-Ellie-
By the time I’ve finished reading, two things have happened. First, we have arrived at the university. Second, my heart is broken.
“See?” says Gillian, turning towards me as she puts on the handbrake.
I nod. “I see.” I see how a little boy can, with three swings of a hammer, give pain that seems like no more than an annoyance. I see how that annoyance can, hours later, become a fatal build-up of blood on the brain. I see how a mother must spend her life in horror and in grief. I see that my husband remembers nothing of this at all. I see that I’m going to have to sit through a whole lecture with him opining on ‘talk and die’ while I keep quiet about him causing just that effect in his father. I see that I am going to have to lie to him forever.
“We’d better go in,” I say.
But when we get to the auditorium, it is dark. There is a note on the door saying that the lecture is postponed.
“I don’t understand,” I tell Gillian. “He left for the lecture this morning. He can’t have postponed it again, at such short notice?” Part of me is relieved, relieved I won’t have to sit through the horror of his specialist subject being – unbeknownst to him – about what killed his father. Or at least, he may suspect the ‘talk and die’ nature of his father’s death, if his sleep mutterings are any clue. But he doesn’t know it is him who did it. He’s probably got some mad theory somewhere in his brain. Like that one he first dreamt up, that Sophie killed Max. I shiver. A mad theory. One he’s over now. Otherwise why would he be so pleased to know that I’d found her? I shiver again, and rub my hands against my arms to keep warm. There’s another pain in my pelvis. I’m going to have to start paying attention to them soon.
Only part of me is relieved the lecture isn’t on. The other part of me is concerned that I’m now going to have to face Will and lie, lie like I’ll be lying to him for the rest of my life.
“He must have gone to his office,” I tell Gillian. “We’d better look for him.”
So we go to the information desk, and explain who we are. No one is going to argue with a seven-month pregnant woman. We’re pointed in the right direction and walk along the tiled corridor and up the stairs towards Will’s office. Or at least, I assume it’s Will’s. Because I see he has put a post-it over the doorplate, replacing the name with ‘Dr Reigate’.
“You’d better wait outside,” I tell Gillian. “I’ll have to explain why you’re here. That you gave me a lift. That it’s OK, with you.”
“But you can’t – ” she says.
I shake my head. “I won’t tell him,” I say. “I promise.”
I go into his room. It’s empty. Or rather, it doesn’t contain him. It does contain a piano. He’s actually got himself a piano. He must be the only medical academic with a piano in his room. But then, he’s probably the only one fixated on a dead piano-genius father. A dead father that he killed. And there are piles and piles of manuscript notes, littering the floor. No sign of order. This is not the office a healthy man. It is not the office of the Will that I know, the Will that I married, the Will with whom I conceived my child. My insides feel like they are sliding. The zebras in the nursery are nothing to do with zebras. They are pianos. My husband is obsessed with pianos. With his father. With the father he killed. I still can’t quite get my mind around it; it keeps repeating in my head, like my subconscious is trying to make sense of it. But how can it? It is too odd, too other-worldly. Yet real.
I move to the piano. There’s a sheaf of handwritten notes on that too, held together with treasury tags. ‘Talk and die lecture’ he’s written on it. Not in his usual handwriting though. These are scrawled capitals. Another shiver. Another pain. Hand on my pelvis, I move round to the other side of the piano to sit at the stool. On the music rack I see sheet music. And Will’s childhood crayon drawing of ‘Daddy’ that I saved from the funeral pyre. Will has been savouring his legacy, then. I sit down on the stool and flick through the lecture. Then I stop flicking and start reading. In horror.
‘And because she the bitch, the bitch Sophie, hit him with the hammer, all the blood began to build up on his brain. And there was so much pressure, SO MUCH PRESSURE, that his brain, even that special beautiful artistic brain for which I will weep and weep and weep and AVENGE, could not survive. And although he went off to record his piece, he died. My father, died. Murdered, by my mother. And do you know what this teaches us, class, members of the public, jury? It teaches us (a) the majority of epidural haematomas are caused by a blunt instrument head trauma (b) that this is just trade jargon for murder (c) so that murdering, thieving, destructive so-called mothers like Sophie Travers think that they can get away with it, just because there’s a bit of talking first, but they devastate lives these people and so (d) they deserve to feel first-hand what it’s like, that hammer-blow to the head, how the blood builds up, how their feeble non-genius brain cannot cope, how it can’t even talk and die, how they go straight to die.’
And on it goes. On goes the polemic against Sophie Travers. Will, how did you get so ill? How did I not notice, you were not only declining from me, but from the world?
But what really chills me is the final sentence, under a heading ‘Update’.
‘The original lecture was due to be given today but as my researcher has found new material I will instead be proving point (d) above to Sophie Travers immediately. À bientôt.’
And at that point, my waters break.