by Liz Jensen
With Linda trembling with righteous fury in front of me, dragging on her cigarette like she was giving it artificial respiration, and scraping at my pine table with her car keys, I knew exactly what he meant. She never fails to agitate me. But I offered her a coffee.
‘Instant please,’ she said. ‘It’s quicker. I have a lunch meeting.’
And she blushed a frantic, beetroot red. This meant only one thing; a man in her life. At a guess, someone she’d met at one of her gawkish Mensa Club get-togethers, where members bring their own sandwiches.
‘What are you staring at?’ she asked. ‘Is instant not posh enough for you?’
Linda, the girl no one loved much, except Ma, who sort of love-hated her, which is worse.
I was too young to be a person when our dad left to live in New Zealand with a floozie of loose morals whom he’d met (according to Ma) at a petrol station near the flyover. But when he walked out with his one suitcase and kissed Linda goodbye on the doorstep, it hurt her a lot, because she was old enough to think it was her fault, and my mother was strange enough, even then in the days when she wore pinnies and rolled pastry, to encourage her to think that too.
Dad worked in double glazing, but he had plans to move into the conservatory and greenhouse market. He’d worked on a project for a pagoda of glass in Jaycote’s Park which was to be the pride of Gridiron, but it came to nothing. He had a fondness for stock-car racing and was a great attender of carpet auctions, where he once obtained in great bargain quantities some rolls of carpeting which had fallen off the back of a BBC lorry. From then on, our living-room floor in the Cheeseways was tattooed all over with a grandiose logo and the motto ‘And Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’. Dad also went to the pub a lot.
‘At least that’s where he said he went,’ said Linda bitterly, on one of the rare occasions I could get her to speak about him. ‘He took me to the fair once. We played Roll the Penny all afternoon. I won two goldfish but they died of fin-rot.’
That’s all I knew about Dad.
‘Not much call for greenhouses and double glazing in New Zealand,’ my mother said when he’d left, rubbing at her eyes with her yellow washing-up gloves still on. ‘He’ll be a nobody out there.’
And he must have been, because we heard no news of him after that, until one evening, years later, when I was ten, a woman we didn’t officially know, in a red flowery dress and a face that kind of matched, came knocking at the door, nearly broke it down, in fact, and barged in past my mother into the living-room and threw herself on the sofa in tears. It was Marjorie, my father’s sister.
She wouldn’t say anything until Ma had poured her a large whisky.
‘Brendan’s dead,’ she said, and took another large gulp.
Linda left the room very quietly. She couldn’t face it. Later I kept telling her about how he’d died, but she didn’t want to know. And even then I’m not sure she believed me.
One of the features of Christchurch, New Zealand, is that, normally, nothing much happens there – so Dad’s unusual death really put it on the map for a while. It was quite big news at the time, not just in the national press but in all the international medical journals, too. He’d been poisoned by water. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it can happen. He’d drunk a lot of water – no one knew why, but there was a rumour that it was some kind of elaborate bet – so much water that his blood became too thin, and he was intoxicated. He fell down in the street stone dead, and carried on passing water for another two hours, according to the pathologist’s report.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ Marjorie kept droning into her whisky.
By the time Ma sent her off in a taxi she was reeling about blind drunk, but quietly, like a hefty zoo creature with a dart in its arse.
My mother wouldn’t discuss it, but she had a wreath sent, with the message: ‘In loving memory of Brendan, misguided husband of Moira and father of Linda and Hazel. Despite the agony of your betrayal, you stay for ever in our hearts.’
I think it was mainly to make that petrol-pump girl feel bad.
When he died it was much worse for Linda, because she could remember him and still loved him. It didn’t bother me at all, because to me he was just an old overcoat that hung in the wardrobe smelling of mothballs, an overcoat that I somehow knew had been there as a symbol of hope, ‘waiting for Daddy to come home’. My mother’s big idea was that he’d been enchanted by a bad fairy who’d cast a wicked spell on him, and that, one day when the spell wore off, he’d come home and wear his smelly old overcoat again. It never got that far, but that was the unspoken happy ending she had in mind, before he died in a pool of his own urine, having drunk enough water to fill a bath. The overcoat went to Oxfam.
‘Daddy’s coat’s going to fill the bellies of starving Africans,’ Ma said as she bundled it into a plastic bin-liner.
I noticed that, like me, Ma developed a fear of drinking too much water, and never had more than one glass no matter how thirsty she was.
Linda never really recovered from Dad’s death. She developed an ‘attitude problem’ towards men, and they responded in kind. She tended to attract the faithful-dog types who were in thrall to her powerful brain, but in fact all she wanted was for them to destroy her self-esteem, like Dad did. So when they didn’t, she had to tell them to go. Having once read a questionnaire entitled ‘Your Man’s Personality: Angelic or Monstrous?’, I knew all about this syndrome. Linda’s faithful ones were angels, or the psychologists’ Type One. While the ones with I am a shitty, selfish bastard printed on their foreheads, the Type Twos who treated her badly and let her down with a sickening and predictable thud, who left her soul collapsed on the floor like a discarded condom – they were the monsters she’d fall in love with. Later she would return to her books. Linda had academic pretensions. But behind the façade of the blue-stocking, Linda’s bad love experiences would be pickled in the venom of hindsight. If Linda had filled in the questionnaire, and read the accompanying article, she might have had more understanding of passion’s mechanics.
‘Why don’t you leave all that stuff to Ma?’ I asked her once. ‘You don’t have to go through everything she did.’
‘Every woman goes through what Ma went through, one way or another,’ was Linda’s cryptic reply. ‘You’ll see.’
She was reading feminist critiques of various things at the time, and studying sociology.
So I just laughed.
I decided to go and have a word with Dr Stern about Ma. I wrote asking for a meeting ‘at his convenience’. ‘Any time is convenient for me,’ I said in the letter, ‘as I’m relatively free during the day.’ I have time on my hands. I don’t work, not since shortly after I married. Well, when you’re a doctor’s wife you don’t strictly need to, do you? That’s what Gregory says anyway. Unlike my sister Linda, I’m not much of a feminist. And as it turned out it suited me, too, because of all my pregnancy and miscarriage problems. Three little ghosts I carry with me wherever I go. And then Billy. Being a mother is full-time work, says Gregory.
‘I look forward to hearing from you soon,’ I wrote. ‘Yours sincerely, Hazel Stevenson.’
I wondered about Ma’s clay thing.
Gregory had invited Ruby Gonzalez to dinner the following Friday. I asked if her husband was coming too and he told me she wasn’t married and she hadn’t got plans to bring a boyfriend. And I could have sworn she was pregnant. I invited Linda, too. I left a message on her answerphone saying she could bring a friend. I spent hours polishing and cleaning the house, with Billy chattering away over his cars. Then I brushed my hair – the tangle-prone, wafting kind of hair that shampoo manufacturers call ‘damaged’, or ‘flyaway’, or simply ‘problem’. Then I applied make-up: foundation, blusher, lipstick, the works. I don’t know what came over me. Perhaps I was sick of being invisible. But I might as well not have bothered, because Gregory didn’t notice the difference and afterwards it left a tenacious brown rim round the washbasin.
As the days pas
sed, I felt increasingly fretful and restless, and had a feeling of foreboding about something too vague to name. On the morning of that Friday, the day the dinner party was scheduled, I went back to Manxheath. Dr Stern’s secretary had rung with a ten-minute appointment at eleven. I got there early and wandered about the grounds, the thin snow creaking under my feet. Once again I was struck by the trees. This time they were lumped with snow. I found them restfully static. Gazing at them, I managed to shove the usual lurking memories of my mother – her monstrous size, her facial tics, her grotesque flirtation, her swinging bag – to the back of my mind.
At eleven I knocked on Dr Stern’s door. He opened it, patted my upper arm, and waved me to a big leather chair.
‘Just excuse me a moment,’ he said, and shuffled some papers on his desk. ‘I’ve just finished this article about autism for the Lancet, and it has to be faxed this morning.’
He smiled briskly across at me, and pulled the top off his pen. I remembered how we’d kept hold of one another’s hands after the handshake last time, and wondered whether the feeling that had passed between us was being echoed when he touched my arm. But maybe it was nothing. Doctors are taught to touch their patients, and it extends to relatives, too. A nice warm feeling is so easily aroused. Gregory does it to everyone.
Through his window I could see a patch of snowdrops and crocuses. On his desk was one of those heavy glass paperweights that look like they have squashed sea anemones inside. When Dr Stern finished feeding his paper on autism into his fax machine, he got straight to the point.
‘Your mother is suffering something of a relapse,’ he said.
He had soft dark eyes like I imagine Jesus Christ, or Judas Iscariot, had; the kind of eyes you see in religious paintings in poorly lit museums. I stared into them sort of mesmerised, and he stared straight back, radiating infinite kindness, and gentleness, and understanding. Again he had that strange effect on me of making me want to cry.
‘Paranoid schizophrenia is a tricky disease to treat,’ he went on. His voice was very gentle, but very decisive, and he stressed particular words carefully, like a teacher. ‘I hope you won’t be offended if we restrict all visits for a while.’
They were trying to modify her medication to cope with her current state of mind, he said. The results were somewhat distressing – for her and for other people. She was in isolation for her own protection. I pictured her alone, playing patience, writing her mad letters, reading Iris Murdoch, and making little effigies in clay with her big fingers. Farmer’s fingers. The thought of them for some reason churned up a great clod inside me. I said I wasn’t offended, because I didn’t visit her much anyway. In fact only twice, and the last time – but I couldn’t help wondering. If that. If that had something to do with it. If it was my fault. My fault, Doctor. Dr Stern. If my visit had. You know, distressed her. If I had wrecked his work on her. If, if.
I was on the verge of tears – not for my mother, but for me, I suppose. Dr Stern was making me cry. I couldn’t stay. Really couldn’t, Doctor. Not like this. Not usually like this. Snuffling into the tissue he tactfully handed me, I wrote my phone number down on his pad and rushed out.
‘Can we talk about my mother some other time?’ I blurted at him through my tears as the door swung shut.
I didn’t know if he heard. Linda would have taken a dim view.
I had to prepare dinner for six people that night. Stuffed mushrooms followed by peppered duck followed by lemon mousse and cheese. Ma once made me do a cookery course.
‘I told you it would come in useful,’ murmured a Scots voice, far back in my head, as I prepared the ingredients. ‘And remember that more salt’s better than less.’
I poured quite a lot in.
You think you’ll always stay young, don’t you? I do. I’m thirty-two, which isn’t so young really. It’s the age by which you should have achieved something, if you were ever going to, even a bit. Look at Christ. He was only a year older when he was tacked up on the cross. I spent so long at the poly doing this and that – interior design, business studies – and going on holiday and having boyfriends and all that eighties stuff, getting drunk on sangría in Ibiza, wearing white high-heels to discos in Club Med, working in travel agents’ offices. I went on holiday a lot, being in the business and getting the discounts.
Slowly work the flour into the fat, and remove the garlic clove.
That’s how I met Gregory. He was booking a holiday for him and ‘a friend’, and then the friend pulled out and I said to him as a joke, because he couldn’t get a refund, ‘Oh, I’ll come with you, if you like.’
It was just a joke, but he took it seriously, because he’s that way. We had nothing in common, but Spain is quite a good place for that. I sunbathed while he read books; he was studying for his obs and gynae exam. The sex was quite a challenge, as was the compulsory musical accompaniment; I found out he was a Catholic and not really used to seeing fornication in recreational terms. This turned me on; I felt I liberated him. I didn’t realise that it would leave me chained instead. Now I wouldn’t know how to seduce a man if I tried. For eight years, it’s been a solid diet of Gregory and fertility charts. And then when Billy came along, I disappeared. Nobody seemed to miss me.
Baste the bird regularly, and add the sauce at the very last minute. Carve and replace under heat before serving as this is a dish that must always be piping hot!
Dr Stern phoned while I was cooking. I had spilt some lemon juice on the floor and Billy was sliding about in it and I was yelling at him when the phone rang, so I shouted, ‘Yes?’ down the phone, assuming it was family.
‘Is this a bad time to call, Mrs Stevenson?’ he asked.
‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, adjusting my voice, reaching for the biscuits. I gave Billy three, so he would shut up while I was talking. That’s one of the things I do that makes me feel like a bad mother.
‘I’m sorry I got so emotional, Dr Stern,’ I said. ‘I just feel ripped into minuscule shreds about the whole thing, like it’s my fault she’s having a new crisis.’
‘I know that’s how you feel, but it’s quite unjustified,’ he said. ‘You really mustn’t worry about any effect you might have on your mother. It might well have happened anyway. The disease she suffers from is very, er …’ There was a very long pause while he searched for the word. It was worth waiting for: ‘cavalier’.
‘Can something be done? I mean – permanently?’
‘We pride ourselves in our pharmacological approach to illness in Manxheath,’ replied Dr Stern. ‘No point treating the underlying emotional problems until we’ve tidied up some of the more alarming and florid symptoms. The brain is the most intriguing organ in the body,’ he went on. ‘Did you know, Mrs Stevenson, that we have only managed to map a tiny area of it? It’s like ocean on the globe. Uncharted, for the most part. Ignored. And your mother’s is no exception.’
Guilt again. And surprise: this doctor seemed to find my mother interesting.
‘See her brain as a vast sea of chemicals, Mrs Stevenson, whose balance has been disrupted by, say, an earthquake on the sea-bed which has set off a series of underwater explosions.’
‘Or something that’s come along and polluted it,’ I said.
‘Absolutely! I see you’ve got the picture. Anyway, we’re trying to restore the chemical ecology through some state-of-the-art intervention. We are lucky to have a man called Hollingbroke on our staff. He has a way with drugs. If it weren’t all so scientific,’ he laughed, ‘you’d almost call it instinct.’
I laughed too. He had certainly cheered me up, with his oceanic metaphor. He said he’d contact me again as soon as there was enough improvement in Ma’s state of mind to allow further visits.
‘Thank you so much, Doctor,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very kind.’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Schizophrenia is very stressful for the whole family. You all have to take it easy and above all not feel responsible.’
After I’d hung up I foun
d myself awash in self-pity and relief, and ate five biscuits rather fast.
At seven o’clock Linda arrived with her new boyfriend: Duncan. It turned out she met him at the mental hospital. He was another regular visitor – the brother of someone autistic, or ‘blocked’, as Duncan put it. He had that sheepish, modest look that classified him as a Type One, according to the questionnaire, but puzzlingly, he wore a lot of aftershave, which is a Type Two characteristic. So tonight Linda had the best of both worlds.
‘Why the fuck don’t you ever have an ashtray in this place?’ Linda accused me.
‘Because we prefer people not to smoke here,’ said Gregory in what I call his ‘voice of authority’.
I could tell Linda was in the mood for a stand-off as she went and fetched an eggcup from the kitchen and lit up in front of him. An hour later Ruby Gonzalez showed up and plonked herself on the sofa. I poured her a huge sherry, but she said she was only drinking fruit juice. She attacked the peanuts with gusto. There was chatter about this and that. The snow, the catalepsy outbreak in Jutland, childcare, the Fish Wars, wallpapering. I had to dash in and out of the kitchen to check the dinner. Then just when we were giving up on him, Gregory’s step-brother arrived. John lived locally and he and Greg only had each other left when it came to family, so he always filled in when we were one missing. As far as I could work out, this was what John was for. I saw no other purpose to him. A dinner-party man, with a range of ten after-dinner anecdotes and jokes, all of which I’d heard. They involved sex, farting and aeroplane journeys, mostly. It took courage for me even to look at Ruby Gonzalez. She gave me a bad feeling, like I was drowning.
‘You’re looking great, Ruby,’ I said to her. ‘Are you pregnant, by any chance?’ (I had to know.)
‘No, no,’ she said with a big julie of a smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m just fat.’
