Mother Wound

Enid opens her father's bedside drawer and removes everything inside. She places half a dozen handkerchiefs on the bed, each with his initials stitched into the corner, along with an expired passport, the box containing his Distinguished Flying Cross, and an envelope that, upon closer inspection, holds baby teeth. She looks at the fragile little pearls, resembling broken pieces of shell, and runs her finger over her strong adult teeth to test them. There are still gaps for wisdom teeth at the back of her mouth. 

Sprinkling the baby teeth on the bed, Enid counts them one by one, touching each tooth and allowing herself a little shudder as she does so. All the teeth she has lost over her fifteen years. 

The front door opens downstairs, and a bolt of tension straightens the girl’s spine. She brushes the teeth into her hand and dumps them back into the envelope. The intruder has the intuition of a wolf, and Enid’s legs turn to jelly as she hears rapid footsteps up the stairs and the bedroom door swings open.

Aunt Bridget stands in the doorway, her bare arms folded and eyebrows raised. Enid takes in her high-waisted white trousers and red halter-neck blouse with a knee-jerk appreciation until she realizes her aunt is staring at her, waiting for her to speak.

“I was getting Mummy some of her things,” Enid says, her eyes sliding to the bed where her father’s passport photograph looks accusingly at her.

An intimidating stillness arrests her aunt’s beautiful face. “I don't think you were. You were creeping about.”

Enid sniffs, crossing one foot over the other. The bedroom curtains are still in their habitual position, drawn with a gap in between to let in a weak dribble of sunlight, which is all her mother had tolerated before her hospital admission. 

Aunt Bridget goes over to the chest of drawers and removes nightdresses and underwear. Her trousers are tight over her shapely bottom, and Enid’s hands brush her rather flat one in her childish summer dress. 

“Help me, why don’t you?”

Enid drags the suitcase out from under the bed, a flurry of dust flying up her nose as she does so. A theatrical sneeze escapes, and her aunt tuts. She watches silently as Bridget neatly folds her mother’s brassieres into the suitcase, and Enid wonders how likely it is that her mother will be able to wear them. Even the ambulance driver had looked pale when he saw the egg yolk coloured stain on the front of Mummy’s nightdress.

She can still smell the wound underneath, hear the snitch of fabric when she had tried to peel the nightgown away from where it had adhered to the skin. Sweat was pouring down her mother’s face, her eyelids the colour of a bruise, her lips white. A smell like when a dog dug up the kitten they had buried in the back garden, the one her father had hit with his car. Sweet, cloying, gagging in the back of her throat like swallowing the jelly from a pork pie.

She doesn’t mean to cry, but the tears come. Once they start, it is hard to make them stop, so Enid reserves most of her crying time for the middle of the night when nobody can hear her. She lies face down in bed and sobs until her stomach and chest ache, until her lips swell and her eyes sting. It is an indulgence she allows herself. Sometimes, if she is alone in the house during the day, she will give in to tears then, too, preferably in front of the mirror so she can watch her pretty face contort and break apart until stars of broken blood vessels are scattered around her eyes. She never cries in front of Mummy, or her father, and certainly not in front of Aunt Bridget. 

Enid is sad, but she is also angry. This bad thing has put its hands inside her mother, uncurled its long, insidious fingers and infiltrated her body most disgustingly, taking her mother’s breast—the embarrassment and indignity make her incoherent with rage. For it to happen just as her father finally returned home, handsome and whole in his RAF uniform, medal glinting on his chest, was unforgivably cruel. Enid had waited a lifetime to feel safe, had allowed herself to be cautiously happy without the threat of a telegram bearing the worst possible news hanging over her head. 

But the enemy had been in their home all along. In her mother’s body for years, the doctor said. 

Enid had a nightmare where she reached inside her mother’s chest and pulled out lump after lump of blackness as if it were coal for the fire. She woke in a puddle of sweat and ran into her parents’ bedroom where her mother slept peacefully, her father reading beside her, and she crawled into bed between them and pretended she couldn’t smell the dressing that needed changing. 

Cautiously, Aunt Bridget straightens from her crouch and closes the suitcase. She opens her arms, and Enid walks into them, resting her head against her aunt’s shoulder. She breathes in the warmth and health of her skin and feels guilty at the relief this offers. Her mother’s arms have grown thin, speckled with purple bruises like damaged fruit. Aunt Bridget squeezes her firmly, her hands over Enid’s shoulder blades, and she feels a sinking shame that she ever listened to what her mother said about Bridget during the war. Loose, a fool, without care or consideration for anyone else, she would rant to Sheila from next door over tea at the kitchen table while Enid pretended to be doing her homework in front of the fire in the living room. 

Enid was not clear at the time of the exact nature of Aunt Bridget’s debauchery, which was perpetrated under the cover of The Blitz, but she has since had her suspicions. She tries not to think about creeping downstairs on Christmas Eve and finding her father with his hand on Bridget’s hip in the kitchen, his thumb scuffing her narrow waist, and a look of what she can only describe as liquid desire in his eyes. 

Enid is not unfamiliar with desire. Not once, but twice, she has let Teddy Armfield slip his fingers into the gusset of her knickers and his tongue into her mouth. He tastes like wet hay, like licking a hot pavement after rain has fallen.

“Do you want to come with me to the hospital?” Bridget asks, drawing back, her hands squeezing the tops of Enid’s arms. 

She doesn't reply; raises her shoulders in a stiff shrug.

Bridget releases her and picks a handkerchief from the bed to dry Enid’s cheeks. She lets herself imagine for a moment that Bridget is her mother—healthy, strong, unapologetically vital—and guilt pours into her stomach like bile. 

With this thought written, she is sure, across her face, Enid refuses to go and visit her mother, lest her betrayal only worsen her suffering.

She pretends to be asleep when her father and Bridget return home from the hospital, pretends not to hear when only one bedroom door opens and closes. 

Teddy walks with her to the front entrance of the hospital after school. She can’t bear for her father to tell her again how much Mummy wants to see her. With a posy of wilting flowers from the corner shop in her fist and Teddy tugging a strip of skin from his bottom lip beside her, Enid hesitates outside the entrance. 

Teddy doesn’t want to come in, is appalled at the prospect, and Enid doesn’t blame him for shrinking away from the contaminating effects of a dying mother. She walks through the double doors alone.

The ward is long, and Enid imagines she is a pony with blinkers securely fastened to the sides of her face, her eyes focused solely on the path ahead. She envisions herself skipping, plopping down on the bed, much to the matron's displeasure, and popping a grape into her mouth as her mother laughs. The thought of eating a grape draws a sourness into her cheeks, and Enid swallows as she nears her mother, glancing up slowly to avoid absorbing the entire scene all at once. 

At the foot of the metal hospital bed is a crocheted blanket that used to reside on the back of the settee at home. A fusty smell is embedded in its acrylic fibres, and it covers the outline of her mother’s legs beneath the sheet. Enid looks at the jug of barley water and the little cardboard cup for holding pills on top of the bedside table, the bedpan on the shelf beneath. On the floor, a copy of Woman’s Weekly is open to a page detailing how to knit summer gloves on two needles. 

Enid stoops down to pick the magazine up, and her straw boater falls off her head, her plaits staticky and untidy beneath it. A hand reaches out to smooth the coiled end of her hair, and she flinches away before she remembers the pale fingers belong to her mother.

A nurse provides a chair and smiles at Enid with pained sympathy. Once she has obediently sat down, the nurse pats her knee in three quick taps as if to signal something urgent. 

Enid looks up. Her mother smiles, and Enid thinks, Why have you done this to me? 

Why is she being forced to come here when the skin is sliding off her mother’s face? When looking at her is like trying to swallow something sharp, when she does not want to, when she can’t? 

There are no stains on her mother’s chest, and the smell is only of bleach, itchy in her nose. But it is worse somehow than the fading of her mother in their home, the minute changes day by day that erased her from Enid’s life. She is a stranger in this bed, sanitised but distant, alive but untouchable. She won’t ever come home.

“Is Aunt Bridget looking after you?”

Enid nods.

The slightest curl of her mother’s upper lip, a dim recall to tea in the kitchen with Sheila. 

“Of course she is,” her mother says, a noise like a kiss when her dry lips part. “I’ve had my turn.”

When her mother’s fever was at its highest, she had said all sorts of strange things. Words that hissed and spun into the air, her eyes darting around as if to catch them. On one occasion, she cried that she was sorry, gripped Enid’s hand so hard that her nails had broken the skin.

Enid sits with her until she falls asleep. Her mother's mouth hangs open, and the flesh inside is a surprising pink.

Bridget can't cook, and over the weeks her mother is in hospital having the wound excised—and, in the end, her other breast removed, too—Enid and her father are subjected to all manner of outlandish attempts at normal meals. Her father smiles politely each time Bridget puts a plate in front of him, occasionally inquiring exactly what he will be eating.

The day they find out Enid's mother is ready to come home, Bridget runs from the dining room with her hand covering her mouth. Enid thinks that her own cooking has finally beaten her, and pokes at an unconscionably sloppy Shepherd’s pie. She extracts a long tendril of raw mince and imagines maggots feeding on the rubbery baby birds smashed from their eggs by next door’s tabby cat. 

“See that she’s all right,” her father says, exhaling out of his nostrils and leaning back in his chair. He removes the napkin from his lap and tosses it over the inedible meal. 

Pots and pans are everywhere in the kitchen, and the sink is full of potato peelings turning black. A small corridor joins the downstairs toilet to the kitchen, and Enid can hear Bridget retching athletically. The back door is open, and a soft breeze is stirring the orange blossom that has overgrown its bed. Enid peers into one of the burnt pans and wonders how one can undercook and burn something simultaneously. This disastrous meal might be the catalyst for Enid to finally take over the kitchen. 

She taps on the frosted glass of the bathroom door. Her lips stick to her teeth in a grimace. She hates vomit, and had to breathe through her mouth whenever she emptied her mother's basin. What if Aunt Bridget is ill, too? They say it runs in families. Enid had lain in bed looking at the late summer shadows on the ceiling as she tentatively examined her own small breasts, sure that at the next palpation she would find a stomach churning lump.

The door opens. Aunt Bridget’s face is the colour of mince just as it is beginning to cook, releasing a scum of fat into the pan. 

“Are you all right?” Enid asks.

“I think the mince is off.”

“It's not cooked.”

Bridget takes a shallow breath, covering her lips with her fingers and closing her eyes. “I'm going to have to go to bed,” she says. “Can you tell your father I'm poorly?”

Enid thinks, but doesn't say, that her father will know Bridget is poorly when she doesn't make one of her usual midnight visits to his bed. 

Enid has told Teddy what is going on at home. He reacted with his usual insouciant shrug, more interested in undoing the top button of her school blouse. She batted him away, wanting some consoling reaction, but knew if she had expected that, she should have gone to one of the girls at school who were already deeply invested in Bridget’s backstory.

“Bridget’s poorly,” Enid says when she returns to the dining room. 

She starts to clear the plates and looks at the red strip on the back of her father's neck from spending the day in the garden. Her mother loves the garden, and he has mowed the lawn, deadheaded her roses, even dragged the garden chairs out of the shed, and brushed the cushions clean. A new bed has been bought and put in the living room facing the window overlooking the garden, so that her mother doesn't have to go up and down the stairs. Although the last time Enid saw her mother, she had been walking capably, visiting some of the other patients’ rooms in the convalescent hospital. Lazarus, risen. 

Knowing what is happening in her parents' bedroom — Bridget’s giggle, the sound of furniture moving — Enid wonders if her mother is alive purely out of spite.

The doctors are not claiming her mother is cured, merely that her condition is stable. Enid spends as little time at home as possible during those first weeks after her mother returns. She stays behind at school to do her homework and is often invited to tea by the other girls' mothers, so that by the time she gets in, she merely has to say goodnight to the adults before going to bed. Her mother has the bed removed from the living room and reclaims her place in the master bedroom with a grim kind of dignity. Aunt Bridget returns to the spare bedroom, and Enid's mother asks most days when she thinks she’ll return to her ‘little flat.’ 

Although accommodating during times of family crisis, the dentist Aunt Bridget works for requires her to return to work. So every morning, while she comes to, her eyes sticky with sleep, Enid listens to Bridget opening drawers and then vomiting into the chamber pot she keeps under her bed. 

Enid is sure that Aunt Bridget does not have a terrible disease. Returning home from school one afternoon before a trip to the woods with Teddy, she went into Bridget’s room to acquire a Tampax and found the same box she had stolen from the month before, still almost full. 

Her father takes her mother to a clinic in London every few weeks. The day is marked on the calendar, so Enid knows she can return straight from school to a blissfully empty house. 

She walks in to find Aunt Bridget sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, her fingers clawed through the waves in her auburn hair. She is crying. Enid considers walking out again. The weather has begun to turn, and the light is gold across the table, suggesting evening is already approaching. Curiosity compels her to stay, and she wraps a thread from her school blazer around her finger until the tip turns white. Aunt Bridget looks up, the makeup around her eyes has run, and her lipstick is smeared.

“Will you sit down, Enid?”

She knows from bitter experience that this request is never a precursor to anything good, and she lowers herself into the chair gingerly, her finger throbbing as blood pushes up against the obstruction caused by the thread. 

She thinks about telling Bridget she doesn’t want to know; that whatever it is, it is her problem and one that Enid - a child, for goodness' sake - wants nothing to do with. Why can’t the adults in her life simply behave themselves, like other children’s parents seem to? It is all so inconvenient, awkward, and uncomfortable.

Is it not enough that she has, for all intents and purposes, lost her mother? Last week, in the bathroom after school, her sanitary towel heavy and sticky between her legs, she was so focused on removing and washing it that she had not heard the sound of water running. Her mother was in the bath, her chest and its two great slashes exposed, barbaric and unforgiving. Enid closed her eyes and ran back out, ignoring her mother as she called her name. 

Looking up to meet Bridget’s eyes, Enid releases the thread around her finger and feels hot blood suffusing the digit again.

“I lost my job,” Bridget says, and the tension in Enid’s shoulders releases momentarily.

“Can’t you get another one?”

Bridget shakes her head, presses her fingers over her lips, and closes her eyes as if bracing against a surge of nausea. 

“Why not?” Enid is irritated. She looks down at the small face of her watch and calculates how many hours are left before her mother and father return — hours she had intended to spend reading or simply drifting around the house unobserved. 

“I’m pregnant,” Bridget says. 

Enid belatedly tries to arrange her face into an expression of surprise. Her aunt doesn’t notice, lowering her face into her hands again and starting up a fresh bout of sobbing, the uninhibited gurgling kind that makes Enid most anxious. “I couldn’t keep hiding it because I’m sick all the time. It wasn’t like this before.”

Enid can feel every stitch and fibre of her clothes resting against her skin, and the seam in the toe of her socks is suddenly unbearable. “Before?”

As soon as the question has left her lips, Enid wants to take it back, stuff it inside, press it as far down as possible so it sits in a lump beneath her ribcage where it will metastasize and eventually kill her. The moment is sticky, adhering to their bodies, every item in the kitchen smeared with it, and the table's surface is tacky with that which cannot be undone. 

She could do a kind thing now. She could tell Bridget what she suspects, what lurked like a sheeted ghost at the edge of her mother’s wildest fever-induced ramblings. She could spare Bridget from having to say it, admitting it. But it sits on her tongue and dissolves there like the inside of a sherbet lemon—sweet and bitter, the cracked shell embedded in the ridges of her molars. 

“I couldn’t look after you,” Bridget says finally, her voice muffled as though she is screaming into a pillow. “I was young and scared.”

The words run through Enid, from her scalp to her feet. And it doesn’t matter that she saw it coming. That some part of her knew. The shock when it comes is a winding blow to her stomach. A hollowing. As if her insides have been pulled out, leaving a space for these words to echo around. 

If Enid felt unmoored before, now she is completely untethered.  It is a curious feeling, a kind of freedom and blindness, like returning to a dark room after being in relentless sunlight. She knows what surrounds her, and yet she cannot see it. She thinks perhaps she will never see it again. 

Her father and Bridget at midnight while her mother lies in hospital. Her father and Bridget in the kitchen, behind the greenhouse, the first flush of autumn dusk like a blade bisecting them as Enid watched from her bedroom window. 

She had watched and known everything, the truth filling her throat like the tears do now.

“Your father will never leave her,” Bridget says. 

And Enid thinks, Of course, he won’t. You should have known that. Experience should have taught you. How humiliating it must be to make the same mistake, not once, but twice. 

“Would you leave with me?” Bridget begs. “We could look after each other. I’ll get a job in a pub after the baby is born, and you can look after it in the evenings.” She pulls a handkerchief from her pocket and belatedly tries to address the state of her smeared makeup. 

“How are you going to live in the meantime?” Enid says. “And I won’t be able to look after your baby. I have exams.”

Screwing the handkerchief into her fist, Bridget asks, “What am I supposed to do?” 

Enid feels beads of cold sweat on the back of her neck, just underneath her collar. A prickling behind her knees, and across the fine hairs on her arms. She is just a child. And she is angry. She is tired. 

“I don’t care what you do,” she says. “I don’t think you’re fit to be anyone’s mother.”

Enid gets up and leaves Bridget crying in the kitchen, alone.

In the woods, Enid lets Teddy remove her underwear. He lays her down on the picnic blanket; he is gentle for a boy. Not the type to slam anyone against the wall or, in this case, the tree trunk. He touches her like she is an electric fence, tentatively at first and then more confidently, gung-ho, running his damp palm past her knee up her thigh. 

Enid tries not to think of Bridget’s bare legs wrapped around her father’s waist in the silver light beside the front door. Pretends that she hadn’t been watching when he’d knocked over the hat stand and ploughed her aunt into the wall so hard the grandfather clock shook.

Teddy kisses her lips chastely, his fingers clumsily undoing the buttons on her school blouse, and once successful, pauses, his hand hovering just above her breastbone. Enid grabs his wrist and pulls him down so he cups her breast. His lip wobbles, his hair falling into his eyes, the pupils blown and dark. Enid lets her legs fall apart, hooks her heels into the small of his back, and encourages him into the cradle of her pelvis. 

Sweat separates the dark hair at Teddy’s temples, and a ruddy bloom of colour streaks across both his cheeks. She feels the pain in her teeth, in the angle of her jaw, her chest, inside her ears, but still, Enid persists. It runs through her even as she lets one foot drop and search for purchase in the dirt. 

Teddy grunts, and when she reaches up to touch his chest, Enid feels his heart jackhammering underneath her palm. He looks at her, and she smiles so that his eyes flutter with relief at this tacit encouragement. 

How easy it is to use a boy, to cleave the powerless feeling from her bones. She thinks it is the easiest thing in the world to let someone inside her hollow body.

It is dark when Enid returns home, and the driveway is still empty. She is sore, and her underwear is sticky. There is no chance of running a bath without waking Bridget, so she lets herself in the back door straight into the kitchen to boil the kettle and fill a basin. She half expects to find Bridget at the kitchen table, perpetually sobbing like a ghost. A burning smell hangs in the air, but there is no obvious source; the pots on the stove are scrubbed clean.

Enid goes into the bathroom with the bowl and adds some cold water. Gingerly, she uses a flannel to clean between her legs, balling up her knickers and stuffing them to the bottom of the bin. She wonders about using a douche, but does not know how, cringing at the idea of the strange, degraded rubber bulb she has often seen poking out from the cupboard beneath the sink. It is not there now, and Enid settles for squeezing as much water as possible from the flannel while lying with her bottom raised on the damp bathmat. 

Satisfied, she leaves the flannel in the bath and dries between her legs with her skirt, brushing some of the errant pine needles onto the floor. Enid tiptoes upstairs, missing the creaking step by mere inches, so distracted is she by the strange, heavy feeling pulling at her stomach as she reaches the landing. 

The air feels wet, as if something has leaked. Enid looks up, expecting to see water dripping from the ceiling. The door to the spare bedroom is open, and she steps inside, her finger hovering by the light switch. The bed is illuminated by a silvery gash of the moon, visible through the open curtains. She looks over the jumble of Aunt Bridget’s clothes, the open suitcase at the foot of the bed, the glass jars and perfumes from the dressing table swept haphazardly into a sponge bag. 

Good, Enid thinks, pushing down the guilty bubble in her throat. 

On the bedside table is a bottle of gin, almost empty, the lid nowhere to be seen. She touches the hem of a silk kimono dressing gown, picks up a pair of stockings that could only have been supplied by an American soldier, and drops them again. 

She closes the bedroom door behind her and is once more in the cold square of the landing. The door to her parents’ bedroom is closed. It is impossible to swallow, and saliva gathers in Enid’s cheeks as she places her hand on the doorknob, feeling the cool brass beneath her fingers. At school, they were once told to touch the door handle to test if it was hot, in case they ever found themselves trapped in a room during a fire. 

Enid opens the door slowly and immediately knows that whatever is behind it is the source of her unease. She imagines her mother, as she has countless times before, dead in the bed, passed over permanently into the waxy stillness she exudes even when merely dozing. 

But it is not her mother. Or it is. 

It is Bridget. 

She isn’t dead, but death is close, so near that Enid can feel its breath on her cheek, smell the iron filings in its blood. 

She approaches the bed. Bridget is lying on top of the counterpane, and even in the dark, the suggestion of blood is everywhere, its thick, viscous insistence. 

Afterwards, Enid will wonder why she turned on the light, but it is a reflex. The bulb in the centre of the room flickers, casting an orange glow and turning the full horror of the scene into stark relief. There is no colour in Bridget’s face. The bed is red, so red it burns through Enid’s eyelids when she shuts her eyes. 

Bridget says Enid’s name, and she hears an accusation. Years later, Enid will tell a psychiatrist how the blame stuck to her palms, congealed between her fingers when she took Bridget’s hand. She will tell him that she couldn’t understand how blood could pour, could soak through fabric, and how the body could hold so much when, most of the time, she felt like there was nothing beneath her skin. 

He will ask her what she did, and Enid will say, Nothing, I did nothing. 

This isn’t true. 

She tries to go for help, but her aunt won’t release her hand. In the end, Enid sits on the edge of the bed with Bridget until she closes her eyes. She stays like that until her parents return home. By then, Bridget is dead.

Her mother makes a noise Enid has never heard before, or since. It sounds like glass breaking, and the pieces are in Enid’s face, embedded in her skin like shrapnel. Her father grabs her as if she were a small child and carries her from the room, but when he shuts the bedroom door, Enid opens it again. There is no feeling anywhere in her body; she could be floating above the ground as she watches her mother pummel closed fists against her father’s chest, then reach up and drag her nails down his cheeks, leaving angry score marks, first white, then blooming red. She watches as her father throws a blanket from the airing cupboard first over Bridget’s body, and then over the mess on the bed, his face splitting with tears. 

The mattress and bed sheets are burned on a bonfire in the back garden, emitting a smoke that makes Enid’s eyes sting so severely that her vision is blurred for days. She doesn’t go to school; she ignores the patter of stones Teddy throws at her window. Instead, she lies in bed and thinks about what parts of herself could be cut out to excise what she’s done.