Page 34 of Little Wing
‘My life feels cluttered with lies and secrets,’ Nell said quietly, ‘And I’m choking.’
‘But do you want to find out, Nell? Because once you do – nothing can go back to how it was.’
Nell sat in her car outside the care home. Questions to ask and imagined answers fought around her head. The notion that she’d been lied to – what possible reasons could there be? And Nell thought, but Mum – it was always you and me – you’d knit your fingers through mine and admire the lattice. Look, Nell, you and me, woven together.
And Nell thought, I would cook dinner for us when you were in a slump on the stairs.
I would put you to bed and finish my homework.
I’d be as full of hope as you were, when a new boyfriend came into your life. And I’d try to cuddle your pain away when they left.
And you defended me at all those parents’ evenings.
And you told Rosie Philip’s mother that her daughter was a conniving little liar.
And when Lee dumped me when I was fifteen you took me to a drag club on a school night and had all the queens fuss over me and then you slept on my floor so you’d be there when I woke sobbing in the small hours.
And in and out of the years you’d cup my face in your hands and ask what you’d done to deserve a gem like me.
In her car, looking at the building keeping her mother out of harm’s way, Nell sat for almost two hours until it was too late to visit. She made her way home and drifted around a muddled sleep and then, for the first time in all her years with the Chaffinch, she phoned in sick.
Marjorie. It would be more productive to go and see her aunt in the first instance. She couldn’t risk nonsensical ramblings from her mother nor could she cope with possible silence and that infernal television. She phoned to no answer so she drove to her aunt’s but Marjorie was not at home; it must be a Cambridge day.
A half-hour drive later, Nell left her car at the park-and-ride. She knew Marjorie was something in Natural Sciences, a Professor Emeritus these days, but that’s all she knew. Now, she was heading for the unfathomably beautiful old colleges without really noticing anything, busy rehearsing what to say when she found her aunt. It hadn’t crossed her mind to check the internet before she left. At any moment, Nell expected Marjorie to appear across some quad or cloister, her academic gowns billowing around her like dark secrets. Eventually, Nell gave up and approached a student, saying Natural Sciences as if she was part of it all.
Which?
Pardon?
Natural Sciences – which? There’s about sixteen different departments.
So Nell had to walk for twenty-five minutes to the West Cambridge site, leaving the dreamy creamy spires and hallowed arches and flying buttresses and stained glass for expansive modern buildings and space. Finally, after trying one office and then walking to another, she discovered that Marjorie was indeed lecturing today. Biotechnology – and her lecture was in full swing.
She crept into the back of the lecture hall and sank down into a seat right at the top, up high. The air felt dense with the brainwaves of the gifted and the screen down there at the front had words and symbols that were a foreign language. There was Marjorie, upright and formidable, barking out her supreme knowledge for all to admire and clone. And all Nell could do was try to formulate a coherent sentence from the scrum of muddled questions.
A small line of students stayed after the lecture to honour Marjorie with their convoluted questions and queries. And then they were gone and it was just Marjorie and there, way up high, Nell. Nell who had forgotten the sentence she’d been honing over the last half-hour. But from up there, Marjorie didn’t look quite so tall and imposing.
‘Marjorie.’
Speak louder.
‘Marjorie!’
Louder still.
‘Dr Lawson.’
Louder.
‘Aunt Em.’
‘Nell? Good God! What are you—?’
‘Who is Florence?’ Nell bellowed.
Marjorie paused only momentarily before continuing to gather her papers, switching things off, putting things away. She buffed her glasses and put them in their case. The snap of the closure carrying all the way up to the back. Shielding her eyes, she looked hard to the back of the hall.
‘I will not speak to you if I cannot see you,’ said Marjorie.
