I knew this was coming. I haven’t spoken to Mum in months now. Of course she would ask Addi to step in.
Addi answers on the first ring. Even through the mist that clouds my brain, I can hear the worry in her voice. I wonder if she can hear the anger in mine.
‘I got your message.’
‘Yes, Mia, I was thinking, maybe over Christmas, you and Roy can come to India—’
‘No.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m not coming.’
‘Mia, Mum needs us. She’s—’
‘Sick? Roy told me. She’s always sick.’
‘Mia—’
‘You’ve been lying to me, both of you. For years. I remembered, Addi. All of it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Mum and Dad! There was someone else, wasn’t there? That day, before Dad left, I was hiding under the stairs and . . . I could hear them.’
Silence. I go on, desperate. I’m hoping Addi will tell me that I imagined all of it; that this was yet another one of the lies my brain invented.
‘Daddy was yelling and Mum kept asking him to calm down. You knew.’ I pause, trying to keep the wobble out of my voice. ‘You knew and you never told me. Why?’
‘Oh Mia.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘You’re right, darling, there was. Mum didn’t want us to know, especially after the accident. She wanted to—’
‘I don’t care what she wants! She made Daddy leave and he died. He died.’
‘I know, darling. I’m sorry but—’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Mia, listen to me. What happened that day . . . it was a terrible accident. And I know how much you miss Daddy. I do too, every day. But, darling, please, we won’t get this time with Mum again. She needs us with her.’
‘She’s always ill. She’ll have her medicines and she’ll be fine.’
‘Mia.’
The quiet in Addi’s voice stills me.
‘It’s melanoma, darling, stage four. She’s having chemo but . . .’
My head instantly goes to Grandma. She died when I was little. The cancer hit her out of nowhere and she was gone within a few months.
‘How long?’
‘Six months, eight if the chemo works. You need to come and see her, Mia.’
ROY
Tuesday, 15th December
I climb out of bed and go straight to my phone – my other phone. I know I’m not supposed to, but my fingers fly over the familiar pattern as if by their own accord. It’s nine forty-five; Dave would have left for work. I press the phone to my ear. Voicemail. I send you a text. I am about to delete it from my sent messages when I realize I don’t have to do that anymore. I leave the text on my phone and jump into the shower, my mind still on you.
Our time together was so limited, I don’t know what it is that I am yearning for exactly. All I know is that I want you.
I hurry out of the shower and pick up my phone, droplets of water trickling down my fingers and onto the cheap rubberized keypad. It hasn’t buzzed and there’s no new notification but I look in the inbox just in case. Nothing.
I get dressed and go into the living room that connects my parents’ suite to mine. My mother’s sitting on the sofa, reading. She puts her book down when she sees me.
‘Ma, I’m going for a walk. Won’t be long.’
‘Wait, I’ll come with you,’ she says, getting up.
‘No, you don’t –’ I begin, but she’s already putting on her coat. I sigh. ‘Don’t forget your gloves.’
‘Are you working on anything at the minute? Any assignments?’ Ma asks, wrapping both hands around her coffee cup.
‘A piece on Morocco for Wanderlust.’
‘Oh, when did you go there?’
‘October.’
‘Any new trips coming up?’
‘Everything slows down in the lead-up to Christmas. I’ll look for stuff in the new year.’
‘What about the videos you were doing with that man, George, was it?’
‘That’s on hold for now. It’s . . . he’s Mia’s friend.’
‘I see. Have you spoken to her again?’
‘No.’
Businessmen and bankers in smart suits rush past us as we cross the footbridge to Canary Wharf. The wind hits me in the eyes and I turn my head downwards.
‘Why don’t you go and see her? You still have your keys, don’t you?’
‘Alistair asked me to be diplomatic.’
‘She’ll come around. She’s just confused.’
I’m not so sure but I nod anyway.
We walk in silence for a few minutes, stopping when we get to a bench by the riverside. We throw our empty cups in the bin next to it and sit down.
The Thames crashes into the bank in front of us, its waters dark and murky. It isn’t dirty, a friend told me my first week in London. It’s a tidal river, he explained, so the sediment never gets the time to settle, it keeps getting swept up to the surface.
A few seconds of silence, and then my mother speaks again. ‘Is it true, what they’re saying about that girl? Was she . . . disturbed?’
I nod, keeping my eyes fixed on the water.
Emily has dominated every news channel and front page for the last week, every aspect of her personality pored over and dissected into nuggets of scandalous information for people to chew on, savour and spit out once they’re done judging her. Despite everything, I find myself feeling sorry for her. After the slut-shaming last week, it’s now time to attack her mental health. Two of her friends, her best friends, have spoken about Emily’s struggle with manic depression: detailed accounts of mood swings, of entire weeks that she would refuse to come out of her room, the obsessive chatter about death and suicide. I consider it, and then shake the image away. Emily wasn’t suicidal.
‘Did you know?’ Ma asks.
‘I knew she was depressed. I didn’t know about the pills or the self-harm.’
‘It seems she spent a few months at an institute.’
‘Yes.’
The two men arrested earlier this week have now been released, with no charges. Sky News ran a one-hour special on mental health services in the UK last night. The host explicitly stated that the feature would not focus on any specific cases, it was about awareness, yet every expert on the panel kept alluding to Emily’s case to make a point. ITV and BBC are following suit, with prime-time shows being advertised for the weekend. Even as the networks use Emily to win the ratings war, I can see the narrative turn on itself. Perceptions are shifting. Sky’s expert psychologist deemed self-harm the first step towards suicide; he called it a way to test the waters before plunging in, an almost literal analogy for what the media has decided happened to Emily.
Clifftop suicide.
The easiest way to go.
A tragic end to a lifelong struggle.
Does saying anything with enough conviction make it true, my love?
MIA
Tuesday, 15th December
I sleep. My phone rings. Someone knocks on the door, lightly at first, more persistently after a few minutes – probably just Jehovah’s Witnesses – and then the knocking stops, the footsteps recede. Noises float up from the street, muffled through the double-glazed window. Mothers on the school run. Delivery men chatting in the street. I push them all away and I sleep. Fitfully, dreamlessly, lustily. As long as I am sleeping nothing else can go wrong. When sleep refuses to come, I still myself. I breathe deeply. I count. I silence my mind. When none of that works, I pretend.
Fake it till you make it.
I try.
I try.
Who comes up with this shit? I don’t make it. I toss and I turn. The Fray’s lyrics spring to mind: between the lines of fear and blame. My phone rings and rings. I wonder how the battery lasts so long. I stare at shadows on the ceiling and watch the hours pass by. I can’t remember when I last ate. The bottle of water by my bed, our bed, is empty. I want nothing.
I
am nothing.
I hear the jingle of an ice cream truck outside. In December? Strange. Something tugs at my brain. A memory. A summer afternoon. I’m perhaps five or six. Mummy’s yelling. I run upstairs and climb into my bed and under the duvet. It isn’t long before the tears come, all hot and angry. I start wailing. I know that if I cry loudly enough someone will come for me. I feel a weight settle on my bed and my sobs get louder. I try to figure out who it is.
‘Oh dear, what a large mountain. Or is it a cave? I think I might climb it.’
Daddy.
‘But wait. I think I can hear something. Could it be that someone’s trapped inside?’
He’s trying to play our game. But I don’t want to.
‘Hello?’
I keep crying.
‘It looks like there’s no one here. Oh well, maybe I’ll climb the mountain later.’
He moves as if to get up.
‘Help.’
‘What was that? Did I hear something?’
‘Help,’ I say, more loudly.
‘Oh dear. There is someone trapped here indeed. I think it’s a little cat.’
Despite myself I giggle. He’s so silly. I’m not a cat!
‘Wait there, little kitty. I’ll rescue you in a jiffy-tiffy.’ He starts poking and prodding through my duvet-cave, making drilling noises. ‘Almost there, little kitty. Just you wait.’
One big, loud drill and he slowly peels the duvet away from me.
‘Oh my God! It’s not a cat, it’s a beautiful princess!’
He cups my face with both hands and bends down so our foreheads are nearly touching. ‘Will you marry me, princess?’
‘No,’ I say. I giggle.
He sits up and puts a hand on his heart. ‘Oh, but why not, dear princess?’
I sit up too. ‘Because you’re my daddy. And you’re married to my mummy.’
He gasps. ‘Oh lord. What a clever little princess you are.’ He scoops me up and plonks me on his knee in one easy motion.
‘Daddy.’ I wrap my arms around his neck and plant a kiss on his cheek.
He looks at me for a minute then pushes my hair back from my face. ‘You mustn’t get so angry, sweetheart. Even Mummy and Daddy make mistakes sometimes. So you must learn to forgive. If you stay angry, how . . . will . . . we . . . have . . .’ – he pauses – ‘. . . so . . . much . . . fun,’ he adds, tickling me until both of us collapse on the bed in a fit of laughter. When my breathing goes back to normal, I close my eyes and snuggle up to him, reaching my arm as far around him as it will go.
We stay like that for a few minutes, then he whispers, his voice at once hoarse and honeyed, ‘Now, did I hear my princess say she wanted some ice cream?’
I feel a smile creep up my face. I open my eyes, expecting to find Daddy lying next to me, my Barbie duvet crumpled beneath him, the air thick with the sound of him breathing through his permanently blocked nose.
But the duvet on this bed is white and the only sound is the incessant ringing of my phone. I pull a pillow over my head and shut my eyes.
I want to go back.
I drift in and out of sleep and when I come to again, the shadows on the ceiling tell me it is still afternoon.
Almost imperceptibly, my head begins to clear, the swirling stops and objects from my life start shifting back into focus.
The bag of weed on the dresser lures me but I am too lazy to get up. The light is still gauzy and it lets me believe that I can stay like this, safe, at least a little while longer.
How wrong I am.
My thoughts flit between my mother and Roy. I can’t believe how screwed up everything is. I replay my last conversation with Mum at the wedding, and all her texts and voicemails since then. It hits me all at once. The desperation, the fragility, the insistence that I try to understand. She’s dying.
She’s dying.
I sit up with a jolt. My mother is dying.
This time next year, I won’t have anyone pestering me to fly home for every long weekend. No one will be planning the menu for every meal I’ll eat at home weeks in advance or ringing me to check if my flight’s landed halfway across the world when I fly back. No one will cup my face and peer at the dark circles under my eyes, worrying about how hard I work and how little I sleep. Or offer to slather my hair with coconut oil because the ends look dry. But most of all, I realize, there will be no one for me to be angry with.
The realization shakes me.
Because if I can’t be angry with my mother, where does that leave me?
Tears prick my eyes and I blink them away. Daddy told me, all those years ago, that I had to let go of my anger and forgive if I wanted a shot at being happy. I wonder if I’ve somehow got to twenty-nine without learning how to do either.
Unless, of course, it came to Roy. With Roy, everything was forgiven, instantly and without apology. I cringe as I think about his emails and the doubts that cloud my brain every time he reaches out. My own double standards humiliate me. Am I really so petty that I can’t forgive my mother an affair she had more than two decades ago? Am I so stubborn in my belief that she caused Daddy’s accident that I can’t see that he was prone to senseless rages himself? That he always was a reckless driver? I question myself incessantly, mercilessly, till there is nowhere left for me to hide.
I run through my scrapbook of memories. I force myself to examine everything, holding each memory, feeling its weight, turning it around, smoothing out its edges until I can see the past for what it truly was: a happy childhood, a troubled marriage and an unfortunate accident. And then I realize something else.
I may have only just pieced it together about the affair but I have been angry with my mother for years. After Daddy died, I pushed her away, bit by bit, until our relationship was little more than a shell of what it used to be. Every happy memory with my mother was tainted with guilt over my father. She was always there for me; she was the one plaiting my hair, whipping up snacks, curling up on the sofa with Addi and me. But for every time I forgot to miss Daddy, I purposely erased her from my memories, to even out the scales.
I punished her for living. For breathing when he had ceased to.
In wanting my father back, I kept pushing my mother away and now that she is dying, I want her back. Her single mistake from years ago doesn’t matter anymore. She’s spent her entire life alone; she’s punished herself enough. It’s time I stopped punishing her too.
I get out of bed and go to my dresser. Roy was right. I have been playing the victim.
I take the metal case into the bathroom.
One last joint. You need the relief.
This isn’t just about me anymore. I flush the pills down the toilet.
Stop!
I strip off my shorts and T-shirt and step into the shower, taking the little zip-lock bag with me. I flip the bag upside down and shake it out quickly before I can change my mind. I know that I have a window of less than a minute before the urge overtakes me.
I turn on the shower and watch the dark green residue swish and swirl, till it’s all swept away.
Idiot.
Then I step into the stream of hot water.
Intense.
Scalding.
Cleansing.
ROY
Tuesday, 15th December
We pass by a couple walking their dogs on our way back. Ma smiles at them and they stop to let her pet the beasts. I step away.
‘You don’t like dogs?’ the man asks me. He’s in a neon and black North Face jacket and compression leggings. Hideous.
‘I had a bad experience growing up.’
Ma straightens up and lets them pass. ‘Maybe it’s time to give them another chance. You know what they say, man’s best friend.’
She wraps her gloved fingers around my hand and gives it a squeeze. ‘You could use a friend, beta.’
We walk on to the hotel in silence.
When I was eleven, I did have a friend. A best friend. Sahil Bansal. We were on the same bus route
and in the same year in school. We sat next to each other in class, played on the same junior football team, shared our tiffins during lunch break and played pranks on our juniors on the bus ride home. We’d walk together till the end of the road, where Sahil would turn right, to go into his block of DDA flats, and I would go left into the gated private colony in which my father owned a bungalow.
Ma worked full time throughout my childhood so lunch would always be prepared by the help, a never-ending line-up of middle-aged, stocky women with lilting Bengali accents. There were so many of them, their names started to blur.
After lunch, which was usually fish and rice, I would pick up my backpack and walk over to Sahil’s. We would finish our homework together – Mrs Bansal was strict about that – and then go to the council park for a few hours. We’d usually take Sahil’s football or our bikes or, sometimes, if Mrs Bansal asked us to, we would take the Lab, Max, for a walk.
I never liked Max, but Sahil did so I didn’t have an option but to get used to him.
On the Friday before the summer holidays, Sahil didn’t come to school. I knew he wasn’t going on holiday that year so I figured he was sick. I finished lunch and ran to Sahil’s place, panting when I got to the top of the building. We were going to my grandparents’ house in Ooty the next day and I wanted to see Sahil before I left. I pressed the doorbell and leaned my head on the cool wooden door.
I waited. I pressed the buzzer again, keeping my finger on it for a full minute.
Max started barking at me from his wire kennel on the landing outside. Mrs Bansal didn’t like him being in the flat unsupervised, said he made too much of a mess.
I leaned over his kennel and peered into the flat from the kitchen window. It didn’t look like anyone was in.
Max kept barking. I didn’t like him but even I could see he was unhappy about being left alone.
I decided to take him for a walk.
Wherever the Bansals were, they would be back in a few hours and Mrs Bansal would be very happy with me for taking care of Max.
I unlocked the kennel door and he stared at me.
Your Truth or Mine? Page 18