‘This is Sid, Moon and Frances,’ I say. Frances steps forward, like she is about to be knighted. My mother takes each of their hands in turn. ‘Very strong energies. Very raw. Especially you.’ Sid steps back.
‘Mother,’ I say, ‘what’s going on?’
My mother widens her eyes and looks at me meaningfully. She lowers her voice. ‘Your text, darling. Your … predicament. I am here to help you sort things out.’
My stomach plummets. That’s why Kelly didn’t reply. I sent that dumb, pathetic yelp to … my mother.
‘Oh god!’ I say. ‘That wasn’t meant for you! And I was being all late-night and dramatic.’ I look at my lodgers. ‘There has been a miscommunication. It’s all good.’
‘No,’ my mother says, ‘it’s not all good. You are evidently not all good. Look at this lightless tomb you’re living in.’
‘This house cost … is worth more than yours. As you know.’
‘That’s London for you. A city of discontented idiots in expensive houses.’
I look at Moon, Sid and Frances. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ I say. ‘No one is coming or going anywhere.’
They look at each other nervously. Then Frances says: ‘Thing is, Jenny, we were just having a meeting earlier this morning, when you were still in bed. We have decided we don’t want to stay here. When we are so … misused.’
‘Misused?’
‘In your “journalism”. We’re not paying this month’s rent, and we’re leaving. We’re going to an Airbnb until we find somewhere else.’
‘That settles it!’ says my mother – domineering, genial. ‘This is what you call good old-fashioned serendipity. I am a big fan of Serendipity, and all her sisters.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No. Just … no.’
Frances says: ‘Personally, I can’t bear to stay in one place for more than a few months. It cripples me, creatively.’
Sid says, ‘I don’t want the treasure of my life to be the silver drawer for your magpie claws. You are twisting my real. You are junk mail.’
My mother stares at her.
ONE-LINERS
I’d gone round to a friend’s house and her father had made me cry because he’d said: Well, I bet they don’t have to worry when they run out of fuse wire in your house. Incidentally, this same man later said to another friend, who dropped a peanut down her top: It’s good to see Victoria is finally developing a figure. Appropriateness was not the man’s forte.
My mother came to pick me up in the car – a Mercedes, I think it was then – and she looked at my face and just knew (it wouldn’t take a psychic …).
‘What’s happened?’ she said.
I told her.
She put the car into Park and got out. ‘Wait here,’ she said.
She walked up to the door. She rapped. He answered.
‘You seem to think my daughter’s hair colour is amusing,’ she said. ‘Which I think is troublesome, if not pathetic, for a man of your age.’ I could hear every word, even though she had her back to me. What can I say, the woman could project.
He said something, probably sarcastic.
She said, ‘Don’t pick on the remarkable people. Go back in there with your ordinary-coloured hair to all your ordinary-coloured-hair family and live out your ordinary little lives. Meanwhile my daughter and I will be over here, being extraordinary.’
‘Is that why her father’s never been around?’ he said. (I heard that part.) ‘You were too extraordinary, were you?’
‘No, he was too dead.’
My friend’s father’s face dropped. ‘Oh god, I’m sorry, Carmen, I had no idea.’
‘That’s your problem,’ my mother said, her parting shot. ‘You have no idea.’
She got back in the car and started the engine.
‘My father’s dead?’ I said.
‘No,’ said my mother, shifting the car into Drive. ‘But it was a great line, don’t you think?’
I stared at my friend’s father as we drove away.
I SAY
‘Look, Mum, that text was a mistake, and even if it wasn’t, even if it was on some level some weird Freudian cry for help, it just would not work you staying here, even for one night. I’m sorry.’
I say it quietly, like I’m not sure whether I believe it.
My mother is nodding, yes yes, in that way she does, after which she just does whatever the fuck she wants. She is staring at Sid.
‘The treasure of your life,’ my mother says, ‘is everyone’s to steal. Because she only steals from her point of view. It’s her experience of your treasure, so it cannot be stolen.’
‘It’s a garbage thing to do,’ says Sid. ‘It’s not the truth.’
‘The truth doesn’t exist. Now, go put your lady balls in a bag and skedaddle.’
Sid says: ‘I bet you voted for Brexit.’
‘Goodbye!’
As I watch Moon, Sid and Frances, one by one (in that order), leave the hall and make their way to their respective rooms to pack, glad to be going, I feel creeping sureness that I might want my mother to stay, even if just for one night.
Don’t let her in, says a small voice inside of me. Remember. Always remember that Christmas.
THE OUTRAGE
Christmas, 1999. The thick tinsel was coiled around the bannister. The angel chimes were motionless on the sideboard, their candles unlit. She was by the front door, her Louis Vuitton case packed, her make-up pageant-perfect. Around her head sat a halo of framed qualifications to impress clients as they came into the house: her certificates from the Institution for Mediumship, Orange County. Healer of the Year 1997 from the Spiritualist Church of Great Britain. Photos of her with soap stars … The overall effect was of a try-hard pizzeria wall.
I called her a gold-digging slut and she called me cold, hard – the usual things she said when I had her over a moral barrel of some kind or other.
‘I know you’re practically a grown-up now,’ she said. ‘And you have your friends.’
I didn’t really have friends. I had lots of people I stood with in school, lots of messages on my yearbook page, but no one I could really talk to.
‘Why the Bahamas?’
‘Roger is taking me! Well, he’s already there, so I’m meeting him!’
Everything was exclaimed; she was so excited, I wanted her dead. I looked at the opposite wall, where there was a dreadful photo of the two of us; dreadful of me, anyway. The two of us at Disneyworld, three years earlier. I hadn’t put enough sun cream on and my face burned so badly I got blisters that joined up across my nose, like the scales of a snake. You can’t really see at the distance of the shot, the photo’s only saving grace; what you can see is my forehead and my shapeless Aztec-patterned shorts-and-T-shirt set. I was yet to discover the power of belts. My mother is next to me, wasp-waisted in shorts and a vest, sporting a pair of inexplicably cool aviators. Not even the men of Tinder would choose the younger woman out of that line-up.
‘Two weeks is a long time.’
‘The freezer’s full.’
‘What if the millennium bug happens?’
‘There’s long-life milk in the cupboard under the stairs. Come on, darling. Do I not deserve a bit of happiness? Can you allow me that? Please?’
I watched the taxi turn the corner and then I cried my heart out. I couldn’t say it. Stay. What was the point? Her bag was packed. She wasn’t one for unpacking once she’d packed.
I’m not saying I’m wise. That would be a stretch. But I know that the above scene is the ghost that walks through all my rooms. This Heartbreak 1.0 is a loop I cannot cut, no matter how much therapy, how much distance, how much steel. It comes back, and back, and back again for my heart and my happiness.
What are you scared of?
Of being left behind.
Of not being wanted.
Of coming second.
And the disappointing utter fucking childishness of that.
BABY ELEPHANT
My mother and I sit, gin-l
oosened, in the lounge. There is a nature programme on the TV. African elephants trekking across the heat to find food and water. A small baby at the back of the herd is slowing. It desperately needs a drink. The narrator tells us how just a small amount of water would save it from near-certain death.
‘Dear god!’ I cry. ‘Whoever is filming this, do they not have a bottle of Evian in their knapsack? This is unbearable!’
‘It’s Nature,’ my mother says. ‘You can’t interfere.’
‘Of course you can! That’s what makes us human! GIVE THE BABY ELEPHANT A DRINK, YOU MONSTROUS FUCKS.’
‘Elephants are matriarchal,’ my mother says, ‘they’re smart. They won’t let it die.’
‘So why don’t they stop?’
‘Because they have to get to the watering hole to save the whole herd. She knows what she’s doing. That big old one at the front. She knows.’
The baby elephant collapses. ‘I don’t think she does. Turn it over. I can’t watch. Whoever made this should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.’
My mother shakes her head. ‘It’s like what I do. I can’t pick and choose what might be painful for someone to hear. I just channel. I am a conduit. That’s all they’re doing. They’re presenting life as it is.’
‘TURN IT OVER, A BABY IS DYING I DO NOT WANT TO SEE A DEAD BABY.’
‘The baby is not dying. See, the older elephants have spotted the watering hole and they’re going to bring some water back to it in their trunks.’
‘They won’t be quick enough. TURN IT OVER.’
I close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears. La la la.
‘Jenny, they’re saving it!’
‘TURN IT OVER!’
She turns it over. ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw.’
‘Fine! Sure! Over there somewhere! I don’t have to see the horrors of the world to know the world is fucking horrible.’
She flicks back over quickly. I scream.
The baby elephant is prancing around, spraying water out of its tiny trunk, in the watering hole.
‘THERE!’ my mother says, standing up. ‘TOLD YOU.’
‘Well I still think whoever made that needs to do the psychopath test. How could you just “channel” when something needs you and you have the power to help it? Does your integrity only stretch as far as your sense of what’s right?’
She shrugs, and then goes to the kitchen to make more drinks.
When she comes back, she stands in front of the painting of herself and says: ‘Do you think I still look like that?’
‘Mum, that painting was done twenty years ago.’
‘I felt old then. You were fifteen.’
‘I remember.’
‘I think I stopped at twenty-five, in my mind. I think my personality set at twenty-five and I’ve never got a day older. That’s why the outside catches me by surprise sometimes. I don’t feel like I look.’
‘You look great.’
‘You’re a love.’ She sits down, still looking at the painting. ‘So,’ she says, ‘how are you doing?’
‘Fine.’
We look at each other. As always during these mandatory catch-ups, I imagine her thinking of my life as a museum through which she is being selectively tour-guided by me. What’s in that room? Can’t go in there, Ma. What about that one? Sorry, not part of the tour.
‘Still working at that womany website?’
‘Yep.’
She sips her drink and says, ‘And you’re … still in touch with Art?’
‘Of course. It’s perfectly amicable. We speak regularly. Emails, mostly.’
‘Still lovely long emails like before? I loved hearing about those.’
‘Yeah.’
She waits.
‘So what happened? I haven’t seen you since and it’s – well, it’s such a shock, darling.’
‘We wanted different things.’
She sighs. ‘Have you considered the fact that sometimes relationships need work, darling?’
I stare at her. ‘I’ve had longer relationships than you.’
‘Have you considered that your fertility halves at the age of thirty-five?’
I look surprised. ‘Does it? Surely not. I thought women’s fertility INCREASED the older they got, no? Tell me more.’
She laughs. ‘You know you can tell me anything.’
I laugh.
‘What happened exactly? I’m trying to process it. He meant something to me, too.’
‘Look, do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’
‘Whatever you want, darling.’
‘What did you get up to today?’
‘I just called in on a few old London friends.’
‘Who?’
‘You won’t know them. Before your time.’
She lived in London, a few years before I was born. She had a few small parts in the West End and almost got a big break. Then she met my father. Another actor? I asked her, hopeful. No, she said. That would have been even worse. She said she did his tarot cards the night they slept together.
And what did they tell you?
Well, I wasn’t really paying attention …
‘And I brought some champagne. Shall we open it?’
‘What for?’
‘Our new chapter.’
She gets up and goes to the kitchen. I watch her go.
What do I remember about living with her, before? Her warmth. Her violence. Her loyalty. Her barbs. Her largesse. She always had to have the last word. Her moods were riotous. Every now and then over the past twenty years I have felt, suddenly, how far apart my mother and I are, and a wash of cold has flooded over my entire body. Then I remember that this happened when I lived with her, too. Sometimes I’d make myself look more scared than I was, just to guilt her. (Later, I did this a few times with Art, too. I cowered. I shrank from him; or rather, from his fear of himself. Worse: his fear of the fatherly part of himself. I must admit that, now. I was aware of that sly leverage.) I knew that what I felt for my mother was, long-haul, in danger of distilling down to the purest of feelings – a feeling that, after her death, would feel like the bleakest, most pointless seclusion.
ART SAID
‘Are you crying?’
I was. I was openly weeping, in front of the TV.
‘What is it?’ he said, his face open, his hand on my hand as he dropped to his knees. ‘What?’
‘This,’ I said, weakly gesturing to the screen. A manatee was swimming in a school. A smaller manatee was swimming behind it.
‘Oh, babes, you know you shouldn’t watch nature documentaries!’
‘No, it’s fine! I’m not sad. It … makes me want to have a baby.’
Art’s face changed. He stood up. ‘What?’ he said, laughing.
‘IT MAKES ME WANT TO HAVE A BABY,’ I bellowed.
‘A great ugly sea cow?’
‘I don’t know why. Order amongst the chaos? Blame Darwin. David Attenborough. I don’t know!’ I wept more.
He looked around my feet. ‘Have you had … wine?’
‘No!’ I said. I noticed him notice the empty glass. ‘Well, not to a traumatic degree.’
He put his arm around me. ‘Why don’t you put some comedy on? Leave these delightful creatures to it.’
He turned over. It was Frasier. Daphne-supposedly-from-Manchester was affectionately abusing Niall and he was affecting not to love it.
‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘About babies? I hate to be prosaic but I am approaching my mid-thirties and once you hit thirty-five you’re technically a geriatric mother. They actually call you that.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. I mean yeah! I haven’t given it loads of thought.’
‘So what should we do?’
‘I was thinking we could order a takeaway and demolish a box set.’ He got up. Canned laughter erupted from the TV.
I said, ‘You like hanging out with Kelly and Sonny, don’t you? You enjoy that dynamic. That … role.’
‘Yeeeaaah. Kelly’s a to
ugh cookie sometimes but I don’t mind seeing them the odd weekend. Let’s just relax and try and be creative right now? That’s the life we said we wanted, isn’t it? I don’t want us to lose the mystical parts of ourselves.’ He said, ‘I’m really hungry, are you not hungry?’
He had been eating a banana in the bedroom that morning, standing there by the window, his back hairs striking out a coarse aura. I had felt a stronger sexual attraction than I have ever felt, before or since, to any human; any ape. Was this raging oestrogen? It was a valid question. My desire for a child. Where had it sprung from? Was it a desire for a lifestyle upgrade, or the wish to do what my mother couldn’t? It was an autumn feeling, that’s the best way I can describe it. That joy. That terror. That rush. That silence. That peace. That fear. Everything in a puddle and a pile of leaves. Everything dying and coming up gold. You know when you see a beautiful view and you sort of surrender to it – you feel yourself slacken and weaken, and you slouch a bit like you’re broken down. Reduced. Mortalised. Remembered. And it’s awful but it’s also … a fucking relief, you know? I want to be reduced by my biology, sometimes. I want the pressure of my higher understanding switched off. Does that even make sense?
Later, we lay in bed, our faces inches apart, breathing each other’s breath.
‘I suppose I would like to create something I didn’t have, for someone else. And myself, by proxy,’ he said. ‘But I’m scared I don’t have the necessary skills.’
I said, ‘Me too.’
‘What else do you want?’ he said.
Sometimes I think I want to walk down a school corridor in autumn-time and see sugar-paper drawings tacked to walls and recognise them. Sometimes I want that more than anything. Other times I just want to be alone with my imagination. Mostly though, I just want to not care what every single person thinks of me all the time, and I want to not have so many people’s opinions whirring round my brain, and I want to share my life with someone and not get bored, and I’m so scared that isn’t possible, because that is a lot of boxes to empty and sort. And sometimes I just want to have a shower and put on a clean pair of jeans and eat a sandwich in a café and feel like a normal fucking person.
Adults Page 10