by Elaine Chong
When I left the gallery, I thought the walk to the LingLang Club would clear my head, but Richard’s startling piece of news refuses to dislodge itself. Like an evil splinter, it pricks and stings and refuses to be ignored, in spite of my best efforts.
In the end, I veer away from the overflowing pavement and head to a favourite coffee bar. I sit down and order a skinny latte. I tell myself I will give this thorny little problem my full attention for the time it takes to drink it.
So, I have a sister – well, a half-sister – who has a claim to my late father’s property. This is not good news. When I last asked a local estate agent to give me a ballpark figure as to its value, he told me I could expect something in excess of two-million pounds. At the time I thought, this is really very good news, because the house is going to be my get out of jail free card.
I don’t use foul language, but I can think of only one response to the news that I have a half-sister, who’s going to get my inheritance and, in the privacy of my head, I shout out the words as loudly as I can, but it doesn’t assuage my feelings of anger and frustration.
Am I surprised that Daddy played away? No, of course I’m not. But to breed a bastard? Well, that’s just careless and not Daddy’s style at all.
The waitress brings my order and, as I sip my coffee, I consider this new line of thought, but it takes me down a road I’m now unwilling to venture for Daddy was never careless, never imprudent, and that means it was deliberate. He wanted her, this other daughter.
The road has brought me full circle and I’m back to where I started: my father left our family home to someone called Miriam and I’m now facing disaster.
Well, I won’t have it! Even if it means I have to leave Singapore for a while and tend to my mother and her fractured hip.
I suddenly find myself glaring up angrily into the face of the startled waitress. I hastily rearrange my features into the semblance of a smile and ask for the bill.
At the LingLang Club Colin is already on his third scotch and soda when I arrive. The empty glasses are still lined up in front of him. I know this is a deliberate statement: a message to me that I should have got there sooner, because in ordinary circumstances the barman would have whipped them away when they were done.
His fair-skinned complexion is mottled with pink and brown. The brown blotches are ugly sunspots: a permanent legacy of thirty years living under a tropical sun. The pink ones are temporary. Any other person might attribute them to an overindulgence of hard spirits, but I know better – Colin can hold his liquor, but not his pique.
“You’re late,” he growls at me over the rim of the glass. “We were supposed to be meeting the Stevens for pre-dinner drinks.”
“I’m really sorry, Colin,” I lie.
“No, you’re not.”
“Okay, I’m not, but I couldn’t help it. I got held up.”
“If you knew you were going to be late, why didn’t you ask Haziq to drive you straight here?”
“You know I like to walk,” I say. “And I needed...”
“Don’t give me that bullshit!” he shoots back at me before I have a chance to explain. “What the hell is the matter with you, Julia? You know how important this is. I don’t ask much of you. I let you swan around that bloody gallery, pretending you’re businesswoman of the year, and all I ask in return is that you turn up on time when I need you.”
On any other occasion, this accusation would have provoked me into an argument, but I have more important problems to grapple with, so I waste no time in trying to defend myself. “I have to fly to London.”
“What?”
I slide onto the bar stool next to him and signal the waiter to bring me a drink. “I have to fly to London,” I say again. “Richard called. That’s why I’m late.”
“Your brother Richard?”
“Do we know another one?”
“Don’t try to be smart with me, Julia. I’m not in the mood.”
I wonder if I should explain about the house, but caution prevails so I simply tell him, “Apparently, Mummy’s fallen over and fractured her hip.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“Richard has demanded that I come back and help out until she’s back on her feet again.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You don’t give a toss about your mother. Never have, never will.”
I can’t deny this, but years of making up excuses not to meet Colin at the LingLang Club has taught me to think on my feet. “I’m not doing it for Mummy,” I say and sound suitably indignant. “I’m doing it for Richard. He says they’ll want to discharge her as soon as she’s well enough to leave, but they’ll insist that she can’t be left alone until they’re satisfied that she can do things for herself.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know!” Colin’s eyes immediately shrink to narrow, suspicion-filled slits so I quickly rein in my irritation and try to embellish my response with a few well-chosen ‘facts’. “Things like making a cup tea or using the bathroom, maybe even just getting out of bed.”
“I thought she’s got some woman helping her out?”
“She has a cleaner who comes in once a week, if that’s what you mean.” He continues to regard me with angry mistrust and my irritation gets the better of me. “Look, Colin, it’s not like here. They don’t have maids to fetch and carry for you or cook your meals and clear up your mess. You know how it is – it’s a different world over there.”
He knocks back the remainder of his whiskey and soda and asks the barman for a refill. The pink blotches are fading as his anger begins to dissipate. “Why can’t Richard help out? Why does he have to drag you into it?”
“He will,” I say, and I try to inject a note of reassurance into my voice. “But at the moment he’s in the middle of an important project.”
“If you’re lying to me Julia...” He leaves it hanging there.
I pretend dismay. “How could you say something like that? I know I sometimes make excuses not to meet your business chums...” Colin’s head swings round and his mouth is already forming words of accusation so I quickly I hold up my hands. “Okay, I admit it. I find most of these dinners and lunches and pre-dinner drinks unendurably tedious, but never, never once have I wanted to fly back to London to avoid them.”
I never want to go back, full stop, but that’s an argument we can leave for another time.
He throws me another baleful glare, but this time I see a flicker of something that looks like fear pass behind his pale, blue eyes because he can’t wait to go back; can’t wait for a quiet retirement in his cosy, little seaside town with his adoring wife on hand to mix his whiskey and soda as the sun goes down.
I reach across the space between us and stroke his face with my finger. “It won’t be for long – a couple of weeks at the most.”
Actually, it’s going to take as long as it requires for me to win back my inheritance, but he doesn’t need to know this.
“When exactly will you leave?” he asks.
“Well, Mummy’s still in hospital so I won’t book my flight until I know I have to go. In any case, I have things to attend to at the gallery. I can’t just leave at a moment’s notice.”
“You’ve left me before,” he says sourly.
I slide from the bar stool and lace my fingers through his. “Let’s go home. It’s been a long day for both of us.”
At once he protests. “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten yet.”
I give his fingers a brief reassuring squeeze. “I’ll call Siti and tell her to make something. How about cheese on toast? You like that.”
“Welsh rarebit? That sounds good.”
Colin swings himself off the stool, but stumbles when his feet hit the floor. A passing waiter hurries over: he’s young, impossibly slender, and doesn’t look as though he has the strength to prop up a drunken sot of an overweight Mat Salleh, but he slips his hand into the crook of Co
lin’s arm, helps him to regain his balance and offers to walk him to the car. Colin declines with a shake of the head and the waiter backs off, but I see the look on the waiter’s face as he disappears into the lamp-lit vestibule: it’s a mixture of sympathy and contempt.
Richard
I watch my mother from the doorway while she sleeps. She looks smaller and infinitely more fragile than the last time I saw her, but I don’t see her very often so perhaps this deterioration in her health has happened more recently. I make a mental note to ask Maggie. She sees my mother every week when she cleans so if it’s something specific, it might be something that she’s noticed.
I step back out into the corridor. The business of attending to the sick and elderly patients began before the sun was up. I don’t doubt for a single moment that everyone working on the ward is a dedicated professional, but there’s a definite feeling of conveyor belt medicine here. There are tasks to be performed, boxes to be ticked, forms to be filled… It doesn’t look like nursing and sometimes it doesn’t feel like nursing, but I’ve entrusted my mother to these people’s care; I have no choice.
A voice at my shoulder interrupts these gloomy meditations. “Mr Oakley? Visiting hours are from ten-thirty. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait outside the ward.”
It’s the same nurse who tried to reassure me yesterday evening that my mother is expected to make a full recovery. He’s a good-looking guy, reminds me of a young Denzel Washington – hair close-cropped, regular almost feminine features and kind dark eyes. I suddenly realise I’m staring back at him in a way that’s wholly inappropriate, but he probably gets that all the time.
I look away, glance into the room where my mother is still sleeping. “I have to go to work now,” I say. “I’ve brought a few things in for her – slippers, toothbrush, toothpaste...” I hand him the plastic bag I’m carrying. “I’ll come back this evening, but I won’t be able to stay for long. Perhaps you could forewarn her?”
“That’s fine.”
I have to admit I admire the guy. He doesn’t step away from me, doesn’t recoil in disgust, which has happened to me before, so I go on. “I’ve called my sister. We’re going to try to make arrangements as soon as we can for my mother to be cared for at home.”
He smiles. “There’s no rush. She’ll be moved from here to another bed in couple of days, and then the physiotherapists will take over. We need to get her up and moving before she can be discharged.”
“So soon?”
“The sooner the better really.”
My mother begins to stir, and I need to leave. As soon as the nurse makes to move away from the doorway, I quickly turn in the opposite direction and head for the exit. I have to press a buzzer on the wall for the door to be opened for me from the desk in the centre of the ward – it’s a security measure, so it’s more than a minute before I can make my escape.
The hospital walls in the outside corridor have been painted a pale shade of green. Some therapist probably advised them that it’s a calming colour; something that will soothe anxieties, but I find it completely debilitating and my feet begin to drag even though I’m trying to hurry. There are windows at regular intervals along its tunnel-like length, but even with the early morning sunlight streaming in there’s still an overwhelming sense of melancholy about the place, which follows me out into the car park.
As soon as I climb inside my car and look at my phone, I’m reminded of the conversation I forced myself to have with my sister, Julia, yesterday morning, and the further conversations I’ll need to have with her about my mother’s house and her financial situation. Of course, it isn’t my mother’s house and that’s the crux of the problem.
When my father died, I have to confess I didn’t even think to ask my mother about the will he’d left in the hands of our family solicitor. The circumstances of his untimely death had left us reeling, and all I could think about at the time was that the person who’d killed him was still at large. I simply couldn’t grasp how a man could be mown down by a speeding car, left for dead at the side of the road, and nobody saw or heard anything.
We complain about unnecessary surveillance, we talk about erosion of civil liberties, we hate to think of nameless, faceless government agents spying on us while we go about our daily lives, but it was a simple lack of video camera evidence, which left my father’s case unsolved. In fact, the car has never been found, the driver never brought to justice.
Julia and Colin came back for the funeral, but their stay could have been counted in hours – they flew in the day before and flew straight back out the day after. I don’t remember either one of them asking about the will, but I’m sure they assumed the same thing that I did: my mother had been left my father’s estate in its entirety.
It was some months after the funeral I found out about a half-sister called Miriam.
Before I pull out of the car park, I suddenly think to check for my briefcase under the coat lying across the back seat. I slide my hand beneath it and feel for the slim leather casing, but it’s not there. I climb out of the car, quickly open the rear passenger door in the hope that the case has fallen onto the floor and under the seat, but it hasn’t. I’m sure I remember draping the coat over the briefcase – an attempt to conceal it from light-fingered passers-by – but perhaps that was yesterday.
I close my eyes, try to reconstruct this morning’s events in my head, and realise that the briefcase is still sitting on the kitchen table at my mother’s house where I left it when I answered the phone in the hallway. I’ll have to go back to retrieve it, and hope that the client, who’ll be waiting for me later in my London office, understands that I’m not hopelessly ill-prepared but merely overburdened by a competing list of priorities.
The traffic is now in full rush-hour mode and I soon find myself in a queue of cars moving along achingly slowly at single digit speed. I realise that I might have to reschedule the meeting with the client, which would be inconvenient for both of us, but perhaps preferable to keeping the appointment and arriving late and unprepared.
As I follow the tail lights of the car in front of me, resigned now to driving back to my mother’s house in Shenfield, my thoughts are free to roam, but they return to Julia and the angry exchange of words, which ensued when I told her about the contents of our father’s will.
“You mean he left us nothing?”
“I told you: he left everything – except the house – to Mum. She gets a proportion of his work pension, and there were other investments, but it doesn’t amount to very much and it won’t be enough to keep her in a private nursing home.”
“Do you know how much that house is worth?”
“I haven’t checked but I guess it’s a significant sum.”
“Two-million pounds, Richard. Probably more. And by the time Mummy dies, definitely more. I don’t believe it. How could he do this to us?”
“Did you listen to a single word I said?” I asked her.
“Of course, I did. Mummy can continue to live in the house. Well, whoopee do! That’s just great for her.”
“It isn’t great, Julia. If she can’t live there independently after this fall, then she’s going to need some kind of help on a permanent basis. That will have to be funded, and she could only just about afford to live there as it was.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she demanded, forever the petulant teenager.
“Because it’s going to be a problem: our problem.” I heard the sudden intake of breath as my words hit home. “I don’t care about the house,” I went on, “but I know Mum will. She won’t want to move, and I can’t see any other solution.”
I waited for her to respond, though I guessed she was still thinking about the inheritance, which had suddenly slipped through her fingers, and I was right.
“Who the hell is this Miriam person?”
“I don’t know anything about her beyond her name and the fact that she’s our sister – well, half-sister.”
“You sho
uld have told me, Richard,” she said in a low voice.
“There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“Why not? Wills can be contested.”
“I think it’s too late.” Once again there was a sharp intake of breath as she took in this unwelcome piece of information. “About Mum,” I started to say, but she hurriedly told me she’d call me then hung up the phone.
On reflection, I realise it was a huge mistake to not attend the reading of the will, but I hadn’t bothered because I hadn’t spoken to my father for several years beyond a few brief exchanges at Christmas and my mother’s birthday each year. We’d become what people sometimes call estranged, although in truth I’d always been something of a stranger to my father, unlike Julia. Although the bizarre circumstances of his death sent shock waves through the entire family, I don’t believe a single one of them truly mourned him, except her. She knew him as a loving and devoted parent and refused to hear a single bad word said against him.
As the days turned into weeks with still no one apprehended, I left my mother to deal with the police and other authorities involved. I phoned her as often as I could – though probably not often enough – and I assumed that she was keeping me informed, keeping me in the loop. In truth, she was continuing to conceal from me that she and my father had been living separate lives under the same roof for a long time; that she had absolutely no idea where my father went when he left the house or how or with whom he spent his time.
The very first inkling that their marriage had effectively ended some while before was when she told me about the contents of the will.
“He can’t do that,” I said.
“Apparently he can, and he has.”
“But why? Why would he do that to you? It’s your home. This is madness, Mum! Why would he leave the house to somebody else?”
“Well, he was very clear in every detail. He’s left everything to me, except the house, but I can continue to live here for the rest of my life.”