Oh Dear Silvia (8 page)

Luckily Jo judges herself to be no fool and has thought ahead. She owns a host of ‘cuddly’ toys, which live in well-organized, serried ranks, in descending order of size on her bed. One of the larger teddies is a sinister creature with its own full-teddy-sized Easter bunny outfit. When wearing it, only the teddy’s face is visible, surrounded by bunny ears and whiskers on a bunny hood. The whole shocking ensemble comes off easily via one long zip down the stomach of the ‘bunny’. Jo thought to bring this outfit as disguise for Lady. So now, Jo is furtling about in the smelly sodden handbag, trying to get the old dog into the teddy’s bunny outfit.

After a short while of muffled yelpings which Jo coughs loudly to cover, the dog is finally, undeniably, in costume. Jo hauls the tiny old mutt out of the handbag and places her on the bed next to Silvia. The bunny outfit is a bit too big for Lady so she seems to disappear inside it, leaving the headspace horrifically vacant as if some invisible wraith is in attendance. When Lady does manage to poke her head through, her appearance is that of an Easter bunny with the face of an alarmed and wizened old rat.

‘Keep still Lady. Sit! Lie! Sit!’

The mixed message notwithstanding, Lady has no option as to how she is positioned since she is utterly immobile inside the roomy bunny husk. She is also completely the wrong shape for the outfit. She is small-dog-shaped and so therefore her legs and … legs don’t fit where a teddy’s would. Jo picks her up and places her on her back, hoping this will make her look more like a stuffed something innocent. She manoeuvres the mutant toy into the crook of Silvia’s lifeless arm. Lady blinks up at Jo from the depths of the deep and empty head. She isn’t a happy actor. She has no idea what is happening to her or what is required of her, so she chooses to take the line of least resistance, and simply lie still, hoping whatever this all is will be over soon and she might be returned to her nice gentle farty old owner with the smelly feet and dog chocolates in her apron pockets. Instead of this … Hell.

‘Good girl, now just stay still and let your … canine … chakras flow out of you and into Sissy. That’s right, good. Heal her, heal her. Health, health. Wakefulness and well-being.’

The veteran mutt stares blankly into the face of the rangy greying woman with the frosted, cheerless curls, whose mouth is constantly moving. Jo is speaking but absolutely no one, especially a dog, knows what she is trying to mean. This is very often the case in Jo’s life. Lots of hectic action in the lips department, usually with good-hearted intent, but no connection to any quiet, thinking head department.

Jo doesn’t want to risk failure with today’s therapy. The dog is the prime player, and she hopes that at some deep human-canine level there will be a kind of holy healing fusion, but she doesn’t want to leave it all to chance. It could well be that Silvia might resist the dog energy, although that’s unlikely because she does actually
like
dogs,
BUT
it has occurred to Jo that this very tiny antique dog just might not emit enough power to raise Silvia. Maybe she should have brought two dogs? Or one big one? She simply doesn’t know how to work out the amp-age. So, in the highly improbable event that the dog is underpowered, Jo has brought some other creatures along, and must now try to place them near or on Silvia as discreetly as possible.

She checks through the window to monitor the nurses’ attention, and seeing no sign of the eagle-eyed Winnie, she dives back into the Biba handbag and brings out a plastic exercise ball containing Betty’s granddaughter’s hamster, Justin Bieber. Although only two human years old, Justin is in fact about sixty-five in hamster years and can only do a certain amount of time in the exercise ball without expiring. He’s been in there today for about two hours now and is more than a little hot and sweaty. The hammy stench that comes out of the escape hatch when Jo unscrews the top of the ball is truly unpleasant, in an overheated rodent way. Jo doesn’t want to put her hand into the hole to extract him, so she turns the ball upside down, and along with lots of tiny torpedo poos and
cage debris, the shrivelled hamster plops out on to the bed, landing on its back and appearing quite dazed.

‘Oh dear, come on, turn over. Lot of mess, just try to … clear that up.’

Jo tries to straighten up the hamster by poking at it with her glasses and she attempts to wipe the mess from the bed. She only succeeds in making it all much worse, smearing the sheets with fresh hamster poo and causing the little creature to scuttle for safety somewhere behind Silvia’s neck, deep in the crevice of the pillows.

‘No, no, come on out of there. You’ve got to nestle up to her, not hide behind her, that’s no good. Come on.’

Suddenly, the door opens. It is Winnie. Jo hides the ball behind her back.

‘Everyting OK?’ says Winnie, a little bit sternly.

‘Yes, yes, fine thanks. Just … brought Sissy a new … teddy … a bunnyteddy …’

From where Winnie is, she can only see the outline of the furry toy. She is too busy to stop for long. Her checks with Silvia aren’t due just yet. And anyway, it’s best to do them when Jo is out of the way.

‘Oh. Dats nice. Real nice.’

Winnie goes.

‘Right chaps,’ says Jo, addressing her zoo of two, ‘time for the last hope …’

Once again, Jo plunges her hand into the Mary Poppins
bottomless bag and brings out a small Tupperware container with tiny holes drilled in the top. She’s not looking forward to this. She prises the lid off. Inside is a big curling leaf of ivy. Jo looks closer. The pet shop assured her they sold her one large Phasmatodea, a giant stick insect. It’s not the cuddliest of creatures, admittedly, but Jo thought that at least she might be able to leave this one in the room after she’d gone, clinging to the blind or something. Even if it only emitted one watt of insect healing power, surely that’s better than nowt? Jo is furious that she has left the pet shop with what appears to be a stack of leaves.

‘Damn!’ she hisses.

The sudden breath of her exhalation wakes up the mighty twig creature who turns out to be the entire contents of the box. It is so surprised that it jumps out and directly on to Jo’s face, where Alien-like, it clamps on. Jo screams at the top of her voice and tries to wipe it off by flapping her arms around wildly. The giant knobbly creature is reluctant to leave its craggy new escarpment home but does a little clinging-on bouncy dance instead. It is positively showing off, wiggling its gnarly bottom over her nose.

The screaming has summoned a couple of nurses, including Winnie, who, bat-like recognized Jo’s undulcet tones from further up the ward and flew down the corridor at a low stealthy efficient speed, to deal with the noisy crisis. What
Winnie witnesses as she enters the room is difficult for her to decipher.

Jo is shrieking and panicking, her arms flailing about dramatically. What seems to Winnie to be a small branch goes flying across the room, coming to rest on the side of Silvia’s face, just above her nasal tube. As Winnie approaches to remove it, a small rat-like creature darts out from behind Silvia’s neck and chomps down on the twig which appears to have sprawling legs and be
moving
, dragging it back into its pillow lair. The other nurses join in the screaming when they see this.

The new volley of screeches persuades Lady, in her dotage and in her quiescence, to quit her suspension and emerge to see what’s going on. She may be vintage, but she’s still a dog, of sorts, and she’s naturally curious. As she shuffles around to right herself, there are loud cries of ‘That rabbit thing!’

‘It’s moving!’

‘It’s alive!’

‘The toy is alive!’

‘Dear God!’

Then Lady pokes her head through the rabbit face hole and the whole room erupts into a cacophony of horrified yelping and high-pitched ululation. It genuinely is a terrifying sight, the skinny hoary old ratty face with the bunny ears. Anyone would be petrified. It makes no earthly sense, what they see,
they can’t process it all in any normal, logical way. The only immediate explanation is supernatural devilment. A live branch, a rat and a teddy/bunny aberration from hell. Neither fish, flesh nor fowl.

Two nurses flee the room still yowling. Winnie remains, but is transfixed by the perversions of nature she is confronted with. Now that the stick insect is off her, Jo calms down somewhat, but she is still panting with shock when Lady, invigorated with new urgent energy from the shrill squawking, gets the smell in her nose of nearby rodent activity. A small mammal is munching on something, and Lady would like to be munching on that small mammal. She wriggles about and tries to free herself from the costume, but fails. Heroically, she lunges forward, virtually
at
Silvia’s face, trying to locate the pesky rodent.

She can smell it, smell it, smell it.

She wants to eat it, eat it, eat it.

Somewhere deep inside the generations of inbreeding that Lady is a result of, where virtually all natural instincts have been bred out, there is still the remnant of a dog lurking inside her shivering delicate lappy skin. For a brief instinctual moment, Lady feels the urge to hunt. Her eyes grow dark, her tiny lips peel back, and she starts to slaver. She wants the prey in her jaws. She is growling and snapping and sniffing and straining to get out of the bloody rabbit head.

Winnie starts to make sense of it all gradually, and fastens
her furious gaze on Jo, who is watching the carnage with paralysed fear.

‘Sorry nurse. I just thought … animal therapy … might help …’

Winnie wades in and, in one fell swoop, gathers up both the snapping dog and the murderous hamster with the insect still in its mouth, throws them all into the bag and shuts it quickly.

‘Now tek it, you dyam heediat – and go!’

Jo exits hastily, carrying the gladiatorial arena of a handbag, which is thrumming with murderous activity. She would have some difficult news this evening for Betty or her granddaughter.

Or both.

Saturday 8pm

Cat is concentrating on Silvia’s face. She was furious to discover a couple of scratches there when she arrived this evening, and when she heard the farcical story of stupid Jo and her stupid neighbour’s stupid dog, she could hardly believe what had been allowed to happen. In a hospital ITU! She had stern words with the nurses, who were adamant that they cannot control visitors’ errant behaviour and that despite Cat’s pleas they didn’t want to bar Jo from coming since she is, after all, Silvia’s CLOSEST RELATIVE.

That did not please Cat. Not at all.

She is now painstakingly trying to apply the delicate drawn-on eyebrows exactly as Silvia does them. It’s impossible. Silvia has been doing it for years, she is expert. It’s a matter of the slightest flick of the wrist and such a light touch. Cat is never never going to get it right for one simple reason. Although she
is using the very pencil Silvia uses, it is blunt. Silvia never allows it to go blunt, because then, each hair is too thick. The secret to this trick is subtlety, artifice.

Cat is an heroic keeper of secrets, but full-strength and enduring pretence is not her strong suit. More’s the pity. If only she could hide her feelings and her temper better, she might have succeeded in many areas of her life where her pathological need to express herself has landed her in plenty of trouble. Cat can deal with almost anything in life. Except rejection or injustice. When she is confronted with either of those, she is automatically propelled into a response. Cat’s bonnet is a virtual hive of bees.

Silvia often says to her, ‘Let it go, Cat.’

Despite knowing full well that Silvia is usually right, Cat just cannot ‘let it go’. And the one thing Cat is definitely
not
going to let go presently, is Silvia. Silvia has changed everything. Since Cat has known her, she has become the centre of Cat’s world, and Cat is feeling severely untethered with Silvia in this state. She is trying to hold it together, but in reality, Catherine O’Brien is screaming inside.

She is lost without her Silly.

The eyebrows are dreadful, Silvia looks like an unsuccessful cross-dresser. They are too heavy and, frankly, wonky. Cat decides unwisely to attempt a lip line too, and some coral lipstick, but again her unfamiliarity with make-up doesn’t help, and the unsatisfactory result looks nothing like it does when
Silvia does it. She’s even
watched
Silvia do it, so why is it so hard to copy?

Some of Cat’s happiest moments with Silvia have been sprawled on the bed whilst Silvia sits at her dressing table painting on her dayface and primping her gorgeous red hair. That’s when they are both relaxed, when Silly is at her most unguarded and when they yap away and share all their secrets. This is when Cat gets to know the real Silvia, the one with doubts and fears like everyone else, rather than the somewhat fearsome figure her reputation would suggest. True, that is also a side of Silvia, but it’s not the whole picture. Cat likes to think she is one of the very few, perhaps the only one who knows Silvia – the full story. Silvia is seen by everyone as an assured person, but Cat knows that by being steadily, relentlessly pushy, she has eroded some of Silvia’s confident veneer, and inveigled her way into her very core.

At the centre of Silvia, there is Cat.

One lodges within the other. Feeding.

Cat finishes the lips. Silvia looks like a latter-day Lucille Ball. The outer line is too heavy and Cat has over-emphasized the bow, making the philtrum seem freakishly small and the lips seem oddly tall, rather than full. Completely wrong. Cat has no idea how to correct it, so she leaves it, reassuring herself that Silvia would prefer some,
any
make-up, to none.

Then Cat moves to the bottom of the bed and, very carefully,
she untucks the neat hospital corners and unpeels the bedding back from the bottom, revealing Silvia’s feet.

‘There, darlin’, you hate your feet being trapped in the bottom of the bed, doncha? Too hot, too tight. You hate that. Let your feet breathe. Much better.’

Cat takes the expensive moisturizer out of Silvia’s familiar washbag, positions her chair at the bottom of the bed, and squeezes the fresh grapefruit and mint cream into her hands. She lays her cool creamy hands on Silvia’s hot feet, and alternately, she kneads away at them, letting the moisture sink in. She puts her fingers through the toes and rubs them back and forth. Cat is starting to relax. She hopes Silvia is too, wherever she is …