Life, Interrupted

by Damian Kelleher

  ‘The hospital specifically asked me to keep you away this weekend,’ she said. ‘That nurse told me your mother’s not well enough for visitors. And there you go, sneaking off up there to pester the poor woman as soon as I’m off to church. You’ll drive that woman to an early grave.’

  She’s still seething as we pick our way through a semi-incinerated roast chicken, so the conversation isn’t exactly flowing. I’m chewing on some semi-raw broccoli and Jesse is cutting the burnt bits off a carrot when he looks up at her.

  ‘It’ll be good having Mum at home again,’ he says brightly. ‘Even if it is just for the weekend.’

  ‘That’ll be nice for the two of yous,’ says Mrs M. She gets up from the table and carries her plate to the sink. I’ve noticed she always has half as much as Jesse and me at mealtimes, pecking away like a demented bird some days, but mostly she hardly touches it. I’ve a sneaking suspicion she’s getting decent food smuggled in during the night.

  ‘I’m making myself scarce so you boys can spend some time alone with your mammy … while you can.’ Her voice trails off as she says the last bit, as though she’s saying something she shouldn’t be. I think about the cancer again.

  I hadn’t said anything to Jesse on the way back from the hospital. Mum said to keep it as ‘our secret’ because she didn’t want Jesse getting upset. It felt as though we were parents conspiring together not to tell the children. It made me realise that Mum doesn’t think of me as a kid any more.

  We’d spent the rest of the visit discussing what we would do when she came home. We’ll have to bring Jesse’s bed down for Mum from upstairs, and Mum said Jesse could sleep in her bed for the weekend, which of course isn’t just Mum’s bed anymore but Mrs McLafferty’s too. Mum said she’ll ask Mrs M to change the bedding before she goes (she could see the horrified look on Jesse’s face at the idea of sleeping on Mrs M’s sheets) and then we discussed watching DVDs, what food we’d eat and what games we’d play, as though we were planning Christmas.

  It’s only now that I realise how much our lives have changed lately. Normally we’d have a takeaway on a Friday night, a curry or a Chinese, or get out a DVD from the corner shop. Jesse would snuggle up to Mum on the sofa and I’d lounge over a chair and stick my feet up on the coffee table. I’d get told off for doing that during the week, but somehow on a Friday night I’d get away with it.

  Friday night was our night, a time to chill out and wind down after the hassles of the week. I know it’s going to be different this particular Friday. I know Mum’s bed is going to be in the lounge, and we’ll have to help her. But who cares? At least Mum will be at home. At least we’ll be together.

  Mrs McLafferty bangs down two bowls in front of Jesse and me.

  ‘Rhubarb crumble and custard,’ she announces unnecessarily. It’s what she serves every Sunday. The health-giving properties of rhubarb are one of Mrs M’s favourite topics of conversation, but I notice she isn’t eating any herself. She’s standing by the window, looking out into the garden and smoking. The custard has been sitting on the crumble for a few minutes now and there’s a shrunken skin formed on the top.

  ‘D’you want your skin?’ Jesse says, though he’s already wedged his spoon underneath the plasticky yellow layer and is greedily transferring it from my bowl to his.

  ‘That grass needs cutting before your mother comes home,’ says Mrs M. ‘There’s a little job for you, Luke.’

  ‘We need to make a banner,’ says Jesse. ‘A proper welcome home banner. You know, with WELCOME HOME, MUM in big letters, that we can hang across the front door. She’ll like that.’

  This smacks a little of reception class to me, but I don’t want to curb Jesse’s unbridled enthusiasm. I still keep hearing the word ‘cancer’ ringing round my head, and I’m thinking I’ve just got to play along with him. But once he starts cutting up magazines to make each letter a different colour, I get caught up in his excitement and start joining in.

  Mrs M says, ‘Make sure you don’t get any of that glue stuff on my table. It’s a swine to get off.’

  ‘It’s not her table,’ I whisper to Jesse under my breath. ‘It’s ours.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Jesse, as though he’s only just realised it’s our house she’s living in and not the other way round.

  He turns round quickly to check she’s not looking and then squirts a blob of glue under the newspaper that she’s made us lay over the entire table.

  ‘That’ll teach her.’

  ‘I’m just going to take the weight off my feet,’ says Mrs M and waddles out to the lounge. It’s time for her ‘Sunday afternoon constitutional’, as she calls it, which means she’s going to snooze her way through the omnibus edition of EastEnders. I reckon now’s a good time to hatch a plan.

  ‘Listen, that weekend we get her out.’

  Jesse’s cutting orange bits up for the ‘U’ of MUM.

  ‘She’s going anyway,’ he says.

  ‘No, I mean get her out for good,’ I say. ‘Mia’s the one who found Mrs M and she’s coming to see Mum on Friday. So that’s our chance to show Mia what an old nightmare she’s dumped on us.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’ says Jesse, poking his tongue out between his lips as he concentrates on the smooth lines of the U.

  ‘We trash the upstairs so Mum can’t tell,’ I say. ‘We don’t want her getting involved, she’ll only get upset. Then we let Mia go upstairs and she can see for herself. We let her draw her own conclusions. Trust me, it’s better that way.’

  ‘Oh I get it,’ says Jesse, looking up from his U which is definitely looking a bit lopsided. ‘Mum’s stuck downstairs in the lounge so she can’t get upstairs to see the mess.’

  ‘Eureka. See, you’re not as stupid as you look.’ I start cutting out the second M for MUM. I’m actually quite enjoying this but I’m not letting on.

  ‘Okay,’ says Jesse, and a big smile spreads across his face. ‘So, when do we start trashing?’

  chapter thirteen

  ‘Twice round the perimeter should warm you up,’ Freya explains. ‘Then we’ll do a few stretching exercises.’

  It’s Monday afternoon and Jesse’s second training session with Joan of Arc’s answer to Karren Brady.

  Jesse nods at Freya – he doesn’t moan or complain – then he starts jogging off up the track. The rec (short for recreation ground) is less of a park and more of a wasteland really, and probably one of the least attractive wastelands you’re ever likely to see. There aren’t that many people around, but maybe that’s why she chose it. There’s some dodgy-looking kid smoking a spliff and walking a Staffordshire bull terrier that looks like it’s been reared on blood and guts rather than Pedigree Chum, and there are a couple of boys messing around on their skateboards. A middle-aged woman with dyed red hair is jogging unbelievably slowly. It’s like watching the London Eye. Unless you look closely, you can’t quite tell that she’s moving at all.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re still trying to make Jesse believe you can actually help him,’ I tell Freya as Jesse jogs out of earshot. ‘You don’t know the first thing about football training.’

  Freya stands with a hand on her hip.

  ‘He’s actually improved a lot in the past week,’ says Freya. ‘Anyway, what’s eating you? What are you so sore about?’

  ‘You’re a charlatan,’ I tell her. ‘A big fake. You can’t train Jesse properly and you know it. If that other kid, Darren Whatsisname, is better, he’ll get a place on the team and there’s nothing you can do to stop him. You’re just setting Jesse up for a big fall.’

  ‘In your opinion,’ says Freya. ‘Why do you think I’ve never mentioned my interest in football to you?’

  I shrug. ‘Because you’re not that interested.’

  ‘Wrong,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘I am that interested. But you’re not. You automatically assume that because it’s of no interest to you, it’s of no interest to anyone else. I know you well enough, Luke, to know that I’d be wasting m
y time talking about football with you. I can talk to you about movies and music and all kinds of stuff. But football? Forget it. What would be the point? Anyway, if I want to talk footie tactics, I can do that with David.’ David’s her dad. She stops for breath and then continues, ‘Oh and “that other kid” as you call him is Duane Mulholland. And I can make sure Jesse has an edge over him. Just watch.’

  ‘David?’ This is all news to me. ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’

  ‘When we lived in Southampton he used to coach my brother’s team. I learned a lot from turning up to training sessions with him.’

  That’s Freya. Always full of surprises.

  The rest of the week drags of course, because when you’re desperately looking forward to something it takes ages to happen. Mrs M has a little phrase for it. She says ‘a watched kettle never boils’, and for once I think she may not be talking out of her wrinkly old tights. If I had a calendar, I suppose I’d be crossing the days off with a big black marker pen. Mum’s looking forward to it too, I know.

  I go to see her on Wednesday while Jesse has his next training session with Freya. Mum’s having a visit from Polly, her Macmillan nurse. I’d never heard of Macmillan nurses before, but Mum explained that they help people like her through their illness (she didn’t say the ‘c’ word but I knew that’s what she meant). It can be anything from practical help to just someone to talk to when you’re feeling down, or worried, or lonely. Mum says Polly’s been great at organising her weekend at home.

  Mum’s told me a lot about Polly. She is quite young and slightly kookie. She rides round on a bicycle that looks like it’s a Victorian original, with a basket at the front. She buys all her clothes from charity shops and her life is like some kind of soap opera. She’s going out with this bloke called Colin, who’s a plumber, and she moans about him all the time. Mum says Polly’s only going out with Colin because she fancies his mate, Gray, who’s an insurance salesman (again, not the most interesting career choice), but in the evenings and at weekends, Gray plays guitar in a rock band called Hub and Polly reckons they’re going to be BIG. Her eyes open wide when she says the word ‘big’ and I think she’s got it bad for Gray. Polly spends a lot of time sitting and chatting with Mum about things that don’t involve pain relief and chemotherapy and all those other words that have slipped into our vocabulary while we weren’t looking.

  Anyway, when I arrive, Polly is sitting in a fulllength floaty floral number at the end of Mum’s bed, a big straw hat by her side, yacking away at full pelt. She’s got this really pretty face with long-ish brown hair and she waves her hands about as she talks as though she’s conducting an orchestra. She and Mum are laughing.

  ‘Heard lots about you,’ Polly says as Mum introduces us.

  I never know what to say when people say that. Adults normally say something like ‘all good, I hope,’ or crack some other corny joke, but I just nod and smile and Polly says, ‘Is that nutcase brother of yours behaving himself?’ like she knows Jesse really well, and I say, ‘I don’t know, he’s all wrapped up in footie practice at the moment,’ and she says, ‘God, he sounds like my boyfriend, Colin. What is it about blokes and football? Is there some kind of unwritten rule that says men can only talk about football?’

  Then Mum says, ‘Luke’s not a big football fan, are you, love?’ and I say, ‘No, not really,’ and Polly says, ‘Oh, there is hope for us all then. Hurry up and grow up, Luke, so I can marry you,’ and she starts laughing and Mum joins in too. Although I hardly know her, I can tell I like her already.

  Everything is set for the weekend. Polly is coming home with Mum on Friday night to make sure she’s all settled in and we know what to do in case of any emergencies. Nobody really elaborates on what an emergency might be, but that’s probably just as well. I know Mum’s pain gets really bad sometimes. It’s mainly her back and shoulder that hurt and occasionally even the painkillers don’t seem to touch it. On Sunday, while I was talking to her, she suddenly started breathing really deeply and pressing her painkiller machine like mad and I could tell it was bad because she just seemed to disappear off into another place, somewhere she really didn’t want to be, somewhere that hurt like hell. She held on to my hand and squeezed it really hard, and I pressed the button to get the nurse, and the nurse told her to ‘ride through it’, as though Mum was surfing or swooping down a rollercoaster ride or doing something quite pleasant, and not suffering some horrible, twisting, gouging pain that forced her breath out in big gasping shudders.

  Polly bounces off the bed and gathers up the basket for her bike, declaring she’ll ‘zip off home, now’, but we can call her on her mobile at any time, even the middle of the night.

  ‘Any excuse to get away from Colin,’ says Polly, winking, and Mum says, ‘You’re terrible, you are,’ and Polly replies, ‘And that’s why you like me!’ and gives Mum a kiss and plants another on my cheek before I can look embarrassed. Then she flounces out, singing, ‘See you at the weekend!’, grappling with the straw hat and the bike lock that she produces from the basket.

  ‘I got a call from your Uncle Stu last night,’ says Mum. ‘He didn’t sound his usual perky self. Still, I suppose that’s the joy of being unemployed.’

  Since Mum’s been in hospital, Uncle Stu’s been on the phone to her every couple of days. He keeps threatening to come and visit since he hasn’t found a new job yet. Seems there aren’t that many jobs for translators in Manchester right now.

  ‘Not having a lot of luck as a family, are we?’ sighs Mum. ‘Me laid up like this, Stu on the dole.’

  She pushes her hair back off her face and I can see a couple of strands come away in her hand. She pulls them out and holds them up to the light as though it’s something precious, hair that she can spin into gold, like some fairytale princess.

  ‘Look at this,’ she says, as though she’s only just noticed she’s losing her hair. We haven’t mentioned it up until now – it’s not a great conversation opener with your mum when she’s fighting cancer, ‘Oh, I see you’re looking a bit balder today, Mum’ – but it’s definitely been getting thinner, which must mean it’s falling out. So I’ve just kept quiet about it, thinking maybe she hadn’t noticed. Of course she’s noticed. Who wouldn’t?

  ‘It’s starting to fall out. They said it might.’ She rubs it absent-mindedly into a little hairball in her hands. ‘I’ll need a wig at this rate.’

  She looks at me. I don’t know what to say, I haven’t a clue what to do. Mum forces her mouth into a smile, and bends her face closer to mine.

  ‘Mind you, I’ve always quite fancied a wig,’ she says. ‘What do you reckon, Dolly Parton or Cher?’ And she smiles and softly kisses me on my cheek.

  chapter fourteen

  I must admit, I did think about bunking off school on Friday to try and get the house ready for Mum, but then I remembered that we are meant to be trashing the upstairs later so there didn’t seem much point. Anyway, Friday is double art and I’m doing this pottery selfportrait which I’m really getting into. It’s a head-andshoulders three-dimensional clay version of me, and I’ve just got to the stage where I’m going to apply the glaze. I’m not so great at this sort of thing but my model seems to have taken on a life of its own. Even Mr Magni, our pottery teacher, reckons it’s a good likeness.

  ‘I’d recognise your ugly mug anywhere,’ he said to me when I showed it to him. He’s all right, is Mr Magni. He walks around listening to an iPod and singing along off-key. They should be firing our self-portraits in the kiln next week, and I’m going to give mine to Mum to keep next to her bed. At the moment she’s only got this terrible old photo. I must be nine and I’m wearing what looks like a grey balaclava, and Jesse’s about seven and clutching his favourite soft toy at the time, a rabbit called Englebert. Everyone picks it up and says, ‘Ah, sweet’, which is a little irritating when you’re fourteen and would quite like to burn every balaclava in the world to wreak revenge.

  Straight after school, Jesse and I rush t
o get back home before Mum and Polly. We’re working on a tight schedule here. Mum’s due in at about five-thirty, so we’re going to have to shift it some to get the upstairs looking pretty rank. As soon as I open the front door, we know what we’re up against. Jesse and I are nearly overcome by the overwhelming fumes of lavender furniture polish that come wafting out. It’s Mrs M’s trademark scent. She thinks the smell of the stuff is the sign of a clean home. I’ve even seen her squirting it around like air freshener. It wouldn’t surprise me if she spritzed it behind her ears too.

  ‘Phwooarh, it stinks in here,’ says Jesse, gasping for breath as he closes the door behind us. ‘Pass me a gas mask, please.’

  Mrs M was heading off to her sister at lunchtime, she said, but she must have been round the house like a demon, dusting and hoovering for all she was worth before she headed off to the darkest depths of Colchester. The cushions are looking nicely plumped, every surface gleams, and the vase on the mantelpiece is buffed up like a diamond.

  We head upstairs to check the state of the bedrooms. To be honest, ours aren’t exactly pristine, but they’re not that bad either. Mrs M obviously realised that Mum wasn’t going to be running a testing finger over the surfaces up here, so she’s concentrated her cleaning blitz downstairs. Very sneaky. True to her word, Mrs M’s also changed the bedlinen on Mum’s bed for Jesse.

  ‘At least I won’t have to sleep in her smelly sheets,’ he says. ‘I bet her farts stink of rhubarb crumble.’

  ‘Come on, get a move on,’ I tell him. ‘We’ve only got about an hour before Mum and Mia get back. We need to get trashing.’

  We head upstairs. Now for someone who has a natural talent for making a mess (and it’s true, I’m not so bad at it myself), Jesse proves to be pretty lousy at deliberately fouling up the upstairs of 47 Colbourne Way. I tell him to start in Mum/Mrs M’s bedroom, and he half-heartedly throws the pillows on the floor and knocks a chair over. Then he sits down on the bed.