I knew she could read my lips if I was facing her. I turned towards her on the pillow and said clearly, gazing into her eyes, ‘Please cut my head off.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Mary Kinnaird said, and kissed me. ‘I don’t think anyone but me knows you’re here! The ward sister was rather run off her feet when I came in, and I haven’t had a chance to explain to her who you are. You were brought in here to the hospital two days ago by a family of travelling tinker folk, and they didn’t know who you are, either. Everyone thought you were one of them! There was a story about it on the front page of the Perth Mercury – “Tinker Lass Left for Dead on Riverbank”! Why aren’t your people worried about you?’
‘I came home early without telling them … I’m not supposed to get here till Saturday. Two days, you said? It’s Friday?’
‘Saturday. The tinkers kept you with them overnight when they found you. They brought you here the next day.’
‘Saturday!’ I gasped in disbelief.
I’d been unconscious since Wednesday.
It was the most tremendous thing that had ever happened to me.
‘But how did you know the person in the Mercury was me?’
‘Of course you’d left me a note, darling. Only I didn’t find it till this morning. The library’s shut all day on Wednesdays, so I can get the messages in the morning before early closing in the village, and I was out when you came in. And then when I found your note I guessed that the girl left unconscious on the riverbank might be you, and I was dreadfully worried – especially as it was a lad that found you, lying at the edge of Inchfort Field with a great dunt on your head. Did he … did he do something to you, darling?’
‘What kind of something?’
‘Oh, well … anything. You know. Any thing.’
I was still too dazed to be alarmed at this subtle innuendo, though obviously I’d nearly had my head smashed in. Surely not by the same person who said he’d found me unconscious? Who’d be stupid enough to ambush someone and then deliver her to the hospital?
I began to take an inventory of my working parts as Mary spoke. Impossible to move my head without being sick. Crikey! Did someone actually hit me, or did I somehow crack my skull on the slab of rock I’d been sitting on? My tongue caught on the jagged edge of a tooth – it was chipped. I poked gingerly at the snaggly enamel with a fingertip, then moved my hand so my friend could see my mouth shape these words:
‘Oh, Mary! Do I look like a hag?’
She answered a little briskly, ‘You’re quite as lovely as ever.’
It was probably the most thoughtless thing I’d ever said to her.
I wished I’d never woken up. I wished I could start all over again and never have let her see vain, coquettish Julie whose first thought in the world is always for the way people see her. Mary Kinnaird lives like a hermit most of the time because people who don’t treat her like a cretin are scared of her. She has the kindest face in the world but it is not a face like everyone else’s.
When you say something that hurtful it only draws attention to it if you try to take it back. So I didn’t. I reached further up my head to explore the bump and the bandages, and discovered what was left of my hair.
I am ashamed to put down here what happened next, but I shall, as a sort of penance for being so utterly shallow.
‘Oh, Mary, how could you! “Quite as lovely as ever.” Oh, what happened? Who did this to me – why?’
I sobbed pitiably. You could say like a three-year-old, except that I would not have howled about my hair when I was three.
It was all gone.
I could feel the different lengths all around my head – much shorter near the great big bump than on the sides. I think the doctor sawed it off tidily at the back of my head first, to get at the wound, and then that – that witch of a nurse took the rest off to even it up.
‘What will everyone say when I go back to school?’ I wailed. ‘That cat Nancy Brooke will laugh her head off. And just when I’m finally old enough to wear it up for dances – and my sixteenth birthday coming …’
Well, I am embarrassed. But that is what I said, and more besides.
‘Darling, don’t cry over your hair, for goodness’ sake,’ Mary scolded. ‘That’s not the brave lassie I know at all!’
Her voice was warmer now. I think she must have attributed my excess of vanity to the dunt on my head, because she hastened on to more important things.
‘Now, I’ll say it again, because I’m afraid you’re a bit woozy – you said your people are expecting you back today, but they’ve no idea you’re here, so I must tell them now. I suppose I should have rung someone before I came to see if it was really you, but the papers this morning said you hadn’t woken up yet and I thought, if it was you, it was more important someone should be with you when you did wake up …’ She trailed off.
I think it is lack of company in general that makes her so loquacious with people she trusts. Just now it left me rather breathless with emotion and confusion.
‘Anyway I must go and tell your lady mother!’ she finished with great purpose.
‘Please warn my mother’s companion Solange about my hair,’ I said selflessly. ‘She was my nanny and she will be just as upset as I am.’
Mary Kinnaird got up and hurried off back to Strathfearn.
I managed to roll over on my side and was able to get a better view of the rest of the ward. The explosive headache began to subside and I grew increasingly aware that my mouth felt like it was full of sandpaper. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for three days – apparently I’d been given fluid injections while I was unconscious, but I was desperate for a glass of water. I had no idea how to get anyone’s attention, and I thought I could help myself to a drink from the jug on the trolley at the end of the bed next to mine.
Gravity helped me to topple out of my own bed. They had dressed me in a hospital gown that felt like it was made out of newspaper, tied at the neck and waist and otherwise completely open to the elements. It did not cover my backside as I crawled to the trolley.
It all took a lot longer than I expected it to, and when I got there I couldn’t stand up or lift the jug.
Defeated, I crawled indecently back to my own bed – getting into it was like scaling Mont Blanc. All the exercise combined to set upon my skewed equilibrium as if I were at sea in a Tay coble in a tempest. I had to stop and close my eyes and take some deep breaths before I attempted the battle to get back under the covers.
I heard somebody say, ‘Dirty wee besom. You saw that? Bold as brass. Asking for trouble.’
And a voice that answered, ‘That’s their kind. No modesty at all.’
I seem to be good at asking for trouble.
I was not so successful at asking for water. Although I finally had the attention of the nurse on the ward and spoke politely, she downright refused me.