by Maria Goodin
“Toes.”
“Whatever. The point is that you have a right to this information. And you said it yourself, soon it will be too late.”
I shake my head, more confused than ever. I wanted Mark to make me feel in control again. I wanted him to help me sort my thoughts into piles and my feelings into compartments. I wanted him to do what he does best; take what’s there and give it structure, tidy it up, make it neat, rid it of any emotion and reduce it down to hard, cold facts that can’t be felt, only known. But I forgot that there’s another side to what he does, and that’s the research. He not only processes facts that are already known, he builds on them, searching for answers, prodding and probing until he gets to the bottom of every single question. That’s what a good scientist does; he never stops questioning. Out of nowhere a memory comes back to me of a science lesson in secondary school when we had to dissect a daffodil. We pulled it apart bit by bit, locating the stamen, the receptacle, the stigma, the sepal… By the time we had finished we knew what was beneath those pretty, yellow petals, but of course all the beauty had gone, and all that was left was a tattered, ruined mess.
“Maybe I don’t need to know anymore,” I say, wearily, “maybe I don’t want to.”
Mark lets go of my hand. “You mean you would rather not know the truth because it’s easier that way,” he says, disapprovingly.
“I would rather spend the final days with my mother some way other than confronting her, and fighting her, and trying to wheedle things out of her that she clearly doesn’t want to remember and I might not want to know.”
“That’s what this is about really, isn’t it?” says Mark, rather harshly. “The fact that you don’t want to know. This isn’t all about your mother. It’s about the fact that after going on and on about how you wanted to know the truth, you don’t like what you’ve heard and you suddenly don’t want to know anymore.”
“Is that really so wrong?” I snap, suddenly annoyed by his lack of understanding.
“It is when you’ve been saying for months, and quite rightly so, that your mother needs to face facts.”
“Well, perhaps I was wrong!” I shout, jumping out of my seat. “Maybe she doesn’t want to face facts!”
“You mean maybe you don’t want to!” snaps Mark, standing up.
“Okay, maybe I don’t want to! Maybe the childhood I knew was just a pack of lies, but at least it was a happy one, and at least it felt like mine. I threw it away and in return I got a miserable childhood that doesn’t feel like it has any connection to me at all!”
“So you would have preferred not to know the truth? You would have preferred to carry on living a life of ridiculous stories and silly lies?”
“Yes!” I startle myself with my response. Yes, yes I would have preferred it. If only I’d known what was to come…“I want to have been bitten by a crabcake!” I shout, my voice trembling with emotion. “I want to have dipped my toes in the neighbours’ tea! I want to have been involved in a high-speed chase from Tottenham Highstreet to Enfield Chase!”
“Then you are just as delusional as your crazy mother!”
“Maybe I am! So what? What does it matter?”
Mark shakes his head in despair. “I thought you were better than that. I thought you were a paragon of truth and reason and logic, but it seems that was just when it was convenient for you. I’m disappointed in you, Meg.”
Disappointed in me! I clench my fists by my sides, swallow down the lump in my throat and look the admirable Mark Daly squarely in the eye.
“If that’s the case,” I say, “then I guess this particular experiment has reached its conclusion.”
Lying on my bed I close my eyes, trying to go back to the day the spaghetti plant sprouted in our window box. If I concentrate hard I can see it there, stringy pieces of spaghetti hanging between green leaves…
‘Well, I never!’ My mother had exclaimed. ‘I bet that came from Mrs Trivelli in the flat above. She’s always leaving bits and bobs on her kitchen windowsill for the birds. I bet she went to put a piece of spaghetti out and it fell down into our window box and sprouted.’ My mother licked her finger and held it out the kitchen window. ‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘I thought as much. A westerly wind. That will make a spaghetti plant sprout before you can say Bob’s your uncle. You know the problem with spaghetti plants, don’t you?’
I looked up at her and shook my head. Being only four-years-old I had no idea about the problems with spaghetti plants.
‘They grow and grow and grow, and before you know it they’re as big as a house. In South America there’s a vast jungle of spaghetti plants, so dense and thick that nobody who has ever gone in there has found their way out alive. In 1953 an explorer by the name of George Wallis Boo Cooper entered the spaghetti jungle, and they say he’s still in there now, wandering around and around in circles, eating spaghetti all day long. Do you know what the moral of that story is?’
I thought carefully. ‘Don’t go into a spaghetti jungle?’
‘No, don’t throw food out your window when you live in a flat. You never know what might grow from it. Now, the only way to stop a spaghetti plant growing and spreading is to pick the spaghetti as quickly as possible. So I think the best idea is if I dangle you out of the window by your legs and you start picking.’
I thought about the number of stairs we had to climb to get to the fourth floor, and about all the traffic going by on the main road below. ‘It’s a long, long way down,’ I said, curling my hair anxiously around my finger and chewing my lip.
‘We all have to do things we don’t like in life, Darling,’ said my mother, picking me up by the ankles and swinging me out of the window. I felt my dress fall over my head and the wind whipping around my bare legs.
‘Nobody’s looking at you,’ said my mother, in the way that mothers do when their children are clearly exposed to all and sundry. ‘Now, if the spaghetti is ripe it will feel warm and soft, with still a little bit of bite. If it’s hard and brittle it’s not ready for picking. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I called from underneath the skirt of my dress. All the blood was rushing to my head and I felt pleased I couldn’t see the traffic whizzing by below. I started picking as quickly as possible, going by feel alone as I couldn’t see a thing, and after my initial fear had subsided I started to quite enjoy myself. ‘Look how much I’m picking!’ I shouted to my mother, as I dangled from her grasp.
‘You’re doing wonderfully, Darling!’ She called. ‘You’ll be a champion spaghetti picker when you grow up. The best in the world!’
And so that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I planned to travel to South America and earn my fortune picking my way through the spaghetti jungles. I wasn’t scared of getting lost like George Wallis Boo Cooper, who clearly didn’t have the natural knack for feeling his way around spaghetti plants like I did. I was going to pick enough spaghetti in six months to feed the whole of Italy, and then I’d buy a big house for my mother to live in, so that she didn’t have to put up with Mrs Trivelli throwing old bits of dinner into her window box.
I open my eyes and look up at the ceiling, somehow surprised to find myself still lying on my bed. A faint smile on my lips and for the first time in days I feel calm.
Ewan has picked the last of the fruit due for harvesting and left it in three Tesco carrier bags, outside the kitchen door. I can’t see him, but every so often I catch a glimpse of Digger crossing the bottom of the garden, so I know he must be down there somewhere. I put the kettle on and make two mugs of strong black coffee, before shrugging on the baggy green jumper that my mother keeps by the back door for gardening purposes, and heading outside.
The sky is grey and overcast, promising rain again. Ewan is sitting on an upturned wooden crate with his back to me eating a handful of blackberries.
“I could charge you for those, you know,” I say, as I approach.
He turns with a start and then smiles. I walk towards him across a patch of soil that p
reviously bore rows of lettuces, but which today lies bare, the soil freshly dug over. I look around me and see that several patches are in the same state. Naked, stripped of their summer plants, they wait in limbo between one season and the next. I hold one of the mugs out to Ewan, and he looks slightly surprised but takes it.
“How’s your mother?” he asks, looking up at me, his face full of concern.
“She’s okay. Tired. She’s been in bed most of the day. She doesn’t remember anything about yesterday. About Gwennie arriving I mean, and fainting.”
Ewan nods. I wonder if he’s going to ask me about Gwennie, about who she was, why my mother was so shocked to see her, what happened after he left, but he doesn’t.
Instead he just says: “I hope everything’s okay.”
I smile, grateful for this simple, unintrusive gesture of support. “Thanks.”
Digger trots over to see me and I fondle his ear.
“We saw Mark leaving earlier,” says Ewan, “unfortunately I couldn’t stop Digger from rushing over to say hello to his old friend. I think Mark will be spending the evening washing muddy paw prints out of his clothes.”
“Well, don’t worry,” I say, “you won’t be seeing Mark around here again.”
Ewan raises his eyebrows, surprised. “I’m sorry.”
I give him a knowing look. “No you’re not.”
“No, honestly, I am. I mean, if you’re upset then I’m sorry.”
I shake my head. “Actually, it’s strange. I’m not nearly as upset as I thought I would be.”
“In that case, I couldn’t care less.”
I turn to him, shocked by his bluntness. He flashes me a cheeky half smile, and I almost laugh.
We sip our coffee in silence, until Ewan catches me looking around for somewhere to sit and quickly shifts sideways along the wooden crate. I can feel him, watching me curiously as I settle myself next to him. He is not used to me voluntarily being in his presence, let alone deliberately sitting down with him. I feel slightly awkward and wonder if he does too, but my mother is in bed asleep and I don’t want to be on my own right now. The crate is small for both of us, and I try to hold my body at an angle so that there is a little gap between us. We sit looking around us, gazing at the sky, at the orchard, at the barren vegetable patches. I count the holes in the ground that Digger has made. Only five. He’s definitely getting better.
“I’m going to fill them in later,” says Ewan, reading my mind.
“I should hope so,” I tell him.
Out of the corner of my eye I watch his hands, covered in grime, clasped around his coffee cup, and his sinewy forearms, tanned and covered with golden brown hairs. I look at the rip in his grubby jeans, just over the knee, where the skin of his leg just shows through; and at his tatty boots, covered in mud, with laces that don’t match.
“Will you tell me a story?” I ask him.
He strokes the top of Digger’s head, long, hard strokes that pull the dog’s skin back, revealing the white at the top of his eyes. It is some time before he speaks, and in that time in silence I realise how confused he must be. After the way I have mocked his legends and ridiculed his myths, accused him of having his head in the clouds and scolded him for being a fantasist. And now I have the gall to ask this of him.
“What sort of a story?” he asks, finally.
I shake my head. “I don’t mind. Anything.” Anything, I think, to take me away from here for a while.
Digger lies down by Ewan’s feet and settles his head on one of his master’s boots as if waiting for him to begin. Ewan gazes thoughtfully down the garden.
“After Zeus had punished Prometheus for giving fire to man,” he begins, “he decided that all humans should be punished for their lack of respect. So he came up with a very cunning plan. He created a woman from clay. The goddess Athene breathed life into the clay, Aphrodite made her very beautiful and Hermes taught her how to be charming and deceitful. Zeus called her Pandora, and he sent her as a gift to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus.
“‘Don’t trust any gift from Zeus,’ Prometheus warned his brother. ‘He is cruel. Think about what he did to me.’
“But Epimetheus had already fallen head over heels in love with Pandora, and so he decided to marry her.
“Zeus was pleased. His trap was working. He gave Pandora a wedding gift of a beautiful box.
“‘But I give you this gift on one condition,’ he told her. ‘You must never, ever open the box.’
“Well, every day Pandora wondered what on earth was in that box. She couldn’t for the life of her understand why Zeus would keep it a secret. It seemed to make no sense. It drove her crazy, to the point where she couldn’t think of anything else except finding out what was inside.
“Finally, Pandora could no longer bear the agony of not knowing. One day, she took the key off the shelf, crept up to the box, fitted the key carefully into the lock and turned it. Slowly, she lifted the lid of the box, holding her breath. What will I find, she wondered. Perhaps some fine silks, some gold bracelets, or even a large sum of money?
“But there was no golden treasure. There were no shining bracelets and no fine silks. Pandora’s excitement quickly turned to disappointment, and then to horror. Inside, were all the evils she could think of. Out of the box poured terrible misery, sadness, anger and pain, all shaped like tiny buzzing moths. The creatures stung Pandora over and over again, and she slammed the lid shut. Epimetheus ran into the room to find her crying in pain. ‘Pandora,’ he said to her, tending to her stings, ‘Zeus tried to warn you. Why did you have to find out what lay inside that box? Well, now you know. You should never have opened it.’”
Ewan stops and sips his coffee. I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face. The message of the story is clear: pursue the truth and you might not like what you find. Either way, on your head be it. Ewan knows what has happened without my saying a word. And this is his message to me? That I have to suffer the consequences of my actions? That I made my bed and now I must lie in it? This isn’t the story I wanted. This isn’t what I wanted to hear. I feel a lump rise in my throat and prepare to leave.
“But that wasn’t the end,” Ewan suddenly begins again, “because Pandora could still hear a voice calling to her from the box, pleading with her to be let out. Epimetheus agreed that nothing inside the box could be worse than the horrors that had already been released, so together they opened the lid once more. And inside they found that something had been left behind.”
Ewan pauses. I turn, watching his profile expectantly. The clouds overhead have parted slightly, bathing us in comforting rays of warm afternoon sunshine. I study the way the golden light illuminates Ewan’s eyelashes, the stubble on his chin, his eyebrows, highlighting the contours of his face.
“What was inside?” I ask, quietly.
He turns to face me, flecks of amber twinkling in his warm brown eyes. One side of his mouth raises slightly into a smile. “Hope,” he says.
Chapter 17
The day comes, all too soon, when my mother can’t get out of bed.
“I’ll get up soon and make us both some breakfast,” she murmurs, pulling the covers closer around her. “What would you like? Perhaps some cinnamon toast? Or some stewed apples?”
“Mother,” I say, about to tell her that it is already two o’clock in the afternoon and that she has missed both breakfast and lunch, but she is already asleep again.
Later, when she still hasn’t risen, I offer her soup, toast, fruit, ice-cream, tea, juice, but she doesn’t want anything.
“I might get up and make myself something in a while,” she says, but she never does.
That night she doesn’t sleep at all, complaining of an ache in her bones that she puts down to too much exertion recently.
“Perhaps I’ve overdone it this Summer,” she wonders out loud, wincing as she shifts under the covers, trying to get comfortable. Her breathing is laboured and wheezy, and she complains that it
feels like an elephant is sitting on her chest.
“Do you remember the time that elephant broke through the railings,” she asks, looking up at me with heavy eyes as I adjust her pillow, “in a bid to get to our delicious iced buns?”
“Shh,” I whisper, gently placing my hand on hers, “don’t.”
Dr Bloomberg comes. He gives her pink pills to stop the pain, and blue pills to stop the nausea caused by the pink pills.
“Would you like to stay for dinner, Doctor?” my mother asks, smiling up at him from her bed. Her face is white and her skin has taken on a certain transparency. “There’s some lovely stroganoff in the freezer.”
She struggles to push herself up from the pillow, ready to start playing hostess.
“I’m afraid I’ve just eaten, Valerie,” the Doctor says, laying a large hand on her shoulder so that she sinks back down. “Otherwise I wouldn’t miss your stroganoff for the world.”
“You need to start preparing yourself, Meg,” Dr Bloomberg tells me gently, as we stand in the hallway.
I know what he is saying, but it feels unreal, as if this is a play and we are all actors. Any minute now I expect the curtain to fall, and when it rises again my mother will run down the stairs and we will all link hands and take a bow amidst a flourish of applause.
“As things progress,” says Dr Bloomberg, lowering his head and peering at me over the top of his spectacles, “there are various options. The hospice is one, although at this stage hospital might be – ”
“She’s staying here,” I blurt out immediately.
My mother has always hated hospitals, and it had never even occurred to me that she would die anywhere else but at home, or that anyone else should take care of her other than me.
“It may be hard,” says Dr Bloomberg, “as she gets worse... ”
“She’s staying here,” I repeat, forcibly.
Dr Bloomberg frowns, his bushy white eyebrows meeting in the middle. “Meg,” he says, slowly and clearly, “if things get bad... ”