by Helen Fisher
I thought of little Faye upstairs, and my eyes went to the ceiling, where we could hear her moving about and playing in her room. Jeanie pointed upwards. ‘That girl knows I love her; if she knows nothing else then she’s going to be okay with me.’
My eyes filled in an instant and my chin creased up. I tipped my head and held my hand over my mouth to hold in a sob, shaking my head to deny the flow of tears, to keep back the river. But the cork in the hole in my heart popped out and with it came salt water and emotion, like lava, hot and spilling down my face, a moan of pain like a quiet roar rising up from somewhere deep, behind a closed door in my chest.
‘Oh you poor thing, come here,’ Jeanie said, coming round the table and putting her arms round me. It was an awkward sideways hug, and she wasn’t having it. She pulled the chair round with me on it, and put her arms fully around me. Pushing me away to look at my face and wipe away the tears with her thumbs. But there were too many. She held me close again, and I let myself lean into her arms, found a spot that fit perfectly, me inside my mother’s embrace, my damp face in the crook of her neck.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, through a bunged nose, and into her hair, which I was making wet.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, and held me tighter to prove that she didn’t mind that a stranger was crying all over her, getting snot on her paisley top.
After a while, she pulled away, keeping a reassuring grip on my shoulders. ‘Is this about your mother?’ she said.
I nodded.
‘Shall we stop talking about this?’ she asked, almost a whisper.
‘No,’ I said, my voice rough at the edges. ‘I want to know what the second important thing with parents is.’
My mother returned to her seat and held my hand across the table.
‘After love, the second thing that matters is just being with them. Time. Simple. Love then time.’
‘Some people can’t do that, don’t get the chance for time with their parents,’ I said, sniffing wetly.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I didn’t. And I don’t know for sure that my parents loved me. I assume they did, but not really knowing hurts me.’
‘Time and love,’ I said.
‘Yes, but not in that order. Love first, then time. There’s no point in spending time together if the love isn’t there. If you only have one of those things, love is the king. And that’s it, that’s all it really comes down to, the rest is all consequences of love and time, like protection and security and all that stuff. It’s all important, but it’s off-shoots.’
‘You said there were three things.’
She batted the imaginary fly again. ‘Oh that,’ she said. ‘Well, the third thing is getting to know your parents as people.’
‘You said that was a waste of time.’
‘I know, but the compulsion to do it is so strong, you really can’t ignore it.’
‘That’s a conundrum,’ I said, and we both laughed.
‘You can only know your parents as parents, you can’t know them as anything else. There’s like a barrier to knowing your parents beyond that role.’
‘What about if you know they’re your parent, but they don’t know it?’
She frowned, and puffed her cheeks out, seemed to think about it and then exhaled. ‘In what world?’ she said.
‘Just hypothetically,’ I said. ‘Let’s say you meet your mum and you know she’s your mum, but she doesn’t know you’re her daughter. Can you get to know her as a person then?’
‘Nope,’ Jeanie said, in a heartbeat.
‘Because…’
‘Because, the daughter still knows she’s the daughter. She can only experience the mother as a mother, not as anything else. The mother-thing is too strong, it’s an impenetrable wall of unknowability. You can know some stuff, but you can’t know them beyond knowing them as a parent, and that’s a different kind of knowing. A sort of not-knowing. Get it?’
‘Uh… yeah, I think I do.’
‘Heavy,’ she said, putting a lot of emphasis on both syllables and sounding like a doped-up hippy.
‘Yeah, but that’s okay,’ I said, ‘I can do heavy.’
Jeanie took both my hands in hers and squeezed them.
‘You okay?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, and I was, at that moment I really think I was.
‘Hey, neither of us has siblings, you want to adopt?’
‘Huh?’ I said.
‘Adopt each other?’ she said. ‘You wanna be my sister from a different mister?’
‘Well, yes, but… we’ve only just met,’ I said.
‘I already know things about you that it can take years to know. And I can tell you’ve got a good heart. Plus you threw yourself in front of a car for my daughter.’
My face felt hot and my heart skipped. I thought of Cassie and Clem and how I considered them to be my sisters, how important a bond that was, and how maybe – for my mother – that was the kind of ally she needed. It didn’t really matter what Cassie and Clem thought, and yet I was certain they would like my mother if they saw us together now, and would agree with me that she was in need of a sister.
‘Sisters,’ I said, and Jeanie released my hands momentarily, spat on her palm and then gripped my hand, giving it one hard shake.
Upstairs I heard little Faye again. ‘She seems like a nice kid,’ I said, keen to find out what my mother would say about me as a child. I was fascinated and I was after compliments, I don’t deny it.
Jeanie sighed and rested her chin on her hands looking wistfully into the middle distance. ‘I couldn’t ask for a better daughter. I feel like it’s her and me against the rest of the world sometimes. And I feel like we’re winning! I love her so much, I want to consume her. I want to be her, so I can feel what it’s like to be loved this much,’ and she held her fists to her heart.
I stared at my mother, held my breath as she said these words, felt a tear slip over the edge and down my cheek. Jeanie put her hand over mine.
‘You’ve had a hell of a shock today, what with the car, and you fell over earlier as well, didn’t you say? Then there’s me dragging up your past,’ she said. She clapped her hands once, changing the tempo of the conversation. ‘Well, if we’re going to be sisters, we need to get up to date, because we actually can get to know each other. Let’s do twenty questions, okay?’
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and nodded. Jeanie pulled a clean, warm folded tissue from up her sleeve and handed it to me.
Jeanie’s favourite food is sticky toffee pudding; favourite colour: blue; favourite thing to do: go to the seaside to play the penny slots and paddle and get fish and chips; favourite novel: Rebecca; if she had a lot of money she would take Faye to Spain for a holiday and buy a good TV; she sometimes feels lonely; she misses having a man around; worst job in the house: hoovering; favourite things to do with Faye: bake, play cards and hula hoop. Her favourite subject at school was art; she’s scared of spiders and heights; she gets a chest infection every year; she has no family except Faye; she likes gin but not vodka; she knows the poem The Owl and the Pussycat all the way through off by heart; she can cure hiccups; she stole a pair of shoes once, leaving her old ones in the shop; if she could spend one day with her mother again, she’d spend it talking and holding hands; she hopes for her daughter that one day she will be happily married and be blessed with children; and the hardest thing she ever did was walk away from the love of her life.
‘Hang on, what?’ I said.
‘No more questions for now.’ She wagged her finger. ‘It’s my turn. You’ve asked me twenty. You’ll have to wait if you want to know more.’ Jeanie lowered her voice. ‘And I can’t talk about it in front of Faye, she doesn’t know about him.’
At that moment Faye came into the room, and slapped a pack of cards on the table. I recognised the image of animals on the front: Happy Families. I love that game, the illustrations of the families on those cards reside in the roots of my childhood.
‘Shall we play?’ she said.
Jeanie looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I said, ‘Why not?’ Finding out what twenty questions my mother would ask me, and asking more about the ‘love of her life’, would have to wait.
In fact it was going to have to wait quite some time. We played a few games of Happy Families. I have always loved the Rabbit family and Squirrel family the best; they’re so pretty. My mother, it turns out, had a soft spot for the Frog and the Hedgehog families, because nobody else seemed to love them and so, according to her, they needed more love. I don’t remember who won the most games, or how many times we played, but I can still see my young face laughing and shouting, the good-natured mock-disappointment and accusations of ‘cheat’ when someone was winning too often. I remember being conscious of the way I played with my hair and pressed my nostril with my finger when I was thinking, the same way little Faye did. I remember feeling caught in a moment in time that existed unattached to any other, like a bubble in space. I remember watching my mother smiling, laughing, living, and love caught in my throat.
The day darkened, and Jeanie switched on the kitchen light.
‘Do you need to get home?’ she said. ‘Will your husband be worried?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But he’ll worry soon. I better think about leaving.’ I didn’t know what would happen next or even if I would be able to get home. My palms were suddenly damp at the thought of what might or might not happen when I got into the Space Hopper box again. And if I left my mother now, would I ever see her again? What if it was the last time? Again.
I longed to hug her with the luxury of knowing for certain that I would see her soon, or talk on the phone. I longed for a telephone that spanned the space and time between us. Instead, I would hold her now in the knowledge that it might be my last chance. It was worse than not knowing, and yet, there was hope. I pushed myself away from the table; she stood too and opened her arms to me.
‘Who knows how this day would have ended if it hadn’t been for you,’ she said softly as she embraced me. And she didn’t let go. ‘I’m blessed that you came into our lives, and I have a good feeling about you, Faye. You’re a kindred spirit.’
I said nothing, my face in her hair.
‘Will you come and see us soon?’
‘Yes.’ I said, remembering that somewhere I had read that a promise I might not be able to keep was better than no promise at all.
‘You okay to get home?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. Then looked at my feet.
‘Where are your shoes?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, pretending to look round for them.
Jeanie brought me a pair of her brown calf-length boots and I pulled them on.
‘I’ll bring them back,’ I said.
I gave little Faye a hug, and after the thank yous for the clothes and the sandwich and the tea, I left. The memory of walking away from that house as a child, knocking on Em and Henry’s door, and never seeing my mother again, replayed in my head as I took one step after another away from my mother’s arms. I looked at my feet in my mother’s boots and felt I was following in footsteps no daughter should have to take more than once in her life. Leaving behind a mother I loved, maybe for ever. And the tears streamed down my face.
7
I felt sick about getting in the box again. What if I couldn’t get home? I desperately needed to see my girls. Was Eddie wondering where I was? I wondered whether I would have disappeared from the present day while I was here or if I was lying unconscious in the attic. But that would mean I was in a coma. I wondered how much time had passed, whether it would be the same, or a different amount. If it was the same, then I wasn’t sure how I’d explain my absence; Eddie would have called the police by now. When the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe disappear, they live their whole lives in Narnia, then return home to England as though no time at all has passed. I started to consider all sorts of various dreadful possibilities: like getting home to find Eddie was an old man, telling me about our grown-up daughters and their lives I had missed.
I pondered all this as I sat on a low wall, behind a hedge, waiting for the cover of complete darkness. But the immediate vital question was only this: would the Space Hopper box take me home? I could only deal with one mammoth philosophical conundrum at a time, and right now, despite the churning in my stomach that came from leaving my mother behind, I was even sicker at the thought of not getting home. What would I do if I stood in that box and nothing happened? Maybe it would take me somewhere completely different, to a world somewhere between the only two I knew.
And I wondered how much it would hurt.
* * *
When everyone in the street had closed their curtains I crept back to my mother’s shed. I felt for the door and unbolted it, but couldn’t see what I was doing, and kicked over the bucket of tools and nails in the dark, before carefully feeling for the edges of the box; I didn’t want to step on the edge and damage it any more.
I stood in the box. I waited. Nothing happened.
‘Please God, make this work, please take me home, please, please, please take me home,’ I whispered.
I don’t know if my words had any effect, but as I said home, it felt as though someone grabbed my left foot and yanked me down. The bottom of the box – the ground – well, it was like they didn’t exist. After the uncomfortable first pull, the rest of me came through smoothly.
When I went through the box, there was pressure on my ankle as though it was being gripped and I was spinning round and round on what felt like a horizontal plane.
Like a fairground ride, at first I could deal with the sensation (if not the actual fear), but it became more and more intense, faster. I think I shouted ‘Stop!’ But I can’t be sure. I don’t think my lips could move. But I was definitely thinking Stop! All I know is, the ride went on for longer than I would like. I wanted to get off.
And the ride did stop, but there was no gradual slowing, no easing me back into the atmosphere I was accustomed to. No. Whatever – whoever – was gripping my ankle, let go and I went spinning into space. It was dark, the air was cool, and I continued to spin as I propelled through nothingness. I was just beginning to wonder if this was it – if my life would be spent spinning through space between the past and the present – when I ‘landed’. Not an elegant landing; not what you’d want if you were doing a dismount in gymnastics. My spinning momentum was halted when my body met the wall of the attic.
I was more or less in the box, though I had crushed it and broken one side again. And I was in a messy heap, cramped up against the end of the attic, hurting, as you would if you were thrown against a wall.
Relief flooded over me as I heard Eddie’s voice from below. I detected concern as he called, ‘Hello?’ up the hatch. I didn’t know at the time what his concern was, because I didn’t know how long had passed in his world during my visit to my mother. If no time had passed, then I imagine Eddie would have heard a loud noise, removed his headphones, noticed the loft-ladder was down and wondered what I was doing up there.
But time had moved on, as it happens, and he was concerned for my whereabouts. I’d spent about eleven hours with my mother in the past. But arrival time back home with Eddie, it turned out, was three hours on from when I’d left. Long enough to puzzle him, he told me, but not long enough for him to call the police. Apparently Eddie had stayed at his computer for another two hours, but when Mary Poppins finished, the girls came in to him, climbing into his lap and singing ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’. He decided to stop studying and only then noticed I wasn’t around. Although Eddie is capable of cooking dinner, I normally do it, and tea-time was around now and I hadn’t said anything about going out. He’d looked for a note on the fridge, he said, then rang my mobile (which vibrated across the kitchen counter), and then put some fish fingers in the oven and played a quick game of hide-and-seek with the girls.
He told me that later he stopped with surprise and relief on the landing when he saw the loft
ladder was down and climbed up to find out what I was doing up there; but it was empty, and then he was confused he said, disappointed that I wasn’t there but not overly worried. What confused him even more was spotting my flip-flops by the front door, which I almost always put on if I’m just popping out.
So Eddie wasn’t overly anxious, but he’d given himself a deadline for worry and planned to start calling my friends if it got to 7pm and I still wasn’t back. When Eddie heard the thump in the attic, he was on edge, because he’d already looked there, and knew it was empty. So, the concern in his voice was a small fear of the unknown.
‘Hello?’ he called. His voice entered the attic like an echo from the past.
‘Eddie, it’s me.’ My voice was dry but my relief equalled my pain. I was home. Home-home. In fact, scrap what I just said, my relief outweighed my physical pain by a long way. I would see my daughters again.
Eddie climbed the ladder and poked his head through. I could see his knitted expression clearly, but his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark and he squinted in my general direction. ‘Faye, is that you?’
‘Of course.’
‘What are you doing up here? Where have you been? Come down.’
‘I can’t move.’ My voice sounded like sandpaper, my throat raw from screaming as I spun through space. I felt utterly exhausted and didn’t want to move. I could have slept right there. ‘Can you put the girls to bed and then come and get me? I’ll wait here.’
‘No. What’s going on? Just come down.’
I tried to move but was incredibly slow. I thought I had splinters in my forehead where I’d skidded into the wall of the loft, my head had really taken a pounding. It took me so long to move, that Eddie just came up and got me.
‘Have you broken something?’ he said, crouching in front of me, using the light from his mobile phone to illuminate me.
‘The lightbulb,’ I said.
‘No, I mean you, have you hurt yourself?’
‘A few bruises, some scratches. I’m all right, I think.’
