Page 65 of The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up
The joy I feel at the thought of her finally leaving Mick is like a wave. I bask in it for a moment, but then I catch hold of something else Dee said. That she didn’t tell anyone where she was going. ‘Me,’ I say. ‘She told me.’ I don’t know where thiscame from but I’m sure it’s true. I try to concentrate, try to think of a place, but nothing feels right.
‘If she told you, you kept it from pretty much everyone,’ Dee says. ‘Even me. Which is possible, of course. Look, Shell, this is a lot. Try to just let it sink in for a bit, okay?’
When we end the call, I sit still for a few long minutes, getting more and more angry. And when I feel like I’ll explode with it, I throw back the covers and get out of bed, and I go in search of Mick. At the main entrance to the hospital, there’s a reception desk with a bored-looking woman sitting behind it.
‘Where could I find a porter?’ I ask her.
She eyes me, in my gown. ‘The nurses will call one if you need to be taken somewhere.’
‘I don’t need to be taken somewhere,’ I say. ‘I’m just looking for the porters’ room. Lodge, is it called? Where they wait in between moving people around.’
She can see the rage in me, and I wonder whether she’s going to do something about it. Call security, ask for me to be taken back to where I belong. But maybe she knows Mick, or maybe she just doesn’t care, because she points down a long corridor and tells me it’s a room near the end on the left. And I thank her, and go.
When I knock, it’s him who comes to the door, and he looks so shocked to see me that I get one big push in before he can react. I put my hands out against his barrel chest, and I shove him as hard as I can. He doesn’t fall, but he stumbles. Someone else in the room jeers, then gets up to see if he needs to intervene.
‘You fucking bastard,’ I say.
Mick smirks, and it makes me want to kill him. All the anger I feel about David is mixed in with the anger I feel about him, and there’s so much of it spilling over. I think about Fern, running away from the man who hurt her. About Mum, going into hiding.About me, unable to let go of the memories of being pushed and hit and broken.
His friend is a wiry, tall man with a shaved head. ‘Come on now,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here but let’s not resort to getting physical with each other.’
I laugh then, and it sounds bitter and cold. ‘This man,’ I say, gesturing with my head towards Mick, ‘this shitty excuse for a man ruined my mum’s life.’
The wiry man opens and closes his mouth, clearly unsure what to say.
‘Domestic,’ Mick tells him. ‘I’ll deal with it.’ He steps out of the room and pulls the door closed behind him, and I see what he’s doing. He’s making sure there are witnesses. Something Mum and I were never able to do.
‘I haven’t seen your mother for about two years,’ he says, keeping his voice low.
‘Because she’s uprooted her life to hide from you!’
He folds his arms across his chest, smirks again. ‘Is that what she’s told you?’
‘She hasn’t told me anything, because I don’t know where she is. And that’s down to you, and I despise you, Mick. I was scared of you when I was growing up, because you were big and powerful. But I’m not scared of you now. Are you beating up someone else and their kid? How do you live like that? How do you sleep?’
‘That’s enough,’ he says.
It isn’t. It isn’t enough, but he goes back into the room and leaves me standing on my own in the corridor, my fists clenched so tight there are little crescent moon shapes on my palms.
Matt comes in at lunchtime, and I’m so relieved to see him that I almost burst into tears. He puts a plastic cup of tea and a KitKat down on my tray, gives me a smile that’s so genuine and simple.
‘I’ve had a shitty day,’ I say.
He looks at his watch. ‘Already?’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
I shake my head. But even as I do it, I’m thinking that part of me does. It’s all too raw and recent at the moment, but at some point I do want to talk about this with him, because I feel like I can trust him.
‘I want to know why you lied to me,’ I say. ‘I’m not angry any more. I just want to understand.’
Matt sighs and sits down, sipping his own drink. ‘Sometimes I help out at a women’s refuge,’ he says. ‘And I hadn’t mentioned it, so I just pretended I’d been at the restaurant. It was stupid. I guess I was trying to simplify things.’
‘A women’s refuge? For, like, women who are victims of domestic abuse?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
