Cocktails and Dreams

by A. L. Michael

  And now she was back, and she wasn’t even the reason I was drinking.

  I clutched the door frame of the kitchen. Tiny sips of water, paracetamol and a cup of tea. All would be well as long as I could make a cup of tea and get to bed without passing out and drooling on the stairs. Maybe that would be the action to make Persephone Black think her daughter was anything like her, or had any fun qualities at all.

  She was sitting in the dark in the kitchen. The only reason I saw her was the moonlight catching her blonde hair. Her knees were bent, clasped to her chest as she sat on the chair, staring at the moon through the window.

  I heard her breathing.

  ‘You scared the shit out of me,’ I said, when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to say anything.

  She smiled vaguely in my direction.

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  There was something different about that smile. It was soft, sweet. I stared at her, trying to figure out what had changed. She watched me watching her, amusement playing around her mouth, tilting her head to the side, daring me to ask. And then I watched her ringed fingers tracing the edge of the whisky glass, the tiniest drop of amber liquid at the bottom.

  She waited, small smile still there.

  The barrier was down.

  ‘My operation is booked for tomorrow.’

  It was easier to hear it then, the deep throatiness of her voice, the rasping edges. Her voice didn’t catch so much soaked drunkenness.

  I put a hand out, resting on the chair opposite hers, thinking of sitting down, but ready to retreat if she responded in that way she always did, brash and mocking.

  ‘So you’re going to do it?’

  She sighed, looking out of the window. ‘I don’t know. What do you think I should do?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘Sure.’ She remained still in the near darkness as I pulled out the chair, scraping it slowly on the tiled floor.

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  She nodded, resting her chin on her knees, looking suddenly so much like a little girl.

  ‘Does it make you sad?’

  She nodded again, briefly, before looking away.

  I paused, sighing. ‘Is the only reason you’re not doing it because you’re scared?’

  She looked at me then, a wry little smile. ‘Good catch, baby girl. Good catch indeed. Don’t see you for years and you still get to the heart of the matter.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing, easing into the chair, my chin on my hand as I watched her watch me. She tilted her head.

  ‘You always had that way about you, even as a little girl. Straight shooting…’

  I wanted to stop her, to tell her she had no right to be nostalgic, to waltz down memory lane like she had walked it even once before, but I didn’t. Because part of me yearned to hear her talk about me, to remember me. To hear that lilt of affection and humour in her voice, and to have it be real, just this once. Not some mocking, squawking voice spouting fake truths and half memories, half dreams. I wanted to hear what she remembered.

  She paused, like she was waiting to be scolded, and then continued when it became clear I wasn’t going to stop her.

  ‘This one time, I will never forget, you asked me why I only remembered men’s names. We moved around every couple of days and you could be sure I would know the name of the cute guy behind the bar, or the stuttering kid who would blush as he took my luggage upstairs, or the waiter out there smoking on his shift. And you said, “Mama, why don’t you ever remember the women’s names?” something like that, and I just stopped. Because it was true, I didn’t know the name of the receptionist, or the lady who served the breakfast. Hell, we hired that tutor to teach you on the tour bus for six months, and I didn’t even remember her name most of the time.’

  I bit my lip. ‘Do you remember what you said?’

  ‘I blathered something, desperately trying to make something up, some reason that this big bold woman I was meant to be, this feminist kick-arse icon of the music business, this person who was trying to raise a daughter in a shitty world – why she thought women didn’t matter. Why the only people who mattered were the ones who validated her and had a dick. I blathered something about how remembering people was important, I think?’

  I smiled, shaking my head.

  ‘No?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, with a snort, ‘you most certainly did not.’

  She resigned herself, closing her eyes, rolling her shoulders. ‘Okay, what dumb fuck thing did I say?’

  ‘You said you had to be good to the people who were useful to you.’

  She made a face, but nodded. ‘Okay, callous, and not the lesson a 5-year-old needs, but true, and practical.’

  ‘That wasn’t the worst bit.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t,’ she sighed, running a hand through her hair. ‘Come on then, I may as well pay penance tonight, in case they put me under anaesthetic tomorrow and I never wake up. Or I never sing again, which would feel the same as never waking up. Hit me with my past self’s ignorance.’

  I took a kind of quiet delight in it, in being heard, in her admitting she had messed up, that she wasn’t mother of the year in the same way the papers called her the ‘mother of rock and roll’.

  I looked away from her, remembering. ‘You told me there were important people, who made you confused and passionate and broke your heart, and everyone else was boring and unimportant, and they were just dust. You said it was very important not to be dust.’

  The noise she made was somewhere between a cough and a gasp, and when I looked up I saw that her hands were clasped over her mouth. She let out two angry exhales before she screwed up her eyes, tears falling from the edges, catching in the crow’s feet around her eyes. She blinked, pressing her lips together as they trembled a little.

  ‘I do remember laying there that night. You were asleep on me, Rumble the cat tucked under your arm, and I just stared at the ceiling and thought, “I’m going to fuck this up. I’m going to teach her that nothing matters but being fuckable, being wanted. I’m going to ruin her life, and I don’t know how to fix myself quick enough to stop the damage.” It was like needing to cut off an arm to stop the poison spreading.’

  ‘“Golden Haloed Baby”,’ I said. ‘Quoting yourself, really?’

  ‘Hey, I thought it before I wrote about it,’ she exclaimed, then shook her head. ‘Dust. I told you normal people were dust.’

  ‘You were young,’ I shrugged, unsure why I felt the sudden need to defend her. Perhaps because she wasn’t defending herself. All these years all I’d wanted was for her to own up to what she’d done, to me, to Jen, to Dad. And now, it was like she was standing there completely naked and vulnerable. All too easy to destroy. ‘And you were right. I became dust.’

  ‘How did you become dust, Savannah?’ Her voice was gentle. Pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them, like a naughty child, she tilted her face towards me, like it was story time and I was lulling her to sleep.

  ‘I became as normal, as unlike you, as I could. I didn’t want to move again, or change. I didn’t want to be seen. I wanted to come home to the same boring house on the same boring street for the rest of my boring life. I didn’t want passion or loss or craziness. I just wanted to plod.’

  ‘You’re not dust, Savannah.’ Her voice was weary. ‘Dust never settles in one place. It has no weight, nothing to hold it down. No substance. It just coats everything else, whips up in the wind, and is gone.’ She raised her eyebrows at me.

  ‘I’m that other kind of dust, the stuff that settles when nothing moves. Heavy and thick and soft, keeping everything trapped in time. No dreams, no goals, putting the quiet ahead of any magic that might be found. I was a coward.’

  ‘Were?’

  ‘I’ve made changes.’

  ‘I can see that,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘And so have you,’ I replied. ‘I can see that too.’

&
nbsp; ‘Too little, too late, baby girl.’

  ‘I don’t think you get to be the one who decides that,’ I said. My mother’s eyes filled with fresh tears then, and she looked up at the ceiling until the glittering glaze was suddenly gone again.

  I took a breath. ‘You know, this is the first real conversation I think we’ve ever had.’

  ‘I know. I used to make them up sometimes, in my head, on tour. I’d imagine you coming to me with a boy problem, or wondering what to do about the girls at school.’

  ‘Really?’ I grinned despite myself. ‘And what advice did you give me?’

  ‘The wrong advice – even in my head I never said the right thing. I usually told you to punch them or to tell them to go to hell,’ she snorted. ‘I’m glad you had Jen. She was always better than me. She always lived life properly. I bet she had all the right answers to your teenage questions, didn’t she?’

  ‘Probably. If she didn’t have the answer, I at least had a shoulder to cry on. I think maybe I could have used someone telling me to punch them, though. I don’t have much of a backbone.’

  ‘You?’ she snorted. ‘Savannah, you put up with a broken mess of a singer for a mum, you were raised by your aunt, your dad turned up when you were a teenager… Yet you’ve made a life for yourself. A life full of passion and purpose and people who love you. That takes guts. You need to be brave to be soft, to be bruised by life.’

  ‘If you’re writing a fucking song right now…’ I said, trying to sound threatening, but bursting out laughing. She laughed too in shock, a real laugh, that trilling, musical sound I remembered from childhood, from being swung around and danced with on endless empty stages.

  ‘I’m not, I promise!’ she chuckled, letting that warm sound trail off, before sitting up suddenly. ‘Let me make you some toast. You want some toast, right?’

  ‘Uh… sure.’

  ‘And some tea?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Strong, two sugars, right?’

  I frowned at her.

  ‘I’ve been watching. I know you think I haven’t, but I have.’

  We listened to the sound of the kettle, growing to a hiss and then a whistle, before she cut it off.

  ‘Why now? Why have you finally cut the bullshit now?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to die without having one real conversation with my daughter.’

  ‘You’re not going to die.’

  ‘Probably not, but realising the only people who would care are the ones in love with an idea of you is pretty disturbing. No one would know anything real about me. There’d be some priest giving a eulogy and he’d talk about my music, and that would be it. That would be all I had offered the world.’

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, before opening them suddenly when the bread popped from the toaster.

  She handed me the plate, bringing over a pot of chocolate spread and a knife.

  ‘Assume you’ve moved on from jam and chocolate spread sandwiches?’

  ‘Never. What’s better than sugar, chocolate and carbs?’

  ‘Maybe topping it with peanut butter and deep frying it?’

  ‘Anyone ever suggest you might be the reincarnation of Elvis?’

  My mother let out a brief chuckle. Her hands were clasped around the cup, and I noticed her long, perfectly pointed nails.

  ‘How long’s it been since you played?’ I gestured at her hands. I used to remember running my fingers over the hard, smooth pads of her fingertips, watching as the white lines became red from the grooves of the guitar strings.

  ‘Too long.’ She shook her head. ‘I guess I just didn’t see the point any more. It all seemed fake…’

  The silence settled and she shook it away, reaching over and sneaking one of the toast crusts I’d cut off. I felt a bizarre rush of affection in that moment.

  ‘So come on, let me do the advice thing at least one time. What’s going on with that boy?’

  ‘What boy?’ The realisation hit my stomach like a stone, sinking slowly and nestling somewhere around my intestines, waiting for a kick in the kidneys every time I visualized his face.

  ‘The boy who’s making you crazy.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s not me. I don’t get crazy. I stay calm and reserved and in control.’

  ‘Yeah, but you feel crazy, even if you’re holding it in, right? There’s someone who does that thing, that magic thing, like the way they look at you, or how they sigh with their whole body when they’re happy, or how their face looks when they’re asleep. A little collection of the things that will bring you joy and make you insane quicker than anything else. You can’t tell me you don’t have that, I can see it in you.’

  ‘I… yes. Yes, I am crazy about him and I let myself get involved, even though he’s leaving and I’m leaving and it was a dumb, stupid, not-at-all-me thing to do… and I messed it up and he hates me.’

  ‘No one could hate you, baby girl.’

  I raised an eyebrow at her, ‘Fine, well, he doesn’t trust me.’

  ‘Trust can be won back,’ my mother said, smiling. ‘At least, I really hope it can.’

  ‘Is there even a point? We’re both leaving, or we’re meant to, if by some slim chance I get into any of these cookery schools I stupidly applied to with so little experience.’

  My mother, Clare Curtis, looked at me, from behind Persephone Black’s kohl-rimmed eyes, and smiled. Not that signature rock-star smirk, nothing but a tilted head and a small smile.

  ‘Of course there’s a point.’ She shook her head. ‘What’s more important than love?’

  ‘Dreams, goals, friendship… things that last. Things that don’t encroach on your life until you suddenly look up and realize you’ve sacrificed so much of who you are that you’re not even a person any more, just a collection of obligations and guilt.’

  My mother raised her eyebrows, as if she was considering it.

  ‘I was in love before, and it made me boring and sacrificial and invisible.’

  She grinned at me. ‘Well, then, it wasn’t love, baby girl. If it made you less, instead of more, it wasn’t love. It was desire, or security or something. I look at you now, and you’re like a light bulb, fizzing and vibrant. Not invisible at all.’

  ‘That’s not him, that’s loving my job and my friends, and cooking. That’s me changing into someone I wanted to be.’

  ‘And he wasn’t a part of that?’ My mother moved into the chair closer to mine, leaning in. ‘Savannah, I know I taught you that love is passing, it’s just pointless and everybody leaves. I taught you a whole bunch of fucked-up stuff that I believed at the time, but loving someone doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t have to stop your dreams. If I’d figured that earlier, maybe I would have quit to give you the childhood you asked for, or told your dad you existed sooner. But if you push people away, denying love matters and not letting people in, you end up like me. Old, alone and scared as hell, with no one to turn to when you need to make choices about your life.’

  I tentatively reached across and placed my hand on hers. ‘You’re not that old.’

  That laughter burst forth from her, turning into a cough. I placed a hand over hers, clasping it tightly.

  ‘And you’re not alone.’

  ‘I deserve to be,’ she said quietly, not letting go of my hand.

  ‘Well, then, it’s a good thing we don’t always get what we deserve, isn’t it?’

  We sat there in comfortable silence for a while more, just sipping tea and eating toast, each of us lost in dreams of what our futures might hold.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I went with her to the hospital. Jen gave me this searching look, like she couldn’t figure out what had changed, and she wasn’t at all sure about it. She didn’t trust my mother not to hurt me, and I suddenly felt like I was betraying Jen, like I was throwing back everything she’d offered me. I wanted to explain, but I couldn’t. Still, Jen and Dad met me at the hospital whilst I was waiting for her… Clare, Persephone,
Mum. I knew it was more for me than for my mother, and I appreciated it.

  We paced the hallways back and forth, and Jen and Dad kept sharing these looks, part guilt, part enjoyment, a delicious secret playing about their lips, but I didn’t want to know. I’d had her back, for one night; in the dark of the kitchen when I was half drunk, I’d had that mother I wanted. And I didn’t want to lose her. But… if everything went to plan she’d be back singing, back on the road, doing that thing she loved.

  Now that I had that thing of my own, I couldn’t be so angry about it any more. She had something she was good at, something she was better at than being a mother, being a role model, being a decent person. My mother was the best at being Persephone Black, at writing haunting songs that chased down your spine and struck you. Even if they weren’t about you. She had a gift, I had to accept that. Those nights she sat beside me on the bed of a hotel room, strumming her guitar whilst she thought I was asleep, I thought she was a magician, a good fairy who sprang music from her fingertips. Half the time I didn’t understand the words, but some nights, she’d make up lullabies on the spot for me. One time, she made up this song, ‘Rumble for Trouble’, about my toy cat, and all the problems he caused. I didn’t think she’d ever release it, but she did. In my teenage years I read an article stating that ‘Rumble for Trouble’ was one of the ‘most powerful anti-establishment protest songs in the modern era, rooted in a desire to destroy the patriarchy and return power to the people’. When I read that, I remembered her secret little smile, the wiggle of her eyebrows when she played it for the album execs in their smart suits. She seemed to say, This is our secret. I was sad ‘Rumble for Trouble’ wasn’t the song that had chased me around all these years. Perhaps I would have felt differently about her, just a little.

  She’d slipped a note under my door that morning, before leaving for the hospital, ever dramatic. I didn’t bother opening it – instead I chased her down the stairs.

  ‘What the hell is this?’