Phyllida’s lips were tingling, her whole face now, and she wondered if this would stop. Could she step out of it? Was she even here? She was away, somewhere odd, as if she were two things. Had she cut a hawthorn bush? Disrupted nature?
‘Phylly?’
A hand was on her arm, and it was hard, grasping, shaking her arm, and pain.Pain.
‘Phyllida,you’ve got to listen—’
She heard the words from far away. Oceans away. ‘You’ve got to listen, lass!’ Mrs Wilson is so still. So certain, the way she sits by the Aga, looking across the kitchen. There is blood here too. It is all over her, she sees now. Why is Mrs Wilson speaking so calmly when there is so much blood?He will die, she thinks.The man will die. What has she done?
‘Phyllida? Phyllida!’
Who is Phyllida? She must see to Francis.The baby is crying, crying, and nobody is coming and now Mrs Wilson is at her feet, removing her boots as she stands at the bottom of the staircase in this terrible house. There is blood on her boots, blood everywhere.
The babbling woman had gone and now the pressure on her arm was lesser. Lesser. Then no longer there, but still the wind. And now someone else. The doctor who drank too much,Caleb, with the Indian name, and his words like chocolate, so smooth, like his skin and his lovely eyes and he was sayingPhyllidaand walking her away from this awful place that was a made-up place and not real. And now she was in a strange van, and a bed, a nice lady who wanted her to sleep and that would be lovely. A needle and a rest.
Phyllida closed her eyes and lay down and slept.
42
LOTTIE
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
‘They put her in amentalhospital?’ I splutter. The idea is so completely unexpected. So foreign to everything I know about my grandmother that it feels impossible. She is the calmest, sanest person I know.
‘She had a little breakdown,’ says Mary. She picks up her beer, looks thoughtful. ‘They admitted her for a couple of months, then she got herself sorted out. But it was slow going. They put her on pills and she had to talk to a head-shrinker.’
‘So, she didn’t cope with David’s death?’ I ask. ‘That was it?’
Mary seems to ponder this.
‘There was more to it than that, love. I think it was that she never really accepted he was going to die. It was so sudden, see? He was young and fit, then a few months later he was dead. I remember nice Doctor Patel saying to me, “Mary, it’s not that simple. There’s something else that has probably triggeredthis. It’s a complex grief reaction.” That’s what he reckoned.’
‘Caleb Patel? The old GP in town here?’
‘Yeah. I had to go and get him from his surgery when she lost her marbles in the cemetery that day. He knew what to do. Janelle from the surgery told me later on she reckoned Phylly was playing her cards close to her chest.’
‘What cards?’
‘From her past. Things that happened to her. Phylly’s a dead-set vault when you tell her a secret, so maybe she had her own secrets locked in there too.’
‘But you have no idea what they are?’
‘No. But Janelle was studying counselling, so we talked about it. She reckoned when you have a traumatic thing, like losing your only kid to cancer, and your early life dramas haven’t been sorted, they pile on. So your brain goes into meltdown.’
‘Do you know anything about her earlier life?’
‘No, love. She turned up here with a baby when she was about thirty, no furniture, no whisper of a bloke. It was like she’d just flown in from the moon.’
‘Or England.’
‘Yeah. She didn’t tell me anything, though, and I respected that. Everyone’s got their past, love.’
‘So, you reckon Phyllida had some awful things happen in her earlier life that triggered the reaction?’
‘I dunno, love. Maybe.’
I stare past Mary’s shoulder. ‘It fits.’
