by RL McKinney
Mum’s flat. Thank goodness it was only Mum’s flat and not the whole building. It wasn’t a total write-off but it wouldn’t be habitable for a while. The worst of the damage was confined to the kitchen but the rest was damp and smoke-cured, and he suspected the wiring was buggered throughout. Expensive insurance job, if any sensible insurance company would agree to cover the fire-raising tendencies of a demented old woman. It seemed a pretty big if in his book. Mary would have to be found somewhere else to live for a while, or possibly permanently. The question of whether she could ever live on her own again hung like a sledgehammer over his head.
Disaster number two: the insurance. Mary couldn’t remember who provided her buildings and contents insurance or where she might have stashed the documents. Calum wasn’t surprised: that would have been altogether too easy. She had been adamant that all of her files were in good order in Granny Ina’s roll top desk in the spare room, but he had opened the desk to find a heap of paper, which slid out onto the floor when he began to shuffle through it. There were pension documents, official-looking envelopes, which had never been opened, guarantee certificates for kitchen appliances she no longer owned, but nothing resembling an insurance policy. He had no idea what you were meant to do in this scenario. Was there a number you could ring, or some other way to track down your policy? A quick Google search brought up a dozen ads for insurance companies, but nothing of use. He would end up making the repairs himself at this rate.
Defeated, he had allowed himself to be distracted from his search by a single box of photographs which, thankfully, she hadn’t yet got round to torching. In their childhood years, Mary had kept beautiful albums. She had kept one of herself and Dad, one for Calum and one for Finn, and had rigorously archived the evidence of their lives: pictures, school certificates for music or maths or sport, little boys’ drawings and home-made Christmas cards. She had stopped updating these after Dad died, and in fact he realised now that she must have stopped taking pictures altogether. Calum’s album stopped when he was eighteen: leaving school with a shocking eighties mullet and a rebellious scowl. Finn’s stopped in his fourteenth year. It didn’t even see him past his adolescent spots.
The only photos from after that time were ones he had given her copies of, and these she had stored unceremoniously in a shoebox at the back of the hall cupboard. He had lingered over one in particular: himself and Finn climbing on Skye. It had been one of those translucent midsummer evenings, maybe nine o’clock at night with the sun still high above the north-western horizon, casting rose dust across the mountains and turning the sea to molten gold. Andy had taken the picture of Calum belaying and Finn climbing: all long fingers and balance, gripping the rock with his toes and left hand as his right hand stretched upward for the next hold. He climbed like a gymnast with barely a care for the gear, so quick you could hardly belay him fast enough. Calum may have talked his brother into taking up climbing, but Finn had elevated it to something beyond sport.
Calum had slipped the photo into his jacket pocket and taken it home. Now he stared at it, remembering that long, cloudless day on the Cuillin. It was what … twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, but its details were still sharp. You got maybe one day like that in a thousand, and when they came you had to suck them dry and hold their nourishment right down deep inside you to keep you going through the dark months. They’d made their camp high up the ridge that night, sustained by laughter, songs and Andy’s hip flask, and in the morning had looked down on a layer of sea mist like a wool blanket covering the world below them.
Mum had a thing she used to say, perhaps to keep herself going through the heavy times: Mol an latha math mu oidhche. Praise the good day at the close of it. That had been a day for praising, and yet he hadn’t thought about it for a very long time.
He’d lost touch with Andy after Finn died. Now he wondered where he was, whether he was still climbing, what kind of a hand life had dealt him. Andy was a structural engineer and had been fostering an ambition to emigrate to New Zealand, where fault lines and wobbly earth meant plenty of work and plenty of mountains. Calum often thought about Dougie and Alison too. They’d been good friends, but lost touch when he moved to America. He’d always meant to get in touch again, but life got in the way. He’d made excuses. You put your life into the hands of others so easily in the mountains, but back on flat ground you let them go again. Was that normal, he wondered, or was it just him?
He put the photo and the empty whisky glass onto the coffee table and stood up, wandered into the kitchen and stared into a mostly empty fridge. He’d eaten only a soggy, packaged sandwich in the hospital canteen in the middle of the afternoon.
Crisis of the Day, number three: Mum had been admitted for further evaluation and moved to a ward, but was now refusing to eat or to speak English. He had been intercepted at the door by a perplexed nurse, who knitted her eyebrows and suggested Mary may require to be sedated and fed by IV if it continued.
She had become a delinquent child overnight. In stunned silence, he’d turned his shoulder on the nurse and found his mother sitting on the chair beside her bed. She was watching Cash in the Attic with her arms crossed over her chest and her lips pressed together like a bairn presented with a plate of spinach. He shut the curtain, sucked in his breath and willed himself to be calm.
‘What’s the story, Mum?’
She studied him, and for a freakish moment seemed not to recognise him. Then she smiled and shrugged, and answered in Gaelic, ‘These people are holding me against my will.’
He was aware of the nurse hovering outside the curtain and dropped his voice, although he was fairly certain she couldn’t understand. ‘Why will you not eat?’
‘You don’t know what they might be putting in my food.’
Fair enough. He’d had enough hospital food himself to be suspicious of it. ‘You’ll make yourself ill.’
‘You can bring food in for me. I’ll make do with bought sandwiches if that’s all you can manage.’
‘I’ll do my best, but the rest of the time you’ll have to eat what they give you.’ At least she seemed to have got over the idea of Finn coming back from the dead. ‘I can’t come every mealtime. I don’t know how long you’re going to be here and I’ve got to work.’
She sighed, shrugged again. ‘It’ll suit you that I’m here, being kept quiet. I’ll just have to do my best to survive, won’t I?’
He pressed his fist over his lips and sat on the edge of the bed, struggling to dredge up the right words. His mastery of Gaelic had never extended to this kind of situation. In fact, even his English was faltering. ‘They only want to help you,’ he blurted after a mute minute. In English, loudly enough for any eavesdropping nurse to hear. ‘You’ll have to speak to them.’
‘Why don’t they speak to me in my language, then?’
He almost laughed. Mary Macdonald, latter day Highland rebel. ‘Because unfortunately they are not among the chosen few who can speak God’s own tongue. You’ll just have to condescend to speak English.’
‘I don’t have to tell them anything.’
‘They’ll sedate you with drugs if they think you’ll cause damage to yourself, or anyone else while you’re at it.’
‘They can do what they will.’
Calum didn’t know how to respond to that, and decided this wasn’t the right time to press her about the insurance. It would only confirm her suspicions. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ He opened the curtain and walked up the ward, between rows of beds containing shrivelled, sickly figures. The charge nurse was at her station, writing notes on a chart. She looked up at him with raised eyebrows.
‘How did she seem to you?’
‘Completely fine, apart from the crazy paranoia. She seems to think she’s being held prisoner.’
‘Mmm.’ The nurse nodded. ‘Does she understand what’s happening to her? With the Alzheimer’s?’
‘She refuses to believe it.’ His eyes were still stinging after a morning in the smoky
flat, and he rubbed them. Guilt nibbled at his conscience; Mary had been showing signs for a couple of years before the diagnosis but he’d avoided talking about it or bringing it to her attention. To be fair, until recently it hadn’t really progressed beyond a sort of irksome forgetfulness. Total denial had worked well enough for both of them until now.
A sudden tide washed over him, turning his legs to jelly. There was a hard orange plastic chair beside the nurse’s station and he sat on it, dropped his face into his hands. ‘I’m not ready for this.’
The nurse nodded, and placed one broad, plain hand on his shoulder. ‘Nobody is, hon.’
He wondered, not for the first time, whether learning to call everyone honey or love or my darling was an official part of the nursing curriculum.
‘We’ll be doing some assessments over the next few days. We’ll sit down with you to discuss options for when she leaves hospital. It would help if she was willing to talk to us.’
Calum looked up at her and wanted to tell her he couldn’t do this. ‘Is there anyone on staff here who speaks Gaelic?’ he asked instead. ‘They might get more out of her.’
The nurse raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t think there was anyone left who couldn’t speak English.’
‘She speaks English more perfectly than anyone I know, she just doesn’t want to.’
‘It may change by tomorrow. They take notions … they pass.’
‘Aye.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Apparently.’
He abandoned his search for anything palatable in the fridge and made a bowl of porridge instead, sprinkled it with brown sugar and tucked into the sweet beige mush. He would wake hungry in the night, but at least it warmed his belly and put a temporary hold on the nagging anxiety in his gut. After he had eaten, he opened his fiddle case and sat with the instrument on his lap for a little while, fingering the strings. He let his fingers explore a new pattern of notes, and he hummed along until this random sequence began to coalesce into a tune. It was a slow, tripping march in 6/8 time, with some curiously blue accidentals thrown in. He played it around a few times until it resolved itself, and then recorded it so that it wouldn’t disappear overnight.
He listened to the recording and concluded that the tune was decent. In fact, it was better than anything he’d written for a while. At least one good thing had come out of the day.
He smiled and decided he would call it Mary Macdonald’s Farewell to Her Marbles.
I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS
‘Mum, can I come in with you?’
Jenny stirred, a shadowy figure in the bed faintly illuminated by the blue dawn seeping through the blinds. She dragged the heels of her hands across her eyes and glanced at the clock.
‘Cat?’
Catriona slipped into bed beside her. ‘I can’t sleep.’
‘No wonder. You sleep all day.’ Jenny sat up and looked at her. Catriona closed her eyes to shield against potential anger, but Jenny’s fingers gently touched her forehead and moved across it. Hot tears squeezed between Catriona’s lashes. There was a dark place in front of her, a place where the world and time collapsed into a sinkhole. She had to turn back from it but she didn’t know how. She needed someone to pull her back but that would involve saying things she didn’t know how to say.
Jenny said, ‘My wee baby. I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong.’
Other girls could tell their mothers anything, but it wasn’t like that with Jenny. She wasn’t soft and accepting. It was like she had spent nineteen years rejecting the label of Mum. I never asked to be a single parent, she said so many times, regret bending the ends of her words so it came out something like a slide guitar riff. You could read into that whatever you wanted, but you could never fully trust her. At any time she might turn around and say I didn’t want you anyway.
‘I’ve decided to go and visit Dad.’
Jenny sat very still and her breath shook. Then she got up and went to the window, tilted the blinds and looked out at the street. The early morning light was dull blue-grey. Jenny’s fingers tightened around the windowsill.
‘I think it’s bad idea,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘You know what he’s like.’
‘He’s better.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I’ve seen him on Facebook.’
‘You can’t tell by that. Catriona, right now you’re so depressed I’m worried about leaving you alone in the house.’
‘Well I won’t be alone, I’ll be with him.’
Jenny sniffed, her shoulders tensing and lifting toward her ears. ‘You remember last time he was here? You were so upset you couldn’t stand to have him in the house. You were disgusted by him and you told him so. What makes you think he’d want to open his door to you now? Why should he?’
‘He’s my dad.’
‘Aye, if you say so. He’s never put himself out of his way to be a parent to you, Catriona; he’s only ever been concerned with suiting himself. He should have stayed in Aberdeen, not taken himself away out to the middle of nowhere.’
‘Mum, sometimes I think you’re just horrible about him for the sake of it.’
‘I’m not being horrible. He’s not able to cope with other people. That’s just how he is. I should have realised that before I allowed myself to fall pregnant, but I was too young. I was naive and he took advantage of me.’
Catriona’s eyes drilled into her mother’s back. ‘So he forced you to have sex with him?’
Jenny turned toward her. ‘No. No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.’
‘Then shut up! Don’t you dare accuse him of that!’ She launched herself off the bed and threw her body towards the door, wanting to clatter against it and feel the reverberations of the wood in her bones. Her fingers gripped the door frame, nails digging into the paint. ‘You always come out with this shit, and you never stop and think how it makes me feel. Like you only had me so you could have someone to blame for everything bad that’s ever happened to you. You want to know why I’m depressed? Think about yourself.’
Jenny sagged. Her backside rested against the windowsill and her shoulders slumped forward under an invisible weight.
Catriona waited in the doorway, quivering, waiting for some kind of response but knowing it could never satisfy her. Before Jenny could speak again, she said, ‘I’m going back to bed.’
‘Cat … ’
‘Forget it, Mum. Sorry I woke you up.’ In bed, she drew the quilt over her head and turned her face to the wall, blocking out sound and light, subsiding into the close, drowning heat. Only deep in the cocoon of her bed could she allow herself to remember the last time she saw her dad.
Aberdeen, 2009
‘How long have you been back?’ Jenny asked.
‘A few days. A week, I don’t know.’ Calum sat at their table, his hands wrapped round a mug of tea. He looked bloated and unfit, with yellowish shadows under his eyes and too much greying stubble. Like a man who had just risen from his sickbed or walked out of prison, with a whiff of alcohol hanging around him. His shoulders were hunched and he didn’t meet their eyes.
‘A week. And you haven’t wanted to come see your daughter before now?’
‘I’ve been dealing with some stuff.’
At the other end of the room, Catriona slid down the settee and turned the TV up. Her dad hadn’t been home in close to two years, and this fusty old man with a flat Americanised accent was almost unrecognisable. Their phone conversations had been short over the last few months, his voice strange and weak like he couldn’t catch his breath. She’d assumed he’d been in too much of a hurry to speak to her.
And now this. She and her mum had only moved into the house in the summer, and finally they lived in a neighbourhood where there were girls worth being friends with. Kate and Eilidh often came round for her in the evenings, and they would go to the park or just sit on her bed and talk. For the first time in her life she felt like she fitted in somewhere. It would be a disaster if they came to the
door right now. Having to introduce him would be the worst kind of mortifying.
‘You’ve been on a bender,’ Jenny said. Her voice was still low but Cat could hear her starting to simmer. She was liable to go off like a whistling kettle at any moment. ‘You still do that? Two weeks on, one week drunk, one week off?’
‘I don’t, Jen, honestly.’
‘Well.’ She sat back with her arms crossed over her chest. ‘Let’s hear your explanation, then.’
‘For what?’
‘For what?’ Jenny gave a whoop of laughter.
Catriona spoke to him for the first time, raising her voice over the television. ‘Have you looked in a mirror lately?’
His eyelids were heavy and his shoulders moved back and forth with each breath. ‘I haven’t been so well. I’ve been off my work for a while.’
‘How long?’ Jenny demanded.
‘A few months.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
He glanced at Catriona, then shrugged. ‘It’s … a bit complicated.’
‘Are you dying?’ Catriona asked, raising her voice across the room. She wanted him to be so ill that his life replayed itself in front of his eyes and he could see the details of every single day that he had missed with her. ‘You look like you are. You look like you have cancer or something. Is that why you came to see us? I hope you’re only here to say cheerio.’
‘Cat,’ Jenny said. A half-hearted warning, at best.
She flicked her eyes at her mother, then turned on him again. ‘I hope you’ve left me something in your will, or does that American Barbie-bitch get it all?’
His body swayed like a branch disturbed by a gust, but otherwise her words appeared to make no impact on him. ‘I’m not dying. It’s not that kind of illness. Sorry to disappoint you.’