Faith - Lesley Pearse [177]
There was the usual hubbub on the wing: women shouting to one another through the windows, someone throwing a tantrum and kicking at her cell door, a drone of radios tuned to various different stations.
She and the other women often talked about what they missed most from their former lives. It wasn’t always the obvious things – their children, husbands or boyfriends, that was understood – but the more trivial things like a favourite snack, walking a dog, or lying in a bubble bath.
For Laura it was always silence she missed, and that seemed so bizarre when for almost all of her life she’d lived in busy, noisy places and never even noticed it. Yet she could pinpoint the moment when she first came to value silence and to realize it had great healing properties.
It was June 1982, a year after Barney’s death, and she was in Italy working in a small hotel owned by Carlo and Janet Ferratti.
Frank and Lena had got to know Carlo when he worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Muswell Hill and Lena had introduced him to Janet, one of her closest friends. They eventually got married and Carlo took Janet back to Italy where they opened their own hotel in Sorrento. But they often came back to England to see Janet’s family, and Lena and Frank. It was on one of these visits in the spring that Lena asked them if they would give Laura a job for the summer.
Barney’s death the year before had almost destroyed Laura. After the first couple of months of shock, self-blame and terrible grief, she wilted into a sort of zombie-like state where she didn’t eat, sleep or communicate with anyone. On several occasions she was picked up by the police wandering the streets of Edinburgh in the middle of the night. She was even taken into a psychiatric ward twice because it was feared she was suicidal.
During the autumn of that year Lena and Frank drove up to Scotland to see their daughters, and prompted by Jackie they visited Laura. Lena was to say much later that she was horrified by Laura’s appearance: her weight had dropped to six stone, her hair was falling out and she had several untreated boils on her neck. But she found it even more alarming that Laura was incessantly cleaning her flat, scrubbing and polishing so much that her hands were raw. Lena felt that unless she intervened, Laura would end up being sectioned.
She and Frank decided to take her back with them to London, and they contacted her landlord and told him she was vacating the flat. It was left to Charles and Belle to pack up what belongings they thought she might want in the future, and take them to their house to store for her.
Laura could remember very little of that period. She did recollect sometimes feeling mystified about how she ended up in Duke’s Avenue, in Jackie’s old bedroom, but it was only much later, when the medication she was given by Lena’s doctor began to work, that she understood how deranged she had become.
By the following January, seven months after Barney’s death, thanks to Lena’s care, her health had improved, and she felt she must get a job.
There was no question of her returning to promotional or even shop work, for she couldn’t have coped with talking to people, so she got an office-cleaning job. It suited her very well, for she worked alone in the early hours of the morning, and again in the evenings, and spent the rest of the day reading and sleeping. She felt a sort of strange irony that she was doing what her mother had once done, yet she didn’t feel it was demeaning in any way, in fact she was glad to be doing it, for it made her feel less of a parasite.
It was in May that Lena suggested she went to work in Italy. Laura didn’t want to go anywhere, but agreed because she knew Lena meant well by arranging it and she also felt that she was in danger of outstaying her welcome with her. She was terrified on the flight to Naples because she was