Songbird

On this particular morning, she sat with her cup of tea and slice of toast, and while she ate, she listened to the radio. Madonna was singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” – a song Maddy loved for its haunting quality. For some reason, today the music was making her tired. And she was so very tired. She was approaching fifty now, too old to be doing the heavy cleaning work.

Afterward, she could never remember how it happened, but when she stood up to clear the table, it was as though a cloud filled her vision. She gasped, gripped the table as faintness overwhelmed her and the years rolled back. She couldn’t see, then she was falling… bouncing across the concrete road, before rolling down the bank and crashing from a great height, into the ditch…

Next door, Betsy was getting her books ready for college, when she heard the almighty crash. “Dave!” she screamed. “Someone… anyone!” She had run halfway up the stairs when Dave rushed out of his room in his T-shirt and boxers.

“What’s all the noise about?” Robin asked sleepily, emerging from Betsy’s room. “What’s going on?”

Since their heart-to-heart talk some months ago, when Darren was being so poisonous, the couple had become much closer and were now boyfriend/girlfriend and passionate lovers. Robin spent as much time as he could in Bedford, as it was harder for Betsy to stay with him in his tiny room in the hospital in London.

“Something’s happened,” Betsy said worriedly. “I heard a loud crash from next door. I think she might be hurt.”

In a matter of minutes, all three of them were hammering on Maddy’s front door. Unconscious now, she didn’t hear them.

Unable to get in through the front, Robin climbed over the locked back gate to look through the window; he saw her there, awkwardly spread-eagled on the floor, with the table tipped over and the mess all around. Shouting for the others to call an ambulance, he smashed a small pane in the back door, reached inside to unlock it and hurried through to check on their eccentric neighbor. She was breathing, but had a sweaty pallor and it was obvious that she was in a bad way.

It took only a matter of minutes for the ambulance to arrive, during which they had righted the table, cleared away the mess, and made Maddy as comfortable as possible.

As she sat beside her, holding her hand and tenderly talking to her, Betsy was shocked to see how Maddy’s long, graying hair had fallen to one side, revealing the mass of scar tissue all around her left ear. “What happened to you?” she tenderly moved the hair over the scar, with tears in her eyes. She murmured softly. “Is this what made you the way you are?”

While the ambulancemen prepared Maddy for traveling, Betsy and Robin waited outside.

“Are you sure you want to go with her?” Robin was concerned to see Betsy so upset.

“Yes, I’d like to be with her,” Betsy answered sincerely. “I don’t think she has anyone else.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

“I hope it’s safe to leave the back door like this. We’ll have to replace the glass and…” she looked about. “I’d like to clean this place up – make it brighter for her to come home to.”

Robin reminded her of how, that very evening, his father was making the trip into town to meet her. “If you like, I can ring my dad and postpone it to another time?” he suggested.

Betsy told him she didn’t want that. “I’ve heard so much about your dad, I’m really looking forward to meeting him,” she said, with a cheeky little grin. “Especially now we’ve decided to get engaged.”

“He can be difficult,” Robin warned.

“So can I,” she replied, and knowing how feisty she could be, the young man suspected that Betsy and his father would get on like a house on fire.

At the hospital, while the doctor examined Maddy, Betsy and Robin were asked to fill out a form with the patient’s details. “We don’t know anything,” they said, “only that she lives next door and works at night – or at least, that’s what we think.” They could give no more details than that, but they promised to find out, if they could.

Meantime, when the doctor called a nurse to undress the patient, it was the very same one who had tended Maddy some seventeen years ago. On seeing the scars, Cathy recognized her immediately; though she was deeply shocked at the way her former patient had deteriorated.

Interrupting the doctor, she explained how, “This lady was a patient here about seventeen years ago, when I was young and newly qualified. Apparently she was involved in a terrible accident, though they never found out exactly what happened.” She recalled how many times she had tried to keep in contact, but that Maddy had been so unresponsive that she eventually gave up trying.

“Her name is Sheelagh Mulligan, and she works here at the hospital,” she informed him. “She does the night shift, cleaning the kitchens and so on.”

With the examination over, the young doctor ordered that Maddy should be treated for iron deficiency. “I’m not surprised she keeled over,” he told Betsy and Robin. “She’s badly anemic. Added to which, she appears to be underfed – wasting away, more to the point.”

“But will she be all right?” Betsy was concerned.

“She will if she takes care of herself,” he replied brusquely. “I shall recommend that she stays in for forty-eight hours, until we see how she is.”

While Maddy slept, Betsy suggested that she and Robin should go back and start putting the house in order for her. “And we’ll need to get the window mended,” she reminded him.

He agreed, wholeheartedly.

A short time later, having made sure that Maddy was still asleep and mending, they returned to the house. “I ought to find a nightie for her, and some clean clothes,” Betsy said. As an afterthought she suggested, “If needs be, I’ll go to town and buy something.”

Their first task was to blitz the house, which they did, hoovering and dusting in every nook and cranny. “I’m not sure we ought to be doing this,” Robin said worriedly. “Our neighbor is a very private person. She might take offense at us going through her house.”

Betsy was more pragmatic. “According to what the doctor said, she’s as weak as a kitten, not taking care of herself and probably not eating properly. She might well be cross at first, but if we do a good job, she’ll realize we were only trying to help.”

They did not stop until the rugs were dust-free and fluffy; the kitchen was given a good scrub and even the windows were thoroughly cleaned. Then while Betsy carried on upstairs, Robin measured for the broken window and went out to get some glass cut and a bag of putty.

When he got back, he found his girlfriend standing upstairs by the open wardrobe door, her attention taken by something inside. “Did you find a nightgown?” he asked, crossing the room to her.

Betsy told him she hadn’t yet, but, “Look at this!” She gestured to the inside of the wardrobe.

Robin took a look, and there, pinned all over the inside of the wardrobe door, were a myriad of photographs; each and every one of the same young woman. Heavily made up for the stage, here she was wearing a long, tight-fitting pink dress; there she was clothed all in black and looking absolutely stunning. In each of the photographs, she was onstage, sometimes jokingly posing, other times serious as she sang into the mike, or leaned down to talk with clients.

To Robin, she seemed strangely familiar, but he assumed he must have seen her on TV, or written about in the papers. Not for one moment did he connect her with his past, when he was a lonely little boy who had recently lost his mother…

“So, who is it?” He was suddenly very curious. “And why has she got these pictures all hidden away like this?”

Betsy had a theory. “Do you remember, a few weeks ago, when we heard that amazing voice coming through the wall, singing to our music?”

He couldn’t believe what she was implying. “Yes, I remember,” he said, “but you’re surely not suggesting that whoever was singing was her?” Incredulous, he pointed to the pictures. “Are you saying these are photos of her? Our poor little shabby neighbor?” He shook his head. “Never! Not in a million years.” But even as he said it, a door was opening in his mind, taking him back to a place and a time when a loving young woman called Sheelagh had brought music and warmth to his life, and to his father’s. And then she had vanished, taking her songs and her smile with her, never to be seen again.

“Look at her!” Betsy grew excited. “That slim figure, that long dark hair – and in the shop that day, you said you saw her eyes – ‘amazing eyes,’ that’s what you said. ‘Dark as night’!”

She opened the door wide. “Look again.”

“I am looking! And I still say you’re imagining things.”

But he was agitated; deeply moved. He studied the lovely woman in the pictures, relaxed and glamorous, and as he tried to relate her to the sad, neglected woman lying in the hospital bed, he saw a caption: The Pink Lady Cabaret Bar, Old Compton Street, Soho, 1976; Maddy Delaney, the Songbird, singing the blues…

There was a mystery here, something linked to himself and his father, and Robin was determined to find out what it was.

It was early evening, and Brad was ready to leave Brighill Farm to drive into Bedford. “It would be so good if I could change his mind,” he told Sue Wright, who was now employed by him as a secretary and jill-of-all-trades. “A man needs his son alongside him. Besides, who will I leave all this to, if he doesn’t want it?”

“You can’t make the boy do what he doesn’t want to do,” she chided, for the hundredth time. Her Dave had been a late starter, and she was simply thrilled that he was knuckling under and studying Physics at the uni. No way would she have tried to persuade him to give it up. “Just as you had a dream of starting your chain of veterinary clinics, so young Robin has a dream of becoming a fine doctor.”

Brad felt ashamed. “I know,” he admitted. “And I know it’s selfish of me to try and undermine him.”

“Then don’t.” Sue always spoke her mind. “Look.” She pointed to the clock over the cooker. “You’ve still time to have a cuppa and a slice of that apple pie.” Her other four sons were all married or living away, and she hadn’t got out of the habit of baking for a large family.

Brad gave a sigh, then with a shrug of his broad shoulders, he relented. “Oh, go on then. Get the kettle on, you big bully! I’ll run up to the office and collect that brochure I want to show Robin.”

A moment later, studying the new, shiny reprint of his clinic brochures, he sat with Sue at the table. “Do you ever miss the old days?” she asked him suddenly. “You know, when our lads were best friends at school? Life seemed a lot more simple than.”

When Brad made no comment, she looked him in the eye. “You still miss that Sheelagh, don’t you?”

He gave a little smile. “Does it show that much?”