The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [41]
“It makes me feel better,” she corrected. “The asthma stays the same. And Dr. White says I mustn’t use it too often. You need stronger and stronger doses.”
“But people don’t die of asthma,” I had said. “Not like drowning, or the plague.”
Standing beside me, Miriam played a scale, first with her left hand, then her right. She had promised she would teach me some songs soon. “Most people don’t die,” she agreed, “but when I can’t breathe it feels as if I’m about to. Sometimes”—she played the scale with both hands—“I even want to. The only hope is that it will get better as I get older, and my lungs grow bigger.”
“So you have to eat lots,” I had said, “and grow quickly.” But as she limped across the hall, Miriam had seemed not bigger but smaller, only an inch or two taller than me, and as thin as my mop.
That night I stole out of bed and down the stairs. I was tiptoeing past the bathroom when a figure in striped pyjamas loomed over me. “You’re not sneaking around, are you?” said Ross.
I gasped and swerved into the bathroom. She stood in the doorway. “We wouldn’t want you trying to see your fancy friend.”
I managed to pee, washed my hands, and pushed past her, up the narrow stairs. Back in bed I listened as hard as I could. Although I knew how Findlayson whimpered, doglike, in her sleep, and how Gilchrist cried out as if she were being attacked, I could not identify Ross’s night sounds. Her bed was on the far side of the room, and I was never sure if that grunting snore was hers. Or that melancholy sigh? How was it, I wondered, that night after night I sent messages to Miriam and was never sure they reached her but that Ross seemed to read my mind effortlessly? Or perhaps, I thought, she was simply paying attention. A few weeks ago, before the girls attacked me, she had remarked that Mr. Milne always parked squint after having a beer. “You’d make a good policeman,” I had said. Her face had lit up. “That would be grand,” she exclaimed. “Do you think they’d have me?” “No,” I’d said. “You have to be good at sums.”
Now I counted a hundred sheep, then two hundred. Just as I was about to try again, someone moaned, “No. No cabbage.” Reluctantly I lay back down. I pictured the bodies piling on top of me, and Ross urging them on.
The following afternoon I was dusting the window-sills in the front hall when the door flew open and a man in an old-fashioned brown suit strode in, bringing with him a faint, familiar smell I couldn’t name. His momentum carried him halfway across the hall before he remembered the door and turned back to close it, leaving a double trail of muddy footprints. As he retraced his steps, I recognised the tang of manure. Near the sofa he stopped to remove his hat and looked around. His hair receded in an emphatic W and his eyes were shadowed. After his noisy entrance he seemed uncertain what to do next. Then he spotted me.
“Girl,” he boomed, “fetch Miss Bryant.”
I dropped my duster and hurried to the corridor where Ross was wielding the floor polisher. I stood in front of her, pointing at the hall, until she turned off the machine and followed me.
“Fetch Miss Bryant,” the man repeated. “I’m here to see my daughter.”
Ross hurried away. While I returned to my dusting, he stationed himself in front of the empty fireplace and surveyed the room, not with the appreciative gaze of most parents but rather as if he were measuring it for a carpet. Between one flick of the duster and the next, it came to me that this was Miriam’s father: the stern man with no use for children. I longed to approach and explain that I was his daughter’s best friend. If only he’d let me come home with her I could nurse her back to health. But even as I moved towards him, the door on the stairs opened.
“Mr. Goodall,” said Miss Bryant. “You got my message.”
Hoping to escape attention, I ran my duster over the wainscoting.
“Yes,” said Mr. Goodall. “I had a bull to see in Hawick. How is she?” His voice, like Mr. Waugh’s, was effortlessly