by Tom Ellen
Because I think it was only then, in those weeks that followed, that I really started to process it all. Mum had been the one constant in my life. She had always been there, and now, suddenly – inexplicably – she wasn’t. She was my only real family. And she was gone.
I never even got to say goodbye. Or, more importantly, to apologise. Because the last time I’d seen her … well, it didn’t even bear thinking about. That was the worst thing – the thing I never told anyone, not even Daphne. The last things I ever said to Mum were so horrible, so childish, so spiteful. And when she died, I wished with every fibre of my being that I could take them back. But I couldn’t.
So instead I buried them, deep down inside me, and left them there to fester.
‘Ben?’
Mum’s voice breaks in again, drifting up from the kitchen, and I realise I’m still crying.
I can hear her feet starting to pad softly up the stairs. ‘It’s after eleven! Daphne will be here any minute!’
Chapter Fourteen
Without thinking, I leap out of bed and sprint across the corridor into the bathroom.
‘One second,’ I gulp, as I lock the door and duck my hot, streaming face under the cold tap.
‘Well don’t be too long,’ I hear her shout over the rushing water. ‘She’ll be arriving any time now.’
I let the water run and run, and then sit on the edge of the bathtub for a bit, staring blankly at the wall, my mind too frazzled to work properly. When my eyes have finally dried and lost their puffy redness, I go back to my room and put some jeans and a T-shirt on. I have no idea how I’m going to deal with this. But I know I can’t stay up here hiding forever.
I take a deep breath, then walk downstairs with my heart hammering.
The house looks like a Santa’s grotto has exploded inside it: holly and ivy hang from pretty much every wall, and tinsel curls down the banister like an exotic silver snake. Mum always took Christmas very seriously.
With every step, the déjà vu gets more intense. Every inch of the house conjures some long-forgotten memory: the photos of me and Mum that line the staircase; the deep dent halfway down the banister rail (a result of my decision to slide down it wearing rollerblades, aged nine). And then there it is: the picture of us at Whitley Bay, hanging next to a faded photo of Mum’s dad – my grandad Jack – as a young man, a broad grin stretching out beneath his twinkling blue eyes.
I feel a strange shiver run through me – something I can’t quite define. This place was home. And back in the present – in 2020 – it’s someone else’s home. Uncle Simon and I put it up for sale a few months after Mum died. We got a fair bit less than the asking price, but I didn’t care. I just wanted the whole thing over with as quickly as possible; it was too painful to keep setting foot in this house with Mum gone.
So now another family lives here, filling it with their own memories.
I push open the kitchen door. Mum is standing with her back to me, arranging bits of smoked salmon into a neat pattern on a plate. ‘Finally,’ she says, brightly. ‘I thought I was going to have to entertain the poor girl on my own.’
She turns around and smiles, her eyes crinkling softly at the sides, and it takes everything I have not to fall apart again. There’s less grey in her hair, but aside from that, she’s exactly as I last saw her. She’s wearing black trousers and a smart button-up velvety cardigan thing, and even with my extremely limited fashion knowledge, I can tell this is one of her ‘special occasion’ outfits. I feel a powerful rush of love for her.
‘Now, I’ve done some little salmon bits to start with,’ she says. ‘And the beef’s in the oven. But, you know, I forgot to check with you whether she actually eats meat. Because more and more people don’t these days. You know Hiam’s son, Henry, well, he’s become a “pescatarian”, and …’ She breaks off, her finger quote marks still hanging in mid-air. ‘What’s the matter, darling? Is something wrong?’
I realise I am clenching my jaw painfully, twisting my mouth into a shape that’s supposed to resemble a smile. Clearly it’s not having the desired effect.
‘Oh God,’ Mum sighs, dropping her hands to her hips. ‘She’s a veggie, isn’t she? I knew it.’
I can’t take it any more. I rush forward to hug her.
‘Blimey,’ she laughs. ‘What’s all this?’
She pats my back gently, and I speak into her shoulder, my voice thick and muffled. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I mumble. ‘I’m so sorry …’
‘Don’t be stupid, darling,’ she says. ‘I can easily do her a macaroni cheese.’
There is so much I want to say to her that I don’t know where to start. I want to apologise for all those terrible things I haven’t even said yet; to tell her I won’t mean them when I say them, and that she’s the best mum in the world and I’m a useless, pathetic excuse for a son. And I want to warn her about what will happen in – what will it be? – twelve years’ time.
There are a million things I want to say, but I don’t get the chance to say any of them. Because the doorbell interrupts me.
Mum breaks out of the hug and claps her hands together: ‘Right, you let her in, I’ll go and get the baby pictures.’
She laughs at whatever expression I’m currently wearing, and then adds: ‘I’m joking, I’m joking. We can do the baby pictures after lunch.’
She nudges me out of the kitchen. At the end of the hallway I can see Daff’s silhouette through the stained glass on the front door. Oh God. I’m just about getting a handle on seeing Mum again, and now I’ve got to open the door to a nineteen-year-old Daphne. I take a deep breath and try very hard to compose myself.
Through the glass I can see Daff fiddling with her hair, and when I open the door, she stops and smiles at me.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey … you look amazing,’ I say. Because she really does.
A whole year has passed since ‘yesterday’, but she looks pretty much exactly the same: young and happy, albeit with a touch more nervous energy about her. The cold air outside seems to have coloured her entire face – her cheeks and the tip of her nose are a soft pastel pink and her big brown eyes are bright and glistening. She’s wearing a black knee-length coat with smart blue jeans and a plain white shirt underneath. Just visible under the collar, winking in the sunlight, is the diamond necklace her parents bought her for her eighteenth.
She leans forward to give me a hug, and when she pulls back, she looks at my chest and laughs. ‘Great to see you’ve made an effort too.’
I follow her gaze downwards. The T-shirt I picked up at random from my bedroom floor turns out to have the slogan PERVERT 69 emblazoned across the front.
‘Shit, sorry … I’ll change.’
Behind her, I can see a little brown car pulling out and disappearing up the road: Daff’s dad, Michael. I’d already met him and Daphne’s mum by this point – they’d come up to uni for a weekend at the end of first year.
‘Isn’t he coming in?’ I ask her.
She shakes her head. ‘No way, I sent him packing. Way too stressful to have the parents meeting each other as well. Maybe he can say hello later when he comes back to pick me up …’
She breaks off and grins over my shoulder. Mum is wandering through from the kitchen behind me, doing a frantic double-waving routine that is bordering on jazz hands and is presumably intended to waft away any meeting-the-mother awkwardness.
‘Hello! Hello! You must be Daphne!’ she beams as she dances towards her.
I’m sure I was absolutely mortified by this the first time round, but now it just makes me love Mum even more. She’s clearly nervous and desperate to make Daff feel welcome: I’ve spent the past few months talking about her pretty much non-stop, so Mum knows how big a deal this is.
‘Hello! Hi! Yes! You must be Rosie!’ Daff is doing the jazz hands back at her now, making them look like some kind of 1920s musical hall double act. Despite everything, I can feel a bubble of laughter rising to bursting point in my chest. I start doin
g the jazz hands too, and suddenly all three of us are laughing together.
‘It’s so lovely to finally meet you,’ Daff says, sticking out her hand for Mum to shake. Mum looks at it for a second, clearly thinks about taking it, then swats it away and pulls her in for a hug.
‘Sorry, sorry, embarrassing mother,’ she says, squeezing her tightly. And as Daff squeezes back, she shoots me a sideways glance that is pure excitement and happiness.
‘Anyway,’ Mum says, letting go of her, ‘come on through!’
Chapter Fifteen
We sit around the kitchen table, and I eat the salmon while they talk.
I’m not even particularly hungry, to be honest, but stuffing my face seems like a good excuse for not speaking, and right now, forming coherent sentences is proving to be way beyond my grasp.
I’m doing my best to keep it together, but the whole thing is just so insane. I thought I would never see Mum again, and now here she is – somehow – sitting centimetres away from me, chatting and laughing and telling me to please, for God’s sake, leave some salmon for everyone else. For the first time since I’ve been back here in the past, the confusion and fear is outweighed by sheer, mind-melting joy.
Mum was – is – an English teacher at the local secondary school. And at times like this, you can really tell. She bombards Daphne with questions about the English course at uni – which writers does she like best, which modules has she enjoyed most – and pretty soon the conversation blossoms to cover not just books but telly and music and whatever else. It’s a bit like watching a dream first date unravel in front of me, because they agree on literally everything: from Charlotte Brontë to Bob Dylan, Alan Partridge to Adrian Mole.
‘We’re doing medieval poetry this term, which is a bit of a slog,’ Daff says, as talk returns to uni. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; all that sort of stuff. It’s a bit like being bored to death in a language you don’t fully understand.’
Mum laughs. ‘I see the exact same thing with my Year Elevens, groaning their way through Chaucer. You just know you’re putting them off reading for a good ten years. I almost want to slip a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy into their bags to try and restore their faith. I mean, reading is supposed to be fun, for goodness’ sake.’
Daff nods. ‘I’ve started sneaking Patricia Highsmith books into lectures, just to keep myself awake.’
Mum’s eyes light up at this. ‘Oh God, Patricia Highsmith! She’s brilliant, isn’t she? Mad as anything, but still: brilliant. Have you read Deep Water?’
Daff shakes her head, and Mum leaps up from her seat and darts into the living room, sending her voice back through in her absence. ‘It’s my absolute favourite, this one. There’s a chap whose wife is sleeping around on him, and so he starts … Well, no, I won’t spoil it. You’ll have to read it yourself.’
She comes back in, waggling a tattered copy of Deep Water.
‘Here, Daphne, take it with you now. I insist. Early Christmas present.’
Daff laughs. ‘Are you sure? That’s so nice of you.’
‘Yes, yes! I can buy another copy.’ This is typical my-mum behaviour. Most mothers force clumps of foil-wrapped food on their guests; she forces paperbacks.
She sits back down and smiles at me fondly. ‘Ben steadfastly refuses to read anything I give him. He’s far more keen on his mardy books.’
This comment has the effect of making me want to simultaneously laugh and cry, and I have to stuff another salmon square into my mouth to ensure I don’t do either. ‘Mardy books’ was a running joke between Mum and me: the books being the gloomy novels by Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre that began to line my shelves around this time, and the ‘mardy’ being a hangover from her childhood. Mum was born and raised in Sheffield, and when she was in particularly high – or low – spirits, the Yorkshire slang would come tumbling out.
‘Mardy books,’ Daff repeats, grinning at me. ‘I love it. That is Benjamin’s taste exactly.’
Secretly, of course, I preferred non-mardy books. I still do. Adrian Mole and P. G. Wodehouse and Hitchhiker’s Guide and all the other funny, silly novels I fell in love with as a fourteen-year-old. But as a posturing, insecure twenty-year-old, I was tirelessly working to rebrand myself from ‘funny and silly’ to ‘moody and interesting’. And the best way to do that, I reasoned, was to have a mardy book poking out of my jacket at all times as I swanned around campus. Who exactly this was supposed to impress, I have no idea. Possibly Marek and Alice (who, to be fair, did seem quite impressed). Definitely not Daphne (who on one occasion removed a Kierkegaard paperback from my pocket and whacked me over the head with it).
Mum and Daphne are both smiling at me fondly now, giggling at my purported mardiness. I imagine that when this moment happened first time round, I probably found it slightly patronising – like I was a dog that had just performed a trick for them or something. But right now, it fills me with a happiness so intense that I almost feel drunk on it.
The two of them always got on well, right from the start. They spoke on the phone more and more regularly over the years, chatting away about books and telly and things. Now, as I return Daphne’s smile, I suddenly find myself wondering how Mum’s death must have affected her. She loved Mum too, I know she did. And yet after she died, I don’t think I ever even asked Daphne how she was coping or if she was OK. I didn’t once try to go through the grief with her; I just let it push us further and further apart.
Mum turns to Daphne and asks: ‘Has Ben let you read any of his own stuff?’
‘Not yet, no,’ Daff says. ‘I’m always on at him to.’ She shoots me a mock-pissed-off glare, and I’m not quite sure how to respond to it. I was always a bit shy about people reading my stuff, even in the early days. Probably because, deep down, I was worried they would compare it – unfavourably – to my father’s.
Mum’s giving me the mock-annoyed look now too, her mouth set squarely in a pouty frown. ‘Oh, well you must read some of it at some point,’ she tells Daphne firmly. ‘He’s brilliant, just brilliant.’
Even through the insane joy of seeing her again, I feel a familiar prickle of irritation. Firstly, I’m not brilliant, and secondly, Mum hasn’t read a single thing I’ve written since about Year 10 at school.
This was something that really got to me over the years: Mum’s pig-headed insistence that I was something more than mediocre. I always wondered what on earth she based it on. The fact that I’d won a couple of creative writing competitions at school? Maybe it’s just a trait all parents have; you can’t accept that your kid is no good, because that would mean there’s something wrong with you too. Even after all the rejection letters I received, and my so-called career spiralling down the toilet, she would still tell me again and again how brilliant I was. It used to infuriate me.
In fact, it’s what led me to say those terrible things to her before she died. She was just being supportive and kind, and I threw it all back in her face. I feel the guilt of it churning in my chest again, and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop the tears coming back. I took it completely for granted that she would always be there: my mum, fighting in my corner. And then one day she wasn’t, and everything seemed to collapse as a result.
I guess at this point, though – 2006 – I didn’t need anyone fighting in my corner. I was still pretty confident that I was some kind of genius-in-waiting. If I remember rightly, I was spending all my non-seminar hours writing a long, sprawling, entirely plot-free novel that was so meticulously ripped off Samuel Beckett it might as well have been labelled ‘fan fiction’.
Not that I realised it at the time. The future still seemed bright and full of possibility, and I knew that even if this book didn’t make things happen for me, sooner or later something else would. Back then, I assumed I had enough of my father in me to be sure of that.
I watch Daphne smiling as she flicks idly through the Highsmith novel. I can’t remember how much I’d told her about my dad at this stage. Not that much, I don’t
think. She’d asked me about him, of course, and she knew he wasn’t around. What more was there to say? He’d left when I was ten, and the number of times I’d seen him since could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. I guess I didn’t talk to Daphne about him because I didn’t want to seem wimpy and pathetic: a twenty-year-old man who still hadn’t got over his dad leaving. I didn’t want Daff to pity me.
Obviously, though, she knew all about his work. Pretty much every student on our course did. While he wasn’t quite established enough to be an actual part of our modules (that would’ve been too awful to imagine), he was still regarded as one of the coolest modern British playwrights around. In Sunday supplements, his name was thrown about regularly as a potential successor to Pinter and Tom Stoppard, so any reference to him in a lecture or seminar would send every head turning my way.
They weren’t to know, I suppose, that I had no sort of relationship with him at all.
Looking back now, I can see that that’s what all the mardy books nonsense was really about. Throughout this whole period – late teens, early twenties – my idea of him was in constant flux. One minute I hated him for leaving; the next I desperately wanted his approval. Just before I left for uni, I’d come across an interview with him in a newspaper in which he cited his five favourite books – every one of them unmistakably mardy. Without even thinking about it, I’d ordered the lot. I still can’t explain why. Did I really expect to bump into him randomly in the street, with one of them poking out of my pocket? Probably not. But it was always a possibility.
Mum clears the plates away and then starts rifling about noisily inside the fridge. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘it’s after midday, it’s Christmas Eve …’ She turns around cradling a large bottle of cava. ‘I think we are obliged to start drinking.’
‘Hear, hear,’ says Daphne.
I get up to fetch some glasses, realising yet again that everything – right down to the cartoonish squeal Mum makes as the cork pops – is happening exactly as I remember it first time round. And as incredible as it is to be with Mum again, I can’t help thinking: what is the point?
