Too Close

by Natalie Daniels

  I should wake Dr Robinson up now, but I like watching her and it seems almost cruel to snatch her from this sweet slumber. I have put her things back in the bag and moved my chair beside the bed again to watch her for a while longer. It’s been an unusual session, to say the least. But the hour is up.

  ‘Dr Robinson?’ I say gently, my face very close to hers.

  She opens her eyes and looks at me. For a second she has absolutely no idea where she is, or who I am. Then she remembers. I see the panic set in. It must be confusing; I am wearing her jacket.

  ‘You’re wearing my jacket,’ she says guardedly, climbing off the bed, the intimacy we shared an hour ago all gone. I take off the jacket and put it at the end of the bed. To be honest, I’d totally forgotten. I hope I haven’t made it smell.

  She takes the jacket and goes to her bag. She pauses there; I know what she’s thinking. I see her check her phone, the time, the code, her driving licence; she gathers her things, crosses to the bathroom and tries to smooth her face in the metal smear of the mirror. She doesn’t look me in the eye. Then she goes straight to the door, clutching her bag tightly. She wants to get the hell out of here. She stops and turns around.

  ‘Connie,’ she says. She looks awkward, which given the nature of the session is fair enough. ‘I’ve let you down and I’m so sorry. I’m going to talk to my supervisor.’

  ‘No,’ I say quite firmly, alarmed at the prospect. ‘Don’t talk to anyone. I’m not going to.’

  She looks surprised. I think I see something like gratitude in her eyes. And a little fear. I frighten people now. I frighten myself. I feel so alone.

  ‘All I ask is that you bring my mother to see me … please.’ As I’ve said before, I’m an opportunist.

  ‘I really don’t think I can do that,’ she says.

  ‘You can. Just drop by – there’s no point in making plans. If she’s not at her house she’ll be at mine. Just go and get her. Say you’re there to pick up a nightie or something for me.’

  She doesn’t want to do this. Her eyes flit across the floor; she’s remembering the vomit. ‘I can’t promise anything.’ But she’s thinking about it.

  ‘I tried on your shoes, too,’ I say.

  She is quiet for a moment. She is looking at her shoes, perhaps wondering whether they feel different since being inhabited by a madwoman. I like her, I really do. She is vulnerable like me. I don’t want her to go, I don’t want her to leave me on my own.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I say, because it occurs to me that she really might know the answer. She looks up at me and gives a small nod.

  ‘How does everyone else … function?’ I say.

  She frowns and cocks her head, listening for that familiar wolf.

  ‘Why aren’t the streets full of wrecked people?’ I ask. And I see something like recognition in her eyes. We stand there in a silence that only loonies, lovers and psychotherapists are comfortable with.

  She shakes her head a little; she doesn’t know. She is so sad; I think she’s as sad as I am. Then, and I have no idea why then, because it seems indulgent and inappropriate, I start to cry. I cannot remember the last time I cried, but whenever it was I don’t think it sounded like this: a ship’s foghorn. And it feels so strange to be feeling something (and preventing a crisis at sea) that I feel almost triumphant in my unhappiness.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I hear her say. And I don’t know if I’m imagining it because she’s not meant to touch me (or vomit in my toilet) but I feel her hand on my shoulder and it makes me foghorn again. I miss human contact so much. I miss my kids. I miss my mum.

  ‘Please don’t hate me.’ I’m pathetic now, bleating like a lamb. I’m really letting myself down with this ghastly neediness, I know, but it suddenly seems vitally important to me that she doesn’t hate me. If she leaves this room hating me, I feel I might go mad. Madder, I mean.

  She shakes her head. ‘I don’t hate you,’ she says, and these are the most beautiful words I think I have ever heard.

  ‘Everyone else does,’ I say. I notice her hand slowly falling from my shoulder.

  ‘Perhaps they don’t understand you,’ she says. I can hear the Squeak coming down the corridor. Dr Robinson can hear her too and suddenly flashes me that professional tight-rectum smile.

  ‘Do you understand me?’

  She looks anxiously through the glass in the door.

  ‘Mrs Ibrahim’s on her way,’ she says, and gives me that curt nod goodbye.

  ‘Emma!’ I cry, reaching for her hand. (I’ve never called her this before. It kind of stops her in her tracks.) ‘Do you understand me?’

  I get the connection I’m after; she holds my gaze.

  ‘Keep telling your story and we’ll get there …’

  And then she’s gone, leaving me standing in the middle of the room like an abandoned toy. But I’m worried now. I’m not sure I want to get to where we’re going.

  Chapter 9

  The local surgery was a hit-and-miss affair, but you would know that already, Dr R. There were six or so regular GPs and unless you specified a particular doctor, you got whoever was next in line. My mother, however, had a specific appointment, an important appointment. The waiting room was packed and we had squeezed ourselves into a pew by the desk; unfortunately the receptionist, a woman with the voice and pores of a seasoned smoker, was hard of hearing and I learnt far more than I wanted to about the personal ailments of my fellow waiting-roommates. I was hormonal and stressed but had promised my mother I would take her. I’d picked her up from her house where she was eagerly awaiting me at the window. To my surprise, she was wearing her best earrings and her pink floral dress. She looked as if she were off to a wedding. I complimented her and saw her anxiety lessen a little. I asked how she was feeling, whether she was still having dizzy spells, but she wasn’t listening; she was rather haphazardly putting on some red lipstick in the hall mirror. In the car, I noticed through her tights that her shins were covered in scratches; she’d been gardening, but what with the poppy smudge around her mouth, it made her seem rather vulnerable in her battle against the professional medical opinion.

  Patient after patient was called in, their names whizzing by on the screen in jazzy dotted writing, my mother reading everyone’s name out loud (and commenting in her not untheatrical timbre on possible parentages). By the time her own name sped across the screen, we were pretty much the last people there. With all the excitement of the lettering and the global mix of patients, we had both rather forgotten the nature of the appointment. You’ll be fine, Mum.

  We went in to see Dr Rhys Evans. Anita Rhys Evans. I knew her: she was a mum at the school and the private–public line had merged too much for my liking (I always specified another doctor for my own appointments). It had been embarrassing for both of us on the first day of nursery to lock eyes as we rummaged about in the sandpit searching for plastic toys with Josh and Hannah when the last time we had met she had been rummaging about in my traumatized vagina post placental abruption. Awkward memories of concrete mammaries and septic stitches came back as I blew sand from a plastic tractor. We had further been thrown together in Year One when Josh developed an obsessional crush on her minx of a daughter. I am the saddest man in England, Mummy, he told me coming out of school in tears one day, snot pouring from his nose (not a girlfriend-keeping look, darling). Hannah, the slapper, had been flashing her knickers at Aidan O’Connor. I’m afraid, Josh, Hannah can show her knickers to anyone she likes, I’d said responsibly. (I also had a soft spot for Aidan; he was a fiery kid from the estate who allegedly once told the headmaster to fuck off – hats off, that boy.)

  Dr Rhys Evans (I needed to keep this professional) didn’t seem to notice the immense effort my mother had gone to, which I couldn’t help but hold against her. A fleeting comment on how well she looked, how pretty her dress was, would have gone far to soothe the nerves. However, her interest went straight to me as we walked in. ‘Hi Connie, how are you?’ She was grinning. She
grinned a lot and spoke through clenched teeth like a ventriloquist. It was most disconcerting. I suspect she even gave grisly prognoses with that lockjawed grin, her hand flapping in a rubber glove. Anita Rhys Evans was one of those women who was desperate to be a hit on the social scene but unfortunately managed to get on everyone’s nerves. ‘I read that interview you did with er … what’s his name … the disgraced MP?’ she said. ‘I loved it.’ I murmured thanks. ‘But Tom felt it was a bit far-fetched …’ She always did this. She loved to deflate; I’m not even sure it was deliberate – it was probably part of her make-up. I was quite susceptible to deflation that day and I had an instinctive, almost visceral response to flee from Anita.

  Anita Rhys Evans was a space-invader, always standing those few inches too close, and she had the most peculiar habit of looking you up and down as she spoke to you, her eyes settling on vulnerable parts of your anatomy for whole sentences. I’m used to men having conversations with my breasts but I’d never encountered it in a woman before. And she never actually listened to what was being said; to ensure that she didn’t have to, she had developed an elongated blink that prevented interruption. She was a brain drain; I always left her company feeling emptied of life. And she certainly wasn’t the one I wanted to hear bad news from; there would be an edge of glee in the telling.

  So we asked after each other’s kids. Hannah – not the sharpest tool in the box – had been force-fed tutors from Year Four and was doing absolutely amazingly at St Poshy-Posh-Posh School for Girls, while Josh – averagely sharp but lazy tool – was learning how to illegally download anything he wanted at Statey-McState Academy round the corner. I’d bumped into Hannah on the bus and been bemused by the new accent and the inordinate number of times she said like (actually she said lake) in one sentence. So within the first minute of sitting on the chair and listening to how Hannah had joined the rowing team and was climbing mountains for Duke of Edinburgh (what is that?) and was almost fluent in Spanish after two years, I felt a new component in my increasing unhappiness: guilt at the shabby education I was giving my son.

  My mother wasn’t helping matters by repeatedly saying, ‘How marvellous! How clever of her! What an amazing school! Wonderful Hannah!’ I wanted to bang the table and establish one important fact: let’s not forget that Hannah shows the boys her vagina!

  So, puffed up by her own crowing, Dr Rhys Evans eventually turned to my mother, lips stretched into an unmoving letterbox slot, eyes fixed on my mother’s cut shins, and said, ‘All right, Mrs de Cadenet. Are you ready?’

  I haven’t told you about Mrs de Cadenet, have I, Dr R? Let me try and summarize. My mother is a warrior. She has always been fearless. She swam across lakes, she dived off rocks, she lit fires, I saw her break the neck of a dying rabbit with her bare hands, she galloped on horses, she climbed trees, she peed in bushes (or worse), she would think nothing of approaching strangers, of fixing plugs or changing tyres, of sunbathing topless, of disputing authority. She prized initiative above all else and nothing annoyed her more than when we didn’t show it. We didn’t have boundaries like other kids did. It wasn’t a considered thing; it was just the way she was. She had been brought up in the wilds of Northumberland under a rule of benign neglect, which she considered normal parenting.

  She adored my father and he was indeed adorable. He was a fusty old academic who didn’t really notice what we, or she, were up to. In fact, he didn’t really notice anything at all if it wasn’t in Latin. (A favourite pastime for David and me was to blindfold him and get him to describe what he was wearing. He would never have the slightest idea at all – I mean, not at all. I’m wearing my tennis clothes, he’d say proudly, sitting there in a three-piece suit.) Which probably explained why we lived where we lived: in an armpit of north London. They could have moved if they wanted to, but it didn’t seem to bother them that our house was the only one in the street that wasn’t derelict, or run-down council accommodation, or a squat, or a drug den, or the Hare Krishna house (goodness, Ganesha, did they like a drum and chant) or – somewhat bizarrely – a convent.

  My mother formed ranting action groups that held meetings in our kitchen – usually consisting of just her, my father (smuggling in a book on Renaissance philosophy) and old Sister Gwendolen. They mounted campaigns, picked up litter, lay on the road to divert Heavy Goods Vehicles (also good reading time for Dad) and fought to keep bus services going. She took the council to court, refusing point-blank to pay our rates, and won the case, becoming the first person in legal history with the right not to pay rates. The local police all knew her by her first name (Julia) as she called them a couple of times a week over some incident or other that she had attempted to sort out: the ten-year-old glue-sniffer she found lying in his own vomit, the skinhead brandishing a weapon – Put the gun down, young man!

  Nothing intimidated her; not even the man who jumped out from behind a tree as she and I were walking the dog in a particularly secluded part of the litter-filled, bombed-out, brambled green space further down the road. He was masturbating furiously at us. Look at me! Look at me! he cried proudly, clenching his prized possession in his plump fingers. My mother pushed me behind her (I was stock still, utterly mesmerized by the sheer monstrosity of it) and stepped right up to him and said in the voice she reserved for truly bad behaviour, Shame on you! Put your penis away, you disgusting little man! To my amazement, the disgusting little man promptly burst into tears and stuffed that thing away. It turned out he was indeed ashamed of himself, and she spent the next twenty minutes comforting him on a tree stump while I kicked some used condoms about. Are you getting the picture, Dr R, of where I’ve come from, of who this woman that bore me is?

  Well, I am sad to say that my warrior mother has finally been defeated. Her brave heart is riddled with fear now as the Alzheimer’s begins to shake her in its jittery jaws. Fortunately ten years ago they moved to a house near me, seemingly amazed that some people lived in streets where windows weren’t smashed and people used toilets. But now, daily, sometimes hourly, she bikes round to my house – I know, I know, but there’s no prising her off it – in a state of pure alarm. (What will she do if we sell the house? I have to be near her, don’t you see, Dr R? She’ll carry on turning up on her bicycle, oblivious to the new inhabitants and their differences: she’ll sit in their kitchen, make their beds, get in their baths.) For she is stuck in a cycle of breathless panic: confused, shrunken, stuttering, swallowing, fear and worry oozing from her every pore. I try to calm her, soothing sweet nothings as she tells me of the latest molehill now become a mountain: she can’t find a stamp, or her soap, or her handbag; she doesn’t know how many teabags to put in a cup. Life itself has become the enemy, ambushing and assaulting her with its every terrifying move.

  And yet, despite it all, Dr R, my mum is still there. She has retained her empathy, her emotional intelligence, her loving, caring soul. She is still the port in all my storms, my anchor, my sanctuary. She is my true north.

  I clasped her hand in mine, overwhelmed by a fierce protectiveness towards her as I explained to Dr Rhys Evans that before we did the test I just wanted to mention that she’d been feeling faint and weak. She flashed her teeth and raised a finger and rang through to the nurse, and asked whether there was time for a quick blood test. Then Dr Rhys Evans looked down at the dreaded notepad.

  ‘All right, Mrs de Cadenet, shall we begin?’

  My mother was very anxious now but she concentrated as hard as she could.

  ‘I want you to remember three words for me … and I’m going to ask you to repeat them to me at the end of the test. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ my mother repeated, as if it was one of the words.

  ‘Apple. Horse. Tuesday.’

  My mother laughed, delighted that the test she had been dreading was going to be so absurdly easy. ‘Apple. Horse and … Tuesday,’ she said, her lips repeating the words several times.

  ‘Right,’ said Dr Rhys Evans. ‘Can you tell me what day it is today?’ (Sligh
tly mean, don’t you think?)

  ‘Tuesday!’ My mother said with great confidence. It was Friday.

  ‘OK,’ said Dr Rhys Evans. ‘And can you tell me who our present monarch is?’

  ‘Of course I can!’ said my mother, rather enjoying herself now. ‘Queen Elizabeth the Second.’

  ‘And what might you put up in the rain?’

  She was thrown by this and killed some time with repetition. ‘What might I put up in the rain … A shelter?’ she said, as if it were an initiative test. It was a vaguely sensible answer, wouldn’t you say, Dr R? ‘I might light a fire,’ she continued, confident but in the wrong vein.

  Dr Rhys Evans flashed those teeth. ‘All right. And what is nine plus eight?’

  ‘Um … nine plus eight … is, ooh. Eighteen … no …’ She was beginning to panic. She wanted to pass this test so badly, to be told that everything was all right, that she wasn’t losing her mind. ‘I just can’t think for the life of me.’ She laughed.

  ‘Never mind. Can you spell the word “difficult” for me?’

  ‘Difficult. D-i-f-f-f … c-l … t.’ I smiled at her encouragingly. She had always been an excellent speller. I felt humiliated for her.

  ‘That’s wonderful. And what were the words I asked you to remember at the beginning of the test?’

  ‘Oh.’ she said. She looked quizzical. She had no idea what the doctor was talking about.

  ‘Remember, Mamma?’ I said. ‘You had three words at the beginning to remember?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, glad for my intervention. ‘Thank you, darling. Now what were they? … Now, hang on … Oh bugger! … Starlight?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said to her, and she looked so pleased with herself. Starlight had been the name of her pony as a child. Horse-Pony-Starlight. There was a logic to it; I’d have given her half a point. But Dr Rhys Evans did not look impressed.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You did just fine.’ But my mother seemed downhearted despite fond memories of galloping across fields on Starlight. Just then the nurse came in with her blood test paraphernalia and sat down next to my mother. ‘Thank you, Sebo,’ said Dr Rhys Evans, and let her eyes settle on mine after noting the make and model of my shoes.