Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

When they arrive home, Elsa goes upstairs to find her mother and tell her what has happened, crawling up the stairs like a sherpa carrying a bagful of pitiful news. On reaching the top stair, she is halted by the sound of deep, low voices behind the closed door of her parents’ bedroom.

After a few moments, the bedroom door opens and Elsa, overcome with a sudden feeling of guilt, flees.

Now a stranger follows her down the stairs and stops to use the telephone without even asking. The stranger smells like a doctor. His shoes are shiny and his glasses have a silver chain that loops around the back of his neck. He speaks with a serious tone on the telephone, he writes something in his notebook, and as he turns to go back upstairs, he catches sight of Elsa. He smiles at her, nodding his head all the while, as if he is agreeing with himself. He looks as though he is trying to squeeze the smile out of his face.

“Ah. . yes,” he says simply, and goes back upstairs.

Elizabeth sits quietly in the kitchen. She has made no move to wipe her hair or face. Elsa had gone upstairs to fetch Elizabeth a towel from the airing cupboard in the bathroom but had come down again empty-handed in her sudden departure after the doctor had opened the door. Now, at least, Elsa shows Elizabeth some concern.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you,” Elizabeth says politely. “Where’s Mummy?” Elizabeth blows her nose on a crumpled tissue from her coat pocket. Snot and egg white are indistinguishable.

“She’s upstairs.”

“Who was that on the telephone?”

“A man.”

“What man?”

“I don’t know. A man.”

“What’s Mummy doing upstairs?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she asleep?”

“No. She talking to Daddy.”

“Oh, Daddy’s home?” Elizabeth, for the first time since the incident, manages a small smile. “I didn’t even see his car.”

“It’s parked on the street.”

“Why is it parked on the street?”

“I don’t know.” The conversation comes to a natural halt. Both of the girls realize how strange it is for the house to be this quiet when they come home from school. Whatever is happening upstairs seems to have cast a spell over everything.

Elizabeth and Elsa hear heavy movements on the floorboards above them. There are footfalls on the stairs and then the front door of the house opens and closes. The two girls remain sitting in the kitchen. Elizabeth begins to shiver.

Upstairs in the back bedroom, everything, in a single moment, reduces itself to a point of nascent panic when the word cancer is mentioned. The doctor has advised George that Katherine be taken to the hospital for treatment immediately, for as far as he can tell, the cancer, wherever it started, has spread to her spine. George cannot hear anything the doctor is saying after he hears the word cancer . The doctor’s mouth is moving, but George cannot decipher sound. The doctor is writing something on a piece of paper and showing it to him, but George cannot make sense of it. It is as though the furniture in the room is rapidly being sucked, piece by piece, into a vacuum and that any second they, too, George and Katherine, will be sucked away.

Finally, the tiredness that Katherine had been feeling is explained to her, and the nausea is explained to her, and the breathlessness, and the back pain.

Now Katherine is moaning in disbelief and shaking her head, a gentle grimace on her face. She cannot comprehend it. She is staring at the doctor expectantly, as if she is waiting for him to change his mind. But the doctor doesn’t change his mind. After a few moments, he leaves the room to make a phone call, and as he opens the bedroom door, he finds Elsa scurrying away down the stairs.

Strange to say that, after this, Elsa will not have any memory of her mother leaving the house. What she will remember is her father coming into the kitchen, looking agitated and white-faced, and she will remember his gentle, if somewhat distracted, concern over Elizabeth and the eggs in her hair and the long boy. She will remember how, eventually, she helped Elizabeth out of her stained uniform and helped her to wash her brown-black hair in the bathroom sink. How she dried Elizabeth’s hair by the two-bar electric fire in the back room, Elizabeth’s cheeks getting overly hot and flushed, and how she brushed Elizabeth’s hair until it was beautiful again. She will remember Isabel calling at the house and sneering at Elizabeth on hearing about the egg incident, and she will remember telling Isabel that that wasn’t a very nice way to behave and then Isabel leaving with her head down. She will remember that later she and Elizabeth joined Maureen and Stephen at Nanny Anna’s, and that she and Nanny Anna and Maureen and Elizabeth sat playing cards at the little round table in Nanny Anna’s front room, and that they lifted their heads occasionally from their game of cards and caught Stephen, wrapped up in his woolen coat in the garden, pulling leaves off the winter shrubs and laughing.

K ATHERINE NOW SHARES A WARD with six other women, all suffering from cancer. She wears a lilac nightdress and a pink dressing gown. She feels the nightdress is too short, but it was all that was available to her — she had pulled it hastily from the airing cupboard — and she tugs the hem of her dressing gown once again to cover her bare knees.

George is with her now. He has managed to secure two days off from work to get Katherine settled. He can leave shortly to get Katherine whatever she needs, toothpaste, tissues, soap, a longer nightdress.

The consultant’s registrar has already been on his rounds and has taken some details from Katherine, confirming her age, the name of her G.P., which medication she has been on, if any. The questions from the registrar had been innocuous enough, but to Katherine they were able to stir within her a deep sense of anxiety and panic. The registrar had written down her details on the sheet of ruled paper pinned to his clipboard, writing them down as she spoke quietly or George spoke for her. The registrar was a young man, no more than early thirties, his registrar’s coat just a little too big for him. He had spoken to Katherine and George with the acquired veneer of authority. He had informed them that shortly Katherine would be taken down to the Radiology Department on the ground floor for a chest X-ray and then Mr. Kentworth — He had stopped to ask if they’d met the consultant, Mr. Kentworth. No, Katherine and George had replied. Well, after the X-ray Mr. Kentworth would be able to get a clearer picture of Katherine’s condition and then decide how best to proceed with treatment. The registrar had left them, a self-satisfied look on his face, cocking his head sideways as he passed the nurses’ station in the assumption that there would be an admiring audience. But the nurses’ station was empty.

Now Katherine and George wait. They say very little to each other because talking seems like a frightening thing to do. It does not help them forget. It does not help them pass the time. It merely serves to draw their attention in, to copper-fasten their terror.

George holds Katherine’s hand, absentmindedly stroking the elongated soft hollows between her knuckles and rubbing the tips of his fingers across Katherine’s nails, which have begun to curl back over and around her fingertips. Both Katherine and George look around the ward. They are out of their depth. The smell of the ward and its muted sounds blend to become one awful, indistinguishable thing.

The other women in the ward lie propped up in their beds, assuming the shapes of women. Only one woman sits on a chair, rocking slightly back and forth with her hand across her mouth, her hair just two small tufted bunches on her head.