The lady at the desk told me I was too early to visit anyone, that I had to come back later for visiting time, and then she glanced up for the first time and said that children weren’t allowed in anyway in case they spread germs. I didn’t know what to do so I went and sat on a bench outside and fiddled with Mavis’s shoe. Then I went back in.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘My mum thinks I’m dead. We’re from Clydebank, you see, and our house burnt down.’ I thought I’d better explain in case she didn’t know.
She looked me up and down. I hate it when grown-ups do that.
‘I thought she might get better if she knew I was alive.’ I pointed this out in case she thought I was just making conversation.
‘There’s a waiting room down the corridor,’ she said. ‘Some other people like you with nowhere to go are already down there.’ She looked me up and down again.
‘I have somewhere to go,’ I told her indignantly.
But she sighed and looked straight at me at last.
‘Then go there,’ she said, and went back to writing something in her ledger.
I thought of Rosie shaking her fist at the bad boys with her chin jutting out and her lips all scrunched up together, but all I could do was slink away in the direction of the waiting room, and as I got close to it I began to smell that terrible smell again, the smell of the bombing, of debris flying about and smoke and unexploded bombs, and I couldn’t go in and be back in that hell. There, I’ve said it. Hell. That’s what it was. It’s how I’ll always imagine hell, and there were no bells, like my dad used to say when he thought no-one was listening, only boom, crash, crackle and roar.
‘Hell’s bells!’ I whispered under my breath.
‘I beg your pardon?’ boomed a voice.
I dived in the door of the waiting room.
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ said a tall woman in a suit. ‘Children are not allowed in here. Poo, what a stench!’
She had a strange voice, a bit like my dad when he’s playing the fool. I half-expected her to say ‘Lah-di-dah!’ But she didn’t. She craned her long neck over my head into the waiting room.
‘I’m looking for ward twenty-seven,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got an urgent message for someone there.’
‘Ward twenty-seven is up those stairs,’ she said crisply, her gaze returning to me. ‘Can’t you read the signs? Give your message to the lady at the desk and I’m sure she’ll get it to the individual in question.’
Well, yes, I could read the signs but I needed to notice them first. I didn’t say this to her. I just nodded and watched her float off down the hall in her long tweed suit with no threads hanging down, and her shoes going clickety-click on the hard floor. Individual in question? What did she mean by that? What question was the individual, my mum, in?
I did think about going back to the lady at the desk but she didn’t seem to understand how important it was that my mum knew I was there, alive and well, even though I’d lost Mavis. So, before I’d even planned it, I ran my eyes from left to right along the corridor then I flew up those stairs faster than the wind, and faster than debris after a bomb, and found myself in a corridor similar to the one I’d just left. There was no-one in the dry silence of its length but ward twenty-seven was on the right-hand side.
There were too many beds to count in ward twenty-seven, probably about a hundred, maybe, and a terrible smell of boiled cabbage and school cludgies. I couldn’t see my mum from the tiny crack I’d opened in the door. Nearly everyone seemed to be sleeping and I wondered if they were sleeping the sleep of the . . . no, I didn’t think so, not dead, not there. There were strange contraptions attached to some of the beds, with metal sticking out and things hanging down. There were white bandages around heads and arms and legs and no sound at all, except for some wheezing. It was the biggest room I’d ever seen, bigger even than the school assembly hall, with cool light from some windows high up on one side and a huge fireplace in the middle where a fire glowed. And then I noticed two ladies and a man standing round a bed at the far end of the room, and I mean the far end of the room.
‘Give her some . . . ,’ said the man in a plummy voice like the tweed lady downstairs, and one of the ladies nodded. They were all dressed in white. I couldn’t make out what they were saying so I started looking for my mum, checking each bed as far as I could see.
But I was disturbed by voices further down the corridor and suddenly I was through the door, and almost as suddenly I was underneath the nearest bed with my hat toppled around my neck again. A snore sounded above me. The floor was smooth, hard and cold. I couldn’t see much above the beds but underneath them and further down the line, in amongst the bed legs there were some human legs, those of the doctor and two nurses. One of the nurses was scratching the back of her ankle with her other foot. They shuffled round to the next bed and stopped again.
I shouldn’t have been in there. What on earth was I doing? How did I end up in this mess? That’s another fine mess . . . only this one wasn’t funny.
‘Pssst!’ said a voice. ‘Pssst!’
A hand dangled off the side of the next bed. It was an old hand with wrinkles and veins, like my gran’s, and freckles all up the arm, as far as I could see.
‘What are you doing here?’ said the voice. ‘They’ll kill you if they find you.’
I already knew that.
‘I’m looking for my mum,’ I said to the side of the next bed. ‘Peggy Gillespie.’
‘They’ll kill the bloody sister too, for that matter, which would be no bad thing!’ said the voice. ‘You’re in luck. She’s two down from here. Nice girl, your mum.’
‘Thanks!’
‘Don’t get caught,’ she said.
Two beds down, having tossed all care to the wind, I found her. I found my mum.
I found my mum!
It was so hard to contain myself and not get off the floor and jump up and down and scream and sing and shake myself all about that I had to cover my mouth with both hands and jiggle on my knees so that my dress bounced and Mavis’s shoe slapped at my side.
And then I stopped bouncing and checked to make sure I hadn’t been seen. I was on the floor beside my mum’s bed, down on my knees and then I noticed the name above the bed. It was a brass plate on the wall with a name on it, like some people have at their front doors, but the name wasn’t hers. It was Picklethwaite. It said ‘Donated by Mr and Mrs PICKLETHWAITE’ and I wondered whether I was at the right bed after all because it wasn’t my mum’s name up there above her but somebody else’s. Mr Tait told me afterwards it was the name of the people who bought the bed and gave it to the hospital.
‘Pssst!’ said the voice, only I could see her now over the sleeping lady in the bed between us. She was pointing at my mum and at the wall behind her and I noticed another, smaller sign made of card saying ‘Gillespie’ which was on a shelf behind her head. I looked closer and underneath Gillespie it said ‘Margaret’ which is another name for Peggy, only I don’t know why it had a second ‘a’ because everybody knows its Margret not Mar-gar-et. You’d think those people would have known. So I had a closer look at this sleeping Mar-gar-et who might be Peggy, my mum, just to make sure.
This is what I saw: she had my mum’s lovely brown hair, all clean and shining on the snow-white, crispy pillow, and my mum’s soft pale skin on her face with cheeks that were almost without colour, as if she’d put on her foundation and forgotten the rouge. Around her head to one side there was a thick white bandage that was tied above her eye with a safety pin, like my Auntie May’s turban hat slipped sideways with a not-so-fancy pin. Her eyes were red and sore but her long eyelashes were as thick as ever. Her lips were pale like ashes and above them was the tiny scar she’d had since she was Mavis’s age. A blue bruise was on her neck and her arms were criss-crossed with more bruises and cuts, a bit like my own. She was wearing a plain white nightgown with ribbon ties on her chest, and her hand lay entangled in the ties as if she’d been fidgeting with them when she fell asleep. A sheet and a green blanket were wrinkled at her waist. I followed the contours of her hips and legs and at the bottom of the bed I saw what wasn’t there. There was no lump where her foot should have risen like the other one into a sharp peak, and over the end of the bed was a metal cage, I suppose to protect her from anything that might fall on her.
So it was her, it really was, and this horrible thing had really happened. I stared at this gap at the bottom of the bed, horrified, the sickness rising in me again, my stomach full of butterflies and wasps. I was willing it not to be true, willing her foot back and wondering where they would have put it so that we could put it back on, her poor foot that wasn’t where it should be. I peered into her face and listened for her breath and watched the shallow rise and fall of her chest. I wanted to ask her where it was, the foot that was missing but not dead, surely not back in the heap I had seen by the road the night we left Clydebank. I bobbed down onto my knees again to hide.
‘Mum!’ I whispered in her ear. ‘Mum! It’s me, it’s Lenny! Leonora! Mum!’
She lay like an impenetrable castle, spread out before me, there but not there, lost in a mist of her own, giving nothing away. I put my hands over my mouth again in case any of those fizzing bombs went off, or the wasps and butterflies inside me fluttered out, and I checked her chest again, in case she’d died right there in front of me without letting me know. Her chest rose again and fell again and rose and fell and rose and fell, and I put my ear to her nose so that I could feel her breath against it, but still she didn’t speak, not even a whisper.
‘Mum!’ I said again, and I felt the tears of longing slide down my cheeks and I had to fold my mouth inside and hold my breath to stop the cries from bursting out because then the nurses and the doctors would come and throw me out and not let me back in even to ask at the desk, or to leave a message and she wouldn’t even know that I’d been there. I put both hands over my eyes now and pressed them so that the tears couldn’t get out but they got out anyway and I had to wipe them away on the sleeve of my new coat from the town hall.
‘Mum!’
I leant forward to kiss her but my pretty hat with the purple flowers fell in the way and its scratchy rough edge fell onto her smooth pale cheek. I lifted it carefully from my head, ruffling my strange, boy’s hair cut and I shoved it under the bed behind the little cabinet that sat there with a glass of water on top. Now that I’d noticed the glass sitting there, and being thirsty, I just had to have a little sip because I hadn’t had anything since Mr Tait’s black tea that morning.
When I went back to kiss her a strange thing happened. Instead of kissing her, I leant in along her side, just like we were at home and she was sleeping in our own bed in the alcove. I lay along her side on the bed with only my feet still on the floor, and I imagined Mavis on her other side, wee enough to snuggle into her, while I laid my head in the crook of her arm and slipped my fingers through hers so that the ties on her nightgown became entangled with mine too. I closed my eyes tight and I wished and wished for us all to be alright, for her foot to be back where it belonged so that I wouldn’t have to see it in my head, and for her to wake up soon and tell me where Mavis was.
‘Mum!’ I whispered. And then I remembered about Mr Tait’s prayer and I said, without saying it out loud, ‘Dear God, Please make my mum better and find Mavis and take us all back home soon. Love Leonora Gillespie.’
Of course, not long after that the doctor and nurses came round to the bed on the opposite wall from Peggy Gillespie’s bed and there I was, caught like a rabbit in a trap, all the electric lights on me as if the moon was full and the bombers had me in their sights. Run, rabbit, run!
‘She’s my mum,’ I said, so they’d know it was alright, even though I knew it wasn’t.
‘What in heaven’s name are you doing there?’ said a grey-haired woman in white. ‘Get down from there, you filthy wee rascal. I’m so sorry, doctor. I don’t know how . . . .’
I didn’t move.
‘Get down from there when I tell you to!’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said the plummy doctor. ‘How is it possible in a hospital of this calibre and in time of war, that urchins of this sort can wander in here without anyone so much as noticing? Extraordinary!’
‘I’m so sorry doctor. It won’t happen again, I promise. I’ll make sure of it,’ said the grey-haired nurse. ‘Get up then, you! Who do you think you are? You heard what the doctor said.’
‘She’s my mum,’ I said again. ‘She doesn’t know I’m . . . .’
‘How dare you speak to the doctor!’ she said. ‘Be quiet!’
She came at me with her big strong hands but I pulled away and accidentally knocked over the glass of water on the bedside cabinet and my back walloped against the bed.
‘Children in here indeed!’ she said under her breath while she was righting the glass. ‘Nurse a towel! How did you let her get past you?’
The other nurse was young with painted eyebrows and dark hair in a tight bun. She stood to attention. Our eyes met briefly and a smile trembled on her lips. She turned away and her feet tippety-tapped across the linoleum floor.
‘What were you thinking?’ said the grey-haired nurse. ‘Coming in here with your germs and such-like. You’ve probably killed her, you dirty wee midden.’ She spat the words out as if they were filth in her mouth.
Was it true? Could I have killed her?
‘Look,’ she said. ‘You’ve woken the whole ward now.’
No, I haven’t, I thought, not all of them.
‘Mum!’ I said, this time out loud. ‘Mum, wake up! You have to wake up!’ I gave her arm a shake. ‘Mum!’
The doctor was tapping his fingers on the metal end of the bed. Click, click, click went the gold ring he wore.
‘I’m losing patience,’ he said.
‘Out, you!’ said the nurse. ‘Out, right now!’
‘Mum!’ I said, louder now.
‘Out!’
Click, click, click!
The grey-haired nurse grabbed my sore arm and hoisted me away knocking my foot against the bed end with a clunk.
‘MUM!’ I screamed. ‘MUM!’
‘LENNY!’ She had woken up!
‘MUM!’ I screamed again, and wrenched at my arm and kicked at the grey nurse’s legs. ‘MUM!’
The young nurse came through the door with a towel in her hand.
‘What on earth took you so long?’ said the grey-haired nurse indignantly.
The young nurse looked at me and then at her shoes.
‘MUM!’ I howled, but I couldn’t get free.
‘Take this ragamuffin and make sure she gets back out onto the street and let them know down at reception that they will be hearing from me shortly.’
The young nurse took my other arm and they both wrestled me through the ward door. Then the grey-haired nurse turned swiftly on her heel and left us. The door rattled shut behind us.
‘Stop struggling!’ snapped the nurse.
‘I want my mum!’ I shouted. ‘I want my mum!’
‘Stop it!’ she said.
‘MUM! MUM!’
‘Shut up, Lenny, or I’ll . . . .’
‘My hat!’ I said. ‘I left my hat!’
She propelled me back down the stairs past the smelly waiting room, past the reception desk and out the front door where I had the biggest coughing fit since the bombing.
She waited until I’d stopped, I suppose in case I died. ‘You poor thing,’ she said, and then she went back in.