by Carol Mason
‘I’m going to do the kitchen in an off-white, and the front room and the stairs in a very pale yellow,’ I tell him. ‘I thought a richer yellow for the entrance and small corridor might be nice, as well as yellow for my mam’s room, and maybe a pale blue for my bedroom, to make my room an extension of the sky… Sunny, happy colours.’ I’ve already given my month’s notice at the apartment.
Richard looks across at me from atop the stepladder, just smiles.
Yesterday, as I was showing out the man who came to hook up my phone, I met my neighbours who bought mine and Jonathan’s house—I couldn’t face meeting them when I sold; I just let the agent handle everything. They’re a nice young couple who’ve just had a baby girl—Chloe. I didn’t bother explaining that I used to live in their house. I didn’t want to tell them that Jonathan had died, and somehow bring bad karma to a place where a newborn has just arrived. But I like her, Yvonne, the mother. I could see us being friends.
After we’re done stripping, Richard perches on the wine-coloured couch. I decided against giving that to charity; it has a certain vintage decrepit look that somehow says keep me, I come with the house. I make us a cup of tea. The other day he was telling me that he thinks Jessica knows he was contemplating leaving her. He said she’s been acting ‘silently admonishing’.
‘You have dust on your nose,’ he tells me, affectionately, as I hand him his cup. He points to the end of his own nose. I rub it away then plonk down on one of the boxes Richard helped me move over from the apartment.
‘Phew! It’s going to be a hell of a job Richard. What have I taken on?’
‘You’ve got all the time in the world,’ he tells me, after a slurp. ‘And I’ll help you all I can.’
I wonder if Jessica ever resents his involvement with me, if she’s sensed his feelings. Did Jonathan know? ‘You already have,’ I tell him.
He puts his mug down carefully on the floor. ‘The thing is… I owe you, Angela, more than you realise.’ He looks out of the window then draws a sharp breath and wipes a hand over his mouth.
‘What does that mean?’ For some weird moment I wonder if he’s actually going to admit he loves me.
‘Things that weigh on the mind, you know.’ He taps his temple then meets me in the eyes. ‘They sit there and you know you’re not going to be able to forget them, and that one day it all has to be out in the open. There’s no other way.’
‘I’m not with you.’ He’s starting to alarm me.
‘I should have told you sooner, Ange. I don’t know, I think I was nervous about owning up to it…’ He looks at me quite intensely now.
He’s definitely going to tell me he loves me.
‘Have you ever wondered why Jonathan ended up losing all that money in the mining venture?’
‘Erm…’ Okay. This is not what I’m expecting. ‘No. Well, he made a bad investment, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, but why did he?’ He doesn’t wait for my answer. ‘Because it was me. I was the one who got him involved in it.’
For moments I can’t react. Then, of course, it all makes sense. Why didn’t I sense this before? That there had to be something greater than friendship and affection. This is why Richard is always trying to throw money at me—not because he likes to play the protector, as I briefly thought—but to try to help me keep my house because he felt responsible for my losing it.
‘Oh! Richard! Don’t be guilty about that. You’ve nothing to feel bad about.’
‘It was a reliable tip. I wouldn’t have gone into it if it hadn’t been. I had a vision that we were all going to become instant millionaires.’ He rubs a hand over his mouth again. ‘The odd thing is, I’ve never played with my money. I’m always… I don’t know. Careful. With just about everything.’ He looks me right in the eyes. ‘Being careful and doing the right thing has always been my downfall. But I had a very strong feeling about this. The odds seemed that we were going to do very well.’
How could I ever blame Richard who I know would only ever act in Jonathan’s and my best interests? ‘It wasn’t your fault, Richard. How could you ever think I would hold that against you? Jonathan made up his own mind to get into it. You know what he was like.’
‘Yes, but I let him put far too much money into it. Far more than I was prepared to put.’
‘Yes but that was Jonathan, always taking risks. You know how it used to drive me mad. Because I’m the complete opposite.’ It’s back again: anger at him being the way he was.
‘That’s what I mean. Don’t you see? I knew that about him, yet I didn’t protect him from himself. And when we lost, well, I lost what I could afford to lose and he—you guys—you lost everything.’
‘I can’t feel pain for money, Richard. Do you understand that? I’ve moved on. We all have.’
‘Even Jonathan,’ he says.
He drinks his tea off, stands up, looks across the street to our old house, for a long while, then walks to the kitchen with the cup. When he comes back, he stands behind me, so I can’t see him unless I turn.
‘The thing is…’ His voice becomes very quiet. I let him talk to my back. ‘There’s not a day goes by when I don’t wonder if the stress of the stock going south is what brought his seizure on that day in the car.’
There it is. Richard is blaming himself for Jonathan’s death, just like I’ve blamed myself. We both think we killed him, yet neither of us did. For a moment I want to get up and put my arms around him, but I know that’s the wrong thing to do. I want Richard to go home to his wife, to his life. I want us all to try to forgive ourselves.
‘Don’t think like that. Stress doesn’t cause seizures, Richard,’ I lie. In fact, seizures can be triggered by stress, if you’re prone to having them. When I turn around, he looks at me. His eyes have tears in them. I know that no amount of reasoning is ever going to remove every last trace of guilt, that always in the darkest corner of his mind—and mine—will be the little question: Could I have stopped it?
I can’t bear to see his face, so I look away again.
He continues to stand there. Then he says a very flat, ‘I should go. Jessica will be…’
He doesn’t finish. We both just stand there awkwardly. ‘Let’s not talk about this again, shall we not, Richard?’
He closes his eyes, nods.
‘Thanks,’ I tell him. ‘For everything...’ I touch his face.
His hand lays itself on the small of my back, just briefly. Before he moves it away, I feel the firm, short, massage of his fingers.
‘Bye,’ he whispers, seeming reluctant to move. Then he adds, ‘I wish I wasn’t leaving.’
When I hear the clunk of the front door, I slowly let my breath out.
~ * * * ~
I miss Greece. Light, lovely Greece. Georgios, the olive groves, and, to a certain extent, Sean and my day with him. It just comes on me suddenly making me dig out the little book with the verse in it. I read the words over and over, feeling more nostalgic, more optimistic, than sad. I look at my lovely Greek thumb ring that I never take off, even when I sleep, thinking of everything it stands for. Then I get out the camera and start going over all the photos.
One of the first on there is the one of my mam that I took in our bedroom on our first day there. She’s standing against the wall, wearing her white mermaid skirt and gold and green Per Una T-shirt, looking strikingly curvaceous and young. I’ve fired shutter just in time to catch that look of scathing dignity on her face. She’s pretending she finds having her photo taken a big bore, when she’s really lapping it up and laying it on thick: her best, most movie-star like pose. I smile.
But then, oh God! Hang on… Somehow, in my mucking on with buttons, I must have managed to press the video mode. Because all of a sudden I’m watching a video of my mam and me in the room, complete with sound. She’s lying on the bed in her petticoat, and I can hear myself prattling on about whether Georgios flirts with all the tourists. More dialogue ensues and then she’s off the bed and bending over and wiggling
her bottom at the camera. I suddenly remember that I meant to call her again. So I pick up the phone to ring her. But it just rings and rings and she doesn’t pick up.
I’m about to put my camera away, when for some reason, the next thing that comes up is a photo of Jonathan. I don’t know how it got there—between a video of me and my mother, and a photo of a Zante beach—but I recognise it. I took it in Barbados—a close-up of him smiling looking very unlike Jonathan—peaceful and laid-back. Not looking scathingly at me, not looking impatient, bored, or like he’s just told me I shouldn’t be so pent up, so scared of everything, so bothered what people think… Just smiling like a man who is pretty happy about life.
I stare at it for what feels like an eternity.
~ * * * ~
Kye has invited me to his house. He’s going to cook for us. My first instinct was to say no, but my body wanted to say yes. Since I had sex with him a week ago, it’s been on my mind every minute of every day—even more so than my impending meeting with my first client, which is ridiculous really.
Kye lives in White Rock, which is about forty minutes away by car. It’ll be the first time I’ve driven my Honda Civic in a good while. I’d thought about selling it, to eliminate expense. But if I do get clients who are not right downtown, how am I going to get out to see them if I don’t have a vehicle?
Last night I watched Godfather Three on the telly. The last time I saw it was about four months after Jonathan died. There’s a scene where Al Pacino is coming down the steps of the opera house after hearing his son’s debut performance, and there’s a hail of bullets and his daughter gets shot in the chest. Al falls to his knees and he tenderly holds her limp shoulders as he watches her die. Then he screams, only we don’t hear it. It’s trapped inside of him, overlaid by the music of Cavalleria rusticana. And then, with his agonized face held there on the screen, the scream that was trapped inside of him comes out.
I could never watch that scene because I’d think of a hail of shattered windshield glass, a symphony of metal and tires, Jonathan having an epileptic seizure at the wheel of his Z4. But last night when it was on I felt only Al Pacino’s pain, not my own.
It was the same with the car. There was a while, after the accident, when I couldn’t drive without imagining I was Jonathan losing control at the wheel. Every hair on my body would stand up and I’d experience a clammy sweat and a racing heart. There’d be an awful instant where I’d see myself suddenly turning the wheel into an oncoming juggernaut. And I’d hear it, the symphony of metal and tires. Then I’d be outside of my own body looking down, seeing the shattered windshield glass, seeing me die the way he did.
But tonight I enjoy the drive. It feels liberating being behind the wheel again. Driving south on the Granville Street bridge, away from Vancouver’s dramatic skyline, with the indigo mountains to my right, and the ocean looking like a sheet of aquamarine glass in this unreal, fragile stage before sunset, makes me suddenly feel like I have something good ahead of me.
Kye doesn’t want me to come over before ten, as he’s not going to be home before then. I thought about teasing him about whether he had another date before me, but didn’t. Do I really want to know? Besides, I don’t want to start claiming rights to him or it’ll take all the fun out of it. Ten’s a little late for me for dinner, but I’m hungry, and apprehensive all the same.
The fields and trees out by the highway are still green. And, White Rock, the beach suburb only minutes from the Canada-US border, with its boulevard of trees lit with tiny blue and white lights, is as pretty as I remember it being when I once came with Jonathan and we ate fish and chips on the pier.
His house is small and messy. Very much the sort of place you’d expect a young teacher, who doesn’t earn much money, living. Amidst all the rubble of a single man’s life, he has an expensive, giant-screen LCD TV. It makes me smile. So does his attempt at making pasta, which consists of chucking a jar of barely-warm bottled sauce over some very soggy noodles, which have been on the boil for about half an hour. But he’s splurged and bought fresh Parmesan and a bottle of red wine. ‘A’ for effort. Or maybe B+.
The sex is definitely a top grade. I tell him this.
‘I’ve never been to bed with an older woman before,’ he says, gazing me over with that impersonal interest you see on young men who know you’re only one of a very long string of lovers they’re going to have in their lifetime.
‘I’ve never been to bed with a man who’s considered me to be an older woman before.’
‘You’re obsessed with age,’ he tells me.
‘You’re the one who brought it up!’ I poke him hard in the chest. When we were talking earlier, he said his “on-off girlfriend” was a few years younger than him. ‘So,’ I say to him, ‘if I’m so obsessed with my age, then, do you like screwing an older woman?’
He pretends to think about this. Or at least, I hope he’s pretending! ‘Urm. Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes I do.’
So we do it again. Just so I can make sure.
~ * * * ~
I drive home feeling somehow unsettled. Thinking of Kye, thinking of a night and a morning of sex—good sex—thinking of my new client, thinking of my new house, thinking of my mother coming here to live with me, thinking of Richard. Latently thinking of Jonathan.
Everything is good. I tell myself. I’ve had commitment-free sex with an extremely handsome young guy who I have no intentions of getting into a serious relationship with. It was fun. I have everything to be happy about. Never mind that the married best friend of my dead husband might be in love with me.
This is progress.
I stab at the radio, searching for songs that might distract me from this dissatisfied feeling I suddenly have; none comes on.
There’s a breeze today. Even though it’s sunny, it feels like Fall, which makes me feel sad and exiled and I don’t know why. I need to get on with filling out my mother’s immigration papers. For some reason they are still sitting by the printer. For the twenty minutes or so that I am on the highway, I just listen to the burr of my wheels on the road, feeling a strange sort of blah.
As I approach where I live, I think how all the trees in my leafy neighbourhood are soon going to lose their leaves and how barren it’s all going to look, and how I’m going to be surrounded by family homes, only I’m not going to have a family myself, am I? It’s in that awful, hollow instant of feeling alone and family-less, that I realise something. It is connected to my mood and to the fact that there has been no answer when I have dialled her number.
Something has happened to my mother.
Twenty Four
I bomb through a 30K zone. I bomb right through the four-way stop, wild-eyed, illogical, apoplectic with fear. One thought only in my head: I have to hear her voice.
My mother lying passed-out on the kitchen floor flashes across my mind. That’s why she wasn’t answering the phone. Maybe she hit her head.
A whoop comes out of me, like a giant sob that has no beginning and no end, it just rolls around unable to break free of my throat. I bomb down our street, screech up at my front door. My neighbour, Yvonne, is in our old garden and she stops what she’s doing to stare, paralysed by me for moments. I flee inside, having to almost break the garden gate. My hand is trembling so hard I can’t get the key in the door. I drop it. Twice. Squeal.
In the living room, fear turns me to stone. The message light on my phone is flashing. I sink onto the sofa, far, far, far too freaked out to play it. I’m still staring at it when it rings. I jump three feet. It’s the call. Telling me what I already know. I can’t pick up.
It stops. The room goes quiet again, except for the sound of my heartbeat pushing in my ears. In a spurt of bravery I pick it up and dial her number. She always gets it before the fourth ring.
One.
Two.
Eight rings.
The recording of her voice tells me that she’s not able to come to the phone right now.
I clash the receiver down a
nd curl into a foetal ball. Pictures of her flash before my eyes. Memories, random and senseless, coming at me. Always her and me; my dad in there somewhere too. But always me and my mam. I always wondered what losing her was going to feel like.
The phone rings again. I have to get it this time.
‘Angela?’ I hear the voice. ‘Angela?’
‘Mam?’ I say.
‘Well who else do you think I am? Joan Collins?’
I start to cry. ‘You’re not dead!’
There’s an odd pause. ‘Dead? Are you mocking the afflicted again?’
That pain again, shooting up my nose, filling my head. ‘I phoned and phoned…’ I’m sobbing. ‘I thought something had happened. That you’d fainted again. That you were lying there on the kitchen floor…’
She laughs now.
I want to kill her. ‘Why the hell are you laughing? What’s funny?’
The harder I bawl, the harder she chortles. ‘Oh Angela, you’ve got get rid of this business of always thinking people are dying. Nobody wants to think you’re looking at them convinced they’re going to peg out any minute. It’s not nice. It’s enough to give them a complex!’
‘But then where the hell have you been? I’ve been ringing and ringing…’ Really, when I think about it, it’s only been about twice. In my frolicking with a younger man, I’d sort of forgotten about my mother and the blood tests.
‘I went to London to meet Georgios!’
‘Georgios?’
‘He surprised me. Said if I wasn’t going there, he was coming here.’
‘But… but what about the doctor’s?’