The Things I Know

by Amanda Prowse

  THIRTEEN

  Grayson seemed to be operating on autopilot, distracted and tense from the moment they jumped down from the Subaru at Bristol Parkway.

  She had kissed her dad.

  ‘Bye, Pops. And thank you . . .’

  ‘Keep us posted, little love, and take care.’

  And then, gripping her man’s hand, she had stumbled once or twice on her twisted foot as he strode purposefully through the throng of people, all oblivious to the urgency he felt. He was preoccupied, understandably so, but still, this felt a lot like returning to reality, coming up for air, as if they had been living underwater in a bubble of rural perfection where they made protestations of love, put cards up in the farm wholesale store, planned for the future and reached for each other’s hand. It was a shock to her system – noisy, sharp and cold. The sea change unnerved her.

  Grayson, leaning on the table in the chair opposite hers, rubbed his forehead. As the carriage rocked along the tracks, he kicked out a couple of times, as if the leg room were inadequate, running his finger under the collar of his shirt, suggesting that the carriage temperature was too hot and progress a lot, lot slower than he was happy with.

  ‘We’ll get there as soon as we can, Grayson. Try to take a deep breath.’

  He nodded, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. And for a second, peace seemed to come over him, before his leg started jumping and his fingers fidgeted with the edge of the train ticket, flicking the corner back and forth, back and forth.

  ‘I just want to get there.’

  ‘I know.’

  According to his sobbing Auntie Joan, his mum had had a heart attack, been whisked to Barts Hospital and was on the brink, hooked up to tubes and wires and machines . . . It intrigued Thomasina that the embarrassing exchange of a few weeks earlier no longer mattered in the light of this new crisis. Nothing did. As is often the case in an emergency, everything was forgiven, the slate wiped clean, and all that did matter was getting Grayson to his mum, either to reassure her or to say goodbye. And Thomasina would be there by his side, offering support, should the worst happen.

  ‘I’ve thought about my mum dying,’ he said as the train hurtled past Swindon.

  ‘I think everyone does that,’ she said, to console him. ‘It’s how we try to cope with the scary stuff before it actually happens, like an emotional trial run.’

  ‘I suppose so. I think what it will be like afterwards – my aunts so sad, drinking, no doubt. And I think about what the flat might be like, plunged into silence. And I know it sounds terrible, Thomasina, but I think about that life of quiet, without the trickle of words from my mum, on constant send, voicing her interior monologue like the man on the radio giving the shipping news.’ He gave her a brief smile. ‘I’m ashamed to say that the idea of that quiet used to fill me with a little relief.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s terrible.’ She again pictured Mrs Potts’s anger and her spiky turns of phrase. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘And yet now there’s a very real chance of her not making it, and I don’t feel relief at all. My heart’s racing and I feel guilty.’

  ‘Why do you feel guilty?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Because she didn’t ever want me to leave her, and now, whatever has happened to her, she had to face it alone.’

  ‘You’ll have a chance to make it up to her, I’m sure of it,’ Thomasina offered, forcing a smile. This was not the time to voice her opinion that he deserved some respite from the chaotic and demanding life in which his mother had ensnared him.

  The hospital was hectic and she hated the smell, the bright, bright lights and the glimpses of the sick and injured. She was no stranger to hospitals, and it was impossible for her to walk the pastel-painted corridors without recalling the many operations on her gut, foot, heart and the painful, painful ones on her mouth when she was a kid. She felt a surge of sickness at the memory.

  Grayson ran around, misreading signs and in a state close to panic as he tried to find the ward, the details of which he’d written down on a piece of paper and on the palm of his hand, lest he should forget. Still holding tightly on to his hand, as his flat-soled shoes squeaked on the highly polished floors when he rounded the corners, it was all Thomasina could do to keep up. With his satchel clutched to his chest, his fright seemed to cloud his sense of where he was. Eventually, he put a call in to his Auntie Joan, who gave them directions towards the ward. She and Eva were huddled over cigarettes outside the building, without any hint of how inappropriate this was.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Grayson pressed the buzzer and spoke to the kindly, slightly robotic voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Patient’s name?’

  ‘Mrs Ida Potts, but I don’t know why she still calls herself Mrs Potts – she’s been single for far more years than she was ever married.’ Nervous energy took over his tongue, and Thomasina kissed his hand.

  ‘Everything is going to be okay.’ She liked the way her mum’s mantra sounded at this moment, understanding now how this warm and comfortable platitude was a little like emotional cotton wool to stuff into the edges of one’s mind when emotional turmoil left gaps.

  The door unclicked slowly open.

  She felt a sudden wave of unease, as if she should be elsewhere, as Grayson walked briskly along the ward, peeping into rooms where the doors were ajar and hovering outside curtained beds, until a noise or a voice told him it was not his mum loitering within its flowery confines. A fat nurse with a fixed smile and an iPad approached him.

  ‘Can I help you two? Who is it we are looking for tonight?’

  ‘My mum. Ida Potts.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, nodding along the corridor. ‘Second bed from the end on the left.’ She turned and pointed with her arm extended, her hand flicking at the wrist like a flight attendant in the middle of the safety briefing.

  They ran then, and as the adrenaline that had fuelled him since he first took the call from his Auntie Joan a few hours before began to ebb, he began to shake with fatigue, lines of worry etched upon his face. Thomasina rubbed his arm and again kissed his shoulder when they arrived, tiny gestures designed not to intrude but to let him know she was close.

  The two stared at the woman in the bed. Thomasina noticed that she was smaller than when she pictured her curled into her chair at home, and she also looked older – small and old, with fear and tension shading her furrowed brow even as she slept.

  She heard the gasp of distress from Grayson as he sat down on the plastic chair by the side of the bed and placed his satchel on his knees, watching his mother sleep. His shoulders sloped in relief at finally being with her.

  Gently, Thomasina placed her hand on his shoulder, and he jumped, as if he’d quite forgotten she was there. ‘Do you want me to leave you alone?’

  He shook his head. ‘I feel like I should take her hand and whisper words of comfort, but we’re just not that kind of people.’

  ‘This isn’t a film. There’s no blueprint, Grayson. You do whatever you feel is right,’ she said, gently rubbing his back.

  He nodded again and gave a small smile. She stood by his side, both of them watching as his mother drifted in and out of dreams, head back, mouth a little slack, the oxygen coming from somewhere overhead, filling her lungs through a snug-fitting mask over her mouth and nose. Despite the intimacy of the situation, Mrs Potts was still very much a stranger and Thomasina felt her presence to be a little intrusive. But as Grayson reached back and took her hand in his, she felt all doubt diminish, knowing she was where she should be.

  Their breathing slowed and the atmosphere grew a little calmer as she and Grayson settled into the environment. Their new-found peace, however, was shattered when his aunts came bustling on to the ward, carrying with them a fug of cigarette smoke that seemed even more repulsive in this sterile environment. The two women, almost carbon copies of their sister, were crying loudly, disturbingly so, as they approached the cubicle, dabbing at their eyes with damp bit
s of tissue and linking arms, as if this mutual physical support were necessary for them to remain upright. Thomasina couldn’t help but think that there was an element of performance in their manner.

  ‘Frightened us half to death, she did!’

  ‘I thought she was a goner!’

  ‘Called us and was all wheezy, breathless . . .’

  ‘By the time we got there she was on the floor – the floor!’

  ‘Shouting out for you, she was, but you’re here now.’

  ‘Yes.’ They more or less barged Thomasina out of the way in their eagerness to squeeze and pat their nephew’s flesh beneath their pudgy fingers. ‘He’s here now.’

  ‘Is she going to be okay, do you think?’ he asked softly, as if wary of triggering another wave of distress from his aunts.

  ‘They said she was lucky.’

  ‘Very lucky.’

  ‘She’s always been lucky.’

  ‘Except for picking that bastard – she wasn’t so lucky then.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Fancy running out on your wife and child . . . Who does that?’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  Thomasina saw Grayson sit up straight, as if their words were a slap across his cheek, and she wished they would either shut up or leave but was not in a position to request either.

  ‘This . . . this is Thomasina.’ He gestured towards her before turning his attention back to his mother.

  She felt the gawp of the women graze her skin. It was a look that managed to be both disapproving and judgemental, leaving her in no doubt that they had been thoroughly briefed by their sister and already held fully formed opinions on her, the floozy!

  ‘Hi.’

  They lifted their chins briefly in response.

  She pictured driving along earlier on this very same day with Grayson’s new puddle-jumpers nestling on the back seat, her confidence high at having confronted Emery and the whole day feeling like sunshine . . . Now it felt like a lifetime ago.

  The minutes ticked by and turned into an hour, which slipped into two. The aunts hovered around the bed, took turns at sitting in the chair on the opposite side from Grayson, rubbing their sister’s arm or crying into their soggy bits of tissue, which they rolled between their impatient fingers. Twice, at his insistence, Thomasina sat on Grayson’s vacated chair until the ache in her foot subsided, or she walked to the waiting room and back, aware of the silence of the women when she returned, as if she’d interrupted a delicate conversation. And, the way they greeted her with a semi-scowl, she suspected that the topic was herself.

  ‘I could do with a cup of tea.’

  ‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ the other echoed, parrot-fashion.

  It might have been the mention of tea but, as the word left their mouths, Mrs Potts’s eyes flickered open.

  ‘There she is!’

  ‘Hello, darlin’!’

  ‘Don’t you worry, we’re all here, all of us!’

  ‘Welcome back!’

  Her sisters crowded over her. But it was the sight of her son that made her tears pool. She pawed at the plastic mask that covered her nose and mouth, pulling it down to her chest, gasping for breath. ‘My boy . . . I knew you’d come. I knew you would. I knew . . .’ Her breaths were quick and shallow.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum. Just sleep – rest now.’

  ‘I was . . . I was so frightened,’ she cried again, her words coasting on stuttered, distress-fuelled breaths.

  ‘’Course you were!’ Joan boomed.

  ‘Lying there all alone on the floor like that, ’course you were frightened!’ Eva shot Thomasina a look, as if it were her fault that he had been otherwise engaged.

  She watched as Grayson seemed to shrink in their presence. It was as if their words, reminders of his abandonment, were a blanket that smothered him, leaving him gasping for breath and wordless. It was as ridiculous as it was bloody unfair.

  Mrs Potts looked at her briefly and her eyes narrowed in the way she remembered. Thomasina felt torn. Part of her wanted to turn and run, all the way back to her soft bed in Austley Morton, the bed with a dip in the middle and the creaky springs, and part of her wanted to pull Grayson to her, to get him away from these women and never let him go.

  It was late when they got back to the flat in the domino block, odd to find it in darkness and so quiet. She didn’t notice the graffiti or the wee smell on the stairs, or even the syringes. Tiredness and an aching body meant she didn’t notice much, other than the empty chair by the window with the empty wine bottles gathered around it, standing guard in a row. Thomasina and Grayson went straight to bed, forgoing the opportunity to fry something up in the kitchen. His lesson at the farmhouse range that morning was now nothing more than a dim and distant memory, and to mention it, something so frivolous as eating supper, felt churlish in the face of what was occurring.

  Thomasina’s stomach rumbled nonetheless.

  Overcome with fatigue, they fell awkwardly on to the narrow mattress in his sad bedroom. Grayson buried his head in the pillow and reached out to smooth the soft length of her hair as though it were a comfort blanket for him, and she liked it, liked his need of her. It made her smile.

  ‘I don’t know how my mum will cope in hospital overnight. She was pretty upset when we left.’ He slurred his words like a drunk.

  ‘She’s in the best hands,’ she mumbled, yawning.

  Thomasina pictured the woman’s tearful face, pleading for him to return first thing in the morning. He had, of course, promised. And she’d felt a jolt of nausea at just how much Mrs Potts controlled him, this followed by a sharp mental rebuke: For goodness’ sake, Thomasina – the woman is very ill!

  ‘Oh shit!’ Grayson lumbered into a sitting position. ‘I need to tell work. I only had another day as planned absence, but I think I might need more.’ He fired a text off to his boss.

  MR JENKS. MY MUM IN HOSPITAL. HER HEART. WILL TAKE FORMAL LEAVE. THANK YOU. GRAYSON.

  The reply was immediate and unexpected.

  SORRY TO HEAR THAT. TAKE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED. SENDING YOU OUR VERY BEST.

  The words were a relief and the final incentive he needed to fall asleep. They lay spooning, his arm over her stomach anchoring her to him and with the welcome weight of his thigh over her leg. She paid no heed to the heckling shouts to flats above and below from the concrete car park or the wail of sirens . . . Grayson was right: it was an urban lullaby – this was her last thought before she fell into a deep, deep sleep . . .

  ‘How’s Grayson’s ma?’ her dad asked with a note of concern.

  ‘Well, she’s awake, and so that’s something,’ Thomasina informed him as she knelt on Grayson’s bed and looked out of the window at the little train creeping along the bend of a track in the distance like a toy.

  ‘Good, good, and how’s the boy himself doing?’

  ‘He’s bearing up, Pops. It’s hard for him, but we were so tired last night we slept like logs. Should know more this morning. We’re heading off to the hospital in a minute.’

  ‘Righto, righto. Well, rest assured, all is okay here. Thurston Buttermore called me to say he’s taken Emery on as labour, just wanted to let me know, which was decent of him, and Mrs Reedley has popped up to lend a hand this morning and your chickens are all fine. I told them you’d had an emergency. And Buddy is right here, aren’t you, boy?’

  She felt a flash of love for her birds and her pup.

  ‘I’ll be home soon as I can, Pops – love you . . .’

  Standing at the end of Mrs Potts’s bed when they arrived was a young doctor in an open-necked shirt and with the confident handshake of a person certain of their place in the world. In that respect, he reminded her of Jonathan.

  ‘Your mum has been telling me all about you. I’m just glad my mother isn’t here, or I’d be in trouble – you’re setting the bar way too high.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that.’ Grayson looked at Thomasina, knowing that she’d borne witne
ss to his mother’s dismissal of him and her sniping, which left him feeling worthless.

  His mum beamed, as if complimented.

  ‘You have a bit more colour in your cheeks, Mum.’

  ‘Yes, a lot better today. Did you stay over last night?’ she asked Thomasina directly, with an undercurrent of disapproval that was strong for one so close to death’s door.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, thank you. I didn’t think Grayson should be on his own.’

  ‘I was just telling your mum that this was a warning.’ The doctor spoke earnestly. ‘A minor heart attack, but she does need to change some of her habits to give herself the best chance going forward. The heart is a muscle just like any other and needs exercise and the right environment to thrive.’

  ‘I’m going to change, Doctor.’ Mrs Potts closed her eyes briefly, as if in prayer. ‘I ain’t going to go through that again. Thought I was going to wake up dead.’ She shook her head.

  ‘Well, as I say,’ the young doctor said, jollying the chat along, ‘it was a warning, Mrs Potts, and you were lucky, but no alcohol, no cigarettes and regular exercise. These would be the kindest changes you could make for your body.’

  ‘As God is my witness, I’ll exercise every day and give up the cigarettes and the booze. Not that I drink that much, not compared to some.’

  Grayson again looked at Thomasina and rolled his eyes, suggesting that he, like her, was trying to think of anyone who might drink more than his mum.

  ‘You’re going to need some looking after, at least until you’re properly back on your feet. Plenty of rest until you feel able to get back to your normal routine.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’ve got my boy.’ She nodded in his direction.

  Grayson stayed mute, but Thomasina felt the shout in her head like a bang. It was the sound of every door of opportunity through which she had tantalisingly glimpsed closing all at once. Was this it? Their great ‘make life happen’ plan – was this how it stalled, because Grayson would be reeled in by his mother, caught on a hook made of duty, attached to a line fashioned from guilt? The very thought made her feel a little nauseous, as well as reflective. She too had felt the twitch of haste in her heels at the sound of her dad’s voice, with the news that Emery was over at the Buttermores. She knew Waycott Farm was a pair of hands short and she felt the pull in her gut that she needed to be there to help.