Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘Mum, you don’t know that.’

  ‘Of course I know that, Abbie. I may be lots of things but I’m not stupid. I know there’s a price to pay.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For not paying my dues.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Not at all.’ She dabs the tears away irritably. ‘I’m just reaping what I’ve sowed. It was always coming. It’s just happened rather sooner than I’d anticipated, let’s say.’

  ‘Oh, Mum. It’s not like that.’

  ‘Yes it is.’ She squeezes my hand with sudden strength. Almost seems to pull herself together physically. ‘And you look shattered. Come on, now. Get yourself off to bed.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Yes. Now skedaddle.’

  I get up off the bed. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Nothing. I need nothing. Go on. Off you go now.’

  Just as I’m about to close the bedroom door behind me, she speaks again.

  ‘Abigail?’

  I put my head back round the door again. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I knew, you know. About the house.’ She clears her throat. ‘I should have told you.’

  ‘What, Hugo’s house?’

  She nods. ‘Well, not as in knew. We never actually discussed it. But I always knew there was something not right.’ She looks past me for a moment. Then back. ‘There were lots of things not right with us, Abbie. I knew he was a scoundrel.’

  ‘So why on earth did you marry him? Sell your flat and everything? Give up all your independence? Why?’

  She looks at me tenderly. ‘You really don’t understand, do you? To be with him, Abbie. Because that’s what I do.’ She smiles then. ‘Yes, he was a scoundrel, but a very charming scoundrel. And because, well,’ she shrugs. ‘You know me. Que Sera.’

  I go to leave then, because even though my head is still full of questions, I’m absolutely dead on my feet. But as I step back through the doorway, though, I have a sudden thought.

  ‘And Gabriel? Gabriel Ash? Did you know about him too?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No.’ Then she muses for a moment. ‘Now, that really is tragic. Don’t you think?’

  ‘That you didn’t know?’

  ‘No. That Hugo paid such a high price for his failings. Terrible to die without coming to terms.’ She settles back against the pillows and folds her hands in her lap. ‘I’m a very lucky woman, I think.’

  Her eyes are still shining. I pad back to the bed. Then I take her in my arms and I tell her I love her, which is something I haven’t done in decades.

  For three-quarters of my life, in fact. A very long time. And, poignantly, I realise, neither has she.

  Chapter 26

  TEXT MSG FROM S; So? How it go?

  It, it, it. Such a little word for such a big embracing meaning. And to my shame it takes me a full five seconds to work out which ‘it’ Sebastian means. Mother ‘it’? Me ‘it’? Generalised life ‘it’?

  That and the fact that I’m trudging through the day as if via a filter of porridge, because I have had precisely two hours of sleep.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ announces Candice with her usual vigour. It is, I remind myself, the first Monday morning of my newly prescribed Nice Life, and I really must get with the programme. Except every time I think about having a nice life, I also think who it was who told me to do so. Which means my progress is scuppered before it’s even begun.

  ‘Hey!’ she says again. ‘Doesn’t it just make you sick?’

  Candice has got this week’s Depth open on the reception desk in front of her, so it’s at least clear which species of ‘it’ she is referring to.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Listen.’ She points to a heading. It says ‘Angel to Demon?’ in big cerise letters. But it’s nothing to do with Dan Brown. ‘“Lucy Whittall,”’ reads Candice, ‘“is to swap her scrubs for a Cat suit and an AK47. The 32-year-old actress and darling of the tabloids has just landed the part of a lifetime. Beating off some pretty well-upholstered competition, she’s just been announced as having landed a plum role in the latest Bond outing, playing bad girl Comtessa Therese von blah blah, opposite the divine Daniel Craig. Shooting, which is due to start late November, is taking place mostly on location in the Caribbean. ‘It’s the most thrilling thing that’s ever happened in my life,’ Whittall gushed, when we caught up with her outside London’s Ivy restaurant last week. THE most? Whatever happened to romance, Lucy love? But fear not, the Whittall nuptials are still very much on track. Reported to be costing a cool thirty grand –” thirty grand! “– the much-hyped union of the angel and her BBC weatherman was due to be taking place over Christmas. But we can exclusively reveal that the happy couple are going to rush everything through for a November 5th bash, before their Caribbean honeymoon beckons… We forecast fireworks aplenty! Ding dong!”’

  She plops the paper in front of me. ‘Ding bloody dong, indeed. Lucky cow,’ she says. ‘Why isn’t my life one big round of thirty grand weddings and Caribbean holidays and getting parts in Bond movies? Eh?’

  I look at the photo. Lucy beams back at me. ‘More to the point, who would spend thirty thousand pounds on a wedding? That can’t be true.’

  ‘Oh, it can, sweet,’ says Brendan, coming up to join us. ‘Friend of mine spent close on that and all she had to show for it was a marquee, a chimney sweep and a fork buffet supper. You two are so out of touch. These things cost.’

  I don’t know why, but it’s Brendan’s words that depress me the most. Caribbean honeymoons, parts in James Bond films. These are things that mean nothing to the likes of me. But the concept of weddings – his wedding – their wedding – is the absolute last thing I want to think about right now. Particularly in conjunction with Nice Life directive. Were it not for the slightly inconvenient fact that I never, ever want to see him again, ever, I’d be straight round the television studios to confront him. Let him know what an ill-advised, stupid, thoughtless, banal, and yes, damned patronising thing that was to say. Him with his TV career andhis movie-star fiancée and his Caribbean honeymoon and his posh linen jackets and his poncey selection of Liberty silk ties.

  No wonder, I think, that Lucy Whittall was so jolly when she saw me. And no wonder Gabriel wasn’t. I close the magazine and sniff at nothing in particular. Well, he can keep it. All of it.

  If he does. ‘Waste of money,’ Says Candice, plopping the magazine back on the pile. ‘I’ll give it six months, tops. Once she’s out there schmoozing with all those Hollywood hunks, he’ll be for the chop, for certain sure. History before you can say biscuits. Don’t you think?’ She glances at me. ‘Hmm,’ she observes. ‘You look like you’ve dropped Owen Wilson and picked up Danny De Vito. Heavy weekend?’

  I smile, albeit wanly. You absolutely have to keep smiling. ‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘Something like that.’

  I then make a manful stab at giving her the highlights of Jake’s gig, while editing out all the rest. Candice knows Club One. She went to a hen night there three years back, in which the bride to be, gobbling brufen after a hockey injury earlier in the day, was mistaken for a drug dealer, and was thrown out on to the street.

  And then arrested by the policeman who had come to her aid, for assaulting him bodily with her comedy penis.

  ‘Seven the next morning, they let her out. They kept the penis for evidence, of course.’

  I’m even managing to find a nugget of amusement in all this – I am trying – when Mr Dobson comes in for his appointment.

  But even Mr Dobson, who is unfailingly gallant at all times, passes comment on the state of my face.

  ‘You’re looking tired, dear.’

  ‘But all the better for seeing you,’ I tell him. Which is true. ‘How are you?’ I add, as I take him through and pull the curtains round the cubicle. ‘It seems like an age since I saw you. I was beginning to wonder if I’d been a bit brutal and you’d decided to
take your business elsewhere!’

  Mr Dobson, ever the gent, assures me that he would do no such thing. That he’s been really looking forward to coming in today. And that he’s missed our little chats. He’s so sweet.

  ‘So,’ I say, once he’s gowned-up and ready on the couch. ‘Have you been away on holiday, or something?’

  He’s face down, of course, so I can’t see his expression. He doesn’t move a muscle as I begin pummelling his back. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Sadly, my wife passed away.’

  I stop pummelling. Come around to the top end of the couch. Squat down in front of him. Take his hand in my own. ‘Oh, Mr Dobson. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  He looks a little embarrassed. ‘Please don’t be, dear. Really.’

  ‘But that’s so sad, Mr Dobson. Oh, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ he says again. ‘She’d been so, so poorly. Really. It was a blessing.’

  ‘But even so…’

  ‘Believe me, young Abbie, it was. She really couldn’t bear to suffer any longer. See me suffer. It was a very courageous decision.’

  I blink at him. Swallow. ‘You mean she –’

  ‘Yes,’ he says simply. ‘She did.’ I don’t know what to say. And as I’m still crouched in front of him, clutching his hand, he presumably feels he needs to move things along, or he might well be stuck there all day. ‘Please don’t be upset,’ he says, with such gentle kindness. Such care. ‘She’d had a good life,’ he says firmly. ‘The best. And there’s not very many that can say that, are there?’ He eases his hand from beneath mine now, and pats it. ‘I consider myself very blessed.’

  I feel really teary when Mr Dobson leaves. I know his wife was elderly and had had lots of problems in the last year or so, and, yes, by all accounts, she had had a good life. And yes, one must be thankful. But it’s still shocking – heartbreaking – even so. So when Brendan declares that I look fit for nothing, I can do nothing but tell him he’s right. And as he generously insists on seeing my last patient, I head home early to catch up on some sleep.

  I like sleep, I decide. Sleep equals unconsciousness and unconscious equals oblivion, and a spot of oblivion is just what I need. On my way home I pass the grey bulk of the hospital and I wonder at all the bracing, resolute, optimistic thoughts I’d been thinking when I made the decision to leave it. It all seems such a very long time ago now.

  But very present in my thoughts, as I turn into our road, is that not only has a lot of time passed since that day, but also that an equally large number of words passed between my mother and I last night. It feels like a weight pressing down on my shoulders. What to do next. How best to proceed. Whether all the decisions I felt so secure in are, in fact, entirely the wrong ones.

  It’s only when I pull the key from the ignition that I realise quite how much I’ve been dreading having to face her. Having to see her in this new incarnation. With all that’s been said, and all that’s been admitted, I really don’t know what to do. How, in all conscience, can I move her out now? How will I cope with the guilt? Yet if I don’t follow through it will have all been for nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact, if the mother who always kept up such a good front is now so in touch with her innermost regrets that I spend the rest of her life trying to make her feel better, when the bottom line is that I can’t.

  Jake’s in the kitchen with Ben, eating crumpets, when I get in, and I’m all at once struck by how precious this all is. This time. This chunk of life that I can load up and always carry with me. No matter what happens next I’ve already got it in the bank. And in thinking that thought, I also think I realise what my mother was trying to articulate last night. She’s right. She doesn’t have this. She may have her trophies and awards and her precious stacks of rave reviews. But where family’s concerned, where what matters is concerned, I realise she has nothing but guilt and regrets.

  Which is a lot worse than nothing. Yes, she had her glittering career. But everything comes at a price. ‘Where’s Nana?’ I ask Jake, dipping to kiss his head.

  He shrugs. ‘I dunno. She wasn’t here when I got in from school.’

  I fill the kettle. It’s cold. Jake and Ben are swigging Sprite. And the teapot, when I look for it, isn’t in its space on the worktop. It’s still empty and rinsed and sitting upside down on the drainer. Exactly as it was when I left it this morning. All day without tea? My mother? Surely not. I put it down on the drainer and cast my eyes around the kitchen. Bar the packet of crumpets and tub of butter on the worktop, everything is much as I left it this morning. My coffee mug still sits upside down on the draining board. The paper lies unread with the post on the table.

  And then something hits me. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said. I’d told her I loved her and she’d thanked me for doing so. And that she didn’t deserve it. As if you even have a choice. And something else. She mentioned Hugo as well. About how sad that he’d died without coming to terms. Is that what we did last night? A coming to terms? I feel cold. Even colder when I recall something else. That I didn’t actually even see her this morning. Her bedroom door was shut and I’d left without waking her. Imagining she’d sleep till mid morning, at least. It must have been four when we finally turned in. So I’d left her to sleep; padding around quietly so as not to disturb her. I hadn’t actually checked on her at all. OhmyGod. OhmyGod. What on earth has she done? I sprint from the kitchen and fly up the stairs.

  There are twenty-nine of them on our stair case. Twenty-two and then a dog leg and a little half-landing. And then a further seven. It’s a high-ceilinged house. Negotiating our staircase takes a good twenty seconds, which is just about long enough for me to fashion the sort of scenario that makes my heart thump in my ribcage and my blood run cold. By the time I reach Sebastian’s bedroom, therefore, I have it all worked out. She has killed herself, plainly. She has taken on board all the things we discussed, and decided there’s nothing left to live for.

  But when I enter the room I do not find such horrors. Merely silence and order and a neatly made bed.

  I don’t realise Jake’s followed me up here until I hear his voice behind me. ‘Mum?’ he asks. ‘Is everything, you know, okay?’

  I turn around and switch on a breezy smile. He has Spike in his arms and is scratching his ears. ‘Oh, I’m sure it is. It just suddenly occurred to me that Nana might be up here. You know, had a fall or something.’ He looks stricken. ‘Or a nap. Jake ignore me. You know how I worry.’

  He looks unconvinced by my lightness of tone. Looks past me into Seb’s room and frowns. ‘It’s just that I, like, heard you last night. You know, arguing and everything. Is everything all right?’

  Oh, God. How I wish now that I’d spoken to him this morning. Spent altogether less time with my head in a bucket and a great deal more being a bloody grown-up. I grab his upper arms and squeeze them. ‘Jake, everything’s fine. Really it is. We just had a bit of an argument, that’s all. Like everyone does. Like we do sometimes.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About, well, about living here, really. I was a bit over-tired; a bit cross about her party, and, well, we just did a bit of straight talking. That’s all. It was nothing. We made up. Don’t worry.’

  I’m noticing more now, even as I speak. That her slippers are absent. That her bathrobe has gone. That her little zip lock bag full of pills has gone from the bedside table.

  That she’s left. With her pills. Where’s she gone?

  ‘Perhaps she’s gone on a sleepover,’ decides Jake. He has Seb’s wardrobe open. Her fur coat is gone, but the rest of her clothes seem to be all there. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, however. I walk across and pull out the top drawer of Seb’s dresser. The drawer I emptied for her to keep all her underwear in. It’s similarly bulging. Jake looks in too. He looks anxious. ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Don’t fret. You know Nana.’

  But he looks like he doesn’t any more. He looks even m
ore anxious.

  ‘But she’d say. She always says. She just doesn’t go.’

  ‘Well, perhaps she was in a hurry.’ But he’s right. She does always say. In some fashion or other. Mostly voicemail; ‘Abbie, dear? I’ve run out of Rennies. Will you pick me up a box on your way home from work?’ Or a note in the kitchen: ‘Have gone with Wilf to Brian’s. Will need collecting at 8 p.m. Thank you.’ Something. Always. She doesn’t just disappear. Four months my mother’s been living in my house now, and in that time she has never gone anywhere or done anything, without somebody else being involved in the equation in some way. Never. Not once. This is not good to know.

  I usher Jake from her room. ‘Oh, you know what she’s like,’ I reassure him anyway. ‘I’ll call Auntie Pru and see if she knows.’

  Hearts, patently, are of a certain sort of size. They don’t vary a great deal from person to person, as far as I’m aware, and if I had to find a suitable size-related analogy I suppose I would plump for a potato. The sort of potato you’d use for a jacket potato. And no one, at least of my acquaintance, anyway, has a mouth that is remotely roomy enough to fit a jacket potato in all in one go. Which is probably why I am so very weary of having my heart in my mouth all the time.

  Even so, that’s exactly where it has decided to lodge and I’m just going to have to work around it. There’s no answer at Pru’s, but I get her on her mobile. She’s standing at the edge of a football pitch in Bristol, and hasn’t heard from or spoken to Mum all this week. And she doesn’t like my tone.

  ‘Abbie, what’s happened?’

  ‘We had words. Last night.’

  ‘What sort of words?’

  ‘Bad words. And it was just – well, you know – some of the things she said to me.’

  ‘Whatdid she say to you?’

  ‘Things that…well, just things I’ve never heard her say before. You know, real things. Like how she’s so frightened of the future. That the best part of her life is over. Like every day is like a black hole. Or something.’

  ‘A black hole? Oh, dear. But you know how melodramatic she can be when she wants to.’