Too Close

by Natalie Daniels

  ‘So how’s Ness doing? I haven’t seen her about,’ she asked, while Sebo rolled up my mother’s sleeve. I could tell Dr Rhys Evans had been waiting to ask me this and was delighted to have me cornered in her surgery. She wasn’t asking in a concerned way, she was asking in a gossipy way; there was that undeniable edge of excitement in her voice. I’d heard it in a few others when they asked about Ness and Leah (I seemed to have found myself being their director of communications).

  ‘I saw Leah at parents’ evening …’ she continued in a leading manner. (She was still milking the state system for all she could get with her younger two children before swanning them off for futures of entitlement.) That was the other thing about Dr Rhys Evans: she was a complete star-fucker. Even as she rolled out the list of Hannah’s achievements, she couldn’t resist dropping a few names – celebrity parents of Hannah’s contemporaries, chefs and footballers (does that count?) – until my face had run out of impressed expressions. Poor Leah – Dr Rhys Evans was all over her like an oozing dose of herpes.

  ‘Ness is fine,’ I said. I was not going to discuss the matter with her.

  But my mother evidently still felt as if she were in an exam environment and had stumbled upon a question she knew the answer to (by nature she was never indiscreet).

  ‘She is now,’ she said, ‘but it was awful for her!’ Every now and then, my mother pounced on a memory as it passed through her head with the agility of a wildcat upon its prey.

  I knew exactly what she was remembering. The day that Leah left her not-so-happy home, Ness had wandered round to my house, barefoot and bemused. I was out interviewing an oil magnate up in town and my mother happened to be in the house looking for something, but had long forgotten what. She was the perfect person in a crisis, with her heart full of compassion and her head full of muddle (perhaps an unriddled mind cannot offer the same simple solace). She received the distraught Ness, no doubt enveloping her in her bosom. Later – I came in through the downstairs door; they hadn’t heard me – I stood in the portal of the sitting room to find them on the sofa, Ness half tucked, half sprawled, like a lazy old dog, across my mother’s chest, with my mother running her capable, practical fingers gently through Ness’s hair, softly singing the same lullaby she used to sing to me as a child, ‘Golden Slumbers’. (My dad, unmoved by post-fifteenth-century music – except for a brief yodelling stint – was always adamant that the Beatles pinched the lyrics from an ancient anonymous poem.) At first, bizarrely, I thought Ness was singing too for she was making an only just audible whining sound, but I soon realized that it was the sound of misery, of sobs almost turned to sleep. Neither of them noticed me. I stood there taking it in, this tableau of tenderness between two of the people I loved most in the world, and I knew exactly what had happened. Then behind the door at my side I noticed Karl sitting in the chair, headphones on, playing Football Manager on his phone.

  I look back now and can say that even in that moment I was aware of the day’s significance, although, I might add, not where it was going to lead. This was the end of an era. Leah had moved into a flat on the high street. Ness was beside herself. However, the tragedy appeared to have ignited something in my mother: a purpose, perhaps. I hadn’t seen her so clear-minded for a while. When I came into the room, she signalled for me to run Ness a bath, which I did. And make her a cup of tea, which I did. She placed the tea next to the sleeping Ness and slithered out from beneath her, and took me through to the kitchen with an almost military focus. I trotted along behind, always amazed at the youthful appearance of my mother from the back; she could pass for a woman of thirty. In the kitchen she told me to make some lunch for the children – Evie had gone out but Polly was upstairs with Annie.

  For the briefest twenty minutes I had my mother back: the brave heart, the compassionate practicality. She asked what had happened and listened without judgement as I explained that none of this was out of the blue, that they’d been fighting for a long time; on our last summer holiday Leah had barely said a word to Ness for the whole two weeks. This all appeared to be news to my mother although I had told her several times that their relationship was getting worse. ‘Poor Ness. Poor children. Poor Leah,’ she said without sentiment. After a moment or two of staring out of the kitchen window, she said, ‘Leah has guts’ – which struck me as odd. Then she held me close and said, ‘Oh darling, this will be strange for all of you.’ Then she started clearing up but I noticed that she put the milk in the cleaning cupboard, and when Ness staggered into the kitchen she turned to her and said, ‘Vanessa, you look awful, are you all right?’ That’s the worst thing about Alzheimer’s – it makes you appear unfeeling. Which is just not fair.

  ‘Was there someone else involved?’ Dr Rhys Evans asked my mother, a gossipy glint in her eye. Everyone assumed there was someone else. And there usually is, isn’t there, Dr R? It takes a third person to really motivate us, to kick us up the derrière. What had motivated Leah? I can only think of how unhappy she must have been to inflict this on the family. She was unhappy, we all knew that, but it was kind of accepted, almost a joke: one New Year’s Eve her resolution had been to start walking with a spring in her step; she thought it might help to cheer herself up. I had never known her any different. I was sure there wasn’t anyone else involved. That’s what I liked about Leah: she wanted a clean life, no mess. She wanted to make a change in her life so she had done so.

  On the way up to the bathroom later, where I’d left Ness to blub in bubbles, I’d popped in to Annie’s room to find her and Polly sprawled on the bed as they watched something funny on YouTube. I gave Polly a hug. She smelt of chocolate. After a moment or two she said, ‘I can’t see the screen, Connie,’ so I let go.

  Ness lay motionless in the bath with her head turned to one side, one hand lying across her breast, like a wounded St Sebastian. It was an inappropriate time to take advantage of, I know, but Ness had always been strangely coy about showing her body; and despite the fact that we had been on many holidays together and lain on numerous beaches, this was the first time I had actually seen her form in all its naked glory. And it was glorious, complete with stretch marks and wayward hairs. Karl was bored of me always going on about her perfection and kept pointing out to me that she was like a boy, straight up and down and had no arse, nothing to grab hold of. (But I thought that was good – blimey, we women really get mixed messages. And when did he last grab hold of me anyway? He’s all talk. In actual fact, we had never really had that grabbing hold of kind of sex; we indulged in pleasant perfunctory intercourse once a month, much like you do, Dr R. Or hey, let’s go crazy, perhaps a two-night flurry. By the way, I’d recently asked my mother how often she and my father made love and she’d said, ‘Oh, hardly ever these days, darling, about once a fortnight.’ WTF?!)

  ‘How’s Poll?’ Ness had asked, turning to face me, the bags under her eyes a pretty greeny-brown.

  ‘Watching YouTube. Evie and Josh are still out.’ (Evie and Josh were now officially boyfriend and girlfriend – weird, slightly incestuous, but nice.)

  ‘It was awful, Con. Polly just ran off and hid underneath her bed crying. Evie marched out of the house slamming the door.’

  ‘They’ll be all right, kids are resilient,’ I said. Sometimes we all need a platitude to keep us going. You could do with using a few more of them, Dr R. If you’re not careful, you can come over a touch frosty.

  ‘I’m going to be that single person that no one invites to dinner parties …’ Ness said.

  I squeezed her toes. ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘Promise you’ll invite me.’

  ‘Of course I will. You can come and eat round here every night, my love.’

  ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’ She was so broken, so full of pain. It was alarming but, I must admit, fascinating to see such rawness.

  ‘You won’t be on your own, I promise.’ I got on my knees at the edge of the bath and wanted to cry myself.

  The whole thing was so profoundly sa
d. Karl and I lay in bed that night, pretending to read, both of us staring at the ceiling, silent, in our own worlds, the repercussions beginning to sink in; little waves kept hitting me. My own foundations had been shaken. It’s selfish, I know, Dr R, but I was gutted for our family. The eight of us were such a safe unit. We had become inseparable, we lived in each other’s houses, we’d holidayed together for the last five years – in fact we preferred to holiday together. Over time we had merged and the eight of us got on better than in our separate fours. Leah and Karl would go off for hours to play golf or tennis while Ness and I went for long coastal walks or lounged around reading. And so the big question was: what were we without them? I wasn’t sure. We would be left alone to face the reality of our own relationships.

  There was something else going on in my head too: I felt slightly envious of their freedom. Leah had broken the chains; she was free of all the cosy conventions of our comfortable little community. She wasn’t in love with Ness, so she had left. She had taken a gamble. My mother was right: she had guts.

  Karl and I should have lain there in the increasing darkness holding each other tight saying we’ll never lose each other, we’ll never break, but we didn’t; we bobbed about individually on our ocean of a bed. Perhaps I should have seen it all coming then.

  ‘We have to look after her, Karl. I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Well, she can come and hang out here, she can eat with us, the kids can stay here …’ He was so kind, as always. He’d even told me that my parents could come and live with us; if my father couldn’t cope with my mother she could come and live here. (His intentions were good but in reality I knew that meant I would be looking after her, as Karl was frequently away with work and, lovely though he is, Dr R, you and I both know he didn’t know how to use the washing machine, so the burden would all be mine – and how was I going to cope with the pressures of work, the kids, the house and my mother?)

  Lying there in that crepuscular light, I felt suddenly terrified by the precarious nature of the future. I reached for his hand and he squeezed my fingers, both of us ignoring the enormous elephant padding about beside us in the room: it was blindingly obvious that we should make love – that we needed a display of unity – but neither of us was able to muster the necessary enthusiasm.

  Dr Rhys Evans was listening to my mother’s every word as she showed off her remarkable powers of recall with detailed descriptions of that day, the tea mug, what Ness was wearing, what she sang to her – but she was soon repeating herself and abruptly stopped sharing information when she caught sight of the huge needle the nurse was brandishing. My mother cried out and grasped my hand. ‘It’s all right, Mamma,’ I said. A fear of needles seems entirely sane to me: only a nutjob welcomes a stabbing. ‘Just look at me.’ I stroked her papery skin. Her eyes were suddenly pale and watery and full of alarm, her shiny blue eyeliner had slipped and smudged, and somehow she had managed to smear some of that lipstick across her nose, lending her an air of tragic comedy. She winced as the huge needle dug into her skin, so pallid next to the ebony darkness of the nurse’s hand.

  ‘What was I saying, darling?’ she asked me.

  Initially, Ness’s misery had been intense. But she soon pulled herself together, sensible girl that she was. After we’d both finished work she and the kids spent most of their evenings round at our house doing homework, she would make work phone calls at our kitchen table as I cooked. We’d share a bottle of red. If Karl was around he would sometimes make us something fancy. He was mean with a wok. Sometimes we’d watch a film. Both families – minus Leah, of course – would huddle around the TV on a Saturday night to get our fill of modern-day bedlam. This set-up soon became normal. During this time my sweet father had to have a pacemaker fitted and I noticed he was having a few memory problems himself, so I flitted between houses and doctors, worrying now about the care that I would inevitably need to get in place for my parents.

  My mother would turn up at the house whenever she felt like it and ask Ness how Leah and the children were. Every time Ness would patiently re-explain the break-up of her marriage until she couldn’t be bothered any more and said they were all just fine. I missed Leah far more than I expected; her brooding negativity had become surprisingly comforting. Eventually she came back to the house to pick up all her furniture and possessions, leaving gaping holes on the walls and in the rooms in her wake. Ness and I sat and looked at the blankness for a while. Then we drove to Ikea and chose cheap and cheerful pieces to replace them with. On a whim she bought herself a cheery little cuckoo clock with a bird that flung itself out on the hour and screeched Cheep Cheep. It made her smile, she said. Smiling was good, I agreed.

  I have to confess: occasionally I wished she would just give us a little space. I don’t think a day went by without her and the kids appearing in our house. Just sometimes I wanted to spend the evening alone with Karl or be able to have other people around without Ness there as well. I’d begun to feel just a bit suffocated. And perhaps I was starting to get on her nerves too; I remember her getting quite short with me. On one occasion, the three of us were walking to the pub one evening and she said I really hate my hair – which was a strange thing for her to say, primarily because it was so girly, and secondly because I knew she liked her hair; she thought she had fabulous hair. She had a particular way of twiddling it that I had begun to find just a teensy bit annoying. It was self-consciously flirtatious – I’d seen her turn on the charm with various people at school, men and women, flick flick twist twist, and they were putty in her hands.

  Was I jealous of her freedom? Perhaps I was. But I was also looking out for her; you must understand that. In my heartfelt opinion she deserved only good things. I did all I could to cheer her up; we spent one weekend painting her floors white and her walls blue, de-Leah-fying the place. I suggested we do a makeover on her as well; I’d always been dying to dress her, as she didn’t have much sense of style. We shopped; she looked fantastic. I bought her some make-up: smoky shades that she said she liked on me. And it worked; she did cheer up. She began to have fun again. It was like watching a flower blossom. Within four months she was blooming. I hate to confess it, but I preferred her un-cheered up, when she was low and needy, enabling me to excel in the friendship stakes. She’d started going on dates. It was one thing her being with Leah but altogether something else when she spent the evening snogging a waitress. I wasn’t adapting very well.

  I just hate my hair, she’d said, tugging at her locks. It’s all … She was searching for the word. We were walking along the towpath; I was behind her, Karl in front. She was wearing this beautiful dress I’d found for her in Urban Outfitters and I was marvelling at her petiteness. Frizzy? I proffered, because her hair was quite dry and flyaway and I did genuinely think that this was the word she was searching for. She did have faults, you see, I wasn’t blinded. Well, she turned round sharply, her face full of indignation. She was insulted and shirty with me all evening. In the pub she pointedly ignored me, turning her chair away from me to face Karl.

  ‘Apple!’ my mother cried jubilantly, as the blood spilled from her arm down the plastic tube. ‘Apple was one of the words!’

  Dr Rhys Evans smiled and passed the nurse a swab of cotton wool. ‘Very good! Apple!’ I didn’t like her patronizing tone. ‘Thank you so much, Sebo,’ she said, dismissing the nurse.

  My mother was in good spirits now. ‘Oh, yes. Thank you so much, See. Eee …’ She was smiling at the nurse but then found herself struggling for the name she had just heard. ‘Eee … Ebola,’ she cried, pretty sure she’d nailed it. I could see the crossing of the wires in her brain: the vowel sounds, the endless threat of disease in the news, the colour of Sebo’s skin. Again, there was logic to her thinking. I felt suddenly terribly moved by my poor little old mum, with her clownish make-up and her accidental racism, for the terrifying loss of herself that she was experiencing.

  ‘I think I need to spend a penny,’ she said, standing up on her thin scra
tched pins. And I got up to help her but Dr Rhys Evans stopped me with a hand on my forearm and asked Sebo whether she wouldn’t mind doing the honours, which was a bit much given the insult she had just received.

  They left the room. I wasn’t comfortable it just being the two of us. Unwillingly I sat back down and rummaged for my phone in my bag to signify that I would wait patiently for the return of my mother, and then to make up for the implicit rudeness of my gesture I said, ‘Yes, I know, she’s getting worse.’

  Dr Rhys Evans stared at me – not my breasts or my shoes, but my eyes. It was an uncomfortable silence so I broke it. ‘But, hey ho, none of us are getting out of here alive …’

  ‘And you?’ she said, like a real doctor, which I kept forgetting that she was. ‘How are you coping?’

  I was surprised by the question. ‘Me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, how is everything with you?’

  I was stunned. For a long time, no one had asked me this. They asked me how my parents were doing, how my children were doing, how Karl was doing, how Ness was doing. But nobody asked me how I was doing.

  ‘Yes …’ I said.

  I felt exposed; my eyes began to sting. She saw it. Oh no. I would for ever be cornered in the deli section at Sainsbury’s.

  My woes felt small in comparison but ever since Ness and Leah had broken up, I hadn’t felt myself. My resistance had dropped. I felt like I was crumbling, not dramatically, but in little pieces. No matter how hard Karl and I worked, we were always stretched financially. Every month we were sliding further and further into debt; there seemed to be no way out of it, as we lived way beyond our means. And work itself was challenging: I’d written a piece on the CEO of a pharmaceutical company for a broadsheet and had been bombarded in the comments section by the most vitriolic, personal attacks on a thread that just kept spinning. I know this is how it works now but if you’ve never been on the receiving end of it, Dr R, it’s really hard to explain. As a journalist, I’m supposed to just take it on the chin – it’s your own fault for putting your opinions out there. But I’ve never been great at taking anything on the chin and fatally, I got involved, defending my point of view. And then things escalated, culminating with rape threats and several poisonous comments about how I was too ugly to be gang-raped. Who the hell are these people?