It was the same every night – they chatted and hobnobbed and told tales to get through the shift. But this time it was different, the moon was soaring and she was carrying us, the doctors and the nurses on night duty in their pools of light by their monitors, the orderlies and the ambulance drivers in the sumps down below waiting a call and the medics and surgeons and police officers in A&E looking out for the stabbers and the stabbed, the gunshot wounds and their makers, and me suspended in my high computerised net of a bed, she was carrying all of us somewhere.
The night-duty doctor had finished ribbing Grace the nurse from Ghana about her love of lemongrass chicken soup and pad thai which were her favourite foods that she dreamed of and couldn’t get in this damned hospital which had every ECG and MRI and CGI machine you could think of but no kitchen or cafeteria for a hungry nurse at night and then the youngest of the team who was from Bangalore and had very gentle tiny fingers like a clever daughter in a fairy tale broke through their chaffing and asked Grace how she’d arrived in this country in the first place and got such a taste for spicy exotic cuisine here and Grace laughed and said, ‘You’re not supposed to ask that kind of question, you know! You’re not meant to think I don’t belong here! Who’s to say my granddaddy didn’t live here a hundred years ago?’
Then another voice broke in and whispered, ‘I’ll tell you how I came here …’ and I could hear her even though she was speaking softly because the others all fell silent around her and the moonlight stretched out silver cool and taut over them so that her voice travelled towards me like music over water in the summer in a park at dusk and she was saying, ‘Every day there were soldiers and explosions and aeroplanes overhead. We still got our children to school, through the checkpoints and the rest of it. But one day when they went to school, the explosions were coming in closer. We were used to it, but …’
She was speaking quietly, with a kind of detachment.
‘Yes, that day the soldiers came and I lost my children. The men came running in to our house; one had the traditional scarf tied round his head so you couldn’t see his face. He was followed by another man, who had his scarf half pulled off so we could see his eyes all startled and hot in his head.’
Her voice was changing, becoming deeper and older.
‘They waved us out of our house with their guns, they pointed down the street, away from the direction of the school. We tried to stand up to them and stay where we were, we tried to dodge them and run to fetch the children but they howled the troops were out there on the attack, house to house. Everyone was shouting. Running and screaming and the smell of bombs everywhere. You never see that smell on the news or the smell that comes with it – like here in hospital … sometimes down in surgery. Insides. The smell of hurt animals. Blood and flesh and fire.
‘You know all this.’
There was a murmur from the others.
I heard a voice – it was Grace’s, saying, ‘Maryam, when did this happen? How long ago?’
A bell rang from one of the beds … Ahmad the night-duty doctor who was from Libya broke in, you could hear he wanted to know, ‘Hey, don’t get to the end before I’m back …’
But Maryam went on, ‘We women who’d been rounded up spent that first night together, in an old garage for bus repairs, and in the morning when the soldiers marched us to a camp and told us all to look for our families and our children and regroup, I didn’t find Raja and Leila. Many of the others with us had got separated too. It went on like this, for one day and night after another. It seemed the longest time. Wherever we were taken, I asked about them, the others asked about theirs. Sometimes someone found their mother, but for us there was no word, just a huge silence in the middle of the explosions of the bombs and the rumble of the artillery outside and the endless wailing inside us. It’s hard to think of ways of describing children so that someone might recognise them – what do you say? My son is six, he has dark curly hair … my daughter is eight, she’s so pretty your heart melts, and she has a chip on her first front tooth from falling over as she was running one afternoon?
‘They were lost. I had lost them. Or had I gone missing? Had our lives left us and walked away? Had we all somehow gone missing?
‘We were kept moving, drawing farther and farther away from our home and our street and the school where they were going when I last saw them.
‘One lunchtime, on the eighth day it was, I had to show my ID as usual to one of the guards and it was then I had the idea.
‘From that day on, I tore up my face in little pieces – first one eye then the other, then the mouth, one corner then the other, then the nose and the hair, and I left the bits behind me in the places they turned into holding camps for us, I left a bit with anyone who would go along with my doing this and take it. It was one of the medical volunteers who pinned a piece to his own badge that my Leila saw. She was lining up for an inspection and she said to Raja – she had kept a strong grip on him – “Look there’s Mother – that’s Mother’s eye …”
‘That way we found one another again. It took another five days but we were re-united. After that terrible gap, a gap like an eternity.’
It was the time again for the moon to start sliding down the sky. The tiger stripes across my bed were contracting and fading, and I was feeling drowsier now, as I heard Grace and the others at the nurses’ station sigh and kind of chuckle with satisfaction. ‘But you still haven’t explained how you got here afterwards, darling,’ I heard Grace say, banteringly.
‘That will have to keep for another night,’ said Ahmad, yawning. ‘Nearly time for the day shift to come on. Are you on tomorrow, Maryam?’
But there was no reply. Or else I was too near sleep to hear.
The Difference in the Dose
‘OTHER CHILDREN HAVE a nonna,’ says Daisy. ‘Why not me?’ She turns her face up to her mother, who is combing her hair after washing it. It is curly and thick and tangles easily, so Bella combs it through before Daisy goes to bed, where she will wake the next morning with her hair in fiery spikes again. Bella’s full name is Belladonna, the name of another flower, a different kind from lilies or roses, daisies or buttercups.
A flower that can be good for you, sometimes.
Bella’s own mother understood plants, and belladonna had a special significance for her, she used to say. She was a herbalist, she knew these things. She liked to quote, ‘The only difference between a poison and a remedy is the dose.’
Daisy is plucking at Bella’s sleeve; she insists, her mouth beginning to twist into a cry, ‘Everyone in my class has a nonna. I’m.The.Only.One.Who.Hasn’t.’ She spells out each word as if learning to pronounce it for the first time.
‘Your granny …’ Bella hesitates. Then she says, ‘Let me tell you a story, which will explain everything.’
And she begins:
‘Women sometimes discover they are having a baby only because they have a sudden craving. In Italian this urge is called, simply, la voglia. The want. The same word as “will”, but with the definite article added: the want. That makes it much more absolute. We call it a craving. When I was small, my mother told me, la voglia is irresistible. It’s a force that takes over and makes you … quite irrational, quite uncontrollable. When la voglia comes over her, the future mother won’t be refused. She’ll stop at nothing – do you realise? – to get what she needs.
‘Needs? Maybe. But maybe the substances she craves aren’t helpful to the new life inside her … Or maybe they’re just caprices, the aberrant fancies of a mind unbalanced by endocrinal surges …’
She’s rushing on, talking to herself, she realises; she has lost the little girl’s attention. So she changes direction, forgets the technical stuff, and says, ‘We might want all sorts of crazy things when someone like you is waiting to be born. Some not so crazy too. Our cravings can be an excuse for
chocolate truffles
lave
nder pastilles
fried chips in strawberry jam
ice cream galore – pistachio, rum truffle, tutti frutti, raspberry swirl, coconut candy, or any flavour you can think of. Häagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche Mini-cups…!’
‘Cherrimisù!’ cries Daisy.
‘In some places they can all be bought in the middle of the night – imagine! Like a pizza, you can get them delivered!’
There’s a pause as both picture this craziness. Then her mother goes on: ‘In some cases we want other things, we want:
coal dust from the scuttle
the colouring bits inside crayons
mud and silt from puddles in the road
mustard and horseradish and ginger
soap powder and shampoo
beetles and eggshells
and …’
She starts laughing.
Daisy giggles too. She begins to look around the room.
‘Carpet,’ she shouts. ‘You might want to eat carpet!’ She bangs on the table. ‘And wood! Nice tasty wood!’
‘No,’ says the child’s father, when he comes in and hears the stories his wife’s telling their daughter. ‘No, those things would harm the baby inside.’
He goes to the fridge and brings out a bottle of white wine and begins to look for the corkscrew.
‘Wine is bad for embryos,’ he says.
‘But it wasn’t when I was having you,’ says Bella to her daughter, cross with Piero because he has broken into their game. ‘And look at you, nothing wrong with you!’
The father pours out a glass for himself and another for Bella; Daisy settles herself against her mother and begins to draw with her finger in the misty veil forming on the bowl. Bella strokes her hair, which is almost dry now after her bath.
‘Your nonna had cravings when she was having me.’
Daisy looks up at her with excitement.
‘What for?’
‘Oh … spinach and carrots and things. Parsnips!’ says Piero, her father, and leans over and kisses Bella firmly, to change the subject.
‘Parsnips,’ giggles Daisy, and makes a face.
‘She ate them raw!’
He grinds and snaps his teeth at Daisy, not to fail the general mood of jollity, because he realises how heavy he’s been. But he can’t help it, and adds, ‘That’s how weird women get.’
Belladonna can’t remember her birth mother, the mother who had the cravings. She wouldn’t ever have been able to remember her, because she was a tiny baby, only a few weeks old, when she was adopted, and she was never shown a photograph of her by the mother she knew, the one who brought her up, Charis Merryll, the beautiful lady gardener, best-selling author of several classic titles (Orchids in the Penthouse; Urban Plots; Hanging Gardens for the Mostly Manicured – and her most famous of all, The Difference in the Dose).
It’s been ten years since Bella quarrelled with Charis, a little longer than the length of time since Daisy was born. Charis found out that Bella was sleeping with Piero; she found them together in bed, in her bed, the one with the satin canopy bunched up into a cherub’s fist, which was such bliss to sleep under. Charis was back from somewhere a day earlier than expected, and she’d come whooping into the lobby of the apartment block where they lived, thinking how it was so great – she’d finished the assignment ahead of time, and now she and her daughter could have a precious day together over the weekend, something that didn’t happen often enough, something she treasured, better than usual weekend quality time, real time out from her busy life planning and planting gardens all over the world for architects, bringing greenery to the desert for hotels in the Gulf, and turning into new Edens the oil-rich Emirates’ island utopias which were rising up out of the swirling salt barrenness.
Charis was thinking all of this as she greeted the doorman of her Madison Avenue apartment block, the Golden Tower, as she went up in the elevator to the penthouse floor, as she pushed at the door, which was never locked, and found that it was, surprisingly, shut and bolted.
‘Bella!’ she cried out at the door. She never carried keys; she didn’t need them, because the doorman and the janitor kept the tower quite safe.
‘Bella!’ Her heart contracted. Charis knew then something was wrong, terribly wrong.
She saw her child in peril. Images of horror jumped in her mind; interference storms jangled the stream of pixels from some terrible news bulletin: Bella sprawling, Bella drugged, Bella drunk, Bella damaged, abducted, gang-raped, murdered.
The screaming inside her was already beginning as she went down again in the elevator to fetch the doorman to let her into her own home.
She was shaking as she asked him for his keys, and she didn’t conceal her agitation from him. She was forming a different picture from her first terrors as she registered, with hindsight, that he had greeted her with a degree of surprise that was perhaps unexpected.
‘Oh, you’re back so early, Ms Merryll,’ he’d said, before he had added, with his more customary courtesy, ‘Have you had a good trip this time?’
Going back up in the elevator, her sense of ominousness gathered. The doorman opened the service door at the back, the one they never used, and she entered her apartment through the kitchen, and began taking in the trail of tumbled glasses and dishes, the mulchy cocktail of smoke and booze and pizza, the drawn curtains and dropped blinds, the cushions tossed this way and that on the floor, the furniture moved out to the edges of the room, one lot of bodies sprawled on the couch, fast asleep, another heap of tangled limbs on the divan, the garden room window opened, her precious plants exposed to the night air. She started in her rage towards her daughter’s bedroom: there she found more kids. Yes, kids, girls from Bella’s class. Boys, too. She pulled off the covers to see where her daughter was. Not there. Not in the living room. She then realised, before she threw open the door to her own bedroom, where she would be.
She pulled off the sheets – and she saw Piero flung down on his front with nothing on – though she didn’t yet know who he was. She saw only a man, a fully grown man with hair on his legs and his buttocks, too, and even on his back, an old man. Then she recognised him: one of her circle of friends, a man she knew, a successful businessman with a string of wig makers, costumiers, and hire shops, a man almost her own age, someone she had found amusing, pleasant, clever at business, but not, absolutely not … not for her child, not like this, not to sleep with her. Rage began breaking her open, letting fly a swarm of demons.
He was lying with one arm over the body of her daughter. His right hand was plunged into her hair, and she was still in a party dress – and one of her own best outfits, Charis realised – though it was all undone and messed up around her. So without even knowing what she was doing, she grasped him by the shoulder and began hitting him as the tears started pouring down. He sprang up and hit her back, square on her left cheek with his right hand, and he was a vigorous man who weighed at least two stone more than Charis, and his blow sent her reeling to the floor.
Bella was awake now, screaming at them both, standing up in her mother’s muddled dress, her hair bunched and knotted and sticking out in all directions.
‘You don’t deserve Bella,’ Piero was shouting. ‘You’re a dried-up old bitch, and all your mothering is a big fucking lie.’
‘Che stronza,’ he bawled at her as he tied the sheet around himself like a smart beach sarong. ‘You’ve only ever wanted your big career and your big fucking credit card – you don’t know anything about being a mother. Well, I love Bella. I am mother and father and lover and husband to her. I love her in ways your sort can never understand.’
They raged at each other. And Bella took his side. Bella turned on her, said unheard-of terrible things to her, poured out a pent-up hatred on her, which, it seemed, had been harbouring for years and years.
‘You took me from my family. You stole me from my
real mother. You thought you could buy me. Well, I am not someone you can buy. Not any more. I am not a slave.’
Piero put his arm around her and tucked her in under his high shoulder, fastening her to him as if she were now his baby.
‘Bella loves me,’ he said. ‘I am the best thing that ever happened to her. I love her more than you ever could. You selfish old bag, you wanted a trophy child. Another lifestyle accessory.
‘Well, it’s over. It’s my turn now.
‘You can buy yourself a puppy.’
Charis was thinking:
In those days, I was so hoping for a child. The streets seemed to me to be crowded with nothing but women displaying their bumps, their navels pertly stuck out like a nipple, the parks teeming with young mothers with Walkmans dangling from their ears, pushing strollers, sometimes speeding on roller blades or, if the kids were a little older, sitting in the sun together chatting – by the playgrounds or the soccer pitch or the ice rink, where their offspring would be running about learning to be social.
But I, I had had abortions in earlier days when it seemed that every time I went to bed with someone it happened, even if I was doing everything to prevent it. Then, when I wanted to have a baby, when I had established my business and had the books done and dusted and everyone wanted a Charis Merryll low-maintenance urban plot with every remedy and every herb you need, it stopped happening.
Alfred couldn’t take my wanting one so much – it wore him out, my crying. It cut him out.
So I thought, I will find someone who is like I was then, someone who can have a baby very easily and then have another soon so won’t miss the first one, and I’ll persuade her to give me hers.
Fly Away Home Page 17
