Without the missing wig, her natural hair seemed so short. They must have cropped it recently. It was fluffy and grey, like down on a baby pigeon.
A doctor came to stand between them. “She might already be asleep,” he said. He seemed kind and concerned. His bald brow was sweating. She watched a single new droplet force itself out of a pore as he spoke with her. He was being tactful. “Her name is down as Liz. Mrs Elizabeth Robinson. On all of our documents. We know she was living as a woman and taking hormones. We need to ask you, as her daughter, if you’d prefer her friends and neighbours to see her like this or not?”
Penny doesn’t understand.
There is a fierce heat in the room. As if Liz has come back with an explosion. Or with the fires of hell at her back, like Eurydice. A flash of burning, transformative light.
“I mean,” says the doctor, “we don’t know whether her other visitors are aware of her biological sex or not. Do they know her as a woman?”
“Oh, yes,” says Penny.
“Then we’ll have to cover up the more obviously male bits,” he says. “When they come to see her. At the moment she’s looking too…natural.”
“Thank you,” she tells him, pleased by his care.
Penny sits by her mother.
“I’m sick of this hospital already,” Liz says at last.
Penny doesn’t point out how many months she has been here. She stares in wonder and simple happiness at her mother’s face. She can’t think of what to say.
“When will they let me go home?” Liz sounds older and querulous.
“I don’t know,” says Penny, and her voice breaks. She bursts into tears.
“Hey,” says Liz. “It’s only concussion, isn’t it? I was all right. Happy New Year! I just fell over! I just fell over.”
Tom comes clean.
He watches Elsie come up the garden path. He opens the back door for her and watches her unpack all her groceries.
“Put the kettle on, be a love.”
He does so and that’s when he decides to come clean. “You know when…”
“You what?”
“You know when you thought maybe it was me who destroyed your garden and your house and all your things? When I was mad and I went missing for days?”
She stops, her head still in the cupboard for tins. “Oh, Tom,” she says. “I was upset. I was upset and lashing out at anyone—”
“It was me, Elsie. I came back a few times when you weren’t home. I wanted to ruin everything of yours that you love.”
She comes out of the cupboard and stares at him. The cupboard is above the draining board, which she is kneeling on. She looks at him from this height, her knees aching and cracking.
He adds, “I wanted to break it all apart. The petty, silly things you invest your time in. Everything you spend your love and money on. Your scraggy rose bushes outside. The ornaments you bring back from the spastics shop. All of it. I wanted to do it out of sheer, unmitigated spite. I did it because that’s what I wanted to do.”
She takes the can of beans she has just set down and flings it at him. One of the six penny tins of beans, reduced to almost nothing in the baked-bean price war. More water than anything else inside. But still it gouges a red weal in Tom’s forehead when it hits him, and he drops to the floor.
He stumbles back into the armchair, the one that smells of dog. The two inflatable reindeer are still there, having found no better home since Christmas.
Elsie takes another tin — spaghetti hoops — and throws this too. He yells in outrage as it thuds off his forearms, which he has put up, rather feebly, to protect his face. His twisted-up, ranting, loud, loud face.
Elsie cries out and reaches into the cupboard.
Marrowfat peas. Cream-of-tomato soup. Power Ranger pasta shapes. More beans. Tinned tomatoes. Ravioli. She chucks the lot. He can’t protect himself against this remorseless barrage.
Pineapple chunks. Ambrosia custard.
Then she throws the jar of cook-in sauce. Chicken korma cook-in sauce explodes against his forehead in a gooey and bloody mess.
Just as well Craig isn’t home to witness this. She clambers down from the draining board once Tom is unconscious.
Now let’s see how he likes being at that precious edge of his. This is your limit of experience, lovey. You walk that bloody bridge of yours.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The poor woman couldn’t be bothered. You could see it in her face, the second the car pulled up to the kerb. Liz looked out of the back window and saw all of Phoenix Court waiting there. Everyone out to welcome her back. She smiled wanly through the window as Penny paid the taxi fare. You could see that the poor woman’s heart sank when she saw all those faces waiting in Phoenix Court. She didn’t want welcoming back. She couldn’t be bothered.
Among the crowd, Fran felt ashamed of herself. It was she who had gone round the doors, alerting everyone to Liz’s imminent arrival. Why hadn’t she used her sense and thought on, in her usual way, and realised that Liz might want some privacy? Letting everyone know like this, getting them to indulge their nosiness and standing in a cluster, lining the path between the roadside and number sixteen...why, it was more like something Jane would do.
There had been a postcard from Jane this morning. Hot from Tunisia. Picture of silvery-white sands. A sunset. ‘It’s far too hot. We should have come back straight away. My mother’s driving me scatty. Her hubby is a twat. Wish I was home in Aycliffe. Regards, Jane.’ It was addressed to ‘Fran and Family (Not Frank)’.
Jane would
