by Jackie Kay
‘When we get there, you let me do the talking,’ I said to my mother. She nodded. ‘I’m having the time of my life,’ she said. ‘We’re cannier than Cagney and Lacey; we’ve got more irony than Ironside, we’ve got more hair than Kojak, nicer raincoats than Columbo, better sweaters than Starsky and Hutch,’ I said, laughing. ‘But we’re not more stylish than, what’s her name? Oh damn, it’s gone. What’s her name; you know the one, the one that had the wee drunken dance with her whisky?’ my mother said.
‘Helen Mirren! Prime Suspect! Prime!’ Doctor Mahmud said aloud to the mirror in his surgery. ‘One of they women that looks as if life’s begun at sixty, like sixty is the new forty. Sexy, sexy! Some figure on her.’ He called reception, really disturbed now. He looked at the hair on the backs of his hands as if he was physically turning into somebody else. He suddenly decided to shave his beard off. Then stopped, his face full of lather. He pressed his buzzer to the reception: ‘No more patients for me today, please. I’m not feeling myself. Can you get Doctor Gordon and Doctor Berg to relieve me?’ The receptionist sounded frazzled. Doctor Mahmud flicked the switch. The receptionist pulled a face. Weirder and weirder! Outside the surgery, snow had started to fall in earnest. Doctor Mahmud’s hand was steady as he took the razor blade across his chin. ‘It’s snowing,’ he said out loud. ‘It’s actually snowing.’
Nora Gourdie stuck her tongue out; she pulled the red scarf around her neck tighter. ‘It’s snowing,’ she said. ‘It’s actually snowing.’ Snowflakes melted on her tongue. ‘Do you think it’s going to lie?’ she asked her daughter. ‘I hope it does. It’s lovely when the snow covers everything, pretty, eh?’
‘We are here,’ I said. The snow was whirling now, dancing. I was feeling like a complete idiot, bringing my old mother out in the freezing cold in a flurry of flakes in search of a Pakistani doctor. It was insane. It was another sign for me, that I was knocking it back too much. I’d lost all sense of judgement and propriety. ‘You sit there,’ I told her. ‘I’ll go and see what’s what. You’re going to come as a bit of a shock to him if he is here.’ My mother nodded. Her eyes were shining. ‘What if I fall in love with him?’ she said. ‘Oh, the snow’s so romantic! The age difference will just melt away. Love does not care about age difference!’
‘Excuse me,’ I asked at the reception, speaking softly. ‘I wonder if you can help me? My mother’s got what we think might be early onset Alzheimer’s or dementia. We’re not sure. And I wondered if she could see a doctor here? We’re visiting Bishopbriggs, you see, staying with friends. We’ve come down from Ullapool,’ I lied.
‘I’m sorry,’ the receptionist said. ‘We’re inundated the day.’
‘That’s him! Look, there he is!’ my mother shouted, springing to her feet and pointing excitedly at a tall handsome man leaving a room with a pile of files in his arms. ‘Is he a doctor?’ I asked the receptionist. ‘Yes, that’s Doctor Mahmud, but he’s not feeling well. He’s going home early.’
‘Do you know me? Do you know me like I know you?’ my mother was saying. Doctor Mahmud stared at the small woman with grey hair, her red coat. There was something familiar about her. She wasn’t one of his patients, he was certain of that. It wasn’t her face that was familiar. What was it? He stood staring at her, puzzled. ‘He’s the one! He’s the one!’ my mother shouted. ‘I’m so sorry about this,’ I said, approaching the doctor. ‘Is there any chance we could talk to you, privately, just for a few moments?’
‘It’ll take more than a few moments to get my thoughts back!’ my mother said. ‘Ssssssh,’ I said. ‘You’ll just sound like a crazy woman to the nice doctor here.’ My mother looked hurt. ‘The doctor hasn’t been told it is you yet,’ I said, conspiratorially. ‘What a handsome man you are, Doctor. Dishy. You’ve not let me down. You’re not a disappointment. But where’s your beard?’ my mother said.
It was her voice, Mahmud thought. Where had he heard that voice before? ‘Excuse me, ladies, but I must get home. I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather myself recently.’
‘It is you, isn’t it,’ my mother said, agitated. ‘I chose . . . oh what’s the word? I chose . . .’
‘Responsibly!’ the doctor said, blurting it out and surprising himself.
‘Exactly,’ my mother said. ‘What is that they say about snowflakes again?’ she said.
‘That no two snowflakes are exactly the same?’ he answered. The doctor stared at my mother and my mother stared at the doctor, looking deeply into each other’s eyes as if they’d just discovered a long-lost twin, a familiar. I could almost hear the Mozart that we’d been playing earlier this morning sound in both their heads. ‘Did I tell you this is my daughter, Doctor?’ my mother was saying. ‘I’m Mary,’ I said. ‘I’m Doctor Mahmud,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘What’s my name again?’ my mother said. ‘Nora!’ the doctor answered – quick as a flash. ‘That’s it! Nora, bloody Nora, never liked the bloody name anyway,’ my mother said.
‘I like it,’ the doctor said, smiling. ‘Nora’s a lovely name. Thank goodness. What would the world be like without Noras?’
The doctor approached the reception. ‘I’m going to take this lady through to my surgery. She seems very distressed.’
‘I thought you were going home, Doctor?’ the receptionist said. The snow was still falling; it would probably lie on top of walls on the way home; there’d be thick snow icing on the roofs of cars; white branches on trees, sparkling roofs, snowy, crunchy secret fields. It was beautiful, the soft, soft snow. The snowflakes were musical notes falling; Mahmud could hear Mozart’s piano. ‘No. I’m not going home right now. I’m feeling better,’ Mahmud said, and smiled enigmatically. ‘Through this way, please,’ – he took my mother’s arm. She was in her element. I could suddenly see her, years back, dancing in the Locarno in that black and white polka-dot dress. ‘I chose,’ she said to Mahmud again. ‘Responsibly,’ he repeated, and felt an extraordinary sensation of wonder and calm. ‘You chose responsibly.’ ‘Exactly!’ my mother said. Nora was beaming. ‘I could dance,’ my mother said. ‘I could dance and dance and dance.’ She was as happy as snowflakes. Her face was flushed; she suddenly looked young again. ‘It looks like it is going to lie, the snow,’ I said. It was like a fresh sheet of paper, no footprints yet, nothing.
Owl
It was when I was ten and Tawny was nine that we first came across the barn owl on the farmland where our parents went that summer on holiday. We think they went on one last holiday to work out their future, because we heard the four of them whispering often, sometimes furiously. But the noise that stayed with us through our childhood and into our teens was the screech of the barn owl. We gave each other nicknames that night as if to remember, and they stuck well past our forties. I was Barn and she was Tawny. Tawny and Barn. We thought it made us sound like a pair of detectives like Starsky and Hutch, or a pair of comedians like Eric and Ernie. We started dressing in similar clothes. We bought sleuth sweaters. Our parents often took holidays together but this was the first one where we actually noticed that Tawny’s father seemed happy chatting to my mother and that my father seemed to laugh in a different way with Tawny’s mother.
We always imagined that owls hooted. It was only after that strange holiday on the farm, with the fields and fields of rolled bales of hay and the red tractor and the big jugs of milk fresh from the black-and-white cows and the rows of green, muddy wellington boots outside the porch, and the potatoes that we were allowed to dig up ourselves, that we realized that owls could screech too. And when we got back home and looked up barn owl, we gasped. Tawny said, ‘The barn owl is also known as the screech owl,’ and I said, ‘No!’ ‘We said it screeched, didn’t we!’ Tawny said, excited and proud. ‘We did. We named it before the encyclopaedia got there!’ ‘Weird, isn’t it,’ Tawny said. ‘Weirder and weirder,’ I said, which was our phrase for everything that was happening around us. We actually saw Tawny’s father kiss my mum one night when we’d crept out late to watch the night flights of
our barn owl. When we got back into bed breathless and terrified, all we could whisper was, ‘Weirder and weirder,’ and giggle ourselves helplessly to sleep.
‘We actually managed to make friends with an owl,’ we told our friend when we got back to school. ‘How?’ Sandra Clark asked, sceptical. ‘We brought it things to eat?’ ‘What things?’ she said, her eyes narrowing like her mother’s, exactly like her mother’s. ‘A frog.’
‘A frog? I don’t believe you!’ she said. And for some reason this made her burst into tears. I think she burst into tears because before that summer she had been Tawny’s best friend; and Tawny and I returning with new nicknames and tales of our feathered friend made her feel left out. (Well, she wasn’t actually there.) ‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd,’ we’d always say to the third of the moment, leaving her or me or Tawny alone and miserable for at least a few hours, which felt like days. ‘I don’t believe you fed a frog to an owl,’ Sandra said. ‘But why would we lie about something like that?’ I said. ‘Why lie that you’d fed an owl a frog?’
‘So you can say you’ve done something I haven’t,’ Sandra said, wiping away her tears.
‘That wasn’t all we fed the owl,’ I continued. Sandra sucked in her cheeks and flicked back her hair. She looked demented. ‘What else?’ she said, challenging me, her eyes full of hurt and fury. ‘We caught a wild rabbit and brought it to our barn owl,’ I said. ‘Didn’t we?’ I said to Tawny. Tawny didn’t answer. ‘Oh, that’s just rubbish, just rubbish,’ Sandra said and stalked off and Tawny and I split our sides laughing. We couldn’t stop. It was painful. ‘Sandra’s getting so boring,’ I said to Tawny and Tawny said ‘She’s all right,’ which made me feel miserable and worried.
‘I don’t think we should both be called after the owl,’ Tawny said to me the next day, ‘or else we need a name for Sandra too. Like Feathers or something.’
‘But she wasn’t there,’ I said. ‘She never brought the owl a rabbit!’ I was outraged. ‘You’ve got to earn your nickname!’
‘But we never brought the owl a rabbit.’
‘But she’s not to know that!’ I said. ‘Anyway, we did really because we did it in our head.’
That was when we had a big talk about whether things that happened in your head were real or not: if they could be really real because they happened in your head. I’d already imagined quite a gory and glorious and gut-wrenching scene where our big barn owl gobbles a wild rabbit whole, and it’d hurt me to visualize it so vividly. I’d cried reading Watership Down! I’d already kept myself awake at night imagining our barn owl eating a rodent. I’d even just learnt the word rodent in order to say it with complete authority. (I had. I had said to Sandra, ‘Did we tell you about the day our owl ate a rodent?’ And Sandra had stared aghast and said, ‘What’s a rodent?’ ‘A rodent is a rat,’ I’d said. I’d been expecting her to ask what a rodent was and I couldn’t stop smirking.)
‘If you’d known he was such a rat, would you have wasted these years?’ That was the question Tawn was asking me now.
‘This is what old friends do at our age,’ Tawn said, wryly. ‘They start going back over their years.’
‘Or they sit around and remember their owls,’ I said. We both laughed and I somehow managed to avoid the question. Late that afternoon, we drifted off for forty winks. We drifted awake too. It wasn’t sudden, but slow. A slow realization that there we were still sitting next to each other, comfortably, after all these years. ‘Do you remember Feathers?’ Tawn asked me. ‘She never knew she was lucky she never saw what we saw.’ I wasn’t even surprised any more when Tawn and I thought about the same thing at the same time; we’d been doing that for years. ‘I was just remembering her.’ I might have even been dreaming her. ‘And I was dreaming about that barn owl.’
‘Our owl!’ Tawn said fondly. ‘Our clever owl.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked me.
‘Get a place of my own,’ I said without a moment’s hesitation.
‘They say that life begins at forty anyhow!’ I said gamely.
‘Well, that makes you only ten,’ Tawn said laughing. ‘And it makes me nine,’ she said.
‘And there was me waiting to feel grown-up, middle-aged. I still feel like a girl.’
‘You still are a girl!’ Tawn said.
‘I thought you said only lesbians stayed girls? And that only heterosexual women grew properly middle-aged?’
‘Did I say that?’ Tawn said. ‘Really? Well then you’re not really a proper heterosexual.’
‘I’m with a man.’
‘Not for much longer!’
‘But that doesn’t mean I want to be with a woman,’ I said. I could feel my hackles rising, like ruffled feathers.
‘Do you remember that time when we became convinced we were growing feathers on our arms?’ she said, after a brief pause. (Sometimes it seemed Tawn knew me better than I knew myself.)
‘Yes, and we thought that soon we’d fly!’ I said, swallowing hard.
‘And we stood at various parts of the garden and tried to take off?’
‘Once I saw my mum kiss your dad.’
‘Once I saw my dad kiss your mum.’
It was quite a confusing time. Hard to believe it was forty years ago. I looked at the clock. ‘It’s late enough now for us to have our gin.’
‘Where do you get all these rules from?’ Tawn said.
‘The middle-aged love rules!’ I said. ‘They like them more than the young or the old.’ I poured us both a gin, chuckling, chucked some ice in and some lime. We always used to like making up untrue facts.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Tawn said. ‘You’ve no idea how free you’ll feel.’
‘You’re on the open road now,’ she said. I gulped down my gin. I couldn’t imagine my nights. I couldn’t think what the nights would be like, locking up downstairs, taking the dog out for the last walk and then locking up, bolting the door.
‘You’re not going to feel anything like the fear you’ve been feeling,’ Tawn said. ‘There’s nothing like the fear you feel when you are in the wrong life.’
‘How do you know these things?’ I asked her.
‘Because I’m an owl. You are too.’
‘And we were never even in the brownies!’ I said.
‘Nope nor the . . . what was the other ones called, the ones you could progress to?’
‘Can’t remember,’ I said. ‘They wore blue uniforms.’
‘It’ll come back. This is the kind of thing that happens to forty- and fifty-year-olds even when they are only nine or ten.’
‘I know. Scary. Suddenly forgetting things.’
‘It’s only scary because we all want to be perfect. It’s not scary if we just don’t care,’ Tawn said.
‘But it’s the feeling of things slipping out of your control, the idea that we might suddenly just lose it, lose our minds.’ I could feel a note of hysteria creeping into my voice. I was only half joking.
‘We’ve everything to live for and nothing; that’s what you realize when you are forty.’
‘That you’re at least halfway there?’
‘Nope. You realize that you’re starting to turn back.’
‘Maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about that summer when we found out our mums and dads had swapped.’
‘We never talked about it at the time.’
‘Do you think it did our heads in?’
‘Well, it wasn’t exactly calming. It didn’t make us feel settled.’
‘Do you remember the night of the owl?’ Tawn said. I nodded. We hadn’t ever talked about that either. Not in excruciating detail. But now that we’d agreed I was ten and she was nine, exactly the ages we were then, it seemed we must. We must face what we saw and what we did about what we saw. And maybe after that we could go back to our names, to calling ourselves our real names. (Though I doubt we’d ever do that. It would sound like we were angry at each other, or suddenly frosty if I out of the blue started calling Tawn
Marion and she started calling me Anita. It’d be ridiculous. Our names would sound dated.) ‘I could never call you anything other than Tawn,’ I said, before we began the frightening work of piecing together the night of the owl. ‘Strange, don’t you think that we don’t really connect our nicknames to the owl any more?’
‘After a while, I don’t think you connect any name to anything any more. It just is,’ Tawn said. She had this way of explaining everything so that everything made perfect sense.
‘Do you think you need to drag things up before you can move on?’ I asked her. Just thinking about returning was making me feel sick.
‘Do you know what?’ Tawn said, and her voice sounded elated. ‘We don’t need to. We don’t need to do it. If we don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to. Our life has just begun. This is the new one we’re in.’
‘The past will always try and drag you back,’ I said, miserably.
‘Not if you don’t want it to,’ Tawn said. ‘Come on, Barn, let’s just move on. Let us just do it. Move on. They don’t deserve us.’
The next morning we both woke up feeling as if we’d released something in the night. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I asked. I didn’t want her to leave. We walked to the end of my street and turned left. Then we walked on the meadows for miles. By the Mersey, we saw a heron stand religiously still for some time before taking off, taking flight, its huge wings opening and closing, opening and closing.