by Nicole Trope
I see the current two gardeners outside now. Anika has told me they are volunteers. A young man whose mother died in the home and his uncle. ‘It’s hard for some relatives to let go of the place even when there’s no reason to visit,’ Anika explained. The young man has a cherubic round face and blond curls, and his uncle is so thin I find myself wanting to bring him a sandwich.
The older man has a long grey beard that hangs almost down to his belt and his cap is pulled down low over his face. They are both hacking at a bush but stop for a moment and turn towards the windows of the home. The older man lifts his hand and waves, as though he knows that there are residents sitting in their rooms, watching him. I watch my mother wave back and I wonder how many others are doing the same. They have little else to do with their time but stare out of their windows.
Next to the television set is a silver framed photo of my mother and my father on their wedding day. You wouldn’t know it to look at her but she’s five months pregnant in the picture. It’s such a beautiful, sad image. My mother is lovely with soft wavy hair, a brilliant smile and long legs, barely covered by her white mini-skirt wedding dress. My father looks so proud of himself. He stares boldly at the camera, his solid, square jaw the epitome of manliness. They both look impossibly young. Whenever I look at it, I feel a strange mix of joy and despair. Joy for the two of them on that day, and despair for the terrible future that awaited the young couple.
The picture used to sit on the mantelpiece above the unused fireplace in our home until he moved in. ‘I don’t need to see that,’ he said to my mother. ‘I like to think I’m the only one you’ve ever loved.’
I remember her giggling when he said that, and then taking the picture and hiding it. I can still remember the rage that made my small body tremble as I watched her do it. ‘You can’t put Daddy away,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so dramatic, Alice – it’s only a picture,’ she replied. But even at six years old I understood that it wasn’t ‘just a picture’. It was her past and the love of her life that she was putting away, and along with it, me.
I caught her looking at it often, secretly, so no one would see, only when he was out. Sometimes she would fall asleep holding it and I would creep into her room and return it to the drawer where it lived. I knew what would happen if he saw what she was doing. I felt like I was betraying my father every single time but I needed to keep her safe, even though she seemed to have no desire to do the same for me.
On some visits she will point out my father to me. ‘He was the best-looking man I knew and he loved you so much.’ But on other visits she is bemused by the photo, assuming it is a stock photo that has come with the silver frame.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I say.
‘Oh, hello, Alice,’ she replies. ‘I was just thinking about how cold it’s getting at night. I don’t love the cold but I love the winter colours. I love it when the trees turn but right now, they must be so confused by the heat during the day. Anika says it feels like spring outside.’
‘Me too,’ I agree eagerly. I can’t quite believe this sentence has been uttered by my mother. Lately I have had to introduce myself over and over again, and usually she spends more time muttering incoherently to herself than anything else.
It’s been a long time since she was lucid. I know if I came more often, she would have less trouble recognising me. I’m sure there are lots of patients here whose children visit once a week at least. I should come more often. She is no longer the same person she was when I was a child and yet I cannot let go of that. I am not a good daughter and I know it, but each time I visit, I feel like I have allowed another piece of myself to be chipped away. Each time I try to help her or do something nice for her, I feel like the woman who treated me in the worst possible way has somehow won something from me. It’s so complicated because there is still some tiny part of me that needs her to acknowledge that she loves me. Perhaps if I came more often, I would receive that affirmation, but I am sceptical about that. I may only receive what I received my whole childhood: nothing.
Alice wants her mother to love her. Alice wants her mother to need her. Alice wants her mother to know her.
‘Do you think you could look at my computer, Alice? It doesn’t seem to be working.’
‘Sure,’ I say and I pick up her ancient laptop from the top of her chest of drawers. I start it up and fiddle around with it a little. It’s disconnected itself from the internet and I reconnect it. She can’t do much with it but I know that Anika finds playing certain videos calms her when she becomes distressed. She’s fond of tropical islands and other natural scenes with classical music playing in the background. I wonder what she thinks when she watches these, if she is remembering something from the past or if she is just drifting peacefully in her mind.
I start a video of an underwater scene that looks like it’s been taken at an aquarium. ‘Lovely, thanks so much, dear,’ she says. ‘I do love to look at…’ She doesn’t finish speaking, instead looking back out to the garden. The gardeners are picking up the pieces of bush and weeds they have been cutting, stuffing them into a green bin.
She’s lived at the Green Gate Home for six years now. Before that she was in the same hideous rental home she had lived in since we were forced to leave the house she had bought with my father. When I went back to see her for the first time, a decade after walking out on her at sixteen, I was horrified to see the state she was in. After seeing how poorly she was coping, I knew I had to keep seeing her. She was living in almost complete squalor, existing only on vodka and bread.
I went back with Jack, meaning to find them both there, meaning to confront them both and make them acknowledge what they’d done to me, but she was alone.
She answered the door and looked at me for a minute before she said, ‘Alice… goodness me, you’re Alice.’
‘Hi, Mum,’ I said and I remember standing straight, my head high and holding Jack’s hand as though I needed to hang on to keep from drowning.
‘Well, I’m sure I wasn’t expecting company,’ she said but she let us in and I saw her glance around the living room and register how it would look to us. The same fake leather couch I had always hated was still there, the top coat completely peeled away in some places. One missing foot meant it was at an odd angle. The carpet was stained and a faint smell of urine hung in the air. On the floor under the window were two blinds that had obviously fallen down and never been rehung, and every surface looked sticky with grime. I looked down at the coffee table, covered in watermarks and rings from glasses, and had been unable to say anything for a moment. My tongue darted into the space in my mouth as I stared down at the corner of the chipped coffee table, remembering how dark the bruise along my jawline had been the next day, remembering that she didn’t see it until it was fading and then she didn’t even ask me about it.
Her shoulders rounded further as she watched me take in the space, and she ran her hand through her mostly grey hair that I could see was dry and filled with split ends. The skin on her chin was rough and peeling. She was as far removed from the beautiful young woman on her wedding day as she is now. It was difficult to believe she had ever been that person.
I had such plans for that visit and so many things I was going to say, but I was so stunned that I found it impossible to do anything other than look around the house, noting the empty fridge and pantry, the layers of mould in the bathroom, the sting of alcohol on her breath.
We left without me asking her or telling her anything, or saying any of the things that had been playing on my mind for ten years. But I returned the next day and cleaned the house, stocked the fridge. While I was there, she followed me around, pointing out what needed to be sorted and tidied.
‘Why don’t you do this yourself?’ I asked.
‘I try,’ she said softly, ‘but some days it’s difficult, you know, Alice. I’ve had a very hard time of it.’
‘I notice you manage to get your vodka.’
‘Well, that gets delivered. I
call the nice young man at the store and he drops some off for me. He’s very kind.’
‘Have you heard from Vernon, Mum?’ I asked. ‘Have you heard from him at all?’
‘The police came round asking for him… I don’t know how long ago that was… Sometimes the days just fly by, don’t they? He got in a bar fight apparently, hit a man and killed him, just like that – one punch. He’s in prison now. I asked them to let me know if they found him or caught him, I suppose. He ran away to, um… Queensland… um, no that wasn’t it… somewhere, and they called me to tell me he was going to jail. They said he was in a lot of trouble. They said he will be there for… years… I don’t know how many.’
‘It’s where he belongs,’ I spat.
‘He wasn’t that bad, Alice. Life… He was sentenced to life in prison. The detective on the case told me… he told me he was given life. They wanted to know if I would come and testify… Is that the word? Yes, testify, at his sentence hearing. His lawyer wanted me to say some nice things about him and I would have… but I wasn’t… well. I should have tried… He took care of you and… Gosh, I’m tired.’
‘You’re always tired. He didn’t take care of me, he hurt me. You know he hurt me.’ I was burning with anger, furious that she had conveniently forgotten everything, that she had simply glossed over it all. I scrubbed hard at the bath I was cleaning, feeling my muscles burn, wishing I could erase my painful memories as easily.
‘I… I can’t talk about this,’ she said quietly.
I tried, I have tried, over the years to get her to acknowledge what was done to me, what I suffered through, but she always seemed mystified by my anger. ‘It was so hard for me after your father died. You have no idea how hard it was to be a mother. You wait until you have children, you’ll see.’ She wasn’t a mother in any sense of the word, and because of her I have always been a broken child.
Last year Natalia’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and I couldn’t help but compare us as I watched Natalia drop everything to be by her mother’s side. She shopped and cooked for her parents, drove her mother to chemotherapy and worked on her laptop while she sat with her. I visited her more than I visit my own mother. I wanted to see her, to let her know that I was thinking of her. I never want to be with my mother. Even now I speak to Natalia’s mother more than I speak to my own.
‘Don’t beat yourself up about it,’ Natalia says when we talk about it. But it’s not that easy. It’s harder to abandon a parent, even a terrible parent, than people might think.
I gave up expecting anything from her and worked on forgiveness. I’m still working on it.
‘Vernon was here,’ she says to me now, coaxing me away from the memories I am always trying to forget. ‘He said to say hello.’
‘She talks about him often,’ Anika once said. ‘Him and your father, Adam. They both visit.’
‘One is in prison and the other is dead,’ I said when she told me this, ‘so I doubt that.’
‘It’s real enough for her,’ Anika chastised me softly.
Today I debate with myself whether to tell my mother that Vernon is indeed in prison as I do every time she says this. I went to the police after she told me about him. I had to call an enquiries line and speak to a police officer in corrections. He is in prison in Queensland, not New South Wales, where I live. I eventually got hold of the right person, who told me that he had been sentenced to life in prison with a non-parole period of twenty years. He began his prison sentence when I was twenty-six. I’m forty-two now. In four years, he might be free. It’s a horrifying thought.
‘You should tell the police what he did to you,’ Jack said, when we learned what had happened to Vernon. ‘Get him charged and make sure he never gets out.’ But it felt too hard. I imagined recounting the things he did to me, the countless unspeakable things, and having to testify in court. The idea of it made my skin crawl. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t expose my child self to the world. I couldn’t relive it all, and I couldn’t bear to see him again.
Every time she brings him up, he appears before me: huge and hideous. I feel like she’s taunting me. ‘Hallucinations are part of the disease,’ her doctor has told me. ‘Your mother will see things that aren’t there, people who have died. It’s a very common thing. Try to not let it upset you. It helps if she can see family members as often as possible so she can stay connected to reality.’
I nodded, as though it was something I would try to do even as guilt nearly drowned me.
To this day my mother has no idea of the existence of her grandchildren. The few times she’s asked me, I’ve been evasive, just saying, ‘One day.’
‘You have nothing, nothing to feel guilty about,’ Jack has always maintained.
‘But I’ve never allowed her to meet the boys. Maybe if she knew about her grandchildren, if she spent time with them, it would help.’
‘There’s a reason you’ve never wanted them to meet her,’ he said, ‘and that reason is why I never want them to meet her either.’
I don’t understand why I’m still so tied to her despite everything she’s done, despite her refusal to understand what she allowed to happen to me.
Perhaps it’s because of the occasional flashes of memories from before my father died. Images of her baking with me in the kitchen, watching patiently as I inexpertly cut out star-shaped cookies. Or of her standing behind me, slowly working a brush through my hair, gently removing tangles so it wouldn’t hurt. But now I wonder if those things actually happened or if I’ve just made them up, to convince myself that I had a normal childhood, however brief it was. Regardless, I can’t seem to let go and just walk away. Mostly I know it’s guilt over what I did, over what I took from her.
‘Do you know what I feel like?’ she says suddenly now.
‘What, Mum?’
‘Fish with salt and vinegar chips.’
I feel my stomach turn over. The tangy smell of vinegar fills my nostrils and bile rises in my throat, forcing me into the small en-suite bathroom, to vomit until my stomach is empty.
‘There’s a woman in my bathroom,’ I hear my mother say.
‘Are you all right in there?’ Anika calls.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’ I rinse my mouth out and leave the bathroom.
‘It’s hard when they disappear again, isn’t it?’ Anika says.
I nod as though this is what has caused my distress because I don’t have the energy to explain the truth to Anika, and what good would it do anyway?
I know Anika thinks I could be a better daughter, and I don’t want to explain to her that that’s not possible because her patient wasn’t a better mother.
‘Maybe I should go,’ I say.
‘Who are you and what are you doing in my room?’ my mother asks, her eyes wide in fear.
Anika shrugs and touches my clammy hand with her dry, warm one. ‘We’ll see you next time.’
I nod, relieved at being dismissed despite not having asked her what she may or may not know about what actually happened all those years ago.
As I make my way back to the car park I sniff deeply, taking in the earthy smell of the damp fallen leaves, slowly rotting into the soil in the garden. But the smell of vinegar has lodged itself inside me, and as I climb into my car, it drags the memory back, dragging me into my past, into a place I feel like I will never escape from.
Alice is trapped. Alice is haunted. Alice cannot leave her past behind.
Eleven
Molly
* * *
The next morning Molly calls her mother again but she doesn’t answer. She is persistent and finally, after four unanswered calls, her mother picks up.
‘Mum,’ she says, ‘what happened yesterday? Why did you hang up on me?’ She fires the questions quickly, not giving her mother a chance to respond. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Oh, Molly, goodness… Let me catch my breath, I’ve only just come in from the seniors’ centre.’
‘Why haven’t you been answeri
ng your phone?’
‘I was busy, you know – I read to some of the attendees who have limited sight.’
‘Fine,’ says Molly, catching a sulky teenage tone to her voice.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t answer, darling, and I didn’t hang up on you yesterday. I said I had to go because the cake was burning.’ Molly knows this is a blatant lie. Her mother bakes like she breathes, getting it right every single time.
‘Was it something I said, Mum?’
‘Oh… no, I just… I really don’t think you should be reading those things anymore. You’re imagining things. Who is the woman who writes the blog anyway?’
‘I don’t know. She says her name is Meredith but that could be an alias. Most of these sites are filled with people who want to remain anonymous. And I have to read that stuff, it helps give my work authenticity. It’s not as if I have an abused childhood to look back on, Mum. I don’t want people to feel I haven’t accurately captured their experiences.’
‘You had a wonderful childhood, Molly,’ says her mother, sounding as if she’s close to tears.
‘I’m not saying I didn’t. Why are you being so strange?’
‘I just… There are things, oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she says, and then for the second time in two days, her mother hangs up on her.
Molly sits staring at the phone in her hand, unsure whether or not to believe what has just happened.
She tries her mother’s phone again but it goes straight to voicemail, and so in frustration she tries her father. He answers on the first ring, as though he has been waiting for the call. He is retired now but not often at home, preferring to spend his days at the local bowling club, playing a game or two and getting lunch with friends. He is a quiet, dignified man who started his career as a high-school teacher at twenty-one and ended it as principal of one of the biggest public schools in the state. Both Molly and Lexie had attended and both had developed a love–hate relationship with being identified as the principal’s daughters.