by Kim Nash
* * *
When I got back to the flat that evening, I rang and spoke to Hayley, who was the activities co-ordinator at Meadow View.
‘Oh Madison, I’m so pleased to hear from you. We can’t wait for your performance on Saturday. Now, I believe you’ll be singing songs from across the decades for our residents. They are going to love that so much. Is it ok if we aim for two half-hour slots and see how it goes, with a cup of tea and a bit of cake in the middle? That way it’s not too much for the older residents.’
My heart sank; I haven’t sung in public since I left the choir all those years ago. I know she said it would only be to a few people, but what on earth was Beth making me do? She really was pushing me way outside of my comfort zones just lately. She knew that I got myself into such a tizzy years ago, before I went on a stage to sing at school, mainly because they used to give me the solo parts, whereas when I was in the choir, I was just one amongst many people who just loved to sing. I knew there probably wouldn’t be a stage at this venue, but it was still a massive thing for me to do. I’d be drinking a whole bucketful of Rescue Remedy before I stepped foot inside that care home on Saturday.
‘Just let me know if you’d like the piano at all, or whether you’ll just bring an amplifier and CD player with you, if you would, please, so we can organise it all for you. You’ll be singing in the day room and there will be a few of the residents and the staff.’
‘The piano would be fabulous, thank you. And I’ll bring some backing tracks with me to play on my laptop too. I’ll judge it on the day and see what they prefer and I’ll alternate between the two if that’s ok.’
That also gave me a bit of breathing space to see whether I was more comfortable with one more than the other but I didn’t share that. I’d checked out some Facebook groups and had been recommended that I bought a cheap amp and microphone and as someone was selling one for a great price, I snapped it up. If it sold that easily, I’m sure I could put it back out for sale if I didn’t use it again.
‘Perfect, well in that case, we’ll see you on Saturday. Thank you again. We’re very much looking forward to it.’
She rang off. I was glad. She could probably have heard my heart thumping from where she was.
I popped the CD into the CD player in my lounge. The dulcet melody of ‘Moon River’ started to play and a smile spread across my face as my heart warmed and memories of times gone by came flooding back. I remembered Mum singing this when I was not much older than five or six. I adored the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s still one of my favourite films, although I haven’t watched it for years.
Mum taught me everything I knew about music when we used to sing around the piano in the dining room. She had a beautiful voice and as a child I was fascinated by the way her fingers danced across the keyboard. Thank goodness I inherited her musical genes and also became a competent pianist. I used to wonder from time to time about my father and whether he was musical too. It was strange – I hadn’t thought about him for years but he seemed to be on my mind a lot lately.
It had been ages though since I’d played properly. I wondered if she still played. I hadn’t heard her for years. If not, perhaps she’d loan me her old piano so I could start to play again. Although I had no idea how we’d get it up the stairs of the flat. Like the singing, I only really gave up playing when I became busy with work and hadn’t got time to be at Mum’s. And busy was something that I absolutely was not, these days. Perhaps that was why I’d been thinking about my father a lot too.
Flicking through the backing tracks, I noticed ‘Que Sera Sera’ by Doris Day, ‘Getting to Know You’ from The King and I, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music. Some of my favourite songs that we used to sing in the school choir, that Beth had clearly picked to remind me of a time when music was everything to me. Thinking about them now brought back such fond memories. There were a few that I could probably still play but I’d have to rehearse first. I counted the days till Saturday. I needed to pull my finger out and start practising.
Beth’s note said that she’d picked some songs to start me off, but that it was up to me to find some more so I set the rest of that afternoon’s task, as I had nothing else planned, to search for more tracks that everyone would know and hopefully get them foot-tapping and singing along to. Now I’d listened to the tracks, and sung along to the ones I knew the words to, I was actually starting to look forward to this project. I found it bizarre that I could remember the words to songs I knew from years ago, but not what I had for tea yesterday.
Uncle Tom had given me the afternoon off, as Russell was working, so I spent a wonderful afternoon listening to songs and singing along, trying to pick some that I knew that people would know and might like to sing along to, before deciding on ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, ‘Over The Rainbow’, ‘When You’re Smiling’ and ‘Unforgettable’. I’d see how long they took me to play out before I decided whether I needed any more. The more I played and listened to these songs, the more I was actually starting to look forward to my afternoon at the care home and not feeling quite so anxious after all.
* * *
The rest of the weekend and the following week flew by. I was helping out at Growlers as often as they needed me; we’d worked out a nice little rota so everyone knew what they were doing and when. When I was there, lovely little Baxter followed me around like a shadow. I was still amazed that none of my old friends from work had contacted me. Clearly I’d been totally forgotten. The evenings were full of me browsing the internet for houses to rent and permanent jobs, but there was nothing that was really pulling on me at all.
I popped over to Mum’s as often as I could in that week too, and threw myself into rehearsing with gusto, and adding more songs to the play list, tinkling away on her piano that needed a good tuning, as it hadn’t been played for years. Mum sang along to most of the songs as she pottered around in the house looking as pleased as punch with herself. ‘I love having you around, darling, it feels like the heart and soul is back in our home when you are here. Do you know, I’m sure there are a load of music books up in the loft. There might be something you can use.’
‘Ah that would be fab Mum, can I go up and have a look?’
‘Of course! I’ll go and make a start on some dinner while you pull the loft ladder down and have a look around.’
I crawled through the hatch and made my way on my knees over to a big old chest in the corner, where Mum said she thought the books were, making sure that I only knelt on the joists. I’d always had a fear of lofts and falling through since Uncle Tom put his foot through their ceiling once. Aunty Jen was fuming at him for weeks because they’d had to have the whole of the bedroom ceiling re-plastered because he’d tried to patch it up and it never looked the same as the rest of it. She was probably fuming even more because Beth and I were rolling around the floor laughing hysterically at the sight of one of Uncle Tom’s legs dangling precariously from a hole in the ceiling at the time and she shouted at us to stop being silly, which just made us laugh even more.
As I reached the chest, my sleeve caught on the edge of a flat, rusty tin box around the size of a shoebox that I’d never seen before. Curiosity got the better of me and I tried to open it to have a nosey at what was inside but it was locked. By this point Mum was standing at the foot of the ladder asking me if I’d found anything.
‘Mum, what’s this red tin box up here? I’ve never seen it before. It’s locked, though.’
‘Mmm, what’s that, Madison? I can’t hear you very well.’ Stalling for time was the equivalent of Mum’s poker face when she didn’t want to answer a question. How strange, I thought, giving the box a shake to see if I could work out what was inside.
‘There’s a red tin box, sounds like it’s got papers and some other bits and bobs rattling around in it. I’ve tried to open it but it’s locked. Any ideas?’
‘I’m not sure, love. I’ll have a think,’ she said, brushing my
question away in a voice which was an octave higher than normal. She didn’t seem to have any problem hearing me that time, even though I hadn’t spoken any louder.
Intuition was telling me she wasn’t being totally honest with me here. I ran my fingers across the top of the box, making the trail of a question mark in the dust, wondering what Mum wasn’t telling me. I was sure she had her reasons for wanting to keep it to herself, so I placed it to one side carefully, grabbed the books, and passed them down to Mum through the loft hatch, hoping I’d remember to ask Mum about the box later.
* * *
Stuffed after one of Mum’s fabulous pie and mash dinners, we were sitting in front of the fireplace. The time felt perfect, so I asked Mum the question I hadn’t asked her for years.
‘Mum, will you tell me about Dad, please?’
Her shoulders visibly tensed but then relaxed and she exhaled a deep breath. She patted the space next to her on the settee. I moved from the fireside chair across the room and she picked up my hand and kissed it. She held it tight, as she started her story.
‘I probably owe you an apology first,’ she choked back tears. ‘You have asked me many times over the years and I’ve never really answered you. I’ve always found it difficult to talk about. I’ve felt so guilty that you had to grow up without your father around and because I was trying so hard to be your mum and your dad, I was always too busy to explain and too embarrassed. Then it seemed too late and I didn’t know when would be the right time to bring it up… and then you stopped asking. I suppose at that point I felt relieved because I didn’t have to go through it all again.
‘Your father was a lovely man. I met him at work, and I fell in love with him the moment I clapped eyes on him. He was tall and dark-haired, very handsome, with big brown eyes that I just lost myself in. He worked in the accounts office and kept himself very much to himself. No one really knew much about him and I worked on the reception so we didn’t really mix at work. He was five years older than me and seemed so much more mature and, I suppose, sophisticated. We became really good friends at first, and used to meet up at break times in the canteen at work, but when he asked me out to dinner I was so excited. I really liked him. We got on like a house on fire and he made me feel a million dollars, showering me with gifts and affection over the next few weeks. He was perfect and charming and wonderful and we were so in love.
‘After three months of seeing him, I found out I was pregnant. I’ll skip over the how it happened bit. I’m sure you don’t need to know every detail. I had arranged to see him that evening and was going to tell him. I was scared stiff, because I was only twenty-three, and because we’d not been together for long, but once I’d got used to the idea, I was so excited. We were going to be a family! But when I told him his face dropped, and he kept thumping his head with the balls of his fists, saying “No! No!” I didn’t understand. He got really angry with me. It was then that he dropped his bombshell.
‘He was married. He told me that his wife had ME and suffered from severe depression, so he couldn’t possibly ever consider leaving her. He said that he loved what we’d had together but that there was no way we could bring a child into the world together. He said that we had no alternative but to “deal with it”.’
Tears streamed down Mum’s cheeks as she relived what must have been such an emotional time for her even though she was recalling something that happened such a long time ago. I put my arm around her shoulders and she leaned into me.
‘I’m sorry that you have to learn this, darling. I thought that he was the love of my life and was devastated at this turn of events. But then the moment you were born, I knew that you were the love of my life and not him.
He never came back into work after that night. At first they said he was off sick, but then I was told that he’d left the company, a week after I’d told him about the pregnancy.’
‘Did you ever contact him again?’ I had so many questions I’d been wanting to ask for so long but didn’t want to push her too hard yet I was so very angry with someone I’d never met, that he’d hurt her in this way. How dare he be carrying on with Mum when he was already married?
‘I sent him a letter when you were born with a photograph of you. I took his address from the files at work before I left to have you. I know it was wrong of me to take confidential information, but I had to try to make him realise what he was giving up. If not for me, then for you. I never heard anything and that knocked me back more and more. It was such a tough time for me; I was so happy to have this little miracle growing inside of me, but so very sad that he’d left me and I was having to do it on my own. I bumped into someone who I used to work with years later, and nonchalantly asked whether they’d ever heard what happened to him, and was told that he and his wife had moved out of the area and that was that. How on earth could I have been so stupid as to think that I meant more to him? But it was clear that I was never enough for him, and therefore you and I were on our own in life. He obviously wasn’t the man I thought he was.’ She stroked my cheek. ‘I’m so sorry, and I’m so sorry that we’ve never had this conversation before.’
‘I’m sorry that I came between you and him, Mum.’
‘Darling, you have absolutely nothing to be sorry for. From the moment I knew you were in my tummy, you were all I ever needed. You were my everything. I knew that you and I could get through anything and we did alright, didn’t we? I know that you didn’t have everything that other children had, but Uncle Tom and Aunty Jen were so very good to us. I owe them both such gratitude. If it wasn’t for them, looking after you so much, I wouldn’t have been able to work, and earn money for the things we did have. And your childhood wasn’t so bad, was it?’
My mum was the most amazing mum ever. When I started at nursery and at primary school, she spoke to them in advance and made sure that when there were occasions when fathers were spoken about, that I wasn’t made to feel like an outcast. I didn’t understand when I was a toddler why all the other children had daddies and I didn’t, but Mum told me that I was special and didn’t need a daddy and that families came in all shapes and sizes and ours was just a small but perfectly formed family of two. These days, there were so many versions of families – children with two mums, or two dads, some with foster parents, some with step-parents and siblings – that now, no one would bat an eyelid about a single-parent family, but in those days, things were very different and it would have been frowned upon.
‘It was great, Mum, thank you. I’ve not always shown you how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and how hard you worked. I suppose as a child you just take for granted that that’s what your parents do. But thank you, Mum. I really do love you, and I’m loving spending time with you, learning to get to know you all over again.’
‘I know you’ll have lots more things to ask me, but do you mind if we leave it there for now, darling? Let’s talk again soon and I might even be able to lay my hands on a photograph of your father if you’d like to see it.’
My mind wandered back to the red tin box that I’d stumbled across in the attic and I wondered whether it held the answers to a million questions that I’d had stored up for years.
Mum smiled at me through shimmering eyes and I’d never loved her more than I did right now. It was only when I was driving home that night that I realized that I still didn’t even know my father’s name.
* * *
Saturday soon came round. Parking up outside the palatial-looking building, which looked more like a hotel than a care home, and taking a deep breath and a huge swig of Rescue Remedy for my nerves, I headed for the double front doors with my arms full of kit. Walking in backwards, pushing open the first set of doors with my considerable arse, which was getting increasingly lardy now I wasn’t working and was eating all the time, I pressed the bell with my nose and announced my arrival on the door system. God I hoped they didn’t have cameras and weren’t all watching me on CCTV. They’d wonder who on earth was visiting them.
Hayley came to meet me and helped me with my baggage, and showed me through to the communal area, where they’d very kindly arranged for a beautiful old upright piano to be wheeled through for me to play, alongside a table where I could put my computer, amplifier and microphone. With fumbling fingers, I set everything up and decided to take a moment to see how the piano sounded so I could decide which I’d rather do.
The sweet, mellow tone of the piano was just beautiful and I knew that I had to do as much as I could on that, so I bent the microphone accordingly so that I could still be heard. I didn’t want it so loud that I might blow up some hearing aids but did want the hard-of-hearing to be able to enjoy the words and music too. I played the intro to ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ and when I stopped, there was a round of applause and I noticed that there were three care workers standing in the doorway, listening. A little embarrassed, I began tidying up my music and fumbling in my handbag. Hayley came over and said that she’d heard me from her office and couldn’t wait for me to get started.
My audience was arriving and there were lots of people. Shit! Lots of people! Was I really doing this? Beth Millington, I muttered under my breath, *If this doesn’t work out, I might have to kill you. *
The next time I looked up, over sixty faces were staring at me, and you could have heard a pin drop. Hayley introduced me as that afternoon’s entertainment and explained that I’d sing for a while, then we’d have tea and cake and then I’d sing for a little bit longer, then they could all go and have a lie down to recover. There were a few polite laughs around the room but I thought for the first time that they could be quite a tough audience. This was so bloody scary. How on earth had I managed to let Beth talk me into this?