Mothers

by Chris Power

  As if in response to the thought, the doctor begins to talk about auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia – or at least she uses a word with ‘schizo’ in it. Schizo-something disorder. Joe reaches for his tablet to make a note, but only stares into the screen’s soft glow, listening to the doctor describe the woman he thought had disappeared for good.

  ‘What can you do for her?’ he interrupts.

  ‘We—’ she begins, then clears her throat. ‘We must proceed according to our current evaluation only, Mr Dewar. What I can say is that Eva has improved significantly since she came into our care. This desire to contact her family is, we feel, another positive step.’

  ‘She hasn’t wanted to see us for years,’ Joe says.

  ‘Well, she has asked to see you now,’ the doctor says. ‘You and,’ she pauses, perhaps to read her notes, ‘Marie. She says you are the only people she knows.’

  Joe remains sitting in the kitchen until it is lit only by a streetlight. At some point he says, ‘Call Marie,’ and the dialling icon appears on the tablet’s screen. What will he say? Marie, we’ve found your mother. Marie, she’s back again. ‘End call,’ he says.

  *

  It was on their third date that Eva told Joe she had once tried to kill herself. They were sitting at the counter of a cramped, crowded tapas bar in Soho, and Joe had to lean in close to hear her. She didn’t look at him, only stared down at her fingers splayed against the marble. Joe looked down too, following the oyster-grey veins that curled like smoke through the white stone.

  Two years ago, she said, she threw herself off a bridge in Innsbruck. ‘The Innsteg footbridge. I found it on YouTube.’ She laughed as if she was telling an embarrassing story about herself, some foolishness from her childhood. She booked a hotel nearby, she said, and when she arrived she unpacked her things very neatly, ‘because that mattered, for some reason’. She left the hotel, crossed a busy street, walked halfway across the bridge, climbed the iron balustrade and stepped off.

  ‘Going there – all the way from London – I felt better than I’d felt in months. Isn’t that funny? I knew something was going to happen that would change everything. And when I decided to really do it’ – she stabbed the counter – ‘it was like solving a puzzle you’ve been stuck on forever. I was so excited I almost ran to the bridge.’

  She fell ten metres into fast-flowing water and was washed downriver towards another, larger bridge. ‘The current kept turning me around. I was pulled out but I’d swallowed so much water I didn’t know much about it. Someone, I never found out who, gave me CPR. They told me in the hospital. I was there for a few days, I had to be interviewed by a psychologist and I got a telling off from some policemen. They said they could arrest me but they let me go. As soon as they discharged me I flew back to London.’

  ‘And then … Are you OK now? Sorry, that’s stupid.’

  ‘No, it’s not stupid, I am OK,’ she said, looking up from the counter and into his eyes. ‘Something washed out of me in the water. I’ve never felt like that again.’

  *

  An image remained fixed in Joe’s mind: Eva pulling herself up onto the bridge railing and letting herself topple. Over and over again he saw her fall. He didn’t know anyone who had ever done something like that. He wanted to see her again. He invited her to a dinner at a pub in Lambeth, a birthday party for his friend Toby. He felt proud introducing her, his arm around her, wanting her to feel secure among these new people. When she smiled or laughed it seemed loaded with significance, a significance the laughter of others lacked.

  There might have been two dozen people there, a long, loud table. Between the main course and dessert Joe was absorbed in conversation with Shelagh, Toby’s girlfriend, when Toby reached across the table and tapped his arm. ‘Think Eva’s legged it, mate,’ he said.

  Confused, Joe glanced to his left and saw her seat was empty, her jacket gone. ‘Just having a smoke or something,’ Joe said, but he knew Toby was right. He slipped on his jacket as he left the pub. It was autumn, a still, crisp night. He headed towards Waterloo and found her a couple of streets away, almost at the tube. ‘Where are you going?’ he called.

  She stopped and turned. ‘Home,’ she said. She looked miserable.

  ‘How come? What’s wrong?’

  She squirmed her shoulders. ‘Parties,’ she said. ‘Just needed to go.’

  ‘OK,’ Joe said, smiling, ‘so where are we going?’

  ‘No, Joe, you stay.’ She tried a smile that veered into a grimace. ‘I’ll call you, OK?’

  He watched her until she turned the corner.

  ‘It felt like I couldn’t breathe,’ she said when he called her the next day.

  ‘Sounds like a panic attack,’ Joe said. ‘My mum gets those.’

  There was a pause. ‘It’s just something that happens sometimes,’ she said.

  ‘Have you ever talked to someone about it? Had it checked out?’

  She laughed and blew out air. ‘No,’ she said, elongating the word. ‘You think I should?’

  ‘Ah, who needs doctors? You’ve got me now.’

  *

  Joe replays his conversation with Dr Järnfors. ‘Schizoaffective disorder’ is what she said. ‘Search “schizoaffective”,’ he says, and the screen blooms with information.

  Schizoaffective disorder:

  psychotic symptoms, similar to schizophrenia, and

  mood symptoms of bipolar disorder

  Show psychotic symptoms?

  Show mood symptoms?

  ‘Save search,’ Joe says. He’ll look another time.

  *

  A few months after they met, Joe and Eva were living together. Within a year they were married. It was a small wedding: just Joe’s parents, his brother Mark, his wife Sally and their two daughters, and Toby and Shelagh. Eva didn’t invite anyone: she had no living family and no friends. She got on with Joe’s friends without having grown close to any of them, and had a jokey reputation for going AWOL on nights out. ‘Just keep an eye on her, Joe,’ Toby said on the morning of the ceremony, ‘don’t want her disappearing today.’

  Writing his speech presented Joe with a challenge: he didn’t know a lot about Eva. Her parents were dead, and there was a stepfather who either was or might as well be – she hadn’t had any contact with him for years. Beyond that, all Joe knew about was their life together. Up to that point it had been enough. ‘Memories are important, Joe-Joe,’ his mum had said months earlier, when she had called him to unsubtly probe for information about this new girlfriend.

  ‘We’re making memories,’ Joe told her. ‘We’ll make all we need.’ He joked about it in the speech. ‘My sleeper cell,’ he called her. ‘My international woman of mystery.’

  But on the first night of their honeymoon, in Tunisia, eating dinner on a torchlit terrace with the palms clacking above them in the onshore breeze, Eva did tell Joe something she hadn’t told him before, about the death of her mother and how sudden it had been.

  ‘For a long time I couldn’t let go of it,’ she said. ‘I’d wake up and see her on the bed, staring out of the window.’

  ‘You still see her now?’ Joe asked hesitantly, not wanting to seem too eager to know.

  ‘Never since Innsbruck,’ Eva said. ‘I’m done with all that thinking about death. I’m more interested in life.’ She smiled and lifted her cognac in a toast. ‘Life with you.’

  *

  Joe types ‘Borås’. He swipes around the town centre, then searches for the hospital. He finds it on the outskirts of town, a nondescript white and grey building six storeys tall. Borås looks more or less how he expects a Swedish town to look based on his very limited knowledge. He once thought they would go there, that Eva would want to show him the country she came from. But when he suggested it, not long after they were married, she said, ‘I never want to go back there again. Never.’

  *

  The summer Marie turned three they went back to Tunisia. The company Joe worked for was growing fast and
the hours were long, and he felt like he was missing seeing his daughter grow up. He loved having time to muck around in the water with her, or read storybooks and eat ice creams by the pool. Eva was quiet, but seemed happy enough. She grew addicted to harissa, bowls of which stood on every cafe and restaurant table. ‘In Sweden when I was growing up,’ she said, scooping the red paste onto a piece of bread, ‘pepper was as exotic as it got.’

  ‘What kind of stuff did you eat?’ Joe asked, smiling.

  ‘In Sweden?’ Eva said, the bread hovering by her mouth.

  ‘Yeah, when you were a kid.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear about that,’ Eva said. ‘Marie, nej!’ The little girl had dug her fingers into the harissa, and was lifting them to her mouth.

  ‘I do want to,’ Joe said.

  Eva, wiping Marie’s fingers clean, glanced up at him, looking flustered. ‘Maybe later,’ she said.

  He thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, throwing Marie around in the surf and chatting about nothing in particular over dinner, which they ate early, before Marie’s bedtime. That night, while Eva sang Marie to sleep, he sat on their balcony drinking wine. He didn’t notice how fast he was drinking. When Eva appeared and he poured her a glass he was surprised to see how little was left, and how clumsy he had become.

  ‘She’s OK?’ he said. He had to make an effort not to slur his words.

  Eva nodded.

  ‘So tell me,’ he said. Far below, in the darkness, he heard the sea turn on the beach.

  ‘Tell you what?’ Eva said, sipping her wine and stretching in her chair.

  ‘About you. Sweden. Before you met me. Whatever.’

  ‘Joe, I’m tired.’

  ‘What about the book?’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘The book,’ Joe said, becoming exasperated. ‘That travel guide, the one you treat like it’s the Bible.’ She would read it while Joe swam and played with Marie, completely engrossed.

  There was a long silence before Eva answered. ‘It belonged to my mother,’ she said. She was looking down at the table, her hands in her lap.

  ‘And?’ Joe said, making an effort to sound curious rather than angry.

  Eva put a hand to her face. She rubbed the heel of her hand left and right across her forehead, her fingers splayed. ‘That’s enough, Joe,’ she said.

  ‘Eva!’ Joe brought his hand down hard against the wooden slats of the table. Startled, Eva stared at him. He slumped back in his chair. ‘Why the fuck can’t you talk to me?’

  Her eyes dropped to the tabletop again.

  ‘Aren’t we happy?’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t I make you happy?’

  She stood and he reached for her, but she pulled her arm away. She walked to the balcony door, a breeze lifting the wrap around her shoulders; for a moment it waved behind her like a cape.

  Joe slapped his glass of wine off the table. It smashed against the balcony wall. Eva stopped and looked back at him, then opened the door and stepped inside. A minute later Joe heard the room door closing. A minute after that, leaning over the balcony railing, he saw her leave the hotel, cross the empty road to the beach, and merge with the darkness.

  *

  As summer became autumn, Eva picked up no new work. She wore her robe over her pyjamas when she walked Marie to nursery, and was often still dressed that way when Joe came home at night, lying on the couch watching TV while Marie played on the floor beside her. When she finally did get a few days’ work at the beginning of October, he came home on the first day of her contract to find her in her pyjamas, the lights off, the room flickering as she switched between channel after channel, never staying on one for more than a few seconds. The volume was so high she hadn’t heard Joe come in. The day’s litter lay scattered across the coffee table: a crumb-speckled plate, the black bowl of a microwave meal, a flattened crisp packet. The room was stale with the smell of tobacco. On the floor he saw Marie watching something on the iPad, her hair a wash of shifting colours as Eva switched and switched again.

  Joe scooped Marie up and carried her through to the kitchen, asking her if she’d had anything to eat. He kicked the door to the living room closed to block out the noise of the TV, and sat with her while she ate a pot of yoghurt. He took her upstairs, brushed her teeth and read her a story. He stayed with her until she was asleep. Then he went downstairs, opened the living-room door, switched on the light, snatched the remote from Eva’s lap and turned off the TV. The sudden silence left a shocked echo in the room. Eva continued to stare at the screen, her jaw jutting obstinately.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to work today?’

  ‘Not now, Joe,’ she said, still looking at the TV.

  ‘“Not now”? When?’ She didn’t answer, and he moved between her and the TV. She looked up sullenly.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘OK?’ As she spoke, tears came into her eyes. She squeezed her lips together, the skin around them whitening, but she couldn’t stop the sobs. A long, trailing cry came from her. Joe sat beside her and held her for a long time, her legs across his lap, his hands smoothing her hair. They didn’t speak; each time he tried to say something she shook her head, and pressed her face more tightly still into the space between his neck and shoulder.

  *

  The night after speaking to Dr Järnfors, Joe lies awake thinking about Eva. He is with her in Innsbruck, a shadow at her back. She ascends a staircase to a hotel room and carefully unpacks her clothes, diligently dividing her small supply of tops and skirts and underwear. The room is filled with the sound of traffic: narrow French doors open onto a barred ledge of a balcony that looks out, across a busy street, to the river. The sky is blue; it’s a warm day in late summer.

  She goes downstairs, hands in her key and leaves the hotel. She moves along the street with purpose. She crosses to the riverside, and for a few minutes she walks beside the rushing water. She is walking against its flow. Joe has input start point and end point and scrolled along the street many times; he knows it’s a three-minute walk from the hotel to the Innsteg Bridge, beside the rushing waters of the Inn.

  The guardrails on the bridge are lattices of wrought iron painted green. As she crosses the bridge, looking down at the wooden boards at her feet, she runs her hand along the top of the guardrail, scudding over the half-sphere rivets that bulge from its surface. When people pass in the opposite direction she politely makes way. Halfway across, without breaking stride, she turns towards the downriver side of the bridge, puts her foot into one of the diamond openings in the latticework, lifts herself up, swings one leg over, then the other, and attempts to step out of her life. Joe follows, but he drops from the bridge only to return to the bed that, long ago, was theirs.

  *

  One sunny winter weekend Joe took Marie to Lewes. Eva had asked him to get out of the house at weekends, which he was happy enough to do. Why would he want to be there when all she did was lie on the couch, or sometimes shamble to the patio doors to smoke a cigarette? ‘The same,’ she would say when he asked her what she had done that day. Whenever he asked a question, whatever it was, she looked pained. When he shouted at her, which was often, she was impassive. Civil communication between them had dwindled almost to nothing.

  Sometimes Joe took Marie to his parents in Hampshire, sometimes to Mark and Sally in Kent. This weekend was the first time he had been to see Toby and Shelagh since they had moved to Lewes the previous summer. That night Joe and Toby stayed up late drinking wine. Toby had a daughter a year younger than Marie, and they compared levels of tiredness and the small, amazing things each girl was doing.

  ‘And Eva’s still no better?’ Toby finally said. Shelagh had asked after her at dinner, but the conversation had quickly moved on. Joe had been waiting for the question to be asked again, in less avoidable circumstances.

  ‘She’s OK, she’s OK,’ Joe said. ‘She’s got her problems but y’know; we’re getting there.’

  ‘Is she working?’

  ‘Not right now, no. She’
s not ready for that right now.’

  ‘Is she seeing someone?’

  For a moment Joe thought Toby meant an affair. He laughed and shook his head. ‘No, she’s not. We’ve talked about it but … y’know. Things with her mum. She resists any kind of … medicalisation of things. And hey,’ he smiled, ‘she’s got me, right? And Marie.’

  ‘Yeah, mate,’ Toby said, tipping his glass towards Joe. ‘What woman could want or need more?’

  They touched glasses, drank and fell silent. Joe peeled the label off the last bottle Toby had upended into their glasses.

  ‘But y’know …’ Toby said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, a pro, a doctor or someone … She might be able to tell them things she can’t tell you.’

  ‘She can tell me anything. She knows that.’

  ‘Course she can! Course she can. But sometimes it’s, it’s the people who’re closest it can be hardest to tell.’ Toby leaned over the table and spoke more quietly. ‘Some of my shit … I just don’t want Shelagh to have to deal with it, you know? Or you. Or anyone who isn’t getting paid to hear it.’

  ‘What shit?’

  Toby winced and waved his hand. ‘Not the point, just … Just don’t assume she’ll sort herself out. Doesn’t always go that way.’

  It was dark the next afternoon when Joe and Marie turned onto their street. Eva was outside, wearing only her pyjama jacket, which barely covered her backside. She was pacing on the pavement outside the house, her breath streaming in the cold air, her skin yellow in the streetlight. As they got closer, Joe heard her repeating something again and again.

  ‘They’ve arrived,’ she was saying. ‘Nothing’s ready, they’ve arrived, they’ve arrived.’

  ‘Eva,’ Joe said, ‘Eva,’ but she didn’t seem to hear his voice. When he took her arms to stop her pacing, she seemed not to recognise him at all. The stink of gin was coming off her, a smell that had made Joe recoil since the first time he ever drank himself sick. ‘Go inside, Marie,’ he said.