“What – can she – eat?” you asked. But the district nurse had already left. Her car pulling outta the accessible-access driveway.
“Of course I can eat,” croaked your mum. “So long as it isn’t solids, son – I’m afraid I’m not doing very well with solids again.”
By then, her body wouldn’t have made it out to the back garden, never mind out to a restaurant. You started wondering what the home-cum-hospice equivalent of five-star hotel room service would be. Your cousin Ravi would’ve probly organised that shit a whole month in advance. Hired a Michelin-starred chef to come home and make carrot-and-beetroot-chemo-superfood soup-du-jour. The kinda service where they roll it into the room with flowers on a ready-laid table. Balloons, even – all that golden-boy grandchild-bearing bollocks. Allow that bullshit – best you could manage for her today would be a simple, slapdash pub lunch. A riverside gastropub-cum-restaurant. Because restaurants, like hospitals and romantic holidays, would now always feel like portals pulling you back to her. All them brochures and itineraries and today’s specials. Soup of boiling bodily fluids. Swollen meat soaked through you.
You pulled up a chair from the dining table and placed it at her deathbedside – apologising to the other diners in the gastropub for nearly spilling their drinks. “Mummy,” you kicked off while she tried to hide a stain on her duvet, “Mummy, you said you wanted to talk about something?”
“I felt we should have a talk, sweetheart.”
“Sure, Mum. But about what?”
“Stuff, my darling. Just stuff. How’s your school? How’s your uni going?”
So this was it then, you thought. That talk. The talk – the talk she’s spent ten years prepping. The talk nearly every cancer-patient parent eventually has with their children. You gave up rehearsing hearing it about six years into her illness, but deep down you always knew the end would begin with a talk. That it wouldn’t really end with sirens. No 999 on speed-dial – probly wouldn’t even end in hospital. No vending-machine coffee in the waiting-room, no string-orchestra soundtrack, no nurses looking at you like maybe they just might snog you outta sympathy. Just aunties and aunties and chutney and the bogey-green curtains and carpet in the living room. The talk that begins with: “Son, I’m really sorry, but it looks like the treatment isn’t working.”
Her curtains, her carpet. The sunlight. The sunlight shouting behind her curtains. Her inner-supermum strength from which would probly spit forth a totally different version of That Talk: “Son, I’m really sorry, but it looks like the treatment’s actually been working. They think it was a delayed reaction. I’m heading back into remission – I’ll probably be around forever.”
You helped her to pull a cardigan over one of the nighties you’d bought her. That band of sequins across the cardigan like the ghost of a belt – like even she wanted to pretend you were dining out somewhere special. Both of you too numbed by your mouth ulcers to order anything but soup and soup and then more soup to replace the spilt soup. Her chewing her soup so intently as if she knew she wouldn’t be able to hold it down. You suddenly feeling like your taste buds were dead, another dipshit synced-up side effect. Random splodge of sequins across her chest. No hat or headscarf, though – just the baby baldness of your mummy reduced to snivelling infant, stringy incontinent toddler’s drool. You like some kinda paedo trying not to trace the outline of her body. Ramona had kept all these sick thoughts of yours away – she did, she does, she must’ve done. Kept all these thoughts tucked deep in the pits of her toe cleavage. Were you really some asshole afraid of her body or just afraid of being afraid of it? And did fear always have to lead to hatred?
“You know, sweetheart, this could still go on,” your mum said to the mug of freshly brewed Cup-a-Soup that you’d somehow poured and stirred and placed in her stringy-cheese hands. Tomato liquid runny lipstick. “What I mean, darling, is that nothing bad has happened. I was dying the last you came to see me and now I’m dying again – that’s all it is. Same story for years. I wonder how many times the doctors can say I’m dying before even their words become dead.”
Your mum probly knew what she was trying to say. You were trying not to know.
“Why should I go to the hospice?” she pressed on. “They say I could become completely bedridden and then get a bit better again and then become bedridden again, so tell me, why should I go?”
“Mummy, where have you gone? How much morphine did the district nurse give you?”
“Don’t be silly, Dhilan – she wouldn’t have left if she’d given me morphine. I’m perfectly lucid. I’m always lucid at lunchtime. Too bloody lucid for my liking. I’m trying to tell you that I could become completely bedridden and then get up again or I could become completely bedridden and then never get up again. Who knows? It could be months, weeks or days. The only thing the doctors know for certain is I’ve got cancer.”
“Come on, Mummy,” you spoke into the scalp you were suddenly stroking and sniffing and stroking. “Don’t talk about weeks or days. You gotta think positive. That’s what you always say. And, anyway, if it’s really just a matter of weeks or days, then what the hell am I doing still staying in student halls?”
Your mum just looked around the living-room-cum-bedroom-cum-hospice as if looking at all the other people in this gastro-pub-cum-restaurant. Even though the tables were donning napkin rings, it weren’t one of them moonlit, candlelit, teeth-lit places. More like the pub she took you to on your sixteenth birthday for your first ever pint of shandy. “You know why you’re still staying in student halls, Dhilan.”
Next, she tried placing her mug on her bedside table, turning to look at the couple kissing at the table to our left as if telling them to get a room – as if this pub was one of them countryside pubs with upstairs shagging quarters. When you leaned over to steady her arm, her left leg slid out from beneath the duvet. Or maybe it was the duvet that slid. Either way, you tried not to look. You always tried not to look. Hating how her various assorted medicines always made her feet swollen. Hating how the word for “swollen foot” in Ancient Greek was “oedipus”. The living-room-cum-bedroom the exact same living-room-come-coven they’d all been talking in. All them years back when Aunties Number One, Two and Three had assumed you were keeping your end of the babysitting deal and sleeping. But how she can divorce her own husband? If my daughter did a thing like this I would thapar her one. Me, I feel sorry for her son. One hard slap across her face. The son will take the father’s place. ALWAYS THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS – THE GOOGLY-ENGINE IT SAYS THIS. THE FACEBOOK STORY SAYS HE WILL GO OFF THE RUFFIAN RAILS. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. He will become the weirdo and take the father’s place … And so on and so forth, the television laughing, the light fixtures flickering, all three aunties’ voices amplified and distorted by the living room’s future furniture-cum-electrical-medical-equipment.
You laid your head gently against your mummy’s scalp. Your elbow on the edge of her pillow. Two gastropub tables to the right of the bed, you clocked two of your old school teachers. Everyone at school had known they was a couple – the clue was in the fact they was married to each other. Mr Forest taught drama; Mrs Levis taught art. It still messed with your head when you saw teachers outside school – even though you no longer went to school. Even more so to be seeing them in your mum’s favourite gastropub by the most romantic stretch of the Thames. They didn’t belong in there, nobody did – just you and your mummy. And they deffo didn’t belong in your living room.
“Whatever happens, sweetheart, you must remain strong,” your mum said – then getting annoyed with herself for sounding cringe. “No,” she tried again, “if you feel sad then, okay, then be it – be sad. But please try not be so angry, son. Even right now I can see it in your face.”
You looked at your reflection in the butter knife that had been placed beside the napkin ring. But all you could see was your acne – like some inverted counterparts of your mouth ulcers. Put the knife back down, spilt soup on her duvet – your duvet, the duvet, our duvet, whatever.
One of the waiters rushed from behind the bar to help you wipe it off the table and hand you a brand-new menu. While he did so, you spotted Aunties Number Three and Four peering through the crack in the living-room doorway. Without moving from her bedside, you reached for your mum’s walking stick and shut the door in your aunties’ collective face. They snorted, all shocked and offended, then sighed, then knocked. “We’re just going to Tesco,” they said in sync.
“Your mother needs some things,” said Aunty Number Three.
“We’ll leave the two of you to talk alone,” said Aunty Number Four.
“Dhilan, can we get anything for you?”
When your voice answered, “No thank you,” you didn’t speak towards the door but to your mother’s swollen feet. Scent of salt from her feet – how the fuck had her eye saliva dribbled down her thighs to her feet? “Actually, wait,” you called out. “Don’t go. Please. Stay in the house. Come inside the room, even. I’ll go Tesco myself when Mummy takes a nap, but for now just please stay in the house with us.”
They pushed open the door, but just by a centimetre.
“No, Dhilan,” said Aunty Number Three – her teeth a sliver of yellow through the gap in the doorway. “You be alone with your mother.”
“Yes, you be on your own with your mother,” agreed Aunty Number Four. “After all, this is it, what you want.”
And so you listened to the keys and the latch and the storm porch as you just sat there and let them leave … No, not you. Me.
I did what happens next.
My mum restarted from where she’d left off before we got interruptured. “It’s just that on Saturday, Dhilan, when everyone came here to the house, they all said you looked so angry. So angry that it scared them. Other people noticed it too, not just me – other people said you looked angry. Always hiding your handsome face behind the phone camera.”
You wanted to ask her how the hell they saw your face if it was always behind the camera, but you didn’t cos you didn’t wanna sound angry.
“Because anyone can be angry, sweetheart. It’s much easier to feel anger against people than it is to feel sad within yourself. Just look at me and your masi – whenever one of us feels sad about something, we suddenly find some reason to fight with someone else. I know this without you needing to tell me. But I don’t want you to be like that, sweetheart. That’s why I’m telling you not to be so angry. Be as sad as you like, sweetheart, but please don’t be so angry.”
You wanted to tell her: What the fuck? Surely not you as well, Mum? The others I can understand, but not you. How can you seriously say all that when you came to all them couples therapy sessions with me?
But you didn’t tell her this cos you didn’t wanna sound angry.
“Or actually maybe what I mean is please don’t hate me, darling – you don’t have to keep looking at me like you hate me. Try to remember me better than I am. Maybe this is why it was a good thing when you moved to the student halls. But, still, even on Saturday you still hated me.”
You wanted to tell her: Of course I don’t hate you, I hate your fucking illness, and so on. But you didn’t tell her this cos you didn’t wanna sound angry. Or because, even if you said it, you knew she didn’t even have the strength to change her mind. Unless she was just fishing for you to tell her again that you loved her. How to convince her, though? How to slap her back to her senses – one hard slap across her face. Fuck you, you ain’t dying, fuck you. Instead, you started giving her your usual reassurances: I love you, I love you, I love you and so on. Forget about Ramona and Beyoncé and Eva Green, etc. – sometimes I think maybe they’re just there to keep just how much I love you in check. A boy’s best friend is his mother, and so on. You’re my one and only BFF. But, Mum, that don’t mean we’re eternal hermaphrodite Siamese soulmates or something. We ain’t gonna be together in another lifetime and I weren’t your husband in some previous life. We’re just mother and son and what we got is here. I been thinking about it ever since I was eight and I ain’t angry with you or even with God, I’m just angry with the clock.
“Because I’m sorry, Dhilan.” Sudden curve of her normally square jaw. “I’m really, really sorry that it’s taking so long. That’s why I called you over today – to tell you that this could still go on and on. Now they’re saying they think there’s a chance I might even respond to a new type of treatment. So, sweetheart, I want you to tell me truthfully …” Your mum looked round the gastro-pub-cum-restaurant to make sure ain’t no one else was listening. Switched her mobile to silent, yanked the living-room landline from the phone socket. Put down her fork, pulled at the duvet. Smiled at your two teachers – the ones who’d once told her during parents’ evening that they wished she’d brought up all their pupils. “… Just please, just tell me truthfully, Dhilan: would you prefer it if I just gave up the fight?”
Your mum didn’t ask you this in some angryfied Anti-Oestrogen way, she just laid it on the table like it was some kinda for-serious question. The gastropub-table-cum-living-room-bedside-table. Didn’t even use the word “dead” or “die”, just “give up the fight”. All her whole life’s battery power diverted into sounding dignified. And maybe it was cos of her businesslike lack of melodrama. Or maybe it was cos the question obviously didn’t need no answer given that, treatment or no treatment, things now seemed so close to the end-of-the-story end. But, either way, you didn’t reply. After all, if you’d said the words “Please don’t give up the fight” you’d sound like you were the one being melodramatic. Like you was kneeling over her wounded and bloodied body sprawled on the floor of some random gastropub-cum-restaurant, begging her to keep breathing, keep her eyes open. Begging her not to leave you – like those kids who get lost from their mummies in shopping malls and start howling in front of total strangers and sniffling and dribbling and shitting in their no-longer-nappies. Or maybe you just didn’t know how to reply. Either way, your dumb ass didn’t reply. And when your mum’s face started liquefying like you were back in some Groupon-deal mother–son sauna where her eye saliva sliced through her sweat – there and then in the gastropub-cum-restaurant, right in front of total strangers – it felt too fucking late for you to reply. It’d just sound like you was lying – same way everyone lies when someone they love starts crying. She didn’t even wipe away a layer of eye saliva – as if she didn’t want to draw it to your attention. Just stayed sitting there like some over-oiled wooden statue, varnish and various assorted bodily fluids dribbling down her chin, into her lap, down her legs. Ditto you just carried on sitting there watching her as she carried on sitting there liquefying. All the other gastropub diners staring at her, waiting for you to just get up and hold her and help her and wipe her – if only to prove that her jawline wasn’t actually made of syrup or something. If you could have moved a muscle in your own jaw, you’d have told them all that they were watching the most courage-ful woman any of them would ever see. But you didn’t even try cos they weren’t really there, and cos the two of you never left the living room, you understood that you’d both always be in that gastropub-cum-restaurant wherever either of you now went. Unless, of course, you managed to … No, not you. Me.
I did what happens next.
43
SO NOW YOU’VE ditched all your sob stories and your daddy’s ditched all his scare stories. Only shit left is the stories you came down here for in the first place.
“Are you sitting comfortably, son?”
You’re still squat-sulking on top of the first stack of back issues. Your daddy leaning on the trolley for carting them to the underground furnace.
“I swear there are other people down here, Dad.”
“No, Dylan. There isn’t anyone. They’re not here. You’re mistaken.”
“But then why … ”
“There isn’t. You’re mistaken. I promise. There isn’t. Just rats and shadows. Nothing to be scared of, son.”
“But … ”
“Be brave, son. Be brave.”
Al
low this bullshit – next he’ll be telling you little boys shouldn’t be afraid of the fucking dark. Except it ain’t even that dark in here. There wouldn’t be no shadows if it was that dark. Anycase, you ain’t even afraid of the dark – you used to stream horror movies just to kill the sadness. Being stressed or scared shitless the only break from all the pre-bereavement bereavement.
“But then what about at the other end of the tunnel?” you ask. “Someone must be operating the incinerator? Surely we ain’t meant to just shovel all these papers straight into the flames like they did with all those diseased cows?”
Reason it ain’t dark in here is cos of the pink neon strip lighting. And the clear plastic sheets that somehow seem tinted. And the puddles beneath the shelving. And the slime on the surface of the ribbed steel walls.
“I mean, it’s just basic workplace health and safety, Daddy. You can’t have a self-service incinerator. Under the fucking ground.”
Your daddy just asks once again if you’re sitting comfortably. And then he nods on your behalf. “Well then, let me begin, son. Once upon a time in a city called London, there was a jaded young journalist who was recruited by a colour-by-numbers crime syndicate to plant coded messages in newspaper stories. These coded messages took the form of fake eyewitness quotes. And then they all lived happily ever after. The end.”
You tell your daddy: “Thank you for telling me.” And then: “Well, let’s do this and then we can go.”
The crusty stickiness of the newspapers. One stack at a time. Put your non-existent backbone into it. No biceps to speak of either – you eat more caffeine than protein. Doesn’t count as carrying her over the threshold if she’s in a stretcher.
“Dylan, I’m telling you the truth.”
“I know, Daddy.”
You knew straight from jump that this time he was going for full factual accuracy. That this weren’t another one of his fake news stories. That maybe this was always gonna be the deal between you: your daddy ditching his scare stories and you ditching your sob stories. Ain’t even whining about your mouth ulcers no more – told him the blood was just from shaving cuts. Acne scars or something. Shit, wait – could shaving cuts be seen as a sob story?
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