Mother of Pearl Read Online Free Page A

‘Souvenir of St Helier’ in green writing around the rim. She fingered it briefly. Charlie turned around.
    â€˜Neilus Grundy,’ he explained. ‘Fell down on his last payment. Not that it’s much use here. Or where I’m going for that matter.’ His face brightened.
    â€˜You take it, go on.’ He flashed a grin. ‘Something to remember me by!’

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    CHARLIE PIPER MUST have told the others. The male patients used to gather after church on Sundays and talk among themselves. Talk dirty, Irene suspected. Dressed up in their shiny suits and shirts with threadbare collars (Irene was able to calculate how long a man was ‘in’ by the cut and fashion of his suit), they became the men they had been on the outside. They regained their stature even though their clothes had been made for bigger men. They stood in knots outside the chapel sizing up the female patients, who also dressed for the occasion. The women did not rely on the clothes they had brought in with them. Sisters would arrive on visiting days with a borrowed dress, or a pair of stilettos would be smuggled in courtesy of the bed-mechanic. If Dr Clemens thought the recreation period in the Day Room on Saturday evenings catered for his patients’ social needs, he was sorely mistaken. The real exchange took place on Sunday mornings during Mass. Notes were passed, trysts arranged and a great deal of ogling went on among the pews. There was an air of suppressed gaiety which rose with their voices to the vaulted roof of the chapel. They sang lustily despite their coughs for the glory, not of God, but of health. Of survival. And afterwards they indulged their capacity for survival by flirting and gossiping, or resorting to forlorn tussling in the woods behind The Camp.
    Irene had never ‘paired off’. In the early years she had concentrated on getting well and getting out. She had thought it was a simple matter of picking up her life where she had left it. As if that lunch hour when she had left The Confectioner’s Hall to go for the X-ray had merely been extended. She had asked Julia Todd to put a cream horn by for her and she liked to think of it sitting there in the shelf beneath the till, the cream and jam smearing the greaseproof wrapping, kept for her return, as if no time at all had passed. She was wearing her uniform when she left, a striped pinny and a white Miss Muffet hat. During her first months at Granitefield she worried that she had never returned the uniform. She feared it would militate against her getting her job back. She would wonder who was filling in for her now, and if they were getting the tots right. Every week she would check in the newspaper to see how she was doing. Each patient had a number so that relatives would know how they were faring, even if they couldn’t visit. B4704: infectious. B4704: critical. B4704: fair. She wondered if Jack or Sonny ever opened these pages to seek her number out? Did they even know what it was? Or her father? She remembered how when she was small he would come up behind her and, swooping from behind, would toss her high in the air, crying ‘And how’s my little girl?’ Or he would nuzzle his head in the crook of her neck and make growling sounds. Why, she wondered, did he care no longer? What punishment was this, and when would she be forgiven? She worried away at these questions but to no avail. And as the months went by and nobody from home or work materialised at Granitefield, it slowly dawned on Irene that she would never go back to
that
life. It was going on, but without her.
    It was Arthur Baxter who first approached her one Sunday morning, bearing a box of chocolates.
    â€˜These,’ he said, ‘are for you.’
    He was a big man with a sad, sagging face. The skin on his knuckles as he clutched the box, was stretched and sheeny but it hung from his face in pendulous folds like an ill-fitting coat.
    â€˜Why, thank you,