The Ghostwriters by M. J. Maloney

Author:M. J. Maloney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jennifer

Jennifer Sinclair felt renewed and ready to face any challenge. Her health had recovered over the past weeks. The Pharmacist near her apartment continued to be helpful in that capacity. She had been thankfully free of complications after she had expelled the birth matter – the foetus. Her helper and Nurse had reassured her that there was no risk for her future chances at motherhood. The procedure did not affect her fertility. This was not what she had been told growing up. If you denied your natural function as a woman, you would be punished with stillborn children. The kind, beautiful woman who had helped her out of her predicament with a soft voice and cool hands reassured her that nature did not work like that. Nature was not ruled by fickle, unkind, mercurial moralising. Nature was pragmatic and non-judgmental.

Jennifer had taken to using the tram system more and more these days. She drew some sneers and sideways looks from her Sky-stream colleagues who did not understand why she would do such a thing, but she ignored them. She felt more connected to others thanks to this daily commute. I’m no different to them, she realised, with the same fears and pitfalls. The kindness of the have-not Nurse, who risked her life to help me, she thought, showed me how wrong and mistaken I have been all these years. Her thoughts were interrupted. She had been looking along the benches of the tram from where she stood, when her eyes alighted on a poster. Small, black drawing on white, with the words ‘Have You Seen Her?’ The face was that of her Nurse.

This little portrait, so accurate that she immediately recognised her helper, had been rendered by a careful hand and taped to the inside of the tram window. There was no doubt it was the same woman who had administered the analgesics and sung to her, soothed her, as she endured the pain. The tram clacked across the Elgin Bridge and cornered sharply into Rothermere Square. Jennifer hardly noticed the lurch as she was transfixed by the pathetic poster and its simple message.

As she disembarked amid the jostle and odours of the lowers, she managed to pass by the poster and make a grab for it. She easily snatched it off the window and stuffed it into her bag. No one noticed. These passengers did not bother to register other’s actions or catch anything in their peripheral vision. You did not get involved in their world. And there was another reason why they were currently distracted. There were some goings-on in the Square.

Jennifer’s mind grappled with the risk she ran of having the poster in her bag and how she could keep it on her and get it past the security at the Sky-stream Centre. Something told her to keep it, and she felt comforted by the picture of her kind Nurse. She need not have worried, however. The studio gates were obstructed. People milled about, a little excited, and deeply unsure of what to do.

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