‘Fine, you’re buying.’
‘I can do that,’ I said.
I don’t actually know how we got home. Afterwards, I could barely recall a thing – just vague images of me walking or being all but carried, and streaks of people blurring into one another as I glided down the street. It was like someone had run their fingers down a wet oil painting and sent all the colours into one another. The world was a smear of everybody and everything.
I’d never drunk alcohol before; my grandparents were teetotal. It tasted foul, and for a long while I didn’t feel a thing. All that talk of gin making you happy and giddy and gay – to start with, I thought it all a great swindle. But the very next moment I was a stumbling, dribbling wreck. Aisling had to drag me through the hospital and take me upstairs without anyone catching us. In the room we shared, the other nurses were already asleep. We both broke out into fits of giggles because we couldn’t see what we were doing or where we were going. I must have grabbed someone’s feet in one of the beds as I felt my way along and that set me off laughing again. There were shrieks and gasps and requests to be quiet until someone lit a candle. I remember scrunched-up faces with bedraggled hair squinting at us, like moles, as Aisling set me down on my bed. Even though the walls were made of stone and the draughts blew through without obstacle, it was still a room in the attic, and with six bodies in their beds, breathing and snoring, it was not the most fragrant.
As soon as I lay down, the room started to whirl about, so I sat bolt upright. The other girls were whining, sitting up and rubbing their eyes. Aisling was on the floor trying to pull my boots off, but then she fell back on the floor herself and started giggling. I did not feel well.
‘My Lord, you two! Where have you been? Look at you,’ said Nora, one of our roommates.
‘Oh Susannah, you are going to struggle tomorrow,’ said another.
‘We’ll all struggle tomorrow if we don’t get back to sleep.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘We went drinking.’
‘Susannah – drinking? Well now I’ve seen everything.’
Aisling pulled herself up next to me on the bed. Nora was standing over us, lecturing us in her nightgown. All I could see was her naked feet, toes wriggling, as she was telling us off, saying how selfish and irresponsible we were. Aisling was holding me upright; I couldn’t control my eyes.
Then Aisling said, ‘Oh, Nora, I would not stand there if I were you.’
‘What do you mean?’ she replied.
I threw up on her toes. Nora squealed like a pig and hobbled off crying. I spent the next few hours vomiting into my own chamber pot with Aisling holding my hair back in the pitch black. Whoever had said I would struggle the next day was correct.
24
I could not stop thinking about the woman I’d seen with Dr Shivershev. She’d been so confident, so unlike me, an anxious bag of rigid fears. There’d been triumph in his expression, not to mention a distinct lack of embarrassment at being seen in the Ten Bells with such a woman. I was a little disgusted to learn that my physician, who had become the only man I had any faith in, was not above the usual male weaknesses. Thomas was right, he did like whores. He was disappointingly like the others with their rampant, indiscriminate urges, eyes bulging on account of the beast they professed to have no control over. I wanted my men to be just as I’d been taught they would be – dignified, wise and morally upright – but I no longer believed such men existed.
That night, I woke to the sound of pigs snuffling beneath my bed. I rolled over to look, but there were no pigs, only Mabel lying flat on her back, staring straight at me, a white finger drawn across her lips urging me to be quiet. She was sinking into the wet mud the pigs had turned over. Her skin and hair were wet through, as if she’d crawled out of water. She gestured for me to come and lie down beside her, so I got down on my belly on the floor and crawled to her on my elbows, slithering through the mud, my hair slick with it, dragging me down, my nightgown caked in it.
When I reached Mabel, she whispered, ‘I told you I’d write.’
‘But this isn’t writing, Mabel. Where are the pigs?’
‘They were brutes, I sent them away. Look, Susannah, it’s gone.’
She lifted her head and gazed down at her abdomen; it was completely open, with a flap to one side through which she pulled out her own intestines. Blood was everywhere, and I saw it hadn’t been mud I had crawled through but Mabel’s blood. Her dress was scarlet, but her hands were black and wet.
‘Mabel, stop it! We must close you up,’ I told her.
‘He cut it out. That’s good, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘See how it’s gone?’
A noise came from something on top of the bed, a choking sound.
‘Is that my mother?’ I asked Mabel.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s your grandmother. She still isn’t dead. Quick!’
The bed had lowered over both of us, as if its legs had shrunk. I had to slide out on my back, leaving Mabel behind, and climb up onto the bed again.
Mabel was right: there was my grandmother lying in my bed in Chelsea. Her anguished squirming had twisted the bedsheets into a sweaty knot, and she had soiled herself. How I hated looking after her. I sighed, started to pull the bedclothes from under her. I would have to scrape off her mess and wash them – again. I began to cry because
