Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French

Author:Dawn French [French, Dawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780141948072
Google: K0x-IXZpwIoC
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-10-24T23:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Three

Cassie

Tuesday noon

Brave, tenacious, ever-hopeful Cassie is giving it another try. Round three.

When she got home last night and fed Willow, who immediately fell asleep on her lap mid-story, she realized that, however difficult it might be to come into this dreadful room, and sit looking at her mother, Silvia is truly out for the count and won’t suddenly sit up and snap at her. It seems that was what she feared the most – a swift, sharp shock with devastating recriminations. Cassie just isn’t strong enough to withstand that presently, and any remaining courage she does have needs to be channelled into Willow. After yesterday’s visit though, Cassie is reassured that there is no immediate danger around her mother.

How ironic. Silvia is in mortal peril, clinging on to the edge of her life by her fingernails, but Cassie senses no immediate danger.

Cassie stands up and moves closer to the bed so as to look at Silvia’s face. Everyone’s face looks a bit unfamiliar when they are lying down, she knows that, but Silvia seems to have changed a lot. She is thinner, yes, a little bit. Her skin has the sallowness of sickness about it, as if it has absorbed the shock and is still reeling. The colour of her is all wrong, just as the stillness is. Whatever else Silvia has been in her life, Cassie always remembers her mother as colourful and active. She is a force to be reckoned with. Loud and vital. Not lifeless like this pallid wodge of a person.

Is she even a person any more? Are you a person if you have no visible signs of a personality or a spirit? Perhaps, thinks Cassie. Perhaps you are simply only that, a ‘sick person’. Defined by illness. That would be a shame. Her mother has hardly ever been sick, in Cassie’s memory. In fact she has spurned sickness at every opportunity. She has always been rigorous about health, barely surrendering a day to feeling ill.

Silvia was as tough with herself as she was with the kids. Told them not to be ‘sickly’. Told them it was no good to give in to a ‘poorly tummy’ or ‘poorly head’. Perhaps she will emerge from this a changed person, Cassie thinks. Perhaps that is the purpose of this awful situation. Or maybe Silvia was supposed to be rendered motionless, completely still, so that, for once, she might listen. How ironic then that Cassie cannot bring herself to speak. This is her perfect opportunity, and she doesn’t feel able to take it. Not yet anyway.

Cassie looks at her mother’s features, reminded that she has often been told they look very alike. In the past, when she was much younger, she took it as a compliment. Firstly, her mother is quite a striking woman, albeit in a big, lumbering way. Secondly, and much more importantly for Cassie since she’s had Willow, she loves the fact that she belongs genetically to someone. Undeniably connected. That’s the part she marvels at. The actual, physical stuff.

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