The Knowing by Emma Hinds

Author:Emma Hinds [Hinds, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-21T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

She’ll play mad, Minnie had said, and it was just like that: a play. What comes after is snatches of memory; my own ghosts, coming out in the dark over the longest and cruellest weekend of my bitter little life. The first part was easy. I was demure, submissive, distant and detached as they marched me down the long corridor of Bellevue hospital, squeezing me through a river of groaning voices and stinking bodies. People were laid on the floor, eyes vacant, waiting for death, as we drifted past. I kept my mouth closed, trying not to breathe their air. I tried not to notice or be noticed by the few battered stovepipe hats I saw, or the flash of a red neckerchief around a Dead Rabbit’s throat. Like a hunted animal, I knew survival was often in being small and quiet.

The second part was simple, too. I sat on a metal bed with stained beige sheets. Minnie sat beside me, the concerned but generous employer of the mad girl, as a weasel-faced doctor spoke to Chester at the end of the bed and looked down at me like a scab to be harvested. I knew bad things would be coming, the same way I had known from the sound of Jordan’s boots if a beating was in order. So I was quiet and limp and let my spirit drift away, following on the currents Kennedy had left inside me. I still felt it when the needle went in. Minnie held my head to her breast, mouthfuls of her sweaty, damp skin against my teeth as I thrashed against the burn of something poisonous entering my body.

‘The mercury creates a fever which helps sweat the lady’s disease away,’ the doctor said. ‘That’s most common for this type of madness. Inevitable side effect of the lady’s disease.’

‘Shhhh, love, shhhh darling.’ Minnie’s words were muffled against my hair, the sweet clean smell of her a blessed relief amongst the harsh tang of ammonia.

‘Oh yes.’ Chester’s voice was cheerful. ‘Most common among slum girls. Or so I’ve heard.’

My last lucid thought was that Chester would be the one to know how common syphilis was among slum prostitutes, but then the burning began. I realised he didn’t just want to kill me; he wanted me to scorch out my mind until there was nothing but a shell and whispers. The shadows of the bedposts were stretching towards me, their ghostly hands made of splinters and claws.

Memories are like pearls on a string. When you touch one, the others tremble. Our minds are houses with locked trap doors, and when poison burns the building to the ground, the bones of hidden thoughts emerge from the dust. A face from my childhood, kind and familiar, cupping my cheeks and whispering, Stay put in the room, little cub. A beautiful girl, a cloud of black hair and a smile with a tooth missing, pushing me back into one of the basement rooms of the Old Brewery. Stay in the room.

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