Fact — during the Kosovo War, the pope, His Holiness the Pope, refused permission for Catholic women in danger of rape by Muslim soldiers to use the pill. If they became pregnant it was the will of God. Some 20,000 women were abandoned by their families for carrying alien children. Abortions are a sin but some carried the children to term and then killed them. The Catholic Serbs did not want Muslim babies in their midst for they were making a Greater Serbia. Why would God send such a message to the pope? Couldn’t he get through to anyone else?
I keep thinking about the lunch where Mother had her stroke. I think I seemed very ordinary at that lunch. Just middle class and ordinary, but I’m not. I’m not just a polite middle-class lady who’s been secreting trinkets from the High Street into her raincoat pocket on the quiet. I don’t mind prison. Perhaps it might even be rather nice to stay. There’s no cooking and I can read. I like reading. I might learn French. I was going to have evening classes in French once, but Adam said he couldn’t see the point. He told me cheval means horse and it’s like that all the way through. They have a different word for each one of ours. The psychiatrist asks me what I think about John now that he’s dead and I say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, of course, but he was very religious. I mean, if he was right he’ll be just fine by now.’ He would be fine in death but he would have ruined Shirley’s life, only I don’t say that.
‘What happened after your mother had the stroke?’ The psychiatrist never seems to tire of his job.
Get off your Bed and Walk
… if you will not hearken unto me and will not do all these commandments… I will appoint over you sudden terror, consumption and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away…
(LEVITICUS 26.14)
I don’t want to talk about Mother. I want to talk about my dreams. The little I do sleep is so full of strange dreams. Last night I was in a plane. Actually, first I was standing next to the plane. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with two wings. What do you call it? A biplane. I was laughing and people were taking pictures with really ancient cameras that flashed and banged. I was thin, which was nice, and I jumped up on to the plane, which was scary. Then I got in the cockpit. The plane started and I was in charge. I was ready to fly but I looked at the controls and I didn’t know how any of it worked. I woke up sweating and I couldn’t remember where I was. I lay there wondering why I can’t seem to sleep and then what good would it do anyway.
Nobody really knows why we sleep. The body doesn’t actually need to shut down ‘the system’ for as long as most people find they need to sleep. I think it must be some kind of safety valve to let the brain sort out all the input from the day. Time to put one’s internal system in order. Unfortunately the office of my mind seems to be perpetually strewn with scraps of paper and untidy bundles of discarded information. I know all these things and they are of no use to me. Why did God give me a brain? To sort tea towels by colour so they don’t run in the wash?
Margaret Thatcher needed only a few hours’ sleep each night to feel refreshed, which I think is all the proof you need that she wasn’t a real person. I always thought the most telling aspect of the Brighton bomb at the Grand Hotel was that at 3 a.m., when it went off, Thatcher was at her desk working, while Denis was fast asleep. The other curiosity was that Norman Tebbit was carried out with the top button done up on his pyjamas. What a fun chap he must be.
What did happen after Mother had the stroke? Well, they were nice in the hospital. Edenford General. Perfectly pleasant to me and Mother. I wasn’t worried at first. She’d had a stroke but the doctors said there was every reason to suppose she might recover, although when I was with her it seemed hard to believe. She had descended into a hell where I could not find her. I tried. I did try. I went to visit every day and she would be sitting up in her bed jacket loudly calling, ‘Who ha! Who ha!’
The stroke had left her unable to see at all without her glasses. She was confused and frightened and flailed about, still refusing to put them on. She was also speechless apart from the phrase ‘Who ha’, which she had once used when she forgot the occasional word. Now it seemed to be the only thing she could remember. She sat up in bed calling ‘Who Ha! Who Ha!’, an old woman who looked like my mother, dressed like my mother, but who in the middle of the night had had her soul stolen by an incontinent and blinded owl.
She had the most staggering ability to urinate. It’s not something you want to know about your mother or any grown-up really. The nurses were very busy and I had to keep getting Wet Wipes to sort her out. We were supposed to meet with social services but William had a conference and Martha can’t/won’t deal with hospitals. When the man arrived, Mother was asleep. I sat looking at her. Her whole face had sagged down on to the bed. She looked a hundred years old. This was my mother. I tried to imagine that I had started life inside her, grown inside her, first heard the world through her, but I couldn’t see it. We seemed to be nothing like each other. What had she done to my father to make him remove her from the will? How could he have been so cruel? Why didn’t he just leave? Why did he wait till after the end? I had so many questions and nowhere to take them.
The social worker was very nice, very young, very tired. I got him a cup of tea from the machine.
‘How old is your mother?’ he asked.
‘Sixty-five, I think, yes, sixty-five.’ Four years older than Shirley Bassey. Who ha, who ha…
He flipped though endless paperwork. ‘Right, and the prognosis?’
I smiled. ‘Good. They seem to think she could recover. She’s just… confused at the moment, that’s all.’
‘Oh dear.’ The young man sipped his tea.
‘Oh dear, she’s confused or oh dear, she’ll recover?’
‘No, that’s good, it’s just we have to decide what to do with her in the meantime.’
I didn’t understand. ‘Do with her?’
‘Well, care … Who will care for her?’
‘Won’t you? Social services?’
He shook his head. ‘Not entirely. We’re not a cure-all, you know.’ He looked at me, frowning, and became a bit less businesslike. ‘Have you dealt with the elderly before?’
The elderly. My indomitable mother was suddenly ‘the elderly’. I shook my head.
‘Let me explain. Your mother could live for some time.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Yes, but you see…
Fact — during the 1970s and 1980s, industrialised countries experienced unexpectedly large declines in mortality among the elderly, resulting in larger-than-projected numbers of the very old. In the United States, the so-called frail elderly group, aged 85 years and older, increased nearly fourfold between 1950 and 1980, from 590,000 to 2,461,000. Given the high incidence of health problems among the very old, such increases have important implications for the organisation and financing of health care.
‘Our budget is very limited…’
Fact — the elderly now constitute the largest single client group using personal social services worldwide. In all advanced industrial societies, the proportion of infirm elderly is on the increase and, although they constitute only a small minority of the retired population, their claim on social services is disproportionately heavy.
‘Obviously we want to help but we have very limited resources. Does your mother have any money?’
‘No.’
‘None at all?’
‘None. It’s all been rather sudden. My father… no, none.’
‘It’s just that there isn’t a vacancy in the local council homes at the moment. Maybe in three or four months—’
‘Three or four months? Look, my mother worked all her life, I mean, not in a job as such but—’
‘Mrs Marshall. Let me explain to you that half of all personal social service expenditure in this county is spent on the elderly. We are doing the best we can but the numbers just keep going up. There are too many frail old people and not enough places.’
Fact — improvements in health
care are reflected by the increase in longevity for people in England. Life expectancy increased from 68 years in 1961 to 71.8 years in 1985 for males, and from 73.9 years to 77.7 years for females.
The young man warmed to his theme. He had obviously done his homework. A social degree in getting old and getting stuffed. ‘I suppose it’s a sign of society doing well, isn’t it? People living so long. Did you know that in ancient Rome and medieval Europe the average life span is estimated to have been between twenty and thirty years? Life expectancy today has expanded in historically unprecedented proportions. The chances of surviving to be over sixty-five are quite staggering.’
‘What’s the point if you’ve got nowhere to go?’
‘Of course, if you could go privately…’
It was money. It was all about money. ‘How much are we talking about?’ I asked.
‘Minimum — three hundred and fifty pounds a week, all-in. It’s very nice. They have regular meals, get their laundry done, bit of entertainment…
‘That’s a lot.’
The young man was running out of steam. ‘Chiropody…’ he faltered as we said goodbye. I went back to Mother’s bedside.
The nurse was nice. She sat stroking Mother’s face.
‘Shame,’ she said. ‘All that experience in there. All that life. Will she be going home with you?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, I wanted to…’
‘I know. People don’t any more. Everything’s changed.’ She leant down to the bed and spoke to my sleeping mother. ‘What happened to the family, eh, Lillian?’
The nurse went home. She went home without Mother and felt fine. I sat beside my old mum and looked at her. Martha had sent fruit, so I cut open an apple. Before I ate it, I examined the thing all over. A miracle. I realised I was looking for a miracle. And that’s what you can do, Inge. That’s the choice. You can sit and wait for a miracle or you can get up and do something by yourself. It was all I was reduced to.
Tell Shirley I love her. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I am trying.
Love, Eve
Chapter Eight
Two very funny removal men arrived early on the Saturday morning of Inge’s move and managed to be funny all day long. Every time Inge came into the room, one of them would start a mock racing commentary.
‘And Inge Holbrook is coming up on the outside. She’s looking good, carrying a small packing case…
Or if one of them lifted something particularly heavy, the other would present him with a medal that was accepted with a thick Russian accent.
‘Comrades, I am proud to be a member of de Russian vomen’s team. I tank god for vodka, vomen and steroids. Tank you, tank you.
Hilarious. Inge smiled and smiled. They played shot-put with the tea bags, relay races with the sugar spoon. Not for one minute did they just let her be a woman who was simply moving house. They couldn’t seem to forget who she was or get used to her presence in the room. She let ride the jokes, she even let ride hearing one of them on the mobile telling someone to ‘guess where he was’ and she let ride how long it all took. By the time the men left, Inge, friend of the people, was exhausted and the flat was empty. Her home had been packed and taken away and Inge was afraid. She looked at the large, empty loft, all set for the next professional couple. For people on the up, people with careers, places to go, people to see.
Inge checked her watch. There wasn’t much time before the truck would be heading off for Edenford. She shook herself into action. There was no point in getting sentimental. She was doing the right thing. Kate was sitting on a folding chair, waiting in the hall. She had a compact camera in her hand.
‘Come on, grumpy, smile!’ she commanded, as Inge appeared in the doorway. Inge grinned as Kate flashed a quick snap.
‘Do you have to immortalise everything?’ Inge enquired.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Do you know what this move has cost in shifting photo albums alone? Thank God we never had children.’ Inge gently put her hand under Kate’s shoulder and helped her to her feet. Kate rose slowly and reached out to stroke Inge’s face.
‘Your children would have been beautiful.’ The two women smiled at each other. ‘You’ll be glad of them. The albums.’
Inge felt the tears rise behind her eyes but she wouldn’t let them flow. ‘Yes, yes I will. Now come on, you old camera bag.’
Edenford lay about an hour south of London if you put your foot down, but Inge took her time. Kate slept as they drove and she didn’t want to disturb her. Kate the lovely, Kate the cursed, secret Kate. Truth be told Kate was perhaps not the prettiest woman in the world. She carried the light tan colour of her Caribbean roots, with dark, curly hair and deep, brown eyes. Nearly fifty, her face was a little too lined and perhaps a little too round for real beauty. Inge tried to remember what it was she liked about her. Why she was turning her life upside-down for her. It was something indefinable. Kate was a person so filled to the core with life that it made everyone who met her feel good about themselves. That was her skill. Making others feel worth something. When anyone spoke to her, she would concentrate so fiercely on what they were saying that for a short while the speaker would believe their own significance. She gave Inge significance. It was a great gift.
A tone deaf version of the ‘William Tell Overture’ began bleating from Inge’s mobile. Her stomach tensed for no reason. It was ridiculous. Inge grabbed the phone off the dashboard.
‘Hello?’
‘Darling, it’s Barry. Well, tell him I’m not accepting that. Unless we get the extra thousand he can forget it.’
Inge waited. She had had this call almost every day of her professional life. Barry Trancher, her agent, would call her and then carry on the rest of his business as if he hadn’t. He always spoke partly to her and partly to anyone who happened to be in the room with him. It had taken some time to get used to.
‘Hello, Barry.’
‘Where are you, darling? I can never find you. You must tell me where you are,’ his slightly high-pitched voice whined at her.
‘I’m moving, remember?’
‘Of course you are. Helen, send Inge flowers … don’t know… moving sort of flowers.., no, not emotional ones … what the fuck is an emotional flower? Moving… you know… house … flowers. Honestly, you can’t get the staff. Moving, that’s lovely. Now, I’ve had a call from contracts at the BBC about the new project—’
‘Don’t even go there.’
‘Darling, I have to. I know it’s the business side of things and you hate that but—’
Inge laughed. ‘No, Barry, that’s the name of the show.’
Barry coughed and moved on. ‘Well, obviously I know that. Now, we can go one of two ways with this. We can go for the kind of all-in contract you’ve had before, you know, you work for the Beeb, they pay you, you do whatever they ask or… well, tell him I’ll call him back. I don’t care if he is in sodding Marrakesh… or we can go contract by contract. Now because this is a game show—’
‘Sorry, Barry,’ Inge interrupted. ‘Game show? I thought it was a documentary?’
‘Doco? No, no, it’s a game show.., with the…’ Inge could hear Barry desperately rummaging through paperwork in order to remember. ‘… kids … that’s it… kids.’
‘What kids?’
Barry tried to be calm. He had clearly thought this was going to be a quick call. ‘The ones, Inge, who are going to take part.’
‘I’m sorry. I was told it was a documentary with members of the public getting fit.’
‘No, no, that’d never work. No, it’s a game show where teams of the public and/or celebs watch kids trying adult sports and guess which one will win. You do interviews with the kids and they say cute things, but if they get a bit cheeky, you say—’
‘Don’t even go there.’ Inge had had enough. ‘Barry, this is ridiculous.’
‘Please, I haven’t even done the money yet. Coffee, where the hell is my coffee?’
Inge waited for Barry’
s coffee. ‘Not the money. The show. All they have is a title. They don’t actually have anything to broadcast. I’m not a bloody comedian. I can’t afford to—’
‘You can’t afford not to do anything. Inge, I deal with this night and day. You have to understand that things have changed. I have clients, established clients, who can’t even get their calls returned. Just let me get you signed up and we’ll worry about what you’re making later when you’re actually making it. Well, what’s he doing in Marrakesh? Sweetie, I’ll call you back.’ Inge’s phone went dead.
‘What shall I do, Kate?’ she said out loud.
‘Quit and have a life,’ replied Kate from behind her closed eyes.
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘No, I merely lie dormant waiting to plague you.’
‘Good.’
Inge and Kate drove on to their new life and a silver Volkswagen Golf followed close behind.
Edenford was almost certainly unprepared for its new inhabitants. Of course it was generally known that TV’s Inge Holbrook had grown up there, but no one had ever imagined she would come back. It wasn’t that sort of place. Throughout recorded time in the town, anyone who had gone off and ‘done something in history’ had done so without ever finding the need to return. The town had done its bit over the years. In the old people’s day centre, down by the river, the fading ladies and men would often gather over a Peek Frean and mutter, ‘The town never really recovered from the war. We gave then. Those fine young men who marched up the High Street. Not one of them ever returned.’
Flying Under Bridges Page 9