‘There’s a machine for tea and coffee in the corner if you want one. Take a seat and I’ll come back for you as soon as Mrs Cowan is settled.’ She gave me a reassuring squeeze on the arm and then left.
The room was small and blandly decorated; nothing to intrude on your consciousness while you worried about whoever you were there to visit. It had little boxes of tissues placed at strategic points around the room; by the side of chairs, on a low table by the window, on a shelf underneath a little mirror fixed to the wall. I couldn’t think why you would need a mirror in a room like that. Just so you could see how shitty you looked when they came in and told you that someone you loved was dead? My brother, Matt, was sitting in a high-backed chair over on the other side of the room, checking his phone; he hadn’t noticed us but Lucy ran across and threw herself into his lap.
‘Hey there, Lucy, are you all right?’ he said, putting his arms around her. She sank into his embrace easily; Matt was more like a father to her than an uncle. After her dad left us, Matt had moved in to help me take care of her. He’d only been twenty-two at the time. He should have been out partying with his mates and getting off with girls but instead he’d been at home with me, helping with night feeds and changing nappies.
I’d had many conversations with him over the years about why he did it and he’d always said that having to be there for us had saved him. Matt had gone off the rails a bit after Dad left; he’d been getting into fights or staying out all night and not telling anyone where he’d been. Our grandparents had just been there to stop social services from putting us into care; they didn’t really give a crap about what Matt was getting up to as long as he didn’t get himself arrested. But he’d seemed intent on screwing up his life.
That had all changed the night that I threw Martin out. After I’d locked the door on the drunken bastard, I’d sat down on the floor and congratulated myself on my strength and courage and tried to ignore the throbbing pain in my face. I could do this on my own, I’d told myself, I didn’t need a man. But after about half an hour Lucy had started to cry and she wouldn’t stop. To begin with, it had just been a gentle mewing sound, like a kitten – aww, how cute – but within minutes it had turned into a full-on screaming wail, complete with tiny clenched fists, purple scrunched-up face and flailing legs. I’d picked her up and tried to calm her down, checked her nappy, made her a bottle, but nothing had worked.
As her cries had continued, I’d started to panic. What had I been thinking? I couldn’t do this all by myself. What the fuck? Why wouldn’t she stop? All those nagging doubts about my skills as a mother had suddenly transformed themselves into a mountain of doubt that I hadn’t been able to see the top of, let alone get over. Lucy had carried on crying and by then I was too. My baby had every right to be upset, I’d told myself, because even she knew how shit I was at this. I’d convinced myself that my tiny daughter was distraught at the prospect of being raised by me, a totally inept single mother. In the midst of this full-on anxiety attack, my brother had turned up. He’d taken one look at me and my crying baby and, without a word, he’d taken Lucy from my arms and rocked her until she’d fallen asleep. He moved in with us the next morning. He stopped going out and getting into trouble; instead he got himself a job at the local boxing gym, cleaning toilets and wiping sweat off the mats. Over time he’d worked his way up to Manager and then eventually he’d become part owner of the place with Keith, the man who’d given him his first job all those years ago. I was fiercely protective of him, even though he was six feet four and built like a brick shithouse. I went to sit in the chair next to him and rested my head on his shoulder.
‘What happened, Matt?’
‘I don’t know. I’d been calling her all morning, but she didn’t answer. I left messages but she never rang me back. It got to about six o’clock and I just thought I should go and check on her.’ Matt closed his eyes as he remembered. ‘I let myself in. There were no lights on, no telly on. I almost tripped over her, just lying on the front-room floor, not moving. I thought she was dead at first.’
Lucy got up from his lap and went to stand by the door, looking out into the hall.
‘How long does it take to get someone into a bed?’ she demanded.
‘They’ll come and get us as soon as they can, don’t worry,’ said Matt. He got up and started to pace the room; he looked like a bear trapped in a cage. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out to read the message. Shaking his head, he typed a quick reply and put it back.
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘Just Karen, nothing important. She wanted to come but I told her not to bother.’
I was glad; Karen was my brother’s current girlfriend. She was barely older than Lucy, with one of those high-pitched baby voices that she thought was sexy but that just made me want to rip off her head and beat her with it. After his slow start with the girls my brother had more than made up for it in recent years, but his choices hadn’t always been that great. There’d been a long line of bubbly bimbos all convinced that they could be the one to get him to finally settle down; Karen was just the most recent.
We sat and waited patiently for about twenty minutes or so, until the nurse we met earlier came to find us.
‘Your mum’s doing fine. She’s all settled in. You can see her now,’ she said. ‘The doctor will be here to speak to you in a little while, to explain more about what’s happened. Just sit with her for now, let her know you’re here.’
Matt took my hand and we walked together with Lucy following behind. The nurse guided us into another side room that had two beds. My mum was in one and the other was empty; an orderly was stripping the sheets from it. I wondered if the patient in that bed had got better or died.
Matt stood at the foot of Mum’s bed, looking awkward and unsure of what to do next. Lucy, however, had no such qualms. She positioned herself at the top end of the bed and sat down in a chair so her head was level with Mum’s. She gently placed her hand on top of Mum’s where it lay on the blanket. It was hard to see her face behind the oxygen mask she was wearing but I could see there was a cut on her forehead, just above her left eye.
‘What’s that?’ I asked the nurse as she busied herself looking at Mum’s chart. After a quick scan of the clipboard she said, ‘She banged her head, we assume when she collapsed at home. It looks worse than it is, don’t worry.’ How could I not worry? All I knew was what Matt had told me and that wasn’t much.
‘It’s all right, Nan, we’re here. You’re all right now.’ Lucy was whispering words of comfort to her and I felt as if I should go and sit closer, but I didn’t move. We’d grown so far apart after my dad left and we’d never been able to find our way back to each other. I’d built a life for myself that meant I wasn’t reliant on her for anything. I’d spent years cultivating my survival strategy, so much so that when she’d eventually resurfaced, after so many years of pushing me away, I’d had no room left in my life for her.
My brother moved to sit opposite Lucy. ‘We’re all here, Mum, don’t worry, everything will be all right,’ he murmured. I thought I saw her eyes open slightly but the moment passed so quickly I wasn’t sure if I’d just imagined it. A very young, very tired-looking doctor came into the room, picking up the chart at the end of Mum’s bed and studying it for a bit before looking up at us.
‘Your mother has had a stroke. I’m sure they will have told you that down in A & E.’
‘Yes. They sent her for a scan. They said it was a bleed on her brain or something like that,’ said Matt.
‘Yes, that’s right. We’re giving her some IV fluids and she’s getting oxygen from the mask she has on, but until she regains full consciousness it’s impossible to predict what her recovery will look like. If indeed there will be any.’ He looked at his watch and then made a note on the chart.
‘What do you mean? People recover from strokes all the time, don’t they?’ asked Matt.
‘The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are critical.
We’ll keep an eye on her, monitor her pulse, respiratory rate, things like that. The bleed was relatively small, but she may still need surgery to relieve any pressure. We’ll keep a close eye on that. Her situation probably hasn’t been helped by the amount of time that elapsed between the stroke and her getting treatment.’
‘She lives by herself. She’s a very active lady – she didn’t need looking after,’ Matt said to the doctor. ‘I called the ambulance as soon as I found her.’ He looked pleadingly at me, like a little boy who’d done something wrong but didn’t really understand what. I felt a sudden flash of anger. How dared this doctor make us feel responsible for this?
‘This stroke has come completely out of the blue. No one could have seen this coming,’ I said. ‘If you’re trying to imply that this is in some way our responsibility…’ I left the question hanging in the air and watched as the young doctor began to stutter out an apology.
‘No, no, of course not, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that at all, forgive me if it seemed that way. But it is a fact that the sooner a stroke patient receives treatment, the more chance they have of regaining whatever functions the stroke has damaged. As I said, we won’t really know anything for sure until she regains full consciousness. We have to wait. If you will excuse me, I have other patients to see.’ He replaced Mum’s chart and left the room. Matt slumped back in his chair; he looked exhausted.
‘Why don’t you go home, Uncle Matt? We can stay with her,’ said Lucy.
Matt shook his head. ‘No. I’m not leaving her now.’
‘It’s not our fault, Matt. You don’t have to feel guilty. It just happened.’ Even as I said the words I knew they’d fall on deaf ears. Matt was always the one who’d been there for Mum. He reached across the bed and took her hands in his. She was so tiny that she barely made an impression under the sheets. Looking at her lying there, unconscious and helpless, with Matt and Lucy sitting attentively on either side of her, I felt like an intruder. I wasn’t capable of feeling any of the same things that they were; I didn’t belong there.
‘I need to borrow your car, Matt,’ I said, suddenly. ‘I’m going to fetch Mum a few things from home. She’ll need them when she wakes up.’
‘Where’s your van?’
Before I could reply, Lucy chimed in. ‘Mum’s old friend brought us here in his swanky Mercedes.’
‘What old friend? Who’s she talking about, Abs?’
‘Jack Chance. You won’t remember him. He moved away years ago. I haven’t seen him in ages. Are you giving me your keys or not?’ I snapped. I really didn’t want to talk about all that now.
‘All right, all right, touchy old cow.’ He fished around in his jacket pockets, searching for the keys. I reached out to take them, but he pulled his hand away at the last minute. ‘I think I do remember Jack, as it goes. Was he the one you spent months being miserable over? He just upped sticks and left, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did. And I never spent months being miserable, more like five minutes, now give me the bloody keys.’ I snatched them out of his hand before he could pull them away.
‘Why has he showed up again, then? What’s he after?’
‘What do you mean? He’s not after anything. It was just a coincidence, us bumping into one another.’
Matt seemed to have more to say on the subject, but I wasn’t in the mood to listen; I had to get out of that bloody hospital.
‘Call me if anything changes. I won’t be long.’ I hesitated for a second before I moved to the top of the bed. Leaning down to give her a kiss on the forehead, careful to avoid the cut above her eye, I waited to see if there was any movement from her, but there wasn’t.
Chapter 10
The street was dark and quiet as I pulled up outside the house. There were no lights on inside and I felt oddly nervous about going in by myself. I couldn’t remember ever having been in the house when my mum wasn’t there; even when she was nothing more than a shadow, hiding away in her room, I always sensed her presence. Now I felt like a trespasser, to be honest.
I switched off the ignition and the silence squeezed in around me; it wrapped me like a blanket and held me safe. I didn’t want to get out of the car; I wanted to stay right there, suspended in time and protected from whatever lay ahead. I couldn’t shake the feeling of foreboding that was growing in the darkest parts of my heart, a shifting feeling of unease that signalled bad times on the horizon. You’re just being silly, I told myself, sitting here in the dark and imagining things. Now get off your bum and get on with what you came here for.
Reluctantly I stepped out of the car, immediately getting hit by a gust of wind that was so cold it made my teeth hurt. It whipped my scarf across my face and momentarily blinded me. I yanked it back down but was knocked off balance and caught my foot on a loose paving slab. I sprawled across the pavement in a very unladylike heap, spewing curse words and handbag contents in all directions. There’s your sense of foreboding, said my pragmatic self. You were worrying about the impending end of the world when you should have just been looking more closely at where you were stepping. Silly girl. I scrabbled around on all fours, collecting the contents of my handbag, and then I stood, grimacing slightly at the soreness in my right knee and the hole I’d ripped in my jeans. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I hissed. I limped a bit pathetically up to the house and let myself in.
Standing in the hallway, I could hear next door’s TV but that was all. Mum had already told me that her new neighbour was as deaf as a post and had his telly blaring away at all hours. She’d tried to talk to him about it, but he just made out he couldn’t hear her. Mum was convinced that this was a ploy. ‘He’s only bloody deaf when it suits him,’ she’d said.
I switched on the small lamp on the hall table and saw her coat hanging over the banister at the bottom of the stairs. Odd that it wasn’t in the cupboard. Should I take it with me when I went back? Would she need it when she came home? Or would that be ‘if’ she came home? I couldn’t think about that now.
The light from the hallway was spilling into the living room and I could see that the armchair and coffee table had been moved, shoved to one side by the paramedics, I assumed. The disruption would have driven my mum bonkers if she were there to see it. She liked everything to be ‘just so’. I caught myself thinking of her in the past tense already; I gave myself a mental rap on the knuckles as a reminder that this wasn’t yet the case. Tidying the living room was going to have to wait though; first I needed to collect her things from upstairs.
I made my way up slowly, creeping up the stairs as I had done so many times when I was a teenager. I could still remember which were the treads to avoid in order to prevent telltale creaks, and exactly how far up I could go before I’d have to drop to my hands and knees to avoid detection. No need for any of that though; there was no one there to catch me unawares. I reached the half-landing at the top, before the stairs turned to the right, and saw the little brown wooden plant stand that had been there for as long as I could remember. It sat, tucked against the wall, with a vase of faded silk roses sitting daintily on top.
A flash of memory stopped me dead. I see a different vase, a cut-glass one, filled with fresh roses, not silk ones, soaring high in the air, glinting in the sunlight, as my mum lobs it at my dad out of an upstairs window. In my mind’s eye, I watch it rise and fall in slow motion, until it hits the concrete path and shatters into diamond shards at my feet. I know they’re my feet because I’m wearing my favourite pink jelly shoes, which means the water from the vase has splashed onto my socks and my feet are wet and squeaking inside my shoes. I hear a voice screaming, ‘You stupid bastard! How could you do this to us?’ I think it sounds like Mum’s voice; I can’t be sure.
When did I see this happen? Or maybe I didn’t see it. Perhaps I heard about it later, or maybe I’d made the whole thing up? I couldn’t be sure. Slightly shaken, I finished climbing the stairs and opened the door to her bedroom. Not for the first time I marvelled at just how tidy the ro
om was. The rest of the house was by no means messy, but Mum’s bedroom took tidiness to a whole new level. The bed was made up with sheets and blankets, pulled tight and neatly tucked under the edges of the mattress, not a wrinkle in sight. Mum had been appalled at the duvet and its rise in popularity; the casual way it could be flung across a mattress and the bed considered ‘made’ was a source of real irritation to her.
Her slippers were tucked neatly under her side of the bed. I picked them up but I didn’t know what to do with them next, so I just stood there like an idiot, holding them for a few seconds. A bag! That was what I needed – something to put everything in. I pulled open her wardrobe with my free hand. On the shelf at the top I saw what looked like two brown leather handles; figuring they must belong to a bag of some sort, I pulled. Sure enough, I managed to drag out a small brown leather holdall but in my haphazard rush I also succeeded in pulling half the contents of the shelf out with it. A beautifully folded pile of jumpers, all arranged by colour, I noticed, upended themselves onto the floor and all I could do was watch it happen. I had the slippers in one hand and the bag in the other; I couldn’t even manage a half-arsed attempt to catch them. Mum would have been bloody furious. I dropped the holdall onto the bed and threw the slippers in, before returning to the sorry pile of clothes on the floor. Picking them up, without bothering to sort or refold them, I shoved them back onto the shelf. When Mum sees it she’ll go barmy, I thought. Or maybe she won’t be here to see it? There was that niggling voice of negativity again.
Pushing those thoughts away, I moved over to the chest of drawers by the window and pulled open the top one: Mum’s underwear drawer. It all felt so wrong to me; it was too intimate, standing there looking at her knicker drawer and wondering which ones to take. Without thinking I grabbed a few pairs, and a bra, and stuffed them into the bag. Opening the next drawer, I found nighties and socks, much easier, I thought. But no, it wasn’t. Which nightdress should I take? Did she have a favourite? I should know which one that was, shouldn’t I? What kind of a daughter was I? Matthew or Lucy should be here. They’d know which one she’d like. Why hadn’t I let one of them do this instead of me? I grabbed the top one on the pile and as I did I saw something stuffed into the corner of the drawer; it was the socks I’d bought Mum for Christmas last year, still with the price tags on. Yes, I’d bought my Mum socks for Christmas, don’t judge me. She was awful to buy gifts for; she’d always ask for the receipt ‘just in case’. I took these unworn socks as further proof, if any were needed, that I was the wrong person to be here. I didn’t know her; I couldn’t even be trusted to buy a pair of socks that she liked.
Secrets and Tea at Rosie Lee's Page 10