You can’t be dead, you ain’t even dying.
You can’t be dying, you ain’t even dead.
This ain’t some plain-vanilla state of denial, this is just crunching the data from all the other times you been dying. Predictions based on your previous behaviour.
“… and please, Dhilan, stop sucking your mouth ulcers – just leave it to the salt to heal them. How many times do I have to tell you? I won’t always be here to tell you – can’t you see that I’m dying?”
Then swallowing the sudden rush of vomit but only tasting the salt water. Oh, fuck you, you ain’t dying, fuck you.
You ain’t dying, you’re making it up.
You ain’t dying cos you’re only forty-nine and you got breast cancer when you was thirty-nine.
You can’t just end when you’re thirty-nine.
I’m only nine years old back then – you haven’t even taught me how to shave yet. Haven’t taught me how ride a bike, tie a necktie, untie the necktie, you haven’t taught me how to walk away. So, no. No, you ain’t dying and you ain’t my mum, you’re making it all up.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry that I keep telling you I’m dying. It isn’t fair for me to keep saying it to you – I know it isn’t fair. Everything about this illness isn’t fair. But I just … it’s just … sometimes I wonder if you think I’m making it all up.”
The first time your mum told you she had cancer you wanted to ask her to show you her tumour. Not just the pictures from her mammogram, you meant her actual-fact tumour. And not for the purposes of proof – more a souvenir. No, a specimen. A sample so that you could personally try and find a cure. Couldn’t they stick her tumour in a jar or something? Or in a mother–son Valentine’s jewellery box. A pillbox, a velvet cushion, a jar. With pickle so her Sweetheart Son could eat it. Just eat it and chew it and swallow it and make it magically disappear. “Fuck you, woman, you ain’t dying, fuck you!”
“Dhilan?” she sniffled. “What are you talking about?” Now full-on sobbing. “What is it that you want from me? I’m going, son. Sweetheart, I promise I’ll soon be gone.”
She must’ve thought you was gonna smack her or someshit. To stop her chatting all that nonsense about dying. To smack her back to her senses. I tell you, if my daughter did a thing like this I would thapar her – one hard slap across her face. And when she raised her right arm in self-defence, the left shoulder strap of her nightie slipped off. You didn’t notice it at first – you was too busy reassuring her that you wouldn’t never ever hit her. Or maybe you just didn’t notice it cos you’d seen it all before. All them accidental sightings while changing her dressings and unzipping her dresses and petticoats and that. Body-scrub, towel-dry, moisturise, rub iodine into her underarm scars. Allow it – ain’t nothing to feel embarrassed about. Men were allowed to flex some pride in their battle scars, so why the fuck shouldn’t women? Men displayed them on their arms and their pecs – their own little slits of superheroism. So, no – no need for her to feel awkward or shamed of the mess of scars on her chest where her breasts used to be. Or the scars on her hips or the scars on her stomach or the scars on her soul. And ain’t no need for you to feel embarrassed by her lack of embarrassment. Don’t get all soppy and chivalrous though – no need for this to end in sadness when it could still honour her by being horrible. Like the promise of an oracle or the prophecy of an algorithm – everything in accordance with the horribleness of her disease. Here – look, here – right in front of you. The most pornofied part of a woman’s body and the reason humans evolved lips in the first place. The reason we’re called “mammals”. Reason babies can afford to be born so weak.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, woman?” This time you spoke directly to her exposed spaghetti of post-surgical scarring – “You ain’t my mummy.”
Scar tissue is harder for a reason. Everything stronger at the seams. Your mother–son love like two lumps of meat soldered together instead of sewn – fused by fever and chemo and screaming. Cos this shit couldn’t just end in sadness – it had to be horrible.
“What the hell nonsense are you talking, Dhilan? If I’m not your mother, then who the hell is your mother?”
“You are, of course.”
“Please, Dhilan, what the bloody hell are you talking?”
“I mean your Facebook page is. Your blog is, your Instagram is.” Because digital content doesn’t die, etc. And cos, online or offline, women don’t actually have to be defined by their bodies.
You carried on staring at her scars just to prove you wasn’t afraid of them – of the caverns and indents and nodules within them.
Don’t even have to be defined by their body odours. Or by their various assorted bodily fluids.
The rigid scar tissue and the squishy. The bone dry and the clammy. Cos this couldn’t just end in sadness – it had to be proper horrible.
Ain’t no lymph glands online either. No sweat glands, no nostrils, no arsehole, no armpits.
Every tiny little bump and lump and dimple. Beneath them and between them. The fungal terrain of some kinda psycho-psoriasis battleground. Cos this couldn’t just end in sadness – it had to be horrible.
And why am I always so hung up about your bodily fluids, Mum? Why do they make me so upset? After all, weren’t I born in them? And before I was born, didn’t I basically used to be them? Didn’t I used to be liquid fucking bodily fluid?
Every little blister-like bunion and abscess and every ulcerated contusion. Because, for both of you, it had to be horrible. No, not you. Me.
I did what happens next.
Cos you ain’t my mum, you’re just her body. Your liquids ain’t her spirit and your stench is not her soul. I mean your scent – your scent is not her soul. All your fluids and your illness and your liquids, all of those things mean that I don’t even know where your body begins and where your body ends, Mummy. It’s just like what I told you when I was nine and I couldn’t yet calibrate my cuddling: how the hell can I hold you properly if I don’t know which bits of you to hold and which bits of you to let go?
“And do you wanna know the reason you ain’t my mummy?” I asked her – though now just staring at and stroking her swimming-cap scalp. Wondering if it was horrible that I’d miss her scalp more than I’d miss her hair and I’d miss her scarring more than I’d miss her scalp. “It’s cos you’re too mashed up to be my mother. Too gross and disgusting and … ”
When, right on cue, my stomach started retching, I tried telling Mum that it was only cos I’d swallowed all that salt water to cure my mouth ulcers. Next, I tried telling her I was retching with guilt over all the sick horrible shit I’d just said to her – that I wasn’t really retching at the sight of her. But I couldn’t say these things properly cos I was too busy retching. Then I tried telling her that I’d seen her body probly thousands of times before and I’d never felt nauseous once. But I couldn’t say this properly cos I was so nauseous. Her tears making it seem like as if the scarring had now spread to her face. The pre-bereavement counsellor had warned me that even my mourning would be deformed, but they didn’t say jack about this part – the part where it can’t just end in sadness, so it has to be horrible.
The drool from your mouth like some brand-new blend of gastric acid. Like the liquid itself was ulcerated. To melt away this moment or maybe to mark it, imprint it, to motherfucking milk it. To sulphurise any lingering sweetness. Until finally, fucking finally, you were in sync once again – mother and son crying and retching in sync. Her whole face squelching while sniffling. Skin tone draining from cancer-patient pale to public-toilet porcelain. And before you could move away from her, your puke came, projectile-style – off-white McDonald’s vanilla milkshake. Blanket coverage all over her bed, but – oh shitfuck – maybe her bedding was waterproof or someshit, non-absorbent, mercy-resistant. Because no need to spell out where your vanilla milkshake vomit should choose to pool and puddle. Flowing back towards the place like rainwater is drawn into drains. Her
reaching for one of her wigs to frantically wipe it away. Howling out to her own dead mum for help.
You remember trying to back away or swallow it – to swallow any follow-up.
You remember being drawn to it. Some kinda duty to stay with it.
Watching it to see if it would melt her or mark her or contaminate her. Maybe even make things even more horrible by infecting her mammary scar tissue so you could drink the pus and pretend you was once again suckling. Cos it couldn’t just end in sadness.
Later, you remember wondering why your feet were boiling. The soles of your trainers.
Like the carpet was sweating gastric acid. Or underground radiation. A bonfire beneath the floorboards.
The burning of possessions and refuse and shit that should really be recycled or donated.
A dirty old man incinerating secrets and a stash of topless pornography.
A boy disposing of stolen headscarves and dresses and other flammable items.
Note to Norman Bates: do not store your mother in the heat of the cellar.
Note to businessmen: do not hide your data servers in the basement.
Note to Oedipus: stay the fuck away from oracles and smartfones and search engines.
Note to men in general: we all got our liquids and fluids so do not diss her and don’t be horrible.
Be an adult, focus on the positives.
Pay her compliments. Buy fucking flowers.
Be careful which stories you choose to click on.
Or else you’ll never even get close to deserving her love.
And you’ll never be able to bury her or burn her or both.
Your mother gave up with the sopping-wet wig. Just gazed down at her chest like as if she was looking at you – all your private unseen thoughts forced outta your stomach and now visible. Like the puddle of your puke was part of you, the same way part of your mummy sometimes seeped into the bathmat. But, truth is, right then the puke seemed more like someone else – a third person right there in the room with you. A witness. She’d told you one time that she felt shame when she was alone and embarrassment when with you. Well, now your vomit was the stranger that made her feel total humiliation.
You looked towards her bedside table – as if you could somehow divert her attention from your soaking sticky foulness. More framed fotos, stack of kidney bowls, bouquets of clichés in plastic vases. Didn’t I used to buy you flowers, Mummy? All those battered bunches. Everyone buys flowers for people in hospital, but I got you that bunch after my first day at uni, even though you were back in remission. You wrote in your blog that it was the happiest moment of your life.
Didn’t you?
Didn’t you?
You started remembering that the bouquet in question had actually been meant for Ramona – but you figured, fuck it, that detail no longer mattered now. Maybe it never did.
And you blogged about my exam results, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Fuck my A levels and GCSEs. I wish I could just give them all back. If I’d just settled for grade Bs instead of As that coulda given us an extra three months together. Or if I’d aimed for Ds and Es we could’ve had another nine months. You made me in nine months, Mummy. Made me out of your body and bodily fluids. Fuck it, if I’d just failed everything we could’ve had another two years together. Just fail everything and take better care of you. I hate my fucking exam results, Mummy. I don’t wanna be some golden-escalator graduate trainee. I wanna flip burgers in Maccy D’s. I want us to have had another two years. Or how about I just fuck up now at uni just to even things out? I’ll never be able to say I did my best but maybe I could fuck up everything else just to even shit out?
Then, as quickly as it had happened, the clean-up. The mopping and scrubbing and cleansing. Nearly new sheets, nearly new nightie, nearly new wig. And throughout this, she didn’t say diddly-jack. Your somehow-still-prettyful mum didn’t say a single word. Knew straight away for definite that she’d never ever speak of this to no one else – that your aunties and uncles and aunties would always think the worst thing you ever done was just walk out on her. And she didn’t even seem disgusted by it: as if cleaning up your bodily fluids was part of the dictionary definition of motherhood. Just gave you a blister-pack of her high-strength anti-vomiting tablets. Well, what did you expect? That she’d rip the cannula from her arm and use the needle to poke out her eyes? Fuck’s sake, haven’t you read the story, Dillon? It’s Oedipus who gouges out his eyes, not his mother. So no – no drama, no cannula, no hypodermic needle, no knitting needle, not even a pair of her blindfolds to shield you from the sight of her. Just a pack of her anti-vomiting pills. And a box of Imodium. As if to reassure you it was probly just food poisoning. As if she’d already rehearsed every possible scenario too often to let any of them be horrible.
Or maybe she’d just rehearsed that specific scenario.
Maybe she knew that the retching hadn’t really come from you; it had come from someone else.
45
WE DON’T BOTHER incinerating the newspapers. Dad and I don’t speak about it, don’t speak about anything. We just reach some agreement not to do it. Like he’s taken on my mummy’s mind-reading techniques. Still, we walk through the tunnel to the furnace. To go through the motions. To say that we came. The incinerator itself more like some rubbish bin – the steel kind, the kind that homeless men light fires in. Abandoned trolleys and tracks on the floor where people have dragged their files and dropped them in.
Dad says he’s been clearing out his flat for the benefit of Naliah and her mum. Reaches into his briefcase and chucks in a collection of topless porn mags. I reach into my breast pocket and throw in my mother’s lilac headscarf. And also flowers – why can’t I conjure up some bunch of flowers? Don’t matter who I’d bought them for. Don’t matter that every time I’d magicked them into existence, Mum would tell me I deserved a better mum. Or that I’ve never actually told her that she couldn’t possibly be better.
“Son, there’s something I’ve wanted to tell you ever since we got back in touch with each other.” Dad speaks as if I’m standing in front of him instead of beside him. Heat slapping up against our faces. “That first time we met in McDonald’s – when you thought I was an insurance salesman. Well, it reminded me of something I learnt from my colleagues in the insurance company. You see, when insurers do all their predictive modelling to work out a customer’s health premium or life premium or whatnot, they only look at the hard data. The evidence. They don’t look for stories – for cause and effect and whatnot. This is because correlations in the data are not the same thing as causation. Over the years I found it very helpful to know this. And I think maybe it’s important you know this too.”
When Dad tries laying his hand on my shoulder, I throw it off. “Then why the hell tell me everything you just told me?” I ask him. “All that stuff about your stories – about why you turned away from her. Why did you tell me all that? Why didn’t you just carry on keeping it hidden?”
Dad says that he hadn’t been hiding it – that how could he have been hiding it when he didn’t even know it himself. He says that over the years he’s told himself many reasons why he and my mum had got divorced, but never ever not once the reason he’d told me tonight. He swears he honestly didn’t know it till now – not until I started searching for him.
When he tries again to lay his hand on my shoulder, he brushes my face and I turn my head. For some reason, this makes him flex some smile. “You know, you used to do that all the time when you were a baby, Dhilan. You’d turn your head whenever we touched your face.”
I tell him that all babies do that. That it’s a reflex, a pre-loaded program. Like breathing and grasping and suckling. In fact, it’s the reflex that leads on to the suckling reflex. I tell him there’s a technical term for it, but I don’t know what it is.
“Yes you do, Dhilan – there’s WiFi down here so it’s in your pocket. It’s in my pocket too.” He pulls out his smartfone. “With all the knowledge we carry in our pockets
these days, it’s a wonder we don’t need industrial-strength belts and braces.”
He googles the words “babies turning heads before suckling”.
Turns out the technical term is a rooting reflex. Turns out there’s also another technical name for it: the searching reflex.
Epilogue
LEFT MY OLD man in the external storage facility. Told him I’d got me some 5am breakfast lecture/seminar/business meeting bullshit. Figured it was okay to lie to him so long as the lie was obvious. Besides, if I’d stuck around we’d have had all that single-file weirdness while I followed him out, and I’m done with following him. Don’t matter that it was me who led the way in. Me who’d been holding the torch.
Wait around in the middle of the street like I’m scoping for a taxi. Botox man takes his time showing up. We stroll badass-style in silence, then duck indoors when it starts to rain or turn cold or snow or whatever. First time I ever been first in line for a freshly laid Egg McMuffin.
“Your father, he wasn’t lying to you back there, Dhilan. But as you already know, his story requires a small clarification. Or an update. Old-fashioned word is correction.”
We got the pick of every freshly disinfected plastic table. I choose some maximum privacy setting by the window.
“We told your father that story about being a crime syndicate for the same reason he’s spent the past few days telling stories to you. Stop him seeking out the truth. At first, we tried not to tell him anything. But you yourself know how difficult that strategy can be. So then we simply tried to create endless confusion and debate. That’s how things work these days: censorship through distraction, too much information, trivialism, continuously contesting the basic facts.”
He chucks a sachet of sugar into his coffee. Without actually opening the sachet.
“You know, Dhilan, this food chain has really started to grow on me. Milkshake on tap. Flesh patties on tap. All that clever industrial pipework inserted into bleeding udders. The wonders of American technology bequeathed to the whole wide world. Remind me, how old were you when your mother forbade you from eating McDonald’s?”
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