How to Measure a Cow

by Margaret Forster

  The policewoman went into the hospital with her, to Nancy’s relief. She wouldn’t have found her way anywhere, so confusing were the signs and so endless the corridors. Her heart began to beat uncomfortably rapidly as they reached the intensive-care unit. It was as eerie as she’d expected, with some machine bleeping but otherwise silence, the nurses moving about without making any noise at all, seeming to glide between patients. There were four there, all with their eyes either closed, or their eyelids flickering, and two with tubes in their mouths. Sarah – no, Tara, Tara, she mustn’t call her Sarah now – had no tube. Nancy was beckoned closer by a nurse. Lord, what a mess. Stitched cuts all over her face and half her hair shaved off. But Nancy recognised her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was my neighbour. Sarah Scott. My friend.’

  Adding ‘my friend’ choked her. She’d never said it before. Sarah – no, Tara, Tara – was such a new friend. And she’d said the wrong name. Oh, God. The nurse had already written it down, and was now saying it, gently, to Sarah.

  ‘Hello, Sarah,’ she said. ‘Can you hear me, Sarah? Your friend is here, Nancy your friend is here.’

  Tara heard these words clearly. She wasn’t Sarah any more. Being Sarah was an experiment that had failed.

  ‘Tara,’ she said, ‘Tara.’

  The nurse frowned, whispered to Nancy, ‘She’s confused.’

  ‘No,’ Nancy said, ‘she’s just telling you her real name. She was only pretending to be a Sarah Scott.’

  The nurse raised her eyebrows, then wrote something down, and motioned to Nancy to leave the room. Before she did, Nancy lightly touched the side of Tara’s damaged face, stroked it gently. Tara’s eyes filled with tears.

  It was all so upsetting. Nancy could hardly compose herself on the way back to Workington. She felt she’d done everything wrong. She’d let that poor woman down. The policewoman, whose name Nancy didn’t seem able to grasp though she’d been told it often enough, had questioned her closely about Tara, alias Sarah. How long had she known her, what did she know about her, who were her other friends, who were her relatives? They had stuff from the car by then, documents, driving licence and suchlike, and they were all in the name of Sarah Scott, but there was no clue as to background. Why was she driving on the A66, did Nancy know? The Cockermouth address was duly noted – she was asked what else she knew about the injured woman.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Nancy. ‘She was quiet, went to work, kept herself to herself, never mentioned relatives.’

  ‘And friends, besides yourself?’ the policewoman prompted.

  ‘I don’t know them. They were down south,’ Nancy said. ‘Old friends, she had old friends down there.’

  She was still not going to mention anything about prison. Keeping quiet about that was the least she could do.

  The dreams were long and vivid. Tara went in and out of them all the time, sometimes even when she was awake. These dreams slipped in and out of her mind, plaguing her, tormenting her because in them she was so happy, so full of vitality, and out of them she could hardly raise her head or move a limb. Claire, Liz and Molly, young again, were all around her, their faces alight with laughter, their bodies moving feverishly around her, round and round, an endless mad dance, and herself in the centre, screaming.

  But sometimes Tom was there too, shoving the girls aside and enclosing her tightly, too tightly, in his arms, and then she struggled and pushed and a nurse would appear because she’d been shouting, and she’d be given another pill. But then, slowly, these dreams, which were more like hallucinations, began to lessen, and there were periods of calm when she was able to work out where she was and what seemed to have happened. She still had no memory of this, but the policewoman who came to her bedside several times filled her in. Nobody had been killed, that was the important thing, and it had not been her fault. She’d been caught between two speeding cars, one overtaking her, one coming round a bend too far into the centre of the road. That was all she needed to know, all she wanted to know. She couldn’t, yet, take in information about insurance claims and so forth.

  Repeatedly, she was asked if there was anyone she would like the police to contact. A social worker – or someone she assumed was a social worker, though she failed to take in either the woman’s name or proper title – also came to make the same offer.

  ‘You’ll need help when you’re out of hospital,’ the woman said. ‘Is there someone who could come and stay for a while?’

  Tara shook her head. She was Sarah Scott again, timid and alone in the world, except for Nancy Armstrong. But no, she’d promised herself, no more Sarah Scott. Of course Tara had friends. And she had Nancy, who appeared at her bedside a week after she came out of intensive care, bearing a tin of shortbread. She was just there when Tara opened her eyes one afternoon, sitting there with her handbag clasped tightly on her knee and a solemn expression on her lined face.

  ‘Nancy!’ Tara said.

  ‘Oh, you’ve come to,’ Nancy said. ‘I thought I was going to have had a wasted journey, with you asleep, and the bus goes at half-four and I can’t miss it.’

  Tara smiled, but smiling still hurt, with her right cheek in the shape it was, so she also winced.

  ‘My, you’re in a state,’ Nancy said. ‘What a to-do. Who’d have thought it’d come to this. Well, you’re mending. They say you’re mending. Take it easy, though, don’t let them turn you out afore you’re good and ready.’

  ‘Nancy,’ Tara whispered, ‘could you do me a favour?’

  ‘Why d’you think I’m here?’ Nancy said. ‘Of course I’ll do you a favour so long as it doesn’t mean too much walking – my knee’s playing up.’

  Tara said it didn’t mean any walking. It meant writing down a few telephone numbers and ringing people up.

  ‘I haven’t got a pencil,’ Nancy said, ‘else I’d do it.’

  Tara gestured to her bedside table. She’d been provided with a biro and writing paper as well as other things.

  ‘You’ll have to go slowly,’ Nancy said. ‘I’ve got stiff fingers.’

  So Tara went slowly, giving her the three phone numbers.

  ‘And what am I to say?’ Nancy asked. ‘I’ll need to know, and I’ll have to write it down or I’ll forget. It’s nearly four o’clock, we’ll need to get a move on.’

  Tara, when finally Nancy left, after she’d put the piece of paper in her bag and shut the clasp so tightly that the sound was magnified to a loud bang in Tara’s ears, was exhausted.

  Claire listened to the answerphone message three times. The voice was northern, the tone loud. No name was given, either at the beginning or the end, but Claire dialled 1471 before the caller’s number could be replaced by another. As she expected, it was a Cumbrian code. Then she sat down and pondered what the message said: ‘Tara has had a car crash, she is in hospital in Carlisle, she just thought you would want to know.’ Now, what, Claire asked herself, did those last words mean? Did they amount to that cliché ‘a cry for help’? How could they not – but what sort of help? Was Tara expecting her to go to Carlisle and visit her?

  Naturally, she rang Liz and Molly, and yes, they too had had the same message but Molly had actually spoken to the caller whereas Liz had only the same recorded message as Claire.

  ‘She’s called Mrs Armstrong,’ said Molly, ‘and she lives opposite Tara. I asked her exactly what had happened and she said all she knew was that on her way to Cockermouth – she was apparently moving to a house there – she’d had a car crash, not her fault, and had a lot wrong with her. Those were Mrs Armstrong’s words, “a lot wrong with her”. She said she’d visited her in hospital but it was a long bus ride and her legs were bad and she didn’t know how often she’d be able to manage it.’

  ‘How did she sound?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Quite cross, gruff,’ Molly said, ‘and a bit breathless.’

  ‘Old, then?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘Well,’ Claire said, ‘what are we going to do?�
�

  The past, Tara lay thinking, is a menace. She was tired of it, exhausted with going over it, worn out with the repetitious cycle of old memories. She wanted nothing to do with the past, her past, anyone’s past. Yet the future was hardly more attractive. She couldn’t see anything in it, only a white blur filling her head. They were bothering her now that she was improving, asking her where she could go to convalesce, who could help look after her, apart from what social services would offer, the Meals on Wheels, the twice-daily visits. She had no answer. ‘Have you got friends you can call on?’ She didn’t tell them about asking Nancy to make those phone calls.

  She was able now, on two crutches, to walk a few steps without too much pain. Limping across to a window, she looked down on a packed car park and beyond it rows of houses. It was all meaningless. She was in a hospital in a city she’d never been to, where she could identify no one and nothing. But this was what she’d wanted: anonymity, a new start, removed from everything she’d known. She’d been going to develop an entirely new personality, not so much a reformed character as a completely remade one. And she had failed. Abysmally. What had she to show for that attempt? Nothing, save for her odd friendship with Nancy Armstrong, and there was no depth to that. Poor Nancy saddled now with a sense of duty to her, visiting her because she felt she ought to. Tara had seen it in her expression, resentment struggling with compassion. Nancy was sorry for her, but wanted free of her.

  Back in her bed, Tara realised it was no good hating the past. Only drawing something out of the past would help her, but first she would need to humiliate herself.

  ‘Dad?’ Tara said.

  There was no reply, but the phone was not put down.

  ‘Dad?’

  Her voice was weak, not like her own voice at all. It was barely above a whisper, and she knew it sounded frightened. Not a good idea.

  ‘Dad,’ she said for the third time, dropping the interrogative lilt, ‘I need help. I’ve had an accident, a car crash, not my fault.’

  Still silence. She knew he’d be on the edge of hanging up.

  Then he said, ‘Money, is it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, relieved he was speaking at all, ‘not money. I need a place to go, someone to help me get over this. Not for long. A couple of weeks, maybe.’

  ‘Begging, are you?’ he said, but there was a hint of sarcasm in his tone.

  ‘I’m begging, yes,’ she said.

  He’d been at her trial. She’d seen him quite clearly, sitting at the end of a row, arms folded, one leg stuck out into the aisle. She’d been surprised, hadn’t thought he’d come. She imagined there would have been newspaper reporters bothering him. Probably he hadn’t said much. A man who kept his own counsel. But she knew he was capable of real fury because she’d been at the receiving end of it. Livid, he’d been, on more than one occasion, when she’d come home in the early hours ‘wasted’ as he put it. He’d accused her of taking drugs, but she never had. Alcohol, yes, cigarettes, yes, but drugs, no. It was something she was proud of, the fact that she’d never even sampled cannabis. It made Tom laugh. He said she should try a little bit of hash, it would relax her, but she refused. When she was eighteen, she’d been told the truth about her mother but she’d sensed it anyway. She’d found the information among documents in her foster parent’s possession during a stage when she enjoyed rifling through the contents of every drawer in the house searching for God knows what. She didn’t tell any of her friends, and she didn’t tell Tom. It troubled her that she hadn’t told Tom, but later she was glad.

  It came out at the trial, all the stuff about her mother, the drug addiction, the baby born with traces of heroin in her body. She, Tara, had been lucky that this was dealt with immediately and she recovered quickly. Her mother died, though. She didn’t know why this had to be told. She didn’t want anyone to know about her mother. She was going to plead guilty and so-called mitigating circumstances had nothing to do with anything. She felt shamed by having these details read out in open court. Her foster father’s account, given to the police she supposed, was not as painful, strangely enough. He wasn’t called as a witness, for which she was grateful. Everything he’d told the police was true. She had, from the beginning, been a troubled child, though with no recollection of what had gone on in her first three years she hadn’t known she was ‘troubled’. She had apparently spent her first two years with the Frasers having violent tantrums, nightmares, spells of not eating. Even later on, when she was said to have settled down, she was capable of acting strangely. His wife, her father said, had been made sick with worry when Tara stole things, when she smashed crockery in a rage, when she threw paint at the newly papered wall. There was such violence lurking there and they’d struggled to deal with it. But he’d said he’d always known she was clever. It was no surprise to him that she did so well at school. Then, he’d been proud of her, but all the same he couldn’t forgive her for being so cold and horrible to his wife. There was no excuse for that.

  He visited her in prison, the first prison. That was a surprise. She hadn’t expected him to. She thought, as he would put it, that he’d have ‘washed his hands’ of her. But there he was, sitting grim faced, arms folded as usual when he was angry, as though he was restraining himself. They stared at each other a long time. She wasn’t going to speak first.

  Eventually he said, ‘What a mess.’

  She didn’t reply. The mess was over. Everything was tidy now.

  ‘What did he do to you?’ he asked. ‘You said nothing about that. You only talked about the drugs, what he was doing, but not what he did to you. They couldn’t draw you out. Why?’

  ‘I’m not, ever, going to talk about Tom,’ Tara said, ‘so you can leave now, if that’s all you’ve come for.’

  She hated people prying, all in the course, they said, of ‘understanding’ her crime. Over and over she was asked, ‘What did he do to you?’ They wanted her to say he had beaten her, abused her, tortured her in some physical way. Then all would be, if not forgiven, ‘understood’. But Tom had done none of those things. His tyranny was of a different sort. He scared her not with blows but silence. He could fill the house with such a menacing silence that he made her talk faster and louder to try and break it down. Then he would pick her up and put her in a room and lock the door and leave her for hours. How could she possibly convey what this harmless-sounding behaviour had done to her?

  But her father was speaking. ‘I’ve come,’ he said, ‘because I’m your father. I have a right to know.’

  ‘No,’ said Tara, ‘you don’t. You have no right. You cared more about your wife than you did about me.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s how it should be.’

  She’d smiled at that.

  ‘Find that funny, do you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Tara said, ‘I find it tragic. Just go away. We’re done with each other.’

  And now there she was, ringing him up, pleading.

  ‘You can’t come here,’ he said, ‘so get that out of your head. There’s only Barney’s place, it’s empty for a month. You could go there, on certain conditions.’

  Barney was his brother, and his ‘place’ was a flat which her father owned and let out now that he was dead.

  ‘All right,’ Tara said, ‘thanks.’

  ‘There’s no one there to look after you, mind,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to arrange a nurse or someone. Can’t you do that wherever you are? Haven’t you got a friend up there, ’stead of trailing back down here? What’s the point?’

  The point was Claire, Molly and Liz, but she didn’t tell him that. He asked practical questions, such as how she was going to get to Barney’s place if she had no car and couldn’t drive anyway if, as she told him, she had a broken leg as well as other injuries. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said, but when she insisted he agreed to post the keys to Cumberland Infirmary. Once that was settled, there was no need to go on talking, but it was he who prolonged the phone call.

  ‘How’ve y
ou been?’ he asked. ‘Not a word from you all this time.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘You’re always sorry,’ he said. ‘Lot of good it does. Sorry too late, that’s you. You could’ve made something of yourself. I don’t know what went wrong, what we did.’

  ‘You know you did everything you could,’ Tara said. ‘It was me, just me.’

  ‘Wilful,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  There was plenty of help provided. She was driven to Carlisle station and helped on to the train, and at Euston she was met with a wheelchair and taken to the next station and the next train, and put on it. Everything was arranged for her, involving at least three voluntary organisations. The only tricky bit was getting off the last train. She had to rely on Claire being there with a wheelchair and on someone on the train opening the door and helping her out. But when the time came, there was no one in her carriage. She had to manage her crutches and her bags and she couldn’t do both. The train, she knew, wouldn’t stop for long, so ahead of time she lurched along to a door, trying to drag her bags, two of them, with the tip of one crutch. She made the door just in time to press the button and make it open, and then pushed the bags out. Getting herself out was harder, but she knew the train wouldn’t start again so long as she was in the doorway. She was perspiring profusely, and felt dizzy, before she was at last on the platform. It was empty, except for one man sitting reading a newspaper. There was no sign of Claire.

  Nancy was more upset than she would admit, even to herself, in the privacy of her own home. She held Tara’s letter in her hand and read the few words on it over and over. Yes, the phrase ‘Thanks for everything’ was there, and so was ‘You’ve been a good friend’ and ‘I’ll be in touch’. But they made no difference to Nancy’s growing conviction that she’d been made a fool of and should have known better. Tara, Sarah-Scott-as-was, had gone. Done a flit – well, in a manner of speaking that was what it amounted to. Nancy had turned up at the hospital, all that way again in the bus, her knees paining her, and there she’d been given this letter. Tara had gone, that very morning, and the letter was to be posted if Nancy did not turn up. Why hadn’t she phoned and said she was going? Nancy said this to the nurse, who shrugged and said she expected Tara hadn’t thought Nancy would be visiting again. Feeble excuse. And there was no address or phone number given for where she was going. Nancy crumpled the letter up and stuffed it in her bag. Now she had the long bus journey back, and all for nothing. All the way to Workington she felt hot with rage, rage mostly because she had enough sense to realise it was a manufactured rage. She let herself get into these states and then she had to haul herself out.