The Assistant
Page 24
Oh, Mummy.
Still I resist the tears as I wander into the living room. I don’t tell Electra to shut up. I stand in the winter sun with my eyes half closed, and listen to this mellifluous music. Until it stops. Abruptly.
Now Electra is screaming, and then the scream becomes more coherent: it is an old woman crying, in terrible raking pain: Help help help! Why, Jo, why?
It is the same scream for help, the same cry of agony, that I thought I heard in my dreams, this morning. But as I listen I realize, with a cold descent of abject horror, that I didn’t dream it. I never imagined this sound. It was and is real. This is surely an actual recording of my mother. I recognize the voice. This is her final cry as she died.
My mother’s Assistant must have recorded it, and then sent it to my own home, so I could hear it, as I emerged from sleep.
My mum was calling my name. Blaming me. And I did nothing. I just lay in my bed.
And now Electra plays the voice again, even louder: Help, help, help! Why, Jo, why? And all I can do is stand here in the wintry light, listening to my own mother’s dying words.
43
Jo
Nothing prepares you for the silence of death. It is beyond the normal silence: a voice hushed, a door closed, the end of a song, of laughter, of a party, a dinner. I remember the terrible frightening silences in this, my mother’s house, in Thornton Heath, after Daddy died. The silence of the first Fireworks Night without him, we always went to the fireworks: me and Dad, he’d take me to the nearest park and hoist me on his shoulders and I’d go cooo and ooooh and hug myself with happiness … and then one day the Fireworks Night came around and Daddy was gone: so instead I shut the windows and sat on the sofa and watched through the windows as the silent distant gorgeous starry explosions of violet and purple and turquoise-rose lit up the South London sky. And in the end I couldn’t even bear to look at the muffled sparkles, so I shut the curtains tight, and listened to the silence by itself.
Special silence. The silence of my mother when she was about to say ‘your daddy’, the silence of my brother’s tears when I found him crying, but embarrassed, a growing boy, in the kitchen. The silence of opening a curtain and looking at the empty place where he’d parked the car and fed the exhaust fumes into himself.
It is a special silence that crushes because you know it will not end, cannot be filled, shall not be forgotten. No noise stops it.
My mum’s lavender-scented house is so fucking silent as I walk around, aimless, purposeless, my mind empty and hollow. Despite the silence, I gaze about, wildly nervous – amidst the anguish. I haven’t forgotten what Electra said: If you won’t kill yourself, I’ll send someone that will.
I’ve locked all the doors of Mum’s house: from the inside. Just in case. And now – now I am in here, I don’t quite know what to do. What are you meant to do after your last parent dies?
Arrange funerals, I suppose. Talk to professionally sad people about cremations. Get certificates? My brother has called and says he’s flying over. It was the stiffest of conversations: he still evidently distrusts me for what I did – or, rather, what someone did on my behalf. Someone who wants me dead.
The defiance rises. I shall have my revenge on him, or, her, or them, or it. Somehow, somehow. Soon. But for the moment I have to deal with the awful fact: my mother has gone.
A couple of neighbours have popped by. Expressed sympathy. Handed over flowers in an awkward way. And they have left.
Now I am alone again, with the silence and my mother’s furniture and clothes and possessions and the Assistant, on the bookshelf in the living room, the Assistant that heard my mother scream my name and relayed it to me: live. The Assistant given to her by Simon.
Of all the people I might have expected a sympathetic message from, Simon is top of the list. I know Polly hates me, I know he is forbidden from trying to reach me, but I can’t help thinking: he knows my mum, his family live round the corner, he’s known this family for decades, surely he would send at least a text. His mum and dad came over and offered to take in the dog, till we decided what to do.
But Simon himself?
Nothing. Perhaps he feels guilt. I’m not sure why.
Whatever the case, I must box things up. That’s what you do when people die, I reckon. You put things in boxes. What you might keep, what you might give to charity, what you might – I guess – sell, inherit, who cares. The money is irrelevant, even if I am broke. My mum’s savings only amounted to a few thousand. The house is rented, it must be emptied. My mother is dead. The silence is supreme. The only noise is a rustle of wool, nylon, and cotton as I gather clothes from Mum’s wardrobes and put them in boxes, seal the boxes with Sellotape, write in big letters: CHARITY? or KEEP? or??? I have to question everything as, clearly, I have to ask Will what we should do when he gets here. He might dislike or suspect me, but our mother is gone and Will and I are left: now it’s just us two, and little Caleb.
More boxes. More Sellotape. More scrawling big notes in marker pen. Boxes of books and magazines, boxes of slightly tacky souvenirs from Mediterranean holidays, boxes with clocks, boxes with boxes, boxes of stuff from my schooldays, my childhood, and Will’s schooldays, too. Home movies in piles. Half of this ancient stuff is new to me: I had no idea Mum kept so much memorabilia: there is hardly anything about her, Janet Ferguson, it’s all about us: her kids. All her real treasures, she things she kept emotionally close, under her bed, in the best boxes, they are this stuff that simply says: I was a mother.
This was what she was all about, in her own mind. Proudly. A mother.
It’s all here. Her life was us. Her purpose was Will and me: we were the meaning in her life. And her happiest moments, as she once wrote me, the week I got married to Si, were those moments she spent laughing and carefree with her infant son and daughter. I remember the precise words in that letter, which arrived on my wedding day: ‘I hope you can enjoy the happiness of motherhood, like me.’
Sorry, Mum. Sorry, Mum. Too late now. But oh, I want to say it. Sorry, Mum. I should have called more, talked more, hugged more, been more grateful. Maybe I should have given you grandkids. And now she is gone and I have seen her body in the hospital and it has not helped. I am, I was, I will be, in every way, too late. And worst of all, she died somehow blaming me. Why, Jo, why.
The thought torments me. I heard my own mother die, as I lay there, half asleep.
The toil has not helped. It is not therapeutic. Even the clothes distress or depress me. Every dress has a memory – the summer dresses when she was younger; the longer, dowdier dresses when she was older. The cardigans with knobbly leather buttons she would knit herself. Enough boxes, for now. Will and I have to talk.
I stand in the stillness and let it surround me. I walk into the kitchen, it is also noiseless. And then my smartphone rings.
Tabitha.
44
Jo
Tabitha? Calling me? I hesitate to take it. I am simultaneously scared and angry. My anger wins.
‘Hello, Tabs.’ I hope my voice is as cold as my heart.
‘Hello, Jo,’ she sounds nervous. Very unlike Tabitha. ‘I’m just calling to say sorry. Oh God. I’m so terribly sorry about your mother. It’s so bloody awful.’
I want to accept her sympathy. She is, or was, my best friend. But I cannot forget or ignore that terrible lie.
‘Thank you, Tabitha.’
‘Are you OK, darling? Do you need any help? Just say the word.’
This is too much. Darling? My anger seethes. And boils over.
‘What I’d like, Tabitha, is for you to tell me the damn truth. Have you heard of the name Xander Scudamore? Because I have.’
She is quiet. I am not.
‘He was Purple Man, wasn’t he? He really did give us pills, and we really did give them to Jamie Trewin, and everything you told me at Delancey was total bollocks. You lied. You lied through your teeth. At a moment when I was significantly unstable. So I begin to wonder, Tabs, is
it you and Arlo, is it you and Arlo that are deliberately ruining my life, creating that Twitter account? Why? Why the fuck would you do all that?’
Another long and agonizing pause. The normally confident Tabitha is anguishingly mute. Then she whispers.
‘Oh God. God. I’m sorry. What can I say? Yes, it was a lie. I got scared, Jo, silly and scared, it’s such a bad time for the truth to come out, for Arlo and the baby and me, and … and … And I don’t know what to say. There’s no excuse. But honestly everything else, everything else that’s happened, the Twitter thing, everything, it’s got nothing to do with me and Arlo. Please believe me. I implore you. I want to help—’
‘Well. You can help by leaving me the fuck alone. Just for now.’
‘Wait—’
‘No. Not now. Go away.’
I snap the call dead. Like breaking a stick in two. And yet, even as I do so, I wonder at what she said. She sounded, despite everything, sincere. Maybe she isn’t to blame. Maybe it is solely Arlo behind all this. Perhaps even he is innocent and there is someone beyond all of us. Or possibly this is a further lie?
The snow falls on snow. Soon we will all be buried and hushed. But I refuse to be entombed, and I will not be beaten. My mother is dead. I must fight back: for her. She would have expected it. Like Daddy, she was always proud of my feistiness, ambition, my self-confidence: Jo the Go. Yet I am also Jo the Scared. Very scared.
I need to calm myself. Opening a kitchen window, I breathe the piercing, unscented cold, breathing in, breathing out. The air does its job. I feel my heart slow. I close and lock the window – got to lock everything now – but as I do, I look at the little apple tree and think of Mummy and Daddy and me and Will all under that tree: in all the photos she took.
Mum loved taking photos.
The photos. Yes. I must see them. Mum used a camera long after everyone else had switched to camera-phones. And when she was forced to go digital she still got her digital favourites printed.
We have to keep the photos. Pacing through the house I go to the cupboard in the dining room where she kept her photograph albums. Pulling out the first album, I flick through page after page of endless baby photos, pram photos, cot photos, then Dad carrying Will as a toddler, my first day at school, then a birthday party for me (age five?) with Mum and Dad laughing and him with his arm around her, not mad then, or, at most, showing a few tiny signs. And then I pause at one photo, with a prickle of fear: it is a photo of Daddy holding me.
It is the photo that was sent to my phone, allegedly by Jamie Trewin, when I received those horrible messages by Camden Lock.
Whoever is tormenting me has access to Mum’s photos, home movies, everything?
I shake my head, puzzled by my own bewilderment. Angry at the intrusion, frightened by the power of my enemy. Repressing my fears, I turn pages, and the photos begin to darken in mood. Dad disappears. Secondary school arrives. Fewer smiles in photos. Three people on a beach, or around a table, not four. Will is now a teenager with a terrible haircut and an attempt at a moustache. I am a teenager with an even worse haircut, yet a fierce, urgent smile. There’s one distinct shot of me and Will in our late teens or early twenties, languid and finally attractive, perhaps, draped on the stairs at some cousin’s wedding. Then a graduation party …
After that: nothing. At this point, the photos essentially stop. When we left my mum’s life, she stopped showing interest in images.
Sliding this album into the cupboard, I pull out the last album she used. The last album I remember lying on her lap, as she happily gummed photos into the pages.
I am cross-legged on the cold dining room floor, absorbed, and distracted from my terror and my sadness. It seems Mum proudly scissored every single newspaper article I wrote – and pasted them all in here. And every news item about Will’s work, they’re also in here: though they are fewer.
Oh, Mum. You were so proud.
Ignoring the urge to sob, I continue my browsing. Halfway through this album, the photos gain a second life: as little Caleb is born. Mum adored her first grandson, her only grandchild, there are photos of Caleb as a baby, showing his first tooth, smiling like a loon, Caleb on a kiddy scooter in the sunshine of California, And on the next page: it’s me again. One big, page-filling photo. Mum must have got it specially printed at this size, she liked it so much.
It’s my mum’s seventieth birthday, it’s a hot July day, we’re having a barbecue under the apple tree, and to make up the numbers I have invited lots of my more interesting friends, Fitz, Anna, Marlow, Gul, Andy, Jenny. Simon is there of course. Simon’s parents too. My mum’s bridge partners. Mum. This was not long before Simon and I divorced.
There is something in this innocent photo, of a sunlit barbecue, which compels me, and I don’t know why.
I am standing in a line with Simon, Jenny, Fitz, Gul, Tabitha, in the garden, raising glasses of Pimm’s and laughing, presumably we are toasting the picture-taker. Even Arlo is there, how did I persuade Arlo to come to Thornton Heath?? It doesn’t make sense. Is that what disturbs me about this photo? Or is it something else? I scan the faces, I can sense the tension between me and Simon in this image, even as we smile, drunkenly.
I was already sexting ‘Liam’ by this time, searching for a way out of a dead marriage.
But there is something ELSE.
WHAT IS IT?
I stare and stare, I run my fingers over the photo like it is braille and I am blind, and its very texture will reveal the final truth.
Then: I see it. Hiding away – yet smack-bang in the middle of the photo.
Mummy.
She is half smiling, half squinting at the camera, perhaps a little dazzled by the sun. She is also holding a book. And I recognize its distinct plain cover. I downloaded it myself very recently.
The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.
The ringing silence is a shrill klaxon in my ear.
Why would my mum be holding a book, in this photo, taken in her garden on her seventieth birthday party? Only if someone gave it to her, as a present, that day. I don’t remember this present, I don’t remember the book. Poetry isn’t really Mum’s thing, as it wasn’t mine. Yet someone who does like Plath gave her this volume. That means if I can find the book, and identify the giver, I would surely have my culprit, my nemesis, my tormentor.
Where would Mum keep a book like that? It’s a present so she wouldn’t give it away; but it is also not a book she would cherish.
Her favourite books – Jane Austen, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, the classics she would re-read constantly, she kept in her bedroom. Cookbooks were kept in the kitchen. Less useful or important volumes were always kept here, in the dining room. The other side of the dining table.
Quickly, I cross to the bookshelves. There must be a thousand volumes here: Mum kept a lot of books, as did Dad. The shelves go high.
I scan the titles, urgently. I walk up and down like a sovereign reviewing her troops, but I am looking for the evidence of my enemy.
No joy. There is no poetry. This does not surprise me. Neither Mum nor Dad liked poetry. Yet I haven’t scanned all the titles. There is just one chance left – one shelf left, the very top, the most unread books. I am too short to reach and see: I have to fetch a dining room chair, to help. Then I step up. And crane my neck.
For the final time, I scan the titles. Old science fiction. Old science. A book about Vermeer. The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.
The urgency burns, as I reach out. The present is in the top right-hand corner, and grey with dust.
Trying to stay calm, not feeling remotely calm, I pull the book. Then I step off the dining room chair, to survey my prize. This has to be the book Mum was holding in her hand, in the photo. This was the birthday present, given to her that day.
Opening the cover, I see a handwritten inscription.
Happy Birthday
xxx
‘myself the rose you achieve’
The acid rises in my throat. The wr
iting is distinctive. That florid looping Y which my daddy taught me to do.
I wrote this. I wrote this to Mummy. I must have given her the book. Yet I don’t remember why or how or when – or anything.
What’s more, I seem to have literally predicted my own future. I saw what was coming down the line to hurt me. Plath.
45
Jo
It is true. It is impossible. But it is true. But it is impossible.
I slip the book in my bag. The book which is asking me to believe in some ludicrous coincidence, bordering on the miraculous, that several years ago I foresaw the events which would lead to my ruination, and maybe my suicide, or my murder, years hence. What’s more, it seems I have since forgotten I ever did this. Bought a book of poems for my mother. Poems by a woman who killed herself, like Daddy.
It is true. It is impossible. It is true. It is impossible.
I have to go somewhere else and work this out. I am ready to flee, to pace to the door, I am far too unnerved to stay.
But a noise halts me.
Someone else is in the house. Someone has opened the door.
Yet I locked it, very carefully. The house is secured: I am all too aware of the menace from Electra, and whoever is behind her. Somebody’s done for. Now someone is coming across the hall. Hard heavy footsteps, and they are unconcealed. A man. Is coming. For me. In the place where my mother died. In the place where I predicted my own destruction.
I hear the man go into the kitchen. Mess with some plates, maybe looking for something. A dull grunt, of displeasure, or dismay.
And all the time I stand here, half frozen. Looking for a weapon, absurdly. A lamp? What can I use? There is nothing. The kitchen door squeals, the footsteps cross the hall. I see the doorknob turning. The door creaks open. I stand up, reach for one of Dad’s paintboxes, I could throw this.