by Meg Mason
As he hared away, a gap formed and she ran towards the other side. Horns blasted, and she was doused by puddle water as a motorbike swerved to avoid her.
In her pocket she held onto the key for her mother’s house, tied on a ratty piece of pink ribbon. She had found it in the metal locker beside Rae’s bed, along with her plastic coin purse and a brown sandwich bag filled with pictures of Julia Roberts at Cannes.
Abi kept running. She thought of Jude. She was no longer frightened about going back to her mother’s house; she only wanted to be inside somewhere.
When she reached the Merton Road, she weaved her way between bundled-up people who’d risked coming out. She passed the Superdrug where her waters had broken the year before. It was closed, but a Christmas carol piped out of wire-caged speakers. ‘Joy to the World, the Lord is Come.’
Finally, she saw the streetlights of Highside Circuit and stumbled up Pat’s brick path. Darya wanted her to come in and get dry and eat something. Abi declined as politely as she could and the little girl brought Jude over. They had been sandwiched all together on the sofa watching a repeat of the Queen’s Speech. He smelled like baby shampoo and was wearing a warm pyjama suit that Darya said she could return later.
Abi carried him outside and stepped over the brick divide. The smell, as she pushed open the front door, made her stomach turn so violently that she gagged. She held Jude’s face into her shoulder. Bulging polythene rubbish bags lined the hallway. The carpet of the front room was hidden by layers of shredded magazine pages, like the lining of a litter box. Wads of soiled bedding and clothes had been pushed into one corner, and the card table stood like a lame animal on three legs. The walls had been turned into a shrine to Rae’s favourite stars, hundreds of pictures cut out and sticky-taped together in messy striations. Abi looked in horror as the muted television illuminated a vast montage of Kate Middleton on her wedding day.
Then, as fast as she could, she threw open the window. Wind swirled in and picked up the magazine pieces like snow. She wrenched down the mural, which came away in a single sheet.
The kitchen was a midden of Argos catalogues, plastic bags and full pint cartons of skim milk. One had already exploded, and spattered up the window like a bloodstain bleached of colour. The cork tiles stuck to Abi’s ballet flats as she picked her way across the kitchen to open the back door. In the freezer, she found two months’ worth of ready-meals that Pat had left there, labelled with days of the week, entombed in a rough white block of ice.
When, from the corner of her eye, Abi saw the rustling of something alive, she ran out of the house and found Darya still waiting on the doorstep. She opened her arms for the baby. ‘When my husband is home, I come and help you,’ she said, taking him inside.
Abi took a deep breath and braced herself to re-enter. Upstairs, she found her own bedroom almost as she had left it, the door sealed against the creep of Rae’s madness. She pulled open one of her drawers, looking for something she could tie over her nose and mouth. There was nothing inside except a single baby sock and her ancient Discman, stuck all over with apple stickers. She opened it and saw the hypnobirthing CD she had meant to return to the library. Without knowing why, she put on the foamy headphones and pressed play.
‘You’re comfortable. In control,’ said a gentle new-age voice, over a synthesised version of Pachelbel’s Canon. Abi had once described the piece to Phil, claiming it was her favourite classical song, although she didn’t know its name.
Phil guessed it in one and then said, ‘No dear, that’s like having Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as your Desert Island Disc.’ Then she made Abi sit down and listen to Bach’s cello concertos from start to finish, snapping off the player at the end and saying, ‘Do you see?’
‘Relax,’ the voice went on. ‘Your body knows what to do. Let your muscles become very relaxed. Your delivery will be successful in every way.’
Now, beyond fatigue, beyond hunger, beyond everything, Abi removed her heavy hoodie, pressed it to her nose and mouth and walked downstairs.
‘You are the source of life. You are the universal mother. Run to the pain.’
93.
Conversationally at Southgate Centre
Abi worked through the night, ignoring her roiling nausea. She concentrated on the soothing voice of the CD in her ears and the task of bagging rubbish and dragging it outside. She didn’t feel cold, although the windows remained open to the night air. She was afraid a heater would cause the liquefied rubbish already in bags to stew where it sat.
When social services opened again after Christmas, she would do what she already knew how to do. Call the benefits office, arrange an emergency loan, the single parent allowance, a waste collection. But in the meantime there was only filling the next plastic sack until it threatened to split.
She emptied the kitchen cupboards of dry goods sticky with weevils and used a dustpan to shovel refuse off the small square of bathroom floor. Darya knocked on the door early the next morning with a jam crumpet wrapped in kitchen paper, which Abi ate without letting it touch her skin or clothes.
For the week after that, Darya came over whenever she could with her own bucket of cleaning things. She chose a corner to start on without asking and sang quietly to herself as she worked.
When Abi visited Rae in the mornings, Darya looked after Jude, wheeling him up to the play park with the others in a huge double pram. Abi could not bring herself to take Jude along.
‘What is it that you listen to in your player?’ Darya asked one evening as they bagged up newspapers in the hallway. Abi fetched the Discman and, blushing, offered her the headphones.
Darya’s eyes became enormous as she pressed the headphones to both ears.
‘It is like my English lesson listening,’ she said loudly. ‘Only . . .’ She tugged one headphone away from her ear.
‘You’d not want to use it conversationally at Southgate Centre,’ Abi said.
‘Excuse me, do you know the way to the station?’ Darya laughed. ‘My womanhood is opening like a flower.’
After that, whenever they passed on the stairs, hauling bags and buckets, they exchanged gentle encouragements.
‘Your body knows what it must do, Abi.’
‘You are a strong, capable woman. You are deserving of an uncomplicated birth.’
When all the rubbish was gone, Abi began carrying out the furniture.
One morning, as she tugged down the stained nets from the bay window, she watched a van stop in front of the mounting pile and a man get out to load Rae’s chair into the back. Nobody wanted the cathode ray television, the thinning pink wedding towels, or the fly-speckled standard lamp. Eventually, on a bleak, blustery Monday early in the new year, a council truck rumbled up and consumed the entire kerbside monument that Abi had made to her mother’s life. Only once in that time did Abi cry, and only because the bottle of hospital-grade disinfectant Darya bought for the floors filled each emptied room with the clean, sharp tang of eucalyptus. That night, like every other, Abi crept upstairs bone-tired and, after scrubbing herself in the shower, curled herself around Jude, already asleep on her single bed. She took out her old phone and closed her eyes. ‘Once upon a time there were three little kittens,’ Phil began in her rich radio voice. ‘Mittens, Tom Kitten, and Moppet.’
94.
Hello Morris
Abi left the wardrobe in her mother’s bedroom until last. She knew it was the repository of Rae’s real treasures. In the years after the accident, Abi would sneak in to examine the photo albums and trinket boxes kept there before carefully putting everything back in its place. Now she was going to throw it all away. She was sick of it all. Sick of her own longing, sorrow and sadness and wanting. That’s what had got her into so much trouble. If she had nothing and wanted nothing, she could be free. Holding an empty bin liner in one hand, she tried to pull open the door, which had warped against the frame.
After a sharp kick, the door gave and a waft of wet, musty air filled her nostrils. Ins
ide, the shelves bowed under the weight of shoeboxes and bulging albums, but the arrangement was unusually orderly. No rubbish, no magazines. Abi drew out a thick, plastic-coated album. It made a cracking noise as she lifted its blue and white gingham print cover away from the first page. There, behind filmy plastic, was Abi. Missing her front teeth and wearing a red home-knitted jumper and tartan skirt, sitting beside Louise, who had one foot up on the brown sofa that Abi had recently dragged out to the curb. Louise was pretending to rest her elbow on her sister’s head and grinning at the camera.
It hurt to breathe as Abi turned the page – another crack – and saw her family, all four of them, standing in front of the turnstiles at Regent’s Park Zoo.
‘We’ll make a day of it.’ Rae always used to say that. Louise had her fingers in her ears and was making faces at the stranger they must have asked to take the picture. The girls had on matching navy duffel coats and Abi was leaning in against Rae, wearing a tight mustard polo neck and denim skirt, hair freshly coloured red. She was smiling with her face upturned to the man in the cord jacket, head and shoulders taller than her, standing beside her with his arm around her back. He looked proudly down the lens.
‘Hello Dad,’ Abi said, putting the tip of her finger on her father’s chest. ‘Hello Morris.’ She wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist, then faster and faster, she turned each page. Morris wearing a pair of narrow jeans and leaning against a car he was washing in the street outside Highside, brand new nets in the windows. Another one of them lined up for the Tower of London, Louise scowling because – Abi remembered – she’d wanted Mr Whippy and not got it. A series of empty pages followed and then, on the final page, under the bubbling plastic, was every picture of Jude that Abi had ever sent to Rae from her phone camera.
They were terrible pictures, grainy and blurry, a half-moon of pink thumb often covering the corner of the frame. Jude on the platform of the pool, Jude on the grass, Jude sitting in the bottom of the shower wearing Abi’s goggles. Each one had been printed out on plain copy paper. Rae must have gone all the way to the library, more than a mile away, and paid 20p a page. They were trimmed with scissors and arranged in a neat grid, the corners held down with stickers, roses and rabbits and love hearts. At the top of the page, Rae had written ‘GRANDMA’S LITTLE TREASURE!’ in a shaky hand. Abi let the album slide off her lap and slumped forward until her forehead was pressed into the lumpy floor. It absorbed the sound of her crying each of their names. Rae, Louise, Morris. Jude, Stu. Kind, lovely Roger. Phil. She wanted them all.
95.
Let me go now
Abi had promised to bring Jude down to the hospital. For more than a fortnight, she had put it off, saying he was at nursery during the day, which was almost true although nursery meant Darya’s house. As soon as Abi could get her old job back, she would sort out something more permanent. But compelled by what she had found in Rae’s wardrobe, Abi took Jude to visit his grandmother. She understood now that Rae loved her as much as she could love anything from inside her windowless grief. Late into the evenings, Abi had peeled every photograph out of the album and wiped them clean. She had studied each lock of baby hair wrapped in tissue, each matchbox of milk teeth, every trophy and trinket of Egan family life, realising as she went that it hadn’t always been a regime of quiet desperation. There had been birthday cakes and Christmas trees, holidays, a station wagon. As Abi put the best bits into a shoebox she would take to the hospital, to prove to Rae that she had been happy once, she thought fleetingly of Brigga’s Box of Sad Things, probably still buried between blankets in the big house.
In the front row of the 44 bus, Abi held Jude on her lap. She had put the shoebox in a Sainsbury’s bag along with her ragged copy of First Year with Baby and the hypnobirthing CD she was going to return on their way home. Jude had woken early and he rested his head against her chest, as they both stared bleary-eyed at the boarded-up shopfronts and chicken outlets along the high street before passing onto the A-road. In her back pocket was the best photograph from the zoo, which she was going to stick up beside Rae’s bed.
When they arrived, Abi zipped off Jude’s jacket and walked the familiar corridors to the High-Dependency Unit. She carried him through the ward, accustomed now to the pip-pip of machines and suppressed moans coming from each curtained cubicle. Rae was sleeping.
‘Mum,’ Abi said in a loud whisper. ‘Rae!’ she said again when her mother didn’t stir. ‘Guess who I’ve got with me? Rae.’ Abi reached out and touched the ridge of her mother’s thigh beneath the white blanket. ‘Mum!’
Slowly, Rae stirred and turned her face towards Abi and Jude, who was burrowing into his mother’s neck. Abi turned him around so Rae could see him.
‘Oh love,’ she said, barely audible. ‘Abi my girl. Look at him, eh?’
As she spoke, a thin ribbon of saliva leaked out of the side of her mouth. Abi picked up a corner of the sheet and wiped it away.
‘He’s a big boy. Aren’tcha? What a big boy.’ Rae tried to smile at him. ‘Haven’t you done well, eh . . .’ she began, before pausing to get her breath back.
Abi put the supermarket bag on the floor and reached into her back pocket. ‘I brought you some things to look at.’ She held up the photograph so Rae could see it.
‘Ah, look at that,’ her mother said with a tight smile.
‘It’s nice, isn’t it? It’s to cheer you up. We were having fun, weren’t we? Until I fell over, remember? I was going to put it up somewhere.’ Abi looked around for a section of wall clear of cables and monitors, alarms and sockets.
‘Take it home wi’ you, love. I’ll have a good look another day.’
‘I could just put it in your drawer and you can look at it later.’
‘Abi. I don’t want it. I can’t look at it. I want to go.’ A gurgling sound followed from the back of her throat. For an instant, her eyes appeared to bulge in their deep sockets.
‘What? Where do you want to go?’ Abi moved Jude from one hip to the other. He was getting so heavy.
‘Abi, I just want to go. It was Louise that made me a mum and I was never a mother one more day, after your dad’s done what he’s done.’
‘What do you mean? Mum! What are you talking about?’
Rae’s face appeared to cave in as she screwed her eyes closed. ‘He’s done it to himself, Abi. You know that. You know he has. He’s gone and put the gas on.’
A dazzling aura lit up in Abi’s peripheral vision, shifting and blurring at the edges. ‘He wouldn’t do that! Why would he do that?’
‘If I knew that Abi . . . if I knew that . . .’ Rae looked down at the outline of her ruined body under the blankets.
‘You told me it was an accident.’
‘Of course I did. You were just a titchy thing. What else was I going to tell you?’
‘But what about Louise though? He would never do that to Louise.’ Abi tightened her hold on Jude, as another flash of light burst at her temples.
‘He didn’t know she’d come back in, did he? I should never have let her run home.’ Rae covered her face with her awful hands. Each fingernail was thickened and brown. ‘I should have kept her with me. But look what I went and done, letting her run off. Why else would I do this to myself, Abi. Why would I?’
Rae could not show her face and Abi was consumed with pity. ‘I was no mother to you, Abi. I’m sorry but that’s how it was.’
Gently, Abi lowered herself onto the side of the bed and held Jude over her shoulder so he could look the other way. ‘You could have told me once I got older, so I’d understand and then I might have been able to help you.’
‘I were helping you. I took it all into myself so maybe you’d never have to know. That was the only thing I could do for you, Abi, my love. You don’t need me now, do you? Let me go, would you love, eh? I’m that tired.’ A long, low bronchial wheeze came out of her mouth, and as she expelled the breath, Abi smelt something like meat beginning to turn.
‘Mum! It’s all right. D
on’t talk. Mum!’ Rae’s entire body began to tremble beneath the blanket. Her lips curled back, exposing dark bottom teeth. Abi ran into the hall shouting. Nurses appeared from two different directions and rushed past her, surrounding the bed. They called instructions at each other, as Abi pressed Jude’s head against her shoulder and tried to press into the circle. ‘Mum! It’s all right. Mum.’ Jude began to cry and Abi’s last memory, before her vision exploded into white and she fell backwards to the floor, was of a nurse turning and diving to catch him out of her flailing arms.
96.
You look a bit rough
The doctor was standing beside the plastic-sheeted bed in the treatment room reading notes on a clipboard, when Abi woke up. Dazed, she swallowed and tried to sit up but a throbbing pain at the base of her skull sent her back into the rubber pillow. ‘Where’s my baby? Where’s Jude?’
‘Ah. Hello there. You’re awake.’ The doctor looked grave.
‘Where’s my baby?’
‘Abi, I’m very sorry to let you know, your mother has passed away. An hour or so ago. You fainted and had to be brought in here to have your head stitched. We gave you something to keep you under until it was cleaned up. Again, I’m terribly sorry to have to deliver the news this way.’
Abi barely heard him. In some way, she already knew.
‘Where’s my baby?’ Abi tried to sit up again.
‘He was taken down to the day nursery by a social worker. I’ll get him sent up when you’re ready, but for now, you do need to stay here.’
‘Where is the nursery?’ Abi struggled free of the sheet and put her feet on the floor. Her legs felt like water, and she fell heavily against the doctor.
‘Abi,’ he said, helping her back onto the bed. ‘Your son is fine. If you would please stay lying down, I’ll ring downstairs now.’
As he took up the internal phone outside the door, he signalled to a plump nurse in a tight green uniform passing along the corridor. They spoke briefly, and after a moment, she entered the treatment room with a bright orange ice-lolly in a plastic tube.
