Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  He’s called Mr Preston, and is not at all like the ones that reside downstairs from A and P. For though still routinely urbane and professional, he is closer to my mother’s age than my own, which is not something you tend to see much in estate agency, them all being burned out or millionaires by thirty. He is also in a brass-buttoned blazer and beige slacks. I wonder if he’s been hand-picked for wooing ladies of a certain age. He certainly seems to be wooing my mother.

  Trying to, at any rate. He’s not necessarily succeeding. ‘Communal? Won’t I have my own one?’ she asks incredulously. ‘How will I be able to sunbathe topless?’

  Though ( oh, yuk!) it’s true, I know she is saying this partly for impact, so it’s to his credit (and her chagrin) that he responds to this question as if it were the sort of thing they get asked about almost every day at Abercorn Gate. ‘If you opt for the second floor,’ he answers smoothly, wafting his brochure upwards, ‘you do get a balcony –’

  ‘Mum, get a grip ,’ I hiss. ‘You’re seventy-four, for goodness’ sake!’

  She fixes me on the end of one of her famed Garland scowls. The one that used to have chorus girls weeping.

  ‘Yes, Abigail. Seventy -four. Not ninety-four. Which hardly makes me Methuselah. Just you wait till you’re seventy-four, young lady. You’ll change your tune then, mark my words.’

  Though I doubt I’ll be flashing my bosoms. I try to imagine myself as a seventy-four-year-old, and, depressingly, I can do it all too clearly. I’ll be wrinkled and worn-out and hunch-backed and exhausted, because I’ll still be looking after a one hundred and eight-year-old witch.

  ‘Well, I think it’s very nice ,’ I persist. ‘It’s handy for the shops, and not too far from your friends at the theatre club. And you’ll be able to make lots of new friends here as well.’

  She looks at me as if I had just suggested she join EXIT.

  ‘Theatre club?’ says the agent politely. ‘Would that be the one in Cyncoed?’

  Mum lifts her chin and strikes a pose for him. I t’s so automatic I don’t think she even realises she does it any more.

  ‘Why, yes!’ she simpers , changing tack on a sixpence. ‘Fancy! Do you know it?’ He nods enthusiastically. ‘I’ve been a member for oh, umpteen years. I’ve always tried to keep my hand in. Ah…’ She sighs wistfully. ‘These things are in one’s blood, aren’t they? (I don’t know why she’d think he’d know about that, but perhaps fellow am-drammers have some sort of secret code.) She does a delicate little frown and lifts her walking stick. ‘Though sadly, not so much lately, of course. What with my knee and so on.’ She sighs again. ‘I sometimes fear my days in the spotlight are finally behind me…’

  ‘Garland!’ he says, slapping his brochure against his thigh, eyes alight with excitement (God, don’t these people have lives? ). ‘Of course! Dance with Diana!’ He la-la-las the music, with all the right hand movements too. ‘I knew it! I knew your face was familiar! Well, I never. How about that?!’

  Mum bats her lashes happily, having discovered a new groupie. ‘Well, now, that was a long time ago, Mr Preston. Goodness, I’m very flattered that you even remember it! Gracious, how amazing you knew who I was! Oh, look. Now I’m blushing…’

  She does the same speech at everyone. And there’s more.

  ‘She Stoops To Conquer !’ declares the agent, clicking his fingers together and beaming at her. ‘Ninety-six? Ninety-seven? In the Community Hall?’

  ‘Gracious,’ Mum says again. ‘You saw me in that ?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ says the agent, hugging his brochure to his chest now and smiling warmly at my mother. He’s thrilled, I don’t doubt, at having seen her in person. Inflamed also, just possibly, at the thought of her breasts. But mainly, I judge, he is hopeful. Because there’s something in the very effusive nature of his manner that smacks of a man with a sale on his mind.

  I wish him luck. By the lorry-load. I must live in hope.

  Chapter 11

  A POSTCARD. FRONTSIDE: LEANING Tower of Pisa (by night). Backside: Dear Mum, Jake, Spike and Nana, we’re not actually here. We’re in some bar in a place called Collesalvetti,(we camped here last night) having a drink while waiting to catch the train down to Florence. Nothing much to report. Big news here is that J thinks he was standing behind Jeremy Beadle in the bread shop this morning. I say not. I think he is hallucinating due to too much grappa. Tho’ the barman here has a sign up saying ‘Tony Blairs and family most welcome!’ We’re keeping our eyes peeled … LOL S xxxxx

  ‘Absolutely not,’ my mother says firmly. Despite the enthusiastic patter of her new number one fan, my mother doesn’t want to live at Abercorn Gate, and she doesn’t want the sideboard either.

  Another weekend, another trip to the Myrtles, another sunny Saturday lost to Project Mum. ‘Oh, I don’t know ,’ she sighs. She’s spent much of the morning wafting in skittish bursts about the living room like a wraith on a moped. ‘Do I want any of it, frankly?’ She lifts the hand without the sherry in it up to her brow and looks at herself in the living room mirror. She’ll want to take that, at least. Take all of them, no doubt. She smoothes her brow with a finger and pouts at herself. ‘Oh, this is all such a chore …’

  ‘Mother, you’ll need furniture,’ Pru says irritably.

  ‘The nest of tables?’ I suggest to Doug, who, along with Jake (who’s been a sweetheart), has been humping stuff since he got here and has by now adopted the sort of defeated and slightly desperate expression he usually reserves for Bristol City FC. I point. ‘And that armchair at the very least. And how about that bookcase, Mum? You might as well have a bookcase.’

  But my mother is not to be jollied along. ‘Abigail, what’s the point? I’ve read every single book in the house already. And I certainly can’t afford to buy new ones.’

  We all sigh in unison as soon as her back’s turned. ‘Let’s take the bookcase anyway,’ Pru whispers. ‘She can fill it with her bloody trophies instead.’

  Which are currently parked in a box in the hall, along with all the theatre posters and programmes and framed reviews, and her ‘Best Legs on Telly’ award. It occurs to me that, no, she probably doesn’t need much else. She could live on thin air if it clapped her.

  The house looks very different now. Denuded of its detritus and what things of Hugo’s Corinne decided to take away, it has the feel of a park the day after a funfair’s been through. Faded patches on the walls, dents and troughs in the carpets, assemblages of disparate items of bric-a-brac in untidy, no-place-to-go piles on the floor. On Monday, after we’ve taken what’s left on the want list (correction – the ‘oh, if I must’ list), it will go through its final stage of dismemberment, when the clearance firm Corinne’s organised come and clear out what remains.

  ‘I feel disinclined,’ my mother says, sitting down heavily on the sofa she doesn’t want either, ‘to take any of it, frankly. And what’s the point, really ? It’s all far too big. Given that I’m likely to be living in a shoebox.’

  Shoebox notwithstanding, the day chunters on , and by mid-afternoon we wave off Pru and Doug, who have shoehorned such items as we’ve deemed worth taking into the hired van, which they are now going to drive back to Bristol. And there, in storage, will the said items stay until such time as another Abercorn Gate-type development elicits sufficient enthusiasm from her to allow us all the luxury of hope.

  Having spent a decade and a half being married to a man who left items of apparel in just about every hotel room he ever stayed in, I’m just on my final check round of backs-of-drawers and corners-of-cupboards upstairs when I realise the hatch to the loft has been left open, and that the loft light is still on as well.

  Thinking even as I’m doing so that their electricity bill really isn’t my worry, I nevertheless erect the step ladder and climb up to pull the light cord. The loft now is empty bar a couple of rolled offcuts of carpet, but as I reach for the light cord, I notice a familiar-looking object half hidden behind two of the struts.
Not a shoe box, but still a box. One of my mother’s old hat boxes, in fact. I’m about to turn to leave it when I have a change of mind. Whatever else she really can’t be bothered with taking, my mother almost never ever parts with her hats. Perhaps this is an old one that got shoved up here when she moved in. I’d at least better check, so I climb to the top rung to reach it out.

  Straight away I can see that the top isn’t dusty, so I imagine this has probably been overlooked only due to being buried under another box of some sort. I reach for the cord carrying handle and slide it back across the boards. It’s also much weightier than I’m anticipating, and as the other carrying handle is missing, as I pull it towards me to get hold of it properly, I almost send the thing clattering to the floor, and myself tumbling headlong down the stairs.

  And I’m right to be surprised , because once I’ve manhandled it down the step ladder and onto the landing, I see that there isn’t a hat in there. It’s stuffed with a large carrier bag, which, when I open it, I see is itself stuffed full: of papers and photos and cuttings. At first I think it’s simply more of my mother’s theatre memorabilia, but a quick riffle through straight away makes me realise it isn’t. These papers must all belong to Hugo. I pick up the first of them and start reading with interest.

  It’s a copy of the local newspaper, obviously read, and folded so the middle pages are now on the outside. There’s a headline ‘Cardiff Weatherman Gabriel to marry his very own Angel’, beneath which is a photograph of Lucy Whittall and Gabriel Ash, emerging from the doorway of what looks like a restaurant, smiling happily for the cameras, arm in arm, heads close, her left hand held out to show the photographer her ring. I skim through the piece, which is reporting their engagement – I check the date; last Christmas – in the sort of relentlessly upbeat and sycophantic manner that local papers are often wont to do. I look further. Beneath it, there’s an almost identical photo, but this time it’s on a page torn from a magazine, and the headline this time reads slightly differently: Fair Weather for TV’s Fallen Angel?’ and the copy beneath it is altogether more cynical; wisecracking, sneering and determinedly mean-spirited. No forecasts of fair weather in this one, for sure. They predict, with much glee, stormy weather.

  I look back in the box. Most of it, it seems, consists of similar things. Newspaper snippets, dating back years. From his appointment as a TV weatherman just over a year back, through various pieces, and correspondence, including some in Italian, going right back to a faded newspaper photo of a young team – football, I guess, because someone is holding one – beneath which his name is underlined.

  I put it back with the others and close up the carrier, a small flame of excitement alight at what I’ve found. About twenty years’ worth of memorabilia, is my guess.

  I put the lid back on the box and take the box down to my car, where Jake’s already installed and plugged in to his iPod. Mum’s two doors up, chatting with a neighbour in her front garden, while Spike, via a cocked leg and a ‘who, me?’ expression, attempts to claim ownership of her beds.

  I stash the hat box carefully in the boot. If it’s left behind, the clearance firm will probably end up with it, and it seems to me it might be something Gabriel Ash would want. Perhaps this is the sort of thing he was hoping to find last time. Or, no, perhaps it isn’t. He’s not ever struck me as particularly interested in his father. Though not un interested, surely. How could anyone be? So perhaps this will be a pleasant surprise. Feeling mildly cheered about being the bearer of glad tidings instead of the harridan harbinger of doom, I insert a proper memo in my telephone reminder. I can check when he’s next due in at the clinic for his physio and present my box of booty to him then.

  We have to leave Hugo’s car on the drive, of course, as there’s no one available to drive it.

  ‘Be best if we do bring it here, though, I suppose,’ I’m telling my mother, once we’re home and Jake and I have unpacked the car. ‘That way, I can put an ad in the paper and be on hand if anyone wants to see it. I’ll have to speak to Pru. See if we can sort something out.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ she replies, while Jake nudges her. ‘In fact, Jakey and I have been having a little chat.’

  Jake and my mother chatting is not always, clearly, something about which to feel encouraged. From where I stand, at any rate. ‘Oh, yes?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ve told him he can have it.’

  ‘Jake ? Have Hugo’s car ? Mother, that’s ridiculous. It may have escaped your notice, but he’s only fifteen!’

  ‘Nearly sixteen, M um,’ he is quick to point out.

  ‘Yes, nearly sixteen, but that’s not seventeen, is it? What on earth do you suppose we would do with it for the next fifteen months?’

  He shrugs. ‘Park it somewhere, I guess.’

  ‘Jake, you can’t just ‘park it somewhere’. Not for over a year. It would have to be taxed. And besides, you can’t just leave a car parked for that length of time anyway. The engine would seize up.’

  ‘So you drive it in the meantime,’ my mother suggests, quite reasonably. ‘It’s a lot better than that smelly old crate you rattle around in at the moment.’

  I’d quite like to point out that it’s the very same car that I rattle her around in. To Yoga, to Bridge, to Celeste’s, to the tea-dance club (where she doubtless sits and seethes), to her bloody am-dram…, and that she should, perhaps, be bloody grateful. But she’s right; from almost any perspective, it is a sensible, rational, reasonable point. My car is an all but knackered, ancient heap, and has been around several hundred blocks. And yes it does smell. But only of Spike. So that’s fine. My mother’s fur coat smells of mothballs and cigar smoke, but I don’t imagine she’ll be putting it on eBay and replacing it with an anorak any time soon.

  But she’s right as in yes, in the fullness of time (and full-er-ness of bank account, obviously) I’m going to have to trade it in for a new one. Well, new-ish, anyway. But not now. And not for Hugo’s. Not in a million years. Hugo’s car is, well, an old person’s car. An old person’s car which is the colour of a rich tea biscuit. Or Complan. Or a pair of surgical stockings. An old person’s car with a sensibly small engine. A car unfettered by delusions of being built for a driver. A car that glories in being just like every other car that’s parked in the day centre or bingo hall car park. Which means I could never drive it, ever. I’m sorry, but I can’t. Jake will/would be able to, of course, because when you’re seventeen you can drive an old person’s car with humour and irony and a ‘needs must’ expression, add go-faster stripes and put a sub-woofer in the boot. But I can’t. I know it’s the most shallow thing imaginable, but driving in my heap – with all its memories and prangs and battle-scarred poppy red paintwork – at least helps maintain the fiction that I am young and up for it and still a bit of a gal. It has character. Personality. A sense of humour. A sense of fun. But if I swap my little Peugeot for my elderly mother’s dead husband’s hearing-aid-coloured car, people will assume that I have exercised choice and in doing so chosen, well, that one. And thus another little flame of youth will be extinguished and I will age fifteen years in a second. I will become the sort of person who has a ‘mum’s taxi’ sticker in the back (oh, how they’ll laugh) and calls her transport ‘my run-around’. Someone – mon dieu ! – who wears drip-dry elasticated skirts.

  And who lives with her elderly mother.

  I know it’s only a metaphor for the way I’m feeling right now, but just thinking about it is depressing.

  ‘Yeah, Mum!’ Jake says. ‘That’s an idea. Then I could have your car!’

  Oh, y es. He can do irony if needs be, my son. But given the choice, he’d rather drive my car as well.

  I shake my head and pat his shoulder. ‘It’s not an idea, Jake, and it’s not going to happen anyway. Nana needs to sell Hugo’s car to put towards her new flat. You know that. I’m sorry, hon, but let’s talk about cars when you are seventeen, shall we?’

  He do
esn’t look too crestfallen. After all, it was a pie in the sky idea in the first place. But then he delivers his coup de grace , straight out of left-field.

  ‘Why does Nana have to go and get a flat anyway?’ he asks, and I’m quite sure he asks it quite innocently too. We both turn. Two lots of breath are now bated. ‘Why doesn’t she just stay living here?’ he asks me. ‘You know. Like, permanently. With us.’

  Chapter 12

  TEXT; LUV U 2. No. Florence bit dull (no REALLY). On nite train 2 Rome now. Oh – also plz put some credit on J’s fone! Also ask him got my txt? If not, £30 resrve min. Ta mum S xxx

  Ah, the innocence of youth. What a precious thing it is.

  And , sometimes, from where I stand, what a pain. There were about three seconds during which nobody breathed. Jake because his brain was already occupied in trying to interpret the doubtless confusing array of expressions that my face was conveying to him from over his grandmother’s shoulder, myself and said grandmother because our sharp intakes of breath were so very sharp that they’d sucked almost every last molecule of air from the room.

  My mother cracked first. ‘Gracious, me, Jakey!’ she twittered. ‘I’m quite sure your mother doesn’t want an old lady like me rattling around cluttering up the place.’

  Jake glance d up at me for corroboration. ‘ Well? ’ his face intimated, ‘ is that right? ’. ‘You don’t clutter up the place,’ he then said, with commendable sincerity. ‘It’s nice having you living with us. Isn’t it, Mum?’

  Jake, of course, would say something like that, for he is (happily) not daily flagellated by the countless irritations of living with her. He doesn’t shop for her, cook for her, do her handwashing-in-Dreft for her, drive for her, or put up with her tantrums and gripes. Mainly, though, he doesn’t have issues with my mother, because she’s not his mother, is she? He’s her most favourite grandson and he loves her to bits. I know that. I applaud that. I think it’s rather special. I’d just enjoy it so much more if she lived somewhere else.