The Friday Tree (11 page)

“Well, Doctor?” her mother said, and her voice was a whisper.

“Not meningitis, anyway,” he said, “or she’d squawk when I move her head. Not measles or mumps. Unspecified respiratory infection. Keep her in bed for a few days and don’t let the other one catch it. Watch her neck. If you can’t make it reach her chest, and if she complains about the light, call me at once.”

He left. They both left, still talking low, voices fading on the stairs, and Brigid slid back into darkness.

When next she woke, she was not in her bed or theirs. All round her there were yellow flowers, and cool darkness, and the air smelled sharp, like the taste of medicine. She thought perhaps she had slept through the winter, like a squirrel or a bear, waking to sunshine and spring flowers, but when she reached out her hand to touch the flowers, they were just a curtain. Then she felt more. The aching of last night was stronger, deeper, and every movement, even lifting her hand to try to touch the flowers, sent pain all through her. Frightened, she lay still. The flowers parted. Tall people appeared. A man stood over her in a white coat. Round his neck hung a tube of rubber, and a circle of bright steel. Beside him was a person like a teacher or a nun, in blue with a white hard square behind her head, who moved towards Brigid. She lifted Brigid’s wrist, not gently, and Brigid cried out.

“Gently, Sister,” said the white-coated man and his voice, though low, was reproving. “The child is in some discomfort.”

“Of course, Doctor,” said the blue woman –
was
she a nun? – but her grip stayed hard.

Brigid thought for a second of Isobel, then the stone-faced nuns in school, then she thought of nothing, because the doctor was pushing her head towards her chest and the pain was exquisite. It was a white light that screamed through her, and it said: “Mama!”

The blue woman said: “You can’t see your mama yet,” and the doctor, looking away from her with his medicine-smelling hands still on her burning head, said across her: “Lumbar puncture, Sister, straight away. With luck it may be viral.”

They went through the curtains and disappeared. Perhaps, Brigid thought, this is another dream. There are so many. This may stop and I will be at home in my own bed. She kept her eyes closed to help this happen, but opened them suddenly as harsh light again intruded, the yellow flowers swishing away from her and two men in shorter white coats lifting her, not ungently, on to a trolley. The pain seared through her once again, and she could feel the hot wetness on her face.

“Poor lassie,” said one of the men, and he stroked her arm, which made the tears worse.

Then, she was in a grey, cold room. One of the men put a white blanket on her, and turned her, slowly, on to her side.

She heard a soft padding behind her. “Hello, Brigid,” said a voice, but Brigid hurt too much to answer. “I’m going to put a little pinprick in your back now,” said the voice, “and it may hurt for a moment. Just hold still, like a good girl.”

Brigid felt a cold that was different, and inhaled a sharp brightness, but she felt no new pain. The whole place, everywhere around her was already so full of it that there was no room for any more. When the voice said, “There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?” Brigid did not even try to speak. Then there was silence, and someone, two someones, brought her back through the grey spaces to the room with the yellow flowers, and she was able to close her eyes again in semi-darkness.

When next she woke the doctor was standing above her. He had papers in his hands.

“Well, Brigid,” he said. “You’re a lucky little girl. You have what is called meningitis, but it is viral, and the pain will soon go. Meanwhile, look!”

A miracle happened. The doctor swept back the curtain, and above her stood her parents. She looked for Francis, but he was not there. “Where is Francis?” she said.

“Hello, Brigid,” said her mother.

“Hello, girlie,” said her father.

“Where is Francis?” asked Brigid again.

“He’s at school,” said her mother, “but he will come, now that we know it’s not as serious as . . . it looked.”

“Will you take me home?” asked Brigid. “I want to go home.”

Her parents looked at each other.

“When the doctor lets you, we will,” said her father.

Then Brigid closed her eyes, and when she opened them no one was there.

She drifted in and out of sleep in the yellow-flowered cocoon. Sometimes it was darker, sometimes lighter, but she did not leave it again until the day there came a young blue person, with a hat not stiff and square like the first one, but pleasantly rounded on soft curls.

“Come on, now, Missy,” said the young person, “let’s get you up,” and very gently she slipped Brigid out of the bed and set her on her feet.

To Brigid, her legs seemed to belong to someone else. They were impossibly long and white, and her slippers were very far away. She swayed and buckled, but the blue person said: “Hold on to me. Once you can walk, you might even get home.”

Brigid tried. She moved one foot and it bent, then the other, and it gave way. The wall tried to come over to her. There was bright spinning in her head. She tried again. She told her foot to move. She told the other one and, this time, they both listened. The pain came with her but she could walk, and after a time, past blank doors, past other blue-and-white people, studying her, watching her curiously, almost rudely, she found she was back again at the yellow flowers and she did not know if she was glad or sorry. The next day, she was propped up to eat, and she was hungry as she had not been before. That night, she slept without dreams.

The following morning, after the white coats and the blue dresses and the new normality of examinations and conversations that did not include her, Brigid saw at last the face she was looking for. Francis had come.

“Hello, you,” he said. “Have you taken up residence?”

“Francis,” she said. “Why haven’t you come before? I’ve been here for . . . I don’t know how long. You didn’t come.”

Francis laughed his quiet laugh, and shook his head. “Oh, foolish Brigitta,” he said. “You have been here for over a week, and they wouldn’t let me come, till they knew you couldn’t pass it on. But,” and he stood up, “I’m here now. It’s Saturday. They’re on their way up the stairs right now – and we’re all going home.”

The miracle continued. In clothes too heavy, on legs too light, Brigid finally left the yellow-flowered place and the people in blue and white who had no names and, though she still had pain outside her head and was very tired, when she lay back on her own cool bed, not wrinkled or hot any more, and watched on the wall opposite the window familiar shadows of the trees in the plot, she knew that this was bliss. Blissful too was the slowly dawning realisation that she did not now have to go to school. Perhaps she might never have to go to school again. There was a half-heard conversation that she thought was real, one night soon after she came home, drifting towards sleep. She thought she heard her parents outside her door, talking softly. She thought she could see tall shadows where the door angled to the wall, in the shaft of the landing light they left on for her since she had become afraid, and her father said, “Fifty children in that class, Grace. Fifty!” and her mother’s voice said, with a sigh, “Private, then?” Brigid understood that: it meant not to be disturbed. Perhaps, after this, she need not be disturbed by school. She did not hear any more but a dim sound, like the men downstairs, and maybe it was the men downstairs, back after all. She drifted quite easily that night into a calm space, with no dreams, and a gentle sensation of floating.

Despite their doctor’s advice, Francis came every day and sat with her. He even brought in his own wireless for her, and she listened in soft darkness, lit only by the glow from the wireless. Inside the green box, tiny people sang, played music, acted plays and read aloud. They became her friends. In those nights, Miss Chalk stayed away, the witch from the tallboy did not come back, the pain receded and she began to be happy again. She was given her father’s wooden chessmen to play with, and as she lay back they climbed hills and danced with each other and hid in the eiderdown. The people inside the wireless got on with their busy lives. Sometimes they sang, of scarlet ribbons, or runaway trains, or her favourite, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

It was a time of quiet happiness, until Brigid grew restless, and nothing made her happy. When at last she was allowed to get up, she could not wait: she felt lighter and taller, but she was giddy, and her clothes were loose. Her legs did not quite work: downstairs seemed a long way away. That first day, she was glad to sit watching pictures in the fire, and at five o’clock, she climbed gratefully back up to bed.

Yet, next morning, with quiet but sudden certainty, she knew she was better. She sat up slowly, walked with care to the end of the bed, and looked out of the window. The Friday Tree had almost no leaves. From somewhere, faintly, there was the smell of smoke. It was time to be well again and, slowly, Brigid stayed downstairs for longer periods. She found she could support the weight of her head by herself, and sit in a chair. She could hold a book, without real pain.

Only then, as she sat occupying herself, did she notice that Isobel was not in the house. Brigid thought she heard her parents say she had gone for a holiday, but it was not summer. Still, she was more glad than sorry. Her mother did all the things Isobel had done, and did them with more care and more kindness. She even let her look at her own book of photographs, brown pictures where she herself was a child, then a girl, laughing with her friends.

The clock on the mantel ticked away the autumn days. When Francis came home he sat with her and at five o’clock they watched television, and all the while the year darkened down toward Hallowe’en, and every night the smell of woodsmoke rose in the air. Waiting for Francis to come home she watched caverns and mountains in the fire. Sometimes she fell asleep. Often she took down the books from her father’s shelves to look at them, or to smell the old paper, or see what was in the pages – a photograph, or a postcard, in writing like stitching, or a square of newspaper, yellow, and soft, like cloth, too small to read. There was one book she liked, with photographs of a small boy in a sailor suit. He was David: he grew up, now he was a king, and he was Edward. In other books, other photographs, she discovered tribes in Africa, Russians in the snow, Italians in the sun, warriors in wooden ships. In her own world, far away from everyone, the days went past too quickly.

One morning, her mother woke her with the words she had almost forgotten. “Up you get, Brigid. School.”

Brigid was stunned. She thought that was all finished. In a dream, she got out of bed, washed and dressed, but her clothes seemed shorter, and the heavy shoes pinched. Downstairs, the things she had left behind her forever were laid out for her: the leather schoolbag smelling of pencils and rubber and the prickly coat with the flat hood. She hated them all.

“Growing fast, girlie,” said her father and she looked up at him.

Behind his thick black glasses, his face in the morning light looked thinner, whiter than she remembered. When he took off the glasses to clean them, she saw that his eyes had brown shadows beneath, and the kind creases, always at the edges when he smiled, were still there when he was not smiling. Without resentment, she saw that the concerns of the family were no longer directed towards her, but once more to her father. It was right it should be so. She was well again; he was not.

Looking about her in the frosty morning, seeing even Dicky in his cage huddled beneath his own wing, Brigid, in her warm home, felt cold – surrounded by her family, she felt alone. She did not need to ask whether her father would be taking her to school in the car. She saw that he would not, that she and her mother would brave the bus together. Something had gone from him. Brigid who, before her own brush with illness, would have asked why, or what, said nothing.

She went back to school, because there was no choice, liking it even less, saying even less about it at home. She did not see George at the school again, and she did not talk about him. Her mother took her on the bus and collected her in the afternoon, and there was still no Isobel. In the shortening days, her father did not leave her again at the end of the road. He did not take her to school at all, even in the wet, even in the cold. Most days, he stayed at home. Sometimes, in the evenings, as he listened to the wireless, and she asked him about her sums or her spellings, it seemed that he had not heard her. When those times happened, she climbed on his knee, and listened to his heart as he tapped pale fingers to his music.

Slowly, Brigid began to feel that school could be endured. She was surprised and pleased when, one bright morning towards the end of October, her teacher asked them to try to write a story. Brigid settled down, forgot where she was and wrote the story of David who became Edward, adding for interest a tribe who ate people and, in fact, ate everyone but him. Only when it was as good as she could make it did she show it to her teacher, and was very pleased when Miss took up her paper and showed it to another teacher, who had come in with books. Some of the children said the two teachers were sisters, but they did not look alike. Brigid’s teacher was big, soft and round, whereas her sister, if she was her sister, was sharp and fox-faced. They both looked at Brigid’s story, and Miss called her up to the desk, higher and more interesting than the children’s desks, with drawers and shelves and hiding places in every wooden corner.