The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (22 page)

Esme has lost sensation in her legs and arms. She can hear a high-pitched shriek and a panting, like that of a sick animal, and the nurse saying, that's it, that's it, keep going, and she thinks that she has heard these sounds before somewhere, somehow, a long time ago, and is it possible that she could have overheard her mother in labour – with Hugo, with one of those other babies? She seems to see herself tiptoeing up to a door, her parents' door in the house in India, and hearing this same pant-pant-pant and the high ululating and the cries of encouragement. And the smell. This hot, wet, salted smell is
something she has encountered before. She sees herself at the door, pushing it open and, through the crack, glimpsing what looks for a moment like a painting. The dim room and the white of the sheet with the startling scarlet and the woman's head dark with sweat, bent over in supplication, the attendants gathered round, the steam from a basin. Is is possible she saw this? She bends her own head, gives three short pants, and even this appearance of a small, slick, seal-being has the unreality of something that has happened already.

Esme turns on to her side and pulls her knees up to her chest. She is washed ashore, shipwrecked. She finds herself examining her hands, which are crumpled near her face. They look the same. And this strikes her as curious, that they should be so unchanged, that they should look just as they have always done. The nurse is severing through something twisted and rope-like and Esme watches as the tiny blue body becomes rinsed with red and the nurse lands a slap on its bottom and turns it over.

Esme raises herself on an elbow. It takes an immense amount of effort. The baby's eyes are shut tight, the fists held up at the cheeks and its expression is unsure, anxious. Look, the nurse says, a boy, a healthy boy. Esme nods. The nurse swaddles him in a green blanket. And Esme says, 'Can I have him?' The nurse, the young one it is, glances towards the door then back to Esme. 'Well,' she says, still holding the baby. 'Quickly, then.'

She comes over and lays him in Esme's arms and the
weight, the balance of him is oddly familiar. His eyes open and he looks up at her and his gaze is grave, calm, as if he'd been expecting her. She touches his cheek, she touches his forehead, she touches his hand, and it opens and locks tight again round her finger.

The older nurse is back in the room and she is saying something about papers, but Esme does not listen. The nurse reaches down for the baby; she puts her hands about him.

'Could we not just give her five minutes?' The younger nurse's voice is soft, pleading.

'No, we can't,' snaps the older one, and she starts to lift the baby out of Esme's arms.

And Esme realises what is happening. She snatches the baby away from the nurse. No, she says, no. She slides off the bed with him and her knees give way beneath her but she crawls away, over the floor, the baby grasped to her chest. Come on, Euphemia, she hears the nurse say behind her, don't be naughty, give me the baby. Esme says that she won't, she won't, get away from me. The nurse seizes her arm. Now, listen, she begins, but Esme turns and lands a punch right in her eye. You little, the nurse mutters, staggering backwards, and Esme finds her strength, raises herself up on her legs. For a second, she cannot balance, strangely light as she is after all these months. But she pushes herself into a run and she makes it past the bed, past the young nurse who, she sees, is coming for her too, towards the door.

She is there, she is there, she is out, she is through, into
the corridor, and she is running towards the staircase and the baby is warm and damp against her shoulder and she thinks that now she might be free, that she will take the baby and go home, that they will not turn her away, and that she could keep on running like this for ever but she hears footsteps behind her and someone catches her round the waist.

Euphemia, they say, stop it, stop it now. The nurse is there again, the old bitch, and she is puce with anger. She lunges at the shoulder where Esme has the baby but Esme jerks away. There is an alarm sounding around them. The younger nurse has her hands on the baby, Esme's baby, and she is pulling at him and he starts to cry. It's a small eh-heh, eh-heh, eh-heh sound, near Esme's ear. It is her baby, and she is holding on to him, they are not going to get him but the other nurse has her now, she has her arm bent up and she is twisting it into Esme's back and here is pain again and Esme thinks she can bear it and they will not take her baby, but the nurse has her arm round Esme's neck and is pressing in and it's hard to draw breath and she is struggling and she feels she feels she feels her grip on the baby slipping. No, she tries to say, no, no, please. The nurse is getting him, she is getting him, he is gone. He is gone.

Esme sees the whorl of hair on the crown of his head as the nurse hurries away with him, one clenched starfish hand, she hears the eh-heh eh-heh noise. People, men, big men, are running towards her with straps and needles and jackets. She is pushed to the floor, face down, a puppet without
strings, and she sees that all she has of him is the blanket, the green blanket, which has unwound in her hands, empty, and she struggles, she screams, she lifts her head and she sees the feet of the nurse who has her baby, she sees the shoes and the legs as the nurse walks away but she cannot see him. She tries to lift her head further because she wants to see him, one last time, but someone is pushing her face into the tiles and so she must just listen, beneath the screams and the shouts and the alarm, to the footsteps as they recede down the corridor and, eventually, vanish.

—certainly didn't know. I don't think anyone did. I think we all just expected the man to have the knowledge and to get on with it. I certainly never asked Mother and she never said anything to me. I do remember worrying about it beforehand but then my concerns were different. It never occurred to me that he wouldn't know what—

—and there were times when I would look at her and wonder what it was about her. Her hair was frizzy, she had freckles because she never would wear a hat in the sun, her hands were uncared-for, her clothes were crumpled, carelessly put on. And of course I would feel guilty then because this was my sister and how could I be thinking these uncharitable thoughts? But, still, I would wonder. Why her? Why her and not me? I was prettier, it was often remarked upon, I was older, closer to his age, in fact. I had skills she would never master. I still think, from time to time, that if he
hadn't gone away, it might have been possible for me to—

—I heard. I heard it all. I was in a room off the corridor, waiting. A nurse came in, then another, and they shut the door, bang, behind them. They looked flustered and they were both breathing hard. That wee, one of them said, then, seeing me, stopped. And we all listened to the screams. There was a gap in the top of the door, so it was very clear, the noise. And I said—

—and the specialist told me to remove the clothes from the lower half of my body, and it nearly made me sick but I did. I had to look up at the ceiling while he stretched and pulled and I was near to screaming by the time he straightened up. And he was looking nervous. My dear, he said, you are, ah, you are still intact. Do you understand me? I said yes, but the truth was I didn't. Have you not yet, he said, as he fussed about, washing his hands, his back to me, had relations with your husband? I said yes. I said I had. I said I thought I had. Hadn't I? The doctor looked down at his notes and said, my dear, no. And that night I sat on the edge of the bed and I tried not to cry, I tried really hard, and I repeated to Duncan the phrases that the doctor had used, I—

—time for a biscuit, that woman thinks. I wish she would go away. I wish they would all go away. How one can be lonely while constantly surrounded by people is beyond me. How am I to exist if—

—tried to pick up clues, girls did in those days, but it was all so hazy. You knew it happened in bed, at night, and
that it was expected to be painful but, beyond that, it was veiled. I did think about asking my grandmother but—

—no, I do not want a custard-cream biscuit. There is nothing I want less. Will these people never—

—and the screaming stopped so suddenly. And after it there was such a silence. I said, what has happened? And the nurse nearest me said, nothing. They've sedated her. Don't you worry, she said, she'll have a nice sleep and when she wakes up she'll have forgotten all about it. And then I saw the baby. I hadn't noticed him until then. The nurse saw me looking and she brought him over to me and put him in my arms. And I gazed down at him and something overcame me. I was close, then, to changing my mind, to saying, no, I don't want him after all. He smelt of her.

He smelt of her.

I have never got over this.

But then I—

—thought they might be words he would understand. I said them to him: penetration, I said, and a release of fluid. I had learnt them like I had learnt French verbs, a long time before. I thought it would help. I thought it might fix the problem. I had put on my rose nightgown. But he leant over and picked up his pillow and then he walked across the room. I think until he reached the door I didn't actually believe he was going. I thought, perhaps he is just pacing about, perhaps he is going to fetch something. But no. He reached the door, he opened it, he left, he shut it behind him. And something in me shut too. And it was
only the next day when I hid from him and my parents and I went to the hospital where I was intercepted by the doctor who said—

—the smell of that biscuit is nauseating. I will pick it up and push it under that cushion and that way I won't be able to smell—

—so I gazed down at the baby because I thought I couldn't do it, I thought I would have to give him back, and then I saw who he looked like. I saw it. I don't think, until that moment, I'd fully realised what had happened, what she had done. She had done that with him. And in me rose an anger. How had she known and not me? She was younger than me, she wasn't as pretty as me, she certainly wasn't as accomplished as me, she wasn't even married and yet she had managed to—

—went there because, in truth, I didn't know where else to go. Mother wouldn't have helped and I couldn't have told her, we just didn't have that kind of conversation, the visit to the specialist doctor hadn't helped, in fact it had made it worse. And I did want a baby so badly. It was like an ache in my head, a stone in my shoe. It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realised, whom I could possibly tell. And I missed her. I missed her. It had been months since she had gone away, so I took a taxi-cab. I was excited, on the way, so excited. I couldn't think why I hadn't done this before. I kept thinking about the look on her face when I walked in.
But when the doctor intercepted me before I got to her and when he said what he said, about her, about a baby, I just—

—never came back to our room. He slept down the corridor, and when Mother died and I inherited the house we moved there and he took the room that had been my grandmother's, while I had the one I had shared with—

And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows. She thinks about those numbers again, the twos and the eights, which together make eighty-two and also twenty-eight. And she thinks about what happened to her once on the twenty-eighth day of a month in late summer. Or, rather, she doesn't think about it. She never needs to. It is running in her mind, always and for ever. She has it, all of the time, she hears it. She is it.

She knows who this man is. She knows who he was. She sees it all now. She glances round the room that used to hold their summer clothes all winter long in cedar chests – lightly folded dresses of cotton and muslin that they hardly ever, in the Edinburgh climate, wore. On bright days in August, they might have shaken them out, aired them, buttoned them on. She doesn't remember how often this happened. But instead of the tall chest with many shallow drawers that her mother found so useful for her print blouses and light shawls there is a television. It casts a guttering, bluish pall over the room.

She looks again at the photograph of the man. He is holding a child on his shoulders. They are outside. Tree branches reach down into the frame from above. He is half tilting his face up to say something to the child. She has her fingers gripped in his hair; his are curled round her ankles, holding her fast, as if he is afraid she might float up into the clouds if he were to let go.

Esme examines the man's face and she sees, in its planes and angles, the set of the head, everything she ever wanted to know. She sees this, she understands this: he was mine. She seems to hold out her arms for this knowledge and she takes it. She puts it on, like an old overcoat. He was mine.

She turns to the girl standing next to her and this girl is so like Esme's mother, so very like, that it could be her – but her in strange, layered clothes and with her hair cropped and cut in an asymmetric slant across the forehead, so unlike how her mother's would ever have been, it makes her almost laugh to think it. And she sees that the girl is hers, too. What a thought. What a thing. She wants to take the girl's hand, to touch that flesh which is her flesh. She wants to hold on to her, fast, in case she might float off and up into the clouds, like a kite or a balloon. But she doesn't. Instead she takes two steps to a chair and sits down, the photograph on her knee.

There is a moment, under sedation, before full unconsciousness swallows you, when your real surroundings leave an impression on that floating, imagistic delirium that holds you under. For a short period you inhabit two worlds, float
between them. Esme wonders for a moment if the doctors know this.

So, anyway, they hoisted her up from the floor of the corridor and she was inert, an outsized rag doll. Already, thousands of ants were boiling up out of the ceiling above her, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see a grey dog running along the wall of the corridor, muzzle to the ground.

Two men were carrying her between them, she could be fairly sure of this. An arm and a leg each, her head lolling back on her neck, all the blood rushing cold there, what was left of her hair almost touching the ground. She knew where she was going. She'd been at Cauldstone long enough. The grey dog seemed to be following her, coming with her, but the next moment it had slunk across the corridor and leapt from a window. Could it be open, that window? Was it possible? Probably not. But she did seem to feel a breeze skimming across her skin, a warm breeze, flowing from somewhere, and she saw a person stepping out of a door. But this couldn't be real either because this person was her sister and she appeared upside-down, walking on the ceiling. And she was wearing Esme's jacket. Or a jacket that had been Esme's. One in fine red wool that her sister had always admired. She had her back to Esme and she was walking away. Esme watched with longing. Her sister. Imagine that. Here. She thought of trying to speak, trying to call her name, but the lips don't obey, the tongue won't work and, anyway, she couldn't be real. She never came. She would
fly out of the window in a moment, like the grey dog, like all the ants, who were growing wings and crowding into her face with small, hooking feet.