Frozen Grave

Chapter 19

Willis was half watching the news, or rather reading the subtitles, when her mother’s case psychiatrist, Dr Lydia Reese, entered the waiting room.

‘Thanks for meeting me here.’ She extended her hand in a fingers-only handshake. Her hand swallowed by Willis’s own. The doctor managed to look perfect even after working a seventy-hour week. Her auburn hair was clipped back from her pretty face in several clasps. She had no make-up. Her face had a fresh, scrubbed look. ‘Your mother should be sent back to Rampton soon. She’s been brought here to this general hospital whilst her injuries heal.’

‘Are you sure she can’t escape?’

There was a pause as the doctor seemed to gauge her response. She smiled but her light blue eyes pierced.

‘That’s not a concern at the moment.’

‘But she is handcuffed?’

‘Yes… Ebony, I understand you have a less than perfect relationship with your mother… Annabelle, but… I am slightly disappointed that you seemed so reluctant to come in and see her. It’s been a fortnight since Christmas. A fortnight since we called you. It’s such a shame that this happened because she was responding so well to her new treatment. I had hopes that we could get it under control.

‘She’s on a drip still; she is taking a small amount of food now but she still talks about wanting to die. She really inflicted a lot of damage with the razor. She needed over seventy stitches.’

‘Where?’

‘What do you mean? Where was she when she tried to kill herself?’

‘No. Where on herself did she cut?’

The doctor looked at Willis as if she were asking something unsavoury.

‘On her arms mainly.’

‘Where did she get the razor?’

‘We think she became a little too close to one of the members of staff and she stole it.’

‘What happened to him?’ Willis hid a smile.

The doctor didn’t answer but she couldn’t hide her surprised expression at Willis guessing it was a male.

‘The nurse in question has been transferred to another hospital.’

‘Why did she say she did it?’

‘Suicide attempts are quite common from someone serving life; they reach a point a year or two into the sentence when they would rather die than serve it.’

‘She can never come out.’ The doctor’s expression showed that she wasn’t sure how to repond. ‘I mean this self-harming – it isn’t gaining her anything, is it?’ Willis added.

‘No. If anything, it lessens her chance of ever being transferred to a normal prison and therefore qualifying for parole. I’m sorry but if she’s suicidal it shows she’s still mentally unstable. Follow me, she is in a side ward with another patient from Rampton.’

As they entered the ward, Willis saw her mother with her shock of platinum-blonde hair glowing like a halo in the sunlight.

She looks like an angel, she thought. Her mother used to say: Bella is a fairy – she is a captured ballerina in a jewellery box – open the box and watch her dance. She remembered how her mother would get up and dance, turning circles on her tiptoes – dancing around the room, laughing and twirling until she’d collapse onto a chair, laughing. Willis remembered watching her mother dance and feeling her happiness. Once she had tried to join in, but her mother had snapped at her: ‘Sit down, Ebony, you look ridiculous.’

As they walked in, a male nurse passed them. He had Jamey written on his name badge. Willis felt the swish of air, the smell of something on him – sex. By the time she looked back up her mother was watching her approach. For a second, Willis felt her feet stop – stop dead. She looked at the pregnant woman in the bed across from her mother. The woman was handcuffed to the rails of her bed. She seemed so still that she looked dead. Until she jerked upright in her bed, snatching at her handcuffs, and screamed obscenities at Willis. The ward was filled with screaming.

‘Don’t bother about her.’ Bella glared across at the pregnant woman. ‘She can’t hurt us. Big fat ugly lump.’

Willis stopped a few feet away from her mother’s bed. ‘Hello, Bella.’ Her mother was as beautiful as ever – she had the look of a 1960s French film star: chiselled cheekbones and deep ocean-blue eyes.

Annabelle was looking past her, watching the nurse until he was out of sight. Then she sighed deeply.

‘Why didn’t you come and see me on Christmas Day? I know they rang you. They must have told you I was injured. I was in such pain. I wanted you to come here so badly. I thought I was dying. I wanted to tell you something. I was frightened it was too late.’

‘You were never fond of Christmas.’

‘Ah.’ Her mother lost any residual smile and her face became the flip side that Willis knew well. ‘I lost a lot of blood, you know – I could have died.’

‘You did it to yourself.’ Willis took off her coat and draped it over the back of the chair before sitting down.

Bella laughed drily. ‘Not really, darling. I was upset. I was a little angry, perhaps. I… I saw the razor and I thought: You are worthless, Bella – you are a monster. You’ve failed the very person you love more than anyone else in the world. You’ve failed your baby.’ She threw herself back onto her pillow and seemed to be gasping for breath. She turned her head and kept her eyes on Willis. ‘That’s you, Ebony, darling. You’ve been my reason for living, my raison d’être. Everything we went through in life we did together.’ Willis started shaking her head; she turned away. ‘What? What? I know I was a terrible mother. I didn’t get diagnosed early enough with my medical problems. No one helped me. No one but you, my little baby girl. You were my world. Remember how you used to ask me to dance. We used to twirl round the room together. Ahhhh, Ebony, my little girl… you kept me safe all those years. It was only when you left that…’

‘I didn’t leave – I was taken away for my own protection.’

‘They didn’t understand how much I needed you. You were the very thing that kept me under control, kept my illness from spiralling out of control.’

‘I spent my childhood waiting for you to explode.’

‘I know – I know – that’s exactly what you did. You were so steady, so quiet. You were always watching with those big brown eyes of yours – always looking after your mummy. Weren’t you, darling? You were a very special child. My child. My flesh and blood. Born from my womb, brought into the world by my will and desire. Mine…’

‘You can’t use a child like that. I was your daughter, not your nurse. Not your possession. It wasn’t right to make me responsible for you. What do you want from me?’

‘It’s only now that I’ve been having so much therapy, after I tried to kill myself.’ She looked at Willis as if waiting to be contradicted. ‘They tell me I have all sorts of conflicting feelings towards you.’ Willis couldn’t hide her smile. ‘What? Why is that funny? I don’t want to feel anger towards you – you are all I have in this world. I need to make my peace with you. Because I do take responsibility for the way my life has gone – to a certain extent. And I do know that you are the most important person in my life and I haven’t always been as fair as I could have been.’

Willis looked at her mother. She would only need to wait. She knew her mother better than any psychiatrist or doctor.

‘That’s why I attacked myself with the razor – I thought: You don’t deserve to live. You know I adore you. You were a tiny baby, I loved you so. I held you in my arms and we danced and danced and people said to me – what a good baby, she sleeps, never cries, but she doesn’t smile, does she?’

‘Bitch…!’ the pregnant woman screamed across at them.

She was leaning towards them as far as her handcuffed arm would allow.

‘Shut up, you worthless piece of pregnant scum,’ Bella hissed across at her. She turned back to Willis. ‘You think that I want to be out of that place, that I want to move to an open prison and show how much I’ve learnt about growing vegetables, and you think I want to earn my freedom?’

‘It had crossed my mind.’

Bella laughed. It was a laugh that was high and false.

She turned a sweetened face back to Willis and reached out her hand. ‘You’re no “catch”, you know.’ Willis resisted the urge to recoil.

‘I swear your father was a good-looking man. The best-looking black guy I was ever with. And yet…’ She reached out again and pushed Willis’s hair back from her face. Willis held still. ‘I do believe you are growing into a kind of beauty – unique. Yes – I can see it now.’

Her mother’s smile slowly eased.

‘Do you have any memories of your father?’

‘There were so many men in my childhood. Not sure if he was one of them.’

‘What do you mean? I wasn’t some slut who bedded men left, right and centre.’

‘Maybe not, but you loved a fair few.’ The pregnant woman choked with laughter.

‘Well, you can judge me any way you want but I am asking for us to go forward with a new relationship now; put the past behind us. It’s not as if I can do any more harm stuck in there.’

Willis smiled. ‘We both know that’s not true. What about the member of staff who you stole the razor from?’

She shrugged. ‘He was a stupid boy who fell for the oldest trick in the book. He deserved everything he got.’

‘I bet you didn’t share that thought with your therapist?’

Bella didn’t answer. She yawned.

‘You know what? You’ve tired me out – such a shame you are not softening. It would reflect in your face more if you could find that inner peace. Inner beauty.’

‘I’ll go.’ Willis stood and picked up her coat.

‘Yes, go, but come again in two days. I didn’t get a chance to tell you something important. I wanted to show you something, to explain something.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that – with such disdain. That’s what you’ve always done. You forget, I gave birth to you. You came out of my vagina. You were the result of passion and wild sex and fun. Does that mean anything, Miss Sourface?’

Willis turned to go.

‘I’m sorry.’ Bella started crying. ‘I’m so sorry. Please come back and see me. I want to tell you all about your father. I have photos to show you. You could find him if you wanted. I’d like to see him again before I die.’

Willis stared at her mother. She didn’t know whether to believe her or not. But she knew that behind every lie of her mother’s there was a grain of truth and a whole heap of mischief.