Little Disasters

by Sarah Vaughan

  ‘None of us want to be on that continuum,’ she says, eventually. ‘And what was acceptable in the Eighties really isn’t now.’

  She takes a swig of her red wine, a drop beading at the corner of her mouth. She swipes it away with her tongue. Eventually she looks up, and there’s no hesitation. Her voice is icy and calm.

  ‘There are different types of destructive parenting. Mine might have been called benign neglect. My parents didn’t care for us much – we were rather an inconvenience. My father rarely smacked us but there was always that potential if we stepped too much out of line.

  ‘It was what was done, as you say. And perhaps an emotionally robust child bounces back if it doesn’t happen frequently: my brothers certainly did. But a child who’s less resilient, who’s scared? For her, the threat can stir up all sorts of anxieties.’ She looks at us, frankly, and it’s as if everything’s stripped away.

  ‘So I can’t think of any circumstance in which it is acceptable to smack a child.’

  LIZ

  Monday 22 January, 2018, 8 p.m.

  Fifteen

  ‘Is that Liz Trenchard?’

  The voice at the end of my mobile is unfamiliar, nervous, and just a little excited. I sense this just as I understand that the speaker is ringing with bad news.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘It’s Sandra Rhys. I’m a neighbour of your mum’s? She’s all right, but there’s been a spot of bother,’ and here Sandra pauses, and I hear the delicious trepidation in her voice: she’s been looking forward to imparting this information.

  ‘What sort of bother?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit delicate . . .’ I imagine her pursing her thin lips. From memory, she’s in her sixties: a small, neat woman with a small, neat Jack Russell my mother thinks is vicious. ‘But she’s a bit incapacitated.’

  ‘Incapacitated? ‘ I repeat, not understanding.

  ‘It was lucky I was in Tesco, really, because that’s where she was being, well, “drunk and disorderly” is how the young police officer described it.’

  ‘Drunk and disorderly? In Tesco?’ My heart stutters: a physiological response to something I’ve feared a long time. ‘And the staff had to call in the police?’

  ‘Well, a PCSO, really. A police community support officer,’ she says, spelling it out. ‘Tim, he was called. A lovely young man. Luckily, he was on the high street at the time, dealing with some teens. The staff called him in because she was being . . . well, aggressive. She wanted a bottle of vodka and she refused to leave when they wouldn’t sell it to her. Then she sat down on one of those stools they use to stack shelves – you know the ones I mean? And she refused to get up. Luckily, I’d just popped in with my Dave.’

  ‘Oh good Lord.’ I lean my forehead against the cupboard in the kitchen, imagining the scenario only too clearly. Memories of her rage kaleidoscope: her hand striking at the back of our thighs until they were whipped red.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ I say. ‘But she wasn’t arrested? You’re not calling from a police station . . .’

  ‘Well, no. PCSOs don’t have the power to do that. They’d have to have called an officer.’ She is keen to impart her knowledge. ‘My Dave’s strong, though, and the officer was only too grateful when we said we’d get her back home safely. The only thing is: I don’t like to leave her alone . . . I’m worried she might vomit in her sleep.’

  ‘Of course.’ The poor woman has done enough. ‘Look . . . my husband’s just got home so I can leave the children and come straight away. Depending on traffic, I should be with you in twenty minutes. Would you be able to stay with her until then?’

  ‘Of course.’ Her voice sings with relief. ‘Though she doesn’t like having us in her flat.’ Her tone turns conspiratorial. ‘She seems to think we’ve been cosying up with the police . . .’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine. I’m so sorry. And thank you for bringing her home, and for calling me.’

  *

  Sandra is brisk when I arrive at my mother’s ground floor flat in a Victorian terrace. She’s clearly had enough of my mother.

  ‘We’ll get going, if we may.’

  ‘Please do,’ my mother says.

  ‘Mum. Sandra and Dave very kindly brought you home,’ I intervene, speaking in the sort of over-bright voice that I’ve used in the past when treating elderly or hard-ofhearing patients. I must stop it. She’s not that old and she’s not my patient. She’s drunk and she’s my mum.

  ‘Get her away. And get him away,’ she says, gesturing to Dave, a mountain of a man, as huge as his wife is petite. ‘I don’t want him here.’

  ‘Well that’s charming,’ he tells her. Though it’s January, he’s wearing a polo shirt that rides up to show a strip of hairy stomach. He pulls it back down, giving his flab an itch.

  ‘They were with that police officer. In cahoots.’ My mother glowers and I’m reminded quite how much she detests authority figures. She has always been like this: resisting parents’ evenings and doctors’ appointments; ensuring Mattie failed to receive adequate care.

  For a moment, I’m back at the hospital burns unit as my mother turned on a plastic surgeon who explained my brother would need regular surgery.

  ‘I don’t want him to come back to hospital,’ she’d said, and her eyes had flitted to the door as if searching for an escape. ‘We need to get on with our lives.’

  ‘Mattie needs the adducted scar tissue to be cut so that his arm can develop its full range of movement.’ The kind young doctor had pressed on, perturbed by her lack of understanding. ‘It’s crucial for his rehabilitation.’

  She had snorted with what looked like contempt but I now realise was fear. Stubborn and self-absorbed, she failed to take Mattie for each necessary operation so that he required more aggressive surgery once he turned eighteen. Her apparent disdain for someone trying to help was the point at which I realised she was fallible. Watching the snarl on her face, a snarl replicated now, I knew I wanted to be a different mother to this.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I tell Sandra and Dave. ‘I’ll stay with her until she sobers up or I can get her to bed. Make sure she’s looked after.’

  Sandra folds her lips neatly against each other. ‘Well, I think we’ve done our bit.’

  ‘I’m incredibly grateful,’ I add, conscious that they rescued my mother from a possible arrest.

  ‘Get him away from me!’ My mother bats her arms in Dave’s direction. The nape of my neck prickles, and I remember her doing the same thing to someone in uniform; not a nurse but I think a policeman. It’s a weird déjà-vu, and I feel unsettled as I bustle them away.

  My mother calms down as soon as they’ve gone, stops shrinking so I can look at her clearly. I scan her face, appalled at what I’ve missed. Her eyes are bloodshot and her skin, sandpaper rough. I want to soothe it. To drench it with moisturiser and ease away the wrinkles that criss-cross her brow and run from nose to chin.

  There’s a nasty gash on her cheekbone, dotted with flecks of tissue where she’s tried to stem the bleeding.

  ‘Is this where you banged your face?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your eye. Can I see?’ I manoeuvre her so that she’s turned towards the light, tilting her chin to see the extent of the bruise which mottles the socket and spreads up towards her hair. She is shorter than me. Five foot two to my five foot six, and I am conscious of how our roles have changed: how I’m caring for her, though in truth I’ve long been a carer, long been someone who acts as a mother, particularly to Mattie. She smells of cigarettes, cheap white wine, and the grub of unwashed skin.

  ‘I dunno how it happened . . .’ she says at last, and she sounds genuinely taken aback.

  ‘Oh, Mum. You’ve been drinking.’ I’m tired of the pretence, of my pussyfooting around her. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  Like an obstreperous teenager, she shakes her head.

  ‘Has this happened before?’

  ‘Wh
at?’

  ‘Your drinking this much.’

  No response. Then a sullen mutter: ‘Stupid little bitch.’

  The insult slides off me like water slipping from a Vaselined back. As a child I imagined myself as a longdistance swimmer, the jibes beading and streaking away. The irony is, that if she spoke to me like that in a hospital, I could have her removed. Here, I can hardly walk away.

  ‘Let’s get some water into you and a cup of tea; would you like that?’ I grasp at the props of ordinary life. My mum used to inhale tea: orange-hued and so steeped you could smell the tannins. I go into the kitchen, crouch down and swing open the door of her small fridge. The seal’s dirty and the holder in the side has snapped so it can’t hold any milk but the light bleeds into the room. There are just a couple of bottles of wine on their sides, an onion, a cracked heel of cheddar cheese, half a wizened lemon, dusted with mould. The milk has turned, the sour smell kicking the back of my throat. I fill her a pint glass of water, which she ignores.

  ‘You need to try to drink this.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘Coffee,’ I say. ‘Let’s have a black coffee.’ There’s a jar of instant coffee in the cupboard and I fill two mugs, taking my time as I stir the granules and inhale the steam. I need to discover whether this is a one-off or a regular occurrence, and if it was precipitated by anything in particular. To work out how I can help her.

  But by the time I take the mugs through, she has fallen asleep.

  *

  Two hours, three, I wait, listening to her heavy snores as she lies on the sofa, covered in a blanket. She looks even more vulnerable, now she’s asleep. Sugar once sustained her. Now her skin hangs in loose flaps below her arms. Her face is mottled and topped by a fuzz of dark brown hair. Many women lighten their hair as they age but my mother is having none of it. Her determination to remain the colour she was at sixteen – but a harsher, chemically induced version, with none of the lighter streaks that might have appeared naturally – is typical. Why should I go grey, her insistence on reaching for the hair dye every four or five weeks seemed to say. But now her one concession to vanity has vanished. Two centimetres of silver run along her parting, like a seam of quartz running through slate.

  I shift in my upright chair. She moved here three years ago. This has never been my home and it doesn’t feel homely. Her old electric fire emits little comfort or heat. The fabric on her armchair is worn and I’m struck by how sparse and impersonal the room is: with its stark ceiling light, its small, mustard sofa devoid of cushions, its wallpaper with damp lapping at the bottom. There’s nothing to indicate she has grandchildren and just the one childhood photograph of Mattie and me.

  I stare at the mantelpiece again. There’s a dog-eared postcard of Hastings Pier, and for a moment I am back there – or more specifically at Sea View, the cafe she ran when Mattie and I were children, right up until it closed five years ago. That’s all it takes: one photo and I am transported to that space. Hungry workers rammed themselves onto benches against Formica tables; the air rang with the sound of male laughter and knives scraping against plates.

  You rarely see caffs like that these days in such prime locations. The sort that serves sliced white bread and butter as standard, and too-stewed tea in individual metal teapots, the handles scalding, the liquid a thick stream. The sizzle of eggs frying in a pan and the smell of hot fat was everpresent, and everything came not just with bread and butter but chips. It didn’t occur to me for years that potatoes came in any other form. There were burgundy bottles of Sarson’s vinegar and fat plastic towers of salt; cheap brown sauce and ketchup, jammy around the cap, which dripped and splodged in smears of blood.

  We didn’t always live there. We moved when I was four and Mattie, two. After my father left us and my mother suddenly found herself on her own. I don’t remember much about our previous home, a Dartmoor cottage down a steep-banked lane, except that it was isolated. My mother hated it, and moved to a seaside resort when he’d gone, craving somewhere less desolate and insular; less judgemental, too.

  Sea View – or the flat above Sea View – holds difficult memories, not least of Mattie’s accident. They come at me in a rush: Mattie’s screams, of course, but more generally her explosions of anger: her wrenching Mattie so that his shoulder dislocated; the dull clout to the side of my head that left me deaf for two days. It wasn’t that we were regularly beaten, but we knew not to push it. Because, when our mother lost it, it didn’t feel as if she was frustrated: it felt as if she hated us.

  Did Jess feel like that? Even now, faced with a mother so drunk the police were called, I keep coming back to this question. Did she ever feel so angry with her baby that she lost her customary self-control? Jess, who crouches down whenever a child falls over to look them in the eyes and tell them they’ll be OK. Jess, who used to set up painting sessions, despite Frankie’s short attention span and her love of order. Jess, who decided to have a surprise third baby while the rest of us only felt relief at having left babyhood behind. I just can’t see it somehow.

  *

  Just after midnight, my mother stirs. Sleep has sobered her up a little and she fumbles her way to the bathroom.

  ‘Do you need any help?’ The toilet seat bangs and she’s violently sick. I fetch a cloth, a fresh glass of water, find some tissues in my bag, amid the detritus of dusty Haribos and bits of Lego figures, and try to wipe her forehead dry.

  I pull a band out of my hair so she can tie hers off her face but she refuses and plonks herself down on the sofa. As she does, her leg catches the pint of water I’d left her.

  ‘Look what you’ve made me do!’ she screeches as she’s drenched.

  I find a towel and dab at the floor and her bare legs. Her legs are threaded with varicose veins, her toenails yellow and gnarled. I am so conscious of her ageing, but her anger makes me recoil. I resist apologising; feel irritation. It’s close to midnight and here I am, the dutiful daughter, the conscientious medic, literally kneeling at my sozzled mother’s feet.

  I just want to go home; but the shock of the water, and of her being sick, means that she is becoming sober. Her speech is no longer slurred; her gaze no longer glazed. She makes a curious sound and I’m surprised by a flood of tenderness. My mother swipes at her right eye angrily. She is crying, and she never cries.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about what happened in Tesco?’ I ask, sitting back on my heels.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK.’ For a moment I am so tired I feel like giving up on her. She has always treated her body badly, piling on the pounds to become clinically obese after we left home, risking type-2 diabetes, until I scared her into doing something; then starving herself as she veered to the other extreme.

  She no longer smokes but she drinks. Just a couple of glasses a night. She has never admitted to the gin. I’ve told myself not to be judgemental; have mentioned that the government now recommends no more than fourteen units a week. Nanny state, she’s said, scornfully, and I’ve known not to push it. But I’ve clearly shut my eyes to a problem. Being drunk and aggressive in public takes self-destruction to a new level.

  ‘Can you tell me if something in particular made you drink so heavily?’

  She fiddles with the edge of the sofa, prising apart the weft. ‘I’d been thinking of Clare.’

  ‘Clare?’

  ‘Your sister.’

  For a moment, I’m bemused and then there’s a dawning realisation.

  ‘You mean . . . the baby who died in a cot death?’

  ‘Yes.’ She swallows. ‘That was her name. Clare.’

  I fixate on the texture of the fabric, a heavy, ugly weave. I knew she experienced a cot death. It was part of our family mythology and yet it was never discussed. I’d never been told the baby’s name, how old she was, or even if it had happened after I was born. There were no pictures and the one time I’d asked about it, my mother had refused to speak to me for three days. The message was clear: I was never to discuss this child
.

  Shorn of any details, her life and death were just cold facts; nothing that preoccupied me until I had my own children and the risk of cot death was something about which every parent was warned. And now my mother, who has resolutely refused to discuss her, has been thinking of her as she drinks herself into oblivion.

  ‘It was thirty-five years ago today.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ I want to reach out to her.

  ‘Don’t.’ She pre-empts me.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it? Tell me what happened?’

  ‘What is there to say? Eleven weeks old. I put her down to sleep. She never woke up.’ She shrugs, dismissing her grief with this abrupt gesture, and yet the impact is clear to see.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ I want to put my arms around her but she has always resisted affection. ‘I wish I’d known the importance of today. We could have spent it together . . .’ I stop, realising the mother-daughter relationship I’m evoking is pure fantasy and probably the last thing she wants or needs.

  ‘You think it’s just a baby,’ she says at last. ‘Not a real life. Not worth getting upset over. But perhaps it is.’

  I try to think of something suitable to say. There is so much I want to know. Thirty-five years ago, I was three, and Mattie one. I have a recurring dream of being a young child and spying on my mother through the chink of a bedroom door. She is holding a baby and I’d assumed this was a projection of my subconscious yearnings: that she is holding the child I longed to be. But perhaps it was Clare and this is a long-suppressed memory of my mother holding this baby in the immediate aftermath of her death?

  ‘Did you talk to anyone about this at the time? Did you have any support? Is her death connected to Dad leaving?’

  The questions tumble from me but my mother has clammed up. It’s as if, having given me a glimpse of her inner life, she can’t risk further closeness. ‘I’m tired,’ she says, crossing her arms in front of her tightly. ‘I want to go to bed.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ This is typical but I’m discomfited by this sudden desire for distance.