I unplugged my guitar, jumped off the podium and walked over to the men’s table. It comes back to you, your punk attitude, when you need it. They were sitting in a semicircle with their pints lined up in front of them and looked up in unison with What you doing over in our corner, Ma? We didn’t ask for extra peanuts! expressions. ‘Do you know how the way you’re behaving makes me feel?’ I asked. They shook their heads. I was surprised they responded. A mistake on their part. ‘Like this.’ I picked up the fullest pint glass on the table and, starting at the bloke on my right, swept the beer in an amber arc across the four blank faces, ending up with the bloke on the far left. None of them moved. They just sat there with their eyes and mouths wide open, dripping. The room fell silent. The four of them were quiet for so long it felt as if time had stretched and was suspended between us, like chewing gum pulled out of your mouth to see how long you can get it. Triumph surged up through my body and went right to my head. I lifted another glass from the table and drenched them again, this time in Guinness. Out of the corner of my eye I saw some members of the audience step backwards into the shadows.
The scariest-looking man stood up (he wasn’t big but he had a feral glint in his eye), reddening with rage and clenching his fists. I remembered what Sid Vicious taught me about fighting: Do the worst thing you can think of first. Except I threatened the worst thing first. ‘If you want to take it outside, let’s take it outside,’ I said, putting the hardest, coldest look I could muster into my eyes. ‘And I’ll put this bottle in your face.’ I picked up an empty bottle of Heineken with such fluidity of movement you’d think I did this sort of thing every day. The feral man sat down. The four of them muttered between themselves, then gathered up what was left of their drinks and headed towards the bar. The DJ put a jolly record on to signal that that was the end of the night, but I hopped back on stage, said ‘I haven’t finished yet’ into the microphone and played the rest of my set. Quite a lot of the audience had left by then, but those who remained saw that the spirit of punk was alive and well, and completely out of place, in a middle-aged woman with an electric guitar, in an underground bar in York.
I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves, that we can be ready and able to come to our own defence when and wherever needed.
Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter, 2008
I’m sure that my choice of when and where to resort to – or threaten to resort to – violence must seem peculiar and unnecessary to most people, but the times I choose to be violent are the times that seem necessary to me.
Later that night I came across the boss of the group at the bar. He was talking to the barman, all excited that he’d been part of the night’s ‘entertainment’. We smiled at each other and I said I hoped his top wasn’t expensive. ‘It was actually,’ he replied. ‘It’s Ralph Lauren.’
* I was led to this quote by the anthropologist Martha Nussbaum by Maria Popova, www.brainpickings.org. See also Alison Bechdel’s book Are You My Mother?
12 I stumbled through the crowd towards the bar, not knowing who I was looking for or what to do, when I bumped into my schoolfriend Maura again. I recounted the phone call from my sister, ending with, ‘I might regret it if I don’t go now though.’ As I waited for Maura’s response, a wave of cold prickles crept from under my shoulder blades, across my back, up to my neck, around my ears and settled on the top of my head. I searched Maura’s face for some sort of clue.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You might.’
Not the answer I was expecting, but that was it, the moment I knew it was all over – the book launch, the panel discussion, the night of celebration. The moment it dawned on me that quite a different night lay ahead.
Mrs FB
Mum’s health declined rapidly during the last three years of her life. I didn’t realise it at the time, but she was having lots of little heart attacks. I just thought she kept falling over. Whenever she didn’t answer her phone for a few hours, I’d drive over to her flat, pick her up off the floor, check she had no broken bones, prop her in an armchair, make a cup of tea and a sandwich and then drive back home to Vida. It didn’t occur to me to call a doctor until her fifth or sixth fall. I found her lying in her hallway trying to reach the phone, and that’s when I realised it was serious. I was so absorbed with my own life – the divorce, moving house, finding Vida a new school and recording my album – that I just thought of Mum’s falls as annoying obstacles. I was irritated that just as everything else was crumbling in my life, she was breaking down too. Not a charitable thought, but I thought it. I decided that the only way I could manage everything and everyone, and keep working, was to be three people at once. It seemed a logical solution at the time. I became more and more exhausted as I hurtled between all my commitments and the strain soon started to show. As always, my tolerance towards domineering men was the first thing to go.
One summer’s day I left Vida with Mum for a few hours while I recorded some vocals for my album. At four o’clock I rang the doorbell to collect her and, excited to see me, Vida raced down the three flights of stairs to let me in. As we climbed back up, the door of the second-floor flat (the one below Mum’s) opened and a tall man in his thirties poked his head out into the hallway. ‘Keep the noise down,’ he said. All that had happened was seven-year-old Vida running downstairs in the middle of the afternoon.
‘Mind your own business,’ I answered.
‘Excuse me?’ he responded, in that highfalutin tone that meant he’d heard exactly what I said and thought he’d humiliate me by making me repeat it. That doesn’t work on me.
‘Mind your own business,’ I said again, loud and clear. We ended up on the doorstep, with him towering over me.
‘What’s your name?’ he demanded. Maybe he thought he’d try and frighten me by being authoritarian. I’m not scared of authority. Shook that off fifty years ago.
‘My name is …’ He leaned in to catch the words. ‘Mrs …’ I paused. I wasn’t sure what to say. I certainly wasn’t going to give him any personal information. ‘Mrs … Bollocks,’ I said.
He froze mid-lean. Vida looked up at me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mum, who was hauling herself down the stairs to come to my defence, stop in her tracks and lean on the bannister, panting and smiling triumphantly, That’s my girl.
The man recovered his composure and tried again. ‘What’s your real name?’ he said. ‘I’d like to know.’
‘My real name is Mrs Bollocks,’ I replied, with confidence this time. ‘But you can call me Mrs Fuck Bollocks if you like.’
(The initials of my grandmother, I later realised.)
Mr Shilling
Before ‘Keep-the-Noise-Down’ moved in, a man called Mr Shilling lived in the flat below Mum for thirty years. He was a gentle person, nursed his mother night and day until she died, and then lived there on his own without any friends or visitors for another ten years. As he got older, Mr Shilling became more and more hunched over, scruffy and smelly. He liked to collect bits of scrap and poke around skips in the surrounding streets after dark for entertainment. One night he was searching through a skip in Belsize Park when two boys spotted him and decided to beat him up. They stamped on his head several times and stole his trainers – cheap old trainers, not a name brand. Mr Shilling ended up in hospital without any shoes.
Mum went to visit him, but he looked horrified when she walked into the ward and drew the sheet up to his chin to hide his bare bony chest. They’d only ever said hello to each other as they passed on the stairs. Mum was sorry she’d visited him and sorry she’d embarrassed him. He died three weeks later. Killed for looking weak, past his sell-by date. That’s how it happened in Neanderthal times: you got weaker and slower until some fit young bastard put you out of your misery. They shoot horses, don’t they?* Except Mr Shilling was happy enough shuffling backwards and forwards to the shops, looking in skips, cooking his meal at night and watching television. He wasn’t doing any
harm and he didn’t want to be culled.
He reminded me of my father, who also turned into a strange-looking, crooked old hermit as he aged. Every time my father went out – he was French and went back to live in France when he was older – people stared at him. Mind you, he did have a Beatles haircut (so he thought, but it looked more like a Friar Tuck as he was bald on top), wore clothes from the 1970s and talked to himself out loud as he scuttled around the streets. Eventually he became so wary of the outside world that he wouldn’t venture any further than the shop on the corner. After a while even that was too much and he stayed in all the time. One day a neighbour heard him crying out and found him dying on the sofa.
I’m attracted to loners. Both my parents became recluses in later life, and I’m becoming one myself. There’s a lovely word from the thirteenth century describing women like the writer and mystic Julian of Norwich (she wrote Revelations of Divine Love around 1395, thought to be the first book to be published in the English language by a woman). At that time, a woman who completely withdrew from the world was called an anchoress. That term suggests to me that recluses are not mad, but anchored.
* They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Jane Fonda, based on the 1935 novel by Horace McCoy. The phrase refers to the practice of killing old and injured horses to put them out of their misery
13 By the time Vida arrived I knew what I had to do. I saw her smiling at me from the entrance of the club, hair freshly washed and shining, in her best dress and new shoes with little heels for the first time. I took her hand and led her into a corner. God knows what the expression on my face was like. My mind was working overtime as we took those two or three steps. How to say this? How to say, You know this night that you’ve been planning your outfit for and looking forward to for months? Well, it’s not happening. I’m lifting the needle off the record mid-song. And you know the person you love most? The one who never tells you off and loves you unconditionally? She’s going to die tonight. That’s what’s happening instead, the thing you’ve been dreading. How to say it? And not scar her for life? And get to the care home in under twenty minutes?
Do Not Resuscitate
I never asked Mum what she was thinking during her last few months in hospital. I didn’t want to stir up thoughts of death in her, not when it was so imminent, in case she was frightened. We’d talked about her dying in the past, but when the looks between us (gaze not held very long, or too long) and gestures (more tactile than usual) signalled that death was getting close, I didn’t want to appear too interested in the actual process and treat her like a specimen to be analysed. But what was she thinking? I was surprised that she kept ordering books from the hospital’s mobile library. Why did she still want to read and increase her knowledge? She only had a few days left as far as she knew, what did she care about the Second World War or the history of slavery in the southern USA? (Although I’ve got thirty years left, if I’m lucky, and the thing I most look forward to is all the books I can read in that time.) Or was immersing herself in books a way to distract herself from thinking about dying? She couldn’t bear to listen to her beloved radio any more or have the TV on, but often when I rounded the blue pleated-paper curtain – always pulled right around her bed for privacy – she was engrossed in a book propped up on the bedside table.
Reading, and fighting for her rights were the two passions Mum kept alive for the longest. ‘You have to fight for yourself, Vivvy, right up to the end,’ she advised me in her last few weeks. ‘Does it really never stop, Mum?’ I asked. She shook her head. Recently she’d insisted on being moved to another ward when a troubled female patient kept swearing at her. And she was so tired of being poked and prodded and operated on that she refused to endure any more invasive tests from her doctor. He was astounded that Mum wouldn’t do as he said. He thought she must be insane. Why else would she disobey him, a consultant surgeon? He sent a psychiatrist over to her bed every single day to hassle her into changing her mind. She wouldn’t budge.
What was Mum thinking? Peace at bloody last, I reckon. She was OK with dying. Do Not Resuscitate.
Luckily – or unluckily, because it’s exhausting, but then for some of us to keep trying to play the game and fit in is also exhausting – my mother instilled that same combative spirit in me. It doesn’t make getting work, going out for a meal and having friends or a relationship easy, but there’s a certain inner peace to be derived from holding on to your principles. ‘You look so young, you must have a clear conscience,’ Mum said to me once. I don’t have a clear conscience. I’ve done plenty of things I regret. If I do look young – and if there’s a reason for it other than being single, sleeping too much, hair dye, bio-identical HRT, genes, not smoking or drinking, avoiding too much sun, and a squirt of Botox between the eyes once a year (stopped in 2016) – it’s because I try to be truthful. I’m cleaned out, like I’ve had regular emotional irrigation treatments. Although with all the diarrhoea I suffer from, the reason may be much simpler than all that. Maybe I just look young because of all the actual colonic irrigation.
With only a month of breath still left in her, Mum and I sat together one afternoon and listened to the broadcast of a show I’d recorded for BBC Radio 6 Music. I arrived at the hospital to find her propped upright, a nurse at her side, the radio on her bedside table tuned to BBC 6 Music, and annoyed I was late. We wore one earpiece each of my headphones and listened to the whole two-hour show. Mum commented on every record I chose and every word I uttered between songs. ‘Hmmm, not really my taste, that one,’ or, ‘I didn’t like that one at all, I liked the last one better.’ I found myself getting upset, as if it mattered whether my mother liked Sun Ra or not. Now I realise she just wanted to be taken seriously, to still be thought of as an intelligent person who had opinions. Mum fought to the last to be seen, even by her daughter.
Film Noir
I am become a hard, thankless, graceless girl, and it was the only way I could do it.
Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth, 1929*
During the last year of my mother’s life I was so sleep-deprived that my senses became heightened. I blundered through the days feeling like a character who’d been edited into three different films by mistake: a Gothic ghost story, a 1950s family melodrama and a dystopian fantasy.
Visiting Mum in the care home was the ghost story. Weaving my way around the residents drifting down corridors, robes trailing, swollen slippered feet barely touching the cabbage-coloured carpet, wisps of frosty hair candy-flossing around wobbly heads, I’d arrive at Mum’s open door to see her lying on her bed motionless, mouth wide open. Oh no, it’s happened. I’d hold my breath, waiting for her tiny frame to lift slightly. I’d never seen her look so corpse-like before. That’s what she’ll look like when she’s dead, I thought (and she did). Before doing anything I’d wash my hands – explicit diagrams and instructions were in every bathroom of every hospital Mum passed through. I’ll never forget how to wash my hands properly now. Don’t forget the backs, the fingertips and that bit that looks like a chicken leg. If you’re out and need a clean finger to extract something from your eye, Mum always used to say, the little finger on your left hand is the cleanest. Then I’d sit next to the bed, take Mum’s hand into mine and ask, ‘How am I ever going to cope without you?’ She’d tut and say, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, you’ll be all right.’ But even as I said it I knew I’d be OK. A tiny part of me was even looking forward to seeing how I’d navigate life without her. Like when I was a child back in Muswell Hill, learning to ride my bike, thinking I couldn’t do it without Mum holding on to the back, but when I glanced over my shoulder as I teetered along, she was a tiny figure in the distance. She’d let go ages ago and I was fine.
After leaving the care home I rush to the station, sit on a train for a couple of hours, arrive in the vacant countryside, find a taxi and am driven down deserted winding lanes while staring out of the window looking for the flashes of primary colours strobing between
brown trunks and green leaves that signal ‘festival tents’.
Now the dystopian fantasy. Tumbling out of the cab into the rain I pull up my hood and look around for the production office (usually a grey Portakabin). Standing on tiptoe, I peer through a hatch at a Wizard of Oz-type Munchkin with a necklace of lanyards, perched on a stool. The Munchkin, examining me suspiciously – I imagine them thinking, Ooh, she’s old – directs me to the stage I’m performing on by pointing to a muddy hill half a mile away and saying something like, ‘See the ribbons flying from the top of the Helter Skelter? Head for that.’ I nod and quash the rising sense of panic, tell myself I’m an adult, I’m not going to get lost, I haven’t got Alzheimer’s, and start listening again: ‘… past the pretend-slum-tenements outdoor disco, turn right at the psychedelic-bubble-machine cupcake factory, keep going until you reach the floating-giant-lily-pads-of-the-glen, opposite the chill-out palace filled with luminous fairy-balloons, then straight ahead you’ll see the pointy-Gormenghast-enchanted-castle next to the strawberry-and-elderflower beers-of-the-forest tabernacle. That’s your tent. You can’t miss it.’
Joining the river of youth I’m swept along in a slipstream of denim shorts, flip-flops and Hunters. Everyone looks the same – same size, same shape, same nose, same colour. I look down at the ground. Must concentrate on walking, don’t want to fall over and arrive with mud all down one side of my body. We march, slip and slide past stage after stage, until we pass the spoken-word tent and I peel off. Needing the loo, I head to a blue plastic cubicle smelling of shit, piss and bleach. Someone with long hair and a long scarf arrives at the same time and, to my despair, gestures for me to go first. I have diarrhoea. Always have diarrhoea. Leave the cubicle embarrassed, give Scarf Person a weak smile and wince inwardly at the thought of them entering the cubicle and … never mind. Pick my way through churned-up sludge to the backstage area, skid, stay on my feet, peep through the back of the tent. Confronted by a sea of blinking eyeballs trained on the lonely microphone, have a nervous twinge and navigate my way back through the mud to the blue cubicle.
To Throw Away Unopened Page 5