MONO ISSUE 2 - Flipbook - Page 76
is how she had explained it to her doctor, who listened with cynical brow as his great
bushy moustache slept, like a squirrel above his lip. He entered the mysterious cavity
with a strange object. She felt envious that he was free to spectate upon the great
flapping creature which had been squatting in her head for some months now, and yet
he didn’t seem in the least excited.
‘I expect the butterfly is nocturnal, isn’t he?’
‘She’s a she!’
‘So, what can you give her, doctor?’
And slamming his brief case shut (although Marie might concede that this was an
embellishment in her recollection) he delivered his verdict, ‘There is nothing in your
daughter’s ear, Mrs Moon.’
‘So, you think my daughter is making it up?’
‘Children will do anything for some time off school, these days.’
‘These days? So, truants didn’t exist in your grand old day? And F-Y-I, my daughter is
not a malingerer.’
‘Does she have siblings? Younger? Well, it all makes sense, jealous child syndrome.
She’s craving attention.’ Her mother hauled her into the car and slammed her foot on the
engine. As they hurtled down the road, Marie asked her mother, whose cheeks were
flushed with indignance, ‘What’s a malingerer mummy?’
‘Someone who pretends to be unwell to get off school.’
‘But I’m not unwell, am I?’
‘No, darling, you and your butterfly are perfectly fine. You ignore him, now.’
She told Marie that she would treat her to ice-cream, any flavour she liked. She
nodded, thinking afterwards, that they only got ice cream after a booster jab or when she
had tonsillitis.
‘This is your daughter,’ an ensemble of faceless people in scrubs announced
overzealously like west end stage actors. All that Marie could fixate upon was the knot
on the baby’s body. That inflamed protuberant knot, glistening and spectacular; her first
scar. ‘It was a close call,’ the midwife was saying. ‘The cord was wrapped three times
around the littlun’s neck.’ She leaned over Marie with raised eyebrows, her skin an illfitted suit over collar bones that appeared to jut accusingly towards the dewy-eyed
mother.
Marie dozed off when a young nurse appeared. She was so close that Marie could
smell her apricot skin, ever so slightly sweet and coated in a fine white down. Her face
was almost entirely obscured by a surgical mask, except for a set of spidery eyelashes,
which flickered over the fabric as she delivered Marie a small bundle wrapped delicately
in blue towel. ‘Would you like to keep it?’ she asked feverishly, in soft Bavarian tones,
before slipping out noiselessly. Marie tucked the gift beneath her pillow like a tangible
dream. 'Mein schatz’ she whispered, ‘My treasure.’ As she began to drift off to sleep, she
felt a beating in her ears again, as her butterfly began to flap her wings.
When Marie awoke, a thin layer of ice coated the fixtures outside. The sun suffused
the room, casting shapes over the duvet, and one across her forehead, in whose warmth
she had been basking in her sleep. She felt overjoyed to find Elliot sitting beside her
doing his usual; reading the New Scientist with a flask of coffee. ‘I had the strangest
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