What Goes Around

chapter THIRTY SIX

‘Gloria’s coming.’

‘What?’ I sort of lurch to sit up and the trolley moves. ‘I’m going home.’

‘You're going nowhere.’

The nurse is really stern.

I thought they were supposed to be nice, she used to be nice.

I remember her.

I try to focus on her name badge for when I write my letter of complaint, in fact I’ll do it now. I demand my bag and I pull out my journal and I start writing but all she does is smile. ‘You’re going down, Rose,’ I say. ‘Who the hell called Gloria? She's got nothing to do with me.’

I don't want her to see me like this. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.

Except, a gradually sobering voice in my head is starting to tell me, my daughter has.

They’ve cleaned me up as best as they can. I can’t stand what Charlotte must have seen and I cannot, I cannot face Gloria.

‘Charlotte called her sister in Australia and she called her mother.’

Half sister!

I've got to talk to Charlotte about the phone calls.

‘I don’t want Gloria,’ I shout. ‘She’s not going with Gloria.’

‘Shall I ring the duty social worker then?’ Rose asks and I shrink back on the pillow. ‘Shall I see if they can arrange a temporary placement for her?’

‘I want to go home. I want to discharge myself.’

‘Fine, but Charlotte won’t be going home tonight with you.’

They keep banging on about my alcohol intake – they don’t get it wasn’t the Baileys I wanted, it was the cream.

‘I don’t drink much,’ I try to explain but they’re not listening. ‘I just wanted the cream,’ I say but my words are slurring.

A doctor examines me and puts in a drip and I hear the word unkempt and I remember that that will sting later. When I look back on this - that word will kill but right now I’m angry.

How dare he?

How dare he judge me for not cutting my toenails, for having roots, how dare he call me unkempt?

I work.

I live in the village.

I’ve got a carriage driveway.

I don't even get my own cubicle for long. I’m moved to the corridor where the nurses can keep an eye on me, without me taking up too much room. I see Gloria arrive, holding Daisy. No wonder he left, I try to tell myself, except it doesn’t console me, because it doesn’t apply, she looks great and as for me…

I look at Gloria and I remember the last time our eyes met.

When she saw me after Noel.

‘Happy now?’ I demand as she walks over.

‘Lucy.’ She's all calm and practical and she talks to me like I’m a patient and I remember that she’s a nurse. ‘I'm going to take Charlotte home with me, she'll be fine. You can come and get her in the morning.’ I want her to shout at me, I want her to call me a bitch or a slut, to tell me I am nothing. I hate her dignity, I hate how she just puts up and shuts up.

And then, when it couldn’t get worse, when it surely could not get any worse – I hear a man’s voice.

‘Gloria, what are you doing here? Is everything all right - is there something wrong with Daisy?’ It's a voice that I vaguely recognize, and I watch as a paramedic comes over and gives Gloria a light kiss on the cheek, and I can't stand it. I know who he is. He’s the one who was there when he died, he’s the paramedic who asked what medication he was on, and I just can't stand it any more.

‘I bet you're both laughing, I bet you sit every night laughing…’ I'm deranged, maybe I'm officially mad, because I'm being moved back to a cubicle now and they’re talking about sedation as I continue my rant. It's him! It's the paramedic from that day and, from the way that he is with Gloria, he must be her boyfriend.

‘Excuse us a moment,’ he says to Gloria. He tries to talk to me, to tell me he’s never said anything and that he never would, but I’m screaming with my shame. I’m burning in hell at this moment, because Gloria knows what he did to me.

‘Lucy.’ Gloria comes in a few moments later; she doesn't have the baby with her. I don't know why, but it looks as if she's been crying. ‘No one is laughing at you.’

‘Please.’ My head is lolling on the pillow. ‘I bet he told you, I bet he came home that night and you both pissed yourselves laughing.’

‘Paul's never said anything about it. I wasn't even seeing him then,’ Gloria explains. ‘He won't even discuss it now.’

‘So how do you know?’ I don't understand, she says he's never told her and yet she knows what I'm talking about.

‘I was married to him remember?’ She says no more than that but I feel a bit of her spite slither out and it wraps itself around me and attaches itself to me but she doesn’t let any more out. She swallows it down and she’s back to her bloody dignity. ‘Charlotte is fine for tonight.’

‘You were right!’ I shout to her back as she walks out. ‘You got the best years of him…’ I watch her shoulders stiffen, strong shoulders that have carried so much of his shit and still do. She turns around and I know it’s coming, that slap to my cheek, all the anger and hate that she has for me, for what I did, not just to her, but to Eleanor. The verdict as to the horrible woman that I am, is about to come. She’s standing over me and her face is savage and then it comes right down to mine.

‘Then don’t let him have got the best years of you…’

I cringe back on the pillow, I want her spite for me, I want her hate towards me to finally be delivered but she won’t let me have it. She walks out of the cubicle and I lie there crying like I never have in my life, and I don’t know if I’m waiting, I don’t know if she’s gone. I don’t know if she’s taken Charlotte.

I’m going to lose my baby….

Then she’s back and I don’t get why she’s crying.

‘Where’s Charlotte?’

‘She’s having a drink in the nurses’ staffroom,’ Gloria says. I can’t stop crying, I can’t stand what Charlotte has seen, I can’t bear that Gloria knows.

I’m curled in a ball on the trolley and her hand is on my shoulder and she’s squeezing it. ‘I know.’

How does she know?

‘I know how you feel.’

She can’t.

‘It took me years, Lucy,’ she’s telling me. ‘It took me years to move on and on days like today I’m back there again. It’s like one of those sodding nuclear reactors exploding, it will never be better, it will never be finished and over with. It goes on for years, for decades, for generations, it’s never over… you just have to keep….’ she looks down at my journal that I’m clutching and there are tears pouring down her cheeks as she then looks at me. ‘Keep writing it down.’

‘It doesn’t help.’

‘Then keep pouring cool water,’ she says and I’ve no idea what she means and she isn’t explaining further, she’s exhausted, I can see it. I can see every line on her face and for the first time it registers - she lost him too.

‘You held it together,’ I say.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Your girls didn’t find you collapsed in the bathroom covered in shit.’

‘They didn’t find me dead either,’ Gloria says, the tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘But one morning they could have.’ She chokes as she says it. ‘I don’t know if I just wanted to sleep, or if I never wanted to wake up. I don’t know what I was thinking, Lucy, but I took enough sleeping tablets one night that I nearly didn’t have to think about anything anymore…’ She’s back there, I can see it. I can see the pain on her face and the lines and the grief and do you know what? I know that it wasn’t just me who put them there. I know that she now knows that too.

We know.

She takes a deep breath and then another one and tells me she has to go, that I can come and get Charlotte whenever I’m ready. To maybe go home and sort myself out first and then, as she goes to leave, she says it again. ‘Don’t let him have got the best years of you.’