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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.’
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
Gloria
‘Will Mum be okay?’
‘She’ll be fine.’ I say as I open up the house. ‘Let’s put Daisy in her cot.’
‘But she’s not fine.’ Charlotte says and I look at her little pinched face and she looks like one of mine. My heart breaks for all she has to deal with, the same way it broke for my girls.
‘I don’t think she misses him or even likes Dad very much,’ Charlotte says. There are tears falling down her cheeks. ‘It’s not his fault that he died, I don’t get why she’s so angry…’
I feel like I’m back there again, back to the hell he made.
I am back there again, because I give her a cuddle and I take her to Alice’s old room. I find her one of Laura’s nightdresses and, when she’s climbed into bed, I sit there like I did all those years ago.
Here’s the guilt, though.
It’s not like all those years ago.
I couldn’t stand Alice’s questions.
They never ended.
I wanted her to go to sleep and then I had to deal with Bonny and then Eleanor would ring and my parents were checking in every five minutes and the school and the neighbours – I wanted to go to bed.
I wanted chocolate, or toast, to just sit and read, or watch TV to escape, to not have to think. I actually didn’t have time to think – not really, I didn’t have time to fall apart.
One hour with a box of cereal was all I had time for and Alice would lie there, taking up every minute of it - her mouth moving, questions spurting, tears starting. It always came at the end of the longest day – I had my uniform to iron, bills to pay, the house to sort. I had all the sodding divorce stuff to deal with.
‘Why did he die?’ I look down at Charlotte and I want chocolate, I want to lie in the bath till it’s so cold that I wake up. ‘Why did he leave me?’
‘He hasn’t left you,’ I say. ‘He's always going to be there looking out for you. Your dad loved you, the same way he loved my girls. Love never leaves.’
It's not much of an answer but it's the best I can give.
Bastard.
I feel this black smoke rise in my chest, it coils up my throat and it tickles my eyes, it fills my nostrils and lungs and I try to swallow it down.
I look down at the little pet – and I want to lie down and cry, I want to be put to bed and tucked in and for someone to make it all go away.
I don’t want to remember how bad my marriage was. I’ve been doing my best not to remember.
It was easier to just blame Lucy.
It’s so much easier to hate her.
Yes, my burden should be lifted by knowing he inflicted the shame and the pain on her just as he did to me – that the pretty blonde thing who took him away, suffered as I did.
But it’s not lifted.
‘Why is mum cross?’ Charlotte persists.
‘Because she’s hurting.’ I look down to her child. I’ve had enough now - there is nothing left of me to give. ‘Grown up feelings are complicated but your mum will work it out.
‘Tell you what,’ as Charlotte opens her mouth with another question I have to think fast. ‘I'm really tired tonight and I’m worried that I won’t hear Daisy if she wakes. Why don't you sleep in Eleanor’s old room with her? Don't get her out of the cot or anything, come and get me if she wakes up. You can keep an eye on your little niece.’
Thank God for Daisy because Charlotte seems delighted. She scampers out of bed and we creep into Eleanor’s old room. I keep the cot in there now, it seems right that she’s close to her mum, even if she's not there and I whisper good night and Charlotte does the same.
