Whereas originally I feared I might never shut up. Now I simply can’t go on because tears are blocking my speech. I clench my fist to my mouth, wanting to punch myself in the face to stop me, to shut me up. Hot tears bubble from my eyes and I’m making the most inhuman sound. I want to run, but I don’t. I shake so much I fear the couch will move. I want to scream. Surely if I scream, that will get rid of all this weird, wired energy inside me. I scream, but it stops nothing. Still the tears fall. Still I shake. And I keep saying, again and again, I am so sorry.
Eventually I calm down. As has happened before, my body slowly stops shaking and a numbness washes over me. It’s like a hot flush, seeping from my head to my toes, and it’s comforting. Like a warm electric blanket. I don’t know if it’s a blood rush or my body reacting to the shaking, the screaming, but it’s like I’ve been injected with a sedative. I feel the neck of my blouse sticking coldly to my neck, wet with tears. Suddenly the couch feels so comfortable I want to lie back and sleep. And never wake up? No. I do not feel like that. I may be upset, I may be all over the place, but I will never attack like with like. I am not depressed. I will not allow myself to be. I will get through this. I want to come out the other side and be normal.
In the following days I know I’ve blown it. He’s never going to come back now. After years of bottling up stuff that I wanted to say, I’ve let it out into the open and it’s probably wafted on the ether to him and he’s heard it. So why should he want to see me again now? He was the one in distress and what’s my reaction? It’s all about me! No. If I was him, I’d wash my hands of me. I decide I don’t like this grief therapy nonsense. I’m not sure it’s giving me many answers. I’m not sure it’s meant to, mind you, but all the same it only feels like semi-closure. I’m getting a lot off my chest, which is good, I guess, but not getting much back. Then again, how much can you actually get back from a dead person? Very little, I guess. Roberta is adamant I will get there eventually, and see, reap and acknowledge the benefits. I’m not so sure. If anything, it’s making me feel even more guilty. Guilty I’m expressing my selfishness when he was only ever ill.
‘I remember when Mums died, bless her, I don’t think I actually cried for a good twenty years,’ Mungo says while tucking into a kumquat in his office.
We’ve decided to do our departmental meeting at lunchtime to give us a free evening. I’ve brought in a salad I picked up from Pret as a treat. He seems to have brought in food that can only be eaten as if performing cunnilingus. He’s telling me how he coped when his mum died when he was about ten.
‘I went into “looking after Dads” mode. I’m sure it’s perfectly common, but it did mean I constipated myself of all emotion until I met Fionnula. She was my emotional laxative, I guess.’ And he licks the inside of a passion fruit lasciviously. ‘I remember once she gave me this hot-finger massage. We were in a caravan in Mevagissey at the time and oh, the release. The stuff that came out of me.’
I’m slurping on a coconut smoothie and feel a bit sick.
‘I thought I’d never stop crying.’
And relax. I can’t face any more smoothie, mind.
‘Do you call your mum “Mums” and your dad “Dads”, Mungo?’ I ask, unsure if I’ve heard him right.
‘You know me, Karen. Never conventional.’
I have decided I like Mungo. It was wrong of me to judge his personality based on the fact that he often teams open-toed sandals with grey socks. That is the behaviour of a shallow person, and I’ve decided I don’t want to be that type. It is right to judge the same personality based on his ‘emotionally monogamous but sexually promiscuous’ thing, but I’ve decided I like him all the more for that. Although he doesn’t broadcast it to the nation – imagine that on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show: ‘And coming up we have Mungo, who’s going to tell us what it’s like to be a swinger!’ – his proclivities impress me, in as much as he is cocking a snook at society and ploughing his own furrow. Or someone else’s furrow, come to think of it. Quite a lot of other furrows, probably. I should take inspiration from this and find the courage to care less about what other people think.
Not that anyone’s been too judgemental since my return to school. The kids have no idea why I was off, obviously, and have given me the nickname Sick Note, which I quite like. And whereas as a child I used to think that all grown-ups knew everything kids got up to, I’m not so sure it’s the same the other way round: Keisha-Vanessa never mentioned my Brazilian as administered by her mother all those weeks ago, and Connor has never mentioned the fact that I have stayed in his house in a spooning situation. I’ve gone into his file on the school computer system and looked up all his notes from his primary school and this one, searching in vain for some info on a name change or the fact that he has a false identity. I could find nothing. So goodness only knows what’s gone on there. I certainly don’t know, and I don’t really like to think of it. I did like Kevin. I don’t spoon with just anyone, particularly so soon after my boyfriend dying – even if I was in denial at the time – but whenever I think about him, an alarm bell rings in my head. It’s a really loud siren. And I know where I’ve heard it before – it’s the sort that sounds when a bomb goes off. A bomb planted by the IRA.
OK, I don’t really have any idea whether sirens go off when a bomb explodes, but in my head, right now, they do. Anyway, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that something’s not quite right there. He’s trouble. With a capital T. I have had a narrow escape.
Meredith’s still staying with her ‘friend’, just till Dad goes home, which will probably be this weekend. It’s my birthday on Saturday (whoopee doo) and he reckons he’ll hang on for that, then get a coach back to Liverpool on Sunday. Meredith can then move back into the spare room.
I’m a bit put out, truth be told, and unimpressed with old Meredith. I know I wasn’t exactly over the moon about her being completely obsessed with me and moving in with me so she could pounce, but why did she flee so quickly? And why didn’t she pounce? I know I was hardly ever there, and always keen to avoid her lesbeterian clutches, but she didn’t so much as graze the hem of my nightie if we passed on the landing. Call yourself a predatory lez? Yikes. I’ve known amoeba with more backbone. And now she’s obviously diverted her affections to someone else. It’s very frustrating for me. I thought I looked like Kate Winslet. What’s the matter with me now?
Maybe she thinks I should have been sectioned. Maybe she thinks I’m an out-and-out mad woman of Shallot. I guess that would be enough to put you off someone. They’re a fickle breed, PE teachers. If I ever see her putting a penny in the slot of someone collecting for a mental health charity, I’ll say one word to her, and one word alone: hypocrite.
I have asked her about this new ‘friend’ and I’m pretty much sure she’s changed her name twice. The first time it was Eileen, said with a stutter, like this: ‘E-e-eileen’. To the rhythm of ‘Come On, Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners. Then the next time I ask about Eileen, she looks blank and says, ‘Eileen?’
I go, ‘Duh! Your girlfriend?!’
‘Oh. You’ve remembered it wrong. Her name’s . . . Ivy-Jean.’
Now excuse me, but I don’t think I did mishear, because I remember thinking the way she said it fitted the rhythm of ‘Come on, Eileen’. And anyway, who on earth is called Ivy-Jean? It’s too Nancy Drew for my liking, but then I always suspected her of being a bit like that. Maybe she’s American. From Noo Yoik.
I realize I am distracting myself, displacing my brain. It’s something Roberta says I am good at, as if I needed telling. She says if I become aware of it, I should try and think about Michael. She also says this weekend might be tough, as it will be the first of my birthdays since he died. I tell her I’ve often felt quite lonely on my birthday due to Michael’s emotional absence, but she claims forewarned is forearmed. She also thinks I need to mark his death somehow. She thinks this may help. She asks if we marked Evie’s death in any way other than the funeral and the grave. I tell h
er we did.
Michael used to like talking to her through my tummy, and till we knew if she was going to be a boy or a girl, he used to call the baby ‘Sunshine’. I worried that sounded like it was a boy, so he changed it to the more generic, in his eyes, ‘Sunflower’. I worried this sounded a bit too girly, but he resolutely refused to change it again for fear of confusing ‘Sunflower’. So when she died, he hit upon the bright idea of planting a sunflower in a tub in the backyard. He made a cloche for the burgeoning buds as they crept up using the cut-off neck of a bottle of tonic water. And lo and behold, like our very own beanstalk, one sunflower grew and grew, its face chasing the sun as its yellow petals burst forth, and it stood there like a big, shiny aciiiid face, serene against the shabby grey bricks of our backyard.
But then disaster struck. We were a bit green about being green-fingered, and after several weeks of majesty overnight the sunflower wilted, collapsed, went dark brown and died. Honestly, it looked so forlorn, like it had been assassinated. The seeds that dropped from its humongous face created such a mess on the ground. Like it had been shot. It was horrific. We hadn’t realized they lasted for such a short space of time, and it was more than a little ironic that this was how we’d chosen to celebrate Evie’s existence – also too short – on this planet. We read up on the plant then and discovered that if you planted the seeds out again, more would grow next year, but it seemed cruel, taunting. Like Mother Nature was rubbing our predicament, and hers, in our face. Michael said he needed to think about it.
The next day he came in from work with a four-foot-high plastic sunflower with silky petals. He arranged it in a waste-paper basked stuffed with crêpe paper in our bedroom. A more permanent memorial.
I’ve never liked artificial flowers. I don’t think they look quite right. I didn’t like the appearance of this and it proved to be a bugger to clean. I sucked up one of its petals when attempting to clean it with the Dyson. I dutifully stuck it back on with superglue and Michael was none the wiser, but I couldn’t tell him how unattractive I found it. It was far too important to him. Every morning he would get up and say, ‘Morning, Sunflower!’ and wink at it. Some mornings I would too. Some mornings I still do.
But a way of remembering Michael? A toy railway round the backyard perhaps? Get someone to paint a mural of Paul Weller on the back of the house? Wendy suggests planting a tree somewhere when we talk one night on the phone. Then there is a cavernous silence. And she apologizes.
I’ll have to give it some more thought.
In the meantime there’s the small matter of my birthday to get through.
The night before my birthday, before going to bed, I check my Facebook. I have thirty-seven messages. I open the newest. It’s from Laura. I read it, then get out my phone to call her.
TWENTY-FOUR
I lie in bed not wanting to get up. Three things are playing on my mind:
1. It is my birthday.
2. I am having a surprise party, and
3. Today I am going to find Michael (I’ve decided).
OK, let’s get the first two items out of the way.
There are few things in life (well, apart from the events that led up to number three, of course) worse than a surprise party. But even worse than that is discovering you’re having a surprise party and having to pretend you know nothing and act all surprised when you turn up to it. Particularly today, because today I can’t. Be. Bothered. Or, if I’m going to nail my true Scouse colours to the apathy mast, I can’t. Be. Arsed.
I was hoping I’d wake with a modicum of enthusiasm, that I’d see the light dancing through my curtains, the petals of the sunflower dancing in the breeze where the sash doesn’t shut properly, and be full of the joys, but no. Nothing. Just a familiar sense of dread. I rarely enjoy being the centre of attention, and I’m certainly not relishing being so at the moment, when my skin feels thinner than usual and my moods have a tendency to fluctuate all over the place.
Now, on to the ‘finding Michael’ thing. This does get me quite excited, so much so that I actually deign to sit up in bed. I pull my knees up to my chest and rest my head on them. Well, on the duvet, but you know what I mean. I want to believe it. I want to believe that today I will see him. In fact, I’m kind of banking on it.
Before I can think too much of my adventure into contacting the unloving, however, there is a tentative tap at the door and Dad tiptoes in and presents me with breakfast in bed. Well, he gives me a cup of tea and a breakfast cereal bar because he claims he saw an advert in which soldiers ate them before marching for miles. I’m touched, and feign smiles and giggles well as I open my card – clearly bought from the local garage, and meant for a boy: it features a speedboat and a moustachioed man in shades on the boat in a Seventies tracksuit drinking a glass of champagne. Oh, the glamour! – and my present: thirty pounds in WHSmith vouchers. I’m not bonkers about stationery, but I’m sure I’ll find something. He looks chuffed that I look chuffed, but it’s not a smile on my lips; it’s a desperate gurn to stop myself from saying, ‘I know about the party,’ and, ‘I am going to find Michael today.’
How do I know about this surprise party that I’m not meant to know anything about? Blame my mother’s booming voice, as per. She was over the other night, and while she was making the tea, I slipped away to my bedroom to fashion the fluff from my belly button into figurines of well-known ice skaters. OK, that’s a lie. I came up here just to sit on my bed and take cover from a monumental row. It’s getting to something when you’re in your mid-thirties and your parents choose to tussle verbally in your house.
I could hear Dad telling her she was ‘making a holy show’ of herself, and Mum saying he wouldn’t know her clitoris if it came up to him and slapped him round the face and said, ‘Hi! I’m Clitoris! What’s your name?’ and then Dad repeating that she was ‘making a holy show’ of herself. Then Mum cranked up the volume and I heard her throw something in the kitchen, possibly a Le Creuset pan, as it made quite a loud crack, possibly against a wall, then I heard her say he’d been ‘frigging useless with organizing this surprise party’. Then Dad hushing her with ‘Shut up or our Karen’ll hear’ and Mum rejoindering with ‘You make me sick’ and him replying, ‘I keep trying to help, but you and that Meredith have got it all stitched up between you. Nice one!’
So then I knew, and I still know. I’ve been tempted many times to sit Mum down and say, ‘Please. No party, surprise or other,’ but she’s been hard to pin down, rushing in, throwing the tea on, then rushing out again with the air of a ‘synchronize watches!’ character from a spy film. I toyed with asking Dad to intervene, to stop this madness, but knew without asking that Mum would be furious with him for piddling on her chips. She’d probably accuse him of telling me about the party just to ruin things for her. Meredith has studiously avoided me all week, and I couldn’t be bothered/arsed to enter into conversations with her where I had to pretend I had no plans for my birthday and to have her making out, nonchalantly, that she was busy Saturday.
Now, I have to get out of the house today. I am not going to find Michael here.
I tell Dad I want to go out for the day to gauge his reaction.
‘OK,’ he’s saying, ‘but when will you be back? Be good if you were back by five.’
I say, ‘Five will be fine,’ and make out I assume Mum is cooking me a birthday tea.
He agrees eagerly, claiming, ‘Yes, that is exactly what she is doing.’ He then enquires where I’m going.
I say, ‘Just out.’
He assumes I am going to spend my vouchers.
I tap them excitedly. ‘Yep, can’t wait! I’m really looking forward to Mum’s birthday tea,’ I lie, overegging the pudding of deceit somewhat.
He looks at me like he can smell a rat. Then I grimace, making out I was joking, and he relaxes. Phew.
Two hours later I’m with Laura on Whitechapel Road.
‘I love what you’ve done with your hair,’ I gush, and she looks genuinely thrilled. I do act
ually, in a Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served? kind of way. The tight-knit curls have gone and in their place is a burgundy swirl of candy floss, and I can’t tell whether it’s a wig or a weave or the real thing. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about the other week. Whenever it was. When I brought that card.’
‘I know, babe. You said in your message, is it. You musta been fackin’ all over the place, you get me?’
I like the way she speaks: part Essex, part Jamaica, part indecipherable. Her teeth are perfectly white. I want to hate her for this, but can’t, as she’s being so sweet.
‘Yeah, I was a bit.’
‘Michael was always so nice ’bout you.’
‘Was he?’
‘Sha’ap . . .’ course he was! Always gan on aba’ what a brilliant teacher you was, is it.’
‘Oh, that’s nice.’
She is opening a door with a big set of keys. She makes me promise not to tell anyone where the secret door is, in case loads of people want to come and hang out there. Personally I don’t think this is likely, but I am not going to argue with her today. As we’re descending the stairs, I decide to come clean.
‘Laura? Do you believe in God?’
‘Too bloody right, you get me?’
‘What d’you think happens to you when you die?’
‘Sha’ap, you worried about Michael? He’ll be fine, babe, is it.’
‘Yeah, but what if he’s not? I mean, do you believe in ghosts?’
‘Sha’ap, it’s my favourite film.’
‘What is?’
‘Ghost.’
‘Oh yeah. Patrick Swayze’s well fit, isn’t he?’
‘He’s dead, babe. He was in that Dirty Dancin’ ’n’ shiz, in it?’
The Confusion of Karen Carpenter Page 29
