Mrs P's Journey by Sarah Hartley

Author:Sarah Hartley [Hartley, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘Kiss It Goodbye’

The sound was of fingers drumming. As Phyllis shadowed the frilled and capped Sister down the corridor, past the series of cell doors, she forbade herself to picture what lay behind them, so she locked her eyes on to the ring of keys pirouetting from Sister’s waistband. ‘Present fears,’ she mumbled to herself, ‘are less than horrible imaginings.’

The drumming ceased as a scorched voice escaped from the end cell.

‘Let me out. Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.’

Phyllis found herself being prodded over the threshold of a red padded chamber.

‘Mrs Gross. It is your daughter to see you. I shall return in half an hour,’ shrilled Sister after she had clunked shut the steel door behind her.

Unimaginable smells.

‘My darling Mama,’ Phyllis longed to say, but in reality it is doubtful that her mouth was able to move at all. Ceiling, floor, dead or alive, buried or exposed, wondered Phyllis as the soles of her feet began to sweat. A vision sliced her thoughts of her own mortality, of the choices she would need to make and of the choices that would have to be made for her. But before she could be smothered by her past, Phyllis was scooped back by her mother, hobbled in the corner spewing gobbledy-gook.

‘Stupid of them to leave me this,’ Bella hissed, her left eye black and bruised, her fingers rain-tapping on the enamel chamber pot. ‘Stupid of them to have left me a mirror too!’

With that she flung the pot at Phyllis’s head (it was empty and it missed) and chuckled as she somersaulted across the soiled mattresses. She cannot know who I am, thought Phyllis.

The mirror, the staff had informed her, had been unscrewed from the wall by Bella the previous day, while in possession of a pair of tweezers. In this hostile environment, a plain looking-glass was a patient’s sole luxury. But it was too, an unnecessary call for vanity and Bella’s reflection proved the cruellest reminder of her very real insanity. For without the mirror she might have ignored the distorted jaw, the mouldy bruises and the hoary skin. Now, no matter how ferocious her howling, the reflection mocked Bella as she strained to conjure up the layers of soft brown curls or the plum lips that had once been so pretty for kissing. You only deserve to behold, the mirror teased Bella, the devil’s wife, shrivelled, with eyes smote and an engorged gossip’s tongue, thick and long like that of a cow.

‘I cannot face what I am, I cannot face my soul,’ Bella had mumbled, as she dismantled the glass in an agitated spell between medication. ‘I shall bequeath someone seven years of bad luck,’ she plotted, ‘and then, truly they will know how it feels to be me.’

And so it happened that the very next day, Bella had been merrily swirling up a water-colour seascape on the day ward when Matron had made polite enquiries as to whether Mrs Gross wouldn’t prefer to join in with a game of ping-pong with some of the other ladies.

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