by Joanna Nadin
‘I need to get home later,’ Harry lies. ‘Anyway, don’t change the subject. She’s being . . . weird.’
‘I think it’s . . . the change,’ he says, reddening again. ‘You know. Lady stuff.’
‘Menopause?’ Harry demands. ‘You can say it. It’s not a dirty word. Anyway, didn’t she go through that years ago?’
‘She had pills,’ David says. ‘Maybe they’re wearing off. Or maybe she’s stopped taking them.’
‘Christ. I’ll be taking them until they carry me out in a coffin. I’m not growing a bloody moustache or giving up sex.’
I think of you then, wonder if you’re starting it – the change. Or staving it off. Wonder if I’ll even be able to tell, given your mood swings, your erratic behaviour.
‘It’s sexist as well,’ Harry continues. ‘Women have to have periods, and then babies, and then just when the fuckers bugger off and you get a life back you dry up and grow a beard and no one would want to do it with you even if you could. Men just carry on shagging willy-nilly.’
‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘Well, not all of it.’
‘I’ve already got chin hair,’ Harry protests. ‘It’s vile. Promise me when I’m old and blind you’ll pluck them out for me.’
‘I promise,’ I say. ‘I will always be your wing woman.’
‘Men have their problems too,’ David says.
‘I don’t even want to know.’ Harry shudders.
And thankfully, David doesn’t get a chance to elaborate anyway because the duck arrives, borne on a silver platter by a sweaty Angela.
‘I . . . can you clear a space?’ She teeters slightly, swaying to the left.
‘Are you all right?’ David asks.
‘Yes. I’m absolutely fine. I’m just—’
But she is not fine. She is not just anything. Because then, in what now plays out as a strange, slow-motion sequence, but which cannot have taken more than a few seconds, she slips again and buckles, the duck arcing onto the table, while the platter clatters to the floor, arriving only a moment after Angela.
‘Oh, fuck!’ Harry yells. ‘Fuck!’
David stumbles around the chairs, crouches next to her. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he tells her.
But Harry does not move. ‘Fuck!’ she repeats.
‘Harry!’
‘I’ll do it,’ I say, fumbling for my mobile phone, sucked back in time to another night, another emergency call. This time, though, I am practised, know what they will ask. What I need to say.
I hang up. ‘They’re coming,’ I say.
Angela groans then, a guttural, animal sound.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Harry wails. ‘Dad?’
‘She’s – she’s—’
‘She’s having a seizure,’ I finish. ‘An epileptic fit.’
‘She’s not epileptic.’ Harry looks at me. ‘She’s not!’
‘I know,’ I say, panic rising. ‘I know. You need to – we should talk to her. Shouldn’t we?’
David reaches to touch her juddering body, then pulls his hand back. Not disgusted – afraid. ‘It’s all right,’ he tells her then. ‘You’ll be fine. You’re going to be absolutely fine.’
But if she could hear him, she’d hear in his voice that he doesn’t believe it. None of us do.
And for once, we are right.
Angela is taken to Addenbrooke’s where she has a second seizure, then a third. By the time she is taken for a scan she is grey, exhausted, and confused. The clarity that comes afterwards, though, is far more debilitating.
Less than twenty-four hours after she was wrestling vegetables, Angela is diagnosed with a brain tumour, aggressive and inoperable. She is given a matter of weeks to live. Angela being Angela, she will eke those out to months, but this will not, does not, lessen the pain for David, Harry or Tom. Or for me.
And for you, it exacerbates everything.
‘Why are you always there?’ you demand. ‘I suppose Tom’s back, is he?’
I smart at this. At the cruel accusation, and the truth at the heart of it. ‘He was, but he had to go back.’ Back to the kids and their demands. Back to his wife and hers.
‘Then why? She’s got Harry. And . . . him.’ You cannot bring yourself to say his name. ‘She doesn’t need you as well.’
‘He needs me,’ I say. ‘It’s not easy.’
‘It never is with her. Even her death has to be bloody difficult.’
‘Jesus, Edie.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, you’re not.’
You don’t argue, just pour another glass – a glass I can’t even be bothered to tell you you shouldn’t have. Not any more. If you want to ruin your body, your life, that’s your call, I tell myself. If you have so little to live for, go right ahead.
The unfairness of it slaps me, and not for the first time I slam the door on you and walk to where I am wanted, needed, welcomed.
Life is unfair, that’s what you would say – do say, now. But back then it felt needle-sharp, acute, that she, who hardly drank, never smoked, barely even swore, was being consumed by a tumour, while you, who abused yourself and others on an alarmingly regular basis and with such wild abandon, were still tottering around the cottage with a fag in one hand and a vodka in the other. It wasn’t that I wanted it the other way, was trying to do a deal with the devil – whatever you might have thought; whatever you might think now. I’ve not for one second revelled in the bitter justice that has brought you to the same stark hospital. But with you, we knew it was coming; it has been a long, slow process of inevitability. With her, it happened so swiftly, and so decisively. Or so it seemed.
She’d had a headache for months, David told me one evening – years, the you in my head muttered uncharitably – which he’d told her to get checked. But there were other symptoms too: misplacing objects so that David would find a shoe brush in the freezer, her wedding ring in the medicine cabinet; forgetting the time, the day, her own children. And, incredible though it seems, she became demonstrably happy. No longer snapping or sniping but laughing at the smallest, oddest thing. Brushing off the pain like it was no more than tiresome. Telling David she loved him. This, he said, was the saddest thing of all: because when she said that, he knew something was really wrong.
But I believe, or like to believe he’s wrong, underestimating her. She told me things, too, you know, when she was deep in the confusion of drugs and damage. Strange, improbable things: that as a teenager she had been a ballroom dancing champion and danced the cha-cha-cha with a man called Johnny Rockets. That her father was a fairground gypsy with a greasy quiff and slicker words, that he rode into town on the waltzers for three nights and went by the name of Elvis. That she once lived for a week on glacé cherries and cocktail olives, because that was all that was in the cupboard.
But there were moments of clarity too, of absolute truth.
That her saving grace had been Sunday school, where her mother dumped her so she could worship down the slots, and where she was taught to read and glimpsed a better life in the shape of a childless woman called Bible Pat.
That David was the making of her; that he had plucked her from secretarial college and put a ring on her finger and made sure she would never have to live on bar snacks again.
That she saw herself in me. But then we both guessed that already, didn’t we?
She got to see the baby, though she barely knew who it belonged to by then. It was a girl: Martha Evangeline; as close to Angela as Harry would allow herself, could bear. And though the child was – is – all Max in looks – dark curls, conker eyes – she is all Harry and all Angela in every other way imaginable.
‘I suppose you want one now,’ you say when I show you a photo. ‘Now that Tom and Harry have them.’
I think back to Mark, and his question two months ago, as we lay under the covers in my bed – always my bed. ‘No,’ I said to him, say to you, too. But then it was a truth, and now it is a fat, sugar-coated lie.
I want a child. I want new life. I
want something to hold on to now that she is gone, and you are God knows where.
I just don’t want it to be his.
I just don’t want it to end up like me.
Lest I end up like you.
Tom-All-Alone
October 2003
I’m jumping ahead, because we’re running out of time, or so I’ve just been told. And I don’t suppose it will matter too much; I’ve already missed out so many scenes in our story, all of them significant in their own small way. And I need to explain this, because this is the last pebble in our trail. This is how we got here. Why we’re here, even. So listen, Edie. Listen hard.
I watched a film a few years ago, and again last night; flickering Super 8 footage shot in a garden – the squat’s, I suppose. But the location is an irrelevance, a blurred background, because what matters, what is sharp, focused, is me. On you.
You are talking to me – or singing, perhaps; there was no sound, just the whir of Toni’s projector – but I don’t think that is important either. Because you could have been reading a cereal packet or reciting the books of the Bible, and I would have still hung on every word, savoured it as if it were gospel.
It was gospel, to me, then.
I’d ask where that adoration went (or to whom), but I think we both know the answer to that.
Oh, Edie. I should have kept my eyes on you. Not because you were a glitterball, a glimmering sun, the star who commanded, demanded attention. But because of the times when you knew you were not. Those dull fog-grey days, or, worse, the slick ink-black ones, those were when I should have watched your every move, listened to every word, to make sure you were still here, stop you slipping through a crack in the floorboards.
But I failed. Too wrapped up in my own drama was I to have to suffer yours being played out on repeat. So I ignored the signs, even ignored your spelled-out pleas; swept them under the carpet with the dust and the cigarette ends.
I should have listened, Edie. I should have looked. I should have seen.
Angela died a month after Martha was born, and in Addenbrooke’s: the same hospital Tom and Harry were born in, the same one Tom was taken to aged eight with a fractured femur, the same one you took Harry to aged sixteen for another reason entirely.
Her funeral was on the thirteenth of October. A Monday when the mercury tipped temperatures rarely seen in high summer, let alone in a month when the air should be sharp with sloe-picking frost. It felt blasphemous, somehow, unseemly to be wearing thin linen to church, to have to push on sunglasses for their intended purpose rather than to conceal our grief.
Did I grieve? Of course I did.
I missed her, this bone-dry, bone-thin woman. This Good Housekeeping angel who mended her world, her children, not with kisses but with antiseptic and kaolin – offers I leapt at, would feign stomach ache for. While your medicine – television, a homework ban, a day on the chaise wrapped in moth-eaten mink and hand-fed dusty Muscat grapes – was met with, if not outright derision, then a sigh and a stomp to my room to read about mothers who might better meet my requirements, in sickness and in health.
So wrapped up in them, and her, was I that I barely had time to wonder what you were thinking, still less care. So if you have ever silently asked if I blame myself, you can be sure that the answer is, yes, on bad days – today, for instance – I do blame myself.
I ask you to come. Foolishly, I know, but I feel I should at least make the offer – or David does. But as soon as I step into the fly-filled kitchen I know I have made a mistake, that I am wasting my time and what little energy I have. The air is treacle-thick and cloying-sweet; rotting fruit lying in a pile on the table, once a still life, possibly, but now crawling, heaving with insects.
‘I don’t have time,’ you dismiss, your hand flapping frantically.
‘To clean, or to come with me?’
‘I’m not coming,’ you snap. ‘Why would I come? Why are you even going?’
‘You know why I’m going,’ I say, determined not to have to spell it out, aware that that will only make things difficult – more difficult than they already are.
But you have less willpower. Or more. ‘Because you love her,’ you say. ‘You love her more than me. You always bloody did. He always bloody did.’
‘Edie—’
‘You said it.’
‘What?’ I demand. ‘When?’
‘Once.’
That night. I jolt at the memory. ‘I wish Angela was my mother,’ I’d said. ‘Or I wish you’d never had me. Then we’d both be better off.’
‘Edie, I was a child, then,’ I plead. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
‘Yes, you did,’ you snap back. ‘Because . . . because I’m a nuisance, aren’t I? A, a—’ You flap your hand again, sending a bluebottle into a buzzing arc. ‘A fly. That’s all. A fucking fly that you wish you could swat, swish-swish.’ You swipe the air. ‘Then I’ll be gone.’
‘I don’t wish that,’ I insist. Not without guilt, anyway, great steaming reams of sobbing guilt that I want a better past, a future that is not even glittering, but just clean. Calm.
Your hand stills and you clutch instead at the table.
‘Edie?’
‘I don’t feel well,’ you say.
I stiffen as I think of the boy who cried wolf, an allegory I have woven into a story of my own, one that sits on an editor’s desk right now, awaiting judgement, my agent prodding gently, nudging for a deal.
‘You probably just need to eat.’ I look around me again, at the wreck our kitchen has become. ‘Off a clean plate,’ I add.
‘I’m busy,’ you say.
‘You just said you were ill.’
‘I am ill,’ you insist, your black-ringed eyes wide with alarm. ‘I’m dying,’ you say, your voice rich, fat with drama.
I sigh. ‘You’re not dying, Edie.’
You pout, a sulking child. ‘I might be.’
‘Please, just stop it. I have to go or I’ll be late.’
‘Well, go on then. Go to them. Fuck off.’
‘Edie.’ But it’s pointless, and so I sigh silently, ready to concede defeat, or a portion at least. ‘I’ll come round later.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise.’
So I leave under a cloud, but in bright autumn sun, and I walk solemnly to St Mary’s Church, retreading my six-, seven-, eight-year-old footsteps to harvest festivals, to carol services; then, at David’s insistence, take my seat in the very first pew, my bare knee pressed against the sheer sheen of Harry’s on one side and the black wool of Max’s on the other, Martha in his lap, her sausage-fat fingers clutching his tie.
Tom is two seats away, conspicuously alone. He came home again two months ago, to help David and me care for her when it got to the very end. We took it in turns to take her magazines she had never once read before, music she had never listened to; took it in turns to hold her hand when the pain became too much, so much she needed to transfer some of it with her clutching fingers. We didn’t talk, though, not properly, or not about us, anyway. Though I know things are difficult with Caroline. And he knows they are non-existent with Mark.
Of course they are non-existent. He was at once too much, and never going to be enough. He was too David – too kind, too eager, too compliant – and not enough Tom. Never enough Tom. And so I chose work, words, and to care for a sick woman to whom I owe, not my life, but a life.
The service is elegant, neat, befitting. The elegies are strained, both in voice and content, David stoic as he talks of the woman who raised his two fine children, her precision, her attention to detail; Tom, sleep-deprived, lapsing into laughter as he recalls the time she thought Harry was dying after she came home jaundiced from a food-colouring bath – yours, of course, though he doesn’t mention your name.
The wake is packed, the living room as full as it ever was on Christmas Eve, fuller than it has been in years: the same faces, but lined now, less devil-may-care. Self-conscious, aware of my status – my suppo
rting role in the headline drama the last time they saw me – I cling onto a tray of canapés, hand out ham sandwiches Tom and I cut this morning, sausage rolls that I can see Angela grimace at, the pastry flaking onto her carpet and leaving smears of grease even after we have vacuumed.
I watch David struggle with drinks, not finding enough, or the right glasses, not having thought to line them up this morning. Which she would have done. I see Harry, glowing with motherhood, pale with grief, clinging grimly onto Martha as if she, too, might disintegrate, dissipate into the swirl of dust motes if she were to let her go. And I see Tom. Tom all alone. His wife too stubborn to come, his sons too small. I listen to him recount the same story – that he has taken sick leave, a sabbatical from CNN, but that he hopes to be moved to Washington soon – a promotion. That, yes, Caroline is well, his sons are well. Look! Here’s a photo of them all, standing proud with her parents on a clipped and sprinkled lawn. But I hear, too, what he doesn’t say – that the move to DC will be without them. That he will go home only on weekends. If that.
And so late afternoon slip-slides into evening, which dissolves into night. Guests leave in dribs and drabs, offering promises of dinner dates, or dropped-off casseroles. Martha is prised from Harry and put to bed, while Max, drunk on cognac, falls asleep beside her. David says he will turn in too, that there’s a programme on Radio 4 about cricket he’s been meaning to catch. And, though we know it is a lie, we nod, and kiss him goodnight in turn like good children, breathe in his dad smell of faint cigar smoke and faded aftershave.
And we three? We musketeers? We sit at the kitchen table, like we did a decade and more ago, and we talk about life, and death, and try to solve the sorry world we have been left with.
‘Shitty way to go,’ Harry says. ‘Painful. And so bloody drawn-out. Worse, she knew what was happening.’
‘Not all the time,’ I point out.
‘Still, if I had to pick, it would definitely be something quicker. Car crash. Or trampled to death by hippos. It’s quite common, apparently.’
I fidget, uncomfortable despite the familiar ground, familiar company. Taken back to another conversation, about how we’d do it, if we were going to. ‘Should we be talking about this, so . . . glibly?’ I ask. ‘Or at all?’