by Anna Maxted
‘Well I don’t care if you don’t,’ I say sulkily, as Luke and my mother laugh at me. Traitors.
‘So will you feed Fatboy?’ I say to Luke, in an attempt to recover some dignity.
‘Love to,’ he replies. ‘Fatboy’s my mate.’
I smile and tease, ‘That figures, what with your similar hygiene habits!’ Fatboy, unlike normal cats, isn’t overkeen on washing. He always smells – as Tina puts it – ‘a bit particular’ behind the ears. As for Luke. He regards baths with the same affection as vampires regard garlic.
I expect Luke to laugh, but he doesn’t. ‘Thanks,’ he says coldly.
‘That was a joke!’ I stutter.
‘Well it wasn’t a very nice one,’ pipes up my mother who I will strangle if she offers one more unwanted opinion. I give up.
‘Sorry, but I didn’t mean it,’ I say crossly. ‘I’m going to make some calls,’ I add as I stamp into the lounge. Luke and my mother are already gassing and ignore me. Unbloodybelievable!
The answer machine is blinking. Maybe Tom? I press play. ‘Helen, it’s Laetitia. Calling to see if all is okay and to remind you there’s a meeting about the Get Rich Quick supplement tomorrow at nine thirty sharp. I need oodles of ideas and I’m counting on you!’ This is Laetitiaspeak for ‘I don’t give a damn if every member of your family has stiffed it because I am paying you (just) to be my maidservant, so be there or be unemployed!’ Needless to say, I have no ideas for the supplement – I’m the poorest person in the office. The work experience girl earns more than I do. What do I know about Getting Rich Quick?
Actually, here’s a good one: Wait For Your Dad To Croak – Hey, It Worked For Me! Ooh, now Michelle would call that bitter. Calm down, Helen. I breathe deeply, and refer to my list. Phone Tom. I leaf frantically through my diary to find his home number. I ring it and hold my breath.
‘Hello?’
‘Tom?’ I squeak, ‘it’s Helen! I’m so sorry!’ There is a pause.
‘What’s the excuse this time?’ he says icily. What? I am horrified.
‘You mean, you mean’ – I am practically speechless with indignation, that sly lipliner-abusing witch! – ‘You mean Celine didn’t pass on my message?’ Pause.
‘So you bothered to leave one.’
Am I paranoid or does everybody hate me? ‘Yes I did, actually. To tell you that my mother slit her wrists earlier today and had to be rushed to hospital.’ Take that, Ice Boy! Pleasingly, my underhand strategy has the desired effect.
‘Shit! Christ, Helen, that’s terrible! God, I’m sorry! Is she, er, how is she? And how are you?’
I say, in a conciliatory I’ve-got-the-moral-upper-hand tone, ‘She’s alright.’ I feel like adding, ‘But it was touch and go’. (A, I’ve heard this said on Casualty and B, I want to punish him for being unfriendly.) However, I restrain myself. First, it’s a lie, and second, I’d be playing into Celine’s over manicured hands.
‘And how are you?’ says Tom again.
I nod down the phone before whispering a strangled, ‘Fine.’ I can’t tell him the truth – that I am rigid with fear and seriously considering keeping my mother in a padded box at the end of my bed to avoid further fatalities. Instead I tell Tom an abridged version of the gory story and an elongated version of my phone call to Megavet. ‘She’s such a liar!’ I shriek, adding, before I can bite off my tongue: ‘She fancies you, you know!’ The second I say it I regret it. Why don’t I just shout ‘I fancy you, you know!’? It’s tantamount to the same thing.
‘Oh yes?’ says Tom coyly. ‘Why do you say that?’
The bastard! ‘I say it,’ I reply in a cute, flirty sing-song tone, ‘because she guards you like a hyena guards an antelope carcass.’
Hm. That didn’t come out the way I meant it to. But Tom’s good humour is patently restored because he says drily, ‘You flatter me.’
I giggle. ‘I’m sorry about tonight,’ I say. And I mean it. I am sorry. I’m also concerned that, this being the second time I’ve screwed up, a third offer won’t be forthcoming. Do I dare ask him? It’s not like I’m asking him to lend me money. Lizzy would ask a man out. Why am I the Rules girl?
‘Would you, are you free sometime later this week, or maybe next week?’ I blurt, cleverly making it sound as if my life is a friendless void.
‘Definitely,’ says Tom, ‘but maybe next week is better? Things might have calmed down a bit.’ We fix on the Tuesday.
I put the phone down and straight away start analysing the conversation like a bad psychotherapist. By suggesting next week as opposed to this week, was he hinting that I was selfish? Neglectful of my poorly mother? (Who, as I ponder this, I can hear cackling in the kitchen). Does it mean he doesn’t like me any more? Not that he said so, at least, not consciously. And Tuesday – that’s a worky, plodding, got to get up early tomorrow, good excuse to scarper at 10 p.m. sort of day. Does that mean he . . . ?
Enough. Enough already, you dork. The minute I start caring is the minute he’ll stop. I give a quick shake of my head to emphasise this cessation of caring, and phone Lizzy. She picks up and in the background I hear what sounds suspiciously like monks chanting. So before I inform my friend that my sole remaining parent is at no immediate risk of death I address a more pressing issue: ‘What the fuck’s that you’re listening to?’
She ignores the question and demands, ‘How’s your mum?’ I tell her. And, eventually, she confesses that her CD is entitled Gregorian Moods and she’ll tape it for me if I like.
‘No ta,’ I say.
‘Well, maybe for your mother then?’
I pause. It is a matter of principle that I automatically write off all Lizzy’s spooky chanty health-freaky bean-munching willow pod worthiness as twaddle. That said, I want to help my mother in any way I can and I cannot see her yapping away with a shrink. I really can’t. She has chosen me as her shrink. She’ll see the nurse once to humour Dr Collins but I reckon that’ll be it. She doesn’t want to speak to a stranger. My mother doesn’t want people listening because they’re paid to. She wants people to listen because they care about her. It’s all highly inconvenient and I need all the help I can get.
‘I’ll pay you for the tape,’ I tell Lizzy. I can’t bring myself to speak the words ‘Yes, I’d adore a copy of Gregorian Moods,’ aloud.
‘I can’t wait to tell Tina,’ says Lizzy happily.
‘One word and the feng shui plant gets it,’ I reply sweetly.
I have rescued Luke from my mother and we are trotting down the hall towards the front door, when Marcus emerges from his room wearing a small white towel round his trim waist. His face falls when he sees a grown-up. ‘Hi,’ he stammers, ‘I just, er, got out the shower.’ My mother ogles him, I’m ashamed to say, like a bird eyeing a plump worm.
‘We heard,’ I say chirpily as I push my gawking mother out of the flat. ‘A fifteen-minute shower – must be a record!’ The recall of his speechless fury keeps me smiling all the way to the Peugeot.
Chapter 20
WHEN I STARTED work at Girltime, I suffered from an affliction known as Fone Fear. (Okay, Phone Fear, but Fone Fear makes it sound less like an excuse and more like a syndrome.) Anyway, every time I had to make a call I’d put it off and put it off until it was 6 p.m. and the person I needed to speak to had left the office. My illness lasted approximately three days before a verbal thrashing from Laetitia scared it out of me. Alas, the virus was cowed but not defeated. Because this morning I rang my mother’s boss at the brisk hour of seven to tell her about her little relapse and it took me from 3.13 to 4.36 a.m. to perfect my lines, and another forty-five minutes to summon the courage to dial the number (I started lifting and replacing the receiver at 6.17 a.m.).
Mrs Armstrong’s first overt concern was for my mother’s health. ‘Shocking news . . . rest and recuperation . . . best wishes for a speedy recovery . . . spring back to her old self.’ Yet the undercurrent of strained patience and fretful guilt soon burst – gasping for atonement – to the surface.
Only last week, it emerged, Mrs Armstrong had ‘had a quiet word’ with Cecelia about ‘organisation’. Not a reprimand, goodness no, just a reminder that the Christmas concert was fast bearing down upon us and the programme, rehearsals, costumes, scripts, timetable, ought really to be well underway. She hoped Cecelia hadn’t taken this suggestion as a slight. Cecelia was an excellent teacher, a true professional. Only that if one staff member wasn’t firing from all cylinders, it placed a burden – no, wrong word – rather, it affected everyone.
I reassured Mrs Armstrong that her ‘quiet word’ had in no way prompted my mother to slash her wrists, although privately I bloody well thought it had. I told Mrs Armstrong I’d report back on an approximate date for my mother’s return to work (again) after consultation with the hospital. But from Mrs Armstrong’s artful response – ‘It’s easier for us to plan if we know someone is going to be absent for a while, than if we expect them to be there and they’re not’ – I suspected that Mrs Armstrong would prefer to rely on alternative cover until Christmas at least. For the sake of her own sanity, if not her budget.
At 8.30 a.m. – after a long hot shower that I’d have happily stood in for the rest of my life – I wake my mother with a cup of tea. And not by throwing the cup at her head. She rubs her eyes, does a little double-take on seeing her bandaged wrists, and slowly, gingerly heaves herself upright. ‘How are you feeling?’ I say.
‘I don’t know,’ she replies flatly. Damn.
‘Mum,’ I say, ‘I’ve got to leave for work in three minutes or I’ll be out of a job. But I’ve spoken to Mrs Armstrong, and she sends you her best and says don’t hurry back until you’re “right as rain”. Now what are you going to do today? Shall I ring Vivienne and ask her to come round? Would you like to meet me for lunch? What would you prefer?’
My mother wrinkles her nose and says, ‘Vivienne has her batik class on Tuesdays.’ Inwardly, I’m starting to panic. I can’t leave her alone already – blowing about aimlessly like a wisp of tumbleweed. She’s got a great cavernous yawn of a day stretching endlessly before her. She might have another pop. An unwelcome idea begins to form in my head. I don’t want to voice it. I’d rather ignore it until it retreats. Unfortunately it is now 8.33 and I have precisely no minutes to think of an alternative plan.
‘Mum,’ I blurt, ‘I know you don’t see each other that much, but what if I call Nana Flo?’ The mere chattery sound of her name sends an ugly dart of remorse shooting to the pit of my stomach.
The truth is that since the funeral day I’ve spoken to her twice. Once, on discovering my mother had become Miss Havisham. It occurred to me that, for all I knew, my grandmother had turned into Darth Vader and it was my duty to investigate. Her woolly stream of phone messages increased my trepidation. It took me four days to approach the telephone. When I explained that my mother hadn’t returned any of her calls because she was – according to her GP – ‘suffering from grief, resulting in a depressive illness’, Nana Flo was silent. Then she said, ‘Ah well, gotta get on!’ I was about to argue: my point being that when you have a depressive illness you can’t get on, but realised I’d be banging my head against a seventy-eight-year-old brick wall. And then it occurred to me – if Nana Flo was so rigidly in favour of getting on, why ring my mother every other day for an entire month, bleating like a small lamb mislaid on a mountainside?
So I said, cleverly, ‘Talking of which, how are you getting on, Nana?’
She replied, ‘I’m managing.’
At this point, I was ready to let it go. But – spurred on by the real live spectre of my closest relatives dying or zombifying one by one – I blundered on: ‘You have been calling Mum a lot, er, recently. Are you lonely at all?’
Nana Flo gave a mirthless bark and retorted in an unpleasant tone, ‘“Lonely” she says! “Lonely!”’ – then in a snitty one – ‘Your mother always did like to play helpless.’
What could I say to that? After a stunned pause, I said, ‘I’ll get Mummy to call you when the doctor says she’s strong enough.’
The second time I spoke to Nana Flo was when I actually saw her – the day probate was granted. After work I drove round to see my mother and my grandmother was sitting in the kitchen reading the TV Times through a magnifying glass which distorted her eye and made her look like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. We had a short, civil conversation about her blood pressure (‘can’t complain’) and that was about it. Since then we haven’t exchanged one word. And, not wishing to overdramatise my feelings on the situation, I’d rather jump off the top of the Empire State Building than speak to her now.
Although if I know my mother, I suspect she’ll feel the same way and I won’t have to. I am incredulous when my mother says, ‘You go to work, I’ll call her.’ At first, I don’t believe her.
‘Really?’ I say shrilly. ‘But you never call her!’
My mother shoots me a snide look: ‘And what do you know?’ she says rudely.
‘I know,’ I say huffily, ‘that you call Nana Flo about as often as I call Nana Flo.’
My mother regards me haughtily and replies, ‘Then you obviously call her at least twice a week.’ Do I believe my ears?
‘Mummy, you’re joking,’ I say.
My mother looks as smug as it’s possible to look when you’ve recently tried to unhand yourself with a razor blade. She says: ‘We see each other every Thursday. She’s not that bad when you get to know her. Actually she’s good company – for a grouchy old crone!’
I am so delighted I smack my mother’s leg playfully through the bedclothes. It’s only as I’m puffing down Long Acre towards the office that it strikes me: I’ve been squandering about sixteen hours a week with my mother for the last five months. Why the hell didn’t she tell me before? Needless to say, I skid into work ten minutes late for the supplement meeting.
When I slink out of the supplement meeting exhausted but relieved (having winged it – or is it wung it?) there is an illegal copy of Gregorian Moods sitting on my desk and a note from Lizzy: ‘Lunch?’ She’s so sweet but I know she’ll expect a gritty account of my mother’s progress and today, I’m not up to sharing with the group. My head is swirling. Why didn’t Mum tell me about her and Nana Flo? Her concealment is as offensive as Tina’s sudden, hypocritical refusal to divulge intimate juicy details about her sex life with Adrian. When Lizzy and I are her closest friends!
I make my excuses, then pounce on the phone and ring my mother. She picks up and I rattle off about fifty questions: ‘How are you? How are you feeling? Is Nana with you? What have you been doing?’
My mother, to my infinite relief, is calm. She’s ‘tired but feels better than yesterday’. Christ, I should think so with all those jollifying drugs inside you. My mother also tells me that Nana Flo came round although she only arrived at 11.30 because she took the bus. Nana Flo has been showing her pictures of Morrie as a small boy. He looked serious in all of them.
While I am impressed that Nana Flo is – for the first time in her life – doing the old person thing and hoicking about dreary aged photographs, I suspect my mother is keeping something from me. I can hear it in her voice. I ask a very stupid question: ‘Mum, are you okay?’
She chirps, ‘Fine! Nana Flo is moving in for a while.’
At first I don’t believe her. I’d find it easier to believe that Santa Claus is shacking up with the Tooth Fairy. ‘You’re kidding!’ I squeak. But she isn’t. ‘But why?’ I say.
‘Because Dr Collins said I need a support system,’ she retorts.
‘Well, that’s great,’ I say slowly. ‘So you won’t need me to stay over then.’
My mother replies happily, ‘No.’
This news should delight me, but it doesn’t. It makes me growly for the rest of the afternoon.
By the time I get home to the flat I’m feeling as snappy as a shark with a tooth infection. I slam the door and am promptly assaulted by a guttural cacophany: ‘Uuuuh! Uuuh! Uuuuh!’ and ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Please,
not again! It’s obscene. I hurl a frenzied volley of V-signs towards Marcus’s room, then blow a long, loud raspberry. Bastard bastard bastard. The anger pulsates. Every grunt and moan is a personal affront. I stomp to the kitchen, viciously grinding my heels into the carpet. (A typical Marcus refrain: ‘Can you take off your shoes in the house, please? That carpet cost £24.95 per square metre.’)
I yank a stick of French bread out of the freezer and wish I was a certified psychopath so I could burst into Marcus’s room and beat him about the head with it and not be sent to prison. Hey, maybe I could bribe my mother to do it. I shove the baguette into the oven, thunder back to my room, and flop on to the bed. Normally I’d play the Beastie Boys to reinforce my wrath, but this mood is too dark and malevolent for tunes. It demands silence. Abruptly, I’m gripped by a surge of hate so vivid I can taste its sour potency. Suddenly I’m thumping and pummelling my pillow – bam! bam! bam! – and my fists are bashing Marcus’s face to a pulp and I’m screaming and screaming. No words, just a long shrill blast of sound.
I only stop screaming when Luke, Marcus, and Michelle burst into my room on the assumption that I’m being murdered. Luke is blinkily anxious while Marcus and Michelle are as breathless and pink-faced as I am. Michelle is wrapped in Marcus’s red velvet dressing gown and Marcus is wearing black silk boxer shorts. ‘Bad day at work,’ I explain, forcing a smile.
Marcus glares at me.
Michelle affects concern and croons, ‘You’ve burst a blood vessel under your eye – loads of funny red dots! Do you want me to get you some ice?’
I sit on my hands to stop them clawing her face. ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I say, although my voice is now as hoarse as a stallion, ‘you can all go away now.’
Marcus treats me to one last glance of disdain before exiting. Michelle curls her fingers in a queenly wave and follows, shutting the door behind her. Luke remains, his arms dangling awkwardly. He scratches his head and says, ‘Do you want a hug?’