by Kate Hamer
My list at the wishing bowl pounds in my head, what I said that day – not a drip, no wheelchair, no pills or appointments. Please God I never want to see a fucking adjustable medical bed again.
‘Mum, I’m so bloody sorry,’ I whimper. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I wished those things because I wanted you better. I think I said that too, I’m sure I did. Please, please, please be alive. Mum, please. Please. I’ll give anything for my stupid-bitch wish not to be true.’
Of course I knew something bad was awaiting me. Of course I realised that, with me being late, she would have struck out on her own, cursing to herself, furious at her own inability to do that simple thing of getting out of bed unaided and in her fury become reckless. I’d seen it all before, but of course before I’d always been there to avert the disaster I could see arriving a few frames down the film, and this is so much more horrible than anything I could have imagined. I see it in fragments, like my brain can’t take it all in at once.
Mum lies on the floor with limbs that are so muddled there appears to be too many of them, like the tangled thready legs of a dead spider. Now it’s just as I knew it would be. But, no, again, the picture in my mind didn’t include the press of flesh into the carpet that has left an embossed criss-cross on her cheek because she’s been lying there so long, or the spitty thread of blood hanging from the corner of her mouth, or the roll of her eyes that look up at me like the real her got imprisoned inside this tangle before she died. It never included the detail that, when it comes to it, is the real outrage. The thickness of the blood on the floor as it congeals.
‘Mum.’ I’m crying so hard now, snot is coursing down my chin. I feel sick and light at the same time. I think it’s possible that it’s not happening but then I sit down with a thump and the pain shocks through my buttocks and I know it is. ‘How could I have left you?’ My words are followed by a half-keening wail that I switch off by slapping myself on the mouth with my fist.
A sound comes from her. ‘Ssssssshhh.’
‘Mum?’ I lean in closer.
‘Ssssshhh, Gracie,’ she whispers.
‘Mum, you’re alive.’ I’m laughing as well as sobbing now. ‘You really are alive?’
I lean over and smooth away the grey hair that she usually keeps so neat, and that is now plastered across her mouth and chin. With my other hand I cradle her skull and the feel of it under my fingers makes me want to weep even harder. You’ll stop crying, bitch, I say to myself. You owe her that at least.
‘Mum. Please God, what’s happened?’ I gasp to this bloody mess on the floor.
She opens and closes her mouth like she is the baby bird and I am the mother with the worm. I peel off the rest of her hair from her chin and gently push a pillow under her head.
‘Now, what have we here? What’s to be done?’ I mutter the inanities in a kind of sing-song like a nurse. I look at the puzzle of her limbs but when I try and untangle them she gives a sharp piercing cry that resonates at the bottom of my skull.
‘Oh Mum.’ I bite at my knuckles, trying to choke the sobs down, but they come thick and fast and I go back on my promise not to cry, and then I feel I’m about eight years old again, crying with my mouth stretched in a stupid upsidedown grin. I’m holding onto her and moaning, ‘Mum, I love you. I love you so much. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ she breathes. It’s just a wheezy whisper but I catch it.
Slowly I ease my arms underneath her and she feels such a bag of bones, and the frailty of the creature she is is so obvious it almost finishes me. I lift her up and gently, gently I lay her on the familiar faded flowered cotton bedspread; it’s printed with pink poppies and blue gerbera, a kind of flowery ocean, because this one place has grown to encompass everything and the outside world has shrunk to the extent that it has no meaning.
Gradually she begins to unfurl, bit by little bit, like one of those Japanese paper flowers in a cup of water.
I rub off my tears with a towel and go to make some tea. I bring it on a tray with our best china, the gold-rimmed cups with the poppies. Slowly, painfully, I manage to prop her up on some pillows and then I sit cross-legged on the floor beside her and watch, the teapot pluming steam through the spout. When I think she’s ready I bring the cup to her lips and wet her mouth. I carry on with this, sip by tiny sip, so after about forty minutes she has managed to drink half a cup. There is a little colour in her cheeks. Not much but a little, and I feel it’s there just because of the sheer gargantuan effort of will I’ve somehow exerted to make it OK.
‘Grace,’ she whispers. ‘Grace, love. I think perhaps you should call an ambulance.’
‘Mum—’
‘Really, I think you should. I think this time we do need to get me checked over.’
My heart clenches. If she goes to hospital all this will come out. They’ll find out she was on her own while I was with a boy downstairs, hung over, addled with grass.
‘No.’
‘Grace, I really think …’ she whispers. Her eyes are closed so she doesn’t see me taking the mobile phone from her bedside table and pocketing it in my grey hoody. ‘We’ll deal with this ourselves,’ I say.
‘But—’
‘Mum. No. We are going to be all right and we are going to manage and we are not going to call an ambulance and we are not going to call anyone and you can stop fussing and stop worrying because I’m not going anywhere and I am going to take care of absolutely everything.’
*
Later, after she is asleep, I drag myself down to the bathroom and stare at myself long and hard in the mirror. She could’ve died, bitch, I tell my reflection. Let that sink in, bitch, while you’re poncing about with boys and growing your hair out all over your pretty little head. My reflection disappears while I grub about in the cabinet and find Dad’s old clippers, and I plug them in and they start first time with a harsh buzzing noise.
From now on you’re a fucking soldier, I tell my reflection as I start to shear off hair in rows that drips in clumps into the basin. You are Travis fucking Bickle. You have something to fight for and you must fight with all your fury and all your might and there is no room for compromise on that. You are a warlord, and if you ever fucking forget it, all you have to do is to look in the mirror at your bitch-head that will from this moment on be shaved as a permanent fucking reminder of that fact.
13
Phoebe
‘I’m soooooo happy.’
I’m aware this is a risky thing to write in my diary. What’s going on? she will think. She’ll lift her head up like she’s scented something on the wind. I can see her parting her lips and putting her finger thoughtfully on the page as she tries to work it out.
All the same, I couldn’t help it. It has to leak out somewhere. I will work to divert her attention to a different place. I’ll show joy over something small and insignificant: a silly new dress I’ve seen; an invitation to a party; an unexpectedly excellent essay mark that really I care nothing about. Maybe I’ll even intimate that there was a burgeoning romance with a boy that had me all in an adolescent quiver but was subsequently cruelly crushed by him. That will please her greatly. So that was the source of joy, she’ll think. Like a detective she will feel like she has cracked the case.
Although of course she won’t have done.
I’ve done something bad, bad, bad and I don’t even care.
Last night as I walked I was convinced that the hot spring waters had washed off some of my female glitter. I didn’t mind, though. In fact, I was glad for it because there was something durable and hard underneath. Something that couldn’t be cracked in the way I normally crack.
When I arrived at Mr Jonasson’s house I could see that he wasn’t home because his little red Citroën wasn’t parked outside. His house is mean and shabby compared to ours. Poor Victorian rather than the Georgian glories that most of Bath is made up of, but the very good thing about where he lives is that opposite the houses is a small urban wood. It means I can stay under its cano
py and watch him coming home or leaving in his funny little car that I’d recognise anywhere. It means I can watch the lights as they click on and off, marking the passage of people through the house. They are very thrifty. From the rate at which lights are switched on and off, I’m guessing a light is never left on in an empty room. Whenever I hide out there to spy on them, I get so excited I swear I can feel my hair stand on end. I’m cloaked in trees and darkness and that is the power of it. Last night I felt like that but a million times more because of the way the baths had lit up all my cells.
Their house was in darkness and I wondered if that meant they were away for the weekend on some disgusting nappy-and-breast-milk-soaked adventure. It occurred to me it could simply be that he had to park further down the road and they were on the other side of the house so were at home. Not knowing made it even more exciting somehow. I slipped into the darkness, threading myself through the trees. Above me was the tweep, tweep of a little bird who’d forgotten to go to sleep; my tiny familiar perhaps. Everything felt like it was turning my way. The trees were dark skeletons, surrounding me like a personal guard. Mother moon was above me in the shape of a hook as if ready to pluck Mr Jonasson up and dangle him for me. I bit at the skin on the sides of my nails. How had it been last time I saw him? I replayed it minute by minute. Hadn’t I felt it, as he perched on the edge of his desk and spoke about ‘character is fate’, hadn’t I seen his eyes constantly flicked to the side, where I was, even though because of where his desk was placed it was an unnatural place to look? I’d felt important for the rest of the week. ‘We’ll arrange an extra lesson very soon,’ he said to me with a smile, and the smile was so intimate I lit up like a lantern. So I’d been wrong that horrible day in the underground car park. He’d wanted me all along.
Character is fate. I wondered about that, there in those woods, and what it meant for me and where my character would lead. Although truly I felt those Fates were with me last night and I was in their hands rather than my own. Fates, in the old sense of the word: beings – three women spinning out the mother thread of every mortal from birth to death. I could almost hear their movement among the trees; feel their breath on my neck, their thread tugging sharply on my belly button, yanking the crinkled skin where once the coil of an umbilical cord, dark and shiny with blood, had attached me to her. And was that Minerva – the goddess who presides over the thermal spring – her soft footfall in the grass behind me? Perhaps she’d silently followed me through the streets from the Roman Baths. It wouldn’t surprise me.
When I’m that little spider scuttling around her and The Beloved, I have no character. At home it’s reduced to a pinprick. But knowing that someone like Mr Jonasson sees something in me that, in my best moments, I truly know is there changes everything. Last night the world felt aligned: the moon, the cars parked on the street opposite, the metal railings, the lilac tree that was lavender-orange in the streetlight – all in a constellation with me at its core, and my character swelled and bloomed. I became complete. It almost didn’t matter if I saw him there or not. I could have swallowed up the elixir of the night and returned home pregnant with its potency. But those Fates had other things in mind for me.
I heard the hum of a little continental engine coming up the hill and I moved closer to the edge of the trees to see. The streetlights had turned the red car to grey but I felt the adrenaline rush as I recognised the number plate. I had a moment of indecision. I could stay here in my little hollow of darkness and merely watch him park, lock up his car, step to his front door. The time spent retrieving his key, his slowness in the putting-down of his bags to unlock the door I’d take as unwillingness to enter back into the family fray. Except I felt the sharp, urgent tugging on my belly button; which one of the Fates was it? I didn’t know, but she was telling me I couldn’t wait for our private lesson.
‘Hey, Mr Jonasson.’ I addressed the back of his head.
He whirled round. My passage over to this side of the road seemed to have happened in a twinkling.
‘Phoebe.’
Again, he didn’t seem pleased to see me, but this time I didn’t take offence because I guessed his wife and children were in there at the back of the house where I couldn’t see the lights. Perhaps they were already all tucked up in bed.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, as he put his bags back down.
‘Just passing.’ I affected nonchalance. ‘I’m staying with a friend tonight, you know, Orla.’
He looked down at my hands, which were in the pockets of my raincoat. It’s an ancient man’s Burberry. I like the style of it.
‘Where are your things?’
‘Things?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled tiredly. ‘Your toothbrush and your night things.’
‘Oh, we just use each other’s.’ I bit my lip. This happens to be true, but he’s Swedish, so he might find that sort of thing disgusting.
‘It’s quite late,’ he said, glancing towards his own front door. Was she really in there or not? I was burning to know. I’ve glimpsed her in the distance. Tawny blonde hair done up in a ponytail. She wears that sprigged vintage style of clothing, infantilised and nursery-ish, that so many young mothers seem to adopt. That, or the head-to-toe boating theme, with stripes and anchors. Both looks seem designed to turn women into cheerful puppets for their own children.
He looked at me silently for a moment. Suddenly he seemed more awake; I could see the shine of his eyes in the darkness. He said, ‘You shouldn’t be walking the streets after dark.’
He cares! I didn’t point out that this was sleepy Bath, not a big city like Stockholm where I know he is from.
‘I’ll be all right.’ Better to seem brave and foolhardy than snivelling and scared, I thought. It makes people more likely to want to rescue you.
‘Come on.’ He leaned over and retrieved his bags. ‘Tell me where she lives and I’ll take you. You shouldn’t be wandering around alone in the dark. It can be quite lonely around here. It might not be safe.’
As we walked to the car I had a spurt of anxiety at the thought of him realising I was out of my way. Why should I be in his street that doesn’t lead from my house to Orla’s? It’s ages away from both. I puzzled this as we reached the car that was still warm and ticking from being driven. He doesn’t know where I live, I told myself. It won’t even occur to him.
Predictably the car was given over to the transport of infants. There was a complicated baby seat in the back, alongside a booster seat with a flowered cushion on top. All that hard plastic and metal for protection, like exoskeletons for their soft tender flesh. I’d expected it to smell like baby food or baby sick but it didn’t. It smelt clean and rubbery, and it made me wonder if Mr Jonasson himself is sickened by these things and keeps his car, his own little domain, as spick and span and without odour as possible. I know I would if I were him.
I thought about living in the car, crawling underneath the wheel arch and weaving myself into its workings. Every time the car started up (the wife has her own car) I would vibrate in his presence. How much better to be in the house, though. If I could follow him through the open door and whoosh up to the attics or live among his shirts and jackets in the wardrobe, breathing in his smell. It might be enough. I could feed my obsession silently. I’d even prefer it to this, and thinking that made me I realise how scared I was as I climbed into his car.
My hands trembled badly as I did up my seat belt. I could hardly believe I was on the inside. He was nervous too, I realised, by the way his thumb tapped a rat-a-tat-tat on the steering wheel, over and over. Neither of us spoke as he started up the engine and manoeuvred the car out of its parking space, and again I panicked that it might be that finally, finally we were alone together and I might find that I couldn’t muster a single word in his presence. Because of that I plunged in, stupidly, awkwardly, enough to make me grimace ahead out of the windscreen.
‘That was such an interesting lesson we had last week,’ I gushed.
To my
surprise he didn’t appear disconcerted. I could see him grinning out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t believe it. It had worked. He was flattered.
‘You like Macbeth?’
How could I answer that? No, I wanted to say. That thing is anthrax; it’s doom and violence. It’s blood falling down the walls.
‘Of course,’ I said brightly. If we were going to talk about this, we’d have to stick to the parts that didn’t scare me. ‘I love the witches.’
I saw him frowning in the light of the dashboard. ‘Hmmm. But it worries me the attention they receive within the play. It’s disproportionate. Of course they are quite peripheral to the core.’
‘Really?’ That’s not how it struck me.
‘Yes, just some hocus-pocus that Shakespeare dreamt up to please the crowds. They loved that sort of nonsense. Plus it was politic as they were a sop to James, the king on the throne at the time, who was obsessed by the subject.’ He sounded vehement in his opinion and it brought out his accent, the Swedish up-and-down of it as if his voice were on springs. ‘It’s a diversion, an entertainment. The real content is that Macbeth has the seeds of his own destruction within himself. He is a tragic hero.’
I wondered at the vehemence. He clearly wanted to be right, and even though I didn’t agree I didn’t say anything, just stroked my little patch of beard in the darkness, the pale fluff on my Adam’s apple, secret hair kept in plain sight.
This conversation was so stilted and seemed to be leading so far down the wrong path, I changed my mind about keeping quiet.
‘Yes, you’re right about that. I completely agree.’ There was a short silence that felt like it urgently needed filling. ‘Do they have Shakespeare in Sweden?’ I asked to fill the gap.
‘Of course.’
He turned to smile at me and not for the first time it struck me how female his eyes were. The long lashes that fringed them were those of a Hollywood starlet. It gave him a sleepy, almost shy, look.