Elsie turned the corner with her trolley. She was nuzzling the fake fur trim on her anorak hood, lost in thought.
Big Sue was in frozen foods, looking at the vegetarian selection. She was going over to that way of thinking. Elsie had packed it in. You never knew what you were eating anyway. You might as well give up your resolutions and go with the flow. Like they said about mad cows, we’ve all been eating cheap burgers for years. We’ll all be bloody mad by 2020. be too old to know the difference, Elsie thought with satisfaction.
Big Sue nodded and mouthed across the chest freezers, “I heard all about it.” She was behaving as if something mysterious had been going on. “I heard all about last night’s events, from Nesta.”
“Oh,” said Elsie, looking at the veggie selection without much enthusiasm. Bits of cauliflower and broccoli stuck in cheese sauces. Flans. She couldn’t feed her men on that.
“Isn’t Nesta a star? She could be a medium. Go on the telly.” Big Sue’s wide mouth twitched, relishing her own irony. She added, “I was sorry not to see Liz actually return. But I was there for the first moment she woke up and spoke, did I tell you?”
“Yes,” said Elsie blandly.
“‘Back to the sixties’!” said Big Sue in a ghostly voice.
“Hm,” said Elsie.
“And,” Big Sue went on, unperturbed, “I hear Craig’s back from Scotland. You must be glad.”
“Very glad.”
“And —” Big Sue leaned closer — “that he spent the night round number sixteen with that Penny. That must put a smile back on your face, Elsie. The thought of them getting back together.”
Elsie looked up and smiled slowly, thinking of half-finished yellow booties.
Penny lies in her rumpled bed and listens to the noises from down the hall. The bath is running; she can hear the drumming of water and the heavy padding of Craig up and down the hail. He always leaves the bathroom door open when he’s in there, letting the thick steam drift down the landing. She thinks it’s because he’s used to the free and easy atmosphere of the gym, where it’s all boys together.
She rolls over and groans. Now he’ll take last night as confirmation that they’re together again. Not that anything happened. Just before dawn they fell into bed and slept immediately. Fell into Liz’s pink satin bed. With Liz lying in a natural sleep, no longer touching death, just six miles away, it might have felt strange to make love here. To lay a Rorschach test of moist blotches on her pink sheets. As soon as Penny thinks this, she wants him all over again. She loves the press of his warmth down her side as they sleep. She thinks about being wrapped up in bed with him. How cosy it is even in the headiest, hardest, most intense moments of their lovemaking. And that’s because, with Craig, it is always comforting. With him she feels gathered up and safe.
“Craig?” she calls down the hall. The sloshing sounds of bath water have finished. There has been a concentrated silence during which she can imagine him drying himself. The curious, serious way he does this.
“Hm?”
Folding a corner of towel between all his toes on one foot. Lavishing a special care on that foot. Then rubbing his damaged foot briskly, as if he can’t bear to look at it.
“Come back here and talk to me!”
He appears in a towel. His hair is wet and straggly and his face is white and worried. “What is it?”
Craig looks at Penny as she sits up in bed. He looks at her small pale breasts as the quilt falls away.
“Come back to bed.”
He untenses slightly. For a moment he thinks she is going to say the thing he is dreading most. That Liz has already had a word in her ear. That she has said to her daughter, “Lean closer, my dear, and I will tell you the truth…that Craig is the culprit. Your ex-boyfriend is the thug that almost killed me. Punched me in the jaw on New Year’s Eve and pushed me backwards into a ten-month coma. That is the monster you have let into your pink satin bed.”
Evidently Liz hasn’t said anything of the sort, yet.
Penny pulls him to her. As he scrambles back onto the quilt, she doesn’t even notice that both his feet are perfect.
Last night there wasn’t much chance for Liz to say anything.
Only Penny was allowed to go in and have real words with her mother. The doctors had finished their business and were waiting for the patient to sleep naturally, of her own accord. They drew back to allow the daughter five minutes’ grace.
Penny came into the room unsurely. The light was weird, aquamarine and gold. It was like being in a fish tank. She’d once had a goldfish called Jessica, who dwindled and lay two weeks dying at the bottom of her unclean bowl. Penny expected to find Liz mooching in just that way, her scales turned the same dull gold.
Penny was aware of the watchful doctors stationed around the room like high priests. They must be student doctors for there to be so many of them. Fancy having students for my mam! She flushed with anger. They were experimenting on her.
Liz was propped on dark-green pillows. No make-up on. Her wig was nowhere to be seen. She had been stripped and lay apparently naked under the green sheets. Her chest was hairier that Penny thought it might be. No chance to shave it. The flat, haired, narrow chest shocked Penny as she came to sit by Liz. At first she thought, They’ve brought me to the wrong patient! Then, staring at the familiar features, she thought, They’ve brought my mother from the land of the dead, but with the wrong body! With an ordinary man’s body! Where’s all her studied voluptuousness? Her primped
