Mothers

by Chris Power

  Postcards began arriving again. They were all from Sweden, and came at set times each year: on birthdays and at Christmas. When Marie turned eighteen Eva sent her a silver bracelet. The message read Love Mamma. It was the first time Joe could remember seeing either word on anything she had sent them, and he wondered what that meant. Was she in a good place? Would she ever come back again? Marie wore the bracelet, but Joe knew she would have traded it many times over for the chance to talk to Eva. To tell her how well she’d done in her exams, and her plan to study medicine.

  It made Joe feel proud that Marie was going to university, the first person in his family to do so. Proud and old. At fifty-four he had become the office elder, and he felt like it. Gwen had moved on years before, and each new finance assistant looked younger, like a school kid who had wandered into the office by mistake. He must have appeared ancient. His parents were growing increasingly frail. ‘Your father fell,’ his mum told him on the phone one Friday evening, and exactly a week later he heard his dad’s voice, almost apologetic: ‘Your mother fell.’ The regularity of Eva’s postcards marked the time. Occasionally, although less and less, Marie would ask why he thought Eva had gone, and why she wasn’t coming back. For years Joe had stuck to the script he formulated the first time she ran away: your mum’s sick and she’s working on getting better. He didn’t believe it, and he didn’t think Marie did either, but they let it be the thing they said about her. For some reason, though, the most recent postcard, a picture of a railway station in some bleak Swedish town with a quick Happy birthday Joe, Eva scribbled on the back, no different from so many others, had infuriated him. The postcards, it struck him, were less a way of keeping in touch and more a nagging reminder. Miss me, each one seemed to say. Miss me. Miss me. Miss me.

  Late one evening, a few weeks before Marie left for Durham, Joe heard her come back from the pub and make her habitual journey from front door to fridge. He intercepted her there, entering the kitchen as Loki uncurled from his basket and skittered over the tiles. Marie dropped some ham on the floor for him.

  ‘Good night?’ Joe said.

  Marie shrugged, then nodded, and folded a slice of ham into her mouth.

  ‘Drunk?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Slaughtered,’ she said, ‘obviously.’

  ‘Good. Need to get in training for university.’

  ‘Har,’ Marie said through a mouthful of ham. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Watching rubbish on TV.’

  ‘Really watching? Or sleeping in front of?’

  ‘More sleeping in front of. Listen, Pluff, can I talk to you about something?’

  ‘Don’t call me Pluff,’ she said, but distractedly. She was staring into the fridge, making her next choice.

  ‘It’s about your mum. I don’t know if …’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘No, nothing. Not that I know of. But then how would we know if it had? We aren’t worthy of knowing what she’s actually doing, are we?’

  ‘Dad, don’t—’

  ‘I can’t forgive her for what she’s done to you, Marie. She’s so selfish. So dishonest.’

  Marie’s head sank down, her hair obscuring her face. Loki circled her, claws tapping, eager for more food. ‘But isn’t she sick, Dad?’ she said.

  ‘She could still talk to us.’ Joe spat the words. ‘She could let us help her.’

  ‘Don’t shout at me,’ Marie said, starting to cry.

  He drew her into a hug. Her fingers gripped the back of his neck. He could still remember her doing that when she was little, carrying her downstairs in the morning, her knees in his armpits. She used to settle her head against his chest and clutch, clutch his neck. They stayed holding each other for a time. Loki lay at their feet, his tongue expanding and contracting with each breath.

  Joe pulled his face from Marie’s hair. ‘I just want you to know, it’s OK if you get angry with her sometimes, too.’

  She snorted into his neck.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cue the acoustic guitar,’ she said, pushing away and rubbing her eye with the back of her hand. Speaking with an exaggeratedly Californian accent she said, ‘This is, like, a life lesson? And we’re, like, growing as people in our, like,’ she wagged her fingers to create quote marks in the air, ‘experience of adversity?’

  ‘You’re laughing at me,’ he said.

  ‘No, Dad. Or yeah, but in a nice way. It’s not …’ She rolled her eyes, looking for the words or the will to say them. ‘I like the postcards, OK? I like them. It does me good knowing she’s out there somewhere. She’s still my mum, even if she’s really, really shit at it. If it’s all I’m going to get I’ll take it.’

  *

  ‘Hello Dad.’

  ‘Hey Marie.’

  She moves the screen to show him her swollen belly. ‘Hello from bump,’ she says. ‘“Bump”. Puke.’

  ‘Soften up, daughter. You’re going to be a mum, y’know?’

  ‘Sexist,’ she says, her face returning to fill the screen. ‘Hello from offspring.’ Behind her Joe sees grey sky and the upper branches of a rain-sodden plane tree.

  ‘Edinburgh’s Edinburgh, then,’ he says.

  Marie glances at the window and back. ‘This thing’ll be born with fins. Dad?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Are you OK? You seem a bit …’

  ‘A bit what?’

  ‘Don’t know. You tell me.’

  ‘I’m fine. Just busy. Actually I’ve got this thing I wanted to let you know about. I’ve got to go to Germany for a couple of days.’

  ‘Germany?’

  ‘Yeah. Conference. Grown men and women losing it over the latest billing software.’

  ‘Wow! Sounds amazing. Shame I can’t come.’

  ‘It is. You’d absolutely love it. How’s Matt?’

  ‘He’s fine. Playing rugby. Says hi.’

  He had been worried about lying to her, but it was easy. It was to protect her, after all.

  *

  After Marie left for university they spoke once a week, and texted or emailed most days. He had access to some of what she posted online. He saw her in the holidays if she came back to London, but she often signed up for training courses, or volunteer placements overseas. He let her know when a postcard arrived, and held it up so she could see the picture on the front while he read out the message.

  It was on one of Marie’s rare trips home that Joe first met Matt, when she had been seeing him for just a few months. Joe took them to dinner. Matt, also a medic, had a very calm way about him, which Joe liked – he found himself imagining Matt explaining, in an utterly soothing way, that Joe’s biopsy had uncovered rampant, inoperable cancer – but by the end of the meal he was bored of him. He was happy to let Matt talk, though, as it allowed him to look at Marie. He was so impressed by her, a woman now. ‘My god!’ she said as Matt plodded through the story of their first date, her elbows on the table and a glass of red wine clutched in her hands, ‘Don’t undersell it! It was a disaster, Dad. He was charm incarnate until we ran into his teammates outside the curry house. Then it was all chest-bumps and songs about arses and “Who’s this fine filly?” Like bloody Wodehouse minus the wit. I wouldn’t see him again until I’d had proof he could read. And that he recognised the stupidity of physically invasive initiation ceremonies. Or could pretend he did, anyway.’

  At the end of the night Joe shook Matt’s hand and said, ‘Of course, no one will ever be good enough for my daughter, but I’m very happy to meet you anyway.’ They all laughed. He seemed kind, which Joe thought was enough.

  In the summer before her final year Marie went travelling around Europe with Matt, taking Eva’s old travel guide with her. ‘In case I fall through a wormhole to the 1970s,’ she said. She was vague about where they were going, but Joe wasn’t surprised when postcards arrived from at least two places he knew Eva had visited: Cadaqués and Innsbruck. The one from Innsbruck showed an old, colourised photograph of the town
with the Inn given prominence, a single, distant bridge crossing it. Joe wondered, did Marie know what happened there? Had Eva ever spoken to her about it? He thought about all those weekends in Sussex. The strange thought occurred to him that his daughter knew more about his wife than he did.

  He wanted to talk to Marie about the trip, but in the end – home for a single hectic day before returning to Durham – all she said was she had wanted to visit the places her mum had told her about. ‘The way she spoke about them, Dad, do you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, thinking Marie had forgotten Eva shared some things only with her, and disturbed at the thought that neither of them could be sure how much the other knew.

  *

  Joe takes an early flight to Landvetter airport. He hires a car and drives east along a motorway cut through pine forest. It is only now, in the solitude of the car, that he grasps the reality of what is happening. Nervous, he turns the radio on for distraction and jumps as music roars from the speakers. He fumbles at the unfamiliar dashboard, and laughs as he begins making sense of the noise. ‘Fucking Abba?’ he says aloud. ‘Are you kidding me?’ He shakes his head and squeezes the wheel in his hands. He murmurs the melody, begins to half-sing words he had forgotten he ever knew, and as the verse flows into the chorus he lowers the window and shouts it into the freezing air.

  The hospital where Eva is being treated is on the outskirts of town, at the edge of a birch forest. When Joe arrives he meets briefly with Dr Järnfors. She tells him Eva has been looking forward to his arrival, but asks him not to talk for too long, and to try and keep the conversation light. ‘It can be very difficult to see people we have been close to after so many years apart,’ she says. ‘I do not want Eva to be disturbed by your visit.’

  ‘Of course, Doctor,’ Joe says. Does she think this is easy for him? Or that he’s come all this way to chat about the weather?

  A nurse leads Joe to a ground-floor cafeteria, its windows overlooking a courtyard with some bare bushes at its centre. The windows must be tinted; through them the grey day looks more like twilight than mid-morning. Aside from a couple of staff cleaning the tables the cafeteria is empty. Scatters of rain begin to blow against the glass. The nurse brings Joe a cup of coffee, and puts one across the table from him for Eva. ‘Decaf,’ she says, unsmiling.

  ‘Both of them?’ he says, but she ignores him, sits down a few tables away and pulls out her phone. A cluster of bubbles revolves on the black surface of the coffee.

  Joe has his back to the cafeteria doors, and doesn’t see Eva until she is right beside him. How old she looks. She is just the other side of sixty from him, but she could be fifteen years older than that. Her skin is yellow and deeply wrinkled. Her cheekbones are more prominent than they have ever been, even than when he first met her, only now they are not markers of beauty but indicators of approaching death. Between them and the way the skin around her eyes has shrivelled, it’s her skull Joe sees first, her face second. Her eyes, those beautiful green eyes, have turned watery, unfocused and indistinct. Her mouth quivers and her hand flaps, searching for the tabletop as if she is blind.

  ‘Hej,’ she says, ‘hur mår du?’

  ‘Bara bra,’ Joe says, remembering some of the Swedish she taught him when they first met. He had imagined back then that he might one day be fluent. It had never happened.

  She says something more in Swedish, and Joe stares at her uncomprehendingly. Realisation animates her face. ‘Förlåt! Sorry! I haven’t spoken English in so long. I asked if you saw the zoo.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I came past it on my way here.’

  ‘I hear them, you know. The animals. Early in the morning, and sometimes in the middle of the night.’

  The topic of conversation is unexpected, but she seems lucid. How old she has become, though, he cannot stop thinking it. Her thick hair has thinned and greyed. It is wet and combed, hanging straight down on either side of her face. She isn’t wearing make-up, and the shape of her mouth and the sloppiness of her speech tell him she has lost some teeth. She is wearing a plain blue sweatshirt that is much too long for her, dark, loose cotton trousers and canvas slippers. She holds her hands out in front of her, fingertips touching, as if she is holding something very small and delicate. They shake – or rather vibrate: the movement isn’t pronounced, but it is constant. They are liver-spotted, their veins raised.

  ‘Time’s ravages,’ Eva says, following Joe’s stare. ‘With,’ she adds, lifting her clenched hands to her mouth as if swigging from a miniature bottle, ‘a lot of alcohol thrown in.’

  ‘Where did you go, Eva?’ Joe says.

  She looks out at the frozen courtyard. Her sunken mouth creases into a smile, but not in a way that has anything to do with happiness. ‘All around,’ she says. ‘I went all around. Wherever I could pick up some work. It seemed to help if I kept moving. Whenever I stopped moving everything became … too much.’

  ‘You made enough money like that?’

  ‘Not really. I had some savings but they ran out. But it wasn’t so hard getting something, usually: shop work, washing dishes, anything. I picked blueberries in Värmland one summer, with the Vietnamese. That was hard work. They went on strike.’ She looks down at the table. Her shoulders subside, as if she is exhausted. ‘I took some charity. You meet some good people. And bad. Part of the time, for half a year maybe, I lived in the woods – down south, where it’s warmest.’

  ‘You camped?’

  ‘Yes, camped. I had a little tent and a sleeping bag. I can build a fire, I can find mushrooms, I know which berries to eat. But I was never so far away from civilisation, really. Most of the food I ate was canned, not … ah …’

  ‘Foraged?’

  ‘Yes! My English is not good. Even my Swedish, I think, is going.’

  It’s true. In the short time they have been talking her speech has deteriorated. Maybe the booze has slowed her down, Joe thinks. Could she have had a stroke at some point? He will ask Dr Järnfors. He has noticed also that she fills the spaces between words with odd sub-vocalisations: quick bursts of humming that sound like noises of agreement, or the cooing of pigeons. He has the sense she is exerting a lot of energy to stay focused on what she is saying. Dr Järnfors has told him her mind often wanders, and her medication makes her tired, and sometimes confused.

  She picks up her coffee cup with both hands and lifts it, slowly and shakily, to her lips. She drinks and exhales with pleasure. ‘I spent a lot of time just wanting it to be over,’ she says, ‘but I kept losing my nerve. Then I went mad, and really didn’t know what was happening from one day to the next.’ She laughs, and for a moment the Eva Joe knew so long ago is sitting across from him.

  ‘It’s really you,’ he says, saying the words without thinking. It is so strange to be sitting here with the woman who was once his wife.

  ‘Yes, really me,’ she says, ‘an old granny. And you’re really you, and old too.’

  ‘I am,’ Joe says, lifting his hands away from his body and looking down at his large belly.

  ‘Am I, by the way?’

  ‘Are you what?’

  ‘A granny.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Marie’s living with someone, but I don’t think babies are on the horizon. She’s at medical school. She’s training to be a doctor.’

  ‘Really?’ She smiles for a moment then her face darkens. ‘I hate doctors.’

  ‘Aren’t they the ones helping you get better?’

  ‘They don’t know what better is. All they do is fill me with drugs.’

  ‘They say you’re a lot better now than when you were admitted. What do you think?’

  ‘Are you seeing anybody?’ she says.

  The question throws him. ‘No,’ he says. This isn’t true, but he doesn’t want to talk about that.

  ‘Everybody needs someone,’ she says, half-singing the words of a song Joe doesn’t recognise. ‘I have my doctors. Dr Järnfors, she’s one,’ Eva says, talking as if she knows something no one else has fig
ured out. ‘She says I should have been on medication years ago.’

  ‘She didn’t know you years ago,’ Joe says, irritated. ‘What are they giving you now?’

  ‘Things with long and ugly names. An anti … antipsykotisk?’

  ‘Antipsychotic.’

  ‘Yes, this. And a … antidepressant.’

  ‘How do they make you feel?’

  ‘Better sometimes, sometimes worse. I get headaches. I sweat.’ She plucks at her baggy top.

  They listen to the rain spatter on the glass. Eva makes small cooing sounds. A minute passes. Two minutes. Joe has run out of things to say, unless he tells her how miserable this all is. A line comes to him from somewhere: ‘They hadn’t grown apart; they had never really been together.’ Is that true? He looks out at the leafless bushes that look like they are writhing in pain, the soil beneath them silvered with frost. It isn’t true.

  ‘Do you want to know what it’s like?’ Eva says, her voice suddenly seeming very loud in the empty cafeteria.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘When it comes it’s like all the rules change. You feel everything falling apart and coming back together in new shapes, shapes you can’t understand. You lose the ability to make sense of anything. You lose the will to get up out of the chair. You don’t recognise your face in the mirror. Your breath stinks, your piss stinks. Everything seems thin, like it’s made of paper. It’s like a joke’s been played on you, only it’s terrifying, too. That’s the worst part. You’re terrified, on top of all the rest.’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ Joe says.

  ‘You never could. You could only judge.’