban doctor.

  He disappeared briefly through a door, returning with a glass of water.

  ‘Here, take this.’ He handed her a pill, which she took and swallowed. ‘Now just wait. It won’t be long.’ He had taken off his hat and coat, and she realised he was completely bald, wearing thick horn-rimmed spectacles. He disappeared again, and as she sat there she began to feel cold. She heard muffled noises from inside, a door banging once, then again, low voices. By the time the man returned she was shivering uncontrollably. He showed her into the adjoining room where there was only a narrow high bed and a hospital screen. Another man, this time in white with strange white-blond hair, was standing at a corner table with a tray of instruments, and a woman who must have been a nurse, also in white, approached her.

  ‘Just take your underclothes off, dear. Behind the screen.’ Ellis fumbled with her clothes, her hands trembling as she removed her stockings and underpants. Then the woman helped her onto the bed and covered her with a sheet, pushing her skirt up to her waist. Despite the water she had sipped with the pill her mouth was dryer than it had ever been, her tongue unable to move. She could see herself as if she were watching from some distance and wanted to help herself and say something, anything, but could not move or speak to save her life. What was the pill they had given her, which she had swallowed without question? She now felt very thirsty, but her tongue seemed to have gone completely rigid. She thought of her father, whom she would perhaps never see again, and how he would wonder for the rest of his life what had happened to her, for she had no identification on her, and she knew, young as she was, that if anything went wrong with this operation she would be abandoned by these nameless people, whom she hoped against all hope were medical people, and her body would be left here to rot in this soulless, empty room. And Ron would be waiting at the designated spot at nine pm exactly to pick her up again and take her home and would be watching the time, wondering what to do. Would he go to the police and tell all, or would he go home and lie back on his bed and watch the wax slowly swell and bubble up and down the orange lava lamp?

  The man and the woman – doctor and nurse, she begged mutely, please be a doctor and a nurse – now both put on masks and rubber gloves. Terrified as she was, she was glad to see that. When the doctor brought the pad soaked in ether to her face she was panicking to such an extent that she was frozen, and could not have cried or yelled out or even whispered a word to save her life. Her body twitched, her eyes swivelling in fear.

  The woman spoke kindly to her. ‘Just relax, dear, and breathe slowly.’

  So Ellis forced open her mouth and gulped in air again and again, until she finally did relax as the pad was pressed over her mouth. It smells like nail polish remover, she thought, and that was the last thing she thought.

  *

  She was awake, and could feel something like a towel between her legs. The nurse told her to sit up and brought a green enamel bucket, into which she promptly vomited. Her mouth despite this felt dry and she was still terribly thirsty.

  ‘Have you brought some Modess?’ Ellis nodded towards her handbag and the nurse handed it to her, then left the room while she dressed. She wished she had water to rinse her mouth but for some reason was unable to ask the nurse. She fumbled with her clothes, with the belt for the sanitary pads that stuck awkwardly between her legs; she put in two, just to be safe. Shivering still, she pulled her coat tighter as she sat once more in the waiting room. Finally the man reappeared, his hat and coat now back on, to take her outside, up the dark narrow path and to the car where the driver waited. All the way back to the city she tasted the acid of her own vomit. They were early, it was ten to nine, but Ron was there, leaning against the VW. She swayed out of the black car and across the kerb as he dashed over to catch her. He helped her into the seat and pulled the door shut. The men in the black car had already left.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘Just get me home.’ She closed her eyes and ignored him, his questions: was it painful, did they treat her properly, would she be all right? After a few minutes she opened her eyes, groped in her handbag and drew out the remaining thirty pounds. ‘Here. They didn’t rip you off, at least.’

  Pausing at a set of traffic lights, he looked at her, and she at him. He held his hand out to take the money, then withdrew it. The lights changed to green and he shifted gear.

  ‘You keep it. Please.’

  She shook her head, placed the notes in the glove box and closed her eyes again.

  How she managed to walk unaided down the path and in through her front door she never knew. She looked in on her father, who was reading in the front room under the standard lamp, and murmured something about women’s pains and needing to go straight to bed, then crept down the hall to the bathroom where she drank de
eply from the tap. Then she fell into her own bed and an unbroken sleep.

  The next morning she had to change her sheets, there was so much blood. The cramps were far worse than she’d ever experienced but she remained still for as long as she could with a hot water bottle, taking Bex like she’d been told, and by the next day the pain had gone away and by the day after the bleeding had stopped.

  12

  Dove saw a woman in a long skirt striding across a dark landscape. It was not snowing, though maybe it would be in another month. It was still autumn, though very cold. The woman walked past the last of her father’s crop of beans, the leaves already turning brown. The beans themselves would be tough but there might be another meal or two from them. The sky was still and dark grey. Up this high, no impediment of rock or tree between the ground and the earth, the sky looked close enough to touch. On bright days it looked so brittle you could almost punch through to heaven. This morning the sky was elusive, with only a hint of light loitering over the rise to her right.

  The woman stepped over the low dry-stone wall and onto the path of crushed pebble and slate, a half-hearted thing that trickled across the next field, its boundary marked by a hedge of furze nibbled down by sheep. She stepped over this too, hitching her grey wool skirt, then dropping it again to keep striding across the knobbly hill that was littered with flat wet stones. Underfoot it was slick and icy, even through her boots. She’d brought her father’s trowel, the one he kept for tending the beans, sometimes cabbages and parsnips, which were all that would grow in the windy patch behind the house. He should have kept a kitchen garden in the graveyard next door to the church, where there was more shelter, not to mention all those nutrients.

  She felt the crunch of heather underfoot, a few sprigs someone had collected earlier and then dropped. She bent and gathered them up. That someone may even have been her. It must have been, for who else was there? She fingered their spiky buds, the tight little heads. Faded purple. Not quite purple: creamy pink. There was a faint scent still. She tucked them into her pocket and kept walking, bundling her shawl tighter, a thick one that she had knitted herself, though it was still not nearly protection enough with the wind snapping like a rabid dog.

  She had made sure that Keeper remained on his chain, as he would only be a nuisance now. Today she did not want his rough comfort, the nudge of his nose against her skirt. That look in his eye. How dogs managed to judge by the faintest turn of their eyeballs, with just enough white to show that they knew what you were doing, or were thinking of doing. A sniff. Raising their muzzle then replacing it on their paws a quarter inch to the left or the right. Sighing. Then glancing again, displaying another sliver of white.

  No, she wouldn’t have it. Keeper had whined then settled down again on his sack beside the kitchen door. She’d given him a scone left over from yesterday’s tea. Not hungry herself.

  Over the next rise the pebble and slate path gave way to a thin track flattened into the grasses by years of walks, easy to follow in full daylight, but by then she would be returning. To either side the landscape vanished into the gloom, flat grey stones and stubbly tufts of grass and hillocks embraced by bracken that was so dark green it looked black, looming and receding as she continued her walk, head down, arms tightly held around herself. There to her left was the stand of stones, three enormous charcoal grey ones, piled together. A giant’s pile: two large, with a smaller on top. Three potatoes set to the side of a plate. Three pears or apples in a bowl. Three dumplings. A gravy of green moss down the western side of the bottom two.

  She shook her head, clearing her mind. Stay focused. The walk there and back took most people three hours, but she could normally do it in two with her long strides. Another reason she preferred to walk out on her own: no one else could ever keep up. To her right a faint brush of lighter grey, hinting at the dawn. And then another pile of stones, this time surrounded by crumbs of rocks. How they got there was anyone’s guess. There were no mountains nearby to fall down, no cliffs to break off and tumble down to land and settle. This was the mountain, up here, this was as high as it could get. It was as if a heavenly being had opened up the skies and flung out a scuttle load of rocks onto the earth. The hill sloped down again soon, after the dumpling-pear-potato rocks. Up here, the landscape was immutable. It embraced her and propelled her along, up and down the rise where there was no other living creature but the wild wolf force that gnashed and howled in never-ending fury.

  In the end it was always the wind that sent her home. Everything else, the vast bare immensity of the stripped land that met the unclothed sky, she could lose herself in, forever. Her cheeks were permanently stained red now, from a lifetime of the biting wind, her lips cracked and white.

  Not even the cold itself bothered her. When the wind stilled, no matter how frozen the world, the cold was something she learned to embrace, though now she tucked the trowel into her sleeve and pulled the shawl closer over the bundle, bending her head against the fury screaming around her head. Her ears burned. She should have worn a bonnet instead of the shawl which she had pulled over her head, not that it would have helped that much. Useless things, bonnets. Sometimes she wore her father’s old leather hat, when no one else was around to care. She almost laughed. No one else was around. It was just her, the cold earth deep below, the sky pressing down.

  She crossed the waterfall as the eastern light was glinting on the rocks and the wind was dropping, as if to convince the dawn it had been asleep and tame all through the cold night. Further up she disturbed a family of plovers sheltering in a nest of heather, the muffled slapping of their wings briefly cutting across the silence. By the time she reached Top Withens, morning had properly arrived. One black-faced sheep trotted across her path, barely pausing to throw a lugubrious glance her way. She strode up the track straight behind the ruined house where two gaunt thorn trees stretched their limbs, as if craving alms of the sun.

  *

  Dove sat upright. She looked at the pen which had fallen on the blanket, the purple notebook in which she hadn’t written for ages but which she still kept on the bedside table. She had no idea if she had been asleep and dreaming, or writing in some sort of trance. But there were the words on the page beside her, the final ones in her own handwriting those of Emily Brontë herself. Either she was still dreaming, or she truly had been writing in her sleep. Or she was going mad.

  Certainly her heart was beating like mad. She had never been to Haworth, never walked across those fabled moors behind the parsonage. But she felt chilled to the marrow, as cold as Emily herself out on that lonely walk in the early hours of the morning. And the scene had not finished writing itself. Now she was outside the scene rather than right there in it but it was as lucid as before, perhaps even more so. Indeed as she watched what the author of Wuthering Heights did next she felt that the clarity might be too painful to bear. Emily unwrapped her shawl and flung it on the yellow grass beside her. She took out the trowel and a small parcel, something wrapped in calico. She commenced digging beside the thorn trees where a clump of blue columbines was still in bloom, their heads dancing like bells. She eased them aside and began scraping away into the mossy turf, then jabbing into the damp earth. A few inches down and the soil became stony, for the whole place was on a knoll, the ruins of the house like an extension of the natural boulders tossed around it. Emily leaned back on her heels and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead then over the smooth brown hair, gathered into a tight knot.

  She was left-handed, Dove noticed, but she passed the trowel to her other hand to keep attacking the soil, striking it deeper and deeper until it disappeared below the surface of the earth. She swapped hands again, leaning further forward then lifting the trowel up to drop the soil into a neat pile. Finally she laid the trowel down and picked up the parcel. Dove paid very close attention but could not discern what it might be. It was small and flat, but wrapped in layers to disguise the shape. Emily raised it
to her chest and held it there for a moment with her eyes closed, then leaned closer and, in a slow and gentle manner, in contrast to her near frenzied digging, laid the precious thing in the hole she had made. Then she looked around, as if expecting there might be a witness, though who might possibly appear on this bleak early morning in late autumn, Dove could not imagine.

  Quickly she replaced the soil, scraping it across with the trowel, then scattered pebbles and pulled at the spongy moss to cover the spot. In moments it was all done and she was slapping her hands to remove traces of dirt, then rising from her knees with the shawl and the trowel. As she began to walk away the wind picked up again, and she turned and faced the tiny grave, for there was no other word for it, and stood with her head bowed, pulling the shawl tight over her head. As an afterthought, she bent and plucked a few of the columbines, then she turned to walk back down the hill to the south. Before she disappeared, Dove heard for the first time something other than the whistling of the wind in the two lonely thorn trees: she heard Emily Brontë cough.

  13

  The photos burned faster than she imagined they would. Perhaps it was the chemicals. Ron would know, with his scientific expertise, but she would never ask him that now, nor any other question, for she certainly would not speak to him again. A flame licked at the last corner, swallowed it, then vanished. She poked the ashes with the toe of her shoe. It had been a small fire, down the bottom of the garden under the plane trees, and only six photos, all postcard size but large enough. She pushed the dirt over the ashes, holding a hand to her chest where her breathing was strangely laboured. A few grey flakes remained.