A Trick of the Mind

by Penny Hancock

  My mother had lost her older sister and it was still raw for her. And lost her in such a painful, unnecessary way. This on top of the physical changes she was undergoing, did indeed sound bad enough to warrant an afternoon seeking the advice of geeks. I made her a pot of Peppermint and Liquorice tea and put some soya beans in a dish. I put a bowl of water on the floor for Pepper. Rummaged about in her cupboards looking for something vaguely sweet to have with my tea and finally made do with a handful of dried cranberries.

  My mother had curled onto the sofa, her feet tucked under her.

  ‘Mum, I want to ask you . . .’

  ‘You’re doing it again, Ellie! Do you remember when you were a teenager you had to turn the light off and on five times before you went to bed?’ she said. ‘I had to say night-night exactly the right number of times or you’d be distraught. But you’re nearly thirty now, you must have grown out of it, surely? Oh, here’s Miri.’

  I looked up. Miriam had come in. The opportunity to talk shrank away from me.

  ‘Hey, Ellie,’ Miriam said, as if she was a teenager rather than a sixty-something woman.

  ‘Hello, Miriam.’

  ‘There’s some herb tea in the pot,’ my mother said. ‘Now, go on, Ellie, what did you want to say?’

  I wasn’t going to tell her about Patrick in front of Miriam so I said, ‘I found some things in May’s house she must have kept to remind her of her foster children.’

  My mother blinked. Paused, the tea halfway to her mouth.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Kids’ stuff. A bib, a lock of hair.’

  ‘Tell me, what colour is the hair?’

  My mother’s face had gone pale.

  ‘Blonde?’

  ‘Oh dear! So she kept bits of her. How macabre. After all that had happened.’

  ‘What do you mean? Did May do something? Something bad?’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to go into all this. It was done with and it was finished. That time spoilt my own love of that seaside town and now you’re digging it all up again.’

  ‘But I don’t know what I’m digging up if you don’t tell me!’

  Aunty May had been a little wayward, a little wild at times, but at least she had been there. My mother didn’t have time to spend with us. Even now I could feel that yearning for a mother who I never really felt was present.

  ‘Your mother feels her sister’s manipulating her from beyond the grave,’ Miriam said.

  I wished she’d go out again. She was hovering around, as if afraid she’d miss something.

  ‘It’s a shame. I wouldn’t mind use of a house in Southwold. But Sandy’s made her mind up and you know what your mother’s like when she’s made her mind up about something.’

  I ignored her, and her blatant reference to what she knew full well was my house.

  ‘Mum, I need you to answer some questions.’

  ‘Don’t, Ellie.’

  ‘Look, I also found this.’

  I held out the photo.

  ‘Who was Daisy? What happened to her? I can sort of remember her but it keeps sliding away when I try to grasp the memories, and yet, and yet, the hair, and there was this label, “A piece of you” . . .’

  ‘I can’t go there now. It’s better that you don’t know. You’ve got your life to live, leave May’s to pass away. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to tell you ever, Ellie, please let’s let sleeping dogs lie. Talking of which, doesn’t Pepper need a walk? He’ll be wetting my floor.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Don’t forget Othello on Friday,’ she called as I walked back up the street, and I turned and waved goodbye. Maybe next time I saw her I’d get a chance to talk to her properly.

  At least I had the New York commission to keep my mind occupied that week. George Albini, the man from the New York gallery, confirmed they wanted a river piece, but a London one, showing the same ambiguity I’d achieved in the Blyth painting, the menace beneath the apparently benign surface. They would pay me five thousand dollars. I reeled at this. It was more than I’d ever been paid for anything. I bought the canvas and a stretcher and worked on the sitting-room floor, placing my sketches and photos around the canvas, and planning the forms I was going to create.

  I thought of Louise’s description of what I tried to do. The sometimes nebulous line between light and dark, beauty and ugliness, life and death. I pulled out a sketchbook and looked at some drawings and photos I’d taken a few weeks earlier down at the river in Greenwich. I wondered if I could use these or would need to do more.

  The delay I’d had while visiting Patrick and Aunty May’s during the week had somehow galvanised me. I was brimming with ideas. I worked all day browsing images, thinking, sketching, working on the piece. I carried the knowledge of Patrick, what had happened between us, inside me, a kind of thrilling secret that intensified my work. I was waiting for his call, telling me when to go and fetch him.

  I finished painting at five thirty, put my brushes in white spirit, cleared the floor of the rags and pieces of fabric I used on my collages. I looked back at my work. I’d put the shapes into place, and was building up layers. I tried to see if it was doing what I wanted it to do, reflecting the tidal changes of the Thames, the muddiness beneath the silver reflections of the water. The layers beneath what you actually saw, symbolising, for me, the layers beneath what we see in each other.

  Working on something all day you could no longer see it. I needed to get some distance from it, to be able to view it objectively. Which meant giving myself time.

  My brother Ben rang and asked if it was OK if he and his fiancée Caroline went down to the cottage. They would do any little repairs that I hadn’t managed. Then George Albini rang again and said they were organising the shipping, could I give him measurements? They wanted to get the painting out there by the end of August. My heartbeat quickened. I must get on with it.

  Then Patrick phoned.

  ‘They aren’t discharging me till Saturday now. I’m going stir-crazy. And I’m missing you like a mad person.’

  ‘I’ll be there soon, Patrick. It’s not long till the weekend.’

  ‘Can you come on Friday? Just to lie with me for a bit. I need to feel you next to me.’

  So. I would have to cancel the play Mum had asked me to go to, I would remove all obstacles to seeing Patrick. To atone for what I had done to him. He and my New York commission were my priorities now.

  I was packing my paints away when Chiara came in.

  ‘Hi, babes!’ she said, going to the kitchen with a bag of fruit and veg she had bought from a farmers’ market. ‘You’ve been rather elusive. Where have you been?’

  I smiled.

  ‘I popped back to May’s cottage on Monday night,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell her about Patrick yet. It would involve too much explanation about my guilt over the accident that she was convinced I couldn’t have caused.

  And though Chiara was my best friend, and had my best interests at heart, I knew her loyalties lay with Finn as well. To introduce the idea of Patrick to her at this stage would be to risk a lecture which would simply muddy the waters I’d worked so hard to clear.

  ‘And then I went to see my mum. She wants me to go down on Friday night to see a play.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘What’s happening with you and Liam? Any news on the flat?’

  ‘It’s all so slow,’ she said. ‘We’re waiting for a survey now. It’s a pity you’re away this weekend. I was hoping you and I might spend some time together. I wanted to ask you about birthing partners.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, barely hearing her. I had promised to give Patrick a lift home at the weekend. That was all I could think about.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Els,’ Chiara said, stomping across to her room. ‘We’ll talk later. You’re obviously preoccupied with your commission and everything.’

  ‘How’s my girl?’

  I had driven with Pepper over to Dad’s with his shopping, something I
tried to do every week.

  ‘I’m OK, Dad.’

  It still pulled at my heartstrings to see him here in a cramped ex-local authority flat in the seamier end of East Greenwich when Mum had gone up-market to Cambridge. It still made my heart sink as I tramped up the concrete stairway and along the corridor past other front doors to his.

  ‘How was the exhibition?’ Pepper had run over to my Dad and leapt up onto his lap.

  ‘It was great! I sold a few. I’ve got some exciting news.’

  I told him about the Americans, the New York commission, and he sat, one leg crossed over the other in his old armchair, and listened.

  ‘I’m so pleased for you, you know. As May would have been.’

  ‘Mum’s still got her heart set on my selling the house, you know.’

  ‘I’ve told her I think we should back off. Leave it up to you. Now, what do I owe you for the shopping?’

  Dad never went beyond the walls of his flat. The world outside had become too menacing to him. And I could understand it to a point, the panicky feeling I got when I ignored my compulsions must be how he felt all the time. It was his increasing withdrawal from the world that meant he’d had to give up his job as a curator at the Maritime Museum, and which meant Mum had finally had enough. She couldn’t live with the restrictions his agoraphobia imposed on her, the fact he would no longer accompany her to parties, dinners, the theatre – anywhere. I could see how meeting Miriam must have opened up the world for her.

  Or that’s what I understood about their separation. I would probably never really know the whole truth. Dad’s asking me what he owed me for the food was my cue to leave. I knew that. He reached a point where he needed to be alone, couldn’t cope with company, even that of his own daughter. I leant over and kissed him, catching a waft of his Dad smell, damp washing, beer.

  Friday came and my other day’s teaching. I dropped my car off on the way into work to get the wing-mirror fixed.

  Chloe arrived late as usual and handed me a soggy pink disc of minced meat. There had been a letter asking for contributions to an international food day, and Chloe, whose mother suffered from depression and was unable to get out of bed, must have taken the frozen burger straight from the packet herself. Six years old, caring for Mum, no one to show her that food had to be packaged, or bought fresh. Chloe was just one of the millions of hidden child carers out there, getting on with it because there was no choice.

  I thanked her. ‘You’re doing a wonderful job, you know, Chloe?’ I said, hoping she would understand my words referred to what she was doing day in day out, not just the burger. I exchanged a glance with Joyce, who took the burger from me and mouthed that she’d deal with it.

  Billy showed a picture of Charles and Camilla at a refugee camp.

  Chelsea-Lee pulled a louse out of her hair and held it out to me in the palm of her hand. Emmylou’s mum came in complaining that Chelsea-Lee was on a higher-level reader than Emmylou. I made an appointment to speak to her the following week.

  At three I got them to pack up early, and let them go as soon as I could. Timothy hung about as usual.

  ‘Me stepdad’s coming, ’im shouting at us again an’ I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Timothy, it’s home time. You need to go.’

  I looked at the clock. I was desperate to get going, to see Patrick.

  For once I wasn’t going to give Timothy extra time. I was anxious to get on the road, I needed to get moving to keep my nerves at bay. I was going to visit him this evening then spend the night at May’s cottage so I could be at the hospital first thing in the morning to take him home.

  Nothing else mattered.

  By three forty there was no sign of Timothy’s child minder. I felt on edge, impatient. I opened the classroom door and looked across the playground.

  Ah. Timothy’s sister was there – she sometimes came to take him to Westfield when the child minder was busy.

  I left Timothy ambling across the tarmac towards the girl. She couldn’t have been much more than thirteen years old herself – she stood by the playground gates, hair dyed a fierce black, in a black top that had had the shoulders cut out revealing her own pink shoulders. Plump legs in tight leggings, feet in pointed black boots, her thumb working her mobile, not looking up as Timothy ran towards her. Two small figures beneath the indifferent concrete walls and billboards of the inner city.

  And I was heading off to pick up Pepper and my car and then to drive again towards the Suffolk countryside with only one clear thought in my head.

  Patrick.

  ‘Where will you stay tonight?’ he asked me. The nurses said they had to run a few more tests, but that yes, he would be ready to come home the next morning.

  I was lying on his bed again, letting him stroke my hair away from my forehead. I could feel the fingers of his other hand pressing into the small of my back and I moved closer to him.

  ‘I told you!’ I smiled into his eyes. ‘I have a house by the sea in Southwold. Have you forgotten?’

  ‘I remember now,’ he said, pulling me to him, and I let him kiss me. His lips were dry and soft. It was the sort of kiss you want to go on forever, the sort of kiss where everything else in the world falls away, leaving just this soft pool of sensation.

  At last I drew away.

  ‘I need to leave before the gallery closes.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Valerie had phoned and asked me to pick up the paintings she hadn’t sold.

  ‘I’ll be back for you in the morning,’ I told Patrick. ‘You mustn’t worry.’

  ‘There aren’t many left at all,’ Valerie told me. ‘I sold another this morning. I’m loath to let you take these away, but this new show’s going up and we have to make the space.’ She handed me an envelope. ‘That’s the money for the sales after commission and the donations to Mind.’

  ‘Thanks so much.’

  ‘Keep in touch. We could think about a solo show sometime.’

  She smiled, and I thanked her and left, not daring to look inside the envelope, but with a fizzing feeling inside me. A solo show! It was what all us artists dreamt of. I was on a high as I arrived at May’s. Things really were working out for me – the commission, solo shows. The contacts Patrick was going to provide for me.

  And the cream on the top, Patrick himself! I let myself forget about the reason I’d met him to start with.

  Ben and Caroline had left the cottage immaculate. It was much nicer arriving to a place that had been occupied. They’d left a bottle of white wine and some cheese and bits and pieces in the fridge and a packet of oatcakes and a bar of organic chocolate on the sideboard. They’d also sorted through Aunty May’s drawers of stuff, had emptied one out into a box with a note saying if I didn’t want anything in it, it could be thrown away. There was a plastic box of toys they had dragged out from the cupboard under the stairs. Pepper lay down beside me and found a rubber ball to chew as I rummaged through them. A Fisher-Price pop-up toy with plastic animals that leapt up when you unhooked the lids. A wooden hammer and peg thing. A wobbly man. Old-fashioned toys. Things you didn’t see any more in the nursery classes at school. A Fisher-Price garage, the kind with the winder that lets the lift down.

  I got myself some cheese and oatcakes and poured a glass of wine and set about rummaging through the papers from the emptied drawer, chucking old postcards and bills into a bin bag and making a pile of things I thought might be worth keeping.

  When in a tightly packed envelope I found an appointment card for the Maudsley Hospital, and a page torn from a small diary, I stopped, put my oatcake down.

  I unfolded the page, written in May’s chaotic handwriting that sloped one minute this way one minute the other.

  It was dated 1990. At the top she had written, My record as a foster parent. Written at Doctor Lipski’s request.

  It was hard to read, the tight folds in the page had obliterated some of the letters, but I got
the gist:

  Daisy felt like the child I alwa-- wanted and yet gen---cally she --s quite dif----nt to ---- As if her bl- nde curls and her pale eyes t-unt-d me with how impossible this was. I have kept little mem--t-es of her, because I cannot bear to let her go. I will never get over -----.

  Beneath this was some more writing, scribbled out.

  I folded the paper and as I put it back in the envelope a photo fell out, a photo with a section cut out of it. The blonde child, Daisy, and next to her my little brother Ben, and then the shape of a third child who should have been there, next to them, slightly taller, standing on the shore. Me.

  I stood up, looked about me. I was no longer happy being here alone.

  I wanted someone to talk to, someone to explain. May had been my beloved aunt. She had left me her house. So why on earth had she cut me out of the photo?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Patrick was waiting for me the next morning, in a wheelchair beside the nurses’ station. My heart skipped a beat at the sight of him in his blue shirt, with his blue eyes and black hair.

  I’d spent the rest of the evening rummaging through May’s things, trying to find the rest of the diary, with no success. I’d slept badly, haunted by the vision of the empty space in the photo where I should have been. I’d kept a light on through the night. I didn’t like being in the house alone and was glad to have Pepper with me, who, as if by instinct, knew to sleep on the end of the bed.

  ‘Here she is.’ It was another young health care worker. He was addressing Patrick. ‘She’ll take care of you now the doctors have signed you out.’ He winked at me and handed me a bag and some papers with diagrams of exercises on them ‘from the physio’, he said, and then I was pushing Patrick in his wheelchair into the lift, his crutches under one arm.

  Seeing him in the chair, his left ankle dressed, his right lolling awkwardly in its prosthetic, I felt such tenderness, mixed with confusion about when I should confess about who I was and why I’d visited him. How long could I keep on deceiving him? Or rather, being economical with the truth, because I had never actually lied to him, had I?