Oh Dear Silvia (20 page)

‘I am doing that. I know I am. I’m winning. I just have to work out who Ed is, who the actual bloke is that I am. I have to coppice myself ’til I can grow back nice and thick. Ha. I have put myself in the centre of my wood, under the shade of that big ol’ queen, but I need to see some sunshine soon myself, I really do …’

Instinctively, Ed stands up and walks to the window where he can still catch a few rays on his face if he stands on his tiptoes and tilts his face towards it. So little sun comes into the quad below. The light on his face is lovely.

‘There is one advantage to loneliness though, Silv. It lends a very particular kind of beauty to everything. You so desperately need to see beauty to mitigate all the shitty stuff, so what happens is, the trees are greener, the sun is warmer, and bread tastes breadier than it ever did when I thought I was happy and not lonely. It’s like the world is inviting me to come out to play, so it’s got its best bloody jacket on. It does look amazing I must say. Not this, not this bloody awful empty yard down here where the sun doesn’t get a chance, but
my
world out there. It’s phenomenal really.

‘I’ve just got to find the … courage is it? … or confidence or
something. Yeah. It’s all waiting for me, but I’m still holding back. Why? Why am I? I still feel empty, that’s why, I think. Haven’t found my balance yet, not completely. I can see a chance, I can see opportunities but I haven’t quite got the balls yet. I am stabilized, my roots are down. I just need to. … decide that I am capable of … triumph. Deserving of it … and I’m not there yet. I am faking it to make it at the moment, which is OK, but … I dunno … I have huge plunges into solid bloody doubt. And. It really pisses me off … because I want to be … better … Yep … I want to be a better, much better man … than this … damn.’

Ed feels a sting of tears behind his eyes. He doesn’t want it. He knows that if he gives in to it, he will be uprooted for days. He takes ages to recover when he gives in to these difficult truths. He prefers to live in an emotional limbo where he circles his difficult stuff. The landing on it all is very bumpy for him.

At this very crucial moment, he decides to leave Suite 5, and get back into fresh air, get back to work in the wood. He sweeps up his coat.

‘So anyway, I’m off now Silv. Sorry to rant on. No actually, I’m not sorry. Some things just have to be said in the end, I think. And it helps me to work it all out. So. That’s me done for today. Bye love.’

He feels a powerful interior wobble as he opens the door to leave, but one he can cope with, rather than one that renders
him jelly. One thing he knows for sure is that he is a lighter man than the one who came into the room today. Only a tiny bit lighter, but …

As he steps outside, he nods to the nurses’ station where Winnie is sitting and she smiles back at him.

If Silvia could sit up in her bed and look out of the internal window she would witness something very small but very significant. This is what she would see. She would see Ed nodding at Winnie, but still moving. He doesn’t want to stop for fear of exposing his current emotional crumbliness. Winnie smiles and watches him move by, but her eagle eye has clocked his wobble, and she rises up instantly to catch him up. She walks by his side for a few steps, ’til he slows down to a stop and turns to talk to her.

It looks from here like he is speaking quietly and honestly to her. She is nodding because she really is understanding. For the second time in as many hours, Winnie is listening, and because she hears him, Ed can talk. He can tell her some of what he has just had the courage to tell Silvia, and by saying it again, his load is massively lessened and his truth is affirmed. Winnie is a safe port. She places her hand on his arm. He places his hand on her hand and continues to get lighter and even lighter.

That’s what Silvia would see.

Wednesday 2pm

Cat is placing Silvia’s birthday card on the shelf next to the ugly grey paper bowls and beneath the poster of Connemara. On the front of the card, there are two enormously fat old ladies sitting on a bench side by side, watching a bowls match, with the sentiment underneath, ‘Edna and Wendy rave on’.

It’s not funny or silly enough to be good. It’s a cheap copy of those picture cards that actually can be quite funny, which Cat hurriedly picked up in the hospital shop. She stood by the till in the shop and scrawled ‘Happy 60th Birthday Silly, from your partner … in crime … xx’ inside, licked the envelope and stuck it down, brought it upstairs and immediately opened it when she arrived in Suite 5, with the gum still wet on the back.

‘Ooh, who’s this one from?’ she pretended badly as she opened it. ‘Ha ha ha, it’s hilarious. Two fat old ladies on a bench.
“Edna and Wendy rave on”. That’ll be us one day Sil, so it will. If you ever bloody wake up. And one day, Silly, I will sign a card to you on your birthday which will say on the front “To My Wife” or “To The One I Love”, and you will happily let me do that because you will happily be with me. Wouldn’t that be just great? Yes it would … It surely would …’

Cat is gabbling and fractious. She has been increasingly unable to disguise her panic in the last week. She is a woman with a knapsack full of secrets and hidden stuff, and that knapsack is very very heavy right now. She can’t afford for the straps to break, and she is having to fake walking straight ahead without any of the heaviness weighing her down. At the same time, she is juggling the genuine heartache and immense frustration she is feeling about Silvia being so incapacitated.

Cat is not good at ordering her mental chaos. She never was. Then life became very messy indeed, and she had to force herself to stay calm and cover up. She only just managed this with Silvia’s help, but now she feels cut adrift from her anchor and she is experiencing a terrifying whirlpool.

‘That’s right. Yes. That’s right. Lovely funny card. On your birthday. Sixtieth birthday. Wooh! Sixty! You don’t look it hon …’

She does. Silvia looks dreadful. Cat takes swift sidelong glances at her, almost too afraid to dwell and notice too much. The grey roots of her dyed hair are longer, more pronounced. She is very pale indeed. She has no eyebrows now. No one has
bothered to paint them on. She has no lipstick on her dry thin lips. She looks older and sicker and more helpless and therefore hideous to Cat. It’s more than a woman with such a pronounced clinical absence of empathy can bear.

Cat is falling apart. She has missed work at the surgery this morning. She called in to the practice and faked a pathetic sore-throat voice to the receptionist to explain that she wouldn’t be in.

‘Hello Kay,’ she rasped, ‘don’t know if you can tell, but I’ve landed myself a shockin’ dose of pharyngitis. M’throat feels like someone’s had a scourer to it. I’d best not come in while I’m infectious. Can you make sure I’m covered? Thanks.’

Cough. Cough. Fake cough.

When she was mid-lie, she suddenly had a flashback to her young, teen self doing exactly the same thing, to skive off lessons, except now of course, she’s much better at it. Even back then, at school, she felt justified about the lying, because she didn’t need to be there, she could pass exams easily without attending much.

She is brighter than most people. Academically brighter, that is, that stuff is easy-peasy. Emotionally, spiritually, intrapersonally? In these areas, Cat is utterly stunted. Ask any of her patients and they will know an extremely effective medical machine of a person, efficient and diligent. They feel safe around her, trust her totally.

Ask Silvia, and she will know a doubting, childlike, volatile,
incendiary person, who often breaks into displays of roaring aggression. Someone who, when detonated, could explode the universe they inhabit along with everyone who happens to be unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Cat is a woman with little to no hold on her temper, and hell, does she have one. Her temper is the portal to profound furies she has, as yet, only ever plumbed twice.

The night she murdered Philip.

And the evening she fought with, and then shoved Silvia off the balcony.

But then, once you have killed someone, in cold blood, a scuffle on a balcony is as nothing. Not that she intended for Silvia to fall, she didn’t. She needs and ‘loves’ Silvia very much. But she, yet again, lost contact with her inner core of reasonableness for a few minutes, and a mammoth violent fury was unleashed. In these rare moments, a red mist descends upon Cat’s brain and anger is all. There is absolutely nothing else. Just rage. What was it even all about? Cat doesn’t want to recall, but begrudgingly, she does.

Silvia was out on the balcony, smoking. Right there was the first irritation for Cat. Cat is a GP. She doesn’t smoke because she has witnessed the gruesome consequences time and time again amongst her patients. Hundreds of diminished, coughing grey people made entirely of smoke and cancer come through her surgery doors. She has a nose for it now. She
diagnoses in seconds. It’s a curse of sorts. ‘Hello Mr Wilkins,’ she says aloud. Inside, she clicks into her internal scanner, ‘Hello Mr Wilkins, advanced adenocarcinoma, non-small cell lung, sternum and lymph, about eight weeks top.’

It’s like a wine taster. They eventually know which vine, which side of the valley, which vineyard. Sometimes, which picker. Cat instinctively knows stuff she wished she didn’t, so consequently smoking is a habit she abhors. She knows how it claims its victims and she doesn’t wish to witness that with Silvia. Silvia, however, is stubborn and ferociously independent, has always smoked since she was fourteen, and is not prepared to pack it in. Not now, of all times. Silvia has enough stress to deal with. Smoking helps. Besides which, Silvia has sacrificed so much else for Cat, the smoking is a step too far. She holds on tight to that. She has relinquished the big stuff. The small stuff, she guards.

Cat reprimanded her in no uncertain terms.

‘Silly, I just can’t witness you slowly killin’ yerself right in front of me very eyes like this every day. It disgusts me so it does …’

Whilst being treated like a naughty child, Silvia retreated into pure petulance for her sulky response.

‘Well, don’t look then.’

‘How extremely adult of you.’

Cat’s sarcasm further fuelled the argument rocket.

‘Put the fag out now, and come inside, its feckin’ freezing out here.’

‘No! I bloody won’t! Go away Cat, and shut up. I can’t bloody bear the sight of you!’

And with that, Silvia sealed her fate.

Silvia had been drinking sea breezes and, as always, she had become extremely maudlin, rehashing all kinds of difficult matters in her head. The alcohol induced a mixture of courage and insensible stupidity in Silvia. She wanted to talk about so many sensitive issues, but she always knew there could be a cost for provoking Cat.

Who else could she talk to? With time and stealth, Cat has isolated Silvia from virtually everyone who cares about her. It wasn’t so much that Cat insisted on the separations, it was more that Silvia knew they would be in everyone’s best interests, so she submitted to their extraordinarily secluded life together. Silvia could sometimes barely believe she had surrendered so entirely, but in actual fact, like most of the ugly awkward stuff of life, it had happened in spurts of drama interspersed with great swathes of ordinary, harmful, flowing time which incrementally caused the great unjoinings, until now, when Silvia realized just how unconnected she is.

Silvia could not tell about what happened with Philip. That would be the end of everything. It would be the biggest betrayal of Cat. It would all be … over.

Besides which, Silvia hadn’t been there when it happened.

Cat came to Silvia one evening, five years ago, when Silvia was still with Ed, and sat at their kitchen table, drinking Chablis and chatting for all the world as if nothing were even slightly amiss. She was good at lying, good at covering up. She was already in giant love with Silvia and Silvia could feel her closing in. Despite her cool, controlled exterior, Cat is an obsessive possessive creature and wasn’t going to stop at anything in her pursuit of Silvia. Back then, Silvia couldn’t imagine for a moment how dangerous Cat’s intentions might turn out to be. She always felt so sorry for Cat living with such a cold, rude man. The more Silvia knew of him, the warmer she felt towards Cat. So, Silvia, the otherwise emotionally rather awkward woman, discovered she could nurture. But nothing she did was ever going to be enough. Cat wanted EVERYTHING Silvia could offer, then much more.

Cat saw Silvia and her obsession with her as a vital chance to get away from Philip. She did indeed try the simplest route, by telling him she loved Silvia and wanted to go, but that was when Philip turned even uglier and threatened to fabricate all sorts of lies, and have her sectioned. Make sure everyone would know of her dangerous mental illness. Silvia was outraged when Cat told her about these threats back then. Cat told her in hushed quiet private moments, away from Ed.

If Silvia was conscious, now, perhaps she might take a moment to reflect on what Philip always accused Cat of. Philip
was unquestionably a controlling bully of a man. A total arse and a snob. But. Perhaps Philip knew something more of what is at the core of Cat, and being a total bastard doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong about everything. Does it? Perhaps Philip knew Cat walked the thin line between sanity and crazy oftentimes.

Silvia gradually came to know it the closer she drew to the predatory and unhinged Cat. Slowly, throughout their time together, Silvia would witness more and more of Cat’s complicated relationship with her own mind. Far from being measured and sensible, Cat flirted with outer extremes of thinking. Perversely, Silvia found it quite exciting to begin with. She was flattered by the attention, and she found the secrecy thrilling. Not just the clandestine nature of the relationship, but the hidden elements of the actual woman. Cat was not what she seemed. Ed was. Ed was exactly what it said on the tin. Reliable and steady, and … yes … dull. Even Silvia’s kids were a bit predictable. They were exactly what kids were supposed to be, endearing and funny and sweet and naughty.