I think about you both so often that I can’t believe I have left it so long to get in touch. Put it down to guilt. I am ashamed of the way I behaved and the silence in between got longer because I didn’t know how to break it. Again, I am sorry and again, I know it is not enough.
There is so much that I want to say to you, so much that matters a great deal, that I want you to know but I am at a loss as to where I can start.
I want to say thank you for fostering me, for letting me know what it felt like to be a part of a family. And thank you for telling me the truth about my birth mother when no-one else would. Words seem to let me down here because I can’t explain how important these things were, saying thank you seems too small somehow. What else? A million things, I am an artist now, it is how I make a living and so I should also thank you for the easel that you put in my room not long after I moved in, who knew where that would lead? Sometimes, it seems it is the smallest things that have the biggest impact.
The village I live in is beautiful. It’s very different from Birmingham, which is, as you know, where I lived when I left Marham and where I still lived until very recently. I haven’t yet decided which place I prefer. I’m slowly falling in love with the peace of the countryside but when I fancy a decent curry or pizza at three o’clock in the morning the lack of options is a little frustrating!
I don’t know what else to tell you, there is so much and surprisingly so little of any significance. I just wanted you to know that, as I said, I am older now, perhaps a little wiser and I can look at the past with much greater understanding.
I hope that one day you will forgive me for what I said and the fact that for years I have said nothing.
With love,
Rachel x
I posted the letter before the gum on the envelope had even dried. It felt insignificant, as if I had tried to seal an amputated limb with some antiseptic cream and a plaster. I thought of the silence and I thought that maybe it would stretch on forever. I could see me never getting a reply, and always wondering what had become of them. I felt that it would be no less than I deserved, there would be a kind of poetry in that, a symmetry in their silence.
Chapter 45 ~ Rachel
When I lived at the home in Birmingham I shared a room for a little while with another girl my own age, called Sarah. She was only ever to be a temporary fixture, her mother was a single parent and had been injured in an accident and Sarah was a resident at the home while her mother healed. We were different in that sense and therefore we were never really friends; we never broke beyond the barrier of polite conversation into the realms of secrets and laughter. But we were never enemies either. We talked, we passed the time, we breathed the same air. That was all.
One night, after lights out, she told me about her dog, Mitzy. She told me that Mitzy had been in season and had managed to escape the house. They had gone out to search for her, eventually finding her in a field at the end of the garden locked together with a scruffy Greyhound from up the road. Her mother had taken Mitzy to the vets and she had an injection to stop her from being pregnant, the morning after pill for dogs. I had laughed at the thought of that.
About three months after this, Sarah had gone upstairs to bed and found some of her cuddly toys missing. She found them in the spare room. Mitzy had scraped up the duvet on the spare bed into a big bundle and the cuddly toys were on top of the pile with Mitzy curled around them, as if she had built a nesting place for the little puppies that would never be. I had found the story so poignant, so sad and at the time I was too afraid to ask what had happened to Mitzy now that her mum was in the hospital and Sarah was in the home.
As I walked up the path to Lacey’s house, I thought of Mitzy. I don’t know why. I knocked on her front door and she opened it, her expression nervous and I reached forward and took her by the hand, wanting to look after her, to make sure she was okay and wondered if what I was doing was building a nest around her. Was she my substitute?
She stepped aside and gestured for me to come in, she looked resigned as if I had come to deliver bad news and she already knew what it would be. We went into the front room and took separate ends of the sofa again. It felt familiar, but not from that morning. There was something in the awkwardness, the stilted speech that reminded me of the first time Lacey had come for tea.
“How are you feeling?”
She raised her hand, gestured needlessly then shrugged and said she was okay. Her eyes slid to her lap and she ran out of words.
“Is there anything I can get for you?”
She shook her head, “I’m sorry, Rachel. For last night, I’m sorry that you had to deal with it.”
“Please don’t do that, don’t apologise. I didn’t have to deal with it at all; I could’ve called someone. I stayed because I was happy to stay.”
Some of the tension drained from her shoulders but not all of it.
“Lacey, I know about the blackouts, and I want you to know that I understand. That’s actually why I’ve come. I want you to keep my phone numbers, mobile and landline, by your telephone. That way you can contact me at the first sign that you are going to black out.” Her emotions played across her face as I spoke, from shame to surprise. “I’m serious about this too, it isn’t just an empty gesture, okay?”
“Why would you do that? You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to, I want to.” I handed her a piece of card and she looked at it for a few moments. She studied the numbers I had written so intently that I wondered if she was trying to commit them to memory. Then she stood and went over to the telephone table and placed the card next to the phone. She turned to me and smiled, a weary smile that lacked vitality.
“Thank you,” she said and came back to sit down. “I don’t know what to say. There aren’t many people that would have done what you did last night.”
“I didn’t do much, I’m sure others would have done the same.”
“Not in my experience,” she said with a slight shake of her head, “it’s like mental illness, you see. People can’t see the cause, only the symptoms and the symptoms scare them. That’s one of the reasons people avoid me, they think I’m mad.”
“Albert didn’t though,” I said and she smiled.
“No, Albert didn’t. He took the time to get to know me, I suppose. Most wouldn’t. Like I said to you before, people seem to have long memories and once they have made up their minds it is hard to change them.”
There was nothing I could say in response to that because I couldn’t contradict her. I knew how cruel people could be about the things they didn’t understand. I knew how careless they could be with other people’s emotions.
“I grew up in a children’s home.” I told her and her head swivelled slowly towards me. “My mother was an alcoholic and they took me away from her.” She blinked at me, uncertain as to how to treat the information I was giving her.
“I guess I’m telling you because I want you to know that I understand what it is to be different. The other kids at school treated us care kids a bit like lepers, like we were less than they were. I always felt like I didn’t quite fit anywhere.”
She nodded her understanding. “How long were you in care for?”
“Forever really, until I grew up. I haven’t seen my mother since I was a baby; I only know that her name is Margaret. It’s not much is it? I was fostered for a while but that placement didn’t work out and there wasn’t any more after it. The problem with being in care is that once you reach a certain age there are less people that want to foster you, especially when you hit your teens and the hormones kick in.”
“What about your father, did you ever meet him?”
“According to my foster parents the father’s name part of my birth certificate was blank. I know less about him than I do about my mother.”
“How awful for you,” she said and I could see that she meant it.
“What about siblings?”
I shook my head, “None tha
t I know of. I was alone when I was found and no-one has ever mentioned that there was another child there, it was just me.” I could see in her face she knew how I felt; she knew what it was like to be the only one. It was why I had told her. I sensed the barriers that she had put in place after the previous night. I knew how awkward, how different she felt as a result of what had happened and I didn’t know how else I could tell her that in some way I understood.
“Have you ever tried to trace your family, through your birth certificate perhaps?”
I shook my head at the question and explained that I had never seen my paperwork, had never asked for it. Perhaps I had always been too wary of discovering too much about the person I could have been had I not been taken away.
We sat with our heads turned to each other, mirror images as we each took the others eyes and looked through them. Seeing the world differently; seeing the subtle nuances of another’s path, the blemishes, the fractures that ran down the middle. She reached across the sofa and took my hand and we sat in silence for a while as I tried to find ways to let her know that she no longer had to feel alone.
“I’m sorry about what happened with Charlie, with both of them.”
She smiled at me and nodded. “Thank you,” she said simply. “You know, even though it all ended the way it did, I’m still grateful. What would I be without them? What would my life be? It would have been an awfully empty place without the memories I have of the two of them.”
I wondered at the years between then and now, at how long those memories had kept her company. I thought of the little bedroom upstairs and couldn’t help wishing that everything had worked out differently for her.
Chapter 46 ~ Lacey
He is dying. She knows it. She can sense it in his laboured breathing, in the paleness of him. He has shrunk on the bed, turning in on himself. His middle is gone, the big dark heart of him, and he shrivels into the space left behind.
He refused to let her call anyone for help, he is afraid to go into hospital, she sees it in his eyes, a shadow behind them. How small he is, how pathetic. She watches him and wonders if the part of him that made her afraid – the part of him that took her life and moulded it, shaped it into something it shouldn’t have been – was the first thing to die; it is no longer there and she no longer recognises him without it.
She thinks that she will find that part of him, take that black and dark and rancid part and place it in a little cardboard box. She wonders where she can bury it. Not in the garden where it will poison the earth, where it will fester and spread rotten roots through the soil, not in the graveyard where it can taint the purity of the ground. She spends days thinking about what she can do with it, where she can put it that will do no harm.
She goes into his room and feels his eyes on her as she moves around the bed with warm water and clean towels. As she bends to clean him, his mouth opens and the smell of rot fills the space between them.
“You hate me, I can see it in your eyes.”
A cloud billows from his cracked, dry mouth and surrounds her. She looks back at him with eyes that hold nothing. She sees no trace of the man she hated. She sees skin that looks a bit like her father stretched over a shrunken skeleton that cowers from hands that try to keep him clean, that try to keep the rot from spreading. She says nothing because there are no words in her just now.
She finishes what she is doing and leaves the room. She goes downstairs and can barely hear her own footsteps as she moves. She wonders if she is the one that has died. Perhaps this is her penance for being the way she is. Perhaps this is her Hell and she will spend eternity looking after the man who stole everything from her.
She rushes to the mirror and sees her own reflection staring back at her with wide eyes and a mouth that gasps for the air that reminds her she is alive. Her hand lifts, touches her face, feels the warmth there, the softness that yields beneath her fingers and she feels gratitude race the blood through her veins. She is solid, complete.
She heats soup on the stove. Not too hot, not too cold. She tests it on the delicate skin inside her wrist before placing it on a tray and taking it upstairs, careful not to spill a drop, careful not to awaken the vindictive part of him. She walks into his room again and helps him to sit up. As she reaches out he flinches, expecting the seeds of who he was to take root in her. She sees the expectation hang in front of her, but does not react.
She feeds him, and when he is finished and she helps him to lie down again, he meets her eyes. “You just want me to hurry up and die don’t you?”
She looks down at him, puzzled, at this man who looks like her father but isn’t anymore. “But you already did,” she says, and he closes his eyes and turns away from her as she gathers the tray and leaves the room.
Chapter 47 ~ Rachel
I told Lacey what Father Thomas had shared with me. Careful to point out that he had kept her confidence and that he hadn’t spoken out of turn. She nodded and thought for a moment, as though she were weighing something up. She stood up and moved away from the sofa towards the window.
“When my mother died, my father didn’t really know what to do with me. I think while she was alive he ignored me quite easily but after she was gone, I became too much for him.”
I watched as she lifted her hand and rubbed it across her eyes. “I hadn’t spoken to him for so long and mother had always been a bit of a go-between. With her gone everything changed.”
She turned to look at me and I saw the uncertainty in her eyes. It stood side by side with her resignation as if she had already decided to speak and nothing would stop the words now even if she was unsure. She walked across the room and sat back down, hunching into herself and raising her shoulders until they framed her face and half hid it from sight.
“It started with electric shock treatment. I don’t remember much about it just bits and pieces really, little flashes of memories. I can recall three or four times when he took me to the hospital, telling me it was for my own good. I never remembered the journey home. When the shock treatment didn’t change anything he had me lobotomised.”
Her voice faded against the expression of horror on my face and she looked away from me. I was stunned. In my ignorance I had thought that lobotomy was something that only really happened in films and stories. I thought it belonged in the past, with archaic medicine and body snatching and I told her so. She shook her head.
“It was far more common then I think. Not an everyday thing but it was accepted in medical circles as a treatment for people with problems in their heads. There were a few quite well known cases.” She smiled then and it failed to reach her eyes.
“Not me of course, I don’t think anybody knew about me. That was probably how my father wanted it.”
“But, why would he do that?”
She shrugged, as if I had asked a question that she herself had puzzled over for years. “Perhaps because I never spoke to him, or because I spent all my time daydreaming. I wasn’t normal to him, I was a source of shame. He was a doctor so it was probably easier for him to arrange than it would have been for anyone else. Maybe he genuinely thought it was the best thing, maybe he thought it would help.” She rubbed at her forehead again, as if assessing the damage done all those years ago. I found myself studying the space she touched.
“That is what Father Thomas was talking about when he said the brain damage was done during an operation of some kind. He just didn’t tell you that the operation was done specifically to cause damage.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what to say. I mean, is that why you have the blackouts then, because of the lobotomy?”
“I think so or perhaps because of the shock treatment. I don’t know really, maybe it was both. My memory was affected quite badly by one of the treatments, I’m not sure which. Some things I can remember really well but a lot of it is very hazy. I can’t remember the shock treatment but I can remember the hours leading up to the lobotomy and part of the operation itself. Though it took me ye
ars to understand what my memory was showing me. Everything afterwards is a bit absent though.”
“You remember the lobotomy?”
I think that she heard the disbelief in my voice. I had heard of people dreaming that they were awake during operations, I had even read that some people had perfect recollection of what went on in the theatre, but I had never met anyone who experienced it. She smiled at me, a sad parody of a smile.
“I know how it sounds but it was done while I was awake. I wasn’t anaesthetised. I think it was quite common for that kind of operation.”
“Oh my God!” I shook my head again, unable to think of anything to say that would fit inside that moment. Knowing that there was nothing I could say that would take from her the terror of what she had been through. I was horrified, fascinated, and appalled all at once, that someone I knew could have been through something so terrible. I looked at this woman before me, at her independence, her vitality and I found it incredible that she had made it so far.
“I remember being on the table, I remember the thingy, the instrument, coming towards my eyes... ”
“Coming towards your eyes?” I asked and she nodded.
“It was what was called a trans-orbital lobotomy. They went in above my eyes, through the back of the sockets. That’s why I don’t have any scars.”
I felt sick at the thought, disgusted by it and it must have shown on my face because I saw the sympathy cross Lacey’s features and she reached out and patted my hand.
“I don’t remember much after that. Little flashes of pictures really that might well have been dreams. All I know for sure is that I lost a year somewhere. I remember that it was 1962 when I went in to hospital for the op but the next date I remember is in 1963. I’m not totally sure what happened between those times.” She looked away from me then, her eyes moving slowly, her face still.
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