Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

George holds Elsa’s hand and listens to her chatter as they walk through the main doors of the hospital. The doors in the hospital corridors are made of a heavy semitransparent plastic. Nurses busily flap through them on the way to Emergency, trolleys push against them, and doctors casually feel them yield under their touch. The plastic doors surrender to the traffic on either side, like the epiglottal folds on a giant throat.

But the smell of disinfectant and excrement frightens Elsa, and now she stops talking. George takes over the conversation, explaining to her where they have to go to find Katherine’s ward. People are passing Elsa in the corridor. Patients are walking forlornly in their dressing gowns.

They find Katherine. Elsa looks at her mother only briefly, feeling, for some reason she cannot explain to herself, that it would be rude to stare at her. Her mother is a gray shape in the bed. Her head is tilted back and her eyes are only slightly open. Her hair is different — there is less of it, or maybe it has just been brushed back. The sides of her mouth are caked a little with creamy saliva.

As George takes Katherine’s hand, she begins muttering and her head lolls from one side to the other. She looks like an old woman. She looks like an old drunk woman in the bed, her body drinking bitterly from a nearby drip.

George kisses Katherine’s forehead gently and pulls over a chair for Elsa to sit down on at the side of the bed.

“Your mother’s just a bit tired. She’ll say hello in a minute,” he says gently to Elsa.

Elsa sits on the chair and opens her comic. She stares at the pictures and listens to the particles of conversation between her father and her mother. When Katherine speaks, she does so in clumped phrases with a rising pitch, which makes her sound as though she is whining. The words are disconnected in short, intense bursts. George’s tone is always reassuring.

They stay for a while together, sitting like three points of a triangle. Katherine is saying something now about a wig and beginning to cry a little, her eyes still half-closed, her head still lolling from side to side, and Elsa pretends to read while she eavesdrops on her mother dying.

There are other people in the ward. They sit as disparate shapes. The patients are in their nightdresses and dressing gowns, pale and gaunt. They look as though they are wrapped in cloth, half-mummified. They are stripped of the everyday. They are patients now and their job is to wait, wait for biscuits and analgesics and the knowing nods from a passing consultant, to whom they routinely nod back, having understood nothing of what he has said.

The visitors sit waiting with the patients who are waiting. The visitors wear clothes that allow them to go out into the wind. They hold grapes and newspapers, and all their voices blend together into one low rumble, which vibrates across the damp sheen of the hospital walls.

Elsa hears a trolley clacking along the corridor, the occasional high rattle of cups, and the shrill peal of a nurse’s laughter. Elsa looks around the ward.

On the bed next to Katherine’s sit a mother and daughter with noses of identical shape and size. They are the younger and older version of each other. As they turn to look at each other, they create a perfectly symmetrical space between them. Across on the other side of the ward, a patient sits alone on her own visitor’s chair, looking at the empty bed. She now dips her head and begins rummaging in a plastic bag. Every so often, she quickly pops something small into her mouth from the bag, gnawing at whatever it is like a wily squirrel with an acorn. Her bed jacket has fallen open, revealing a thin slice of breast. At the bed nearest the door, a group of young men in white coats are surrounding the slim shape of a sleeping woman covered with a blanket. They are talking cheerfully, as though they are at a luncheon and are eagerly waiting to see what they will have to eat.

George reaches over to touch Elsa on the shoulder.

“Would you take out the things for your mother from the bag, pet?” he says, attempting to coax Elsa to engage with her mother. Elsa lifts the bag up onto the bed. Out of it she lifts some fruit — two apples, two bananas — a neatly folded facecloth, a magazine, and Katherine’s mule slippers. Elsa hands them to her father. George places the fruit and the magazine on the bedside locker and then, pulling open its creaky tin door, puts the slippers and the facecloth in among Katherine’s spare nightclothes.

“Has Vera been up to see you, Katherine? Or Frank?” George is tidying the contents of the locker. Katherine groans in response, lifting her head from the pillow and looking past both her husband and her daughter into the air beyond.

“Elsa has just come from swimming.” George continues calmly, as though there is a conversation. “Monday already. And we got Mass yesterday at St. Mary’s, you’ll be glad to hear — we haven’t all become heathens since you’ve been out of the house!” George turns to Elsa with a smile. Elsa bends her head and pretends to read her comic.

Suddenly, Katherine pushes herself up in the bed, pressing her fists into the mattress to raise her chest, her arms like thin stilts.

“Swimming,” she says clearly.

George turns to Katherine, surprised at her voice.

“Yes — swimming on Monday.” George’s reply is cautious. “Tell your mother about the swimming today, Elsa.”

Elsa says nothing.

George reaches over to help Katherine settle in the bed. She arches her back in distress. “Where?” she asks.

“The Templemore Baths, Katherine, with the school,” says George.

“Yes. Yes, I know.” This time, Katherine’s voice is a calm day. She looks kindly at Elsa and then slides through George’s hold to rest back on her pillow. George fixes the blankets around Katherine and turns to pour water into a glass from the jug on the locker.

But Elsa doesn’t want to talk about swimming. Talking about swimming makes her stomach sore, for every Monday Miss Fairley takes the whole class to the Templemore Baths like lambs to the slaughter. Today was just like every Monday, Elsa thought to herself. And every Monday it’s the same thing. When they reach the flat gray steps of the baths, all the girls are marshaled through the heavy stained-glass doors, which then swing tightly closed behind them. Miss Fairley orders the girls to move in a dignified manner to the cubicles. Some girls rush ahead to get the best changing rooms — the ones nearest the showers. Elsa inevitably ends up with the cubicle at the end with the broken door, so she always feels on view. The floor of the cubicle is wet and scummy and the grouting between the tiles is green and dirty. Elsa hates when the swimming teachers shout, which they do all the time. When she tries to put on her swimming cap, her hands fumble against the resistance of the rubber. It thwacks stubbornly each time she tries to push more hair in underneath it. The cap tugs at the hair on the nape of her neck and creates little spindles of pain each time she moves her head. Every Monday, she walks to join the rest of her classmates who are always already standing by the edge of the pool, a strand of her hair snaking its way down the back of her neck, marking her out as different, marking her out as the worst swimmer in the class. This Monday was no different from all the others. She had stood, as usual, cold and frightened, shaking in her little black swimsuit. So, no, Elsa doesn’t want to tell her mother about the swimming.

Another trolley clacks along the corridor and a nurse bustles into the ward carrying a tray of medication. George reads this as a sign for them to go. Elsa is relieved. She feels uncomfortable sitting at the side of the bed of a mother who seems unfamiliar to her. She folds her comic and listens as her father speaks quietly to her mother, as one would speak slowly and calmly when leaving a nervous child. He strokes her head. He tells her she has beautiful hair. Her mother has sunk into her half-unconscious self and groans as though to acknowledge their leaving. Elsa and her father make their way out of the hospital and walk back across the car park.