by John Clanchy
‘Grandma means Lassie, Mum,’ Katie said. ‘She means, is Lassie coming back. That’s all.’
The news break ended, the movie started again.
‘He’s back,’ Mother said, settling comfortably to watch.
‘Lassie’s not a he, anyway,’ Katie said. ‘He’s a she.’
Laura, of course, takes no part in this tomfoolery. She’s up in her room getting radiation sickness from the latest heavy metal exposure. If she were down here she’d be telling us what a fake the whole show is, how the dog is actually starved and tortured to within an inch of its life to get it to do all these dumb tricks, just so hypocrites like us can sit around all night and go oh and ah at how clever it is. When in fact it’s all cruelty and sadism that ought to be reported to the RSPCA. I can remember the days when she wept buckets over Lassie, just as Katie does now.
It’s not just Laura’s tastes that have changed. What is she, fourteen? But some fourteen. She’s the very opposite of Miriam – this must be the Greek coming out in her. She’s black – eyes, hair, wide dusky forehead – pouty, thick-lipped. And moody, Jesus. One thing I learnt early on was not to come between Laura and Miriam, because if the force of the tension didn’t get you then the force of their attraction would. Either way, you’d get crushed. So mostly I leave Laura to Miriam and focus on Katie who’s as uncomplicated and innocent as a sparrow. Innocent’s not the word I’d use about Laura. Laura, in a towel, out of the shower, black and plastered, the whitest of white shoulders, is a worry in the house. Normally she ignores me. I understand that. She’s divided, she’s not Katie, she’s not my daughter. But then, for no reason, one morning or another, it’s suddenly ‘Philip, that’s a nice shirt’ or ‘nice tie’, a kiss, arms on my shoulders, the towel’s rising with her arms, and Jesus –
‘Laura, you’ll be late.’ From Miriam. Normally ends it. ‘Go and get some clothes on.’
‘I’m off first period,’ says Laura. Without thinking.
‘Then that gives you time to clean your room.’
Which, for Laura, always resurrects a sudden interest in school, in education, in clubs, societies, charities, friendship groups – in anything but the dungheap of her own room.
Laura’s a worry in the house, all right. Though not the only one. Mrs Johnson’s on strike again. She says she won’t come back without an apology this time. Mrs Johnson’s the granny-sitter – the geriatric care-giver, I ought to say – who comes in and sits with Mother while Miriam goes to the college to teach. And, of course, she takes most of what Miriam earns. Not that Miriam minds. Teaching, she says, is the only thing that keeps her sane, and what she pays Mrs Johnson is a fair exchange. Mrs Johnson was the best we could get, but even so it’s a seller’s market, and – as she says herself – she doesn’t come here just to be insulted.
‘That fat woman was here again,’ Mother said this last time. Mrs Johnson, when she says this, is still hanging about in the next room waiting to be paid.
‘She’s stealing from the fridge again,’ Mother says.
‘Mother, please,’ Miriam says, raising her voice as loud as Mother’s. ‘Mrs Johnson is a guest here. She’s more than welcome to help herself to any small thing from the fridge that she pleases.’
‘She’s eating you out of house and home.’
What I don’t understand is how Mother does this. Most of the time she’s about as alert as a garden gnome, but when she really wants something – like getting rid of Mrs Johnson – she’s like a mongoose with a snake.
‘You’d better make sure you take your purse with you when you go out.’
The doctors have told us she’d come and go like this. Normally there’s a lot more going than coming, but in anything to do with Mrs Johnson, every day is Advent.
‘We get along famously,’ Mrs Johnson once said to Miriam. ‘Me and your Mum.’
‘Yes,’ Mother said. ‘Like Hitler and the Jews.’
I mean, how does she do it? How does this on-off electrical current work? Most days she can’t remember who’s standing next to her, or even whether anyone’s standing next to her – unless it’s me, of course, in which case she’s just as likely to turn and say:
‘Oh, you’re back, are you? How was Athens?’
I don’t actually believe for a moment she thinks I’m Stavros, or even that I’m Greek. I think it’s just rat cunning in overdrive.
‘It’s Philip, isn’t it?’ she said to me one morning last week. At this point she hadn’t spoken a word to me for ten days.
‘Yes, Mother,’ I say back, astonished. ‘It’s Philip.’
‘Of Macedon?’
Fucck, I don’t say. Crazy, vindictive old bitch, I don’t say. There’s a lot I don’t say, even when I hear her chuckling and I know it’s not confusion, it’s not depression or amnesia that’s put her up to this but pure, joyful, unquenchable malice. I don’t say this, either. I can’t afford to. Things are tense enough as it is. No one has any idea what all this is doing to our lives. Our sex lives, for starters. Last Monday I was twenty minutes late for the week’s strategy meeting at work. I’d been fetching something from the pharmacy for Mother. It was nine-thirty by the time I made it – a bit flustered – to the conference room.
‘Afternoon, Phil,’ Tony Ryle said, pointedly, but without ill-will, as I dropped into a seat beside him. ‘Naughty weekend?’
Naughty weekend? Christ, that pulled me up. I mean, I actually had to stop and think, when was the last time –? Miriam used to be crazy for it. Not just at nights. Saturday afternoons, if the girls were out at a film or off with friends, we’d retire to the bedroom for the duration and bonk each other senseless. Regularly. I wouldn’t have the lunch dishes half-stacked before she had her hand in my pants. Now, I reckon Mother’s getting more out of the White Rabbit than we’re getting out of each other. That’s another thing we don’t talk about, that we just look past at the moment. But if Mother’s going to be here for another – what? six months? twelve? eighteen? two years? Christ – we might as well rent out the garage and the spare room to the Carmelites.
To say nothing of the son Miriam was desperate to try for before all this descended.
And what happens – this is another thing we haven’t faced – what happens when the selective amnesia goes, and she starts doing really crazy stuff? The police have had to bring her home twice already, they’re pretty soon going to get sick of that. The second time they picked her up out on the highway in her slippers and Laura’s bicycle helmet. She claimed she was looking for the police station because a woman had broken into the house and was stealing food from the fridge. But what happens when she starts stealing herself, or carrying off babies in the street?
I’ve already had to install one of those magic eye laser beams in the doorway between her flat and the house. This is to stop her wandering at night, and burning us to death in our beds.
‘God, what’s that?’ Laura said when the electrician came to put it in.
‘It’s an alarm, darling,’ Miriam said. ‘It’s for Grandma Vera.’
‘What – like in a video store?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it goes off every time someone takes her out?’
‘The important thing is, it goes off when she goes out. Or when she comes into the house.’
‘You’re making it like a prison for her. You’ve already got deadlocks on the front and back doors so she can’t get out.’ ‘Darling, I don’t like it any more than you do – being locked up like this in our own house. But we can’t just let her wander, especially at night. There’s too much electrical equipment in here for a start –’
‘She was only hungry.’
‘I know she was hungry,’ Miriam said. ‘And I know what she thought she was doing. But, darling, please be fair and think about it. She could have set fire to the house …’
Mother had woken in the early hours of the morning and slipped a couple of oven pads, instead of bread, into the toaster in her flat. The pads had burnt, the t
oaster fused, the smoke detector went off, and Miriam, Laura and I had rushed, haggard with sleep, down to Mother’s flat to find her kitchenette full of smoke and Mother calmly buttering the blackened pads.
This episode had really rattled Miriam. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she’d said to me, as if I was the one who had brought Mother here, and was now imprisoning her somehow against her will. ‘She could kill us all,’ Miriam said – and I might have pressed the issue then. And maybe I should have. But I didn’t.
Miriam tossed and turned for the rest of that night, listening, rigid with worry, and at dawn she went and slept in Laura’s bed, carrying Katie in there with her. I have no idea what made her do that, but I knew if I asked, I’d simply be demonstrating the fact that I didn’t understand her at all. So I didn’t. Ask, that is.
But I did get an electrician in the next morning – to strip most of the electrical gear out of the flat, and install the alarm. So now, if Mother moves at night – if she comes into the main house where all the equipment is – at least we know. If the alarm goes off – and it’s nothing loud, it’s only a soft beep to wake Miriam and myself but not the girls upstairs – we don’t necessarily do anything about it. We don’t get up and rush about. We just lie there for a while and listen. We can usually tell, just by listening, exactly where she is and what she’s doing, and if another beep comes soon after, which tells us she’s gone back to the flat, we just roll over and go back to sleep. It’s only if the second beep doesn’t come within a few minutes that we get up. Or at least Miriam does. I’ve offered from time to time, but she won’t let me. ‘A naked Greek coming on Mother in the middle of the night,’ she said once, ‘we’d never hear the end of it.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said back, ‘by morning she’d never remember it’d happened.’ ‘Oh, something like that she’d remember all right,’ Miriam said. ‘It’d confirm everything she ever suspected.’ ‘But she knows I’m not Greek,’ I told her, ‘you know that. It’s a bloody-minded game she plays, just to annoy me.’ And are you?’ Miriam said. Am I what?’ I said. ‘Annoyed?’ she said.
For the first week, the laser beam worked like a charm. The two nights she wandered, we woke, listened, rejoiced, slept.
‘She hasn’t worked it out,’ I said to Miriam. ‘She hasn’t made any connection.’
And she hadn’t, I’m sure. For that first week. But then, in the second week: Beep went the alarm, and we woke. Beep went the response, and we relaxed. Then: Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep …
‘It’s broken,’ Miriam said.
‘It can’t be.’
Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep …
‘It is.’
‘I’ll switch it off, then,’ I said, heaving myself out of bed. ‘I’ll have to get the electrician back in the morning.’
I found Mother standing in the open doorway between the family room and her flat, hands pressed against the sides of the doorway, swinging one leg back and forwards across the light beam. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep …
‘Mother –’
‘Oh,’ she snorted, looking up. ‘Plato,’ she said. And kept swinging.
The alarm, we found, couldn’t be switched off, or not by us without the risk of fusing everything else in the house. We lay, at first trying to read, and then in waking darkness, listening to this manic clockwork parrot that had apparently come to settle in the family room. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep …
‘She’ll get sick of it,’ Miriam promised. Just as dawn was breaking.
And so this is the way we go on, compromising, adjusting, skirting around problems, around dangers. Miriam won’t really face any of this. She won’t even talk about a home, about institutional care. She says she’ll give up teaching altogether and stay home herself before that happens. But if she’s right, and her teaching is the only thing keeping her sane, what the fuck happens then? That’s what I’d like to know.
Miriam
‘You didn’t mind leaving early?’ I say.
‘No,’ Philip says. ‘No.’
He’s driving carefully, worrying about breathalysers and speed traps.
‘It’s just that Laura’s got exams next week, and I didn’t want her up all night. Besides, it wasn’t such a great party anyway,’ I say. Philip doesn’t answer, just stares straight ahead through the windscreen. ‘Did you think? …’
There was nothing wrong with the party. Chic and sleaze, reasonably mixed, I enjoy just as much as the next person. It wasn’t the party that was the problem, it was me. It has been me, I realize, for some months now. Longer. Two hours ago I’d stood in the upstairs bathroom of this ritzy house where the party was held – the bathroom was vast, tiled, glass-walled, spa’d – and looked into the mirror, into its green lights. I’m thirty-nine, I thought, haggard, bagged, past it. Old. I’ve got old – and boring. In a year I’ll be forty. I’d knocked on the bathroom door before going in. I’d heard giggling from inside, and turned away. But –
‘Come in, honey,’ a girl says to me from the half-open door, ‘come in.’ There’s another girl in there with her, cutting lines on the glass top of the cupboard below one of the mirrors. Her back is to me and, as I go in, she bends until her face is almost flat on the glass, and snorts. ‘Ahh –’ she says then, and straightens quickly, both hands spread on the glass top, her head stretched back until her spine is a sprung bow.
‘Ah, Jesus,’ she says, shaking her blonde head slowly. ‘Jesus, that’s wild.’
‘We’re just finished,’ the first girl says. Looking at me. ‘You’re gorgeous, honey,’ she says. ‘You must know that?’
The two of them burst into giggles again, and I try to smile back. And know my face has frozen. And that’s when I feel it. Old. These girls are nineteen, half my age. And only five years older than Laura. Or fifteen years older, I hope, as the first girl, still giggling, but unfocused, way out of it, bends forward and kisses me on the lips. I kiss back, briefly, out of friendship, to show I understand. To show I know where she is, that I’ve been there myself. Once upon a time. Before all this ugliness and age and haggardness set in. This endless stretching just to hold things together. I kiss back, just in fun. To show her that. And find her tongue, fat and grainy, and tasting of whisky, and something else, filling my mouth.
‘Ohh –’ I say, and gently take her hand from my breast.
She looks at me, head cocked, still smiling but seriously now, as if appraising. Me, or maybe herself.
In the centre of her palm, right where she’d cupped my breast, the crude naked figure of a woman is tattooed in blue. When the girl stretches the skin of her palm, the legs on the figure part. My own nipples, I find, are already hard.
‘I – uh – need to go,’ I say then, indicating the toilet bowl. And stand, old and ugly.
‘Honey,’ she says, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got.’
They go out, hand in hand, giggling together. And that’s when I stand and look into the green lights of the mirror. Till someone else knocks, and I let them in and go out in the end without going at all.
‘I thought it was okay,’ Philip says on the drive home. As parties go.’
‘I guess I just wasn’t in the mood,’ I say. Again he is silent, just letting the words not in the mood create their own echo between us. ‘I could have got a taxi,’ I say. ‘Or you could.’
‘I suppose.’
‘If you’d wanted to stay.’
‘Yes,’ he says, driving on.
‘Did you?’ I say.
‘Did I what?’
‘Want to?’
We’d got to the party late. There’d been a … misunderstanding between Mother and Katie about whose turn it was to have Yogi on their bed for the night.
‘Well, where is the blessed cat now?’ I’d said.
‘Grandma Vera’s hidden him,’ Katie said. ‘She’s mean. She knows it’s my turn. She just pretends she’s forgotten, she never forgets when it’s her turn. I hate her.’
‘Katie, please.’
‘Well, I do.’
‘I know you’re upset.’
‘She never takes it in turns.’
‘You’ve got to learn to make allowances. We’ve talked about this –’
‘Why do I? Why do we have to all the time?’
I hadn’t seen Katie as upset as this for a long time. ‘It’s just not fair,’ she kept saying. ‘She’s mean and she’s horrid, and she smells –’
‘Katie, that’s quite enough,’ I said.
‘But –’
‘Enough!’ I said again. ‘Do you hear me?’ And found myself shouting. And Katie looking at me, cheeks wet, but cowed now. I hated seeing her like that. ‘Look, darling,’ I said, ‘we’ll see if we can’t get Grandma Vera to share. You have Yogi till you go to sleep, and then she can have him later on. Would that be okay?’
She nodded. No, her face said, it wouldn’t be okay. It wasn’t fair. But for me she’d do it, her face said.
‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ I said, aware of Philip pacing in the next room. This party was mostly for him. Philip and one of the partners in his firm had won a huge defamation case in the Supreme Court. This was his night. ‘I’ll make it up to you tomorrow,’ I told Katie.
‘Can I have Yogi for two nights?’
‘We’ll see. Where is he now?’
‘In Grandma’s room.’
‘Come on, darling,’ Philip said from the doorway behind me. ‘Come on.’
‘Just give me a minute, will you?’
‘A minute?’ he said, looking at his watch.
Katie led me down the corridor to Mother’s rooms. She’d rubbed the tears from her face, and was marching now, her tiny body swollen with righteousness.
‘Mother?’ I said, looking into the small sitting room where she sat, in a deep chair, arms folded over her stomach, watching TV. ‘Have you got Yogi in here?’
‘Yogi,’ she said.
She didn’t look away from the screen, merely pursed her lips in that way I knew so well and moved her head, slowly, stubbornly, from side to side.
‘Are you sure?’
Then up and down.
