“Yikes! You’re a mess, kid. Red eyes, swollen lids, puffy cheek. Let’s get a cold compress going. Turn on the tap. If she sees you like this, you’ll only catch it again.”
“I know.”
Adele could wake up at any moment, blast open the bathroom door, and see the damage for herself.
You played with that during the night to get it to swell up, didn’t you? Don’t think I don’t know your tricks, missy, trying to get attention. You didn’t look like that last night.
Cathy decided to concentrate on her swollen eyes. She made a cold compress out of a wet facecloth and held it against one eye. Without the swelling, her eyes wouldn’t look too bad. They’d be only slightly bloodshot and inflamed, and their appearance could easily be passed off as irritation from hay fever.
“That’s good,” Angela said. “Keep it there for a few minutes. What else needs doing?”
Cathy had brought along last night’s damp underwear, hiding them beneath her pyjamas. Now, with one hand, she held them under the running tap, making certain that not a trace of stain or smell of urine remained. When she had wrung them out, she tucked them back inside her pyjamas.
The lump under her cheek was less swollen than it had been last night, but it was still quite visible. She doubted whether a cold compress would have much effect on it but nevertheless reached into the cupboard for another facecloth. Thankfully, the bulk of the swelling rose up at the outer edge of the cheekbone rather than in the dead centre of her face. She shook her head gently, letting her hair fall experimentally over that part of her face. She twisted and turned, examining herself from every possible angle, finally concluding that the injury could be mostly hidden behind an artfully arranged hank of hair.
While she dampened the cloth, she slowly pulled open a vanity drawer and silently withdrew a roll of adhesive tape and the cuticle scissors. She repaired her uprooted nail, carefully holding the roll of tape and the scissors over the carpet in case she dropped either one. The job completed, she reversed her actions, lowering the tools into the drawer, letting go only after each was resting securely on the drawer bottom. After slowly closing the drawer, she lay down on the blue carpeted floor and covered her injured cheek with the second cold cloth. Beside her, the tub filled slowly, the tap barely running, another cloth placed beneath the waterfall to dampen the splashing sound.
Lying on the floor reminded her of seeing her mother on the floor a couple of years ago. It was in the middle of an afternoon, and she had caught her mother laughing alone in the upstairs hall. The hem of her apron was tucked into her mouth, and tears were spilling down her face. The sheets from Richard’s bed were piled in a mound in the middle of the hall. When she spotted Cathy, she pulled the apron out of her mouth, threw her head back and cackled, and then slid down the wall to the floor, her legs splaying out across the carpet.
“Oh my dear that’s a funny word,” she said, using the apron to wipe the tears from her cheeks. Cathy had been on her way to her room, but now she hesitated, unsure of what to do. It was so rare for her mother to laugh like this.
Another wave of hysterics seized her mother and she began to tilt to one side, gasping for breath, propping herself up with one arm and holding her other across her jiggling abdomen. Hardly able to speak, she struggled to look up at Cathy.
“Do you know what a penis is?” she asked.
The word “penis” shot from her mouth like the cork from a champagne bottle, and then she slapped the floor with her hand as more hysterical laughter welled up. Cathy stared at her. Adele wiped the corners of her eyes with the apron.
“Isn’t that a funny word, ‘penis’? That’s what it’s called. A penis. A man has a penis.”
Then she rolled over onto all fours and climbed to her feet. “Ah, me. I haven’t laughed that hard in years.”
And that was the end of it. She picked up the bundle of sheets, stepped past Cathy, and headed downstairs.
Then, a day or two later, in a fit of rage, she had taken the screws out of the lock plate on the bathroom door and dug frantically at the wooden frame, gouging pieces of it out until the plate fell to the floor.
“I don’t need you in here behind a lock doing God-knows-what for hours while the rest of us wait to get in,” Adele had shrilled at Cathy.
“Hey. Let’s not fall asleep down there. Hurry up and get in.”
“Right.”
Cathy got up, turned off the water, and slipped into the tub. Only when the tepid water washed over her legs did she redis-cover her injured knee and toes. Seduced by the comforting warm water, she stretched out, immersing everything but her nose. She lay there, peacefully, her hair dark ribbons drifting around her, her weightless arms floating beside her, the steady rasping of her own breathing magnified in her submerged ears. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. Drifting. Warm. Quiet. The sun on her face. She was in California. On a beach. Where Angela lived.
Then a tremor came up through the water from beneath her. The whole tub was vibrating. A truck passing by on the California highway. No. She heard pounding. Footsteps. The bathroom door abruptly jerked open. Adele marched in and wheeled around to face the tub. She was wearing pink pyjamas and a pink bathrobe and her fuzzy red hair was squashed flat on one side.
Cathy shot forward, splashing water over the rim of the tub, and curled herself over her knees.
“It’s no wonder I can’t sleep with you whaling about in here. Did you wash your vagina?”
Adele’s finger jabbed towards an unseen place beneath the water.
“Use lots of soap and get it clean down there.”
Cathy, cowering, trying to fold herself up and disappear, wrapped her arms around her knees and turned her head to the wall.
Adele abruptly turned away from the tub to lean against the bathroom sink and began examining her teeth in the mirror. Her eyes scanned her gums and the vertical crevices between her teeth. In the bright overhead light, the inside of her mouth appeared pink and glossy.
After a moment, she suddenly gagged and had to bow over the sink.
“Dirty, filthy thing probably never brushes,” she said into the sink.
Cathy quickly ran her tongue over her own front teeth, wondering if her mother’s remark was aimed at her.
Rising up to the mirror again, Adele pulled down her lower lip. She gagged a second time and bowed to the sink again. While she hung there, waiting for the waves of nausea to stop, Cathy lunged for a towel on the back of the door. She managed to wrap it around herself while kneeling in the tub, before her mother straightened up.
“My God, some people are pigs,” Adele said, finally rising up out of the sink. “Yuck.”
This time, she dropped her jaw and looked at the gums at the back of her bottom teeth. Her tongue swept over the tooth surfaces. Next, she shot her tongue straight out, examined it quickly, and frowned when she saw that it was white. Disgusted, she retracted it, and then her eyes lost their focus and roamed over the empty space in the mirror just to the right of her head.
“There it is again,” Angela
