by Sue Margolis
“Sorry,” Dan said, “the name means nothing.”
“What about V for Vera?”
“Nope.”
“S?”
“No.”
“W?”
“No.”
Ada Bracegirdle put her cigarette-free hand to her forehead and frowned.
“I think I must have a bad line today, my darlin'. . . . No, wait. . . . I'm getting it. . . . It's definitely N. I've got Aunty Nellie here for you with a message. She says your sister made the right decision to take holy orders. That brickie was never going to make an honest woman of her.”
“ 'Fraid not . . . there's nobody in my family called Nellie, and we're Jewish.”
Dan shuffled in his chair. He was beginning to get irritated. According to the newspaper cuttings, Ada Bracegirdle was the most gifted medium in Britain. He was already fascinated by the idea of what a consultation would be like with the least gifted.
But suddenly, Ada Bracegirdle began turning her head in a slow circular motion. Once again her breathing became noisy and deep. Keeping her eyes closed, she felt along the chair arm for the ashtray and stubbed out her cigarette. Then her entire upper body joined in the circular movement. This gradually became faster and faster.
Dan looked up. The faint sound of music and singing was coming from the ceiling. He felt a tremor go through him. The slow, melodic singing got louder. The voice was unmistakable. It was Sophie Tucker. She was singing “My Yiddishe Mama”—his mother's favorite song.
The singing seemed to be all around him now. Dan's eyes darted round the room, looking for a stereo and speakers. There was nothing. He was beginning to feel frightened. The singing continued. Dan looked at Ada Bracegirdle. She had stopped turning her head and body and was now sitting completely still and ramrod straight. Her eyes were still closed. She began to moan quietly. The moans possessed an almost melodic quality. They seemed to quiver and vibrate—almost as if they were trying to follow the music. Then, in the space of a few seconds, it happened.
Dan could only blink in childlike disbelief as the features on Ada Bracegirdle's face started to change. He could almost hear the blood pumping round his head. Any minute he would require a change of underpants.
It was her skin which began to change first. The wrinkles disappeared and were replaced by dark, leathery skin. This had huge open pores and sagged bloodhoundlike at the jaw. Her blue eyes turned dark brown. In place of her small pointed nose, there appeared a rubbery, bulbous 747 hooter. Her bubble perm seemed to dissolve. A moment later she was sporting a strawberry-blond, heavily backcombed Chez Melvin of Hendon special.
Dan, icy and trembling, was staring into the face of his dead mother. Only she wasn't dead. Her eyes were open and she was staring back at him. There was nothing remotely phantomlike about her appearance. “My Yiddishe mama . . . I need her more than ever now. . . .” Sophie Tucker's voice was still floating in the background, but Dan barely heard it. The only thing he needed more than ever now was a stiff drink. He gripped the arms of his chair so hard that his knuckles turned white.
In the midst of his fear, he remembered that a couple of the newspaper cuttings had mentioned Ada Bracegirdle's rare psychic ability to take on the face of a dead person. They'd referred to the phenomenon as transfiguration. Dan had dismissed it as hysterical nonsense.
Finally the moaning stopped and the singing faded.
Lilly Bloomfield began looking her son up and down.
“Daniel, stop slouching.” The fierce haranguing tone he hadn't heard for seventeen years hit him like a thunderbolt. “You want to turn into a hunchback like your uncle Barnet in Westcliff?”
Instinctively, Dan straightened.
“So, you've got a kiss, maybe, for the dead mother you haven't seen in seventeen years?”
Dan looked down at his hands, which were still gripping the arms of the chair. Slowly, he relaxed them. As his heart began to leave his mouth he got up. His mother turned her cheek towards him. Dan leaned over, gave her a nervous peck and returned to his seat.
She grunted as if to say, “Is that the best you can do?”
“And look at you, Daniel.” She pointed an accusing forefinger. “You're nothing but skin and bone.”
“Mum, don't start,” Dan heard himself say. “I'm just over twelve stone, which is ideal for my height.”
“Height, schmeight. . . . He turns forty and he's an expert all of a sudden. Daniel, believe me, a mother knows. Just one look at you and I can tell you're not eating enough. A sparrow with a terminal disease would eat more. Doesn't she cook for you, this shikseh you married?”
“Anna is not a shikseh. She's as Jewish as you are . . . were. And we both work, so we both cook.”
“Huh.”
Dan couldn't believe it. He'd been in his mother's company for less than three minutes and he was already on the point of losing his temper. They sat in silence for a few moments while Lilly continued to inspect her son.
“Why is your suit so creased? You look like a bottom.”
“You mean bum . . . and this suit happens to be the height of fashion. It's made of linen. It's meant to look crushed.”
“By you it's crushed, by me it's demolished. Believe me, if you sent it to Oxfam, the starving children would send it back. . . . Take it off.”
“What?”
“You heard me, Daniel. I said take it off. There's an iron and ironing board by the window. I'll give it a quick press.”
Daniel said nothing. He sat staring at his mother in utter disbelief.
“What's the matter? Daniel, I'm your mother. I wiped your little tuchas. Now suddenly you're too shy to let me see you in your underpants. Now then, do as you're told. Take it off.”
To his absolute horror and disgust Dan found himself taking off his jacket. He then undid his trouser belt and unzipped his fly.
A few seconds later he was sitting in his shirttails and boxers watching his mother cross the room on Ada Bracegirdle's bandy legs. On the upright chair next to the ironing board was a pile of Anthony Bracegirdle's grayish shirts. A couple of them had been ironed and were hanging from the picture rail on wire coat hangers. Lilly picked up the iron and spat onto its underside. The iron fizzed. She held up Dan's trousers, making a center fold along one of the legs, and laid it on the ironing board.
“So, the shikseh you call a wife can't even do your ironing. I'm a dead woman and still I can manage to iron your clothes. . . . Still, you wouldn't expect a woman who carries on like she's been carrying on recently to have any energy left over for ironing.”
There was a rasp of steam as the iron glided along Dan's trouser leg. The name Liaisons Dangereux was suddenly lit up in neon inside Dan's head.
“What do you mean, “like she's been carrying on'?”
There was panic in his voice. There was something important Lilly wanted to tell him. This had to be the reason she'd asked him to make contact.
“I'm not saying another word,” she said, turning the trouser leg over to iron the other side. “I'm no marriage wrecker, but don't say I didn't come from beyond the grave to warn you.”
Dan came towards his mother and stood towering above her.
“Warn me of what? Come on, you called this meeting. What is it?”
“I just know what I know. You need to keep your wits about you, Daniel.”
“About what?” He was becoming exceedingly frustrated.
She smiled a smug smile.
“There's nothing, is there? It's just you making fucking mischief, isn't it? You can't resist making me miserable, can you? You've been back from beyond the grave for five minutes and already you've managed to pick holes in my body, my clothes and now my wife. For fuck's sake, Mother, why is it that in my entire forty years I have never once done anything which meets with your approval?”
She stood the iron on its end and looked up at Dan, hands on hips.
“Tell me, what sort of son swears at his dead mother?”
“This one, you st
upid, overbearing fat cow.”
Lilly let out a long sigh and clamped her hand to her chest.
“And there's no point having a heart attack, because you're already dead.”
Dan realized he was nearly screaming. He snatched his trousers from the ironing board. As he stood putting them on, furious words came tumbling out of him like marbles from a tin. Lilly made her way back to her armchair. Along the way she clutched the furniture for support. Dan followed her, still shouting.
For the next fifteen minutes he stood in front of his mother and, barely pausing for breath, told her precisely what he thought of her. He called her wicked, cruel and insensitive. He reminded her in detail of each of his childhood humiliations.
“Christ al-fucking-mighty, what sort of woman in her right mind constantly pulls her child to pieces and refuses to give praise or recognize his achievements? I always got brilliant marks at school, but you were never even remotely impressed. Do you know, I don't remember you once saying you loved me or were proud of me.”
“So,” she said, turning away from him, “this is how he thanks the mother who, every Friday night, nibbled on a chicken wing so that her son should have breast. This is how he treats the woman who used to schlep home every day weighed down by six bags of groceries and then stand on swollen ankles to cook for him. This is the thanks I get for sewing on buttons with used dental floss for five years so that the money I saved on cotton could be put towards your first record player.”
“But Mum, are you proud of me?”
She turned her head towards him.
“You're an editor on a national newspaper already. Tell me, what's not to be proud of?”
“And do you love me?”
“You're my son. What's there not to love?”
The closest Lilly had ever got to an affectionate smile flitted across her face.
Dan looked at her. Alive or dead, he knew there was no changing his mother. She was never going to acknowledge how she'd damaged him while he was growing up, and that she had been responsible for his hypochondria. He suspected that the pain of doing so would be too much for her to bear. But suddenly it didn't seem to matter anymore. For the first time in his life Dan had been able to get angry with her. He had stood up to her. He had changed. The transformation which had begun the day he ate a guilt-free bacon sandwich and ditched his medical appliances was now complete.
As he stood watching Lilly, he realized it had been enough just to tell her what he felt about her. He didn't need her to say sorry, and he was more certain than ever that he didn't need her approval anymore. He got up, put his arm round her shoulders and kissed her. She looked up at him and grunted. Then, without saying anything, she took his hands in both of hers. Just for a second or two, Dan could see there were tears in her eyes.
He picked up his jacket from on top of the pile of Anthony Bracegirdle's shirts, sat down opposite his mother and watched the slow return of Ada Bracegirdle's small pointed nose, wrinkled skin and bright-blue eyes.
“Remember”—Lilly's voice was hovering somewhere in the distance now—“it was me who went without lunches for a month in 1974 and fainted from low blood sugar, in order to save a few pennies so that you could go to that Andy Stewart concert at the Oval.”
“Rod Stewart, Mum.”
“Whatever.”
C H A P T E R S I X T E E N
ANNA WAS TEARING ROUND THE bedroom, naked except for a pair of flesh-colored knee-highs, flinging clothes into a black leather holdall. She opened her knicker drawer and paused for a few moments in order to work out how many pairs of panties she should pack, bearing in mind she would only be one night in Dorset on the hen-party feature Campbell McKee had commissioned her to write for the Globe on Sunday.
The logical side of her brain could see no reason to pack more than one pair of knickers. The other side, anticipating umpteen personal hygiene emergencies, including groinal sweating, copious vaginal leakage and loss of bladder control, wanted to pack half a dozen.
She compromised. She took four pairs of panties from the drawer and stuffed them into the bag. She considered taking out a couple of pairs of shoes to make room for a box of panty shields, but decided against it because the shoes matched the outfits she'd already packed. Making room for the panty shields would involve rethinking her entire wardrobe for the next twenty-four hours. Not that she imagined for one minute that she would wear more than one of the three outfits she'd packed. It was just that she liked to have a choice.
She tugged the zip across the bag and left it on the bed while she started to dress. She was just doing up the cuff buttons on her cream silk blouse when the doorbell and phone rang simultaneously. Ignoring the phone Anna flew onto the landing and yelled down the stairs to Denise.
“If that's my cab, tell him I'll be down in five minutes.” The phone was still ringing. Anna shot back to the bedroom. She picked up the receiver, held it under her chin and carried on doing up her shirt buttons.
“Anna, angel . . . thought I'd give you a quick bell just to check that you're all monkeyed up for tonight.”
It was Campbell in old-style Fleet Street vernacular mood, checking she'd been assigned a photographer—a monkey—for her assignment.
“Yeah, Campbell, it's all sorted,” she said. “The picture desk rang me at lunchtime. I'm going with Monalisa Blake. Look, Campbell, I'm in a tearing hurry . . . there's a taxi waiting. I arranged to meet up with Monalisa at the Globe—we're driving down to Poole in her car—so I can pop in and see you before we leave if you want to chat about the piece.”
“No, angel, I'll leave it to you. I always trust you to bring home the badger. Just do me a favor, that's all. Remind that barmy artsy-fartsy Monalisa bint that this is not the Independent and I shall not be requiring any of 'er snaps of miserable lone gits standing in the middle of bleak housing developments under canopies of menacing black clouds. We're talking hen parties here. I want to see gangs of pissed tarts with 'appy smiley faces and wobbly jugs. She can shove anything else right up her aperture. You get my drift, don't you, angel?”
Anna assured him she did.
Dan sat in the X-ray Department waiting room, planning his funeral.
He'd considered it fleetingly as he'd watched Dr. Harper slowly remove her stethoscope earpieces from her ears and look at him in a way that indicated he might be better off buying day returns to the office rather than monthly seasons, but had only begun to give it serious attention on the way over from the surgery to the hospital.
Dr. Harper's look had coincided with a slow shake of her head.
“I never thought I would hear myself say this, Mr. Bloomfield,” she said, putting the stethoscope down on her desk, “but your symptoms are giving me cause for concern. That is a nasty little cough you've got there and I do not like the color of your phlegm.” She picked up Dan's balsamic vinegar bottle from her desk. The bottle was empty of balsamic vinegar, and a quarter full of Dan's catarrh, which, in the few days since his appointment with Ada Bracegirdle, had turned bright green and was the reason he had changed his mind about seeing Dr. Harper.
“I think the wisest course of action,” she went on, “would be to have your chest X-rayed—today, if possible. In fact I think you should get yourself along to the hospital as soon as you leave here.”
Dr. Harper began filling out the X-ray request form.
“You don't need an outpatients appointment,” she said briskly. “Just hand this in at reception. You may have a bit of a wait, but I'm sure they'll fit you in.”
She stood up and handed Dan the form, indicating that his appointment with her was at an end. Dan took the piece of paper. He noticed she'd written “Urgent please” across the top. He made no attempt to leave his seat. He sat clutching the form.
“So,” he said, looking up at her, “you really think I could have something serious then?” Panic was beginning to rise in his voice. “I mean, it must be, if you think it's important I have the X ray right away.”
D
r. Harper sat down. She reached for her spectacles, which were on her desk. Holding them by one arm, she swung them gently.
“Mr. Bloomfield, we will know nothing until we have the result of your chest X ray. I am not in the habit of making diagnoses without being in full possession of the facts.”
“But you suspect this could be more than just an infection?”
She put down her glasses and brought her hands together as if she were at prayer. Then she rested her hands on her chin.
“It could be. . . .” For a moment her tone had become uncharacteristically gentle. “As I say, we will know more when we have your X-ray results. Please try not to worry.”
It could be. . . .” Walking back to the car, Dan had repeated Dr. Harper's words out loud, over again. Each time he managed a perfect imitation of her slow, measured delivery and the way her voice had dipped at the end of the sentence. “It could be” usually meant the speaker was in some doubt. There had been no doubt in Dr. Harper's voice. The tender tone of her “It could be” said it all. She meant “It definitely is.” Dr. Harper knew precisely what was wrong with him, and so did Dan. He'd read enough medical books in his time to know that a persistent irritating cough was one of the first symptoms of lung cancer. So that was it. He was dying. The X ray was merely a formality.
Dan felt strangely calm. He had spent years imagining what it would feel like to be told he was terminally ill. He had spent nights awake in bed picturing himself shaking and hysterical as he knelt in front of some anonymous consultant, clutching his trouser leg, begging and pleading with him to say he'd made a mistake.
Now that it had happened, or as good as, all he could think about was what it was his death would mean to Amy and Josh. He was going to leave them forever. They were about to lose their daddy . . . the daddy who had taught them to swim and ride their bikes, the daddy who used to read them The Very Hungry Caterpillar when they were tiny and couldn't sleep.