by Anna Legat
‘That’s me. Stroke, heart attack, dying peacefully in my sleep – choose one,’ she said, rather cheerfully considering the circumstances under which we found ourselves reunited. ‘Fact is, I didn’t create much fuss with my passing. You, on the other hand,’ she pointed an accusatory finger at Paula, ‘did push the boundary a fraction too far – your own fault, no one else’s!’
‘Oh, Mum, do you have to? Don’t you think I know it?’
‘A bit too late knowing it now! Typical Paula: act first, think later … and as for you,’ she glared at me, ‘you’ve always been too arrogant for your own good. Someday, someone was bound to put you in your place. And, for God’s sake,’ she passed me a handkerchief, ‘wipe that snot off your face!’
Our darling mother was on form: unfair, as usual. She was bound to drive me bonkers right through eternity – and that was just Mother. If you threw Paula into the mix, then fireworks would fly. Hellish fireworks! Keeping my wits about me for all eternity seemed rather tricky from the outset. And eternity looked never-ending; well, it was: a life sentence without the possibility of parole. I had to pause to consider my options. Doubts niggled at the back of my mind: was I ready to plead guilty?
Paula looked like she was. Dying to go. Her transformation was outstanding, and well overdue. She was no longer the tired, used-up skeletal apparition – she was the sweet and cuddly little girl she used to be when her whole life was still ahead of her and she was free to make sensible choices. Fingers crossed, she would make them in the afterlife. It was her last chance. Mother would keep her on the straight and narrow. For one, she would make her have a cooked breakfast every morning, before releasing Paula into the fields of Paradise. Paula would benefit no end from her mum’s cooking! Not to mention Mother’s firm hand when it would come to Paula’s natural predilection for fraternising with Evil (the Garden of Eden’s serpent would at last have someone devious enough to play Snakes & Ladders with) and corrupting the Innocent (neither saint nor angel would be spared her advances). But Mother would keep her safe, and fat. There would be no escape from the relative sanity of Mother’s middle-class values, for where could Paula run other than to Hell – and she had been there already once.
Things were looking up for Paula. When I saw Dad, I knew things were looking up for Mother as well, for while she was running after Paula, Dad would take care of her. He had clearly forgiven her for all her earthly trespasses and was ready to take her on – once again. He waved to us from the far end of the hospital corridor where the light shone brightly. It looked like a good place to be. Mother agreed. She squealed with delight and bounced about like a bunny on Duracell. It became her in a way because she had regressed even further back in time and was now a ten-year-old tomboy clad in boy’s shorts with elasticised braces and grazed knees. Next to her Paula was perfectly in character, looking like a precious little princess with ribbons in her hair and a toothless smile to die for – all innocence revisited.
Mother took mine and Paula’s hands, me on the left, Paula on her right, and said her usual, ‘Let’s go, together, on three. Dad’s waiting. One-two-three …’
‘JUMP!’ Paula and Mother yelled together. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. A lump grew in my throat and I couldn’t say a word. I pulled my hand away. I stole a furtive glance at my bereaved family: Rob was hugging the kids and they were hugging him back. They stood huddled up together, like a herd of hapless sheep without a shepherd. They needed me.
It wasn’t just the eternity with Mother and Paula that held me back, but it was the eternity without Rob and the kids. I couldn’t just leave them. How would they cope without me? Who would pay the bills? Who would fix the broken toaster? Who would hold the kids to account? Who would make them pick up their dirty socks and put them in the laundry basket? Who, on earth, would tell them how to live their lives? They needed me.
‘Georgie, you’re no good to them the way you are – a vegetable, no less,’ Mother warned me. She sounded and looked a bit ridiculous, she was hardly compelling in her little boy’s shorts. I couldn’t possibly take her seriously. And I didn’t.
‘I’ll take my chances, Mum. Off you go. Don’t make Dad wait.’
‘Let’s go, Mum,’ Paula had to have the last say. ‘She won’t come. She’d rather be a turnip than come with us.’
They both turned on their heels and glided away. Typically for him, Dad said nothing, but when they weren’t looking, he winked at me. Then the three of them walked into the sunset, Dad bringing up the rear.
APPEAL IS GRANTED …
I must admit I was sulking. After all the drama of my earlier antics when I had almost ‘sleeped’ away and given everybody an almighty fright, I changed my mind and decided to stay. It must have been a bit of an anti-climax for all concerned. They had prepared themselves for the worst, held their collective breath while I was supposed to draw my last one – it must have been exhausting. So as soon as Dr Jarzecki declared me a miracle and I was back beeping and puffing through my extensive machinery, everyone had gone home for a good night’s sleep in their own beds. I was particularly hopeful Olivia would be spending the night in her own bed, but I didn’t take the risk of verifying that in person. I chose to keep my own company and sulk by my own bedside.
On some level it was pleasant: the comforting beeping, the reliable hiss of my ventilator, the reassuring smell of disinfectants, the occasional patter of nurses’ feet in the corridor, a random stranded soul asking for directions. I could focus on feeling sorry for myself.
As I was beginning to feel restless (no good sulking without an audience), Tony walked in. The first thought that hit me was that of sheer horror. I looked like shit: no whorish make up, no killer heels, no bucketfuls of Opium. Just poor, ailing me, flattened in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of my nose and plasters stuck to my forehead. I would never allow that to be the last memory of me hovering before Tony’s eyes. I had to recover if only to erase that unfortunate picture from his mind.
I was just about to rise from the dead and put on some makeup when he stopped me. He sat on my bedsheets, thus pinning me down. In the past, I would have welcomed that experience with my arms wide opened, drooling at the thought of carnal pleasures to follow.
As it was, I was just drooling.
Tony took my hand. Considering all the invasive intimacies we had shared in the past, he had never held my hand. I wished I could feel it. Both his hands were clasped over mine with some plastic peg protruding between his middle and fore fingers, trying to separate us. Again my wishful thinking kicked in: I wished I could pull that damned peg off. I didn’t give a toss if that peg, attached to a fat needle, was what was keeping me alive. I didn’t want anything between me and Tony. I wished I could smell his stag scent and sense the heat of his body … All over again, I was working myself up into an orgasm, one which I knew would never come. That’s how impotence must feel, I concluded sadly.
He must have sensed my frustration. He patted my hand – a rather disappointingly paternal gesture – and kissed my forehead.
‘Sorry it took me so long …’ he said.
You were busy , I told him, not that he took any notice.
‘… but I was busy’.
You shouldn’t have done it! I said, and immediately wanted to kiss him better.
‘I shouldn’t have done it,’ he echoed after me. ‘It didn’t make any difference. I still feel like crap …’
Try getting into my shoes!
‘… and you’re still dying.’
Speak for yourself!
‘And you’ll never know –’
Ha!
‘If I told you,’ he made his hand into a pistol, pointed at my head and fired, ‘I’d have to kill you.’
I’m doing a good job of that myself, thank you very much!
He bent over and only then did I notice he’d brought a bag with him: a Tesco bag. Was he going to smother me with it? Couldn’t he wait? I was just about to kick the bucket anyway.
He produced a bunch of grapes. ‘Brought you some grapes,’ he said and dangled the bunch in the air. Then, one by one, he ate them.
Well , I told myself, it’s the thought that counts.
He was speaking to me with his mouth full. Perhaps, because of what he was saying, he wanted his words muffled. ‘You’re such a pain in the arse, Georgie … Why, oh why? Why do I care so much? What the hell is there about you that I love so much? You’re just a bloody pain.’ At this point I was speechless. I had never heard a confession of love delivered to me with less grace. Come to think, I had never heard a confession of love – full stop. Rob wasn’t one for declarations of undying anything.
Then came the punchline.
‘I think I’ll go away for a while. I can’t take this shit.’
And that was what got me going. I couldn’t let him go, not even for a while. It was my blinking heart again. The bleeping went berserk, lights flashed, steam came out of my ears, and a war cry tore from my chest …
OK. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but what I did, in a nutshell, was to wake up. Or perhaps, more to the point, I came back from the dead.
Since that day when Rob had compressed my chest into a cardiac arrest, which surprisingly had been only a couple of weeks ago, I had lived – vegetated, rather – in fear of there being a funeral soon. And there was. Luckily, it wasn’t my own.
Other than that, I wasn’t feeling particularly smug about it: after all, it was my mother and my sister who were being laid to rest. Their two coffins had been lowered into the hole in the ground, Mother first, Paula on top, watched by a respectable crowd of mourners.
I was still in a wheelchair, too weak to stand, too shaken up to deliver eulogies. In fact, there were no eulogies. Rob had always been a man of few words, shying away from the spotlight. And even if he wanted to say something about Paula, I didn’t want to take the chance of hearing it. Rob couldn’t lie and we didn’t want the truth to come out. It was better off buried alongside Paula. As for Mother, she wouldn’t want us to speak behind her back. She would say, ‘Speak to my face, or shut up!’ So we shut up.
Did I mention a crowd? There was one. A cavalcade of raven-black limousines had rolled up, and out of them poured the thespians of Paula’s world. They wouldn’t miss the opportunity to flash their veiled, wide-brimmed hats and black cloaks, to wipe away theatrical tears with crisp white handkerchiefs that would contrast beautifully with their black leather gloves. I was sure Paula was smiling in her coffin, in the secure knowledge that she could have done grief so much better than the lot of them.
Tony had come, too. With a bouquet of red roses. They didn’t look the freshest, I assured myself, a pang of uncharitable jealousy stinging my cardiac-challenged heart. He must’ve pre-ordered them for my funeral – for me. It would have been such a shame to waste them, so Paula got them in the end. That girl! Once again she was centre stage!
Three months later we were back in court: the lot of us. One happy family. I sat in the gallery – it wasn’t my case to run. Next to me was my semi-faithful husband and honorary kettle holder, Rob. Emma held Brandon’s hand, or he held hers – whichever way it was, they were holding hands openly and in public, and with my blessing. Mark and Chi delayed their departure to Vietnam to be there for me and see the wheels of justice in motion. Tony was present too, crossing swords with the pimply Gavin Aitken, the only persona non grata in the courtroom.
On reflection, ‘crossing swords’ is an overstatement. Aitken couldn’t cross his fingers when it came to it, so what they were really doing was just congratulating themselves on the conclusion of the case. Jason Mahon had pleaded guilty to theft and two counts of grievous bodily harm under sections 18 and 20 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. One of those ‘persons’ was me and the other Brandon.
Aitken had done his best – which wasn’t much, really – to implicate Jason in the killing of Ehler, but Tony had, skilfully, weeded that idea out of Gavin’s head, by firstly reminding him of departmental budget cuts and the pressures of running a full-blown trial. Then came the reasonable doubt: there had been no traces of gunpowder on Jason’s fingers. The gun used had in fact never been found. Jason confessed to being in Ehler’s study, but the fatal shot was fired from the garden. The killer’s footprints were size tens while Jason was only a size seven, not to mention that his only footwear was a pair of very tired trainers with a tread not even remotely resembling that of the killer’s shoes.
We all sighed relief when Aitken agreed to accept the guilty plea Tony put in front of him on Jason’s behalf. Bizarrely, we were all rooting for Jason. After all, he hadn’t done it under his own steam. He was a hapless victim in Ehler’s schemes, just like the rest of us. Admittedly, he was a shitty little weasel with a lot on his conscience, but then weren’t we all in some shape or form? We had to sort of adopt Jason into our small but tight family of misfits and small-time criminals. He sort of grew on us. After all, were we any better than him? Tony, the cold-blooded killer? Brandon, the statutory rapist? Or I, who concealed their deeds, the accessory after the fact on all counts? In comparison, Jason’s crimes paled into insignificance. He had only done what he had been told to do: had gone and ‘grabbed life by the feet’. How was he to know a more conventional way to go about it? And he didn’t get away with it. We did. The least we owed him was the membership of our club.
We had come to court to hear the sentence. We were holding our fingers crossed for our assailant as the judge read his lengthy dictum. Jason, as his weasel’s nature dictated, wriggled and fidgeted through the entire process as if his body was under attack by legions of deadly ants. He didn’t understand a word of it: not a word about the aggravating circumstances of his crimes which justified placing the offences in Category One, featuring greater culpability; and not a word about the mitigating circumstances being few and far between, his tender age being the most prominent one.
The Honourable Justice Poggycock reduced Jason’s sentence to six years following his guilty plea. That was what Jason understood. He knew all about the possibility of parole and so he raised a triumphant fist in the air and cried, ‘Yeah!’ You would be excused for thinking he had just been nominated for a BAFTA.
We were happy for him. He was now a serious criminal, not a petty car thief as he had been at the start of his adventure, but an offender of great standing in the criminal community, a man who could kill if pushed. No one would dare try his patience in prison. Jason was a crime lord in the making. In a way, he really had grabbed life by its feet.
But more to the point, it had never really been about Jason. We left the courtroom, carrying our sins with us. In a way, we all got away with murder.
It’s been a few years since it all happened. Only now did I manage to write it all down for posterity. Before I put this memoir away in a safe place with instructions for it to be opened fifty years after my death, I need to say that had it been written by someone else I would not believe a word of it. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to believe it. Like the other day when I bumped into Etienne in court.
I said, ‘Etienne? What brings you here?’
He went white as a sheet. His lip trembled as he finally managed to stagger over his dodgy past to correct me.
‘My name is Jack Raulston … I’m a forensic psychologist. I’m an expert witness for the defence.’
‘Of course. Sorry, I mistook you for someone else,’ I mumbled hopelessly.
Tony, the defence counsel in that case, gaped wide-mouthed for a good minute or two after overhearing my faux pas.
Oh well, shit happens. I am glad to know that Etienne – or Jack, Tony got that one right! – has made something of himself.
Mark is doing well too. He has become something of a romantic hero – a Don Quixote fighting the windmills of injustice in the remote outposts of the Far East, with Chi, his very own Sancho Panza, by his side. The apple could not have fallen further away from the tree because Rob still delights in gardening and reading on the bus.
Olivia has become a cherished family friend, valued especially for her cooking abilities. We always invite her for Christmas dinner. I must confess I watch her chubby little chorizos very carefully whenever they stray too closely to my husband. Like they say: keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.
Finally, to Tony. Unlike Olivia, he has not become a cherished family friend. He lives dangerously somewhere on the periphery of my respectable existence. That is the best I can wish for because I know I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off him.
Not to mention the fact that he can’t cook.
THE END
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Published by Accent Press Ltd 2015
ISBN 9781783758722
Copyright © Anna Legat 2015
The right of Anna Legat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN