To Throw Away Unopened

by Viv Albertine

  The thing is, I didn’t think much of my father. I’d never have chosen to live with him, so was there really any need for Mum’s brainwashing and manipulation? She thought so. Not only had she been stung once before, she knew that children can be coerced by suggestions and sad expressions from adults – my father had already got me into his bed with this method. And it was possible the judge in the divorce case might have tried to influence us into changing our minds. He might have favoured Lucien; they were patriarchal times. No: to be certain of the outcome, Mum believed she had to make us hate our father – it’s not like she was making us hate a nice, kind man – and instruct us on how to behave at the hearing, otherwise she risked losing us to a violent and potentially sexually abusive man. (When the divorce was eventually heard, Lucien behaved so unpredictably and with such belligerence throughout the proceedings that he was discredited. His counsel dropped him and he had to represent himself.)

  As soon as my father left home the whole atmosphere changed. Mum spoiled us, not with money and presents – we were too poor for that – but with her time and attention. I’m ashamed to say I sensed her guilt and exploited it, took everything she offered and asked her to do even more. I presumed she was feeling guilty about the divorce. Not many people I knew had divorced parents (I was the only child in junior and secondary school who could wire a plug and change a fuse), but now I think she felt guilty about her behaviour during those years.

  48 At four in the morning Vida’s eyes kept closing, so I made her a bed on the floor by pushing three cushions together and covering her with coats. While we were bustling around I switched the TV on and turned the sound down low so that Mum would know we were still there. Vida and I had quite an animated discussion, conducted in hissing whispers, about which channel Mum would prefer. I can’t remember what we settled on. After tucking Vida in I dragged my chair over to sit by Mum’s bed again. Funny how you know it when you see it. She was in exactly the same position as a moment before, mouth open, eyes closed, arms by her side. It’s the stillness that tells you.

  Broken Baubles

  When Vida was nine years old I told her that Mummy and Daddy were going to divorce. We were on our way to buy a Christmas tree at the time. I’d planned to tell her after Christmas but she asked me point blank as we were walking, hand in hand, to the garden centre. She looked up at me and said, ‘Are you and Daddy going to divorce?’ I only had a second to decide whether to lie and stick to the plan, or risk spoiling her Christmas and tell the truth. I thought, If I lie now, at such a crucial time, a time she will think back on and remember all her life, she will never trust me again, so I said, ‘Yes, we are.’ After I’d explained as gently and simply as possible why we were separating, Vida thought for a moment and said, ‘Can you please not say “Your mother” or “Your father” when you talk about each other?’ I promised her I wouldn’t, and I never have (not as easy as I thought). She didn’t cry, make a fuss or ask for anything apart from that one thing. I understood what she meant when she asked me to be mindful of how I spoke to her about her dad. Every time Mum put Lucien down I’d think, Half my genes are his. You’re putting half of me down too.

  The first Christmas after Mum died I was reluctant to buy a real tree – I didn’t want the nuisance of pine needles all over the floor for months afterwards – so I asked Vida whether she minded if we got a fake tree that year. Mum always bought a real Christmas tree when we were young and tried to make Christmas enjoyable for us by saving all year with the Co-op. Lots of poor people did that in the 1960s. You’d start buying pale-blue Co-op savings stamps in January, stick them in a little booklet every week and by December every page had morphed from white to blue. Then you’d go with the full book of stamps to the shop, and in return they’d give you a Christmas hamper with a packet of loose tea, chocolate biscuits, fresh dates, a bottle of R. White’s lemonade and a round fruit cake with a layer of thick yellow marzipan on top (no icing, the only part I liked). All this came in a cardboard box with wood shavings and shredded paper tucked around the cartons and jars. Mum iced the cake herself and stuck two chipped plaster robins, two fawns, a Christmas tree with hard white blobs on its green bristles and a Santa on top.

  The Christmas after losing her grandmother Vida very much wanted a real tree, so in the end I agreed to get one. We put old gloves on and carried it home together. I grumbled a bit because I took most of the weight. I’m glad I gave in about the tree because lots of little things I did wrong when Vida was young still haunt me. I wish I hadn’t shouted at her when she sneezed all over the (just unwrapped) chocolate log one Christmas – she was only seven. And why not let her wear a mermaid dress on her fifth birthday – so what if the theme was fairies? I also regret insisting she do her homework every night when she was in junior school and crying with tiredness. That’s the sort of regret I have. Then there’s the bigger stuff, like her seeing me lying on the floor, sobbing and banging my fists after a water pipe broke, flooded the ground floor and ruined my archive of photos and music memorabilia. Mum’s archive was so different to mine: labels from practical school uniform – Clarks shoes, Viyella tunics and Lyle and Scott and Dannimac raincoats; receipts for ballet lessons, sewing machine parts, aluminium pots and pans and a Morphy Richards iron – everything bought for her children or because it was functional and long-lasting.

  Once Vida witnessed me throw a chair (Ercol) across the room in a temper about I-can’t-remember-what a couple of weeks after Mum died. It broke. I can still hear her shouting, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ in a terrified voice. I’ve sworn at her a couple of times too and I shouted at her for getting her hair cut too short when she was sixteen. Every time I’ve been angry with Vida I’ve actually been upset about something else, nothing to do with her at all. Especially with the haircut. I’d just looked in a well-lit mirror at the hairdresser’s and seen my neck.

  On our first Christmas without Mum, Vida and I decorated the reluctantly bought tree lavishly, smothering it in pink, purple, green, silver and red balls, candy canes, robins and icicles. After she went to bed I sat on the sofa and stared at it, mesmerised by the flickering lights. I was still gazing at the tree in a hypnotic trance an hour later when it pitched forward off its little table and landed face down on the floor. A whooshing sound accompanied its descent, followed by the delicate tinkling of breaking glass. It looked like every ornament was broken. I wondered if Mum was sending me a sign. I’ve only been dead six months and you can’t do anything right without me. They weren’t expensive ornaments, but a lot of them were Mum’s and I’d seen them every year since I could remember. She used to wrap all the decorations in tissue paper and pack them in a battered biscuit tin which had a printed background of fake brown hessian embroidered with cross-stitched sayings like ‘Be to her virtues very kind, be to her faults a little blind’ and ‘I oft have heard defended, least said is soonest mended’. Years of memories were attached to those glass shards.

  Distressed by the sight of the tree prostrate at my feet, I was tempted for a second to run into Vida’s bedroom, wake her up and tell her what had happened. Now Mum was dead I had nobody to tell my troubles to. I remembered just in time that I was in charge and Vida was a child and stopped myself. You’re on your own now. Just sort it out. I heaved the whole thing back onto the table. Some of the balls were still attached to the branches but they were sharp and jagged, lethal, not cheerful. I swept up the debris, unhooked the ornaments and chucked everything into the bin. We went out the next day and bought new decorations. What a relief it was not to make a fuss, to just start again. Remember the year the tree did a face plant? Haha. And we went to buy new decorations but the shops had sold out of almost everything, and that nice girl in Paperchase at Westfield went into the storeroom and pulled out all the stuff they’d put away for the sales when she heard our tale of woe? That’s where these sparkly little robots came from, and the pink and green frosted pine cones.

  49 No scrabbling for air, no gasping for breath. No warning that
she was going to die, like the medic said there would be. I was upset that I’d missed the moment. I wanted to be holding her hand when she went. (Although I’ve heard that it’s quite common for people to slip away while nobody’s looking.) ‘She’s gone,’ I said to Vida. It was important I showed her I was OK, that a beloved grandparent’s death wasn’t the end of the world. So I stroked Mum’s hair and told her she was beautiful. We really have to broaden our ideas about beauty. They’re so narrow. My ninety-five-year-old mother was beautiful. ‘You’re so beautiful, Mum,’ I said again. How can someone who’s stood by you your whole life – who helped you empty the contents of the kitchen bin onto the floor when you were seventeen because you accidentally threw away a piece of hash the size of a cocoa nib, or who accompanied you, when she was eighty years old, to the Southbank Cinema on Mother’s Day to watch hardcore gay and lesbian sex films because no one else would go with you (ditto a Sparks concert at the Royal Festival Hall) – how can that person, who you’ve been through so much with and who is now lying in front of you with snow-white hair, pale-grey eyes, soft pink skin and worry lines, not be beautiful?

  Imperfect, Tense

  Two days after Mum died I was invited to the George Tavern in Hackney for a wedding celebration. Vida wanted us to go. I wouldn’t have bothered but I wanted to appear strong, so I said yes. Pushing the swing door open and stepping into the room I was overwhelmed. Too many people. I didn’t know if I’d be able to cope. We headed towards the bar. I tried to relax but my legs stiffened and I stalked across the floor like a wind-up doll. It was an easy enough room to be in – distressed plaster walls, bare floorboards, scrubbed wooden tables, wild flowers in glass jam jars – but I felt as if I was swimming my first length at school and might not make it to the other end. When we reached the bar I grabbed hold of it, twisted round and looked around the room. Eryk was lounging on a banquette in the corner, long thin legs kicked out in front of him, arm stretched along the back of the seat, shaved head, high cheekbones, serious expression.

  Adrenalin flushed through me, my head grew hot, I started shaking. I hadn’t seen Eryk for a year, not since I’d thrown beer and vodka over him and run off down the tunnel.

  Until I was about fifty, nothing agitated me as much as really liking a man. But it wasn’t about the man. It’s not that I thought, Here is such a special and extraordinary person that I’m quivering with admiration. I’ve met enough men, through school, art school, film, television, the music industry, writers, actors, lawyers, plumbers, builders, to know that it’s not the actual man I get excited about. And I wasn’t motivated by sex, so why did I get so flustered? It must have been the thought that I might have come across someone at last who would make me feel less alone. That was what made me giddy.

  Vida was chatting to a friend, so I slipped into the seat opposite Eryk and smiled. He smiled back. We went outside, leaned against the windowsill and confessed we still had feelings for each other. Then we walked to the off-licence so he could buy some cigarettes. On the way to the shop he put his arm around me. I needed that arm around me so badly, it felt so good, so necessary. Never mind that he can’t talk about his feelings, doesn’t contact me regularly, is a workaholic, tells lies and wants to go to the pub and drink all night more than he wants to see me. Right now all that is worth it, just to walk beside him with his arm around me. To feel connected to another human being. Was this far-from-ideal man reappearing in my life two days after Mum’s death a way of her saying, Here you are, Vivvy. Now that I’ve gone, you can accept the imperfect.

  Eryk let me talk about emotions and feelings for quite a while and did his best to join in, until he felt he was in danger of getting it wrong and upsetting me, at which point he smacked his hand to his head and said, ‘I don’t know! I’m no good at this. I’ve been up since six this morning.’ I felt sorry for him and changed the subject to films and buildings.

  Dungeness

  Not long after we got back together, Eryk and I went to the coast for the weekend. The morning after we got back from the trip I woke up at 7.15 and made Vida breakfast – a sliced Pink Lady apple without the skin (I know, but I couldn’t be bothered to wash it), a ginger and honey yoghurt, a vitamin pill, a fish-oil capsule, a glass of water, scrambled eggs and baked beans on wholemeal toast with melted grated cheddar cheese on top – gave her £5 for her lunch, which left her with a bit to give to the girls at school who were raising money for charity, waved her off from the front door and went back to bed. I don’t know if I was so tired because I was depressed (don’t think so), getting old (fifty-nine), suffering from an accumulation of stress from the last five years – divorce, packing up and selling a home, moving four times, acting in a feature film, recording an EP and an album, writing a book, raising a teenager, looking after my mother, my mother dying, travelling around Britain talking about such an intimate book – or because of what had happened with Eryk the night before.

  We’d booked a hotel in Rye, East Sussex, and stopped off in Dungeness on the way there for fish and chips at the Pilot. As we sat down I remembered my friend Magnus (art GCSE, neighbour, crabs) telling me that last time he was in the Pilot he’d said the word ‘rabbit’ during a conversation and an elderly man had reprimanded him, ‘Never say the word “rabbit” to a fisherman. It’s bad luck, they won’t fish that day if you say that.’ Not that I intended to talk about rabbits, but you know how it is, once you’ve been told not to say something, it pops out of your mouth. (It didn’t.) I could tell the fish was fresh by the way it flaked out of its crispy orange body bag. I don’t eat batter but I ate all the chips, a huge mound of carbohydrate. I also ate all the peas and drank a glass of white wine, which didn’t get me drunk even though I hardly ever drink. The alcohol must have been soaked up by all the carbs. I used to drink occasionally when I was with Eryk. It made our time together dreamlike – sometimes life needs a bit of a nudge to live up to our expectations. After lunch we walked across the beach. As we crunched over the shingle I could feel the muscles in my calves and thighs working and was glad I was fit. The first building we saw was the award-winning Black Rubber Beach House, matt and low, a stealth house, followed by two new black houses built since I had last been there. The image of the three sharp-edged black blocks set against a thick sweep of golden shingle, thin ribbon of green sea and wide band of cloudless blue sky almost hurt me. I felt a pain in my chest. The complementary colours and the proportions of the land, sea and sky stacked on top of each other were so satisfying and so unobtainable it was painful.

  The two new houses were clad in narrow strips of low-grade timber battened onto a frame painted matt black, with a shadow gap between each one. Their exteriors echoed the net-drying huts that used to be dotted around the beach when this was a thriving fishing community. The windows were frameless and abutted the timber. We tramped across the shingle to have a closer look. Eryk worked out that the windows did have frames but the wood cladding was taken right up to the glass so they appeared frameless from a distance. I checked the name of the manufacturer on the doors and windows. They were made by Schuco, the same company as my sliding doors at home and most of the doors and windows of the local shops and restaurants in Hackney.

  After the houses, we came across an abandoned fisherman’s hut, its corrugated-iron roof draped in a tangerine and green fishing net. The net fell in delicate folds and fanned out over the shingle like the lace train of a wedding gown, as pretty as any dress by Rodarte. As we stared, we rocked our heels up and down on the oily black sleepers of a miniature-gauge railway line that stretched down to the sea. In the past a train must have chugged backwards and forwards on the track, loaded up with fish and molluscs. On the way back to the car park I noticed Eryk was more out of breath than me. Must be all that sitting in the van.

  50 Even though Mum was dead and couldn’t hear me, I thought maybe she could, so I told her how wonderful all our years together had been and thanked her over and over again and said goodbye, and suggested Vida say goodbye
again too. I was trying to teach Vida something about death, how to handle it – not the fighting part, that was bad, but you never know, she may have to fight for something one day that needs that level of commitment; it was more that I was trying to demonstrate how to handle my death. That was the only chance I’d ever get to show her how to carry herself when faced with the death of her mother. I wanted her to see that I wasn’t going to fall apart when my mother died, and neither would she when the time came. I wanted to show her what to do, that she should talk to me, hold my hand and, when I’ve gone, say goodbye all over again. I wanted her to know that she was safe, I was strong and all was right with the world. Everything was in its place. We’d had our time together and now we had to let go and move on.