CHAPTER 21
THE MOTHER
‘I’ve no idea what’s holding your dad up.’ I put down the brush on Gemma’s hospital locker and stare at it. ‘I don’t expect he’ll be long. I’ve asked him to bring in a new book for me to read to you.’
I sit very still, fighting the urge to watch her eyelids for the tiniest flicker, and it’s as if my body is absorbing the silence. The stillness. Sometimes it makes me want to cry, this vacuum that seems to seep into my bones, my very blood, and so, to challenge it, I reach forward to pick the brush up again, stroking the engraved pattern on the silver. Enjoying the feeling of the dips and the bumps on my fingers. My flesh.
It’s not a very practical brush, truth be told, but it’s so very beautiful. So special. It’s a child’s brush – real silver with especially soft, natural bristles – a gift from my mother to Gemma when she was small. Of course, Gemma stopped using it many years back, needing modern brushes, designed to retain heat – to tease and to tame. But she kept this brush with its matching mirror on her dressing table ‘for show’ and so I got Ed to fetch it from home. For my sake really.
When Gemma was little, she absolutely hated having her hair washed. Oh my word, the battle over the tangles afterwards. I used lakes of conditioner to try to ease things but there was still grumbling and moaning every single time. Ow. Ow. You’re hurting me. You’re really, really hurting me.
And so I would use a comb for the tangles first, holding the hair in sections and trying my very best to ‘shock absorb’ the pulling, and when that battle was finally over – no more comb. Have we finished with the comb, Mummy – I’d switch to ‘Granny’s brush’ as a signal that the tangles were gone. Then I’d brush through her hair, stroke after gentle stroke, until Gemma was calm again. She would close her eyes and I would watch her shoulders relax and I would brush and brush and brush.
Of course, her hair has no tangles now that she can’t move. Never moves. So I use ‘Granny’s brush’， hoping she can feel the softness of it; that it might somehow soothe her. Calm her. Trigger a memory that might will her to come home. To come back . . .
I run my fingers across the soft bristles, again enjoying the sensation on my flesh. I think of my mother, sitting by the Christmas tree, when Gemma opened this present, rushing between us all to make us check our reflections in the matching mirror. Me. Ed. Granny.
She was really good at presents, my mum. Even when we had so little money after Dad left and she had to work two jobs to keep us afloat, she’d come up with treasures for me on my birthday. Something home-made – an outfit for a favourite doll – or a trail of riddles she’d made up herself, leading to a special box of chocolates.
Amazing how she found the time and the patience after everything she went through.
I look back across the hospital cubicle at Gemma, motionless in the bed. Her laptop’s on the bedside cabinet. They sent it over this morning. A favour. Nothing relevant in it, the police say. I’ve looked at some of the photo files but have found it much harder than I expected. I can’t find the photo of her in that pink dress and so the laptop’s just sitting there alongside her. As if it’s waiting for Gemma to emerge from a nap and start tap, tapping away.
I stare at her closed eyes and think again of my mother; of all the stories I’ve told Gemma about my own childhood. About her grandfather. Her gran. Did I do the right thing? I think so; what good would it do to hurt people you love with a past you can’t change?
And it wasn’t all invented. The stories from my early childhood were real. Precious. My father making me a rocking crib for a favourite doll. Reading me stories at bedtime. Building a hutch for my first rabbit. All those things really did happen, Gemma . . .
I let out a sigh and check my watch. Where is he? Why so long with the police? I picture DI Sanders and get a tightening in my stomach. I realise that I really must speak to her about that odd woman who bothered me a while back, just to exclude her. Damn it. Maybe I should just come clean with Ed first about the stupid private investigator I hired. Why I worried that he was having an affair. Maybe it will be better to face his disappointment in me than all this worry and this guilt.
If I can just persuade him not to make a scene. Not here. Not with all this going on . . .
And now suddenly I sense something happening outside the cubicle. I can just see the elbow of the police guard, sitting beyond the window on to the main ward. Ever since the awful scene with Alex, we keep the blinds at a careful angle – the slats closed enough to keep some privacy but with enough tilt to let me see what’s going on out in the main ward.