by John Clanchy
That’s what he wants, Prick Philip, I see it in his eyes every time he looks at me. In a home, he’s saying, you old stinker. In – that’s where you’re going, Mother, in. That’s where you belong. He thinks I can’t – He thinks I can’t – And he has to pay Mrs Bloodstock to, to, to … Old Fatso, well I’ve got rid of her. But that won’t stop him, only Miriam can stop him. If Miriam can’t stop him –
Like Ruth Darby, in a home, he’s thinking. Was it Ruth? I remember seeing her there once, in a home, Ruth Darby, in a home, saw her there once, saw her there once – did I see her there once? – with all these people just sitting around and going mad and for their tea they wore hats, that’s right, I remember, I remember, I do remember, it was someone’s birthday – was it Ruth’s birthday? – and they wore hats, paper hats, and someone came to shake their hand, the mayor or someone, with a red, a red, a red, a red, but she hated it and didn’t know anyone there and didn’t have her things with her, things with her, or her dog, what was the name of her dog? Ruth’s god. Or was that TV?
Dogs aren’t allowed in a home, or cats. If I was in a home, I couldn’t have, couldn’t have, couldn’t have. I like TV, like it. I watch the girl with TV. Watch TV. She’s six, six. Katie – there, I do remember. Today I remember everything. We were playing school, she likes to play school. She always did. Ever since she was small. That’s how I knew she’d be a teacher. Always knew. She’d get her chair and her little table and her board with the white finger things, and make me sit down facing her. I’ve got Yogi, that’s a good idea, that’s – I’ve got Yogi, see I do remember, I’m not supposed to have him in school but he’s under my, under my –
‘Now, Mother,’ she says. And then she stops and says, ‘No, I can’t call you Mother because I’m the teacher’ – she was always the teacher, even back then, she would never let me be teacher – ‘and you’re the student,’ she says. ‘So, I’ll just have to call you Vera,’ she says. ‘Aloe Vera, he used to say when he came in. As a joke. Even in the middle of class. When we were in class, he’d still say it. ‘Now, class,’ she says – and I remember this so well, like it was yesterday – ‘now, class, we’ll see who’s learnt their homework.’ She looks around the room then but I already know she’s going to, know she’s –
‘Vera,’ she says, ‘Vera Harcourt. Have you learnt your questions?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘Good, now the rest of you can put down your pencils and listen properly. And the first question is, Who won the War?’ And I don’t know. And I can feel my heart, and it’s beating beating just because I’m asked a question, and then there’s the fog, and it’s all in lines and sparking like the wires in a toaster, and I can’t remember anything.
‘Well, Vera Harcourt,’ she says. ‘You can’t get out of it just by pretending to cry like that. You said you’d done your homework, and you haven’t, so now you’ll have to be punished. You’ll have to go and sit in the corner with your back to the class till the bell goes. You’re a very naughty girl, and you’ll have to leave the cat behind.’
‘No –’
‘You can’t have the cat over there. It’s not allowed.’
‘Please,’ I say.
‘Cats aren’t allowed in the corner.’
‘Please –?’
Miriam
Some days I catch Katie sitting by a window or in a beam of sunlight. She’s got the same downy, little-boy fuzz on her cheeks and the back of her neck as Philip still gets, and I think to myself, I could eat you. And sometimes I do. I stretch my jaws on her neck or cheek.
‘Who are you?’ she giggles. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Tigger,’ I say. ‘I’m going to swallow you whole.’
She goes into hysterics then, and we end up rolling, locked together, over and over across the floor.
Quality time. Isn’t that what we’re continually told we should all be after? Like Quality chocolates, or prime cuts from the butcher.
For an hour each day, whether I’m teaching or not, I make time to sit with Mother in her rooms – just the two of us, sometimes talking, sometimes not. She’s usually watching TV, which means I can read or do some marking while she watches, but I’m still there beside her, attending, ready to break off. Mostly nothing happens, but once or twice recently she’s made a desperate effort to communicate. To say something important.
‘Miriam,’ she’s said, ‘I know I’m –’
I watch her physically wrestling for the word, the corners of her mouth working, the fingers of one hand twisting and turning in the other.
‘What, Mother?’ I try to stay with her, to push her on that next step without harassing her. ‘You know you’re what?’
Difficult? Devious? A burden? Is that what you’re trying to say?
‘It’s just that I can’t –’
‘Can’t what, Mother?’ And suddenly I feel my own panic rising. At what she could say, could still demand – even now. Can’t say what you feel? Is that it? Or love? Can’t love —?
In the end it’s always me, not her, who cracks and supplies something, if only to still the terror inside myself.
‘Can’t help it, Mother?’ I say. ‘Is that what you’re trying to say, that you can’t help it?’
‘That’s a good idea,’ she says.
And then I’m the one who’s left frustrated and close to tears while she’s beginning to laugh or clap at something – it’s usually an ad – on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ or ‘Sale of the Century’.
‘Do you love Grandma Vera?’ Laura asks, out of nowhere. And that’s what takes my breath.
‘What a silly question.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, which is unusual enough for her, but I know she’s still waiting.
‘Why on earth wouldn’t I love her?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘There’s no need to get mad.’
She’s become a great watcher, Laura. People, relationships. Which normally I’d rejoice in. Except that now it’s me she’s watching. And that’s what produces these sudden little eruptions between us.
‘Do you really enjoy teaching?’ she says another day. I’m sitting at the dining-room table, marking some exercises. She’s just come in after school and has plonked herself down on the couch. She’s half-lying there, slumped, at a loose end.
‘Yes, I do,’ I say. And wait. That’s something I’m learning from her.
‘Lots of our teachers don’t. They’re always telling us how they’d much rather be somewhere else, doing something else.’
‘Well, they shouldn’t be teaching, then,’ I say. And keep listening for what this is really about.
‘They say if they weren’t teaching, they’d be able to do a lot more things. Without all the correction, and the preparation and things.’
Ah.
‘Like with their families?’ I say.
‘Yeh,’ she says, dragging a string along the couch for Yogi to catch in his paws. ‘Or just for themselves, I suppose.’
I finish the last of the exercises, pack the papers back in a folder. Laura is still playing with Yogi. But her mind isn’t there.
‘Saturday,’ I say. ‘Would you like to go swimming?’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I guess.’ And then, after a while, ‘That’s if Philip’s going to be home. To babysit Grandma.’
We’ve always swum together, Laura and me. In Greece, first of all, from the time she was tiny, and then later back here. We’d swim three mornings a week – even school weeks – summer and winter. Occasionally Katie’d come with us. After my own laps, I’d teach Katie to swim while Laura chatted with friends – one boy, David, in particular – and snapped the bottoms of her bathers, and looked around.
But it must be months now since we’ve swum, six in fact. In fact six exactly, if I’m to be honest. Since the day Mother came to live with us. Laura’s never once asked or complained about it all this time. Which is how I know she misses it as much as I do.
‘Mum, you’re
so slowww –’ she used to say, sitting on the side of the pool after she’d done her laps and watching me breaststroke towards her. ‘What are you doing, your meditation again? Your Boo-dhist swimming?’
‘Exactly,’ I’d say. And that’s something I do miss. In the centre of my being. My Boo-dhist swimming, as Laura calls it.
I have tried to convey to her what teaching means to me.
‘It’s not money,’ I’ve told her. ‘Over half of what I earn goes to Mrs Johnson.’
‘What, then?’
And I know I’ve got to get this across. Because if it’s not money, then it has to be something pretty important to weigh against what’s lost.
‘First of all,’ I tell her, ‘it does a lot for me. It’s like swimming. You know how sometimes you go to the pool, and you’re not really feeling like it, but you think you should, or someone else makes you go, and by the time you finish your blood’s racing and you’re just bursting with energy –’
‘Most of my teachers only just crawl out of the room like they’re heading for an ambulance, or something.’
‘I’m sure they’re not all like that.’
‘Miss Temple’s okay. She’s got lots of energy left.’
‘Well, I’m like Miss Temple.’
‘She’s young but,’ Laura says.
‘Thank you.’
‘I didn’t mean that –’
‘But it’s more than that. It’s what gives you the energy in the first place that counts. It’s the interaction, the exchange. Everyone working together.’
‘Working together?’
‘Don’t be so cynical, dear. I wish you could just see this one particular class I’ve got. Some of these women – migrants, refugees – what they’ve had to do to survive …’
‘What, like wars, and things?’
‘Violence of all sorts. The killing of people they’ve loved. Their children sometimes …’
‘Really?’
‘There’s one class I’m thinking of, it’s not just a class. It’s a kind of family. Another family for me.’
‘But I thought you just taught them English.’
‘It’s what they do with their English. It’s what they’re able to share when they’ve got it.’
‘What they’ve been through? Stuff like that?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I can’t see how that would make anyone strong.’
‘It does, sweetheart. It does.’
‘Just because you share it?’
‘Don’t you share things with your friends?’
‘Yes …’
‘Well. Doesn’t it make you closer? Stronger together at least?’
‘You mean if it’s really bad or something, and you’ve told it?’
‘Even if it’s really bad. Maybe especially if it’s really bad.’
‘I guess,’ she says. And thinks for a bit. ‘With other girls,’ she says. Her chin goes up a bit. ‘Other women, I mean.’
‘Not … men?’ I almost said boys. Laura is nearly fifteen.
‘Men are hopeless. With things like that. They always want you to be talking about them. What they’re doing, their problems.’
‘Yes,’ I say. All that terrible ego.’
‘Their dicks just keep getting in the way,’ she says.
‘You, what?’ I say.
‘Their dicks just get in the way all the time.’
‘Darling, I’m not sure that’s the way to talk –’ I start, and then I suddenly hear myself. I am my Mother. You pompous twit, I think, you stupid, stupid woman. What are you, thirty-nine years old and shocked out of your bathing suit because this young woman, your own daughter, says the word dick. Laura, you’re lovely, I think. You understand so much. At your age, I remember, I was still hiding the fact that I had periods.
‘Yes,’ I say to her finally, ‘that’s right. Their dicks get in the way.’
Though Philip’s doesn’t. Normally.
* *
‘What are you thinking of, darling?’ I say. I realize he’s said nothing for ages. And – unusually for Philip – he’s not reading. He’s lying in bed beside me with his hands on the pillow cradling his head. And smiling.
‘I’m thinking of taking silk,’ he says, and props himself up on his elbows to kiss me on the bare skin of my shoulder.
I hesitate for just a moment, then throw onto the floor the lesson plan I’d been reading through for the morning.
‘Okay,’ I say to him. ‘Why not? Just give me one second to check.’
‘Check?’ he says. ‘What do you need to check? You’re still on the Pill, aren’t you?’
‘On Mother,’ I say. ‘Check on Mother.’
Laura
There’s difficult and difficult, I understand that. Now.
At first I thought Mum’s memory must be going the same way as Grandma Vera’s. Only earlier.
‘If you think I’m going to pack your grandmother up in her present state, and cart her all round the country. Like some blessed King Lear …’
We were arguing again about my birthday party. About whether Mum and Philip couldn’t go away for the night. And take Katie and Grandma Vera with them. To the coast. To Uncle Brian’s. Or somewhere.
‘Just,’ she was still going on, ‘so that you and Toni and your friends can have the house to yourselves …’
‘To play up in,’ I said. And I saw from the way her head snapped back and her eyes narrowed that I’d got the voice just right. Grandma Vera’s voice. ‘Misbehave in –’
And that was when she came out with it.
‘Laura Vassilopoulos,’ she said. ‘You can be a very difficult young woman.’
And it was my turn to go Huh? then, because that’s exactly what she’s always said she wanted me to be when I grew up. A difficult young woman. And I understood at that moment there’s difficult and difficult.
Grandma Vera would never go to the doctor, but I always liked it – at least I used to, back then, when I was smaller – because there were lots of things you could play with. Besides, I liked looking round the waiting room and trying to guess what everybody had, if they had cancer or their guts were falling out or their womb or something and wondering if it would happen there in the waiting room before they even got in to see the doctor. Once, I remember, there was a man who didn’t have any nose or only a very small one like a monkey’s, and Mum said later he had skin cancer and lots of surgery but I shouldn’t ask out loud like that because it embarrassed other people and only made them cough. The nurse always gave peppermint sweets to the children but not to the adults. But that wasn’t the reason Grandma Vera wouldn’t go to the doctor. Mum said she was frightened.
‘Of what?’ I said.
‘Of what’s in her mind,’ Mum said. ‘Of what she knows.’
Just for one second I thought she must be talking about the man without any nose, but then I thought, That’s stupid, your nose isn’t in your mind, and I worked it out. Knows and nose, I mean.
So the only way Mum could get Grandma Vera to go to the doctor was to take me along and pretend it was me who was sick and my development or something wasn’t good and I’d be starting high school in a year and needed testing. And Grandma Vera could come along too and help so I wouldn’t be frightened. I was only eleven then, or maybe I was only ten because I was just going into the last year of primary school, and school had just started and it must have been summer, like now.
‘The doctor will just ask you some questions,’ Mum said before we went.
‘What sort of questions?’
‘Easy questions,’ she said. ‘You’re not to worry. It’s only a game.’
‘If it’s only a game, why are we doing it?’
‘After you’ve answered the first two or three, I want you to pretend you don’t know the answers to any of the others, and let Grandma Vera answer them.’
‘Why?’
‘Will you do that, darling? Just for me?’
It wasn’t our normal doctor at al
l, who’s Dr Lazenby, but a special one, and they didn’t have sweets for children or anything, and there was no one else in the waiting room to look at or games to play, just magazines like New Idea or Women’s Weekly that were about a hundred and fifty years old, and I remember thinking what if you were a man and wanted to read about cars or football or something. And it was so quiet, there was only one lady behind the desk and she was like Sybil from ‘Fawlty Towers’ and kept fiddling with her hair and looking down behind the counter so you couldn’t see what she was doing, but I think she was reading and it was probably the Women’s Weekly but I bet her copy wasn’t a hundred and fifty years old. It was probably last week’s or this week’s even.
And just then Grandma Vera leaves her seat and starts looking around, and the lady behind the counter looks up and says, ‘Is something wrong, dear?’ – Dear, she says, and she’s just met her, she doesn’t know her at all, people are such fakes, but Grandma Vera, instead of going No or Mind your own business, says, ‘There aren’t any trolleys,’ and she must have thought she was at the supermarket or somewhere, and the woman goes, ‘Doctor won’t be long now’ – not the doctor or his name, Doctor Gerontics or someone, his name was on the front door when we came in – just Doctor, like Gorilla or Ape or something, and I laugh then, not because of Grandma, but I’m just thinking Gorilla won’t be long now or Ape will see you soon, but Mum looks at me because she thinks I’m laughing at Grandma Vera, which I’d never do, and she says:
‘Don’t be difficult, please, Laura. Things are hard enough as it is.’
When we do go in the doctor’s room, I don’t like him very much. There’s nothing in the room to look at, no cabinets or jars with dead babies or even eye charts on the wall you can test yourself on while the adults are blabbing on and shut one eye and pretend you can’t read half the letters and wonder what it’d be like to have a Labrador and be blind.
‘Well …’ the doctor was saying, and he was looking at me and not Mum or Grandma Vera. ‘Isn’t this one a real beauty? Isn’t she gorgeous?’
But I didn’t trust him as soon as he said this because I didn’t think he was talking about me at all, and his shirt was all white and shiny and pressed and he had this red bow tie and he started fiddling with it as soon as Mum came in the room, and he was about forty or fifty or twice her age and had glasses and everything, but I knew he was talking about her not me, which was strange because he hardly looked at her at all.