by Stuart Evers
A laugh and a smile. She looked around and she did not see the rich, or the famous, or the very old. No one as old as her, certainly. Mainly she saw kids lull between tantrums, couples drinking from coffee mugs, truckers eating fries. She took a bottle of water from her bag and drank from it as she watched the silent cars zip along, most of them silver now though once they’d mostly been red.
Two days after the respite, after moving him for a stay at the hospice, gathering up clothes and driving off, Nate over at Carlie’s for the night. Enough time that, if she could face the drive. Now, the coffee cooling and wondering whether this the right thing, whether turning back would be a better use of time. Ray had not wanted her to go; he had given his express reservations.
‘When was the last time you drove that far?’ he’d said in their first phone call.
‘It’s not just the distance, it’s the time.’ On the second.
‘I’d feel better if I drove you. I hate to think of you going all that way on your own.’ The third. Her husband dying, and this the nub of his objections.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked a hotel.’
‘At least call me when you arrive.’
She’d agreed to this, though wondered what he would do if she didn’t call. Send out the search parties, report it to the police. Good luck with that, Raymond.
She finished her coffee and went to the toilets again. Inside, against the whump of the dryers, she tried to remember which cubicle had been scored by Elise. She narrowed the choice to three, then two, then one. She entered the cubicle, closed the door expectantly, perhaps as Elise had once done. The door was unmarked. She put her hands on the door but there was nothing there. The hand dryers roared. She peed, left the cubicle and washed her hands. She avoided her face in the mirror, darted her eyes left and right. As she left the toilets, she thought of the song ‘Stranger on the Shore’, her lips moving but without any sound.
*
There were no crashes and no incidents, just a lowing sun and the radio playing. She drove miles with just one hand on the wheel, overtook HGVs and coaches, indicated at the correct turnoff without even thinking about it. It was a little after midday and she had made good time. Just over two hours with a stop. Through trading estates and housing estates until reaching the hotel.
After check-in, she slept on the single bed, sparked out, utterly exhausted and rinsed. To do the whole thing again tomorrow. Should have taken the train, got taxis; Ray’s suggestion again. Nothing he could say though. Nothing that would change her mind.
‘You’re so stubborn!’ Ray had said.
‘You’ve only just noticed, Ray?’ she said. ‘Really?’
Just a laugh from Ray, caught out and familiar.
She woke and checked the clock, panicked she was late, too late and the whole thing a vainglorious bust. She had enough time, though, just enough. In the mirror she looked like a seventy-year-old woman who had just woken, hair in place, low maintenance. She slipped on her fleece; drank a glass of water. She had an address and in the car typed it into the satnav.
The playing fields were a short drive from the hotel; she wished it further, another two hours away. Preparation time, time enough to set herself, remind herself of what to say, what not to say. No time for that, a roundabout and junction, a left and a right, the woman satnav voice, Sally Satnav, taking her through the turns. At the destination, Sally so happy to have delivered Gwen there, into a rammed car park, cars double lined, blocking each other in.
There were many football pitches, all of them with a game going on. When watching Nate there had been only one, or at the most two; but here there were ten or twenty. Once, she’d seen Nate headbutt an opponent. He’d professed his innocence, escaped censure, but she’d seen it: the leap for the ball, his eyes on the nose of the opponent. She never watched another match, never talked to him about football again. And when later, when everything with Carlie came out, she saw him at that same moment, arms waving wide, appalled that anyone would think he’d done anything wrong.
She walked the pitches, thin netting behind the goals, the bright kits and brighter boots. The teams playing in yellow and blue were too old; those in red and gold too young. Towards the back, there were three pitches, the players the right kind of age, more fans at the touchlines, louder roars from fathers. She looked to the pitches and to the supporters, hoping to spot her, to spot him. She saw Femi first, running up the wing, taking the ball, passing it backwards. As if that were normal, as if that was what he did all the time. Collecting the ball, laying it back to a teammate. She did not know if this were a good thing, but it looked right. It looked like something he should be doing.
There were spectators on both sides of the pitch, those wearing the colours of Femi’s team on the right-hand touchline. Her daughter there. Clutching a paper cup of coffee, watching the game intently. Her daughter, same as in the photographs, older now than she thought herself. Her daughter pointing, her husband laughing, some man beside them screaming at the children, telling them to pull their fingers out of their arseholes.
She walked the touchline, settled behind Anneka. Gwen thought she’d be able to smell her, to know she was in her orbit, but there was nothing, no forcefield or traction to put her off. Not seen, unnoticed, but there, yes. With her daughter, the first time since forever, her grandchild on the pitch, missing a tackle, getting up from the sodden turf, running back to try and cover.
‘It’s not our turn for the kit this week, is it?’ Anneka said to Robin.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Pritchard’s.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘More mud than shirts this afternoon.’
The two of them laughed, happy people. How best to break them up, how to wade in between them. She wanted to leave. Leaving was the best idea for all. Turning away, walking back to the car, taking off the muddied shoes, driving to the hotel in socks and nothing else. She stood back from Anneka, a knight’s move away from her, just a lift and turn of the head and she would see her face.
A goal was scored; Anneka raised her fists, raised her arms, turned slightly, narrowed her eyes, fixed her eyes, fixed on Gwen. Gwen watched her daughter juggle the coffee cup, it not falling, then falling to the ground. Her daughter said something to Robin and he shook his head and went back to watching the game, shouting something onto the pitch as Anneka walked towards her.
‘There’s a cafe,’ Anneka said. ‘Follow me.’
There was steel to her voice, it was flat and trammelled, all trace of accent gone, evened out to generic south. She wore denims and a North Face raincoat, her hair short like Gwen’s, almost the same cut, feathered and cropped. Gwen gave her a head start, followed in her wake, past goal celebrations, fouls and injuries, past insults and encouragements. Not like in Nate’s day. Surprisingly quiet then. She did not recall Drum shouting, could not remember her or any other mother shouting Man On. She remembered washing the kit though; the slog of that twice a season.
On the other side of the dressing rooms there was a low-slung brick building, its steps strewn with mud and energy drink bottles, a small coffee concession, large windowed, room for about ten tables. It was sticky warm inside, condensation on some of the windows, steam from the espresso machine released in relieved waves.
‘Would you like something?’ Anneka said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But you get yourself whatever you like.’
Gwen went for her purse, but Anneka had already moved to the counter. Gwen sat down at a table as far from the other patrons as possible. Her hands shook, the way Drum’s did all the time now, that low tremor, sign of the old. She watched her daughter pay, the casual way she spoke to the woman behind the counter, clearly a regular exchange. She watched her put the change in the tip jar.
Her daughter sat down at the table, as though they often did this, a slightly stilted Sunday morning ritual, daughter to talk of this and that; mother to complain of ailments. Perhaps still time for that. For get-togethers, chinwags, getting to
know one another again.
‘Was it the Internet?’ Anneka said.
‘What?’
‘How you found me.’
No, love. Through a journalist who remains in love with me, who has been surveilling you for decades, perhaps in the hope that I’ll fuck him. No love, it was not the Internet, it was analogue, old-fashioned.
‘Something like that, yes,’ she said. ‘You can find anyone these days.’
That what Ray had said, sadly and with nostalgia. The process so much quicker now, so much less rewarding. She had not called him. The search parties would be out.
Anneka stirred her coffee. She had holes in her ears where once there had been rings or studs. She had not changed significantly; those who do not add weight seem to stay the same as they get older. Daphne said she knew about as much about her daughter as Gwen knew of hers.
‘You think there will be an impermeable bond,’ she’d said. ‘You believe that, but it’s a mirage. It’s a one-way passage: you only get what they’re willing to give, and Natasha wouldn’t give me the steam from her kid’s piss.’
Anneka took a sip from her mug and looked up at Gwen. Cold in the eyes, so blue her eyes, so blue and cold.
‘I expected it’d be him, not you,’ Anneka said. ‘All these years, I thought I’d be standing somewhere and then he’d be beside me. Telling me to come home. That kind of thing. I never thought it’d be you.’
Gwen put her hand out to touch her daughter. Anneka moved away. Gwen was unsure whether coincidence or natural reflex, or whether simply revolted by the thought.
‘I told my husband you were dead,’ Anneka said. ‘Both of you actually.’
She laughed, scratched her temple. ‘It was a car accident, if you’re interested. So convenient, a car accident, they’re such easy ways to kill two birds with one stone.’
Gwen should have got a coffee, should have had something to shift to, to look down on. But there was just the inquisitor eyes.
‘You know about him?’ Anneka said.
‘And Femi,’ Gwen said. Anneka pursed her lips. Gwen had wanted to get that one out of the way. Annie wanted to weaponize them, her husband and child. Especially Femi. What a warhead that one; but one now neutralized.
‘You’ve done your research,’ Anneka said. ‘Saves me having to precis thirty-odd years in a few minutes. Thanks for the reprieve.’
In those words, the memory of her teenage daughter, the firing back, the anger and resentment. The things we do not lose, the tics that do not desert us, no matter what else we change. Anneka looked out over the playing fields, would not look at Gwen.
‘Is he dead?’ Anneka said. ‘Is that it?’
The slack body and the screams in the night, the drugs, the bone-set pain, the agony of it, the discomfort of it all. And her daughter sitting there, with her coffee. Is that it? Is that the thing you’ve come to say? The dismissal set her teeth. The calculation, the intended effect. A memory of calling her a little bitch, calling her that when there was no one around to hear.
‘No, Anneka, he’s not dead. But he’s dying. The doctors have given him a few months, but it could be any time, really. He’s in a tremendous amount of pain . . .’
Do not say, good. Do not say, I’m glad. Do not say, he had it coming. Do not say that to me. Do not. I will slap you, I will tear you apart if you say anything of the kind. Daughter or no, I will rip you clean if you say any such thing.
Anneka stared right back at her, took up her coffee cup.
‘My husband, Robin, he says that we’re all born into politics,’ Anneka said. ‘That without realizing it, we experience right from the day of birth a political system. Some will live with an enlightened despot, some get an illusion of democracy, others they get something between the two. But it’s a political system nonetheless.’
Anneka leaned in closer to Gwen.
‘He talks like that all that time. He’s very clever is Robin.’
Gwen had no idea what she was talking about, but this bragging interlude was unbearable. For a moment a mother–daughter exchange, the kind of offhand comment intimates make with one another. Anneka’s voice changed at its end, though. As though she knew she had strayed from the course she had plotted.
‘Robin asked me about my home. What kind of system I’d grown up under. I said that I’d been raised in a dictatorship. That home had been a banana state, a military junta. He ruled us all. You, me, Nate. A tyrant in his tower. Never to be questioned, never to be challenged, never to be contradicted. The all-seeing—’
‘Oh, Annie,’ she said, ‘that’s just not—’
‘No one calls me Annie. Don’t call me that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gwen said. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. But he loved you so dearly, Anneka. He loves you so dearly. There isn’t a day goes by he doesn’t talk of you.’
Where this lie coming from, where this deliberate falsehood? Demonstrably untrue, demonstrably wrong. It felt like the right thing to say, the kind of thing that would stop someone in tracks, give them pause. Emotive and manipulative, how low to sink.
‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Anneka said. ‘I don’t expect you to even realize. After what is it now, almost sixty years? You don’t have eyes left to see it.’
‘He’s dying, love. He’s going to die.’
Don’t say, please don’t say. Please keep decorum, please keep civil.
‘I didn’t come here to argue,’ Gwen said, going again for her arm and getting no purchase. ‘I just came here to tell you—’
‘No, Mother, you came here to lay on the guilt. You came here to give him, what, absolution? His deathbed wish? Some kind of last rites? You think telling me he’s dying changes anything? You thought you’d come here and I’d just collapse under the weight of the news? He’s been dead a long time to me. So many years dead.’
Anneka was shaking, anger ripping through her. Should have seen this coming. In the book she’d read, On Death and Dying, one of the stages, anger.
‘Look, Annie—’
‘I told you don’t call me that. Call me that again I’ll leave right away.’
‘Look, Anneka—’
‘No, you look, Mother. You look and you listen. I will not see him, not now, not ever. Do you understand that? I don’t want to know when he dies, and I won’t be there at the funeral. I won’t be a hypocrite and I certainly won’t be a liar. I’ll leave that to him and I’ll leave it to you.’
Anneka stood, looking down on Gwen, then bent down her head. As though about to bestow on her a kiss. Her lips stopped short, rested an inch from her ears.
‘You know,’ she whispered. ‘You look like him now. Like you’ve both become the same person.’
She stayed there for a beat, Gwen could hear her breath in her ear.
‘Such a shame,’ she said. ‘You used to be such a good-looking woman.’
Anneka stayed there for a moment, just standing there, her daughter. She shook her head, bent down again. She kissed Gwen on the cheek.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
And then gone, the automatic doors parting, her quick steps, almost a run, back to the game. Back to her son and her husband; Gwen looking at an empty coffee mug; Gwen staying like that until someone took it away, a ring where it had sat, a faint circle on the Formica.
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
‘It’s beautiful,’ his mother said. ‘Look at this, Drum.’
Nate could see his father was furious with him, but Molly had not taken no for an answer, never took no for an answer; and even were she to do so, Nate rarely said no. Molly had drawn Grandpa Dum a get-well-soon card and Nate didn’t have the heart to deny her. She was quite the artist: the cows perfectly drawn, the surprisingly detailed likeness of his father, capturing something of him, though quite what Nate didn’t know. Too much to say an essence, just something elemental of him.
‘Oh that’s a bobby-dazzler, that,’ his father said. ‘You’re good at drawing, aren’
t you, Molly?’
She was eleven, smaller than most in her class, confident, but already with the dark clouds of adolescence knitting. There had been tears, there had been meltdowns about friends, about the prospect of Big School; shouting matches and slammed doors.
‘I’m glad you like it, Grandpa Dum,’ she said.
‘I love it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put it up on my wall when I get home.’
The week had been Nate’s idea, one he was sure his father would nix, but surprisingly he’d seemed happy for the change of scenery. ‘It’ll give your mother a week off,’ he’d said, but did not mention Nate, him working the farm as well as helping his father at night. The nights of hearing him cry, with pain and with fear, hearing him talk of the Mayan prophecy and how it had been a good life, a good life but a terribly slow death.
His mother was making tea, and he went to her and held her, the smaller frame, the smaller breadth of shoulder, the bones tight against the skin.
‘Carter sent Dad a CD. All old tunes. Nice thing to do, I thought.’
‘When are they coming back?’
‘Thursday, I think.’
‘Does Dad know?’
‘I told him, but I don’t know if he remembers. Either he knows or he doesn’t. Either way is fine.’
‘How was Patsy?’ he said.
‘Patsy?’ she said.
‘Your friend Patsy. You went to stay with her on Sunday night.’
She looked confused, then relieved.
‘You mean Patty. It was good to see her. It’s been a long time. She hasn’t changed much.’
‘Did she keep you up?’ he said. ‘You look exhausted.’
‘Why thank you, Nathan. What a gentlemanly thing to say.’
She laughed and he laughed and they stayed like that, in each other’s arms, in each other’s exhaustion, then resumed their roles: wife and mother, son and father.
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Cold, those last words to her mother. So unnecessary, not even true. Vile to have said such a thing. Not her fault, not her fault. What it would be to nurse her father to death, to look on him vacating his body, to peek with terror on the world to come without him. Her mother was always dependent on him, always nothing without him.