Maddie Read online

  And what are you going to do? She found herself standing stock still in the middle of one of the gravel paths staring out across the slope of the lawn to the view beyond the hospital as it fell away down towards the motorway in the valley. Go back there to that hateful flat? Or – and she began to weave a fantasy of herself, going back there, packing a suitcase, digging out her passport from wherever it was hidden and then taking the car to Heathrow, just along the motorway there, not very far at all, and parking it in the long-stay car park and then going, going, going, anywhere she could get a ticket to go to. She would look at the departure boards and read off the places, those magical, romantic place names, Vienna and Berlin, Palma and Madrid, Genoa and Bermuda, Rome and Paris, Frankfurt and Venice, and they would sell her a ticket. First class even: she could afford that now that Jen was dead. And off she would fly and there she would have peace of mind and start to laugh again and –

  And there she would be waiting for herself in the hotel when she got there to stare back at her out of a mirror, contemptuous and sneering, and ask her what she was doing there. Wasn’t it bad enough she had gone to Paris and left Jen behind to die with no one to care? Was she going to do it again, to this woman, Maddie?

  But she is nothing to me, a voice in her secret mind cried passionately, nothing at all! When you left Jen and let her die here all alone, that was different, Jen was your mother, Jen was someone you loved – who loved you – and this time the little voice in her head rose to a shrill shriek so real she had to put her hands over her ears to make it go away. And the movement and the resultant muffling of the ordinary outside sounds made her realise how stupid she was being and she took a deep breath and made herself walk with carefully relaxed steps back to the West Pavilion.

  Sister was hurrying through the ward as she arrived and greeted her with a wide and obviously deeply relieved smile.

  ‘Oh, Miss Matthews, am I glad to see you! I thought perhaps you weren’t well. I should have realised of course you’d let me know if you weren’t coming. Poor soul, of course, had nothing! We all tried, every one of us, and she refused to take a single mouthful. Staff Nurse Cobbins got very irritable and threatened to force feed her and even that made no difference. Not that we would, of course, we don’t do that sort of thing these days, it’s not the kind of thing modern therapists – anyway here you are and I’m very glad. I have to go over to the Larcombe Estate – they’re having all sorts of problems there, but then I told everyone they would, anyway, didn’t I? You heard me at the meetings, Miss Matthews. I warned them there’d be problems and of course there are. So I must go. But I asked them to keep something for Maddie in case you got back in time, and it’s in the kitchen. It can go into the microwave, you know, one minute is enough to take the chill off, I find, and then they don’t burn their tongues. We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we? No, of course not – well, so long Miss Matthews, I hope to be in in the morning, but the way things are at Larcombe, who can say? They’ve not been there a week yet, and it’s exactly what I said it would be, nothing but trouble –’ and she went rustling away and Annie stood in the middle of the ward looking across at Maddie in her chair, sitting and rocking and not looking at her.

  But she knows I’m here, she thought then. She’s waiting for me, because she knew I’d come back. And it’s not just for the food. It’s me she’s waiting for. I know she is.

  But she couldn’t say how she knew.

  7

  January 1987

  It was four weeks before Maddie spoke to her and even then Annie couldn’t be sure she had. Four weeks of pushing and talking and deciding to pack it all in and still coming back to try again, four weeks during which she became more and more angry with Maddie, and yet more and more attached too.

  It really was absurd the way this silent rocking woman had come to fill her life, Annie thought. She became the first thought of the morning when Annie opened her eyes to her bleak bedroom and its still lingering smell of new plaster and paint, and the last one before she fell into her lonely sleep at night. She was used to waking hours before there was any point in getting up, to lie and stare at the ceiling and push vagrant thoughts about her head, but this was different. She would wake early, as usual, but now she would think not about odd wisps of things while being furious with herself for not sleeping, but very definitely of Maddie, without minding that she was awake. And the same thing would happen as she lay curled up after climbing into bed, trying to escape into oblivion. Maddie and her silence would haunt her. She would go back through the whole of the previous day, seeking clues in her reactions – or rather non-reactions – to the flow of talk with which Annie now bombarded her, and sometimes thinking of that would actually make her smile. Because it was ridiculous the way she talked to Maddie. It was as though she had pulled a plug out of the bottom of her own mind and every thought that ever entered it immediately trickled out again as words. And Maddie would sit and rock and stare ahead with her blank brown stare, but Annie knew it wasn’t as it had been used to be. She wasn’t locked away; she could hear, and understand too. But she still didn’t speak.

  Until, one afternoon after she had eaten her lunch, and Annie, unusually tired for some reason, had sat staring out of the window and paying Maddie no attention. The ward was quiet, with just three or four of the older patients sitting at the far end staring at the muttering TV screen. A few more people had been transferred to hostels and to other places over the last few weeks and the whole place had the feeling of a seaside hotel at the end of the season; dreamy, lazy and working at half speed.

  It might have been that which had made Annie so lackadaisical herself, and left her sitting in a half-doze long after Maddie had finished eating, or it might have been the fact that she was feeling rather comfortable. It had been a long time since she had been able to sit slumped as easily in a chair as she was now, and she wondered vaguely why she should be so relaxed. She was, in fact, sleeping a little better these days, and this morning had actually woken late. She had drifted into the habit of getting up at seven and leaving the flat before half past in order to get to the ward to get Maddie out of bed early and to give her breakfast, and had never needed an alarm clock. She was usually awake before five. But this morning, she had woken with a start at seven-fifteen and had had to rush to get to the ward at the usual time; and sitting now and staring out at the dying November garden she wondered a little about why that had happened.

  And then realised that Maddie was looking at her. She did this more often now, although she still didn’t do it when anyone else was around. Annie had never been able to demonstrate to Sister or to Joe Labosky the change in their patient, but all the same it happened, and she always knew when it did, even if she wasn’t looking at her at that moment. It was as though someone had switched on a different light somewhere and changed the pattern of the shadows.

  She turned her head lazily and looked at Maddie now. She was sitting in her usual position, the fork from her lunch still clutched in her hand and her plate very empty in front of her. Annie was beginning to know the sort of food Maddie liked, and today had been one of her favourites, a concoction of pasta and cheese and tomato that would have horrified any Italian cook told it was called lasagne, but which tasted well enough. Maddie had eaten all of it; there was not a scrap of waste left on the plate anywhere and Annie grinned at the sight of that.

  ‘You like it? You can have some more if you ask for it. Mm? Another plateful? There’s plenty there. The trolley’s still hot and it’s over there –’ and she jerked her head towards the far end of the ward where the trolley indeed still sat, ignored by the nurses who because they had so little to do found it an effort to do anything at all, and were just not bothering to start the afternoon’s tidying and chivvying of patients to occupational therapy and group sessions. They were sitting smoking and gossiping in the staff room and Annie was the only non-patient in sight.

  ‘I’ll get you some more if you want it,’ she said then and
still Maddie’s eyes were fixed on her and she leaned forwards very deliberately and stared deeply into them. ‘But only if you ask for it. Say please. Ask for it. If you don’t you can’t have it. And what’s more, I’m feeling bloody minded. So you shan’t have pudding either unless you ask for it. It’s ice cream, too. Not boring old vanilla, either. Rum and raisin. I saw it.’ She leaned back with a casual air and grinned back over her shoulder at the silent woman in the chair. ‘So it’s up to you. Say please and I’ll get it. I might even go and get you some coffee – the real coffee the nurses drink, not that muck they usually give you.’

  And she closed her eyes, pleased at having been so unkind to the woman. She wanted more food; Annie had learned to identify the feelings that came from Maddie, however uncommunicative she was, and she was quite certain that a second helping of lasagne was something she wanted very much. Refusing to fetch it for her gave her a sense of pleasure, she told herself; and then opened her eyes to stare out of the window again, horrified by her own hatefulness. Was I always like this? she wondered. Did it always give me pleasure to be a bitch? Why can’t I just get up and go and get the poor devil some more food? What skin is it off my nose whether she talks or not? And she was about to tense her muscles preparatory to standing up when she heard it.

  It wasn’t so much a word as the ghost of one. The voice sounded remote and hollow, but it was a voice all the same.

  ‘Please,’ Maddie said.

  Annie sat very still and then slowly turned her head to look at her. She was still sitting as she had been, her fork clutched in her hand, the plate on her lap, and was still staring directly at Annie. Her lips were half parted, but then, they often were, and Annie couldn’t remember if that was how they had been before she had closed her eyes, and she said a little stupidly, ‘What? What did you say?’

  Maddie stared back at her, but now there was more to her gaze than there had been, or so it seemed to Annie. She did not move a muscle or shift her eyes at all, but there was expression there now, a sort of reproach and after a moment Annie laughed.

  ‘My God, you did ask, didn’t you? You said please! I didn’t imagine it!’

  Still the dark eyes stared and this time Annie thought she saw a glint of self-satisfaction there and she grinned and got to her feet and went to pick up the plate from Maddie’s lap. She stood there looking down at her and there was no movement at all. Maddie still kept her head in the same posture and after a moment Annie touched her shoulder and then went to fetch the second helping of food.

  She arranged it on the plate as neatly as she could, wanting to give Maddie the extra reward of food that looked attractive as well as tasting as she liked, and took it back to her, and then sat and watched as slowly she ate it, finishing it with the same meticulousness as she had shown when she demolished the first helping she had been given.

  ‘Ice cream?’ Annie said as Maddie raised her head and again fixed her eyes on her. ‘Ice cream and then coffee? Good. Would I be pushing my luck to ask for another please for them? What do you think?’

  The eyes looked back at her and this time Annie saw no expression at all, and then made an irritable sound in her throat. ‘I’m a bloody fool, aren’t I? As if eyes ever showed any expression anyway. It’s the way the muscles around the eyes look, not the damned eyes themselves. You know that, don’t you, Maddie? And you think I’m a bloody fool, don’t you, imagining otherwise? Well, I am. I probably imagined you spoke before too. Except I don’t think I did –’ She picked up the plate. ‘All right, Maddie. Ice cream and coffee, coming up. Maybe when I get back you’ll feel like saying thank you. You never know your luck, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Maddie said quite loudly as Annie turned away and at once she whirled and came back to crouch in front of her and peer into her face, and there she squatted for a long moment.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ she said. ‘I’m damned,’ but Maddie said nothing, just sitting and looking at her. And Annie laughed and got to her feet and went and fetched the ice cream and then, as Maddie spooned it up, went and collected cups of coffee from the staff room.

  The nurses had cleared the trolley and taken the patients away to their various activities now and the ward was completely empty apart from the two women sitting drinking coffee. Annie watched Maddie over the rim of her cup and tried to contain her excitement. She’d done it. She had persuaded this woman to speak, after years and years of silence. She couldn’t be all bad, after all. She wasn’t useless, or stupid, as she had been so certain she was. She had made Maddie speak, and she could have laughed aloud at the thought of it. But she didn’t, collecting their empty cups neatly and taking them away to the kitchen before coming back to sit close to Maddie’s chair and lean over her.

  ‘You’ve done it now, you know,’ she said conversationally. ‘As long as you stayed silent no one could or would expect anything else from you. But now you’ve spoken and you won’t be allowed to stay silent again. Had you thought of that?’

  There was no response. Maddie had started to rock again and her eyes were fixed as usual on the far distance. But Annie wasn’t going to allow that; she leaned over and pulled on Maddie’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t. You’re going to talk to me,’ she said and shook her slightly. There was no resistance there; it was like shaking a bag of hay and Annie let go and leaned back in her chair.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I? Why should you speak to me, after all? What am I to you? You don’t know anything about me, after all. I’m not a nurse, you know. And I’m not a patient either.’

  She looked round the ward. ‘Not officially, anyway. He thinks I ought to be. The doctor who looks after you, if it’s called looking after, seeing how little he seems able to do for you. He thinks I’m mad, you know. Depressed. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Not in your right mind, that’s what it means. They can call you disturbed or depressed or manic or crazy or mad. It all adds up to the same thing. They are normal and we aren’t. And I sometimes think there are a bloody sight more of us than there are of them.’

  Still no response, and Annie frowned. ‘Oh, bloody hell –’ she said and then stopped. ‘I keep saying that lately. I wonder why? It’s so stupid. Say it often enough and it doesn’t mean anything. Bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody. It never meant anything before and repeating it doesn’t make it any better. Why do I do it, Maddie? Hmm? Is it because I used to be punished for it when I was a child? Is that why?’

  The silence persisted and Annie took a deep breath. ‘Listen, Maddie, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll talk to you if you’ll talk to me. What do you say to that? I’ve been talking for a bit – for a month already. But never mind. I’m more used to it than you are, so I’ll start now. I’ll talk to you, and then you talk to me. Fair enough?’

  Maddie was looking at her now, and again there was expression there even though the muscles of the face seemed not to have moved an iota. She looked wary, Annie decided, uncertain whether to go along with what she was saying, and she grinned.

  ‘Oh, come on, Maddie! What harm can it do? There’s no one here at all, so even if you do talk and I go rushing off to tell them all, those doctors and nurses who are so full of themselves, if I go off and tell them you spoke, they won’t believe me. Why should they? No one need ever know if you don’t want ‘em to. It’s for my own interest I want you to talk. I don’t give a damn about them and their problems. Or about yours come to that. I don’t really give a damn about anything. But I’m curious about you. I want to know who you are and why you stopped talking to people. So start talking to me, just to me, and let me off my hook, hmm? I want to know if it’ll work for me, you see. If I can do it then I will, if it makes me feel better. Does not talking make you feel better, Maddie? Is that why you stay so quiet?’

  The lips moved, fluttering a little and the word came out like a whisper. ‘No –’

  ‘Then why? For all these years, why?’

  ‘No,’ Madd
ie said again and Annie frowned. Was she really responding, or just making a sound? The only word she had been sure of hearing was this ‘no’; that first ‘please’ had been so ghostly and strange that she might have imagined it. Was Maddie actually talking or was she just making a noise?

  ‘Listen,’ Annie said firmly, ‘I’ll start you off. I don’t want any more of these “noes”, thank you very much. I want information. So here we go. I am Ann Brady Matthews. I’m usually called Annie. I’m a bastard.’

  Maddie still had her eyes fixed on her and Annie laughed, a savage little sound that echoed in her own ears.

  ‘Now I’ll never know, will I, whether you’re quiet because you’re horrified or because you’re not talking anyway. What the hell. Let’s keep going. So. My mother had me with a man called Colin Matthews. Her name was Jennifer Brady. Pretty she was. Bright too. Could have done all sorts of things with her life. But not she. No, she spent it being madly in love with a selfish bastard who used her like a second car, when it was convenient and it didn’t matter who saw him, and she waited for the convenient times in a silly house full of silly rubbish, raising a silly kid. And then got even sillier and died all on her own while the silly kid she’d spent her life rearing was whooping it up in Paris. That’s me. Now, how’s that for a nice tale to start you off? Hmm?’

  Maddie wasn’t rocking, she suddenly realised, and that made her feel good. It meant she was sure that she was listening. She wasn’t trying to escape into her own world of trance, that was certain. So Annie went on talking and talking, waiting sometimes for some sort of response and then, not getting it, ploughing on. And on.

  ‘All right, you want to know more? I’ll tell you more. She never married him, this Colin Matthews. Shall I tell you why? His wife wouldn’t let him, that was why. Or so he told Jen. That’s what I called her, Jen. It was too shameful to say Mum to a woman who didn’t have a wedding ring. That’s what I thought when I was at school, when I was ten. I couldn’t tell her that, of course. Could I? There she was being so brave, so bloody heroic, the stupid creature, refusing to tell a lie about being married, for all she was always so proper, and I was ashamed to call her Mum. How could I tell her that? So I pretended it was smarter to use your mother’s first name at our school and the silly bitch believed me. What do you think of that? Such a snob – she used to boast to me, do you know that? She’d boast about how high-class her precious Colin was with his big car and his kids at public schools. Oh, yes, he had other children. Three of them. I was never allowed to meet them of course, never even knew their names, any more than Jen did. He didn’t think it was right to mix the two sides of his life. That was what he told her and the poor bitch believed him. Oh, what a poor bitch she was! Whatever he said, she believed him. And boasted about him to me. Not to anyone else, of course. We had to be refined, she said, keep ourselves to ourselves. No friends, no chat with the neighbours. Crazy. I couldn’t argue either, even when she said words like “refined” in that awful Irish voice of hers. “He’s so refined” she’d say.’ And Annie lapsed into a cruelly accurate mock-genteel Irish accent. ‘ “He’s so refined. Drives only the best of cars and has such a lovely house. In Northwood, you know, very smart area, very select. Nice tone to the neighbourhood.” Pah –’ And again Annie made the thick sound in her throat that was all she could use to show her disgust.