‘Where are we going?’ I shouted.
‘You’ll see!’
Mac dragged me, laughing, into a small dark doorway, music throbbing beyond it. The black door, featuring a painted-on spider’s web and a skew-whiff brass number ‘6’, opened to expel both a girl in a black tutu and white T-shirt and a muffled bass-y beat that was in danger of causing a seismic tremor beneath my sandalled feet.
‘What is this place?’ I asked. There was no sign about the door.
‘The Electrifonic,’ Mac said. ‘Early eighties electronic music. It’s pretty cool.’
‘Far from the cowboy plains of Glen Campbell,’ I teased, amused. ‘I wouldn’t have thought this was your bag.’
‘Lots of things are my bag,’ said Mac. ‘I’m a man of eternal surprises.’
He yanked open the door and we stepped into a black womb of an entrance, three steps to a further matt-black door, the throbbing base straining behind it. To our right a girl in a booth – blonde quiff, red lipstick, look of utter disdain – took our money.
‘Friendly,’ I remarked, as we walked from her, and Mac laughed. ‘How do you even know about this place?’
‘I read about it in the NME,’ Mac said, pushing open the matt-black door.
I was whacked in the face by a rush of heat and a pulsing beat that went straight through my body: boom boom boom. The place was heaving, compressed; an organic mass, shifting and swaying. Made-up boys and girls out-pouted one another in brief kaleidoscopic sweeps of disco lights; sprayed-on silver jeans rubbed against chain mail and competed with New Romantic ruffles and snappy suits with skinny leather ties; post-punk hair topped curious, glittery-hard stares.
Mac was smiling, laughing, already moving his hips. He looked incongruous in here … preppy, American almost, in his chinos and unfashionable white shirt. But he was so uncool he was cool and being ridiculously, stupidly handsome helped, of course. He was getting glances from both men and women – eyebrows raised, the curl of new smiles – and I fitted in pretty well in my fifties dress and my wild hair because, it seemed, anything went in that place.
We weaved to the bar, queued for Alabama Slammers – Southern Comfort, sloe gin, Amaretto and orange juice. We grinned at each other, drank in each other with our eyes. I reached behind Mac and slid my hand into his back pocket; he pulled me into him and kissed me on the nose while a man dressed as a pirate dandy winked at us both over a pina colada.
Holding our huge drinks, we squeezed our way to the dance floor and joined the throng. It was only the second time I’d ever danced with Mac; tonight it was making me laugh.
‘What?’
‘Nothing!’
‘What’re you laughing at?’ I adored the flat vowels of Mac’s northern ‘laffing’ – I adored Mac; at this moment, I knew I would never love anyone as much again.
‘You’re cute when you dance.’
‘Is that a good thing?’
‘Yes!’
The music changed to Tubeway Army’s ‘Are “Friends” Electric’, and whether he was responding to me laughing at his cute dancing or just because he wanted to, Mac wrapped his arms round me and we slow-danced, in a slow-turning circle, like we were at a wedding. I was in temporary, disco light-flecked heaven – Mac’s floppy fringe already damp and lilting against my humid curls; me pressed close to his shirt, his warmth, his heat. The music was deafening, thudding, enveloping us and holding us in its sweaty, electric palm as colourful strangers pulsed and grazed around us.
‘I love you,’ said Mac.
‘What?’ I shouted above the music, although I had heard each of those three words and the combination of them was unexpected, delicious, mind-blowing and everything I had ever wanted. ‘I can’t hear you!’ I was grinning from ear to ecstatic ear as I shouted that.
‘I said I love you. I love you! I love you.’ Mac pulled me to him, breathless. ‘I’ve never felt this way about anyone. Ever. I love you.’
I laid my cheek on his. I breathed him in.
‘I love you too,’ I said. And I knew that whatever happened, and whatever might come to rip us apart, Mac and I were supposed to be in love. It was written … somewhere. It was recorded. It felt right and it was right, for this moment and always.
NOW
Chapter 18
The Cedars looks as depressing as I remember it, except last time I came it had been August so the trees at least had leaves on them and the lawn at the front was a chirpy bright green. Now, the trees are bare and scary-looking and the lawn is brown and churned up in parts as though a massive mole has burrowed through it. They are building something to the right of the squat beige new build – an additional wing or something – there is scaffolding and orange tape and piles of dusty, rust-coloured bricks. It’s ugly. A little girl clinging on to a father stares at the scaffolding as she walks past. A tiny lady on a walking frame, accompanied by a huge carer, comes out of the front doors of The Cedars bundled up in a coat too heavy for her.
I don’t want to go in. James has parked the car over on the far side of the car park, under the willow tree – my back is to the front of The Cedars but I am eyeing it suspiciously in the little square mirror on the inside of the sun visor.
‘So, we’re here,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve been here about five minutes.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you going to go in?’
‘I don’t know.’ I flick down the sun visor and turn to face him. ‘I suppose I have to.’
I feel unreasonably annoyed with him, despite the soul-baring confession of the journey, the funny anecdote-providing trip to the services. If I’d come by myself I’d have a choice whether to go in or not. I could just walk away if I wanted to. Of course, I’d still get the phone calls, the wheedling letters, but I’d have a choice. I’ve done it before – walked away. I’d stood outside the lobby, looking in and then had turned and walked back to the train station. But as James has kindly brought me here – all this way – I know I have to go through with it.
I stay in my seat.
‘So, I’ve got that expo … fairly soon,’ says James, after a few seconds.
‘Yes, yeah, OK, I’m going,’ I say. ‘Thank you so much for the lift.’ I put my hand on the door handle, ready to open the door.
‘Pick you up at five?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ Gosh, that’s an awfully long time, I think. I wonder how long I can feasibly sit on that bench over there, waiting for him. It’s one o’clock and there’s no way I’m spending four hours with my mother.
I open the door and get out. The air is cold, after the cocoon of James’s warm car, unpleasant. I walk to the entrance, with a heavy heart and the dragging feet of a moody teenager. I can hear James’s car nosing out of the car park.
As soon as I am inside The Cedars the smell hits me: peach air freshener layered over burnt egg. Tea bags. Bleach. There’s a mug of tea on the reception desk, half drunk, as I sign in, no receptionist to be seen. I buzz myself through, pressing the sticky buzzer under the desk and then quickly availing myself of the watermelon-fragranced antibacterial handwash in the grubby wall-mounted dispenser, before I push open the door.
The corridor down to Marilyn’s room has been painted a hopeful but rotting pale apricot and dotted with funereal nosegays of artificial flowers shoved into vases in waist-height alcoves. The whole place is shrouded and dipped in stinky, sticky artificial peach; the upholstery a universal dirty cappuccino.
Marilyn’s room, by contrast, is pink; a sickly blancmange. She’s lying in the middle of it in a pink bed and wearing a primrose nightdress, done up to the neck. Her hair is frizzy – a Marilyn-Monroe-gone-wild halo; red lipstick dries and bleeds into the lines around her mouth. Her face is white. Now I know What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. I always feel like I’ve stepped on to the set of that movie when I come here. There’s a woman in the room next door now who actually looks a bit like Joan Crawford … she has a brown wig like a motorcycle he
lmet and an imperious smile – it’s terrible but I enjoy imagining her and Marilyn threatening to push each other down the three steps to the depressing little café here, when no one is looking.
As I step towards the bed and the suspiciously stained ‘easy’ chair beside it (nothing ‘easy’ about this place) I want to turn and run.
‘Arden.’ The voice is tremulous, husky and put on.
‘Hello, Marilyn.’
‘Please sit down.’
I’m already sitting. I don’t want to touch the armrests of the chair. I don’t want to take off my coat, which is now definitely more Kramer vs. Kramer (Mother vs. Daughter?) than Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘How have you been?’ I ask. I’m looking around me so I don’t have to look at her. There are photos on the Queen Anne dressing table. None of me or Dad; they are all of Marilyn in her heyday. Marilyn on a donkey at Southend-on-Sea, in a gingham shirt tied at the waist; Marilyn raising a glass of something to a lip-glossed mouth on holiday at an outside restaurant table on the Costa del Sol; Marilyn reclining on the sofa with a book, legs entwined like snakes, and I know she straight-copied this pose from the real Marilyn – I’ve seen the original. I’m reminded of Rose, the old lady in Titanic, and all the photos in her bedroom at the end of the movie. But Rose’s life was fulfilled, crammed with love and adventure; Marilyn’s has just been fluff and treachery.
‘I’ve not been so good,’ says Marilyn. ‘It’s really terrible in here now. It smells. And some of the other residents are just witches. That one next door, well, you’ve never heard anything like it. She just moans, moans, moans, all day long. To be frank with you …’ Marilyn struggles to sit up, trying to lean forward. A spindly arm startles me by cantilevering out, clutching on to mine. I have no choice but to steady it – its skin feels like a dry doily from a vintage tea tray – and Marilyn’s breath is hot and sweet, like gone-off cloves. ‘I think she’s trying to kill me.’
I can’t help but laugh, into the cloves. I imagine Joan in the bed next door, in a cloud of polyester and lavender talcum powder, having exactly the same conversation about Marilyn.
‘I doubt it, Marilyn. And how exactly would she do that?’ Pillow over the head? A trip-up with an errant walking stick?
‘She’s trying to poison me. She’s got some from somewhere – her son’s a chemist, you know – and she’s slipping it in my tea and sprinkling it on to my biscuits of an afternoon, when they’re still on that trolley, outside. She’s always got that evil look on her face, nasty old cow. Well, I’ve got the measure of her. I refuse to drink the tea and I throw the bloody biscuits on the floor!’
‘You’re imagining it, Marilyn.’ I really want to leave.
‘I’m telling you, poison. On my biscuits!’
I extract Marilyn’s hand from my arm, put it down on the bed. ‘For God’s sake,’ I say, ‘this is not Murder on the Orient Express! It’s a care home in the west Midlands. I’ll talk to one of the carers about it,’ I add, but I won’t. The whole notion is quite ludicrous.
‘Thank you.’
Marilyn leans back with a plompf on her pillow, satisfied. Reaches for a cough drop from a little tin on the tiny bedside table. She struggles to open it with long, burgundy talons but I don’t help her. When one is finally free – a shiny prune – she pops it in her gaping mouth.
‘How’s Christian?’ she asks.
‘Well, I don’t know, Marilyn. I’m not married to him any more.’
‘Such a nice man.’ She flicks the sweet from one side of her mouth to the other, with a clacking tongue.
‘He really isn’t.’
‘He looked after you.’ She revolts me by spitting the cough drop into a tissue she’s unearthed from under the bed covers. She drops the tissue parcel, a tongued-edge of sweet poking through, on her bedside table.
I almost splutter, outraged. ‘No, he didn’t! He did the opposite of looking after me. How can you say that?’ Of course, she says the same thing to me every time I visit but this is the first time I have retaliated beyond smiling tightly and changing the subject.
‘I think you were stupid to throw it all away. You had a good life with that man.’ She is actually tutting.
I save my breath. It is no use trying to explain to the woman, even though I now seem to have the strength to do so. She won’t listen to how it was. The abuse. The control. The reduction of me, over those long years, until there was only a shell left. She is deaf to it all.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ is all I bother saying. I am considering the pillow myself, to be honest, though it’s me who feels suffocated. I want to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to say the words any second.
‘It’s lunchtime in a minute,’ says Marilyn. ‘It’s shepherd’s pie.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Will you stay for some?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Did you come on the train?’
‘No. I got a lift.’
‘Who with?’ I should have just said ‘yes’.
‘A friend.’
‘Christian didn’t bring you up, then?’
‘No! Why would he? We’re divorced. I’ve got a restraining order against him!’
‘You always were a melodramatic child.’
I snort, so preposterous are these words, so ironic. Then I stand up. ‘I think I’m going to go, Marilyn.’
‘What do you mean? You’ve only just got here! I was going to ask you to look at my feet. They say there’s nothing wrong with them, but I think I’ve got a touch of athlete’s foot, round my big toes. You could pop out and get me some cream … rub it in for me.’
‘I don’t want to look at your feet, Marilyn,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to rub cream on your feet. I’m going.’ I check the back of my coat for stains.
‘You never stay long.’
‘No, well. I don’t want to.’
Her face falls but I can’t find it in me to feel guilty for being so horrible. I’m not going to kiss her on the cheek, like I usually make myself do. Her cheek is always rough, like the sugar paper at school, and her skin slightly sour. I’m already at the open door.
She squints at me until no part of her irises are visible. ‘Why won’t you stay a bit longer?’
‘I can’t, I’m sorry.’ I pause. My hand is on the germ-ridden handle of the door and I don’t even know why I’m touching it. ‘Did you ever actually like me?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘Did you ever actually like me? Did you enjoy spending time with me, ever?’
Marilyn purses her dry red lips and seems to consider my question for a moment. She tips her head to one side like a semi-reflective Jack Russell.
‘I loved you,’ she says tersely, ‘in my own way.’
This is astonishing, coming from her – the mere mention of the ‘L’ word (her ‘L’ words were more customarily ‘lazy’, ‘licentious’ and ‘liar’). It simply wasn’t in the vocabulary of our lives, growing up. Oh, she had loved me once – she of the apron and the cuddles – then, nothing. No more. I felt love from Dad but he would have been far too embarrassed to say it; Marilyn flounced around in contempt of the very notion for years and years. It’s quite a shock to hear the word ‘love’ from my mother, even if it nestles sourly amongst the other tart words of this dismissively strangled sentence, and the accompanying look of acid distaste on her face underlines how much its utterance pains her.
What she’s said – however lacking, embittered and the most backward of terribly backward compliments – must have shocked her too as she goes into a temporary coughing fit; dry, hacking. I don’t even wait for her to compose herself before I say, ‘Your way was never good enough, I’m afraid, Marilyn,’ and I’m absolutely horrified to feel tears bothering my eyes. I’m about to cry? Why? I despise her. It’s far too late for any kind of volte-face on her part, however badly executed. She never loved me in any kind of way that I needed.
I grip the grimy door handle. I look at her, swatting at her mouth with
a tissue. It kills me, but I know why I’m in danger of crying. Because there was a long, long time when I desperately wanted her to love me, when her love was all I craved, because I remembered it. I remembered her love before it turned as sour as the lemons she looks like she’s sucking now. But she could never do it. She simply didn’t have it in her.
While I’m still here – I feel stuck to the spot, actually; maybe it’s the sticky carpet – I say, ‘Also …’ I take a deep breath. ‘I’ll never forgive you for what you put Dad through. I just want to say that to you. Now.’
I watch her face for a reaction but, as usual, she disappoints. There’s a ‘So what?’ shrug from bony shoulders. A closed face. My questions about Dad won’t be answered. Questions like, was it one affair too many? As he neared old age did Dad look back over his life and calculate how much of it he had wasted on my mother? From the look of her, Marilyn doesn’t have the answer to why Dad committed suicide, nor does she much care. It was me who found him, that afternoon, when the buzzing of sun-scorched bees competed with the indifferent splutter of next door’s lawnmower and a distant ice-cream van tinkling ‘Greensleeves’, on a loop. She was in the house, where it was cool, having a G&T. She screamed blue murder for two hours when I told her, but three weeks later she was moving to Walsall with a man – her last man – she’d met at the post office. Following me to the the Midlands again, although I was no longer there.
I sigh. Her silence and her shrug are my cue to depart.
‘I’m going now.’
‘Goodbye then, Arden.’ Incomprehensibly, she is angry now and almost spits at me. She is claiming my name, reminding me she chose it and every word she spits is a tiny, poisoned arrow intended to puncture my heart, but I don’t want the arrows to find me. They can fall to the sticky carpet, along with Joan’s cyanide biscuits.
You, Me and The Movies Page 22