Tell Me What I Am by Una Mannion

Author:Una Mannion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

15

Nessa

2008

Look at you. You’re bone-thin and exhausted. And, quite frankly, you’ve become isolated and odd. You need help. Like, from professionals.

Thanks, I think? Nessa tried levity but Molly didn’t laugh back.

We have to make these referrals every week in the NICU, she said. There’s a lot of suffering out there.

In the restaurant the drone of conversation was broken now and then by laughter. People living. Linen tablecloths, the clink of cutlery on plates. She wanted everything to stop.

Molly kept talking. Nessa, in the course of two years you lost your mother, your father, your sister and … Ruby. You’ve also pushed away a boyfriend who loved you and most, if not all, of your friends. Your sister isn’t here to say it, so I will. You need help.

She pushed a leaflet across the table.

This isn’t therapy. It’s a group of people who meet every two weeks and they have artists who do work with them. I think it would help.

Molly was always the one to call it. She’d said from the beginning something was wrong with Deena’s relationship with Lucas, that she didn’t like what was happening. She had never stopped being Deena’s best friend. Nessa loved her intensity and candour, her thick eyeliner and bright-red lipstick and her ability to always be herself. Being with her was as close as she could get to being with Deena.

There’s something else, Nessa. David and I have been talking about the stuff with Ruby, and he has a suggestion that would at least help you know what’s happening in her life.

Molly had married a lawyer. David was straitlaced and quiet. Nessa liked him, loved watching him watch Molly. He hung on her every word, revelled in her, especially when she was being irreverent or outrageous.

What?

A private detective. David knows a really good one. If it’s ripping your heart out that you don’t know what’s happening to Ruby, this way you can still be sort of a guardian. At least from a distance. You’d know how she is, if she seems okay, if there’s anything you should be concerned about, like abuse or neglect, her living conditions.

Molly took a card out of her purse. David knows this guy. He was a few years ahead of him in law school.

Talking about Ruby still made Nessa feel like she couldn’t breathe in, as if someone had stepped off the see-saw and dropped her to the ground.

Something has to change, Molly said. These are two things to make a start. Help her, even from a distance, and please, for God’s sake, help yourself.

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