Suddenly the room was full of water. Shafts of sunlight hung like white needles from the surface high above her head. Darkness under her feet, darkness all around. Ivan was talking but his voice was tinny and unreal as if he were on a radio link from a long way away. “Breathe,” he was saying. “You have to breathe.” But she couldn’t breathe because if she opened her mouth the water would rush in and flood her lungs.
Finally, despite these churning thoughts she passes into shallow sleep until she comes round just after three on the tail end of a scratchy, anxious dream in which she hears someone entering the house. Unable to sleep without reassuring herself she gets out of bed and goes downstairs to find the living room empty and her mother gone. She runs into the street but it is silent and still. She puts her shoes on, checks the garden then jogs once round the estate’s central triangle calling, “Mum…? Mum…?” as if her mother is a lost dog.
A pack of hooded teenage boys cycle past, slowing to examine her, then sweeping silently onward. She comes to a halt at the junction of Eddar and Grace Roads where the taxi dropped her off forty-eight hours ago. A scatter of lights still burn in Cavendish and Franklin Towers like the open doors in two black Advent calendars. The cherry-red wing tip of a plane flashes slowly across the dirty, starless sky. A dog is barking somewhere. Yap…yap…yap…It is a couple of degrees above freezing, not a good night for an old woman to be outside.
She returns to the house and as she puts the key into the lock she remembers her mother’s story of Jackie Bolton drowning herself in the canal. She puts the key back into her pocket and starts to run. Harrow Road, Eliza Road. A milk float buzzes and tinkles to a halt on Greener Crescent. She is flying, the surface of the world millpond-smooth while everyone sleeps. A fox trots casually out of a gateway and watches her, unfazed. Jerusalem Road. She stops on the little bridge and looks up and down the oily ribbon of stagnant water. Nothing. “Shitting shit.” She walks down the steps onto the gravelled towpath and sees her mother standing on the little strip of weeds and rubble on the far side of the canal. It is like seeing a ghost. The blankness of her mother’s stare, the black water separating them.
“Don’t move.”
She runs down the towpath to a decayed cantilever footbridge. She heaves on the blocky, counterweighted arm and it comes free of the ground, the span bumping down onto the far side of the little bottleneck in the stream. She steps gingerly across the mossy slats, squeezes round a fence of corrugated iron and kicks aside an angry swirl of barbed wire.
She comes to a halt a little way away, not wanting to wake her mother abruptly. “Mum…?”
Her mother turns and narrows her eyes. “You’ve always hated me.”
“Mum, it’s Carol.”
“I know exactly who you are.” It is a voice Carol has not heard before. “But I look at you and all I see is your father.”
Her mother is tiny and cold and she is wearing a thick skirt and a heavy jumper which would become rapidly waterlogged. How long would it take? And who would know? The thought passes through her mind and is gone.
Her mother’s glare holds firm for several seconds then her face crumples and she begins to cry. Carol takes her hand. “Let’s get you home.”
The registrar says they are keeping her in overnight. Carol leaves a message for Robyn. On the ward her mother is unconscious so she drinks a styrofoam cup of bitter coffee in the hospital café, doing the quick crossword in The Times to distract herself from something gathering at the edge of her imagination. Whales cruising in the dark, right now, just round the corner of the world. The sheer size of the ocean, crashed planes and sunken ships lost until the earth’s end. Serpentine vents where everything began. Images from a magazine article she’d read years ago of the Trieste six miles down in the Mariana Trench, steel crying under the pressure, a ton of water on every postage stamp of metal.
Robyn sits down opposite her.
“She walked out of the house in the middle of the night.”
“Sweet Jesus, Carol. You’ve only been here two days.”
She stops herself saying, “It wasn’t my fault,” because it probably is, isn’t it? She can see that now.
“You’re just like Dad. You think everyone else is an idiot.”
“She’s going to be OK.”
“Really?”
“She had a shock. She’s exhausted.”
“You can’t just decide how you want things to be, Carol. That’s not how the world works.” She sounds more exasperated than angry, as if Carol is a tiresome child. “Some people’s minds are very fragile.”
The doctor is plump and keen and seems more like a schoolboy prodigy than a medical professional. “Dr. Ahluwalia.” He shakes their hands in turn. “I will try to be quick and painless.” He takes a pencil from his pocket and asks Carol’s mother if she knows what it is.
She looks at Carol and Robyn as if she suspects the doctor of being out of his mind.
“Humour me,” says Dr. Ahluwalia.
“It’s a pencil,” says her mother.
“That is excellent.” He repockets the pencil. “I’m going to say three words. I want you to repeat them after me and to remember them.”
“OK.”
“Apple. Car. Fork.”
“Apple. Car. Fork.”
“Seven times nine?”
“My goodness, I was never any good at mental arithmetic.”
“Fair enough,” says Dr. Ahluwalia, laughing gently along with her.
Carol can see her mother warming to this man and is suddenly worried that she can’t see the trap which is being laid for her. Her mother tells the doctor the date and her address. “But you’ll have to ask my daughter for the phone number. I don’t ring myself very often.”
Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can repeat the phrase “Do as you would be done by.”
“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby.” Her mother smiles, the way she smiled in the bath. “I haven’t heard that name for a long time.” She drifts away with the memory.
“Mum…?”
Dr. Ahluwalia glances at Carol and raises an eyebrow, the mildest of rebukes.
“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby,” says her mother, “and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.”
Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can make up a sentence. “About anything.”
“It’s from The Water Babies,” says her mother. “We read it at school. Ellie is very well-to-do and Tom is a chimney sweep.” She closes her eyes. “ ‘Meanwhile, do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman.’ ” She is happy, the bright pupil who had pleased a favourite teacher.
“Excellent.” Dr. Ahluwalia takes a notepad from his pocket and draws a pentagon on the top sheet. He tears it off and hands it to her mother. Every page is inscribed with the words Wellbutrin — First Line Treatment of Depression. “I wonder if you could copy that shape for me.”
She seems unaware of how little resemblance her battered star bears to its original but Dr. Ahluwalia says, “Lovely,” using the same bright tone. “Now, I wonder if you can tell me those three objects whose names I asked you to remember.”