Towers of Silence

Chapter Twenty-three

Hattie Baker had known Miriam for years.

“We met back in 1987,” she said. “In hospital.”

“You worked at Saint Mary’s too?”

“No, no. We were patients. Mental patients.” She said it gently as if she was taking the sting out of it for me, followed it with a small smile.

She was a tiny, birdlike woman, with an enormous beaky nose, warm brown eyes and a scrawny frame. She wore lurid orange lipstick which more or less matched her tousled dyed hair. I guessed that she was in her sixties.

We were in Hattie’s lounge, a real fire blazed in the hearth and I suspected that the central heating was on too, as the room was incredibly hot. The decor and furniture was a complete mismatch of styles; a traditional richly patterned carpet, Turkish style, the main colour was burgundy, a black leather three piece suite, an Indian rosewood coffee table, ornately carved, an incongruous computer station in one corner and garish geometric wallpaper in brown, orange and beige. Thankfully most of the latter was covered with a plethora of prints and paintings, mainly landscapes and street scenes.

There was the tang of satsumas in the air, a bowlful sat beside Hattie and the peel from several lay on the occasional table.

“Miriam wasn’t there long. She responded well to the shock treatments. But she’d come back and visit me, you see. And when they finally let me come home, she’d come here. Funny, really. Most of the people you meet in hospital… well, it’s not a happy time, you don’t want reminding. You never see them again. We just clicked. I do miss her.” She gave a sigh, turned the ring on her finger. “Oh, I do miss her. I could rely on Miriam. She always came, without fail. Didn’t mind that it was always here.”

I must have looked puzzled because she leant towards me to explain. “I don’t go out. Agoraphobic. So she always came to me. And the fun we’d have,” she smiled. “I manage. But there are times, like the funeral,” she winced, “if only I could have been there. I sent a letter of course. Times like that, it makes me think what a stupid, scared, silly woman I am. But I can’t…” She stopped talking.

I waited.

“She seemed to be so well. I never imagined… You never really know anybody do you?” She turned her gaze on the fire. “Just the surface. We barely know ourselves. I do miss her. And those lovely children,” she looked at me, “how are they bearing up?”

“It’s hard.”

She nodded.

“When did you last see Miriam?”

“September the thirtieth. My birthday. She brought me that.” She pointed to a watercolour above the fireplace. It was a Manchester scene, St Ann’s Square looking towards the church. Springtime. Trees in blossom, shoppers, a fire-eater entertaining the crowd. “Someone in her art club did it.” I stood to peer at the signature. Dolly B.

“These are my substitutes,” she waved at the pictures, “for the real world. Of course now with the Internet, I go all over the place, marvellous,” she beamed. Then pulled herself back to my question. “So, Miriam. She came on the thirtieth but I spoke to her after that. She rang me.” Her eyes watered. “I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled a tissue from the box beside her. “I do miss her. It was the day she died.”

I felt a squirt of adrenalin tighten my concentration, speed up my pulse.

“She was in a bad way, panicky, raving. I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was listen. I felt so… bloody useless,” she said bitterly.

“What time was this?”

“About two o’ clock.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing that made any sense. Something about being put in hospital again, if she told them.”

“Told them what?”

“I don’t know. And she said it was awful and he’d punish her.”

“Who would?”

“God. I thought that’s what she meant. Miriam spoke about God as if he was a real person, like he was in the same room, really there. She’d often talk about Him and mean God.”

“What else?”

“I tried to calm her down. She just kept on, a lot of it was garbled but she kept saying she couldn’t hide from him and she didn’t know what to do.”

God? Or the grey haired man? Could it have been him?

“What did you think she meant when she said she didn’t know what to do?”

“About the state she was in, about getting help. I told her to go to the hospital, that they’d make her feel safe but she wouldn’t listen. But I was only guessing. It was hard to understand her. And I told her to get a taxi and come here. I’d pay the fare.”

“Do you know where she was ringing from?”

“No. I assumed she was at home. Then she rang off. I tried ringing but there was no answer. I even tried to ring Connie but I couldn’t remember which school she taught at. If only she’d have come here, I could have got help and then…”

“You never told the family about this call?”

“No. I thought about it. When I wrote with my condolences. But I couldn’t see what good it would do, to hear that she’d been so distressed. They knew that anyway, given what happened. Do you think I should have?”

“I don’t know. I’ll be telling them now. It tells us quite a lot more about how she was.”

Connie Johnstone had found it impossible to accept that her mother had become so dramatically unstable that Now I had testimony from one of her oldest and closest friends that she was suffering from delusions by the early afternoon and was incoherent. It was the first evidence I’d found of her changing state of mind. The decline had been rapid. By the end of the afternoon she’d reached the point of no return. I wondered what would trigger that sort of episode. Something external or was it just part of Miriam’s make-up, the black dog of depression poised to rear up with no good reason to devour her?

“If only she’d come here,” Hattie repeated, the firelight flickering in her tear filled eyes.

If only.