Concealment

by Rose Edmunds

  She knew as well as I did how our mother could surpass our worst expectations, and seemingly take pleasure in doing so.

  My former childhood home was a three-bedroom inter-war semi in a leafy avenue, with pebbledash and bay windows. From the outside, superficially at least, it resembled the other houses on the street. The garden was neat and the exterior décor no worse than some of the neighbouring properties.

  Cynthia Hope was hovering impatiently at the window, awaiting my arrival. The past decade had aged her. At one time she’d been a force to be reckoned with—a former headmistress. But she’d lost her vigour somewhere along the way—with a shrunken, fearful face, her tweed skirt and baggy sweater tired and pilled with age.

  ‘It’s good of you to spare the time,’ she began. ‘Your mother tells me you’re quite the tycoon these days—far too grand to associate with the likes of her.’

  How typical of my mother to blame me for our estrangement. And how typical of Cynthia to unquestioningly accept her version of events.

  Cynthia scrutinised my car with suspicion—as if it corroborated the fiction my mother had woven to explain our alienation.

  ‘Won’t you come in for a cup of tea first?’

  I refused, although I did step inside while she fetched the key. The house was neat but dated and shabby—as my mother’s would have been if she hadn’t succumbed to this terrible hoarding sickness.

  ‘Would you like me to go in with you?’ she asked, although understandably she didn’t sound keen.

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘You might find it easier to go round the back,’ she said—I assumed because of the stiff lock. Maybe she didn’t realise I had the knack of jiggling the key at precisely the right angle.

  ‘No—front will be OK.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ she said.

  As I made my way up the path, the illusion of a normal house began to unravel. Naturally the curtains were drawn, to ensure none of the neighbours saw the horrors within. But my mother never seemed to consider what they made of the dusty windows and the haphazard arrangement of flowerpots, replete with dead plants, on the inside window sill.

  The lock had been stiff for as long as I could remember—a repair would have involved someone seeing inside the house. It now seemed reluctant to yield even to my much-practised nifty jiggling. But I persisted and eventually the key turned.

  I’d scarcely opened the door a crack before the musty stale odour of my mother’s wasted life hit my nostrils. A visceral terror swept over me as I fought for breath. Dread of the doorbell ringing—fear that my mother would die and abandon me in that squalid pit—the relentless ordeal of keeping friends and boyfriends at bay. My whole childhood was encapsulated in that foetid odour. I steadied myself against the doorpost before pushing open the door, or rather, attempting to push it open.

  I now understood why Cynthia had suggested the back entrance—I could scarcely squeeze through the front. In the gloom I saw that apart from a tiny pathway, the hall was waist-deep in a jumbled mass of debris. I caught my breath as I took in the sheer scale of the squalor—worse than my worst imaginings.

  How did my mother manage? She’d been a solidly-built woman the last time I’d seen her, whose lack of self-discipline embraced overeating as well as the senseless accumulation of crap. Either she’d slimmed down, or she no longer used the front entrance. That sounds ridiculous I know—I mean any normal person would clear the clutter once it obstructed their movements——but for hoarders, stuff outplays convenience every time.

  Once I’d levered myself in, I picked my way along the narrow goat trail through the mountain of rubbish. I felt calmer now—brilliant in a crisis, as ever. Among the random debris, I spotted shopping bags (never unpacked), unopened mail, newspapers, suitcases, boxes of book-club purchases, mail order packages, hats, gloves, coats, garden chairs and casserole dishes. Despite my primeval response to the smell, the scale of the mess didn’t shock me, at least not on an intellectual level. Unbridled over-acquisition combined with failure to discard led to one outcome. And the only limit to the depths plumbed (or more accurately the heights scaled) by a hoarder is the ceiling.

  A chest of drawers stood in the centre of the hallway, heaped precariously with junk. As I inched round it, I must have disturbed the pile, for a huge avalanche of junk tumbled down, missing my head by inches and obliterating the small footpath.

  I stumbled through to the lounge in the semi-darkness and flicked on the light. Nothing happened, but I edged past the piles to the standard lamp by the television, which gave more than enough light to see the worst.

  The floor was heaped like a mountain range, with mini-crests created by landslides from the principal peaks. No part of the carpet was visible, but another barely navigable goat trail zigzagged through the room. A jumble of clothes—indoor, outdoor, and underwear teetered perilously on the sofa. Who could say if they were clean or dirty? Next to the sofa, my mother had erected a camp bed, presumably because upstairs had become uninhabitable.

  The dining table, its original purpose long since abandoned, was buried beneath stacks of dirty dishes and other debris. A half-hearted attempt to disguise the chaos by throwing a tablecloth over the pile was both ineffective and misguided. The chairs had been requisitioned as additional repositories for magazines, catalogues and yellowing newspapers. I checked the date on one—2002—shortly after my last visit.

  Apart from the bed, the one item of furniture capable of use was my mother’s favourite armchair—its headrest heavily soiled during many years of mindless television viewing.

  Moving on to the kitchen, I marvelled at how she cooked anything. The counters were encrusted with ancient grime and stacked with expired packages of biscuits and cakes, boxes of pasta and discarded egg cartons. A Le Creuset casserole stood by the back door, full of an evil-smelling liquid of uncertain origin. Old food wrappers littered the floor, and the hob was thick with burnt-on food residues. Green slime covered the sink and more dirty dishes together with the pre-historic remains of meals covered the drainers. The ironing board had served as an additional table for many years, but the enormous cardboard box taking up most of the floor space was a new development. I checked, and found it to be empty.

  On opening the fridge, the stench of death knocked me back. Gagging, I hastily shut the door but not in time to prevent a mass exodus of fruit flies. By the way, to cut a long story short, this is why I don’t eat red meat.

  I retreated to the hallway and then onwards and upwards. A mattress wrapped in brown paper partially blocked the stairs, apparently carelessly abandoned on its way up.

  My scrutiny of the three bedrooms was limited by my inability to open the doors due to the junk behind them. I managed to reach round to the light switches, but when I clicked nothing happened. However, the silhouettes of more gigantic heaps of rubbish were plainly visible even in the gloom.

  Her bathroom was the only semi-functional room. The tub, basin and toilet, though filthy, were potentially useable, although there wasn’t much space to manoeuvre. She’d crammed the room to the ceiling with precarious towers of plastic storage boxes full of towels, sheets and multi-buy packs of toiletries. At least the plumbing worked now, since my 2002 intervention. It hadn’t for the previous eighteen years.

  I jumped as my phone rang—Lisa.

  My heart pounded as I answered it, as though she could see my secret shame across the ether.

  ‘Where are you?’ she demanded.

  ‘At a meeting in Croydon.’

  ‘Which client?’

  ‘Prospective target,’ I lied.

  ‘I’m so pissed off with you,’ she began, launching into a rant without checking it was convenient to talk. ‘I specifically asked you not to bother trying to get me reinstated on the partnership assessment, and what do you do? You go running to Townsend stirring up shitloads of trouble for everyone.’

  ‘I was trying to help you.’

  ‘I wish you’d kept me in the loop.
And I can’t imagine why you told them I’m lodging a claim.’

  ‘I didn’t say so in as many words…’

  ‘But you obviously implied it. Anyway, the whole thing got escalated up to Bailey and he threw a real benny over the merest possibility of a lawsuit and gave Smithies a huge bollocking.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘We’re back on the assessment centre, all six of us.’

  ‘So that’s positive isn’t it? I mean, perhaps “thank you Amy” might be called for.’

  But no gratitude was forthcoming.

  ‘You must be joking. Smithies and Bailey believe I’m a dangerous activist, and as we all know “perception is reality”, so I don’t give much for my chances, do you?’

  ‘They might be too scared to fail you.’

  ‘I don’t plan to find out. I’ve made up my mind to leave.’

  ‘That’s up to you,’ I said. ‘But now you have the chance to give it a shot—you have a choice.’

  My gut feel was she’d go for it, despite her protests.

  ‘What bugs me is the fact you didn’t tell me—it’s becoming a habit with you. I had to practically drag it out of you that you shagged Ryan, then you keep quiet about the police being after you, and now this…’

  ‘I’m sorry—I should have kept you informed. But it’s all sorted now, and I do hope you give it a go.’

  Even as I apologised, I was acutely conscious of the big hoarding secret I still hadn’t shared. But this seemed a singularly inappropriate moment to blurt it all out.

  ‘Not a chance,’ came her curt reply. ‘And if I were you, I’d keep a low profile. Smithies is gunning for you big time.’

  ‘That’s OK—I’m a big girl—I’ll handle him,’ I told her, almost convincing myself as I said it.

  After Lisa rang off, I gazed around me in despair. The task ahead was gargantuan.

  Little Amy sat in the armchair, legs crossed and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Oh great,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I live here, remember.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be smoking.’

  ‘She lets me.’

  The poor kid had no idea it would take her another twenty years to kick the addiction.

  ‘You do understand that she doesn’t give a damn about you?’

  ‘What—because she allows me to smoke?’

  ‘No, because she makes you live in this shit hole.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘I get a heck of a lot more freedom than my friends in their dreary little bourgeois lives.’

  I gasped—had any part of me ever believed that the freedom neglect afforded compensated for living in such squalor? I had no memory whatsoever of such thoughts, only of a desperate longing for the normal life everyone else enjoyed, without knowing what normal was.

  ‘You’re rationalising it.’

  ‘And you sold out to the life I despised.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, staggered by the sheer absurdity of her attitude. ‘You can’t criticise me for things I’ve done, because you’re going to do them in the future.’

  ‘Whatever,’ she replied, coolly. ‘Anyway, it’s up to you to clean up the mess now.’

  ‘But if you hadn’t been so lazy, it wouldn’t be in this state.’

  I’d deliberately aimed for a raw nerve there, but felt no guilt. Was it even possible to be cruel to a figment?

  ‘That’s not fair. I try to tidy up, but she shouts at me. And I try to stop her buying stuff but she won’t listen.’

  ‘Although you come out of the shopping OK, don’t you? With plenty of clothes.’

  With hindsight, I saw the deal in all its shabby clarity—complete freedom and nice clothes in exchange for colluding and denying the squalid truth. How had I been dumb enough to fall for it?

  ‘I look great don’t I?’ she retorted, as though this justified everything.

  Undeniably, the clothes had been a huge help in sustaining the illusion of normality. I’d been the envy of my school friends, and no one would have dreamt how we lived—but I’d paid dearly.

  To be fair, Little Amy had tried on many occasions to clean up, each time hoping against hope that our mother would endeavour to keep the tidied parts nice. And each time she’d repaid those efforts by re-hoarding. Sometimes she’d talk of having the badly-needed repairs done and expect praise for the mere intention. But when she failed to deliver on these empty promises, she attacked Little Amy over the state of the house. Ultimately tidying became impossible anyway, because of the sheer volume of stuff.

  In the end, a healthy regard for my own sanity had compelled me to walk away from this draining cycle of hope and despair. After I’d left for university, I visited the hoard house as little as possible.

  But ten years ago, I’d given it one last shot. Struck by guilt, I’d taken three weeks of my annual leave to clear the downstairs, bathroom and landing. I’d ignored her protests and made trip after trip to the rubbish dump. Then I’d called the plumber to fix the hot water and the toilet. At the time I believed I’d achieved something useful. But within weeks, she’d junked it up, almost as bad as before, by moving stuff in from the garage. I realised then it wasn’t my fault—all the self-reproach over the years had been needless. I pleaded with her to seek psychiatric help. She refused (how would these fools assist a towering intellectual like her?), and that was the end. We could have gone on, I suppose, chatting on the phone, meeting away from the house, and avoiding the subject, but it would have been meaningless. I’ve always possessed a sound instinct for self-preservation, and I sensed that my life would be immeasurably simpler uncoupled from hers.

  ‘You don’t tell her, do you, how you hate living here? I know you’d like to have hot water on tap, flush the toilet without using a bucket of water, and have a clear table for doing homework. And wouldn’t it be nice to take a bath without transporting pans of boiling water upstairs? Yet you never complain. Why not?’

  ‘Because it would upset her,’ Little Amy replied.

  As I criticised her, it sunk in properly, for the first time, that these were all fundamental rights for a middle-class child in Croydon. But my mother had chosen to ignore my rights to avoid the anxiety of dealing with the hoard and facing up to the perceived shame of being mentally ill. This was unacceptable behaviour by any standards.

  Surely, on some level, she must have recognised something was wrong. But she had blanked it out, put on an elaborate pretence of normality, and inveigled me into her grubby concealment tactics. I’d lied to my friends about why they weren’t able to come over and cowered behind curtains if any of them were sufficiently foolish to call round. I’d adopted “perception is reality” long before it became fashionable, hiding behind my fancy clothes and bubbly personality, all to keep her dirty secret. I’d been like an undercover agent, but with cover so deep that I daren’t even admit the truth to myself. And for years she’d unscrupulously capitalised on the natural loyalty of her child, without any remorse. My thoughts and feelings were so unimportant that they could be denied, trivialised and subverted.

  What, I asked myself, would I say, if one of my team came in and told me this story?

  Faced with Little Amy, so vulnerable and deluded, the answer stared out at me. My poor muddled, inadequate mother, traumatised by the sudden death of her husband, did not fit any conventional image of a child abuser. But nonetheless, that’s what she was—which made me a victim.

  But I couldn’t stomach the victim part. Here I was, a successful professional. The hoarding hadn’t touched me, not really, not now. This was my mantra, and I said it often enough, it would become true.

  ‘You have to help her,’ said Little Amy, interrupting my internal dialogue. ‘Everyone will criticize you if you don’t.’

  I hesitated momentarily. After the crap job my mother had done in raising me, I owed the woman nothing. And did I care what Cynthia Hope and her coven thought?

  No.

  ‘
I’m doing nothing,’ I said. ‘This is her house, not mine.’

  ‘What a bitch,’ pronounced Little Amy, and disappeared.

  ***

  ‘Appalling, isn’t it?’ said Cynthia. ‘I had no idea it was this bad…’

  It would have been easy to agree that the state of the house was indeed shocking and surprising, but I declined to play along. Pretending the mess was a recent development represented another form of collusion with my mother, and from now on I was done with that.

  Besides, as I considered the facts dispassionately, I realised it ought to have been abundantly obvious to the Hope woman long before now that something was wrong. And the same went for all those other po-faced bitches who called themselves my mother’s friends. Many clues were there, right under their noses. They must have speculated as to why she never held coffee mornings, and the meaning of the drawn curtains and cluttered windowsills. Didn’t they notice how quickly my mother closed the front door behind her when they came to collect her for outings? Maybe someone had asked to use the bathroom and been refused—didn’t she wonder why? Had these women no curiosity whatsoever?

  Truth was, they’d ignored the evidence, for fear of causing a scene. And in so doing, they’d let her get away with child abuse.

  ‘So what do you plan to do?’ she asked, undeterred by my silence.

  I now realised I’d made a mistake in coming here. It had built up Cynthia’s expectations to an unrealistic level.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s not my problem.’

  ‘But you can’t let your own mother live in this filth, surely?’

  ‘This is how she wants to live,’ I said. ‘And you know it. We can both lie to each other, or be straight. If she was a normal mother who raised me in decent surroundings, then arguably I would have some moral obligation towards her now. But she’s surrounded herself by increasing squalor since my father died thirty years ago, with no regard to my needs or feelings. At least I’ll be respecting her feelings by leaving all this alone.’

  ‘But she did her best to bring you up. It can’t have been easy on her own, and you were such an ungrateful child…’