Page 13 of Mad Mabel

Roxanne snorts. She is, it turns out, one of those offensively good-natured people. It makes me wonder if she is, in fact, a nurse. It’s always bothered me, nurses and their insufferable cheer. Never mind that they spend their days doing the most difficult and important job on earth for a wage barely above the poverty line, they do it with a bloody smile on their faces. It’s hard to take, truly it is.

“A lot of drama today.” Roxanne rolls up the leg of my slacks and starts efficiently unwrapping a sterile cloth from its plastic wrap. “How are you feeling?”

“Me?” I say. “I’m feeling fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

In fact I’m feeling clammy and a little unwell.

“Not every day you see a dead body.”

“No, I suppose not,” I say. My voice sounds a little funny, so I clear my throat. “Unless you’re a coroner, I suppose. Or in the medical field. By the way, Persephone tells me you’re a nurse.”

I mean it comically, to highlight the fact that children are insufferable liars, but Roxanne shoots her daughter what I would consider to bea look.

“I am,” she says after a beat. “Also a cook. A chauffeur. A cleaner. Generally I go by the job title of mother, though.”

“That’s why you’re always yawning then,” I say. “All that mothering.”

She shrugs. “You have to hustle, don’t you? To make ends meet.”

I consider this. “Persephone’s father contributes, though? Financially?”

“We make do,” Roxanne says. She rummages in her box and pulls out a tube of something. “Anyway, let’s see what we have under all this blood.”

As she begins to clean the wound, I find myself staring. She’s a lovely looking girl. Almost black hair, pale skin, rosy cheeks, water-blue eyes. She’s in a tracksuit today, but I’ve seen her tarted up to go out on the town, and in her tight dresses you can’t help but notice her hourglass figure. There’d been a time when I would have yearned for even one-hundredth of this beauty, but one of the many glorious things about old age is that while aspirations of beauty may linger, they sit well below aspirations of health, comfort, and absence of pain.

“Owww!” I cry. “Mother of God, Roxanne!What are you putting on me now? Acid?”

“It’s antiseptic,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Sissy.”

“Elsie Fitzpatrick?”

We all look up. A pair of uniformed police stand in front of us.

“Good afternoon,” one says. “I’m Constable Harris and this is Detective Gibson.”

The police are both men, which is disappointing. All the British crime shows I watch have led me to believe that police partnerships are exclusively between a man and a woman, generally a young, exceptionally attractive couple with Cockney accents and a lot of unresolved sexual tension.

“Oh good!” I say. “Are you here for the dog?”

“Which dog?”

I point at Nugget. I get the feeling that these policemen aren’tthe sharpest tools in the shed. They are both that north-of-sixty, thick-necked variety of man—the kind that still lives with his elderly mother and tells people that he “cares” for her when really he’s just waiting it out so he can steal her fully-paid-off two-bedroom villa unit in Bonbeach. They are the same height (five-foot-eight would be my guess) and same build (rotund), and both have that pink-stained, mottled skin of one who drinks too much and doesn’t take care of himself. It would have been difficult to distinguish one from the other had it not been for Harris’s thick salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, and the fact that Gibson is bald as a bowling ball. In light of this, I call them—inside my own head—Hairy and Baldy.

“Nugget isn’t my dog,” I say. “She’s Ishaan’s. Ishaan whojust died?”

Understanding dawns, finally. “Oh. Well, no, we’re not here for the dog. You’ll have to call the animal shelter.”

“I’llhave to?” I blink. “Can’tyoucall the animal shelter?”

“I’m afraid not. We just wanted to give you our card, as you were the one to find your neighbor.”

The mustached policeman holds out a business card and I take it.

“What happened to your arm?” he asks.

“What?” I look at my arm. “Oh, that. It happened a couple of days ago when I discovered Nugget in my garden. When I returned her to Ishaan, he grabbed her and scratched my arm! That’ll teach me to do a community service.”

“Rude,” Persephone says.