The More You Ignore Me Read Online Free Page B

disappeared into the back of a police car were something to be avoided
at all costs even if it meant allowing her to deteriorate further.
    Marie
wished she could just lay it on the line. In an ideal world she would say to
Gina, ‘Look, Gina, it’s obvious to everyone, even your five-year-old daughter,
that you’re as mad as a snake and you need some treatment. Let’s not let it go
any further or we’ll all be up shit creek and the emotional debris will cause
even more damage than last time.’
    Instead,
she smiled a benign smile, which irritated Gina enormously, causing her to look
for a missile. Marie encouraged her to call if she needed to and quickly
walked away A handful of chicken droppings landed a few feet behind her,
accompanied by Gina’s personal parting shot.
    ‘There’s
more of that in your face if you come back, you nosy cow!’
    Marie
knew it wouldn’t be long before the woman would be sectioned again.
    And it
wasn’t. The following day, a Monday, Keith took Alice to school before work up
at the farm. Gina seemed to be completely absorbed in a book about the weather
in space that she had managed to pick up in a second-hand bookshop in Ludlow
on one of her shopping trips. The more disturbed Gina became, the less likely
she was to come back from a shopping trip with what she had originally intended
to buy On the Ludlow trip she had gone on market day to get some fresh
vegetables and meat but had come back with a book and a barometer she’d found
at the back of an antique shop. Inner Keith said, ‘What the fuck are we going
to do with a barometer, you silly mare?’ Outer Keith said, ‘Hmm, a barometer.
Well, I suppose that’ll come in useful.’
    Gina
caught the humorous edge in his voice and said, ‘It’ll come in useful for
knocking you out.’ And that statement had no humour in it.
    Keith
wished the Wildgoose family could be a bit more help but the last time he’d
called upon them to try and persuade Gina to go into hospital voluntarily,
Gina’s mum had screamed down the phone, ‘Over my dead body, you useless lump,’
and hung up. Not a bad exchange, Keith had thought and took refuge in some
mother-in-law jokes he’d heard on telly.
    Keith’s
parents were equally unhelpful. Their dislike of Gina had moved up the scale
from ‘Give her the benefit, Norman’ to ‘Can’t abide the woman.’
    It was
hard to even get them to come to the house and look after Alice. They didn’t
like the countryside because it had a funny smell and all the people they met
looked like sex offenders. Added to that, Jennifer didn’t have any suitable
shoes and refused to wear her beige suede K-Skips anywhere near mud, of which
there was copious gloopy amounts down Keith and Gina’s lane.
    So
Keith was a lone sailor in this sea of madness, apart from a few lifebelts
thrown at him by Marie Henty and Doug in the shop. Doug was an ex-psychiatric
nurse from Chester who had realised that he was so inured to people’s pain
after ten years on a general psychiatric ward that he was surplus to
requirements in the field of solace. Ironically, though, he was the last person
who should have left nursing because he possessed a cheery disposition, true
empathy and an endless supply of fags.

 
     
     

     
     
    It was Saturday morning
and Keith, exhausted from grafting all week and lying awake all night smoking
some very big joints, trying to work out a way to talk Gina into some treatment,
lay in bed snoring gently, protected from the day ahead by a thin sliver of
sleep. Alice had woken and, as she normally did at the weekend, ran downstairs
in her pyjamas to see how Smelly was and give him some food.
    Her
heart somersaulted in her little chest when she saw that Smelly’s cage was open
and her beloved guinea pig was nowhere to be seen. She hoped that her mum or
dad was up and had put Smelly’s garden run out for him to sniff and nibble at
some fresh grass. She went out on to the dewy lawn in her bare feet and