After

by Nikki Gemmell

  But where did all the cash go? The police want to know. They didn’t find any in her flat. The scribbling in Constable R’s notebook intensifies.

  *

  As the police officers ask their questions, a world stopped; bleached, glary white. Ahead, endless explaining, talking, and I’ve never felt so far from the truth.

  *

  I shouldn’t have let the cash question lie. But like so much else I did. Treading carefully. Needing a soothing in the relationship, too old now for anything else. One of the reasons I’d returned from London for good was to be with Elayn and I didn’t want a homecoming marred by the furies that had blighted our adult relationship for so long. We were both exhausted by the situation. Had become used to letting things lie in those last years; to not slipping into the default position. We were both too tired now for the roar of offence and attack and outrage, which happened too much in the depleting old days.

  *

  Elayn knew she came a distant sixth in my world after the children and husband; I never carved out a pedestal that made her feel special enough. ‘Can you pick up my salmon from the fish shop, Nik? It’s ready.’

  ‘Mum, I’m at soccer trials. Nowhere near it. An hour’s drive away.’

  ‘No matter. I’ll work it out.’

  In the final weeks phone calls like that were increasing. There were sudden summonses and orders out of the blue and they were impossible to always carry out with the rest of the family clogging up the hours. I begged Mum to give us notice, to slot in requests at least a day in advance so the cram of the days could be managed. I didn’t have a clean path to Elayn, to all her needs and wants. It was always a juggle, eating into time I needed for something else.

  *

  I let Elayn down more than once. Was often somewhere else. My life was so regimented by the demands of four children that I couldn’t abandon everything at the drop of a hat. There were always sporting fixtures and playdates – some several suburbs away – work meetings and children’s parties and the salmon remained uncollected more than once. Or Andrew would go to pick it up and the order wouldn’t be there, we’d have no idea why. Was the pain disintegrating Elayn’s mind? She would ask me to make a doctor’s appointment that I was to drive her to, then would cancel at the last minute; or she’d ask me to cancel for her. Everything was becoming tricky, unreliable, pesky. But I did it. When I could. Which was most times. The rare times when I couldn’t blare loud in my memory.

  *

  This was the woman who drove hours to get me to country eisteddfods as a child, sometimes in dresses she had copied from Young Talent Time on the television. The bottom line: as an adult, I wasn’t there for my mother enough. Should have dropped other things more. Never gave back to the extent that I should. But does any child? Elizabeth Jolley said that the child can be concerned for their parent but their energy can’t be spent going backwards; the child’s is a forward-going tie, not mired in the past. Do adult children sometimes use that as an excuse? We the children, so distracted by other worlds.

  *

  The police officers are told that in her final weeks Elayn was doubled over in pain. That she was heavily medicating in the final days of her life. The police officers are told of her buoyancy in our final conversation, on the Tuesday. Constable B explains that suicides are often like that when they’ve made their choice. Elayn seemed energised, motivated. It is often the suicide’s final, joyous, lightness of being. They are released.

  *

  Going in circles, back tracking, head hurts. Five days before Elayn killed herself, the Sunday. We had made an agreement that night to check in regularly with each other because I was worried; it was a new ritual of care between us. Late that evening Elayn sent some beautiful photos of my eldest son, known as Ticky, from her phone. Monday, no word. Tuesday, worry. I rang. She said she was taking a lot of pills, and sleeping a lot. She sounded buoyant, as if the great weight of pain had lifted. The builders were on a break. ‘I can’t talk Nik, I’ve got so much to do while they’re not here.’ Elayn was firing again. Finally, I felt, there could be light at the end of the tunnel. Wednesday, no word. But I didn’t worry, because I felt we could finally be on that upward trajectory. I sent an email checking in on the Thursday. At 5 p.m., a reply.

  Nikki I’m ok. Just bombed out on drugs xxx

  I assumed this meant Elayn’s regulation painkillers. This was her last email to me. No indication of intentions, no illuminating final message, three kisses but no last words of love or motherly acknowledgment. The haunting of that. Did she love me? Did she care?

  *

  Thanks for telling me mama. Really reassuring to know.

  Love you x

  I don’t know if Mum ever got my email in reply. It was sent shortly after 5 p.m. The police tell me it’s unclear if she died on the Thursday evening or Friday’s early hours. As I search up these final emails the police are swiftly behind my shoulder. Noting down time of sending. What exactly had been said. Tone, no doubt. Of all of this mess.

  *

  Everything takes on a different meaning now. The Baileys by her side. ‘But Mum doesn’t drink!’ Nothing makes sense. It all feels irrational, and despairing, and too sudden; a fit of pique. Drinking? ‘Well, only on social occasions. Like the glass of Prosecco and orange juice, just like me. At the last dinner. It was enough for both of us.’ The memory of her zippy happiness as we raised our glasses for the birthday toast. Or was that just mine?

  Constable B: ‘She ordered in alcohol from a home delivery service the day she died. The builders told us. They were there when it came.’

  Oh. Secret pockets in secret lives.

  *

  While the two constables watch, I can’t get on to any of my immediate family. No one is answering. Minutes tick away. Bob has been divorced from Mum for forty years, bitterly, but our family is still entwined; he had seen Elayn at my house a few weeks previously, when she dropped in for a shower while he was staying with us. But I need a parent. Right now. Need the reassurance of knowing I’m not completely an adult, yet, that there’s someone still out there for me. I’m such a jumble here: desperately adult and child at the same time.

  Finally I track down my half-sister in Armidale, six hours away by car. Dad isn’t with her. I stumble out that Mum has died; that I need Dad. She understands. He’s a short drive away. Within ten minutes he rings. In his response I catch the vestige of a love not seen for forty years, a rhythm of partnership. The one image of tranquillity I have of them is of the folding of the bed sheets in a dance of coming together, the strange, slow waltz of it, perfectly in sync. These two people had made three children, and parented them, and it was all in Dad’s voice now, bereft.

  I couldn’t raise Paul, who lived in Newcastle, several hours north. Dad would get one of my half-brothers to drive to him, they live close to my brother. Within a fractured family of steps and halves we are pulling together. ‘Do you want me to come down? I’ll drive right away.’ I smile. My love for him fierce. Tell him no, it’s too far. This is something I have to deal with myself; he went from my mum’s world almost four decades previously and it doesn’t feel right to reel him back into it, now.

  *

  Andrew arrives. He envelops me, in shock. But the fact he is here, strong beside me, is a step into repair; into facing the world. The police leave. Paul rings. ‘Oh Mum, oh Mum, oh Mum.’ I’ve never heard my brother weep. He is as I am right now, I can hear it in his voice. The disbelief, the desolation. That she actually did it, that we didn’t listen enough.

  *

  The telling of the story. Again and again. Shock, disbelief, from all of us. Crying, ‘No, no,’ at the phone. ‘What? What?’ Elayn was too vibrant, too alive, for the sordidness of this. Yet I was the only one of the family who saw her in those final weeks. When I saw her curved in pain around her walking stick, and fighting it.

  *

  Paul drives several hours to join us that Friday night after an afternoon of pacing in his f
lat. ‘Was it an accident?’ we keep asking. We need the solace of that possibility, because the other is too momentous to think about. ‘The police think not,’ I say. No, no comfort, for either of us. That’ll be a long way off. Both of us feeling peeled here, skinned; for everything about our family has been laid bare, in all its inadequacy. As a family we haven’t been good enough.

  *

  No farewell note. No clue. No explanation. A suicide note would have allayed police fears, negated the ‘suspicious’ tag. But no, we’re not to be given the dubious consolation of that. A medical officer has certified death but not signed a death notice – which means it is suspected the death was not natural. So, welcome to a world of suspicion. Doubt. Rationing answers to official questions. Red tape.

  *

  In the fraught world of euthanasia, I say this: if the perpetrator’s family cannot, by law, be involved in the wishes of the person wanting to die, then you’re condemning that person to a horrendously bleak and lonely death. And there will be many people left reeling in the wake of that death. People who have to find the body. Hear the news from police that their relative has died. Identify the body in a morgue. Submit to a gruelling police investigation. Deal with unanswerable questions. And find it difficult to extract themselves from the situation, to firm themselves from the mess of it.

  *

  Paul and I, broken in one corner, and our older brother, Mark, in another, holed up in Newcastle during all the demanding official business of death then far away in China on a business trip; his choice. Paul and I did not understand the absence of Elayn’s first born during this time, the mystery was a burden to us. Yet as Jane Austen said, ‘Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.’ To me, during that time, it felt like the Gemmell family had suddenly become a liability, a great weight to now carry through life. I’d never turned a forensic eye on my family. More than anyone else, family members had always been great mysteries to me. And none more so than its matriarch, in life, and in death.

  *

  Some days are seared in a very white light on your consciousness, and remain that way; their hurting light will always be with you. That Friday when the police came is one of them. Was this all about Elayn? Or was it that she didn’t want it to be about her any longer? The burden of her. To all of us. We could have done it, could have gotten her through. Yet Elayn wouldn’t let us.

  That day of the telling was the last day of my old life, my young life, when I had a mother in it. A mother with a secret life and she would never let me in; who’d organised a lock and key for her bedroom during the time I lived with her. Right to the end she was ring-fenced. Prior to the arrival of the police on my doorstep now feels like my ‘Before’ world, which seems a very long time ago. From the moment the officers said, ‘It’s your mother,’ I have existed in another world, an After world, which is less carefree; brittle, unbalanced. My state, now, is Demolished.

  10

  To the children.

  In the fragile hours after the police have gone on their way and before the kids arrive home from school, Andrew and I agree that we will not tell our little family too much detail of Elayn’s death. Cannot bring ourselves, at that point, to articulate what we barely understand ourselves. ‘Nonna died in her sleep.’ We will leave it at that. Yet dancing around the truth only curdles the situation. But I did not know that then.

  *

  The news is broken to Ticky, the eldest son, as he’s picked up from the bus stop. He absorbs the loss of his beloved grandmother like one of those buildings folding in on itself in a controlled moment of destruction. Right. Someone else to worry about amid the wreckage of all this.

  *

  ‘I want to walk,’ the teenager clotted with emotion says, shrugging his mother’s arm away. He climbs out of the stationary car and strides off with a furious, lone velocity. ‘I need to be alone.’ I’m struck by the chasm that sometimes opens up between mother and child – deep, uncrossing; motherhood at its most helpless. At a time when I just want to cleave him to me. Smell his vulnerable softness just as I used to when he was a child; stroke him into a soothing. The knot of him now feels somehow like blame.

  *

  All the grandchildren called Elayn, Nonna. It was her commanding choice. Nanny or Granny or Gran? All, she felt, were too aging. My very modern choice, G? Too obscure. Yet she loved the European warmth of a nonna. Loved her grandchildren effusively in a way she rarely did with me. Ticky and her talked often; she had spoken of her pain to him. He had helped her many times with carrying groceries or shifting boxes around in her flat; he had helped her shuffle up the stairs to her flat, or down the stairs to our front door, always a careful arm over her shoulder.

  *

  An hour or so after Ticky’s recoil from the car, Andrew goes searching the neighbourhood for his son. Finds him sitting against a wall on the beach, by himself. They sit there, in silence, man to man. Andrew rings to alert me; I leave them be. Another world. Fierce and fragile with love for them both.

  The gratitude, deep in my core, for my husband. Amid all this. That he’s here, continually solid, enfolding us, laughing us up. ‘Your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of her Leonard and yes, oh yes, my Andrew too. Later on this vibrating night of too much he catches my eye across the chatter and we smile our grim secrets. My love for him glows calm like a candle and at no time more so than now. Yet I never tell him of the thankfulness for this deep, rescuing love. Should. Must.

  *

  Thirteen-year-old Boh weeps and wails with a head thrown back and mouth wide; the Greek chorus loud enough for all of us, keening anguish to his heavens. He sobs like a toddler abandoned at a shopping centre. And at night asks if he can snuggle up beside me in bed. Needs to. Presses close. All of us anchorless here, all of us needing some solid thing to hold on to.

  *

  The eight year old, nicknamed Biahbi, is frowning. Calm and thinking and perplexed. ‘But Nonna is still in her flat,’ she insists. ‘In her chair. She’s not dead. We can’t speak to her but we can see her.’ What is my daughter understanding here, or not? What is she going through? She’s as impenetrable, and fascinating, as her grandmother. Elayn loved taking her only granddaughter to shows; dance performances, the circus, musicals. The last one they saw together was Matilda, several months previously. A girly treat, with sushi beforehand and chocolate at interval. I’m not worried about Biahbi on this fragile night. She’s my strongest of the lot.

  *

  And then Jages. Just four years old, he’s the afterthought. Never meant to be on this earth. When I skipped a couple of periods in my mid-forties I thought it was the menopause galloping too soon into my life. He was our astonishing mistake, nudging into the tight family unit when we assumed our little posse was complete. He has tipped Andrew and me over the edge with exhaustion, but he fills out our lives with a soldering delight; he makes us all laugh so much. Within our family he exists solely to be loved; there are no expectations upon him, no pressure nor stress; he is the kissing post we all gravitate to, often, when we need enveloping. Like now. His response to the news of his grandmother: ‘So sad, so sad. Poor Nonna.’ As if he is understanding, and accepting, most of all.

  *

  What bleakly adult world have the older children been plunged into with all this? With their Nonna’s choice to leave them, without a word. All the family is coming together in fragility and shock, everyone is processing their grief in wildly varying ways. There is the calm of Biahbi, Andrew and Jages on one side but then there is the rangy rest of us. In pieces, like the ceramic lanterns.

  *

  Andrew puts out little spot fires of howl, makes dinner, runs baths, scoops up lone children from the beach and laughs them into silliness with stinky bum jokes. As if he’s trying to pull us away from these selves we are becoming, these new selves. I remember the night of our wedding,
almost two decades ago, the man I married trying to make me laugh; the great distractor who does it magnificently. May he never grow up. Over the years I’ve wanted to wipe the floor with him at times and he’s wanted to do the same with me (more often, I know, than I have with him). He’s seen me at my ugly worst as I have with him. (Why is it easiest to hurt most the people we love? Perhaps because we know, all too well, their Achilles heel.) But it’s as if the ingredients of mateship, affection, admiration, duty and respect have combined over decades into a rich brew of deep, quiet love. I now know there are two types of love: unanchored, consuming, romantic love, where all you want is the other person; and the great calm of true love, where all that is wanted is the other person’s good. And so it is with him.

  *

  Andrew knew Elayn well. The woman behind the mother. Her complexity. He had seen her trickiness over the decades and sometimes did not agree with it but was ever the diplomat; careful, retreating, but often silent with anger at how she treated us. To her he was the man with the beautiful, broadcaster’s voice, who wore a suit well and a lovely tie impeccably, the son-in-law she always wanted to have.

  She had made it known, vocally, how unsuitable all of the previous boyfriends had been. Not only to me, but to them. ‘Your mother doesn’t like me, does she?’ said N, long ago, a man I was going to marry in my twenties. The sadness, to hear him declare it so baldly, because of course it was the case. It became a stain between N and me that neither of us could scrub off, that my mother didn’t like him and never would. Another notch in the tally of daughterly fury.

  Yet in hindsight Elayn was right. N was a serial flitter, and perhaps she perceived the weakness in him right from the start.

  *

  The last time we all saw Elayn was at Ticky’s fifteenth birthday, four days before her death. We had taken her to a local Greek restaurant. We knew the owners well. They had made a fuss of the family matriarch as she hobbled in on her walking stick with her brave, warm smile. It was an occasion brimmed with laughter. Elayn had taken the photos that she would send me later that night, of her grandson almost six feet tall. She had laughed, ‘You’re as handsome as a movie star.’ They had discussed her latest-model smartphone. It’s how they often bonded, Ticky the enabler of Elayn’s electronic life. Perhaps that night cemented her enormous decision, as we hooted and joshed as a family around the merry table: Andrew and I and the kids were happy, wewould be all right, we would carry on.