Dear Doctor Lily (41 page)

But she would still go off with Duggie Manderson. ‘Nothing will stop me,' she had said. Nora!
Nora
saying that. It was like a foreign language.

His heart didn't burst with the second barrel, so he sat on the stone step with an ache in his ribs, and pulled his face down to cry. How could she deceive him so cruelly? How could she go ahead and plan the trip to Boston, when all the time, she
knew?

Tears fell into the folds at the corners of his mouth. ‘Why? Why?' he asked the cellar. When he had asked Nora, she had said quietly, ‘If you don't know why, Jamie, I can't tell you.'

‘Hey, Lily.' Chuck, one of the Crisis volunteers, was on the intercom. Tve got Louise on the line. She's in the bin.'

‘Why?'

‘The usual, I suppose. Can you talk to her?'

Louise was in South Side Hospital. She whispered to Lily, ‘Can you come?'

‘When?'

‘Today. Oh, please. I'm scared.'

‘Where's Damon?'

‘He's all right. I've got to go. I'm only allowed –' A voice spoke to her. ‘Leave me alone!' she gasped, and hung up. She sounded about two feet high, and fading.

‘Want someone else to go?' Martha asked. ‘She likes Chuck, and he's good with her.'

‘No, I must.' Lily had made a good friendship with Louise. When the imaginary small boy Gerald left her alone, she could be funny and bright, playing intriguing games with her son, offering Lily love, which Lily also felt for her. But Louise was so unpredictable and self-destructive, and when something went wrong, she did not tell anyone until after it had happened.

‘Shit, man, I'd like to go.' Chuck was a huge, bearded young man, with holes in peculiar places in his jeans.

‘Shit, man, so would I.' Lily's language had deteriorated a bit to match the casual young students.

She called her good neighbour Alice, whose daughter came home on the same bus as Isobel and Cathy, and asked her if the girls could go to her house, finished up some letters, put away the confidential files, and drove to the psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city.

It was a state hospital, a Bedlam type of Victorian prison with heavy doors, steel bars across the lower windows, wire mesh for those above, a high brick wall round the yard.

South Side took up a whole city block among streets of what had once been decent narrow wooden houses, which were now sagging under the damp weight of poverty and squalor. Garbage
and old iron fought the weeds in the tiny spaces between rotting front steps and the littered sidewalk.

Lily found Louise in the fourth-floor day room. It was a square bare room with a tattered sofa and a few lopsided armchairs, two lines of metal chairs facing each other down the middle, and a scarred table by the window where three men sat with their heads buried in their arms. There were more people than chairs. Some sat on the floor. Some paced. Some just stood. With their backs to the door through which Lily had been let in, two huge black female sentries sat with arms crossed over powerful chests.

Louise was sitting on a ledge by the wall with her feet drawn up under her. She was pale as milk, and her eyes looked dark and hectic. Beside her was the canvas satchel she took everywhere, with her journal and poems in it.

‘What a ghastly place.'

‘It's worse for you than for me,' Louise said considerately. ‘I've been here before. You should see the Quiet Room.'

‘What's that?'

‘Solitary. No window. No door handle. No furniture. No light switch. No light, if the aide doesn't feel like turning it on.'

‘Why are you in here?'

‘Dr Reed's away. I wanted to be safe, so he got me into the psych unit at St Clement's.' This was a high-class downtown hospital. ‘They threw me out,' Louise said with the glee her small alter ego, Gerald, might show.

‘What for?'

‘Setting fire to a wastebin?' Louise tried that out on Lily. Gerald was not far away.

‘What else?'

‘Oh, let's see – a little cutting?' Louise pulled up her sleeve. She always wore long sleeves, except when she was showing off, because her arms were scarred from wrist to shoulder with cuts and cigarette burns. A new dressing was on the inside of her forearm.

‘And?'

‘Well, I got a lamp cord and hung myself in the closet of my room. Something to do.'

‘Louise –'

‘Oh, I left the closet door open, and the door of the room. They found me, but they didn't like it. I'm glad you came. I knew you would.'

She put her arm round Lily. Patients kept wandering up to ask questions, or to show Lily something, or to stare. Louise was distressingly at ease in this uneasy room. She knew who to answer kindly, who to ignore, who to tell, ‘Fuck off, Jack. I've told you before.'

When Lily left, one of the sentries heaved herself up to open the door. Instantly, a girl with long tangled hair made a bolt for it. The black woman shoved Louise and Lily back into the room with the flat of her hand, and locked the door. The elevator gates clanged. Bells rang in the hall.

‘What excitement,' Lily said nervously.

Louise shrugged. ‘Something to do. She's not going anywhere.'

When Lily collected her daughters at Alice's house, they were both watching television quite happily, lying on the floor among Alice's children with bowk of popcorn and soft-drink cans.

Cathy said, ‘Hi,' without looking away from the screen, but Isobel jumped up and cried, ‘Where have you been? I want to go home!'

She tugged her mother down the street, complaining about Alice's five-year-old, fussing about needing to call her best friend, asking what was for supper, when would it be?

In the house, she said, ‘I'm going to call Jane,' and started for the living-room. The phone rang before she got to it.

‘Gramps? Hi, how's England? I'm fine. At school, we're doing this really neat play, and it's with some of the parents and Daddy's going to play the piano and I'm going to sing. What? No, it's about a sailor who falls in love with a mermaid – well, she's not really a mermaid, you see, because this other sailor, not the one who's in love with her – what? Oh. Okay,' she said flatly, then shouted, ‘Mudder! It's Gramps. He says it's urgent.'

‘What's happened?' Lily grabbed the phone. ‘Something wrong with Nora?'

‘No. Well…' – hollow laugh – ‘You could say that, I suppose.' Her father's voice was strange. The line was very clear, but he sounded as if he were shut in the cellar. ‘Lily, I – Lily –' He was on the cracked edge of tears. ‘She's left me.'

‘What are you talking about, Jam?'

‘She has. With Duggie.'

Dug Manderson – everybody's friend and asexual neighbour? ‘This is madness, Jam. When?'

‘She got packed up and went yesterday. She said a week ago she meant to go.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I didn't believe it. I thought I could talk her round.'

‘What about the pub?'

‘Bianca is here. She's been a brick, I have to say it. Lily, you know about these things. How do people kill themselves?'

‘Now, you stop that, Jam.'

‘What is it, what's happening?' The shock and anxiety in Lily's voice had brought Cathy and Isobel clamouring round her.

‘It's all right, darlings. Gramps has had a bit of bad luck.'

‘I want to talk to him.'

‘Listen, Daddy, you get on a plane and come out here. You've got tickets. Change the date.'

‘I couldn't face the journey. I wouldn't have the heart for it. Lily, you couldn't, could you – my darling, I know you're so busy, but you're the only one who –'

‘I'll come,' Lily said briskly. ‘I'll make some plans and ring you back. It must be ten o'clock with you. What time are you going to bed?'

‘You don't think I can
sleep?'

‘Lemme talk to Gramps.' Isobel took the phone. ‘So when it's their wedding day, and the sailor carries her up the aisle in this beautiful white gown over her fish tail, and the organ plays “O Perfect Love” – that's Daddy – and the sailor, the good one, his perfect love turns her into a lady. Mud.' She held the phone away. ‘Gramps is crying.'

*

Martha gave Lily a week off, and Paul's Aunt Bridget, a widowed good woman, would come and stay. One of the last-minute things was a quiet visit to Louise.

She had managed to stay out of the Quiet Room, and was now a Trusty, free to meet Lily downstairs in the hospital lobby. They went to the cafeteria, and Louise took some papers out of her canvas satchel and spread them out on the greasy, coffee-ringed table. There were bits of her journal, unposted letters to her parents and to Damon, and to that love-hate child, Gerald.

‘Has Gerald been in here with you?' Lily asked. She had got used to talking about him as if he existed. Louise was far beyond the point of understanding him as fantasy.

She shook her head. ‘He put me in here,' she said, as matter of factly as if Gerald were a psychiatrist. ‘He wrote these, look.'

She showed Lily some loose pages, disorganized cries of agony, stabbed on to the creased paper in big letters, a few words askew down the page.

‘Psychotic writing.' She grinned sideways, to see if Lily was impressed.

As she displayed some of what she had written over the years of her illness, her eyes were alive, not hectic, but shining with genuine creative pleasure. She laughed a lot, and told shocking stories about the hospital staff. Silent people at other tables stared glumly. Louise nudged Lily, and giggled and whispered behind her hand. They were like two teenagers in a snack-bar: us and them.

‘Don't go away, Lily.'

‘You'll be all right.'

‘Don't go.'

Lily flew to England to try to comfort her father, and bolster him up a bit to face the catastrophe of his life. At the back of her mind, she also hoped that in some way she might be a go-between. If her mother had done this in a fit of pique – although Nora had never done anything on impulse – Lily might be able to get her to go back home and start again.

That was what Jam hoped too. He was a wreck. Neil met Lily at the airport, because her father did not trust himself to drive.
She found him in a hot, stuffy room, sitting hunched into himself like an old man in front of the electric fire, as if in defiance of Nora, who would have marched in and switched it off and thrown open the window.

The first thing he said was, ‘Get her back for me, Lily. I want her back.'

Lily was tired from the overnight flight, but she stayed up all day to be with him. He was a large, bulky man, but he looked smaller, because of this. He wouldn't stand up straight. He poked his big head like a tortoise. Even his paunch seemed to have shrunk, as if it were deflated.

They had supper at Blanche's house, with Duffy, which meant not much could be said. Afterwards, Neil played cribbage with Jam, while Lily went upstairs with Blanche, and they talked after they had put Duffy to bed.

‘What are we going to do?' Lily had laid herself out on Blanche and Neil's neat double bed, exhausted.

‘Nothing we
can
do.'

Because Lily had the wobbly indecision of jet lag, and Blanche had already been coping with their parents' problem, she seemed like the older sister, not the younger.

‘Have you seen Nora?'

‘I've been to see her, yes, but not him. He stayed out of the way, like the soul of tact he is, dear old Duggie, who wouldn't hurt a fly. They've moved out of this area, of course. He'll sell his house and they're going to start again in Essex, or somewhere.'

‘Do people here know?'

‘Not yet. They think Mum's gone to stay with Gran.'

‘Will she come back? Blanche, she's got to come back.'

Blanche kicked off her shoes and lay down beside Lily on the bed. One of the terriers jumped up too.

‘She won't.'

‘But this isn't like her. She must be mad. It's the change of life.'

‘She's had that.'

‘But not
Mum.
I mean, she's always been the quiet, steady, hardworking one, never put a foot wrong, ever since we've known her. I mean, she would
never –'

‘She did.'

‘I'm going to tell her what I think of her.'

‘Don't.' Blanche lay like a stone queen on a tomb, with the dog at her feet. ‘She's suffering. I know her. Don't make it more difficult.'

‘She's suffering! Look at that poor old man down there.'

‘You always take his side, don't you?' Blanche turned and put an arm round her sister. ‘He had it coming to him.'

‘Oh,
don't.'

They held each other as they had not done since one or the other of them had been in love and was rejected.

Downstairs, Jam was asleep with his feet on a stool, splayed outwards. Lily left him there and went back upstairs to sleep on the other bunk bed in Duffy's room.

Nora and Duggie were living in a furnished flat over a promenade of shops in an indefinite place north of London. Duggie's firm was transferring him to the Chelmsford branch, and they would eventually buy a bungalow.

‘In a village or in the town?' Lily sat on the edge of an uncomfortable settee like a railway-station bench, discussing practical domestic details with her mother in a calm and rational way that made her think they had all lost their reason.

She had started the visit by flinging herself at Nora and bursting into floods of tears, because her mother looked so normal and just like herself in her green crochet top and pleated tweed skirt. Her grey hair was done the same way, and she wore the same pendant round her neck which Lily and Paul had given her on her fiftieth birthday.

‘Don't cry, pet.' Nora patted her, while Lily clung to those familiar fat, capable upper arms. ‘It's all right.' ‘It's not, it's not, you can't do this!'