The Ophelia Girls by Jane Healey

Author:Jane Healey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chapter Seventeen

Maeve’s parents have an argument in their bedroom before dinner. The shape of the upstairs hall means she can hear every word spoken, the little barbs they fling, in her own bedroom where she lies on the bed with her legs propped up high on the wall.

She’s trying to sink herself into the memories of what happened with Stuart, how he touched her and looked at her, how it felt, but the voices keep bringing her out of it, making her limbs restless, making her want to kick at the wall.

‘How was I supposed to know you had booked someone to come around to look at it?’ her mother is saying to her father. ‘Am I psychic?’

‘I think you’d like me to be,’ he replies. ‘You’re quiet and moody and then you lash out like this. And I’m supposed to read your mind and know what’s wrong.’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘Ruth,’ he says firmly, and Maeve pictures him putting his hands on her shoulders, switching to his rational tone of voice. We’re all adults here, he seems to want to say at these moments. ‘I know the hospital this morning brought up a lot of stuff for you, a lot of memories.’

‘A lot of guilt.’

‘You made the decision not to see your father when he was in hospital, and that’s something you’ll have to deal with. We all have things we regret.’

‘What the hell,’ her mother states, voice shaking with a rare kind of fury that has Maeve on her feet and deciding to leave her room for somewhere further away. ‘Are you saying you didn’t agree with me? Because you said nothing of the sort at the time. You told me I was doing the right thing—’

‘I was supporting you,’ her father begins, as Maeve runs along the hall and into an open door, the junk room, closing it behind her.

She can’t hear words any more, just a murmur.

So it was her mother’s decision that they were estranged then, not his, Maeve thinks bitterly as she looks around a room filled with her grandfather’s old, forgotten things; that the man who gifted her the polished jewellery box with its twirling dancer never had the occasion to buy her any more presents or, more importantly, to spend time with her, to get to know her.

At the beginning of the summer, the thought of leaving home made Maeve want to lie down and never get up again – she hadn’t had enough time being a child, she wanted to be looked after, to stay with her parents – but now she feels only an aching desire to leave. At university, she thinks, rifling through an open box of books (biographies of politicians and military leaders mostly), no one would keep tabs on her. No one would care if she met with Stuart. But if the tests come back and she is ill again, if she has to go back to hospital and back to chemo and loses her hair, if they have to

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