by Tony Parsons
Jackie smiles her happy, beaming smile, very pleased with herself, and I think she’s got away with it.
But she hasn’t. Jane is still watching her.
‘So you’ve got this—what?—army of Mrs Mops who go around scrubbing and scouring all over London?’
And I think to myself—I’m so glad I gave you the cold shoulder, you cruel bitch. You were never nice at all. Just overweight and lonely, which is not quite the same as being nice.
‘No,’ Jackie says. ‘There’s just me. Sometimes I get a friend in. If there’s extra work. But usually it’s just me.’
‘Oh,’ Jane says. ‘You’re Mrs Mop.’
Then they are all laughing at Jackie, and she can’t do what they all do, she can’t laugh at herself and make it nothing, defuse the lonely moment, take the sting out of the words with the magic trick of just not caring; her life is too hard for her not to take it seriously, to take everything seriously, so she has to stand there going red while Jane and India and Josh and Dan and Jane’s four-eyed boyfriend all cackle with glee.
But then it passes, because I know there is no real harm in these people, except possibly Jane, and soon they are talking about the politics of housework and chore wars and feminism’s response to the fact that somebody has to clean toilets, all these half-chewed scraps of public debate that they have picked up from some Sunday broadsheet that they skimmed through a red wine hangover. From here they glide effortlessly into a conversation about how difficult it is to hire someone you can trust to clean your home, but by now Jackie is pulling on my sleeve, her lovely face still burning.
‘I want to leave.’
‘You can’t leave.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then they win.’
‘They win anyway. They always win.’
We stay. But the night has gone flat for both of us. She makes half-hearted conversation only with people who approach her first. I retreat with her to a corner, and make small talk about the prints on the wall, Tamsin’s ring, any rubbish that comes into my head. Just before we leave, when she goes off to the toilet, Josh pulls me to one side.
‘I like her,’ he says. ‘She’s nice.’
‘I like her too.’
‘But, my dear old Alfie, when are you going to get yourself a proper woman?’
‘What does that mean? A proper woman?’
‘It’s always—I don’t know—someone inappropriate. Your little harem of foreign girls. Very nice and all that. A different flavour for every day of the week. I’m not knocking it, mate. I’ve been in my fair share of foreign parts too, as you well know. But you cannot be serious, man. Not if you think you can make the hot and spicy stuff last a lifetime. It’s inappropriate. And now Mrs Mop and her tickling stick.’
‘Don’t call her that.’
‘Sorry. But, come on, Alfie. When are you going to get real? She’s no Rose, is she?’
‘I think Rose would have liked her. I think Rose would have thought she was funny and bright.’
‘Oh, she’s horny enough, in an obvious sort of way. Looks like she goes like the bloody clappers.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘But what’s so admirable about cleaning floors for a living? I mean, just because you’re poor, it doesn’t make you a good person, does it?’
‘She’s bringing up a kid alone. A girl. Twelve years old. I think anyone who does that has got some guts.’
‘She’s got a child? Then I think you’re the one with guts, Alfie. I wouldn’t go out with someone who was dragging around a reminder of the man that came before me. If you’ll pardon the expression.’ He raises his champagne glass in mock salute. ‘You’re a better man than me.’
‘I never doubted it, Josh.’
We laugh, but there is no warmth or humour in our laughter, and I wonder what I am doing in this place, with these people. Is it because I don’t have anywhere else to go? Or do I secretly want to join them, to be able to laugh that easily and chat that mindlessly and care so little about everything under the sun? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so scared of caring. Perhaps that has been my problem.
‘What do you call it when a woman is paralysed from the waist down?’ says Dan.
‘Marriage,’ says Josh, and the room roars as Jackie and I leave the flat.
She is silent in the back of the black cab on the way to Liverpool Street.
‘I thought you were the best-looking woman there,’ I say. ‘And the smartest.’
‘Me too. So why do I feel so bad?’
I can’t answer that.
And I watch her back as she walks down the platform and gets on the train for the long ride out into Essex. She doesn’t turn around. But just as I am about to walk away, she sticks her head out of the window and waves, smiling, as if to say: don’t worry, they can’t hurt me for long, it’s going to be okay in the end.
She’s brave. She is. That’s exactly the word. Jackie is a brave woman.
Ah, I think to myself.
That could be her.
thirty-four
Sometimes I think that the dead live in dreams. Heaven, the afterlife, the next world, whatever you want to call it—it’s all in our dreams.
After Rose died, I saw her in my dreams. Not often. Only a few times. But those dreams were so real that I will never forget them. They seemed as real as our wedding day, as real as the day we met, as real as the day she died.
And I still don’t know what to make of those dreams—were they just the product of loss and imagination and grief? Or was that really her? They didn’t feel like something that I had made up. They felt far more real than most of the waking days of my life.
In the dream that haunts me most of all, she was walking by this playing field called South Green near the streets where she was a little girl. Everything was exactly as I remembered it—Rose, South Green, the little string of quiet shops on one side of the gently sloping field. What was different was this wall of glass between us. It reached to the sky. It didn’t bother Rose, this wall of glass—or me—it didn’t stop her smiling that same warm, goofy smile. But it kept us apart, that wall of glass, and when I asked her if she could stay, her face crumpled and she started to cry, shaking her head.
She was happy enough. But she couldn’t stay. That made her sad.
And that made me believe that the dead live in our dreams.
Take Frank Sinatra. If you want to visit Sinatra’s grave, you have to go to Palm Springs in California, then you go to the Desert Memorial Park cemetery, and you will find that Frank is buried in Area B-8, lot 151.
I’ve never been. I’m not a big cemetery man. I haven’t even been to Rose’s grave since the funeral. I don’t think it would upset me, being at her graveside, in fact I think I would find it quite soothing, a trip out to that small church on a hill above the suburban neighbourhood where she grew up. The reason I don’t go is not that it makes me sad or I can’t be bothered, it’s just that I don’t believe she’s really there, just as I don’t believe that Sinatra—his essence, his spark, the thing that made him the man he was—is in the Desert Memorial Park cemetery in Palm Springs. Sinatra is somewhere else. And so is Rose.
If you want to remember the dead—or rather if you want to see the dead, if you want to meet them, to see them smile, to reassure yourself that they are at peace now—then you have to look inside yourself. That’s where you will find them. That’s where the dead live.
My nan has started to see the dead in her dreams. What is a little bit scary is that sometimes she is awake when she has these dreams. She doesn’t need to sleep to see her remembered dead. They come to her anyway.
To make using the phone a little easier, I buy her this portable job and tap in all her most used numbers. My mum. My dad. Plum. Me. A few of her old ladies. The doctor’s surgery. And the next day she tells me that her husband has programmed the new phone, and wasn’t that good of him? My granddad, who has been dead for twelve years.
I don’t know what
to do. Should I just humour her? Or gently remind her that her husband is long gone? I can’t let it go. I am afraid that she will slip away into madness if she can’t tell the difference between my grandfather and me.
‘Nan,’ I say. ‘Do you remember? It was me who put your numbers into the new phone. It wasn’t Granddad, was it?’
She stares at me for a long time. Then a dim light seems to switch on somewhere inside her brain and she shakes her head angrily. But I don’t know if she thinks that it’s her who has got it wrong. Or me.
It is becoming hard for Plum to be around her. My nan chats about brothers who died long ago, she talks about her husband coming to see her, she goes back even further—to her own mother and father, to the daughter who died as a tiny child, my dad’s sister, pneumonia, happened all the time back then, a death that gave a lot of emotional clout to the first chapter of Oranges For Christmas.
My nan talks about the dead as if they are living, as if they are all still around, and Plum is not quite thirteen, her life has just begun, she has no experience of death, and she doesn’t know what to think, what to do. I don’t feel so very different from Plum.
‘It freaks me out, Alfie. She talks about them as if they’re real.’
‘Maybe they are, Plum. To her. I don’t know.’
So Plum goes off to catch the last train back to the suburbs, back to Bansted, and I sit with my nan, holding her hand until she falls asleep, although by now sleep can come in the middle of the day or not at all, day and night mean less and less.
We play the old songs on the music centre, Sinatra and Dino and little Sammy in all their pomp and glory, so full of life and love those anthems from the fifties, so full of hope and joy, and the ghosts softly gather around my grandmother’s bed, the brothers lost, the husband gone, the dead child, the friends of long ago, her mother and her father, all of them slowly becoming more real than the living.
To my surprise, I find that I am dreading the day when Jackie sits her exam. At first I think it is because she has awakened some long-dormant passion for teaching. But it’s far more than that. What she has awakened in me is the quiet pleasure you feel in the company of someone you know and like and enjoy being around.
We sit there with our books, sometimes talking, sometimes saying nothing, sometimes arguing as though writing and writers are the most important thing in the world, and I realise that I have come to treasure every second in her presence. I remember how much I used to love it. Being together.
Jackie is the best of my students. Her mind is sharp, curious, challenging. She works hard, in class and on her own, and although her job means that her days often start early and finish late, she always gets her homework and course work delivered on time.
But she is the first student I have had since my years at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys to turn up for a lesson with a black eye.
‘What happened to you?’
‘I walked into something hard and thick.’
‘A door?’
‘My ex-husband.’
‘Jesus Christ, Jackie, you should go to the police.’
‘For a domestic? You kidding? The police are not interested in a domestic.’
‘It’s not a domestic. How can it be a domestic? You’re not even married any more.’
‘Jamie hasn’t realised that yet. He’s always hanging around. Outside the house. Following me.’
‘Does he see Plum?’
‘On and off. He’s more interested in who’s sleeping with me than my daughter. Our daughter. I’ve told him that nobody is sleeping with me. He doesn’t believe it.’
‘He gave you a black eye because he thinks you’re sleeping with someone?’
She laughs bitterly. ‘He’s the jealous kind, my ex. Always feels sorry afterwards. Says he only did it because he loves me. Because he’s crazy with jealousy. He thinks I should be flattered, he does. Flattered to be battered.’
‘Who does he think you’re sleeping with?’
‘Well…’
Someone rings my front door bell.
‘Don’t answer that,’ Jackie tells me.
‘It’s not him, is it? He’s followed you here? He’s not jealous. He’s nuts.’
‘Really, Alfie.’ She seems frightened. I have never seen her frightened before. It infuriates me. I feel so angry with this man. ‘Don’t let him up here.’
‘I’m not letting him up here.’
‘Thank God. Just ignore him.’
‘I’m going down to see him.’
‘Alfie!’
But I am out of my flat and down the flight of stairs where I can see a broad, shadowy figure on the other side of the frosted glass. I throw back the front door and there he is—an athlete who has run to fat, still packing plenty of muscle although it is now larded with the after-effects of too much junk food and designer beer. He must have been good-looking once—tall, dark, a little dangerous-looking. Handsome if not exactly pretty, back in the days when he was a boy wonder with a ball. But now life has made him bitter and mean. He looks like the worst kind of bouncer, the kind that actually wants you to step out of line.
Jackie’s Jamie.
Before I can open my mouth he has wrapped his hairy fingers around my windpipe and swung me into the street, pushing me backwards into a little row of dustbins where I fall flat on my arse, getting stuck in this ridiculous sitting position as Jamie proceeds to whack me around the head with a dustbin lid.
The Slab, I think to myself. Didn’t I see someone attack The Slab with a dustbin lid? Didn’t No-Neck Toledo assault The Slab with a dustbin lid at SuperSlam ’98? What would The Slab do in a situation like this? I can’t remember, for the life of me. So I just sit there, covering my head with my hands, my bum pulsating with pain.
‘Stay away from my wife, you fucking bastard!’ Jamie is screaming at me in the kind of London accent that you so rarely hear in London these days. ‘Stop giving her all these ideas about going back to fucking college! You with your books and stuff! You’re giving her all these ideas, you nonce! And keep your fucking hands off her!’
The dustbin lid pounds down on my arms and shoulders with a flat, metallic sound that has my neighbours leaning out of their windows, although they are not so concerned that they do anything more than watch. Jackie is hanging on to Jamie’s back, beating the side of his head with her fists, and I reflect that this is probably hurting him more than me. But I am the one who is being publicly shamed.
‘You are so stupid!’ Jackie shouts at him. ‘Teachers don’t sleep with their students!’
That’s not strictly true, of course, but I am touched by her efforts. I don’t know when he would ever have stopped if it wasn’t for Jackie.
‘Just stay away from her,’ he says, panting for breath.
‘And stop making her think that she’s something she’s not.’
Then he is gone and Jackie is helping me to my feet, brushing off the bits of pizza and egg fried rice and takeaway curry that have somehow attached themselves to my clothes.
‘You asked me what my marriage was like,’ she says, indicating Jamie as he strides off down the street with his what-the-bleeding-hell-you-looking-at swagger. ‘That’s exactly what it was like.’
They talk about people bravely fighting cancer, but in the end the disease inflicts the ultimate cruelty. It doesn’t matter how brave you are. Cancer robs you of yourself.
‘This is not me,’ my nan says, as I help her to the bathroom. ‘This is not me.’
She is in pain, terrible pain, and although for so long she has fought this disease with humour and courage, her life is now narrowing down to a sharp edge of unbearable suffering.
She has never been a woman who is prone to self-pity, despair, fear, all the weak, dark thoughts that can make you jump at shadows. But now she clearly feels that it is becoming all too much, that she is fighting a battle that she can only lose, that her humour and bravery and stoicism are all meaningless because there can only be o
ne ending to this thing.
Cancer has kicked the stuffing out of her. Cancer has stolen her sense of self.
I stand outside the bathroom door waiting for her to emerge. There is still so much that my father and I rely on the women to do—my mum, Plum, Joyce, my nan’s old female friends. Even at this late hour, my dad and I never go into the bathroom with her, we never wash her. Even in the midst of the ravages of terminal illness, even with cancer staring us in the face, a kind of modesty prevails. For her sake as well as our own.
But tonight is different. Although she has eaten next to nothing for days, doesn’t even drink more than a sparrow’s sip of the diluted orange cordial that sits on her bedside table, tonight I hear her moaning shortly after I have helped her into bed and turned out the lights and left her. I hear her moaning as though something unthinkable has happened.
She is wailing when I go into the room, really wailing as if she never knew it could be this bad, but it is soon clear from the smell in the little bedroom that it is not the endless pain of the tumour in her side that is causing her distress. The smell in the room is coming from her bed. This has never happened before. How could I not have seen it coming? And how can I deal with it?
There is only one thing to do. I reasure my nan that it doesn’t matter, that this is nothing, although when I pull back the sheets and see that the mess is everywhere—on her nightshirt, the bedclothes, her hands—I am deeply shocked and uncertain if I can cope with this moment, this thing I have to do because there’s no one else here to do it.
It is her distress that helps me to do what I must do, it is her humiliation that somehow both steels me and softens me—‘Oh, Alfie, it just slipped out of me, oh, this is so embarrassing, oh, look at me, Alfie’—and I am filled with such an overwhelming love for her that dealing with this thing becomes natural.
Not easy. Never easy. But natural.
I help her gently from her bed, telling her that this is nothing at all for us, for her and me, that we can get through it together, we will get through it together, and I take her to the bathroom where I help her out of her soiled nightshirt and into the bath, and I run the hot water, as all the time she cries with embarrassment and shame, and I see my grandmother naked for the first time, and I get soap and water on a flannel and I softly say all the words of reassurance as I clean her up, as gentle as a mother with her child, just as she once cleaned me.