by Nicky Singer
The corridor is dark, the feel of the place small and cramped, what space there is blocked by a stack of commercial-sized plastic tubs of water. They are called Nature Springs and are still in their Cellophane.
“Are you on the list?” asks Marcia.
“What list?”
“Patients have to nominate visitors. In advance. Five only.”
And would my mother have nominated me? I can’t answer that question.
“Wait here,” says Marcia. “I have to deal with something. I’ll be back in a minute.” She disappears down the dark corridor with the pills.
I edge towards the Day Room. Will my mother be there? The room is a cross between a doctor’s waiting room and student sitting room. The chairs are lined up against the walls, a TV blares. There’s an uneven stack of videos, a pile of magazines, a plate of biscuits. Screwed to the walls, slightly too low, are pictures, some yellow flowers, a foreign coastline.
Five people are in the room, none of them talk, or look at each other. One, a young man in his twenties, is sleeping, curled up on his own arm. He looks peaceful. An older man, immaculately dressed in black jeans and a well ironed shirt, sits astride his chair, back to the TV, looking out on to the road. Perhaps he’s watching Grandma sob. I wonder then who his Grandma is, who washes his clothes and keeps him clean? A bigger, more thickset man stares at the television. He’s smoking and the cigarette and his right leg wobble. He coughs and clears his throat. The other two patients are women. A young blonde, also smoking, and a woman in her thirties with black hair scraped into a neat ponytail, reading a book. There is nothing extraordinary about any of them, and that gives me a strange comfort. If this is a humdrum thing, if it could happen to anyone, then my mother is not a freak. I am not a freak.
I wait. The television makes a joke.
No one laughs.
A clock ticks.
Tick. Tick.
Where are you, Mama?
“Oh Matilda, it is Matilda Weaver, is it?”
“Yes.”
Marcia is back with a list. “Come with me.” She leads me to the office, the door is wedged permanently open with a bottle of Nature Springs. “You are on the list.”
This fact makes me feel suddenly tearful. Did my mother put me on the list before – those times I didn’t visit?
“But I’m afraid I’m going to have to search you,” Marcia says. “You do understand, don’t you?”
And I suppose I do.
“Lift your arms, please.” I lift them. What are friends and family for if not to bring you comfort, the smooth glass comfort of a miniature, a reeling little bottle of Vladivar?
“And turn out your pockets.”
In my mac pockets are a Tazo disc from a cereal packet, a bus ticket, a dirty tissue and a twenty pence piece.
Marcia smiles wanly, gestures at me to put them away. “Now just take off your coat, please.”
I take if off. Now even Marcia cannot keep the surprise from her face.
“Just been to a fancy dress party,” I inform her.
“Has it got pockets?” she asks.
“No. I mean yes.”
She nods.
I turn out the pouch. Show Marcia Gerda’s severed legs, her arms, her face with the gouged-out eyes.
“Was it a voodoo party?” asks Marcia.
“No,” I say, and then I make a speech. “And anyway people have the wrong idea about voodoo. The word ‘voodoo’ actually comes from ‘vo’ meaning ‘introspection’ and ‘du’ meaning ‘into the unknown’. And it’s not about dolls so much as about ‘loa’, the spirits, spirits of the ancestors mainly.”
“Right,” says Marcia. “Is that what they teach you in school these days?” She feels into the corners of the pouch, brings out a half-sequin. “OK,” she says. “Thank you for that. And I’m sorry, but it’s the rules.”
I put the pieces of Gerda away.
“Your mother’s in Room Five, second on the right.”
The door to Room Five turns out to be labelled DF16. It’s the sort of door you might find in a pretty jail. Blank, but with a window, the bars of which are in fact the crisscross grill of patterned safety glass. Behind the glass is a small, floaty, summer-flower curtain and above it is a slot for a name, only there is no name. What might she have put there? Judith, Mrs Weaver, Mother, Mama, Big? Perhaps there is no name because when you come in here you lose your right to a name, or maybe it’s just that by the time you get here you have no idea who you are any more.
I knock and enter without waiting for permission. The room is in fact only half a room, a chipboard wall dividing what must once have been an elegant first-floor bedroom. The effect is to make the half-room too thin and the wrong shape, the once graceful bay window cleaved in two and banged up against the chipboard wall. The furniture is cheerless: a rickety chair, a hospital bed, a wardrobe, a small set of – lockable – drawers. On the bed, staring at the ceiling, lies Mama, my mother. Big.
Only she doesn’t look big at all. In fact, in the moment before she rolls over and sees me, it occurs to me that she’s the smallest person I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s lying very still and has her arms crossed over her breast, her hands on her shoulders, as if she is trying to hug herself. Her feet (like mine) are bare, tiny, of course, and, against the black of her trousers, seem an unearthly white. It’s not cold in the room but I know those feet will be cold. I have an instinctive desire to cover them up. Her wounded wrist is concealed, flush against her black T-shirt. And I can see nothing of her blue eyes, fixed as they are on the ceiling, but it’s still as much as I can do to stop myself launching my body at the bed, flinging my arms around her. She turns then.
“Matilda,” she says, “is that you Matilda?”
“Yes.”
She heaves her huge body to an upright. And yes, actually, it is a big body, massive and fleshy, but so hunched and curled over, there might be nothing inside at all.
“Really you? Let me touch you.” She stretches out an arm and then withdraws it quickly. “Because there have been ants. And earwigs. They came in my left ear and ate their way through my brain. Or least that’s what I dreamed. Come.” She stretches towards me again.
I move closer, I go into her touch.
She takes my hand in hers, squeezes it tighter than bearing. I see the cut. It’s healed into an ugly red welt, the lower edge weeping a little clear liquid. There are marks where stitches have been. And I know most hospitals use SteriStrips now, so I wonder if they have done this to punish her.
“Why didn’t you come before?” she asks. “Why do you never come? Why do you leave me here?” Her voice sounds so like Gerda’s. “Have you any idea what they do to you in here? They withhold your medication. I’m supposed to have medication four times a day. But they’ve cut it down to three. Two. They say they have it controlled, under control. But they’re not the ones lying here, sweating. Do you know how much I sweat? Sometimes my back is drenched. Drenched. And my hairline, my forehead. They said it would go, stop after just a few days. A few days! And the shaking. And you can’t sleep. I haven’t slept a wink since I came here. Not an hour, not a minute. But I dream. Oh yes I dream, do you know what I dream, Tilly? I dream that the nurses are eating me up, that they eat me up, starting with my feet. Can you imagine what it’s like having those people who should be caring for you eating you up?”
“Yes,” I say, “I can imagine.”
Then I make myself remember. I walk myself around our house on the days that Grandma cleared away the vodka and my mother prowled for cough medicine, for aftershave, for things under the kitchen sink, anything anaesthetic to throw down her throat. I watch from the doorway again, recalling the days when she could barely stand, when she held on to a chair and practised in front of a mirror how to hand over cash before she took that trip to the off-licence. I hear her slurred voice: “A bottle of Shmirnoff, pleesh,” listen to the pathetic noise of her fingers scrabbling inside her purse for cash. I walk myself from the s
itting room, smelling the vomit, to the bathroom, smelling the vomit, to her bedside, smelling the vomit.
“You’re not listening,” my mother says.
“I’m listening,” I say.
“You do love me don’t you, Tilly? Because I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
A silence.
“I love you Tilly, you do know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you do love me?”
“Yes,” I say. “I love you, Mama.”
15
It is ten minutes since Jan arrived in the car park, maybe a quarter of an hour. He’s waiting in the grainy dark, a spit of rain in the air. He would wait all night, but this may be the wrong place, she might not be here at all.
He scans the lit windows of the Victorian building. Only one window is uncurtained, a bay on the upper storey. A man, sitting behind the glass, stares out. He hasn’t moved since Jan arrived. But then Jan hasn’t moved much either, just stood in his T-shirt, Mercy’s words ringing in his ears: “Did your Cinderella turn into a pumpkin?”
Perhaps it had been rude of him to descend upon Mercy (directly from the stage) and, quite forgetting to mention her captivating outfit of blue gauze, say: “Where is she, where’s Tilly, where has she gone?” But then it was Mercy whom Tilly had been standing beside.
“How should I know?” Mercy had said, and then: “Didn’t she leave a glass slipper?”
The anger was quite unmistakable, quite unmasked and it would have been nothing for him to backtrack, observe the courtesies. For hadn’t he said: “This is for someone – she knows who she is”? And of course Mercy might reasonably have thought he meant her (and perhaps he did – even though the dark figure beside her was so very close and quite in view). But he wasn’t quick enough to say anything at all before Mercy spoke again: “What are those pipe things anyway?”
“Antara,” he’d said. “From Bolivia. In winter you have to put seeds in them. Pulses. Just a few. Or they play too low. Where is she?” he couldn’t help adding as he touched the pipes and heard the tiniest rattle of those seeds. “Where’s Tilly?”
It was Charlie who spoke up. She’d overheard some remark made by Audrey Phillips, who was (apparently) a friend of Tilly’s grandma’s.
“Well, if she’s gone to see her mother,” said Mercy, her smile as tight as a cat’s, “then she’ll have gone to the sin bin.”
And of course he’d had to ask for the address and of course Mercy had said she’d be delighted to supply it, after all there was only one state-funded place for pissheads in town, and, she intimated, Jan’s concern was touching.
So here he was in the car park of the hospital, trying once again to stop a dream spiralling away into just so much smoke.
His mother had offered to drive him, of course, but he’d refused. It was only a mile, he’d said, and he needed the walk. Actually he needed to be alone. To sort something out in his brain. Because once again Tilly had fled, hadn’t she? Hed played her the tune, the one he thought she’d understand above all others and she’d simply run away. He wanted to walk the mile to acknowledge the madness of coming after her yet again. Well, he’d acknowledged it and here he was. Waiting.
There was someone else waiting, he noticed. An old woman in a car. When he’d arrived she’d been crying, the sobs violent enough to rock the whole of her slight body. Her head banging, at one point, against the glass of the driver’s window. But the crying had ceased. The old woman had blown her nose and was now sitting erect, waiting.
Waiting.
And now the door to the glass porch opens and he (and the old woman in the car) both turn expectantly. But it is not Tilly. Just a man in a light jacket with the collar turned up. And Jan is about to look away again, begin the wait again, when, from behind the man, a smaller figure emerges. It is her. He knows it from the tilt of her head and also from the tight feeling in his chest.
“Tilly!” he wants to call. But he does not. He merely remains standing where he’s been standing all this while. In the shadows. For somehow he hasn’t quite got imaginatively beyond this point, the point at which she emerges and he – does what? Says what? Says what, mainly. It’s while he’s standing there, all the words in his mouth swallowed down, that Tilly sees him.
“You,” she says. There is no surprise whatsoever in her voice.
He stands and stands.
“So now you know,” she says. “I lied. My mother isn’t dead at all. She’s in the sin bin. Just like Mercy always said.”
And now he does speak, grabs her by the wrists (in case she thinks to run again) and it all starts spilling out of him, and he doesn’t know if the words are in the right order, but maybe that doesn’t matter, because surely she can feel the heat in him as he speaks about perfect mothers who aren’t really perfect at all. “You see,” he tells her, “I have a mother who is dead and not dead. Perfect and not perfect. A Chilean princess, dressed in rags, who never grows old, never will grow old, who gave birth to me, held me, loved me, loved me so much she knew she must give me up, because she was dirt poor, starvation poor, and if I was to die, how could she bear that? How could any mother bear that, when there was another way, another mother standing by with open arms?”
Tilly looks quite bemused, shocked even, and it occurs to Jan that he’s going too fast and hasn’t even mentioned the word “adopted”, hasn’t actually said it, “I’m adopted”, but she isn’t pulling away, so Jan takes a chance and dips one hand in his pocket to bring out the Violeta doll. He opens his palm so she will see the wired thing with the sand and tarmac hair and the skirt the colour of baked mud; pushes beneath her face the arm that’s only a rusted stump, the one that was never quite long enough to hold him.
“And of course that was love, she loved me,” he says, because he’s been saying it to himself for so many years (and so has his English mother). “To give away your own child, what greater love could there be?” And then he stops, because he knows what a dangerous brink he’s on.
So it’s Tilly who has to jump. “Or maybe the greater love,” Tilly says in a voice that sounds quite faraway, “would have been to keep you. Keep you close whatever, forever.”
And now he really can’t speak. His throat is closed up. Not least because the girl is crying, though her tears fall without any noise at all. He puts a hand up to touch one of those tears, tastes it, wet and salty. He has never been able to cry about this himself.
She puts a very soft finger on his lips then.
“Did you kiss me?” she asks. “Up at the bridge. Did you kiss me?”
He nods, feels the finger move on his mouth.
But still she waits, it’s almost as if she’s listening for another voice, for someone to disagree, to say there was no such kiss. But there is only the night wind about them.
She leans upwards then, places her mouth against his and kisses him with an urgency which is almost famished. There is nothing in his life which has prepared him for this.
And who knows how long they might have held that kiss but for the sharp honk of a car horn?
Honk. Honk. Honk.
Tilly pulls away.
“Grandma,” she says and she touches her lips with her hand.
It’s the old lady in the car.
“She was crying,” Jan says.
“I know,” says Tilly. “Which is why I ought to go.”
And she walks away. But, for the first time, Jan knows she is not leaving. She turns, halfway towards the car, and she looks at him. But he knows anyway, this just confirms it. If he were a winged creature, he would fly around the world this night. He would take off and circle the planet. Twice. Three times. He’d flip round Orion, say “hi” to the grandfathers and return to earth barely out of breath. Tilly is not a dream, not a puff of smoke, Tilly exists. Real as a mountain.
As Tilly’s car leaves the car park, a white Rover drives in. He recognises it at once. Susan Spark. She takes the space vacated by Tilly’s grandmother. She can se
e him of course, he’s standing in her headlights. She switches off the engine but she doesn’t get out. Waits for him to make the first move, afraid of course that she’s interfering, because she’s come when he said, quite categorically, “I want to walk.” Want to be alone. But suddenly he feels quite exhausted. There is no one he could be more grateful to see.
He walks to the car and gets into the passenger seat.
Her face is all concern, but she still waits for him to begin.
“Thank you,” he says.
And she smiles like he’s given her a gift.
“Do you want to go home?”
He nods.
She starts the engine again, slides them silently into the night. She asks him nothing else, just keeps her peace and his. Then his love for her, which has been so quiet and so constant down all the years, flows over him. He wants so much to say something to acknowledge her place in his life, to make her understand how much her soundless intimacy means to him. But perhaps she knows already.
And so they travel together, gently, until (maybe aware of his noiseless need) she finally relinquishes, and says: “Is everything all right?”
And he replies: “Yes.”
He remembers her face at the Oakwood Club, a bright face lit with tenderness but also with fear, how she said: “I never knew” and then used his name, spoke it to him the first ever time: “Jan Veron.” Said it as if it contained a loss, as if being Veron he could not be Spark. But watching her there beside him, he knows he is also Spark. He is also for her as she has been for him. Susan Spark with arms not of rusted wire but of flesh and blood. Arms which have ached from holding him.
“Yes,” he says, “everything is all right.” And then he adds, “Mum.”
16
The pyre is Jan’s idea. He says we should take the dolls and go to the bridge, so we do. Our mothers, he believes, are like a grief only there’s never been a funeral. He wants us to make a funeral, a celebration and a mourning.