by Rosie Walsh
Arun’s ability to get through to Mum is partly because he’s a really nice man, and great at his job, but partly because she has, I think, got a shy little crush on him. And of course he hasn’t left. Nor is he off sick. They’d have cancelled us if he were, probably sent out the community psychiatrist. But the idea has lodged itself in her head now, just like those infuriating thoughts about Sarah have lodged themselves in mine.
What if Sarah died? Would you still think you’d done the right thing? The question continues to seep into everything, like rising damp. Where has it come from? Why won’t it go away?
Sarah is fine , I tell myself sternly. She would almost certainly be asleep now, thousands of miles away in her friend’s little bungalow. Breathing in and out. Limbs soft, face quiet.
When I realize I’m imagining lying next to her, sliding a sleepy arm around her waist, I get up. ‘I’ll go and check how much longer,’ I tell Mum.
The lady on reception knows I’m not asking for myself. SUE , her security pass says. ‘You’ll be seen next,’ she says extra loud, so Mum can hear. There’s a picture behind her of her family. A pleasant-looking man, two children, one wearing a lion costume. I wonder if Sue looks at families like mine and thinks, Thank God I’m not in their shoes! That’s pretty much what my last girlfriend, Gemma, said when we split up. She ended things after three months because she couldn’t handle me running off to deal with a Mum-related emergency once a week.
I felt bad about Gemma for a while – she was the third girlfriend in six years worn down by Mum’s demands – but I bumped into her in Bristol a few months ago, holding hands with a bloke who called himself Tay and told me he did street art. He had a man bun. And I’d realized, as Gemma and I exchanged bland pleasantries on the pavement, that neither of us had ever been all that mad about each other anyway.
Mad about each other – like Sarah and me – that’s how you have to feel. That’s how good it’s got to be.
When I sit back down, Mum’s checking her hair in a pocket mirror. Her hairstyle has the contours of a rugby ball today. ‘It’s a beehive,’ she says. ‘I used to have one in the sixties.’ She peers at it. ‘Do you think it’s over the top?’
‘Not at all, Mum. It’s lovely.’
In truth, the beehive is a) hollow and b) leaning to the right like the Torre de Pisa , but I know she’s done it for Arun.
She puts her mirror away and starts doing something with her phone. After a few seconds I realize she’s pretending to message someone so she can take sneaky photos of the poor guy in the corner, presumably to be used in evidence when he has brutally murdered her. If Arun Sopori doesn’t come out soon, with his beautiful Kashmiri features and his warm smile, today is going to go very badly indeed. And I really need to get back to work.
Then: ‘Hello, Carole,’ says Derek’s voice. He ambles in – Derek never strides – and shakes my hand, taking a seat on the other side of Mum. ‘How are you doing today?’ He stretches his legs out in front of him and I feel her begin to relax as she tells him she’s had better days, if she’s honest.
‘Storming hairstyle you’ve got there,’ he tells her, when she’s finished.
‘You think so?’ She’s smiling already.
‘I absolutely do, Carole. Storming.’
Thank God for Derek! Week in, week out he visits her. He’s like a magician, I sometimes think – he can spot things nobody else can see; he can make her talk when no one else can get through. He’s never once lost his cool, no matter unwell she’s got.
‘Does your mother have a specific diagnosis?’ Sarah asked one day. I’d just mowed the lawn of my clearing because I was hoping to lure her back to England with the smell of cut grass. When I’d finished, we’d sat down with some cold ginger cordial, and she’d sniffed the air happily. Then she’d just turned to me and asked that about Mum – straight out, no pussyfooting around, and I’d liked her even more.
Still, I hadn’t wanted to answer, at first. I’d wanted to be the man with a Cotswold stone barn who bakes bread and makes ginger cordial and leads an extremely appealing life, not the man who has to field several phone calls a day from his mother. But it was a reasonable question, and it deserved a reasonable answer.
So I prepared myself to reel off the list of diagnoses she’d been given over the years – the chronic depression; the generalized anxiety disorder; the cluster-C personality disorder that hovered somewhere between anxious and dependent and obsessive-compulsive; the PTSD; the psychotic depression that might be bipolar – but when I opened my mouth, a great weariness washed over me. Somewhere along the line I had given up on labels. Labels gave me hope of recovery, or at least improvement, and Mum had been sick for nearly twenty years.
‘She just struggles,’ I’d said eventually. ‘If my aunt wasn’t with her this week, I imagine I’d have had to answer the phone quite a bit. Probably go and see her at some point.’
I wish, now, I’d told her more. But what would that have achieved, other than to end our time together? We’d have worked out who each other was in minutes, and then I’d never have known what it felt like to be that happy. That certain .
‘Mrs Wallace.’ I look up; Mum’s hands fly to her beehive/rugby ball. Then she tucks herself into my side, suddenly shy, as Derek and I lead her over to Arun and the open door.
Chapter Forty-Two
Several hours later I’m free.
I walk through an evening softened by misting rain, humming some tune or other. Mostly, I’m on footpaths, but from time to time I take a lane. Damp earth, damp tarmac, damp leaves. Damp Eddie. From time to time droplets fall from the edge of my hood.
I kick a stone along in front of me and think about the session with Mum today. Based on Derek’s recent reports, Arun wants to tweak her medication, which I think is a good idea. It hadn’t escaped my notice that she was sliding into paranoia – at first I’d thought it was perhaps just a temporary reaction to my absence, but Derek said he’d noticed warning signs before I’d gone away.
I learned many years ago that miracles don’t happen, so I’m not expecting a monumental change, but with a bit of luck Arun’s new cocktail will arrest a downward spiral and avert a crisis, and that’s more than good enough for me. No matter how fantastic her mental health team are, how brilliant the research, how efficacious the treatments, they can’t transplant Mum’s brain.
The best thing was that she came away from the meeting in relatively good spirits: so good, in fact, that I persuaded her to go for tea and cake in Cheltenham. She had a large slice of flapjack and only suspected one man of plotting to murder her. She even managed to laugh at herself.
When I dropped her off so I could get back to the workshop, she told me I was the best and handsomest man on earth and that she was more proud of me than she could ever say.
So that was nice.
Later, Derek called me. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked.
I told him: ‘Fine.’
‘Sure?’
He said that I had looked exhausted. ‘Remember, I’m always here if you’re struggling, Eddie.’
Half an hour later I reach Bisley and the heavens open. ‘Pleasant,’ I remark to a crow on a post. It flies off, presumably to somewhere nicer, and I feel a touch of envy. Mum might be heading out of danger, for now, but nothing about my life has changed. I’m not free, and I can’t have Sarah. And nothing Derek can do for me – no strings he can pull within the mental health services – can change that.
‘Right, Ed,’ says Alan, a few minutes later. He offers me the most severe expression he has, which is not at all severe. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t good enough.’ Alan is one of the gentlest, warmest people I’ve ever met. Tonight he smells of strawberries and sourness, and his jumper is covered in pink stains. Lily had a tantrum involving strawberry yoghurt when he told her he couldn’t read her bedtime story.
I grin at him, although I can’t remember a time I felt less jolly. ‘I know. Just give me another week or two to get over th
e business with . . .’
I can’t say her name.
‘. . . with . . . the lady . . . and then I’ll be on it. ’
The lady ?
Alan is kind enough not to laugh.
I’ve been summoned to the pub to discuss my fortieth birthday, which is less than four weeks away. So far, I’ve organized nothing and Alan says he’s ‘concerned’. I think I should check up on you , he messaged yesterday. Get some plans brewing & make sure you’re not growing a beard.
He’s chosen the Bear in Bisley for the intervention. It’s a lovely old pub, and it reminds us both of the glory days of our youth, but it’s convenient for neither of us. We’ll have to share an expensive taxi later, and Alan’ll have to somehow pick up his car tomorrow. But he’s moving to the village soon, and wants to check out the beer situation, and I was very happy to walk here after a day of hospitals and kitchen building.
Hannah Harrington lives only a few doors from here. I bumped into her in Stroud a couple of years back, in the health food shop of all places. I was buying something not particularly healthy, like banana chips, but she was carrying armfuls of oat bran and all sorts of other things that have become curiously indispensable to middle-class people. It was perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’d seen her since Alex died, and – as ever – I was struck by the remarkable similarities between twelve-year-old Hannah and grown-up Hannah.
I wondered how much my sister would have changed, if she’d lived.
Hannah had told me that she and her husband had had an offer accepted on a house in Bisley. We’d discussed house prices and builders, and then gone our separate ways. I wish she’d told me that Sarah had moved to America. I wish she’d said, ‘Hey, remember my evil big sister? She buggered off abroad, years ago, so you and Carole need never worry about bumping into her again! ’
Alan puts a pint in front of me and sits down.
‘Thinking about the lady?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Stop me.’
He karate-chops my forearm and says, ‘Stop it, Ed. Right now.’
Then he looks at me, and I see in his eyes the ghoulish fascination of the long-term married. ‘What were you thinking? Was anyone naked?’
I smile. ‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘Just stuff about how avoidable it all was. How I’d have been able to work it out in seconds, if only I’d known that she moved to America.’
Alan looks thoughtful. He takes a good draw on his pint, and I notice that the yoghurty stains extend down his shorts. There’s even a splodge of pink in his leg hair.
‘Even if you had worked it out, though, you might not have stopped yourself,’ he says. ‘You told me you fell for her almost straight away.’
I think back to those first few minutes in Sarah’s company. How smart and funny she’d been, how pretty. How I’d dragged on the joke about the sheep for far too long because I’d wanted to keep her talking.
‘But I did stop myself. The moment I realized. And by then I was pretty far gone. Listen, you knob, I asked you to stop me thinking about her.’
He chuckles. ‘Yes. Sorry.’
Alan is the person people think I am. Easy in his own skin, troubled by little. The sort of man who’s always on the edge of laughter, even when he’s just missed a train (which he does frequently) or lost his wallet (ditto). We became friends the day I noticed him launching an exploratory finger up his nostril during our welcome speech at secondary school, and instead of blushing, he had grinned and carried right on. Later he had challenged me to a game of shithead and didn’t mind in the slightest when I thrashed him.
We didn’t discuss becoming best friends because we were too busy kicking footballs and pretending not to notice any of the girls, but best friends we became. Partners in crime; frequently in trouble. We were even suspended from school once, for concocting a vomit-like substance and throwing it out of the toilet windows where the rebellious teachers smoked, the ones who wore leather jackets and didn’t have their hair cut often enough. I thought Mum would actually kill me, but when we got into the car, she started laughing. She often laughed, back then. ‘You’re only boys,’ she said.
Nearly thirty years on, Alan and I probably seem unchanged.
Only I’m not the same as Alan anymore. That boyish, uncomplicated Eddie was almost certainly lost the first time I found Mum unconscious, puddled in vomit and surrounded by pill bottles. And if he wasn’t lost then, he would have been extinguished maybe the second time, or the third, when I found her in the bath with newly cut wrists leaking red trails into the water. And if those first three attempts didn’t finish me off, the fourth attempt would have done, years after she’d been discharged from the psychiatric hospital, long after I thought I was done with ambulance journeys and the Mental Health Act and late nights fumbling for change by the hospital drinks dispenser.
Don’t get me wrong: these last two decades haven’t been all bad, not by any means. I’ve plenty of friends, a decent social life (for a barn-dwelling hermit), and I’ve even had girlfriends. I do a job I love, and I live in a beautiful place, and when I need to go away, I’ve a very patient aunt who comes to stay with Mum .
But then I met Sarah, and I remembered how life could feel. The lightness, the ease, the laughter. Life sung in a major key.
I’ve often wondered if I presented her with a counterfeit version of Eddie David during our week together. A happier, freer version. But I don’t think that’s what happened. I think she just got to see a version of me I’d long forgotten; a version that only she seemed able to revive.
‘It’s rough, Ed,’ Alan sighs, leaning forward to scrape off the yoghurt spot on his leg. ‘I’m sorry.’
Firmly, I tell him I’ll get over it.
I take a long sip of beer and settle back in my chair, ready to talk about the problems Lily’s been having at primary school, or the baffling news that our friend Tim has been cuckolded by his pregnant wife.
But Alan’s not done with me. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. ‘Forgive me, Ed, but you don’t look like you’re getting over it. You look bloody awful.’
He catches me unawares. ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I say, although it sounds more like a question than a statement. ‘But regardless, what choice do I have? Me getting together with Sarah would finish Mum off. And I mean that quite literally.’
Alan winces. ‘I know. I don’t disagree. But that’s not what I asked. I asked you if you were sure you were getting over it.’
He looks straight at me, and I feel it. Right under my skin. Years and years of it, pressing desperately outwards, contained only by thin dermal layers.
‘No,’ I say, after a pause. ‘I’m not.’
He nods. He knows.
‘I’m on the edge. I’m on the fucking edge, and I don’t know what to do.’
I turn my pint round and round in circles, fighting the heat that’s pushing at my eyes. ‘Not sleeping. Can’t concentrate. All I can think about is Sarah. I just feel . . . well, desperate, knowing I’ve cut off any possibility of anything. And since LA, looking after Mum has started feeling impossible. I keep catching myself thinking, I can’t do this anymore. But that’s not an option, Alan, because what the hell is she supposed to do if I just flip out and run off? I . . . Fuck.’
‘Fuck,’ Alan agrees quietly.
I don’t trust myself to speak.
Alan takes a sip of his pint. ‘I do often wonder if you need to get some extra help with your mum, Ed. Gia was telling me about some friend who’s been caring for her husband for fifteen years. Awful story – he fell off his bike and now he’s completely paralysed . . . Anyway, this woman had a breakdown last month. Just hit a wall. Couldn’t do another minute. And it’s not as if she’s fallen out of love with him. She adores him.’
He pauses, takes another sip. ‘Made me think about you, mate. I mean, it must be wearing you down in a serious way.’
I make a non-committal sound, because I don’t want to have this conversation. Gemma was th
e last one who tried it – tried telling me that I would eventually go under if I couldn’t find a way of carving out more freedom for myself. I chose to take it as a criticism of my mother and we had a fight, but I knew, deep down, that she was probably right.
‘There’s nobody who can do what I do, though,’ I say now. ‘It’s not like she needs someone to wash her, or make her food – she just needs a person she trusts at the end of the phone, or to come round if she goes into overwhelm. I take her shopping, I sort stuff out, I talk to her. I’m her buddy. Not her carer. ’
Alan nods, but I don’t think he sees it in the same way. ‘Just think about it,’ he says. ‘But as for Sarah . . . You did the right thing, Ed. You did the only thing.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Think about Romeo and Juliet. Or Tony and Maria.’
Alan’s love of musical theatre delights me normally, but I’m not in the mood for West Side Story tonight.
‘They knew it was wrong to get together,’ he persists, ‘but they went for it anyway and then ended up dead. You’ve been a lot smarter than that. You’ve resisted, which takes much more courage.’
‘Well, that’s great to know, Alan. Thank you. But the real problem is that I have to stop loving her and I don’t know how.’
Alan looks thoughtful. ‘I’ve often wondered how that works. Making yourself fall out of love with someone,’ he says. ‘What do you actually do ? Why haven’t Haynes published a manual on it?’ His hayrick hair sticks crazily out from the sides of his head as he ponders the question. Alan’s never had to stop loving anyone. He and Gia have been married for nine years, together for nineteen. Before her there was only Shelley, whose heart Alan (very guiltily) broke, and a small handful of girls from school with whom he was mostly just trying to subdue his never-ending teenage erection.
How do you just stop loving someone? The love I felt for Sarah wasn’t just a version of something that already lived in me; it was something I built from scratch, something I grew. By the time we said goodbye, it was as tangible as she was.