about sedation as I continue my rant. It's him! It's the paramedic from that day and, from the way that he is with Gloria, he must be her boyfriend.
‘Excuse us a moment,’ he says to Gloria. He tries to talk to me, to tell me he’s never said anything and that he never would, but I’m screaming with my shame. I’m burning in hell at this moment, because Gloria knows what he did to me.
‘Lucy.’ Gloria comes in a few moments later; she doesn't have the baby with her. I don't know why, but it looks as if she's been crying. ‘No one is laughing at you.’
‘Please.’ My head is lolling on the pillow. ‘I bet he told you, I bet he came home that night and you both pissed yourselves laughing.’
‘Paul's never said anything about it. I wasn't even seeing him then,’ Gloria explains. ‘He won't even discuss it now.’
‘So how do you know?’ I don't understand, she says he's never told her and yet she knows what I'm talking about.
‘I was married to him remember?’ She says no more than that but I feel a bit of her spite slither out and it wraps itself around me and attaches itself to me but she doesn’t let any more out. She swallows it down and she’s back to her bloody dignity. ‘Charlotte is fine for tonight.’
‘You were right!’ I shout to her back as she walks out. ‘You got the best years of him…’ I watch her shoulders stiffen, strong shoulders that have carried so much of his shit and still do. She turns around and I know it’s coming, that slap to my cheek, all the anger and hate that she has for me, for what I did, not just to her, but to Eleanor. The verdict as to the horrible woman that I am, is about to come. She’s standing over me and her face is savage and then it comes right down to mine.
‘Then don’t let him have got the best years of you…’
I cringe back on the pillow, I want her spite for me, I want her hate towards me to finally be delivered but she won’t let me have it. She walks out of the cubicle and I lie there crying like I never have in my life, and I don’t know if I’m waiting, I don’t know if she’s gone. I don’t know if she’s taken Charlotte.
I’m going to lose my baby….
Then she’s back and I don’t get why she’s crying.
‘Where’s Charlotte?’
‘She’s having a drink in the nurses’ staffroom,’ Gloria says. I can’t stop crying, I can’t stand what Charlotte has seen, I can’t bear that Gloria knows.
I’m curled in a ball on the trolley and her hand is on my shoulder and she’s squeezing it. ‘I know.’
How does she know?
‘I know how you feel.’
She can’t.
‘It took me years, Lucy,’ she’s telling me. ‘It took me years to move on and on days like today I’m back there again. It’s like one of those sodding nuclear reactors exploding, it will never be better, it will never be finished and over with. It goes on for years, for decades, for generations, it’s never over… you just have to keep….’ she looks down at my journal that I’m clutching and there are tears pouring down her cheeks as she then looks at me. ‘Keep writing it down.’
‘It doesn’t help.’
‘Then keep pouring cool water,’ she says and I’ve no idea what she means and she isn’t explaining further, she’s exhausted, I can see it. I can see every line on her face and for the first time it registers - she lost him too.
‘You held it together,’ I say.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Your girls didn’t find you collapsed in the bathroom covered in shit.’
‘They didn’t find me dead either,’ Gloria says, the tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘But one morning they could have.’ She chokes as she says it. ‘I don’t know if I just wanted to sleep, or if I never wanted to wake up. I don’t know what I was thinking, Lucy, but I took enough sleeping tablets one night that I nearly didn’t have to think about anything anymore…’ She’s back there, I can see it. I can see the pain on her face and the lines and the grief and do you know what? I know that it wasn’t just me who put them there. I know that she now knows that too.