All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  Bridget shrugged.

  ‘She’s going to do a painting for each one of us,’ said Bridget.

  I assumed that I wasn’t part of us – no I wasn’t, I knew I wasn’t.

  I breathed deeply and I gritted my teeth so that my jaw hurt.

  ‘Also,’ said Bridget, ‘did you hear about the ducks?’

  ‘What ducks?’

  ‘There was this massive load of rubber bath ducks being transported on a ship, and they all fell off …’

  I nodded.

  ‘And now they are floating all around the oceans.’

  This was quite a random thing to say.

  ‘I just love the thought of it,’ said Bridget, with a funny little yelp of laughter, which started and stopped very suddenly. ‘They’re going to start landing on beaches in all different parts of the world.’

  ‘Do you remember our bath-time duck stories?’ I said.

  ‘I wish it was then,’ said Bridget.

  Chapter 33

  Bridget said nothing at all about her mother’s cancer.

  For days.

  For a whole week, then two weeks, then three.

  Then, in the minibus, on the way to swimming, she said, ‘My mother has Stage 4 breast cancer.’

  I grabbed her hand.

  I hoped there were 10 stages – I thought 10 was the round sort of number people normally used for things.

  ‘There are medical advances all the time,’ she said.

  I tried to think what to say.

  ‘Do you remember what D said about the wasp?’ I said.

  When I said D, it was as if she exploded.

  The PE teacher said that Bridget and I didn’t have to go to the swimming lesson, and we sat and cried together on a slatted bench in the changing rooms. Even though I hated crying, I couldn’t stop myself.

  ‘You don’t have to be polite to me just because I have cancer,’ Blue Mother said to me when I went round after school.

  Then: ‘You remember your mother got herself well again for you. Well, I’m going to do the same …’

  For me?

  ‘… for my lot,’ she said.

  Blue Mother, darling Blue Mother of the clinking bangles and the smooth skin, of the shoulder-squeezes and the tingly scalp-rubs, didn’t get better. She got worse.

  She lost her energy, and lay rag-dolled on the sofa, where we joined her, arranging ourselves into shapes which fitted into her, a litter of overgrown puppies, willing her to reinflate.

  She didn’t.

  She listened to our stories, and took a deep breath to answer, to smile, to sparkle a second of brightness into her fading eyes.

  We all felt like crying all the time when we were with her.

  But we knew we mustn’t.

  She probably felt like crying too, knowing how much we needed her.

  I say we.

  But I was careful to remember it was really they.

  I was careful to defer to them, to keep my distance on the sofa.

  She, the most naturally brilliant mother, could no longer mother.

  She could guarantee them nothing.

  And, when you caught her off guard, you could see how much this hurt her.

  She went in and out of hospital.

  The chemotherapy ate her beautiful dark wavy hair.

  She found it hard to breathe.

  Bridget went to visit her in hospital and she literally froze when she saw her, so Mr Blume had to carry her out, her body stiff and seized up, and after that she refused to go back, not to the hospital or even the doctor’s surgery to get her own verruca looked at. And she wouldn’t talk about this, not even to me.

  When Blue Mother came home from hospital, Mr Blume brought her bed into the sitting room.

  ‘We must be big and hopeful,’ she sometimes said, and she flexed her arm like Popeye, with a little giggle.

  But her giggle was full of tears.

  The cancer had broken through her membranes and made a huge lump under her armpit and in her lung.

  When I saw her staring out of the garden doors, I could tell that she wasn’t seeing the bald lawn or the cricket stumps. No, she was looking way beyond, to a mirage of the future, to her children’s weddings, to her Blumey grandchildren.

  Looking at her was painful.

  I can’t imagine how painful it was for Mr Blume.

  And the children.

  Because all the air was coming out of her, and her breathing was laboured, and she was shrinking, and she tried to hide herself under jewelled scarves because she didn’t want to hurt us by being how she was.

  Her eyes said I am sorry for looking like this.

  For being like this.

  I tried to think of ways to talk to Bridget.

  ‘It must be so hard,’ I said nervously.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said.

  ‘Can I do anything?’ I said.

  ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘She’ll be better soon.’

  Did she think that?

  If so, I didn’t want to contradict her.

  Bridget didn’t cry again with me after the day in the swimming pool changing rooms.

  She started eating more than she’d ever eaten before in her life.

  She was either very quiet or very loud, and this made me nervous, not knowing what to expect. She was like a fire alarm that might go off at any time. She forgot to give me a present on my eleventh birthday, and although I understood, it hurt me. Jean took me to the cinema, and out for pizza, and Pink Mother gave me a hard pink birthday cake, which I took into school in slices wrapped in rose napkins. Bridget ate the cake but still didn’t give me a birthday present.

  Mrs Williams did a Form Time on healthy eating as part of her excruciating puberty series, and we all tried not to look at Bridget.

  My legs were getting so hairy that I was limbering up to ask my mother if I could shave them. When I did, a beautician appeared in the basement, unfolded a stretcher-cum-trolley and asked me to climb onto it, and she started slathering hot wax onto my legs and peeling it off, successfully ripping out every hair, one at a time, from its roots, but also relieving me of one layer of my own skin.

  I lay back, panting, and she put cream on my legs and started rubbing it in.

  In the middle of the rubbing, the phone rang.

  Pink Mother picked it up outside the door.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear.’

  Gap.

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  Gap.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ she said.

  She came in.

  The woman stopped rubbing.

  ‘Eva,’ said Pink Mother, ‘I am very sorry to tell you that Bridget’s mother has died.’

  I felt a massive wind blow through my body, and I had this strange feeling that all of me had been blown out of myself and was flying around the room like debris caught in a tornado.

  I was an outline.

  Drawn in pen.

  Still lying on my stretcher-cum-trolley, with my desecrated outlined felt-tip legs.

  I couldn’t move.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  I couldn’t imagine a world in which Blue Mother didn’t exist.

  I couldn’t imagine that people who were alive really did die.

  It seemed impossible.

  We prepare for everything, thinking carefully ahead as we put things in our suitcase for a holiday, for example.

  But we cannot pack for death.

  Chapter 34

  I leapt off the trolley and ran up the stairs, and up the other stairs, retching with pain.

  I ran into my room, and I picked up the gold crucifix.

  ‘Come back!’ I cried, and shrieked, and begged on my knees. ‘Resurrect like Jesus Christ!’

  I bent over so that my forehead touched the carpet, and the carpet smelled horrible, and I was sitting on top of the hill with her blue cheesecloth arm around me. I beat the carpet with my fists.

  ‘No no no no no!’ I screamed.

 
; ‘Come back!’ I screamed.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ I screamed.

  Then I ran out of breath and slumped against the bed.

  ‘Two more days, God!’ I whispered. ‘I’m trusting you on this one!’

  ‘One more day, God!’ I whispered.

  But Blue Mother didn’t resurrect like Jesus Christ after three days, and I was destroyed.

  Pink Mother didn’t let me go to her funeral, so I stayed off school, curled in a ball under the sheets at the foot of my bed, like a woodlouse.

  The next day, Mrs Williams leant the painting Bridget’s mother had given her against the wall of our classroom because, apparently, this was what she wanted.

  All the Populars gathered around Bridget, and didn’t leave her alone all day.

  I couldn’t get anywhere near her.

  I sat and stared at the painting – the churned-up sea on a windy day.

  Bridget was still performing slightly hyperactively for the Populars.

  I couldn’t believe she didn’t look sadder.

  I couldn’t believe that she didn’t want me, and not them.

  I stared at the painting, at the misty shore, right in the distance.

  If you looked carefully, you could see a tiny yellow bath duck and a tiny green frog – like the ones we used for our bath-time stories – which were sitting all perky and bright on a gold nest.

  ‘May I be excused?’ I said.

  I ran down the corridor and exploded with pain in the locked loo cubicle, retching and gasping and thinking that I loved her more than anyone, more than even her own children.

  Chapter 35

  A few days after the funeral, there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Don’t open it!’ shrieked Pink Mother. ‘Let me check the camera!’

  ‘It’s Mr Blume,’ I said, opening the door. ‘I saw him through the window.’

  Mr Blume’s hair looked like he’d had an electric shock, and his shirt was crumpled and had come out of his trousers on one side. He was holding a big thin rectangle, almost as tall as him, wrapped in brown paper.

  I wondered – could it be a picture for me?

  No, stop it, I said to myself, don’t hope, hoping is bad, it ends in tears.

  Pink Mother stared at me, and went into the kitchen.

  Mr Blume leant the long thin package against the hall wall and opened his arms.

  I fell into them.

  Then I tried to pull myself together, and took a step backwards.

  ‘Come in here,’ I said to him. ‘This was my father’s study.’

  He leant the package against the wall again, and he sat down on the leather Chesterfield armchair.

  He looked around him as if he’d never been in a room before.

  ‘It must be awful for you,’ I said. ‘I know how much you loved her.’

  I felt as if Blue Mother would have wanted me to be very open and honest about my feelings as she truly believed in openness and honesty, even if I found it hard. But perhaps I was a bit too open and honest, because tears started to gather at the corner of his eyes.

  ‘It’s awful for everyone,’ he said, trying to be brave, picking up a gold shell ornament and stroking it.

  ‘It’s worse for you,’ I said.

  I remember him saying something about the special love between them, which was always there, from the moment they met right to the last moment of her life, and what a blessing that had been for him.

  ‘Was it love at first sight?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes!’ he said, and he tried to smile.

  ‘What does that actually feel like?’

  ‘It’s like a chemical reaction!’ he said.

  I tried to smile back at him.

  ‘The energy in the universe isn’t held inside particles like scientists always thought,’ said Mr Blume. ‘It’s held between them.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Love also has to be between,’ he said. ‘Do you see?’

  He was smiling, though one tear was rolling down his cheek, and I told him that he looked like one of those days when it’s sunny and rainy at the same time, and if he wasn’t careful, he might accidentally make a rainbow. Then I felt like an idiot.

  ‘Love and grief, joy and pain,’ he said. ‘They’re very close together. Or perhaps sometimes they’re not even different things.’

  He asked me if I’d ever felt a piercing joy, a painful joy. And I remembered the day we went for a picnic, when Blue Mother was sitting between Bridget and me with her arms around us as we looked out to the huge sea, and the boats floating liked curled feathers.

  I told him that in Lyme Regis I’d felt so happy it hurt.

  Pink Mother came in.

  She didn’t mention Mr Blume’s loss at all.

  She simply said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Mr Blume.

  ‘Milk and sugar?’ she said.

  And she went out.

  ‘I brought you something, Eva,’ said Mr Blume. ‘It’s something Aunty M painted for you.’

  Pink Mother brought Mr Blume’s tea in a cup whose handle was so small that he couldn’t fit any of his fingers through it. She went out again.

  ‘She painted one for me?’ I stuttered.

  ‘She really loved you very much,’ he said. ‘As if you were one of her own.’

  I exploded.

  I was drowning in my own tears.

  I was part of her lot!

  I had a lot.

  ‘Why don’t you open the parcel?’ said Mr Blume.

  He lay it flat on the floor, and I started to pull off the brown paper with my shaking hands.

  It was a tall rectangular piece of metal.

  And on it was a painting.

  Of a girl.

  Who was me.

  With my actual face and long dark hair.

  And she was also pretty, this girl.

  She/I was sitting on a little wood-and-wicker chair, with a terracotta pot at her feet, with red geraniums in it, their petals dashed with dew or drops of rain.

  The background of the painting was a grey-green colour, with about twelve terracotta pots on the wall, full of red and white geraniums.

  ‘She was going to paint more pots,’ said Mr Blume. ‘All over the walls. You can see it’s not finished. She ran out of strength. I never thought she would. You just can’t imagine it will ever happen.’

  Chapter 36

  ‘Did you like the painting?’ said Bridget breezily the next day at school, acting weirdly fine, as she had consistently since her mother died.

  Before I could answer, she headed to Mrs Williams’ desk to hand in her homework.

  ‘Are you OK with it?’ I said when she came back to her desk.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ she said, frowning.

  ‘I thought maybe you wouldn’t want me to have one,’ I said. ‘After all, I’m not her daughter.’

  Bridget blushed, and the skin on her face trembled.

  ‘By the way,’ I said. ‘Major follicle. It never seemed the right moment to say.’

  Then it happened.

  Bridget collapsed.

  Tears seemed to be bursting not only through her eyes but through her skin.

  Mrs Williams said we should go and have a walk together in the school grounds, and we could be as long as we liked. We walked across the grass, holding hands, and Bridget sobbed and shook, and I started crying too. We sat next to the pond where we liked to spot goldfish, and we put our arms around each other like my two koala bears that velcroed together, and I could feel the soft flesh she’d built up around her pain.

  Bridget said, ‘I’m so sorry but I didn’t want you to have the painting!’

  It was almost a relief to hear her say what I already knew.

  ‘It was because you were so pretty in it,’ she sobbed. ‘And I’m not even in my one.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, because it was all I could manage. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ s
he said. ‘But all I got was a duck and a frog.’

  ‘It’s not her fault either,’ I said, because I couldn’t bear Bridget to be angry with her mother, now that she was dead and would be dead forever, which might mean Bridget would be angry with her forever, which would be too sad for me to bear.

  As if she was reading my mind, Bridget said, ‘I hate feeling angry with her. I’ve never felt angry with her before. And this is the worst possible moment.’

  We fell into each other, so that we could feel each other’s hearts beating, and we both knew that there was nothing we could say that would help, so we just let ourselves cry. After a while I said that I would never ever leave her or stop loving her, and that we would definitely go to whichever secondary school we both got into.

  ‘There’s one thing I’m dreading about going to secondary school,’ said Bridget, between sobs. ‘Do you think people will think of me as the fat girl?’

  ‘You will always be beautiful to me,’ I said.

  ‘I miss her so much,’ she said, and she tried to swallow her sobs. ‘So much, Eva, that it actually hurts, you know, physically.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning and, for a millionth of a second, it feels like she’s still alive.’

  I held her hand and squeezed it, and when she could speak, Bridget said, ‘It’s just knowing I can never have another conversation with her.’

  Now I couldn’t breathe.

  I wanted to tell her how much I missed Blue Mother too, but I knew it was her grief that mattered today. I also desperately wanted to tell her about the photo of the angel and the beheaded mother which I’d never managed to show her – but I knew it was her grief that mattered today.

  ‘D looks so lost,’ said Bridget, swallowing.

  ‘He loved her so much,’ I said. ‘That should be a comfort.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Bridget. ‘If you have love and lose it, it’s too terrible. It’s not worth it.’

  ‘Not having love is terrible too,’ I said.

  I wanted to say that you don’t grieve in the same way for love you’ve never had, but it still feels like a punch in the stomach. I wanted to say that you don’t get any sympathy cards for the love you’ve never had, however much it hurts.