The A-Z of Everything

by Debbie Johnson

  ‘I think he’s happy enough with his mates,’ she adds. ‘And anyway, even if he wasn’t, so what? This is our weekend. We’ve been planning it for ages. I can see Andy whenever I want – but spending quality time with my adorable little sister is far more precious.’

  Poppy laughs, and stubs the cigarette out on the lid of the little tobacco tin she carries everywhere with her. Rose glances at it – it’s what they call ‘vintage’ these days, and the lid is decorated with a naval design. It looks suspiciously like one that used to live in a glass cabinet back in the cottage.

  ‘Did you steal that from home?’ she asks, pointing at the tin.

  ‘Well, as it’s my home as well, technically I don’t think it would be called stealing, do you?’

  ‘Mum would go nuts if she could see us now … especially when she realised you had that tin …’

  Poppy stretches out, her limbs so long her grubby, bare toes touch the end of the tent, and replies: ‘Nah, she wouldn’t. Well, maybe about the tin. But she wouldn’t mind us lying here having a smoke, I don’t think. Mum was working in show business in the Seventies, dahling, don’t you know? She’s probably snorted cocaine off Oliver Reed’s arse! Plus she paid for the tickets and everything – I don’t think she was under any illusions that we’d be spending the weekend behaving like nuns, do you?’

  Rose ponders this, and it takes her a few moments to drag her mind away from the image of her mum and Oliver Reed. Is he on the list, she tries to recall? The list that her and Poppy keep, of names their mother has dropped from her more glamorous days? She seemed to have known – and ‘known’, she suspected, could mean anything from having met on set to had lunch with to shagged in an orgy – pretty much every big-name actor of her era.

  The girls know there is truth in it. When they were younger, they joined her on set in various locations, and found it all pretty boring. To them, it was just what happened when your mum went to work, even if it sounded glamorous from the outside. And to them, Mum was just Mum, even if she did once paint Joan Collins’s nails for her.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ she eventually concedes. ‘She wouldn’t mind. Actually, I kind of wish she was here, don’t you? She’d be a good laugh.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ replies Poppy, whispering conspiratorially, ‘but I think she might actually be here. I think she might have been one of those naked ladies with the blue-painted boobs, the ones who were doing yoga around the camp fire earlier …’

  Rose bursts out laughing at the idea, and Poppy joins in. Everything really does still seem very, very funny. For some reason.

  They laugh for what feels like hours, until the bongos finally go silent, and peace falls over their little patch of Glastonbury.

  Chapter 9

  The Present Day

  The phone rings, and Rose is so shocked she physically jumps. The tub of Heroes jerks from her lap, and the shameful evidence of her binge eating spills out on to the carpet in a mass of shiny, multi-coloured foil wrappers. She kicks them under the sofa with her bed-socked feet.

  It’s the landline. Nobody ever calls her on the landline any more. In fact, nobody ever calls her full stop. Apart from Joe, when he needs a lift or wants to check if he can stay out later.

  Joe … she reminds herself that he is upstairs, safe, and that the landline call will not be from the police, telling her he’s had an accident, or been beaten up by chavs, or fallen down a well. Which means it will probably be some nice man from India worrying about her levels of life assurance cover, or possibly her mother, calling to tell her Poldark is on.

  Once she’s calmed down, she reaches over to the side table, and answers with a cautious hello. She doesn’t like to be rude to the nice men from India, they’re just trying to make a living after all, but she doesn’t want to encourage them either.

  ‘Good evening,’ says the voice, too posh and well modulated and elderly and English to be a nice young man from India. ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Rose Young?’

  Rose mutters yes, and is suddenly, for no apparent reason, gripped by utter dread. Her entire body feels cold and shaky, and she has an almost irresistible urge to put the phone down. To end this conversation – this conversation she is convinced must not be allowed to happen.

  ‘Rose, my name is Lewis Clarke-Smith, and I’m afraid I’m calling with some bad news …’

  Chapter 10

  Approximately 200 miles away, in Islington, Poppy is still trying to muster up the energy for a quick shower, and debating how short a skirt she should wear for tonight’s adventures.

  She is surprised when the landline rings, and it takes her a few moments to find the handset. Kristin would text her if she wanted to get in touch, so, she deduces, it must be her mother, who tended to stay up late watching re-runs of old TV shows and critiquing everyone’s performance. She might have some stern words to utter about that scything scene.

  Poppy slings back a gulp of her G&T, and answers.

  ‘Hi, Mum!’ she says jauntily, trying not to let any of her borderline maudlin mood seep down the phone lines to Shropshire. Everything in the garden must always be rosy, as far as her mother is concerned, or she’ll just worry about her.

  ‘Erm … no, I’m afraid not,’ comes the reply. It’s a man’s voice, someone older, deep in tone and precise in enunciation. ‘Is that Miss Poppy Barnard?’

  ‘It is,’ she says, starting to get annoyed now. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

  ‘My name is Lewis Clarke-Smith,’ he says, ‘and I was a friend of your mother’s.’

  Poppy barely registers the name, and is no longer concerned with his enunciation. She only hears one word of that sentence: ‘was’.

  The glass falls from her hands, and spills the remainder of her drink across her Lycra-clad thighs.

  Chapter 11

  Rose puts the phone down, and automatically reaches for another chocolate. It takes her three attempts before she manages to get the wrapper off, her fingers are trembling so much, and she doesn’t even taste it once it’s in her mouth.

  She’s just going through the motions. Giving her brain something to do. Trying to avoid processing what she’s just heard.

  That her mother is dead. That the great, garrulous bundle of energy that was Andrea Barnard is no longer gracing this planet. That she’d been ill for a while, and not told her. That she’d been diagnosed with stomach cancer a few weeks after her birthday, and for some reason kept it secret.

  She doesn’t know what she is feeling. It is a sensation unlike any other she has ever experienced. It is a shock, the way she has been told, and that is making her numb. Perhaps it would have been different if she’d been there at her bedside, where she belonged. If she’d been with her. If she’d had the chance to say goodbye.

  She wasn’t alone, she knows. Lewis Clarke-Smith assured her of that, in his calm, steady, deep voice. The kind of voice that is used to being listened to, and is used to making itself firmly understood.

  Except she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand any of it. Of course things had been difficult in recent years, but she still thought of herself as having a close relationship with her mother. She saw her as often as she could, making the trip down scenic A-roads from Liverpool to Shropshire, meeting her in Ludlow for lunch or shopping in the markets. Having her here for Christmases. Alternate Christmases, of course, as every other year she went to the home of She Who Shall Not Be Named.

  They spoke on the phone, they texted each other. They were present in each other’s lives – so why wasn’t she present in her death? In her suffering; in her final days?

  Rose feels a stirring of anger in the pit of her stomach, mixed in with shock and disbelief. She tries to stamp it down, she knows it’s not appropriate – but it’s there.

  She’s angry that she wasn’t told. She’s angry at the slightly disapproving tone in Lewis Clarke-Smith’s perfect voice – just a hint, the barest sneer, but most definitely there. He thinks she failed her mum, and Rose has the s
neaking suspicion that he might be right. And that, when it comes down to it, is why she is angry – because she can feel the guilt starting to curdle its way up to the surface.

  She has so many questions, and she asked so few of them. The call was unexpected, shocking. The voice on the end of the line delivered the news with steady, practised sympathy, and he sounded so calm that she completely forgot herself.

  It was one of those authoritative voices that she could never resist, like the head teacher at her school. He’s a complete wanker, but somehow everything he says seems to make sense. It was the same with this man, with this Lewis Clarke-Smith who, now she comes to think of it, her mother has mentioned in the past. She’s never met him, but recalls vague stories about am-dram shows and the village fete and borrowing his dog Betty for walks in the hills.

  She wasn’t paying attention, of course. And she never went back to the village, or the cottage that had been her childhood home. She was too caught up in her own life, her own challenges. In avoiding memories that would hurt too much. Probably, if she’s entirely honest, too busy planning what she was going to order from the takeaway that night. And Mum’s stories were never in short supply – there was always an anecdote, a memory, an amusing vignette.

  She’d taken that for granted, and now it suddenly occurs to her that there will be no more stories. No more tales about her Eighties show-biz life. No more accounts of the size of the marrows in the vegetable-growing contests. No more descriptions of the time she let out a 200-decibel fart during her sun salutation at the village-hall yoga class.

  No more Andrea.

  It is simply inconceivable, that thought. Her mother, she’d assumed, would outlive everyone. She was a force of nature, a one-of-a-kind, a goddess walking among mortals. She couldn’t be dead. It just did not compute.

  Rose is now on to her fourth Creme Egg Twisted, and feeling slightly sick for all kinds of reasons. The news. The chocolate. The fact that all of those questions are still swilling around in her head like sour milk sluicing through a sieve. The fact that Lewis had calmly instructed her that she now needed to watch a bloody video. That a lot of her questions would be answered, and that it’s what Andrea had wanted.

  The nausea rolls over her, and she leaps to her feet as fast as she can. She runs into the downstairs loo, kicking aside the various travel brochures she keeps in there, full of luxury holidays she’ll never go on.

  She falls to her knees, and pukes up an entire tub of Cadbury’s. By the time she’s done, the toilet bowl is full of thick brown chocolatey liquid, and tears are streaming down her cheeks. She falls back on to her bottom, landing plumply on a Kuoni safari brochure, and lets herself fall apart.

  Chapter 12

  Poppy strokes her tobacco tin, the one she filched from her mother over two decades ago, tempted to smoke for the first time in years. Instead, she puts it away and slides the desk drawer closed. She picks up her phone, and messages Kristin to say she will definitely be late, and might not make it at all.

  Feeling strangely calm, she sends the email from Lewis to her ‘incredibly clever TV’, as her mum always called it, steadfastly refusing to attach the word ‘smart’ to any kind of technology.

  ‘Smart means a well-tailored suit and some polished brogues, darling, not a few buttons on a silly device,’ she’d always said.

  Lewis had answered every question Poppy had thrown at him, as she worked her way through some kind of scarily efficient checklist that had sprung up in her brain during their brief conversation.

  She has no idea where it came from – it’s not like she had planned for this, or been prepared in any way. But she was used to holding meetings, and being in charge, and she supposes that’s what kicked in – her lizard brain was helping her process this new information by turning it into action points. She could practically turn her mother’s death into a PowerPoint presentation now.

  She had died that evening, in the nearest big hospital. She had stomach cancer. She’d planned her funeral in advance; the arrangements were all made, and there was nothing she needed to do. Lewis, as Andrea’s friend and as her solicitor, was taking care of her affairs, and needed to see both her and Rose after the service. Both of them. Together. In the same room.

  Jesus. That was almost as much of a shock as the fact that her mother was dead, which didn’t exactly make her feel good about herself. Andrea was gone, and she was beginning to freak out about seeing her own sister again – how selfish could one person be?

  The gin-infused haze has cleared completely now, and Poldark has finished. Her legs are still damp from spilling her drink, and she can smell her own body odour. She needs to shower, inside and out, to scrub her brain clean of all the conflicting emotions she is starting to feel.

  Keep calm, she tells herself, tapping away on the controls. Keep calm and carry on. There is nothing to be gained here by having a nervous breakdown. It won’t bring your mother back, and it won’t help you.

  She moves to the sleek leather-and-chrome sofa in front of the television, and presses play with one long, perfectly shellacked nail.

  Chapter 13

  Andrea is propped up on a hospital bed, her steel-grey hair smooth, her make-up flawless, if a little more heavy-handed than usual. The silk blouse she is wearing is perfectly pressed, and her smile is dazzling. If not for the weight loss and, of course, the location, you’d never know she was ill.

  The room is small, dominated by that bed, by the tiny figure lying in it. The cabinet is overflowing with flowers, wilting lily petals drooping down into the open jug of paleorange cordial, and the lighting is bright.

  Andrea does a quick test, and the camera wobbles slightly, as though the person holding it is moving around, or maybe giving a ‘thumbs-up’ gesture. She nods once, folds her delicate hands neatly on her blanket-covered lap, and begins. Her voice is steady, assured, perfectly poised – she’s delivered many a monologue, and this is by far the most important she’s ever spoken.

  ‘My darlings. Rosehip, Popcorn, my only true loves. Not to be too Hollywood about this, but if you’re watching this tape, that can mean only one thing: I have shuffled off this mortal coil … and you two are going to need each other more than ever. You need to set aside your differences, and look out for each other – just like you always used to.

  ‘I know this has all come as a terrible shock, but I make no apologies for doing things this way. The illness came quickly, and horribly and, before I knew what was happening, I was dealing with lovely Macmillan nurses and charming doctors – all of whom had awful news.

  ‘It’s only been a few weeks, my loves, and I know that you’ll be so sad that you didn’t get to spend that time with me. You might even be a tiny bit angry that I deprived you of the chance to be here, at my side – but I had my reasons, and if ever an old lady has the right to be awkward, it’s when she’s dying, don’t you think?

  ‘Part of me was reluctant to let you both see me suffer. You were both too small to remember when my mother died, but it was one of the worst experiences of my life – sitting by her bedside, holding her hand, when she didn’t even recognise me. The pain had taken her over, you see, like some kind of demonic possession. I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if her head had started spinning and she talked in ancient Aramaic.

  ‘Pain can do that to a person – it reduces them to their animal state, strips them of everything that makes them … human. I spent endless nights in that hospice with her, all alone despite being surrounded by people, and I vowed right then that it was an ordeal I would never put you two through. I have no idea what my fate is – I am hoping for a dignified swansong, with gentle lighting and aromatic oils and possibly some gentle Gregorian chanting in the background. A graceful exit, stage left.

  ‘But the truth is, I might just as easily turn into my mother – become that pain-wracked animal who only knows one thing: that they are dying. She had no clue I was even there at the end, and since then I’ve always thought the whole sitti
ng-by-the-deathbed thing is simply a steel trap for suffering. It’s a consolation, I suppose – as the person left behind, you can always tell yourself you did your best, that at least they weren’t alone.

  ‘But honestly? I think we are all alone when we die. We’re embarking on a journey that nobody can accompany us on – we don’t get a plus one.

  ‘For the people left behind, exhausted and drained, it is an emotional battering the likes of which you can never prepare yourself for. It is an indescribable torment, waiting for someone you love to leave you, knowing that each minute together could be your last, but also knowing that part of them has already gone.

  ‘I simply didn’t want that for you two, and I hope you understand – it was a decision made out of love. And I had my poor Lewis with me, I am guessing – I’ve tried to kick him out on several occasions, but the stubborn old fool simply won’t have it, and I suspect he’ll be here to the bitter end.

  ‘He’s here with me now, helping me make this video, and let me tell you he’s one of the finest human beings that has ever graced the planet. But enough of that – I can’t have his ancient hands trembling, or him crying, can I?

  ‘Anyway. That was part of my reasoning. I should probably have discussed that with you at some stage, but it’s not an easy one to slip into casual conversation, is it? “I’m having a lovely mini-break, darling, and by the way, I won’t be inviting you to my deathbed.” It doesn’t slip easily off the tongue, so I’m afraid I avoided it. Perhaps I was being a cowardly lion, who knows? But it never seemed relevant. I always felt so healthy, despite all of those little games I played over the last few years.