by Maria Goodin
She picks up her teaspoon and rubs it between her fingers as if wishing a genie would appear and with a click of his fingers make this horrible situation go away.
“Plus, I have a daughter,” she adds. “She’s younger than you, just thirteen. Her father and I might not be together, but she knows where she came from, who she is. I think that’s her right. I wouldn’t ever want her to be without that knowledge.”
I trace my finger around the rim of my mug, over and over again, gazing at the cold film of milk on the surface of my tea.
“Do you get along?” I ask, for no particular reason.
Gwennie gives a little, quiet laugh. “She rather hates me right now. But I’m hoping she’ll grow out of it.”
I nod and muster a small, appreciative smile. “She will,” I tell her. “I promise.”
Gwennie examines my face closely, staring into my sad, tired eyes. “You’re so like your mother,” she says, and I almost laugh at the irony of it.
I have strived all my life to be nothing like my mother. I have clung desperately to the principles of truth, logic, and rationality, while my mother has indulged in fantasy and denial. I have wrung my hands, stamped my feet, and wept tears of frustration in the face of her delusions. And yet I wonder now how different I have really been.
I recall Dr. Bloomberg’s words when I visited his office that day. It’s amazing what we can forget.
I touch the scar on my forehead, the scar I now know came from having my head banged against a coffee table, not from being attacked by a crab cake. I have forgotten everything, not because I have wanted to, but because I have needed to. And yet I am filled with the horrible certainty that deep down some part of me still remembers. The White Giant who haunts my dreams is no giant at all, but a man in a butcher’s coat. Those calloused hands around my neck are no figment of my imagination, but the shadow of my past. His name, his face, his pockmarked skin. That house, the fear, the violence…it is all still there, lurking in the deepest recesses of my mind. The memories that I so desperately wanted to recall have been there all this time, and now, like a sleeping beast that has been prodded with a stick, they have begun to stir. Vague recollections are now teetering on the edge of my consciousness, and I have a sense that it would all come flooding back to me if only I let myself remember.
The question is: do I want to?
chapter sixteen
I sometimes think that Mark should wear a spandex leotard, a mask, and a cape with an enormous R printed on the back. Rationality Man to the rescue, applying logic in the midst of chaos. I called him late last night, after Gwennie had left, like a damsel in distress. “Help!” I wanted to scream down the line. “I’ve just discovered the truth about my past! My mind is in turmoil, my thoughts are confused, and my feelings are threatening to overwhelm me! Save me, Rationality Man!” Of course, what I actually said was, “Mark, I’ve just been told the truth about my past. It’s all been rather a lot to take on board. I was wondering whether you might be able to come down tomorrow instead of Sunday so that we can go over it? I mean, if not, don’t worry. I’m absolutely fine.”
Mark arrives, not in spandex, but in well-shined shoes, freshly pressed jeans, and a sensible waterproof jacket, which would be my second choice of outfit for Rationality Man. Just seeing him is like a drug for me. Watching him stride confidently up the front path, full of composure and self-assurance, I already feel my confusion and anxiety starting to subside. By the time he has cleared the kitchen table of baskets of fruit, sat me down, and said, “Right, let’s start at the beginning,” I am ready to abandon myself to his powers of orderliness.
By the time I have finished telling Mark everything I have found out, he already has a list of facts and questions written out neatly on a piece of paper.
“So,” he says, rubbing his chin and examining his notes, “this has certainly filled in a lot of the gaps. But there are now several questions that arise as a result of this newfound knowledge. For example, question one, where is your biological father now? You have a right to know.”
“I told you,” I say, “it was just a fling. She probably can’t even remember his name.”
Okay. So perhaps I haven’t told Mark everything. I may have glossed over the circumstances of my conception. I know that what happened to my mother is not a reflection on me, but I can’t help wondering if Mark would see me differently. Tainted. Impure. Guilty…all these things that keep popping into my head and I keep trying to push out because I know they are illogical. I don’t want Mark to see me as any less than perfect.
“I don’t think I want to think about my real father just yet,” I say swiftly.
“Okay,” says Mark, as if he’s chairing a meeting. “We can come back to that. Let’s move on to question two. Is your mother still married?”
This hadn’t even occurred to me. The thought that she could still be legally tied to that man makes my stomach turn. I could still legally be his stepdaughter.
“Now, on the one hand,” says Mark, “we know that your mother uses her maiden name. This is fairly standard practice when a woman divorces her husband. However, this evidence is somewhat counteracted by the fact that your mother would have needed to maintain some sort of contact with Robert Scott, even if only via a lawyer, in order for a divorce to go ahead, and we don’t think this is likely. Now—”
“Mark,” I interrupt, “I’m not really sure I want to talk about Robert Scott right now either.”
“If your mother is still married, Meg, it could have legal and financial implications when your mother dies. Have you thought about that?”
I shake my head.
“Well, you need to. Now, I’m not a lawyer, as you know, but I imagine this Robert Scott fellow may still be entitled to some of your mother’s money. Perhaps we should brainstorm possible routes to pursue depending on what your mother’s answer is.”
I nod, starting to feel rather overwhelmed again. “Okay,” I agree. “Answer to what?”
Mark looks a little exasperated. He likes to work faster and more efficiently than this. “Her answer to whether she’s still legally married or not.”
“Oh, right, sorry. How will we know that?”
Mark’s fingers tighten against his pencil, turning them white at the tips. “Because you’re going to ask her.”
“What? I…am I?”
This morning my mother had dragged herself downstairs in her dressing gown, pale and weary, but forcing her usual smile. “Good morning, darling,” she had said, as if nothing had changed. She had examined some eggs, some cereal, some bread, and some milk as if it were all contaminated before declaring she was not hungry.
“Are you still feeling faint?” I had asked, watching her shuffle unsteadily around the kitchen.
“Was I feeling faint?” she asked, confused.
“Well, yes. You fainted,” I told her, “yesterday afternoon. When you saw Gwennie.”
My mother shook her head, baffled. “Who’s Gwennie?”
“I don’t see how I can question my mother about any of this,” I tell Mark, “when she doesn’t even remember Gwennie being here.”
Mark raises one eyebrow skeptically. “So she says. Look, Meg, your mother’s a wonderful liar, you know that.”
“I’m not sure she’s lying. I honestly don’t think she remembers anything in between picking fruit yesterday and waking up this morning.” Then, remembering Ewan’s words yesterday, I add, “There’s a difference between pretending and believing.”
Mark shakes his head and looks at me in the way one might look at a mistreated puppy. “Meg,” he says, taking my hand, “doesn’t that seem rather convenient? This way your mother doesn’t have to answer any awkward questions, she can deny all knowledge of Gwennie, and she can carry on just as things were before, telling you silly stories, denying you the truth. I suspect the reason she fainted yesterday was
sheer panic, panic that her lies were all about to be revealed. Or, even more likely, she pretended to faint, just like last time. She used exactly the same transparent strategy. She pretended to faint as a distraction. She hoped that in the chaos Gwennie would just go away. But what she still doesn’t know is that Gwennie didn’t go away. She sat here and told you what really happened when you were little, and so now you are the one holding all the balls. You’re in the perfect position to catch your mother out, to take her by surprise and make her own up to the truth.”
I rub my eyes, feeling exhausted. I didn’t sleep a wink last night and this is all too much. Catch my mother out? Take her by surprise? My mother’s not the enemy. This isn’t about tactics. I hope this isn’t the bit where Mark expects me to whip out my copy of TALK! and wire her up to the food processor, because I simply am not going to do it. But Mark seems so confident in what he’s saying, and his line of reasoning sounds so logical. And he has a pencil and a piece of paper with points listed on it…
“My mother’s very weak,” I tell Mark. “What if all this is too much for her?”
“If what’s too much for her? Her only daughter wanting to fill in the missing pieces of her life? Her only daughter wanting to know the truth so that she doesn’t keep making a fool of herself by repeating silly stories about getting nipped by crab cakes and having her fingers dipped in sugar?”
“Toes.”
“Whatever. The point is that you have a right to this information. And you said it yourself, soon it will be too late.”
I shake my head, more confused than ever. I wanted Mark to make me feel in control again. I wanted him to help me sort my thoughts into piles and my feelings into compartments. I wanted him to do what he does best: take what’s there and give it structure, tidy it up, make it neat, rid it of any emotion, and reduce it down to hard, cold facts that can’t be felt, only known.
But I forgot that there’s another side to what he does, and that’s the research. He not only processes facts that are already known, but he also builds on them, searching for answers, prodding and probing until he gets to the bottom of every single question. That’s what a good scientist does; he never stops questioning. Out of nowhere a memory comes back to me of a science lesson in secondary school when we had to dissect a daffodil. We pulled it apart bit by bit, locating the stamen, the receptacle, the stigma, the sepal…By the time we had finished, we knew what was beneath those pretty yellow petals, but of course all the beauty had gone, and all that was left was a tattered, ruined mess.
“Maybe I don’t need to know anymore,” I say wearily. “Maybe I don’t want to.”
Mark lets go of my hand. “You mean you would rather not know the truth because it’s easier that way,” he says disapprovingly.
“I would rather spend the final days with my mother some way other than confronting her, and fighting her, and trying to wheedle things out of her that she clearly doesn’t want to remember and I might not want to know.”
“That’s what this is about really, isn’t it?” says Mark, rather harshly. “The fact that you don’t want to know. This isn’t all about your mother. It’s about the fact that after going on and on about how you wanted to know the truth, you don’t like what you’ve heard and you suddenly don’t want to know anymore.”
“Is that really so wrong?” I snap, suddenly annoyed by his lack of understanding.
“It is when you’ve been saying for months, and quite rightly so, that your mother needs to face facts.”
“Well, perhaps I was wrong!” I shout, jumping out of my seat. “Maybe she doesn’t want to face facts!”
“You mean maybe you don’t want to!” snaps Mark, standing up.
“Okay, maybe I don’t want to! Maybe the childhood I knew was just a pack of lies, but at least it was a happy one, and at least it felt like mine. I threw it away, and in return I got a miserable childhood that doesn’t feel like it has any connection to me at all!”
“So you would have preferred not to know the truth? You would have preferred to carry on living a life of ridiculous stories and silly lies?”
“Yes!” I startle myself with my response. Yes, yes, I would have preferred it. If only I’d known what was to come. “I want to have been bitten by a crab cake!” I shout, my voice trembling with emotion. “I want to have dipped my toes in the neighbors’ tea! I want to have been involved in a high-speed chase from Tottenham High Road to Enfield Chase!”
“Then you are just as delusional as your crazy mother!”
“Maybe I am! So what? What does it matter?”
Mark shakes his head in despair. “I thought you were better than that. I thought you were a paragon of truth and reason and logic, but it seems that was just when it was convenient for you. I’m disappointed in you, Meg.”
Disappointed in me! I clench my fists by my sides, swallow down the lump in my throat, and look the admirable Mark Daly squarely in the eye.
“If that’s the case,” I say, “then I guess this particular experiment has reached its conclusion.”
***
Lying on my bed, I close my eyes, trying to go back to the day the spaghetti plant sprouted in our window box. If I concentrate hard, I can see it there, stringy pieces of spaghetti hanging between green leaves.
“Well, I never!” my mother had exclaimed. “I bet that came from Mrs. Trivelli in the flat above. She’s always leaving bits and bobs on her kitchen windowsill for the birds. I bet she went to put a piece of spaghetti out and it fell down into our window box and sprouted.” My mother licked her finger and held it out the kitchen window. “Yes,” she said, nodding, “I thought as much. A westerly wind. That will make a spaghetti plant sprout before you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ You know the problem with spaghetti plants, don’t you?”
I looked up at her and shook my head. Being only four years old, I had no idea about the problems with spaghetti plants.
“They grow and grow and grow, and before you know it they’re as big as a house. In South America there’s a vast jungle of spaghetti plants so dense and thick that nobody who has ever gone in there has found their way out alive. In 1953, an explorer by the name of George Wallis Boo Cooper entered the spaghetti jungle, and they say he’s still in there now, wandering around and around in circles, eating spaghetti all day long. Do you know what the moral of that story is?”
I thought carefully. “Don’t go into a spaghetti jungle?”
“No, don’t throw food out your window when you live in a flat. You never know what might grow from it. Now, the only way to stop a spaghetti plant from growing and spreading is to pick the spaghetti as quickly as possible. So I think the best idea is if I dangle you out of the window by your legs and you start picking.”
I thought about the number of stairs we had to climb to get to the fourth floor and about all the traffic going by on the main road below. “It’s a long, long way down,” I said, curling my hair anxiously around my finger and chewing my lip.
“We all have to do things we don’t like in life, darling,” said my mother, picking me up by the ankles and swinging me out of the window. I felt my dress fall over my head and the wind whipping around my bare legs.
“Nobody’s looking at you,” said my mother in the way that mothers do when their children are clearly exposed to all and sundry. “Now, if the spaghetti is ripe, it will feel warm and soft with still a little bit of bite. If it’s hard and brittle, it’s not ready for picking. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I called from underneath the skirt of my dress. All the blood was rushing to my head, and I felt pleased I couldn’t see the traffic whizzing by below. I started picking as quickly as possible, going by feel alone, as I couldn’t see a thing. And after my initial fear had subsided, I started to quite enjoy myself. “Look how much I’m picking!” I shouted to my mother as I dangled from her grasp.
“You’re doing wo
nderfully, darling!” she called. “You’ll be a champion spaghetti picker when you grow up. The best in the world!”
***
And so that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I planned to travel to South America and earn my fortune picking my way through the spaghetti jungles. I wasn’t scared of getting lost like George Wallis Boo Cooper, who clearly didn’t have the natural knack for feeling his way around spaghetti plants like I did. I was going to pick enough spaghetti in six months to feed the whole of Italy, and then I’d buy a big house for my mother to live in so that she wouldn’t have to put up with Mrs. Trivelli throwing old bits of dinner into her window box.
I open my eyes and look up at the ceiling, somehow surprised to find myself still lying on my bed. A faint smile comes to my lips, and for the first time in days I feel calm.
***
Ewan has picked the last of the fruit due for harvesting and left it in three Tesco bags outside the kitchen door. I can’t see him, but every so often I catch a glimpse of Digger crossing the far end of the garden, so I know he must be down there somewhere. I put the kettle on and make two mugs of strong black coffee before shrugging on the baggy green sweater that my mother keeps by the back door for gardening purposes and then heading outside.
The sky is gray and overcast, promising rain again. Ewan is sitting on an upturned wooden crate with his back to me, eating a handful of blackberries.
“I could charge you for those, you know,” I say as I approach.
He turns with a start and then smiles. I walk toward him across a patch of soil that previously bore rows of lettuce but that today lies bare, the soil freshly dug over. I look around me and see that several patches are in the same state. Naked, stripped of their summer plants, they wait in limbo between one season and the next. I hold out one of the mugs to Ewan, and he looks slightly surprised but takes it.