‘Too much cake?’
He nodded and moved backwards to a more comfortable position. ‘You did? How is she?’
‘She seems fine. We had a good chat. She’s kinder than I remembered. Tom, I can’t believe I’ve hated her for so long. I must have missed so much.’
‘I told you so,’ Tomas answered, delighting in the words.
‘Now there’s a birthday present for you, eh? Reconciliation.’
We both smiled and I leaned closer still until my knees skimmed his.
‘She says to say sorry.’
Tomas’s confusion was apparent and he shrugged his shoulders.
‘Oh and she said Happy Birthday too.’
The tension fell from Tomas’s face and shoulders. ‘Ah, she needn’t have worried. I didn’t expect a gift. Where’s she gonna buy it anyway? I should have called to see her though.’ He checked his watch. ‘I guess it’s too late now.’
‘I don’t think she meant that. Look Bro ...’ I chewed my lip, feeling guilty, but the truth was desperate to reach out. No drama, Cathy had said, but was this drama? I hoped not. I was sharing a moment given to me by a loving parent. There was no harm in telling him. ‘There’s some diaries. She ... she hid them in the attic. She wants me to read them. I’m, well I guess I’m kinda nervous. It can’t be good huh, if she’s apologising for them already. Would you read them with me?’
Tomas crinkled his face, the same look he’d used when pondering a question when we were children together. He sat silently for a moment, staring in my general direction but without focus again. ‘You know I love Mum.’
He paused and I nodded.
‘Well I’ve always loved her. I guess neither of us had a father. Mum was it. She was ... is everything. I know you two had your differences. I even understand why you didn’t get on. But, but, God I wish I could explain this better.’
‘You’re doing fine, Bro. Keep going.’
‘It’s gonna sound, odd, creepy even. I know that, but hear me out, okay. I guess, when it comes down to it, Mum is ... well she’s sort of the model by which I judge all women ... Yeah, yeah, I know ... Freudian much. But you see ... How do I say this?’ He leaned forward again, looking uncomfortable then took a deep breath and stared into my eyes. Moisture gathered in his eyelashes. ‘You see ... no one, not you, not even Cathy has ever measured up to her.’
He glanced at the doorway. I followed his gaze, no one was there. I nodded for him to continue even though what he was saying was painful to hear.
‘If I read the diaries and I discover Mum isn’t perfect ... No that’s not it ... that’s wrong, I know she isn’t perfect and I know she’s made some pretty bad choices in her life ... But, if I read them and find out who I think she is ... well maybe it’s a lie, what then? I’m not sure I could cope. I really don’t think I could. Not now and maybe never. I love her, Giz. I love her so much and she’s dying in hospital. She’s a caged bird and she can’t even spread her wings.’
I reached for his hand. He sniffed and pulled back, moulding his spine against the chair. His hands were fists that he shook and bounced against his lap. I smiled at him, hoping he would be helped by my acceptance, knowing I wanted his, but he felt too distant to reach. If I couldn’t reach him, my own brother, what was I doing with my life? One step forward, two steps back.
‘It’s getting late,’ he said.
It wasn’t, but I could empathise with his tiredness and wish for solitude. ‘Will you take me home?’
‘I’ve been drinking. How about a taxi?’
I nodded and accepted the ten pound note he passed across the void.
31
I kept my eyes on the garden path as I approached the dark house. The silence was thick with menace as I stood in the hallway. I raced upstairs, clinging to my echoing footsteps, leaving the lights switched off, knowing an electric bulb or two wouldn’t stop them. Inside my room, I breathed deeply. The stink of stale sweat, wafting from the sheets, filled my nostrils and the sour smell comforted me, told me I belonged.
I switched on the light to remove my boots. The bed looked like a harbour, jutting into an unforgiving ocean. I swam to it and it welcomed me. My eyes darted back and forth between the well-thumbed novel and a drawer filled with secrets. I picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being and started to read, but that night the sense of Kundera's words eluded me, dancing in front of my eyes, just out of reach. I put the book back and reached for the drawer and the diaries. I took four journals and placed them on top of the divan. Looking at the first page of each, I established they were from very different times. The first diary had been started just under a year ago, but the others stretched back in time, one to when Vivienne must have been a teenager. I held them in my hands and the weight of the knowledge inside them pinned me to the bed. Here lay Vivienne’s story and perhaps mine as well. Contained within these four volumes were all the mysteries of this house and my mother’s life. I wanted to know, yet was afraid to read them. Unlike Tomas, I had never placed Vivienne on a pedestal. There was no gilded image to be tarnished with new knowledge. I wanted to understand all that had happened to her and to me, but the power of that knowledge intimidated me. I wondered whether there were things I should not know, but today, in the hospital, Vivienne begged me to read them, demanded it. But where to start: at the end or the beginning? The beginning terrified me, within those years the pregnancy and the near drowning would lay in wait. I was certain of it. The end then, if it wasn’t too confused to understand.
After replacing the three earlier diaries in my drawer, I opened the last. Foetus-shaped, curled up in the womb of my bed, with one hand holding the book and my cheek resting on my pillow, I began to read. 19th September 2012, I wondered what I was doing that day. With no diary, or permanent record of my movements, each day blurred into the next until they became a homogeneous mass of rebellion and self-hatred. But what of Vivienne, what happened to her on that day - the day she started a new diary?
Unlike those of the novel these words did not elude me, they entered me. Reading, I heard my mother’s voice; not the pitiful voice of the woman glued to a hospital bed. This voice was full of energy and vitality, a strong voice that beckoned to me from nine months before. As I absorbed the thoughts and words on each page, the silent house filled with creaks and moans; phantom footsteps echoed across the landing, pacing restlessly, showing their distress. The door handle rattled. I slammed the diary shut and squeezed the palms of each hand against my ears. When I released the pressure the room remained empty and the rattling had stopped. I found my place and read some more.
“More discussions, more deliberations and more stalling. I grow impatient while he tries to hold me back. These swaddling myths I use to suppress my more destructive memories also hamper my determination to seek enlightenment. Would it be, as he claims, folly to immerse myself in the persistent feelings of an omnipresent violence inextricably linked to my individual sexual morality?
“He offers me knowledge and adventure, seeking answers that may of themselves prove revolutionary, a oneness without the physical hindering the psychic victory I seek, and a reconstruction of self; the courage to harmonise with the elemental, searching for a revival of that inner mother in those receptive Northern lands. He argues that in the process of guiding me towards enlightenment we must move slowly, organising each stage according to my increasing efforts, but cautions against too early a step from the old regime to the new. He advises me that ghosts still dwell within my fundamental being and it is better to defend than attack.
“I disagree, arguing for a psychic assault on the metaphysical, purging ancient history from all compartments of that other, the physical self and seeking new freedom through death and subsequent revival. Yet, when I try to touch his essence, he scurries from me and without sex I am powerless, fragile. Is this, in fact, his purpose and if so what is the end goal? I worry he wishes only to stifle when I seek release, release from guilt and responsibility, and an understanding of t
he child as a product, packaged in the raw materials of upbringing. When the package is torn the individual leaks and this is the normal process of growth, a growth that swallows all obstacles, utilising mankind for the inner journey of self-determination.”
I looked up from the elegant scrawls. Although the language Vivienne had used was ambiguous, the meaning behind her words seemed clear to me. My mother desperately wanted to be free of her past. It was a desire I understood and shared. I wondered who “he” was. Was she writing about Scott, Clive or some other man? So far I had no clues to this person’s identity. I felt determined to read on, take what I could from the phrases she used and discard those things that were unclear, knowing I could ask her about them when I next visited her in the hospital.
I licked the tip of my finger and turned to the next page. The handwriting was different from before, simpler, smaller and neater. It was a new entry on a new day, this time the 25th September. She missed six days of entries, perhaps nothing happened during that time, or perhaps she fell ill, laconic or manic and feverish. I remembered all those moods clearly from my childhood and the speed with which she could switch from one to another. Yet again I realised how unusual my childhood had been, an atypical upbringing to say the least.
“Pride is a terrible and pointless thing. It separates us and turns privilege into something earned and admired, makes us forget others may work just as hard and never achieve our success. I was proud of two things: my beauty and how gracefully I danced. At least I worked hard at the latter, but the former was simply chance, an accident of genetics and perhaps the reason he made me his victim, or so I once thought. Looking back, I suspect he was just a filthy pervert.
“It’s his birthday today. I’ll remember but never celebrate, no flowers to lay on his grave. If I could face going I might gift him a heavy globule of spittle or some tears of regret that I wasn’t quick enough to ensure I was his last victim.”
I stared at the page, the tiny handwriting and the concentrated pain it contained. Someone hurt my mother. They hurt her badly. I shook with fierce anger, wishing I could have protected her, but I was too young, or perhaps not even born, and I didn’t know. A lump filled my throat, and I shut the diary, too afraid to turn the page, afraid to see what else Vivienne had suffered, and the ever changing writing that reflected her perpetually altering personality. As a child she’d made me dizzy just watching her swing back and forth between excitement and sadness. There seemed to be no balance, no mid-point, only elation or desperation. If I read on would I find out why? Was I ready to face such a revelation? A creak outside my door and the book fell from my hands, thudding onto the floor. I didn’t follow the sound. I had no wish to leave the relative sanctuary of my room and face what waited beyond.
32
The doorbell rang, waking me. I looked around the pitch black room, wondering whether I had dreamt the sound then it rang again. I pulled on my clothes and hurried down the stairs.
There was no chain on the door and no spy hole and I had no idea who could be calling this time of night.
‘Who is it?’ I shouted.
The reply was muffled, but definitely my brother’s voice.
I reached for the door. I heard his sorrow and felt it too. As I pulled the door open Tomas shouldered his way into the hallway. His face was red and wet, his hair unbrushed. As I stared at him he shook his head. With a hollow chest I enveloped him with my arms.
‘Is she?’ I asked.
Tomas nodded.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said and I was, sorry for Tomas’s loss and my own. Realising any chance I ever had of a loving relationship with either of my parents had evaporated. I was alone, an orphan and so was my brother.
In spite of my emptiness I did not cry. Nothing had changed, not for me. I had always been alone. But the house around me wailed with grief. It had lost its plaything. Vivienne would be missed. Sounds of sorrow whirled about me as I remembered Vivienne, the ballerina. I held Tomas tighter and breathed deeply; his tears washed my shoulder. We were two children, hiding in the dark, both wishing for a parent who would never return. In the past this would have been different parents, Tomas had always wanted his mummy, me my absentee daddy, but now our thoughts combined, directed together towards the void, the space left by Vivienne’s stage exit right.
‘Will you come to the hospital?’ he asked at last, wiping his eyes roughly with his sleeve.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll get my things.’
Melissa was gently snoring in her car seat and Catherine stared blankly ahead, not acknowledging my arrival. I smiled at the peaceful baby.
I guess I’d been lucky; I had never seen a dead body before although I had witnessed much violence. Vivienne looked as though she was sleeping, her face peaceful, no sorrow, no regrets. I imagined her with her lover in the wild Bolivian mountains, reunited after all those years.
‘She’s with Dad now,’ Tomas said.
I wondered which one. The phantom lover I painted in my head wasn’t a blood relation to Tomas, in fact his father had never been discussed, neither had our sister. Perhaps he shared my father that night, and the story wheel turned a full circle, the ballerina and the revolutionary together again.
33
Walking towards Scott’s house, I remembered what Cathy said over breakfast. ‘So I guess you’ll be going back to London now?’
In that one question, or was it a statement, Cathy had left a second wound in my chest. What would I do? I could go back. My reason for coming to Bristol had been to see my mother and appease my brother. The first task had been more than accomplished. I had gained a new understanding of Vivienne and sympathy for what she’d endured. Was Tomas appeased? I had no idea; sometimes it felt as though he was sorry I had come back at all. His mother, the beacon he had held aloft all these years, had died, appeased perhaps, happy no. What next? I supposed I would need to move out of the house when ownership passed to my brother. I would leave with regret, however, without learning the secrets Vivienne had been so eager for me to read. I could take the diaries with me, hide them from him. He had said he wouldn’t read them. But what of Scott? Yes, what of him? I shook my head. Perhaps my dreams were a mystery I could never solve, in fact perhaps everything was.
Tears filled my eyes as I realised I loved my mother. Loved her in spite of all the beatings and the name callings, in spite of the damage I carried with me all these years. When I saw Vivienne in that hospital bed I had felt love. I loved Tomas too, even if he was choosing his wife and family above me, even if he refused to hear what Vivienne wanted, so desperately, to tell him; I still loved him. Did I also love Scott? No, Scott was different; loving him would mean having some sort of sexuality, wouldn’t it? I remembered brushing past Scott’s warm body in the kitchen and my mind skipped to other potential lovers who were never lovers and how I had cast each moment aside before it could mature, including Chrissie and those microseconds of passion I had felt for her. No, not passion, something else - romantic longing perhaps?
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said as Scott opened the door. ‘You won’t believe the day I’ve had.’ I smiled then felt guilty about smiling. As I hovered at the doorway, focusing on Scott’s kind face, I felt unable to fix an appropriate expression to my own. He smiled at me, his eyes suddenly warm and wise, and invited me inside.
‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.
‘Scotch.’ I laughed and shook my head. The laugh kept bubbling in my chest and I felt frightened of losing control of myself. I gripped his arm to steady my body and felt grounded. The threat of hysteria ebbed away. ‘Just kidding, um, water, please.’
I followed him into the kitchen and sat down. ‘My mum died today.’
He dropped the glass in the sink, but it did not break. He turned and looked at me, gentle sadness in his soft eyes and creased face. ‘Are you okay?’
I nodded. The movement of my head spread to my shoulders and back, and the tears I had held at bay started to fall. Chokin
g laughs escaped with my sorrow. Scott knelt in front of me and steadied my shoulders with his embrace. Once again, the hysteria subsided as I concentrated on his blue eyes, so deep and intense. In his eyes I imagined lazy days spent on a Mediterranean beach. I willed my body to be still in spite of my ragged breath and stared into his eyes. He didn’t seem to mind, returning my greedy stare with a steady gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually.
‘What for?’
‘Your loss,’ he said. ‘Vivienne was a ... she was a ... an impressive woman.’
I held my hand in front of my mouth stifling nervous giggles that started to bubble inside me. They forced their way through as hiccups of amusement. ‘Impressive?’ I shook my head, slowly, controlling every muscle so I wouldn’t lose myself in involuntary shaking again and looked at his baffled expression. ‘Do you know she was in love with you?’ Anger replaced my amusement and my hands balled into fists as I ground my teeth. ‘She died because of you, didn’t she? What did you do to her?’
Scott’s hands moved from my shoulders to my cheeks. He held me firmly in his soft touch. I tried to look away, but realised I was unable to move my face. I looked downwards, momentarily, but felt even less comfortable staring at his crotch. I closed my eyes then opened them again wider than ever, feeling closed eyes were too submissive to communicate my defiance.
‘Well?’ I asked again.
‘I knew she was in love with me.’ His voice was a whisper and I had to strain to grasp the meaning of the words that crept towards my ears across the soft cloud of his breath. I wondered whether I was dreaming and whether this cushion of words had been sent to carry me away from the pain. ‘I never encouraged her, and I didn’t love her back. But I admired her strength. She asked for my help and I tried to help her, but she ran on ahead. When she failed, she ran straight into the bonnet of a car.’
The Ballerina and the Revolutionary Page 12
