Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  It occurs to me that it would be deeply satisfying to point out that if Wilfred was available to pick her up, then he could have picked her up in the first place. But I don’t point it out, because that would be childish, and I strenuously don’t wish to do any single thing that might inspire her to treat me like one.

  And she’s quite right. It did occur to me to call home. Had Jake been at home I’d have definitely called. But she’s not my child. So I didn’t feel the need. No, more than that. I even resented the obligation to inform her of my movements; were she not in my house, it simply wouldn’t apply. And I know all too well that what I mainly resented was that if I had rung my mother I would have had to explain, which might necessitate me telling her a lie. Childish again. Mean and selfish and discourteous. But I do resent it. I resent it all the time. I can’t help it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say instead. ‘ Really. I’m sorry. I was at the hospital, all right?’

  ‘At the hospital?’

  ‘Yes, at the hospital.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A had to go and visit a sick friend.’

  ‘What, at this time?’

  I drink some milk. It’s disgusting. Because someone left it out. ‘Yes, Mum. At this time.’

  She says nothing more, and goes back to her – my – puzzle, while I clatter about putting things away. It’s some time before I realise she’s now stopped doing the puzzle again and is silently following my progress around the kitchen.

  I close a cupboard. ‘ What ?’

  ‘Who is he?’ she then asks. And her tone’s entirely different.

  I open another one and force in the cake rack. Then I realise it’s still dirty and pull it out again.

  ‘Well?’ she says.

  I feel cornered. ‘Well what?’

  ‘Who is he?’

  I put the dirty cake rack in the sink and turn on the tap. Oh, please. Please, not now. I’m too tired.

  ‘Who said it was a he?’

  ‘Well, isn’t it?’

  I sigh heavily. ‘Yes, it’s a he.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  I say nothing. I look at the clock on the kitchen wall. Would it be so ridiculous to go to bed at this time? Yes. I won’t sleep anyway. No. I shall have a bath. A long one. Decided, I tip the remainder of the milk down the sink. Perhaps there’s a beer knocking about at the back of the fridge. I return to it and rummage. The silence is clamouring in my ears.

  And then she breaks it.

  ‘So you weren’t at the hospital at all, then.’ Whhhaaat? ‘Hmm,’ she says, before I can answer her. ‘Thought not.’

  Which feels like such an outrageous thing to say under the circumstances, that it’s all I can do not to rush across the room and club her with the cucumber I currently have in my hand. Is that what she’s thinking? That I’ve been off on a tryst and am making up stories to try and mollify her? That I’d do something like that? And then a second thought rides up and elbows the first one out of the way. That I’m a fully grown woman, with a grown up child of my own, and that I do not – do not – have to answer to her. I put the cucumber back in the fridge with great deliberation.

  ‘Yes, of course I was at the hospital!’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ she says, tartly, rising now from the table. ‘Whether you were or whether you weren’t is really neither here nor there, Abigail, is it?’ She shakes her head as she shuffles round to get her stick. Fires off her “found you out, young lady” expression. ‘No wonder you were so reluctant to have me staying here,’ she mutters.

  I have to let that go. I can’t put her straight on that tonight. I can’t trust myself not to be toxic and hateful. I return my attention to my quest for a beer.

  But before I’ve even had time to see it coming, the contents of the fridge begin to shimmer and mist. Behind a veritable Niagara of hot fresh tears. Which is the last thing I want at this moment, in this company, so I slam the fridge shut and push past her out of the room. Fast.

  I hear her huffing her way up the stairs long before she’s tapping at my bedroom door. I feel sixteen again. All puffed up with hormonal upheaval. Traumatised. Braced for her inevitable disapproval. A little scared. A lot defiant. But not at all In Charge.

  She taps again. ‘Can I come in?’ she says softly. I don’t need to answer, because straight away, of course, she does.

  I sit up on the bed and swing my legs over the side.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she says. She’s still in the doorway at this point, but she soon relocates to the dressing table stool. ‘Well?’

  It’s funny seeing her there. I’m used to Jake sitting there. Coming in to impart some terrifically important piece of musical intelligence, late at night, or to run through some Saturday itinerary with me. Which invariably includes some tortuous bus or train journey somewhere, and me offering to take him because he never ever asks. Wouldn’t dream of doing so. I wish he was home.

  And I wish my mother felt more a proper part of my life and less like a stranger at the foot of my bed. I can’t remember the last time she was in here, before she moved here. We’d shop, sometimes, lunch sometimes, I’d go there for tea sometimes. Sometimes – though rarely – she and Hugo would come for dinner. But mainly I drove her. I’d go there and get her. We’d do what we’d do and then I’d take her back home. And Jake went there weekly. For his tea. On a Thursday. Now he has tea with her most days each week.

  But I always went to where she was. And here she is, in my bedroom, in my personal space, looking worried – looking worried about me, moreover, which feels suddenly, intensely, uncomfortable. This is not what we do. We do her problems, not mine. I haven’t gone to my mother with a problem since I was twelve. And hardly before that. I always had my father. And after he’d gone, when we might have grown closer, she hardly ever seemed to be there.

  And she’s looking at me from the stool where Charlie always tended to sit too – I can see him sitting on it now, while putting on his socks. I play with that thought for a moment, then let it go. Used to. No longer does. I feel no sudden twang of my heartstrings, and it soothes me. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I tell Mum flatly. ‘Yes, he’s a he, and yes, he’s in hospital.’

  ‘Is he very sick?’

  ‘No, he’s okay. Well, he’s going to be. Just a heart scare.’

  ‘Just ?’

  ‘It was just a virus. Of the surface of the heart. It’s not life-threatening.’

  She nods. ‘What’s his name?’

  Oh, ye Gods. ‘You don’t know him.’ The lie feels acid on my tongue. I pull out my bedside drawer to rootle for some tissues.

  ‘And neither am I supposed to, I imagine.’ Not a question, but a statement. I attend to my nose.

  ‘It’s academic anyway. We’re…well, he’s –’

  ‘Married. Yes, I think I gathered that much.’ I look over at her, astonished. Now she’s shaking her head. ‘Abigail, you must think I came down in the last shower of rain.’ She says this pointedly, but not in the least bit unpleasantly. I say nothing, and then she looks at me in an almost motherly way. Almost, but not quite. ‘But I didn’t, I promise you. How long’s it been going on?’

  ‘How long’s wha –’

  ‘Come on, Abbie,’ she says immediately, though gently. ‘There’s no need to pretend. I’m not stupid, you know.’ She lifts a finger towards me. ‘That expensive watch on your wrist, for example. Not the sort of thing one tends to buy on an NHS salary. And the perfume on your dressing table. That necklace.’

  We both turn, in unison, to where it sits, behind her. Still in its box. As it has been since I put it there. For an instant I feel a surge of outrage that she’s been in here. That she’s looked at it. But it dissipates again, because it hasn’t any substance. Of course she’s been in here and looked at it. Why wouldn’t she have looked at it? I hadn’t hidden it or anything. I hadn’t barred her from the room. And, after all, she’s my mother.

  And she lives here
. I ball the tissue in my hand. ‘Too long. Not that long. But too long.’ I stand up. ‘A few months, that’s all. But now it’s over.’

  ‘That’s not how it looks from where I’m standing.’

  ‘You’re sitting.’

  She narrows her eyes. ‘Even so.’

  I go around to the other side of the bed and open the window. ‘Well, you’re wrong. It’s long over. It was just a bit of a shock, that’s all.’

  She inclines her head and makes a ‘tsk’ sort of sound. ‘I take it he wouldn’t leave his wife, then?’

  As if he should have. As if he had no business not to. ‘Mum, I didn’t want him to leave his wife. He didn’t want to leave his wife. He has three children, for God’s sake.’

  She dismisses this trifle with a waft of her hand. ‘Oh, yes. Don’t they all?’ she says tartly. ‘And I dare say the arrangement suited him very nicely. But what about you, Abigail?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You just accepted that, did you?’

  ‘No! I didn’t know, Mum.’

  She goes ‘tsk!’ for a second time, and I find myself close to crying all over again. I don’t think I can bear it if she’s going to start on Charlie. I think I might feel inclined to lamp her. With the copy of Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, which is close at hand and beckoning from the floor beside the bed. What does she know about it anyway, huh? What does she know about him ? I can stand a lot of things, but I can’t stand her standing in judgement over Charlie. Me, I can deal with, but not him. But perhaps she’s already figured that one out anyway. Because her sour expression softens. ‘Do you love him?’ she asks.

  I shake my head. ‘I thought I did,’ I answer truthfully, my anger now abating. ‘I thought I might. But I was wrong. I was just a bit swept off my feet by him, that’s all.’

  And saying so no longer feels like a pep talk. I can say it and mean it. Because I realise it’s true. They’re now very much back on the ground.

  Chapter 17

  WHEN I WAKE THE next morning, it’s to the almost molten sensation of the sun seeping into my bedclothes, and I realise I’ve just awakened from the longest period of uninterrupted slumber I’ve had in months. My glass of water sits untouched on the bedside table and the last LCD time that burned on my retina read 22.29, not 02.30, or 04.10. It now reads 08.11. Almost ten hours asleep.

  I push the duvet from my chest and draw my legs up to stamp it down to the end of the bed. I can hear street sounds, a dust cart, crows calling, traffic. The murmur of the television wafting up from downstairs. And something else. My mother’s voice. She’s obviously talking to someone on the phone.

  I pull on my dressing gown and head down the stairs. I’m still not fully used to the business of being in my house on a weekday, any more than I’m used to finding someone else in it every single time I turn around. She’s in the hall, replacing the receiver.

  ‘Ah, you’re up.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘It was your friend Dee,’ she says. ‘About booking badminton for Tuesday?’

  I nod. ‘Okay.’ She’ll also want to know about Charlie. Still, no rush. No panic. I inspect my synapses as I think this. No pings. No jolts. I really am free.

  ‘Anyway,’ continues my mother. ‘ I told her you’d call her back. So,’ she says then, inspecting me properly. ‘Feeling better for your lie-in?’

  I also forget that to my mother 8.11 is a lie-in. Still, she’s right. It does feel like I’ve had one. I nod. ‘And hungry. I didn’t eat last night. You had breakfast?’ Silly question. 8.11. She’ll already be thinking about what to have for lunch.

  Spike’s bouncing at my heels, so I pick him up and take him into the kitchen with me. Mum follows.

  ‘Shall I make you something? A boiled egg? Some porridge?’

  I almost say an automatic ‘no, I can do it,’ but then I realise that in her cack-handed, unapologetic way, she is actually trying to make amends of some sort. At the very least, to make some sort of connection back to last night. And it makes me feel awkward around her all over again. I don’t actually much want to re-visit last night. I don’t want to talk to her about Charlie, for one thing, and for another, and more importantly (for I think I can see where we’re headed) about her and me. About her being here. In short, I don’t want to confront it. I’m more comfortable dancing the dance, observing the usual rules…i.e. strenuously not being honest and upfront. Where would that get us, after all?

  I put Spike down. ‘I’ll just have some toast, thanks,’ I say instead.

  She crosses the kitchen – she’s managing indoors sometimes without her stick now, I notice – and gets the bread out of the bread bin. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Do you have plans for today?’

  I pull out a chair and let her attend to my toast. Spike puts his front paws on my knees and I scoop him up again into my lap for a cuddle, burying my nose into the fur on his neck.

  I sometimes wonder quite what I’d do without Spike. Perhaps take to hugging cushions. Or trees. One of the starkest of stark realities about being on your own is the terrible dearth of physical contact. If you’re a huggy kissy touchy sort of person, like I am, that sort of thing really matters. And though my sons will hug me, and frequently do, there’s a subtle shift once the testosterone kicks in. There are times when they can but many more when they can’t. And all too soon, giving their mother a cuddle will be something they do just on greetings and partings and birthdays.

  I look at my mother and remember my father. He did. She didn’t. It just wasn’t her style. We air-kiss on parting and we air-kiss on greeting. And that’s it. And it’s sobering, to me, if not her. It’s not as it should be, but where do you start?

  And where will we end? Two grumpy old women co-existing without contact and shuffling around together with our force fields intact?

  She puts a plate and knife and the butter in front of me and refrains from commenting about dogs at tables, which is a first. I put spike down again anyway, because much as I love him, his breath smells of dog food. Which means she’s fed him as well.

  ‘Erm…’ Plans. I consider. My brain’s been so hijacked, I can barely recall that it’s Friday. Plans. Plans for Friday. Did I have any plans? I try to think what plans I might have had. To cut the grass. Yes. But then I always have a plan to cut the grass. Cutting the grass never seems to be far from my mind between April and October. It’s one of those things I constantly plan to do and then don’t. Because it’s raining. Because it’s windy. Because something else comes up. Because all sorts. Latterly Because Mother. Because trailing round estate agents. Because never seeming to find a single moment for myself.

  Hmm. Memo to self. When next moment to self happens, is lawnmowing number one priority? Gadzooks – you must seize it, woman! Get life and soonest!

  But right now I can’t seem to think of anything better to do. ‘I thought I might cut the grass,’ I respond.

  She brings two slices of toast to my plate. Carefully props them in an upside down ‘V’. ‘Only Celeste and I thought we might go through our lines, and –’

  ‘No probs. I’ll take you over there. What time?’

  She still looks apologetic. ‘Will about ten be okay?’

  Order restored. And some moments to myself. ‘Sure.’ I pick up the knife. But there’s a thought. Lines? ‘Lines?’ I ask. ‘What lines?’

  ‘Our lines for the play.’

  ‘Your lines? I thought you said you’d missed the auditions.’

  She folds the tea towel in her hand and slides it carefully over the handle on the oven door. ‘Wilfred called me back last night,’ she says sheepishly. ‘He’d been pulling my leg, bless him. They’d already put me down for Medea.’

  God. And after all that bloody fuss.

  Still, I think. What’s new? But then I think some more. And I blink at her. ‘Medea? You ? Playing Medea ? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Medea, well, young ?’

  And a bit of
a babe, by all accounts. I’m not as clued up on Euripides as I might be, but as far as I can remember she was a vampy young Greek sorceress who duped someone into cutting up their father and boiling up his bones, before knocking off both her kids after a hissy fit with Jason. Hmm. Bar the age, I can see it.

  My mother tuts. She has no concept of the world ‘old’. None at all. ‘Not this Medea. This is Wilfred’s contemporary re-working of the play. It’s a sort of allegory, set in an old people’s home.’

  The mind boggles. That sure will take some re-working. And I was wrong. She does seem to have the word ‘old’ in her vocabulary. Just doesn’t tend to apply it to herself. ‘That sounds bizarre,’ I say, buttering my toast. ‘What’s your contemporary Medea about, then? Is she the new kid on the block, come to stir up the residents and woo a retired colonel called Gerald?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she says sniffily. ‘I can see you are feeling better, then. And yes, as it happens, something like that. And the killing’s an accident. We don’t want too much gore. It’s for a Cyncoed audience, after all.’

  ‘Any bones boiled?’

  ‘I believe there’s a scene with a symbolic leg of lamb.’

  ‘You mean mutton.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You mean leg of mutton, don’t you?’

  ‘Now you’re just being silly.’

  And feeling all the better for it. Order most definitely restored.

  And so it came to pass that I took Medea to Celeste’s house, took Spike for a long walk and took a parcel to the post office for Jake. Seb’s X-Box, as it turned out, which he’d agreed to Jake selling on eBay, to put towards a double bass pedal for his birthday next month. Which made me feel all warm and woolly and proud. And then I came home to cut the grass.

  For all the time I spend thinking about cutting the grass and then forgetting I thought it, deciding I will cut the grass but then not getting around to cutting the grass, definitely scheduling grass cutting on the calendar, and then double booking other stuff instead, it would be easy to suppose that I don’t actually like cutting the grass very much.