Page 32 of Mad Mabel

“Strictly speaking, you can. Whether you succeed is another matter.”

“You don’t think I’d succeed?”

“What is she saying?” Daphne says. I hold my finger to my lips.

“I’m not saying you couldn’t succeed,” Linda replies carefully. “But if you decided to take this on, you’d have a pretty big fight on your hands. I imagine more than one media outlet would be involved. It would be a long fight. Given your age, it almost certainly would be a fight that outlives you.”

I open my mouth, but my response gets stuck in my throat. Daphne’s hand grips the hand not holding the phone and squeezes it.

“Ms. Fitzpatrick?” Linda says gently.

I clear my throat. “Mmm?”

“I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you.”

I clear my throat again. “Not to worry. Right then. How much do I owe you for your time?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“Nonsense. I understand how it is, billable hours and all of that.”

“I’ll write this up as a coffee break.”

I nod silently. Daphne’s thumb strokes the inner part of my wrist.

“I…”appreciate it, I want to say. But the words don’t project.A silent tear slips down my cheek. It strikes me that, with all the cruelties in this world, there is still nothing quite as dangerous as kindness.

“All the best, Ms. Fitzpatrick.”

“Thank you,” I manage.

Daphne takes the phone and ends the call.

“Are we fucked?” she asks, handing me a handkerchief.

“Yep.” I blow my nose like a foghorn. “We’re totally fucked.”

19

It isn’t the way I expected to spend the afternoon. A camera is balanced on a tripod on my little round table and the room is full of nervous, expectant energy. My home hasn’t held a lot of guests in the almost sixty years I’ve lived here. I imagine the walls and windowpanes and ceilings feel as uneasy as the three of us.

It’s line-ball to tell who is the most uncomfortable out of me, Libby, and Adeem as we sit at my little round table, though I’d probably put my money on Adeem because his pale blue shirt is ill-fitting and pulled taut across his stomach, and the blind pimple on his nose is stretched so tight that the light is bouncing off it and making it glow.

“So,” Libby says. “What made you decide to speak with us?”

She’s a pretty little thing. Round moon face, masses of blond hair secured haphazardly on the top of her head with a green claw clip. Sandals. Jeans. An oversized men’s business shirt. She lifts her cup of tea to her mouth and blows on it. I’d raised an eyebrow whenshe requested chamomile—because who on earth stocked that sort of nonsense?—but then I stumbled across an individually wrapped tea bag in the back of my tea drawer that I think came out of a free goody bag from the “aging actively” festival at the library a few years ago. Its discovery filled Adeem with a false sense of optimism because he went ahead and asked for green tea.Green tea!Before I could even curl my lip and ask if he thought this was some kind of hipster tea establishment, he quickly added, “Or whatever you have is fine.”

It has to be said, the pair look too young to be drinking tea. One of the (many) confronting things about being elderly is that to me, everyone looks like a kindergartener. There’s something sweet about it when dealing with a cashier or tradesperson, but disconcerting when it is your surgeon and they are about to remove your gallbladder. Had I been having my gallbladder removed today, I’m not certain I would have selected Libby and Adeem for the job, but for this particular role their youth makes them feel less threatening somehow. More earnest about capturing the truth rather than jaded into “getting ratings” or however they measure it on YouTube.

“This is the first time you’ve spoken publicly to anyone,” Libby prompts gently, when I don’t answer. “Why now?”

It’s a fair question. After my call with Linda Raiti, I’d spent twenty-four hours weighing my options—what few remained. Linda had been frank: Legal action was unlikely to achieve much, certainly not the thing I needed most—getting the media circus off my bloody lawn. So, I did the only thing I had left. I opened my mouth and hoped the beast might lose interest once it had been fed.

“There was never any point talking about it before. What was done was done.”

“And now?” Adeem asks.

“Now I just want peace,” I say. “Even if I have to earn it the hard way.”