by Adam Thorpe
He didn’t stay for the noisy reception; he went straight back to Hayes. Apart from the usual overhead traffic, it was nicely quiet in the house, as if the air was sitting with pursed lips. He tried to find Radio 3 on the battered tranny in the kitchen, fiddling with the dicky plug at the back then giving up in a haze of crackles. The plug had been dicky for years, although Donald could find the connection in seconds with a tap of his finger. Why had they never thought of buying his parents a radio? It was always pointless, trendy, style stuff they bought, stuff that got put away because ‘there’s no room’. Really, it was because it would damage the integrity of the house, its mind-blowing, well-dusted dullness, c. 1970. He remembered sitting in this same chair as a kid, watching the black-and-white test card for ages and ages, waiting for the pretty long-haired girl to move, the lines to take on colour, the wallpaper music to turn wild and weird. Sometimes it did.
Donald came in from the hospital, eventually.
‘How’s Milly?’ said his father. ‘Doesn’t she miss you?’
‘Things aren’t all that brilliant between us, in fact.’
His father nodded, but said nothing for a few moments. He was making a pot of tea for two in the tiny kitchen, although Jack had offered. His hand trembled as he poured the boiling water in. The teapot was from Devon and overdone with autumn leaves in thick impasto relief, the lid awkward to put back on, making it look as if Donald was playing a strange percussion instrument.
Eventually his father said: ‘A marriage is not just a summer-house. It’s for all seasons. More like a conservatory.’
‘That’s a very good simile,’ said Jack, surprised.
‘But a conservatory’s walls are of glass,’ Donald went on. ‘You can’t go throwing stones. You have to take care.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘“Thought for the Day”, this morning. About respecting each other’s faith. I thought of your mum and me, you see. Not about faith.’
He suddenly started crying. Jack put an arm on his shoulder. He hadn’t touched his dad in this way for decades. Donald didn’t like to be touched.
‘Right now it’s winter,’ Donald managed, in a piping voice like a child’s. ‘But I’m not going to abandon her now, am I?’
‘No,’ said Jack, rubbing his dad’s back through the sleeveless cardy scattered with scurf.
‘Well, I’m blowed,’ said Donald, his chin scrunched up like a little boy’s. ‘Sorry about this.’
‘Don’t be. Good to have a cry.’
‘Better to have a laugh than a cry,’ said Donald, who’d hardly ever laughed in his life. Or cried.
‘Not always,’ said Jack.
His mum died three days later, delirium followed by clarity followed by sleep from which she never woke up, sinking into death with an obstinate look on her face, daring anyone to stop her. Jack’s visit coincided with the clarity. She couldn’t be bothered to listen any more to her RNIB CDs, or to the radio, so Jack read to her. For this very possibility, he’d carried in his jacket pocket a book of poems by the Sufi poet, Rumi. He started reading them, and realised it was a complete mistake. He should have brought something side-splittingly humorous. His mother listened politely, though. His voice droned on, each poem ending too soon, so that it sounded pointless. A nurse came in, rather large around the waist, with a mug of tea on a tray. It was just before lunch. The tea was stone cold and milky.
‘I’ve been asking for that since ten o’clock,’ piped his mother, shrunk doll-like against the pillows in her chair. ‘It’s because they’re all coloured. They don’t know our ways.’
‘She wasn’t. She was as Aryan as they come,’ said Jack. He could hardly tick her off for racial prejudice this late in the day.
‘I know that one was white,’ his mother fibbed. ‘What about playing me one of your musical works?’
‘I didn’t bring anything. Stupid. I’ll bring one tomorrow.’
He did feel stupid. He also felt touched. There would be a great, healing moment tomorrow. He might even tell her about Jaan, who he was missing not in his head but in his belly.
‘That’ll be nice,’ she said. ‘One of the calmer ones.’
‘No problem,’ said Jack. His father had all three of his CDs in a special drawer. ‘I’d really like that.’
‘What are you sitting on the lawn for? You’ll catch your death.’
‘I’m, um, not sitting on the lawn, Mum.’
‘Don’t fib. I can see now because it hasn’t happened. Don’t tell me it’s happened already. You’ve got to get me out of here, you can’t just sit on the lawn. There’s too much wind about.’
‘Mum, it’s OK.’
‘No it’s not. Look at you, you’re miles away.’ Her head was bowed right over, her nose inches from her lap, like a drunken queen. ‘All dreamy again. Sweet little charmer. D’you want a bicky, Jacko? You mustn’t sit on the bare lawn like that. We’ve got to get to the other side. What are you looking at then?’
‘You, Mum. You’re looking great.’
‘Them clouds, is it? All nice and white, eh? All fluffy? Like they’ve been through the wash with Daz? Muriel uses Persil. So does Daphne.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack, half mesmerised. ‘The clouds are whiter than white.’
‘Why don’t you play with your ball, run about a bit? It’s that washing line, Jack.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said, smiling. ‘About to rain, is it?’
He remembered her popping out, leaving him to get the washing in if it rained. And how many times had he forgotten to? And the washing then had to stay out there until the rain stopped – staying for days sometimes, strung between the metal poles on a plastic cord that ran along the side of the garden plot. Bedraggled, wetter and wetter, like a reproach.
‘Going round and round,’ she was saying. ‘Turning thing. What d’you call it? The thingummy that goes round and round? Like we used to have before my accident. Come on, tell me!’
‘Round and round? You mean a revolving washing-line thing?’
‘There’s a name for it. A special name. Come on, Jack! You’re so useless!’
He had never known her like this. Maybe this was what Moyna really thought of him. Maybe she was hitting some primordial layer of honesty, now.
‘I can’t think,’ he said, helplessly.
‘You’ll know when you’re older,’ she said. ‘Makes them noises. You love them noises, don’t you? It’s the washing line going round and round, making them noises. Mmmmmmmmmmm.’
Jack stared, open-mouthed. His mother was imitating the private sounds the white clouds had made. It was a crude imitation, but it was unmistakable. Bent right over, humming. Dying.
‘Come on, what’s that name? Don’t be useless.’
‘I don’t know, but I’ll look it up. I’ll ask someone. It made that noise, did it?’
‘Mmmmmmmmm,’ went his mum, rocking slightly in her almost doubled-up state, heavy with her crown, the healing fracture no doubt strained to breaking point. ‘Round and round, on windy days. Mmmmm. Get it all in before it rains. What’s that name? Come on, come on, you ought to know. You’ve a blinking brain, haven’t you? Why have you come instead of Donald? Eh? If you don’t know the name?’
‘Look, I’ll find out. Don’t worry about it. Mum, please don’t worry about it. I promise I’ll find out.’
She raised herself a little, wincing, and then her head bowed down again under its terrible weight.
‘When’s your dad back then? I don’t want you instead of him. You’re no blinking use.’
‘It’s all right, Mum. It’s all all right. Really. It is. I’ll find out.’
He went to the desk, but the usual ward sister warned him before he could open his mouth that she had one of her migraines, while the two other young nurses were in a flap, and the phones were going, and the man in the room next to his mum was crying out louder than usual, and he could hardly ask them what you called a revolving washing line in the midst of all this life-and-death
stuff. By the time he got back, she’d forgotten all about it and wanted him to comb her hair, which he did.
He asked Donald that evening about the washing line. Donald was on weirdly good form, almost cheerful.
‘Our old rotary clothes dryer, you mean?’
‘That’s it. That’s the name of it. It was on the tip of my tongue.’
‘Why?’
‘She was asking about it. She said it made noises.’
Donald smiled. ‘It did make noises. Oh yes. It sort of hummed when it turned, if the wind was right. Not every time. You liked the noise. You reckoned it came from the sky. Like the Heathrow lot. You were tiny, of course. There you are, you see. You were musical right from the start.’
Jack stared at his fish finger. He felt his whole life was built on a misconception. Most lives were, probably. The cat was gazing up at him with eyes as big as saucers.
‘Dad, why did you get rid of the rotary dryer?’
‘Too difficult for your mum, after the accident. She had to locate it. You won’t believe how hard it is to locate a rotary clothes dryer on the edge of the garden, when you’re blind. I tried it myself, with my eyes shut, one day.’
‘It’s not exactly a big garden, Dad.’
‘But it’s a thin pole. And she’d bang her head on the poles sticking out. Much easier to feel her way along the flex from the house. And then just follow it back again. I made sure a bag for the pegs was hung at each end. She never had any sense of direction, you see.’
‘She’s still alive, Dad.’
‘I know she is. And she’ll be back.’
Jack was looking forward to telling Moyna the right name for it. Rotary clothes dryer. Show he cared. But a call came early in the morning. They had to rush straight over. She was unconscious. She was really dying, now, lying on the bed and reduced to the bony architecture of her face, which was dead white. By teatime, the gaps between each rattling breath were as long as those of that patient called Eileen had been. Then the gap wouldn’t close up, one time. The silence went on and on. Donald had popped out to the loo. He was taking ages. Her hand was as cool as something left out all night.
Jack said, ‘Mum, hang on, you’ve got to wait till Dad’s back. It’s a rotary clothes dryer. Mum, don’t go off now.’
Then a little sigh came from the mouth. She wasn’t yet passed away, thank goodness. And Jack still expected her to open her eyes and begin a long, slow recovery. He couldn’t lose his mum. He wasn’t prepared for it. He was still only about fifteen. Donald came back, washing his hands at the alcohol gel dispenser. Jack was relieved. There was another little bubbly sigh, apparently cut off in the middle.
Jack said, ‘I think this is it, Dad. We’d better get a nurse.’
Donald sat down in the chair next to the pillow and said, ‘Did they have any toilet paper? Of course not.’
‘Dad, I think she’s going. Any moment now.’
‘Is she?’
There were no more sounds from her mouth after that.
It was the last day of October. November came in as normal.
The last thing he’d said to her while she was still conscious was, ‘I’ll bring my CDs tomorrow. Till then, Mum.’ The last thing she said to him was, ‘With a bit of luck, love. Ta-ta.’
So her last word to him was ‘love’, discounting ‘ta-ta’.
‘Mum’ and ‘love’.
This made it easier when he looked in the coffin at the undertaker’s and saw her face as he’d never known it. Dolled up with pancake, tidied, it was tucked and pinned, the skin as smooth as paint. The eyes were closed, and he wondered if she could see, now, wherever she was. Now that her eyes were open somewhere else. But the overall impression was one of relief, on her part. She could no longer feel, no longer know she was blind, and curse it. She could sleep for good.
There was a Bible open under the fake electric candle in the windowless room. The tissuey paper smelt like sick, oddly. He turned the pages and stuck his finger at random on a verse. It was from Jeremiah: ‘For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, How are we spoiled! we are greatly confounded, because we have forsaken the land, because our dwellings have cast us out.’ He felt a ripple of recognition travel up his spine, realising that no one would ever believe it was sheer bloody chance. And he knew his fate was sealed.
He leaned over the coffin and kissed her forehead, which was even colder than he’d expected. Cold from the hospital morgue. He wondered how the jaw stay closed, invisibly trussed.
The cold stayed on his lips for several hours, like a metal butterfly clip.
Right through the funeral a few days later – his second in under a fortnight – he could only picture the face in the coffin. Milly was there, of course, and they had to pretend. He half hoped she’d be sympathetic, but he’d had the vague impression, through the various phone calls beforehand, that she considered this whole death-of-the-mother business to be a deliberate ploy on his part to win her back. This was probably a ridiculous projection on his part, as she’d been very good to Donald, phoning him every day and giving practical as well as emotional counsel. She seemed to be living all the time at Claudia’s, now, and still had a healthy flush about her face when she turned up, at the last moment, flustered by the traffic. Her snappy black outfit made everyone else look dowdy.
Jack would have liked to have helped carry his mother’s coffin, but it was already there in the crematorium, waiting for them to the strains of ‘The Piper’s Lament’ played on the flute by James Galway. He had helped to choose the music, but was cramped by his sister and brother. He had a tape of his first recorded piece, like a childhood memento, but they didn’t feel it was ‘quite right’.
‘It’s meant to be Moyna’s choice, not yours,’ said his sister, interrupting the minimalist tinkles and pings, turning them ridiculous. She’d always had this notion that Jack never missed a chance to push himself into the limelight.
But Moyna was dead, he pointed out.
They all three entertained this idea that she’d loved Frank Sinatra, which Donald vigorously denied.
‘Val Doonican. Or Andy Williams. And she never missed The Black and White Minstrel Show,’ he said, staring mournfully at the blank screen. Which was all Moyna would have seen of it, after the factory accident.
In the end, the coffin slid through the curtains into the furnace to the strains of a slow air from the Chieftains, recalling Moyna’s origins. Since she avoided all mention of her origins – there was some dodgy business involving a drink-sodden uncle and abuse, quite apart from the grimness and poverty – this might not have been appreciated by her. Val Doonican would have been subtler. None of her Irish relatives turned up, perhaps because they were too distant, or hadn’t been invited. Jack was disappointed. Moyna had lost most of her immediate family in the Blitz not long after their arrival in England, been placed in an orphanage at thirteen, and gone into service two years later. She’d worked at the Wall’s factory in Hayes from 1952, meeting Donald at a factory club do. She’d erased her early past, which was probably sensible.
The family speeches recapped on this, on Moyna’s bravery and suffering, her sense of humour, and – in Donald’s Baptist brother’s long-winded contribution – the remarkable achievements of the children. In his sister Julie’s case, this consisted of marrying an Australian policeman whose shaven, cannonball head had never quite been able to encompass the idea of Jack. Jack’s brother, Denny, had turned overnight from interesting hippy to computer geek sometime back in the early 1980s, and had an American weight problem which made him waddle and wheeze. He was a bachelor who had all but tied the knot three times, and was still hoping.
And Jack got on reasonably well with both of them, partly because they were so much older than him. He had been the baby brother, although he had no memories of being particularly spoilt or petted – not even by his sister, who now had five rather difficult kids of her own, the oldest being a twenty-four-year-old lifeguard convicted recently of assaulting an A
rab tourist on a beach.
The idea that either might find out about the collapse of his marriage was anathema to him: they would gloat, if only secretly. They were convinced that he did nothing all day, except count his wife’s money and whistle tunes.
Milly came and stood next to him in the front row. At the instant his eyes met hers, he felt desperate. He needed Milly. He needed his wife. Her face was gentle, not hard – not turned against him. She was beautiful and clever and tough. She was unique. She couldn’t do this to him, not now. Not now. She touched his hand, but didn’t take it, didn’t squeeze it.
Amazingly, although he felt vaguely dizzy and unreal, he didn’t cry once during the funeral. He half tried to and had brought along a wodge of tissues in expectation. The ducts didn’t function. It was as if the engineering had gone wrong. In the little reception afterwards, with some twenty people crammed into the house (it was raining), Milly asked him how he was. They were in the hallway, where the overflow had spilled out. She was standing on the lower step of the stairs, and so was artificially taller than him.
‘It hits me,’ he said. The occasion had made him oddly excited, even high. It wasn’t just the roach-killer red Julie had insisted on bringing over from Australia. ‘At unexpected moments. I’m OK, then it hits me again.’
‘It?’
‘Everything,’ he murmured, catching her eye with meaning.
‘Life doesn’t always time things well,’ she said. ‘Take the tsunami.’
He nodded, seeing bloated bodies and the grieving wives of fishermen. Milly had always tended to arse about with scale. He felt himself shrinking to a kind of silly bendy toy.
‘That thing about making rice pudding quietly and stuff,’ he said, not quite able to focus on the words, ‘I reckon it might work now the whole situation’s less awkward.’
‘Are you drunk, or just sad?’
‘Depends what you mean by sad,’ he said. He remembered sitting on this step and almost suffocating on a biro top. Now his estranged wife’s very smart Gucci heels were denting its runner. Not exactly sexy, talking in your parents’ house. My father’s house, now.