by Holly Seddon
I learned about red bills in that house, having never seen a bill in my own.
But sometimes they were big, boiling rows. Sometimes they were the kind of rows where Paul would say things like ‘Dad’ll be on the sofa tonight’.
The idea was alien to me. Back home, no-one needed to sleep on the sofa. My dad had his own bedroom and an office next door to that, which overlooked the small pond and a fountain where water trickled from horses’ heads onto grey stone roses. My mum had her own bedroom with an adjoining dressing room and bathroom. Mum’s bedroom was becoming her room for dying in.
The more she died, the less my father went in to see her.
The summer cold had never left her. Instead of any respite, diarrhoea had started, hollowing her figure from the inside out. She’d stopped going to London altogether by then. Soon after, she stopped leaving the house. Then the bed. At first, it had seemed like all the other times she’d stayed in bed long into the day. Mrs Baker would take trays of food up and return with them untouched an hour later.
The local doctor came out to see her and diagnosed flu but my father and Ted helped her out to the car one day, and they drove up to London to see a specialist. When they returned, my mum was helped back into bed without meeting my eyes.
I was told by my father that evening that she had cancer. The conversation went something like this:
‘I’m afraid your mother is very ill, Kate. She has cancer and is going to need strong medicines and a lot of rest.’
No more, no less.
My father patted me on the shoulder and then walked slowly to his room. I lingered outside my mum’s bedroom for what felt like a full hour before I could force myself inside. The sky darkened outside the landing window while I stood, in passive panic. My right leg had pins and needles and I remember feeling guilty because my mum’s pain must have been so much worse but I had still allowed myself to notice the pins and needles.
Eventually I crept inside and stood next to the bed, scared to look even though I’d only seen her a couple of days earlier. I knew that cancer was bad. Everyone knows cancer is bad, it’s like knowledge we’re just born with. I looked at her face and noticed how much thinner it had got. She had little white dots around her mouth that she later told me were ‘stress spots’ and whispered that she was scared. I told her I was scared too and that I was sorry she was ill. I wanted to tell her that I loved her and would look after her – the kind of words people said on TV – but I was too embarrassed.
She was so thin by then. Not the kind of thin you mention, not the ‘how did you shift those last seven pounds?’ variety. The kind of thin that isn’t acknowledged. The kind where bones rattle with the cold when everyone else is warm. The kind where my mum’s eyes became like fish eyes, bulging out on each side of her razor-sharp nose bone.
The more she died, the more I hid at Paul’s.
I would get off my school minibus in the village and rush around to let myself in the back of the Loxtons’ house. I’d find Viv in the kitchen and let her make me a cup of tea. She had made me more and more tea as those weeks went on.
‘Your father came into the hospital today, Katie,’ she said one day. And then she’d put her hands around my hands, which were already wrapped around my mug of tea.
‘Because of my mum?’ I asked, quietly.
‘Yes, darlin’.’
‘But I thought she’d be going to the private hospital in London, I heard my dad telling Mrs Baker.’
‘I don’t think they have the facilities she needs, m’love. And I think the journey would be too much.’
‘She only went up there to see a doctor a few weeks ago though?’
‘These things—’ Viv had stopped for a moment and cleared her throat, taken a small breath. ‘These things can develop very quickly,’ she’d said quietly but firmly.
My hands burned from the heat of the mug, but I didn’t want to lose her touch by moving them. We stayed like that, silent, until the tea was cold.
My mum was admitted in mid-December while I was in school. It was Viv who took me to the hospital for a visit. My only visit, as it turned out.
In the weeks leading up to Mum moving into hospital, I had run through every possibility in my head. She would wake up and call for me, and I would spend the last of her days holding her hand and soothing her, promising her I’d be okay once she was gone. Light would stream in through the window and she’d look more beautiful than ever, and we’d feel an unspoken connection that would stay with me my whole life, like a butterfly on my shoulder.
Or that I would write her a letter telling her all of the ways I would make her proud, that I would look after my dad and live up to her legacy, even though I really didn’t know what legacy she was leaving. I would slip it to her as she was carried out of the manor and she would die with it clasped in her hand.
Or right at the last minute, she would desperately want me with her and I would be called out of my lessons at school and whizzed through the countryside to make it to her bedside for her last moments.
None of those things happened. I said goodbye to her sleeping head at home, on the morning of her move into hospital. Then she was whisked away, but still there just a few miles up the road. Breathing and sleeping and dying, just in a different room.
As usual, I hovered on the outside of the situation and let things happen behind closed doors. It was Viv who decided for me. I’d regret it if I didn’t go to see her and say goodbye properly, she said. It didn’t matter that she’d not always been a great mum, she was still my mum, Viv said, and I wouldn’t get another.
So Mick drove us to the hospital one afternoon. Viv, still in her nurse’s uniform from her earlier shift, sat in the passenger seat, my long legs scrunched into the back.
It was raining but sticky warm from the radiator and the Allegro’s windows ran with condensation. Mick was quiet, driving carefully in a way that had all the hallmarks of Viv giving him a talking to and a warning about behaviour. About not Micking the whole time, blabbering on and saying the wrong thing.
‘Would you like me to come in with you?’ Viv asked when we got near to the ward, her soft eyes searching my face for something.
‘No, it’s okay. I think it’s okay.’
I continued to whisper ‘it’s okay, it’s okay’ to myself like a mantra as Viv showed me down the squeaky corridor and I stepped into the cool of my mum’s room. I left Viv in her uniform outside, like some kind of guard. I wasn’t supposed to visit. I was forbidden from visiting by my father. Quietly, totally, forbidden.
I was wearing a blue angora sweater, matching blue leg warmers and tight pale blue jeans. My black pixie boots had a slight heel on them and I felt like an overdressed Hammer Horror monster looming over the tiny body in the bed.
‘You look very pretty, Katie,’ Mum had whispered.
‘So do you,’ I lied. She had a piece of red tinsel wrapped around the bed frame and a fake red plant with gold berries on the bedside table. I was taken aback by its ugliness.
Mum had wrinkled her nose just slightly when she saw me looking. I wondered if she was thinking of the Christmas we spent alone together, or about all the Christmases we’d barely seen each other.
I lay my hand on top of hers and when that wasn’t shooed away I squeezed her hand ever so slightly.
‘I’m sorry this has happened to you, Mum.’
‘I’m sorry too, Katie. I’m really sorry.’
I poured some water from the plastic jug into the plastic beaker, even though she had a hydration drip going into her left arm like limp spaghetti. I straightened the top sheet a little and sat down again, trying to think of something to say.
I wasn’t sure if she was sleeping or resting so I put my hand on hers again and her eyes opened quickly like a doll, with the same clicky, sticky sound.
‘Do something for me, Katie,’ she said with a fast puff of breath.
‘What?’ My heart raced, I wanted to back out of the room, afraid that somethi
ng weighty was about to happen and I wouldn’t handle it in the right way.
‘Don’t be scared to live the life you want, and please don’t settle,’ she rasped.
I nodded, looking down at my lap.
‘I love you so much, Katie. I’m sorry I didn’t know what I was doing. You’re all I think about in here.’
I stayed there with her until she fell asleep again. I kissed her hand and crept out of the room, not looking back. Viv had wrapped her arms around me and walked in silence until we reached the Allegro, Mick stony-faced inside.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
November 2012 – Tuesday afternoon
We’re back from our lunch, the kids’ bellies full of crisps and sandwiches. Paul and I are full of Ploughman’s, which two Somerset kids can never resist. As I’d bitten into a huge slab of bread with salty butter laid thickly on top, Paul watched me approvingly. I ate the lot. Eye-watering mature cheddar, chunks of pickled onion, ham as thick as gammon steak. Now Paul is lying down on the sofa with the top button of his jeans undone. He thinks I haven’t noticed. I’ve come up to get changed into my jeans from yesterday with the looser waist but I couldn’t help but head for my overnight bag.
The tips of my fingers root around but don’t connect with anything. They should be feeling folded paper, the edge ridged and prematurely aged from frequent handling. But instead, all my fingertips can feel is the grit of an empty section of my bag.
I feel the uniquely catatonic panic of a cornered animal. Rigid with fear, heart thundering. Fight and flight making my wheels spin pointlessly. Who the hell has the letter? Where the fuck is the letter?
If Paul has it, wouldn’t he have said something by now? Wouldn’t he have marched to find me, grabbed my shoulders? Asked me where I’d got it from at least? Could he have sat opposite me, shovelling Ploughman’s into his mouth if he knew what I knew? There would be a confrontation, surely? But then, I found it and I didn’t march to him, or grab his shoulders. I didn’t ask where he got it from. I just went for a really long walk and tried to make sense of what I’d seen and what it meant for us all.
I sit back on my heels and think, think, think. Who would have gone through my bag, besides me? Izzy had barely left Paul’s side and she isn’t allowed in our room without us. Not since she’d got into my make-up a year ago and scrawled all over her face and the wall with a red lipstick I daren’t have worn any more but was still devastated to see used for graffiti. It was the closest I’d ever come to smacking either of them, and Paul had thrown himself in front of her like a royal bodyguard.
Harry.
Harry had asked to fetch his Nintendo DS from our room. He’d called down to ask where it was and I’d shouted back that it was next to our bed. Paul had rolled his eyes a little bit. ‘I wish we didn’t yell,’ he said. Meaning all of us except him, because he only yells when he’s angry with Harry and apparently that’s different. But how long had Harry been up here rummaging before he called down to ask? Long enough to unearth the letter, to tuck it into his pocket for secret spying. Maybe he wanted to use it to leverage something out of us. Out of me.
Oh God, I think, I’m acting like a crazy person. Harry’s a little boy, not a hijacker. But he isn’t an angel. It might not be beyond him to try to force my hand. Nothing serious, maybe some extra gaming time or a McDonald’s.
I tuck my bag away and step lightly down the hall to Harry’s bedroom. Inside, he’s playing with some Match Attax cards that have spread like wildfire through his class this year. I don’t think he really cares about the footballers on them, it’s more about collecting and joining in with classmates. Paul and I used to collect the cards from sweet cigarettes. Always more from Airdrie than any other team. Paul and I got quite obsessed despite a mutual distrust of organised sports.
‘Hey, Mum,’ Harry says as I walk in to his room, looking up at me with those beautiful deer eyes. Mum. The shortening of Mummy still stings. He sees it. ‘Mummy,’ he adds with a smile.
‘Hello, Harry Hair Pot,’ I say. We like to give them both ten million nicknames for no reason.
He starts to tell me about the cards he has and the order he’s putting them in. Not really for my benefit, more a chant of enjoyment as he contentedly sorts.
‘Harry,’ I say, cutting him off as he’s talking about the shinies he swapped with a boy whose name I vaguely recognise from the year above him.
‘Yeah?’ he asks, without looking away from the face of a Congolese footballer.
‘Did you go in my bag, Harry?’
‘What bag?’
‘My overnight bag, the leather one.’
He furrows his brow but looks down. ‘No.’
My heart sinks until I realise he’s not avoiding my eye but has already finished with our conversation and returned to organising the world’s football players.
‘Are you sure you didn’t take anything out while you were looking for your DS?’
‘DS?’
I’m getting frustrated but it’s obvious he doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about. I grab his wrist and whisper hard, ‘Look, Harry, did you take a piece of folded paper out of my bag?’
He looks at our skins scrunching together under my pressure.
‘It’s really important, Harry.’
His eyes well up a bit and he shakes his wrist free. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Mummy.’
I stand up and survey him. Paul is always telling me that I give our son the benefit of the doubt too easily – and I probably do – but right now he just looks upset, not guilty. I grab him into a hug. ‘I love you,’ I say into his hair as he squeezes his bony arms around me.
‘Love you too,’ he says and then breaks free to attend to his cards again.
The guilt washes over me and I want to go back and insert big fat lumps of benefit of the doubt into the last five minutes. ‘I really love you,’ I say. ‘Sorry for being mental.’
He smiles with the side of his mouth. ‘S’alright, Mummy,’ he says, without looking up.
As I turn to go, I put my hand into my back pocket and realise with a start that the letter is wedged in there, soft and warm from my body heat.
There are gaps in my parenting. I often don’t know what they are until it’s too late.
I learned a lot from television. Which sounds awful, but is true.
Harry’s baby years were largely instinctive, and I was incredibly relieved and proud about that. But with both our children, I wavered around the age of three. Never in my love for them, but in my understanding.
Potty-training and all those generic milestones I gauged from leaflets, Mumsnet and half-conversations at playgroups. It wasn’t the practicalities that let me down. I just didn’t know how to be a mother. When to soothe, when to chide. How much to explain, how often to say ‘love’ and how to show it without words.
I didn’t have a deep bench to draw from. When I thought about myself at three, what little I remember had revolved around shoulder rides on drunk hippies or being dressed up and often forgotten. I think of egg and chips at Mrs Baker’s house, of drawing endless pictures of my mum’s yellow hair and red smile.
It got easier again when Harry got older and I could draw on memories of Viv.
I know Paul worried about my patchy CV, my poor parental education. I know he thought he’d have to jump in and commandeer things with Harry. That he was surprised and maybe affronted when he remained an understudy. He certainly stuck his stake into Izzy early on.
But I think he struggled the most when he saw a familiar competence in me, those echoes of his mum, rather than gaps in experience. He had adored his mum but not her background and lack of scope. And here I was, his wife, aping everything that he had rejected. And, of course, if I was playing Viv, what would that make him? Mick? A role he shied from his whole life. A buffoon. A philanderer.
I stand in the doorway of Izzy’s room and watch her with curiosity. I look at her and wonder if that’s what I looked like at her age. A dimpled smile th
at drops into a deep, dark frown when she concentrates. She still looks and behaves a lot like she did as a baby. All squidginess and endless demands. I don’t think I made endless demands.
At least as neither of them has my colouring, they don’t burn at the hint of summer like I do. I would have liked at least one of them to look a little like me though. Sometimes, I forget that I contributed anything into Izzy’s creation. The IVF process probably didn’t help. At times, I felt like a vessel. A birthing unit for something belonging to Paul, which had been placed inside me for safe-keeping.
As a kid, I remember Judith Hann on Tomorrow’s World talking about IVF – or ‘test-tube babies’. It was proper science-fiction stuff, but I never thought it would play a role in my life. When I was young, I never really imagined myself having kids, beyond that vague silhouette that childhood storybooks implant in all of us when we picture ourselves as grown-ups. Funny how things can change.
In my storybooks, children were children and adults were ‘mummies and daddies’. I remember reading The Tiger Who Came To Tea when I was really little, fantasising about having a mum who’d feed buns and beer to a tiger, and a father that’d take us out for bangers and chips at a cafe. A daddy, rather than a father. Paul is definitely daddy and father to our children.
Paul was more established at work when Izzy came along, Creative Director – respected and admired throughout London’s AdLand. He was important enough to be allowed to take a month of leave and then work from home for the next month. He was also important enough to know that he was hugely missed at the office and to take plenty of ‘crucial’ calls throughout that time. Huffing at the lit-up screen but answering anyway.
We were co-parents for those two months. Sharing the job, me nursing Izzy and then Paul whisking her off for cuddles and slow walks around the garden with her cradled in his arms, leaving me to curl up to Harry and reassure him over and over that he was still so special to me.
When I think about the fathers we grew up with, the idea of them co-parenting is almost funny. Mick loved Paul, I know he did, but change a nappy? Take a role in his weaning? Know what weaning is? Not on your life. And as for my father. . . Saying that, I really can’t imagine my mother doing any of that stuff either. I know there were night nurses and nannies, I vaguely remember cuddling up to starchy uniforms, and that was probably for the best.
