My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “Bethany is part of this family too. She’s been looking after me all this time. She helped bring up Tamsin and the twins.”

  “We’re very grateful to Bethany,” George said. “But she’s not part of this family, and if she’s hoping to gain any financial benefit beyond all the years she’s been living here rent-free—”

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” Trish said. “You twist me around.”

  “You sold Gran’s house in Twickenham without even really asking her,” Helen said. “I remember when we went down there.”

  “I do too,” Trish said. She looked at Helen. When had she stopped being beautiful? It wasn’t anything she did. She was just effortlessly lovely, all the time, until one day she just wasn’t. She was the same person with the same face, but no longer a beauty. It was 2004, and Helen, her oldest surviving child, was fifty.

  “You should be in a home,” Cathy said.

  She managed to put them off until the next weekend, and talked to Bethany. “They want to sell this house and throw you out. Is it too late for me to give it to you?”

  Bethany laughed bitterly. “They’d easily find doctors to say you weren’t in your right mind if you did. In fact, it would be quite hard to find anyone to say you were!”

  “They don’t need the money. Cathy’s rich, and George is very well paid, and Helen is all right.”

  “Helen could do with the money. You’ve forgotten that Don’s divorcing her.” Bethany poured Trish more tea. “Remember? He found out she was having an affair with that customer in Quernmore?”

  Trish didn’t remember. “At her age?”

  “I’m the same age as she is,” Bethany said. “And you were older when you got involved with that Chinese American, what was his name?”

  “Lin Da Wei,” Trish said. “But we called him David. He still sends me Christmas cards, lovely American ones. He was such a nice man. Wonderful in bed.”

  Bethany smiled. “Good. I’m glad somebody was.”

  “Did I tell you about Mark?”

  “You did. Please don’t tell me again, I just ate.”

  Trish laughed. “Will you be all right?”

  “I’ve got the money from the record, remember? It’s not much, but it’s my little savings. You know the food co-op only pays peanuts and the council only pays grifters. I could pay rent somewhere. There are lots of co-op houses that I’d fit into, or even communes. We don’t all have to be as bourgeois as your children.”

  “I could give you some money without them knowing. You deserve it. I’d really give you the house if I could, so we could stay here as we have been.”

  Bethany looked uncomfortable. “Helen says your mother got incontinent at the end, and also terrified and aggressive.”

  “She did. But it was only right at the end. Oh God, I don’t want to end up like that!” Trish wailed.

  “You’re nothing like that,” Bethany said. “I don’t want them to shove you in a home, but there’s nothing I can do about it. You’re not my mother—and my own mother I wouldn’t cross the road to shake hands with. She threw me out when I was pregnant with Alestra.”

  “I hate to ask, considering what they’re doing to you, but will you come and visit me in the place they’re making me go?” Trish asked.

  “I’ll come as long as you keep recognizing me,” Bethany said.

  “That will be a long time.”

  Trish walked slowly and carefully down to the bank the next day and drew out a thousand pounds, the maximum withdrawal. She put it in an envelope and pushed it under Bethany’s door. She did the same on each of the next six days, writing “ATM” on her lists so she wouldn’t forget. When Cathy asked her the next weekend what she had done with the money she said that she couldn’t remember. It was the first time she had ever used her forgetfulness as an excuse. Usually she tried to cover it up if she had forgotten. Now she knew perfectly well what she had done but Cathy had no way to know that.

  The worst thing about going into the home was that they wouldn’t let her take the Mac. “I need it. I need it more than anything else,” she said.

  Cathy wouldn’t listen. “Nonsense, Mum, what do you want with that old thing?”

  “I send email to Rhodri and Bronwen.”

  “You can send them cards when it’s their birthdays.”

  “It helps me remember things,” she begged. “My pills. I’ll never remember my blood pressure pills without the Mac.”

  “The nurses will remind you,” Cathy said.

  She let her take books and clothes. Trish kept pleading for the computer. She called Helen, who she hoped might understand. Helen listened to her for a while then asked to speak to Cathy. Trish waited in anxious hope, but Cathy snapped the phone shut and tossed it down on the counter when she had finished.

  “If Helen wants, she can get you a new computer. A laptop. This one with the big monitor is bigger than they’ll let you have.”

  “But I won’t know how to use the new computer,” Trish said. “I understand this one.”

  “Helen will set it up for you,” Cathy said. “Lot of nonsense anyway. I wish I could do without mine. I hate the things. Do you want to take your china?”

  “Am I allowed?”

  “They said small ornaments, and I think that would count,” Cathy said.

  Trish packed her mother’s china carefully. She also took the gold disk Doug had been awarded for “Getting Married on the Moon” and photographs of all her children and grandchildren. Then Cathy helped her on with her coat—entirely unnecessary help.

  The home was up on the Moor with a fine view down over Lancaster. Trish remembered when she first came to the city and learned to drive. As a supply teacher she had driven to schools in all kinds of funny places. She had looked down at the town, and the sea shining in the distance, from this very place.

  When she stepped inside the home it felt like prison doors closing behind her. But they were kind, very polite. “Oh, the healthy heart diet,” the nutritionist said. Trish wished fiercely that she had eaten all the things she wasn’t allowed and burst her heart before she had given up her house and turned poor Bethany out.

  Her room faced the back, with trees behind. It had a pale green blind and a hospital bed. There was a shelf for her knickknacks, and a little bookshelf and an armchair. She arranged the china carefully.

  “This is it, then?” she said to Cathy.

  “Yes, I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable. The bathroom is just outside, to the right.”

  “I saw it,” she lied.

  Helen came to see her the next day, bringing a laptop. “Cathy was right that the Mac would be too big. This is a MacTop, it’s the same thing only smaller.”

  “Oh bless you, darling. Thank you for bringing it so quickly.” It was small and folded, but it had the familiar Apple logo on it, and the aesthetics of it reminded her of her beloved Mac.

  “Well, you sounded as if you really desperately wanted it. And I can still get a discount in the shop,” Helen said.

  “What’s wrong in the shop?” Trish asked.

  “Oh Mum, I’ve told you a million times that Don and I are getting a divorce,” Helen snapped.

  “Sorry,” Trish said. “I’m sorry. My silly brain. I forget these unforgiveable things. I keep doing it. But the computer will help. Rhodri put all my programs on the Mac. Can you put them on here?”

  “What programs?”

  “My to-do list, which beeps to remind me to do things. And the diary program so I can write down things I want to remember. Of course, all that will be on the Mac so I’ll have to start again. And Safari for Google, and email.”

  “You won’t have net access here,” Helen said, then seeing the incomprehension in Trish’s face. “You won’t be able to go online. You won’t be able to use Google or email. What did you use Google for, anyway?”

  “To remember things,” Trish said with all the dignity she could manage, though she was starting to cry. “You can look anything up o
n it, even things you didn’t ever know.”

  “Yes, it’s—I use it all the time,” Helen said. “I had no idea. You were using the Mac to make up for not being able to remember? Using Google to fill the holes?”

  “Yes,” Trish said. “Rhodri showed me how.”

  “He’s a smart kid,” Helen said. “That’s how you stayed so functional so long. I’m impressed. They ought to write programs especially for old people. And as we get older and we already know computers, there’ll be more and more use for them.”

  “Do you think you’d be able to set it up on here for me?” Trish asked.

  “No. I’m sorry. The to-do list and the diary, yes, no problem. I might even be able to get your old diary off the Mac and transfer it for you—is there a password on it?”

  “Moonday. With two Os,” Trish said. “Rhodri put it on.”

  “Well unless Cathy has thrown it out already I’ll get the diary off it and load it on here for you so you’ll have what you saved,” Helen said. “And I won’t read it, don’t worry.”

  “It’s nothing you couldn’t see. Just things I wanted to remember,” Trish said. “But Google?”

  “Well, as far as the internet goes, you have to be connected, and you have to pay for that. You have to dial-up to connect. There has to be a phone line. You had that at home, but there isn’t any here, and I can’t see how I could get them to set it up. You don’t even have your own phone line. It’s just not possible.” Helen opened the MacTop. It played exactly the same little song on boot up as her old Mac had. Helen juggled icons and brought up the same “to-do” and diary programs that she knew.

  “That’s something at least,” Trish said, taking it. “Thank you so much.”

  Helen managed to save her old diary too, and brought it in a few days later and added it to the MacTop, which meant she had that to look at when she wanted to check things.

  The only problem with the MacTop, apart from the persistent lack of Google, was that there was no desk in her room, so she had to use it in the armchair, and she kept forgetting to plug it in to charge so it was often out of batteries when she wanted it.

  Bethany visited her often, and so did Helen. Donna and Tony came sometimes. Tamsin came when she was at home, and Alestra called in occasionally. George and Sophie brought the twins a couple of times every year. Time passed, every day like the last. Trish grew frailer and more easily confused.

  33

  The Last Gelato: Pat 1998–2015

  They had their last day, on which they ate so much granita and gelato that Pat was almost sick. They went to the Uffizi and stared at the Botticellis and the Raphaels. They watched the sky fade from the Piazza della Signoria, and looked up at Machiavelli’s office window and the shape the Palazzo Vecchio made against the sky. Pat said goodbye to Cellini’s Perseus and to the copy of Michelangelo’s David. They ate dinner at Bordino’s with Jinny and Francesco, and told Francesco, who was nonplussed by the story, how they had decided to conceive Jinny right there. She said goodbye to the Duomo, and at Giotto’s tower Pat couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. They had one very last gelato on the way back.

  The next day Jinny drove them to the airport and they flew home.

  A week later Philip and Sanchia got married in a registry office in Cambridge, very quietly. “Did I know this was going to happen?” Pat asked Bee.

  “No, this is new,” Bee reassured her.

  “Stupid regulations,” Philip said. “Sanchia wouldn’t be entitled to any maternity leave or any benefits having a baby unless she’s married.”

  “How did you decide which of you she was going to marry?” Bee asked.

  “We did a DNA test to see who was the father, and it was Ragnar, so she’s marrying me,” Philip said. “That way we are all the parents.”

  “This was difficult for us too,” Pat remembered. “Michael was wonderful.”

  “I don’t think it’s any of the government’s business. All this regulation all the time. Cameras everywhere. Caring what goes on in people’s bedrooms. All this talk about vice.”

  “The cameras are just trying to catch suicide bombers,” Sanchia said.

  “And when they do catch them they execute them on TV,” Bee said, scratchily. “It makes me sick.”

  “On TV?” Pat asked. “That’s awful. When did they start doing that?”

  “That’s your memory being merciful,” Philip said.

  Pat and Bee were the witnesses and the only people to attend the wedding. Afterwards the bride and groom went back to Manchester, where Sanchia had lessons to give and ante-natal classes to attend. “I would stay and look after you, but the baby’s due so soon, and I want to be there,” Philip said.

  “I understand,” Bee rasped.

  Bee was in too much pain from the cancer now for Pat to sleep in the same bed. Pat’s small movements in the night shook the bed and woke Bee, and then she would lie sleepless for hours. So they developed a routine where Pat would cuddle Bee until she fell asleep, then she would get up and sleep in Jinny’s old room. Pat managed the bedpans, under Bee’s direction. “Life always comes down to bedpans,” Pat said. “But it doesn’t matter when there’s love as well.”

  “Love and bedpans and Florence, that’s you,” Bee croaked. “Give me one of my really strong painkillers now. That’s the right bottle, yes, the brown one, give it here. Plenty of them, more than enough to last.”

  The doctor, an old friend, stopped in regularly to check up on them. When Bee stopped being able to eat the doctor insisted that she go into a hospice.

  “You need to be properly looked after,” he said. “And a feeding tube. Don’t tell me Pat could manage that.”

  “Call Jinny,” Bee said to Pat as soon as he had gone.

  “Flora?” Pat suggested. “She’s so much nearer.”

  “It has to be Jinny.” Jinny was Bee’s natural daughter, of course, her next of kin, the only one who could make decisions for her.

  Pat called Jinny in Florence, and Jinny flew home right away. Bee went into the hospice, but Jinny and Pat visited her every day. She stopped being able to speak, but her eyes were alive. She squeezed Pat’s hand and Pat sat there talking to her, not knowing what she was saying really but knowing Bee was there, was listening.

  Then Bee died, choking for breath, with both of them at her bedside. Pat’s own chest felt tight hearing it and her heart beat faster. Now would be a good time to have another heart attack, she thought at it, encouragingly, but her heart took no notice and kept on beating.

  Jinny drove Pat home, and Pat went to bed. She couldn’t forget that Bee was dead, much as she would like to. She knew Bee had made a plan for what would happen next, though she couldn’t remember what it was. She stared into the dark. She had cried so much that her eyes burned but no more tears came. She got up, knocking into the little table they had brought in here when Bee had been sickest. She put the light on and fumbled about for her pills. She had her blood pressure pills, and there were also some of Bee’s strong painkillers left. She thought Bee might have been saving them for her, for now, making sure she knew which ones they were. She went downstairs and poured water into one of Bee’s wineglasses. She swallowed all of Bee’s pills and then all of hers. She sat down in Bee’s green armchair and waited, trying to think of the time she had sat in the Palazzo Vecchio watching the sky darken and realizing that she loved Bee. She took down the photograph Michael had taken of Bee and the babies. She wanted that to be the last thing she saw. She crashed into the mantelpiece and fell on the rug. The pills must be taking effect, she thought. Good.

  Then Jinny came in, rumpled with sleep. “What are you doing banging about down here?” Then she saw her. “No. Oh no. Not you too.”

  Pat tried to speak and say it was what she wanted, but Jinny took no notice. She was calling for an ambulance. Then it was hospital and a stomach pump.

  When Pat woke, Philip and Jinny were arguing. “I can’t believe you did that,” Philip said. “It can’t
have been easy for her, and it was so clearly what she wanted.”

  “I didn’t know what had happened! I thought she needed help!”

  For a moment she didn’t remember what had happened, and then she did. Bee was dead, and she had botched joining her. Thank you for nothing, St. Zenobius, she thought. She didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to be alive.

  “I couldn’t lose them both like that,” Jinny said.

  Pat opened her eyes and tried to smile.

  They packed efficiently for her move to the home. “It’s near Flora,” Jinny said.

  “I think I remember that,” Pat said.

  “You broke the glass in this picture of Mamma and the girls,” Philip said. “I’ll have it mended.”

  “Thank you.”

  She took the album of pictures of all of them that Michael had taken when he was dying, and copies of her guide books. She took all her art books and boxes of English literature. She took her Life List and her birding books. She took the old green silk scarf, hardly more than a rag, that Mark had given her for Christmas in 1948, and which Bee had clung to in hospital after the accident. She let Jinny pack clothes and her mother’s china. She picked up her binoculars.

  “You won’t want those, Mum,” Philip said. “What will you do with them in a home?”

  “Watch birds,” Pat said.

  “Oh, let her,” Jinny said. “She might as well bring them if she wants them.”

  They drove north towards Lancaster. She told them about that time in the war when she had been held up in Lancaster and gone to Barrow-in-Furness. “Did I tell you this before?” she asked.

  “Maybe when I was a little girl,” Jinny said.

  “I don’t remember ever hearing about it,” Philip said. “It’s fascinating.”

  “I can still remember that kind of thing. I just forget new things.”

  “I know,” he said. “Look, it won’t be so bad. I’ll come and see you regularly. I’ll bring you anything you need. I’ll bring the baby to show you.”

  “Has it been born yet?” she asked.

  “Not quite yet,” Philip said. “Any day now. That’s why you’re giving me a ride to Manchester, so I can be home with Sanchia while it’s born.”