‘What are you thinking about?’ Grandad asks me.
‘Oh, sorry. I was just thinking it’s a nice morning.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perfect for a party.’
He smiles, and his smile seems painted on, poorly acted. Have we ever really talked before, one person to another, not grandparent to child? I feel nervous of him now.
‘You know you’ll probably have to see your mother today, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I wonder what I’m supposed to say. The thought of her makes me tense, my skin pricking, like I’m being hunted. It upsets me to think I’m a cause of tension for people like my grandad, who don’t need to be affected by the gulf that’s opened between me and my mum. I suppose I’ve let him down by refusing to see her all this time. I wish it could have been different. Thinking of talking to her again today makes me feel sick now, makes me want to hide away. I’m not ready. But if I wait till I’m ready whole decades might pass, we might never meet again, and that would be another reason for hating myself.
‘Will you be all right, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I hope so. I’m sure I will.’
‘Just come to me if it feels too much.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I haven’t done anything, don’t thank me yet. I just don’t want you to dread the moment when everyone starts arriving.’
‘I’ll be fine. I know I’m going to have to see her eventually. Today is probably as good a day as any.’
By which I mean, of course, that there will never be a good day. I’ll always feel like a failure as a daughter. I’ll always feel afraid of her.
And the thought of Joe rises and breaks through the surface of the day, and I didn’t even make it through breakfast before I felt myself caught in the undertow, a shrill lament of memory like a curlew calling over a lake, and found myself thinking of him.
‘Why not just tell her how she makes you feel?’
We were lying on his bed, wasting an afternoon, staring at the ceiling, our legs intertwined and the light of a rainy day coming in through the windows. I remember him taking my hand.
‘I could never do that.’
‘Why not? I don’t understand. How can you solve it if you don’t talk to her?’
‘You can’t solve it, that’s naïve. It’s something I just have to live with, and the only way to survive is by not talking about it and making it worse. You’re assuming that life is fundamentally all right, that it’s possible for everything to work like a clock. But what if the whole thing’s actually broken or random and everything that doesn’t go wrong is some kind of miracle? Why is that less likely than things magically working out?’
The first time I ever really felt close to someone else, as if another person was a part of me, was Joe. That was when I realised how much Mum and I had never got on. We were still speaking at that point, things hadn’t gone completely wrong just yet. But time with Joe showed me how lonely I’d felt all the time the centre of the world had been my parents. That was why I set about turning him into my family, and drifted away from the people who had brought me into the world. The whole of the world, in the years we spent together, was Joe.
I have to try not to dwell on him now, because I need too much of myself today to get lost in the memory of him. I have the meeting with Mum to think about – the terrors of the present, not the past. The past is played out and I can’t rewrite it. All I can find the words for is now.
All my life, there’s been some deficit, some absence in the space where feeling should have welled up between Mum and me. I think it’s the flaw at the heart of me. I don’t love enough; somehow I never learned how to love when I was young and living at home. I’ve always felt like a part of me must be missing. People tell me I’m exaggerating when I try to describe that, say it’s my insecurity speaking, but all the same, when I was growing up, I believed I was broken. My heart didn’t quite work. Sometimes I think all the darkness I’ve ever experienced welled up out of that emptiness, and fed on it, and used it to grow and live.
Not now, I can’t be thinking about this now, I have to live in the day around me.
‘Your shower’s very good, isn’t it?’
This is the stuff life is made of, I think. Small thoughts strung together so people who love each other too much to say so have something to share. Love among the rubble of an ordinary life, sprouting up weedlike through the difficulty of ever really saying what you mean.
‘Oh, do you think so? I’m so glad,’ he says.
‘I can’t get mine anywhere near as hot.’
‘You probably need a new boiler.’
‘Yeah, but if I said that, the landlord would probably stick his fingers in his ears.’
Grandad laughs, and I smile, because I’ve made him happy, in a way.
‘You know you could always come and stay here, if you ever got tired of things like that. The troubles that come with a rented flat. It’s a big house; you know there are plenty of rooms.’
‘Thank you. That’s really kind.’
‘I know you have your work, and your life, you have a whole network of things to keep you where you are, as everybody does. But you can always come and stay here if you want to.’
‘Thank you.’ I drink down to the bottom of my coffee, leaving the last mouthful so I don’t have to swallow a thimble of grains. I’m afraid to look back up from the bottom of my cup. Shy of this sincerity, this kindness from him. I wish I was brave enough to look at him, and tell him how much I appreciate his generosity, but I don’t know how, I can’t quite manage it. I feel like I must be blushing, colour spreading across my chest. Then the moment of seriousness passes, and Grandad sighs, and gets up from the table.
‘I’d better get ready, hadn’t I? Aunt Laura will be here soon. She’ll murder me if I’m still in my pyjamas.’
‘I might go for a little walk before everyone turns up,’ I say. ‘Would you mind?’
‘No, of course not. Go ahead.’
‘I’ll wash this up first.’
He shakes his head. ‘There’s no need. Just put it in the dishwasher.’
I laugh. ‘I always forget you have a dishwasher. Houses like this don’t feel like they should, you know?’
He laughs. ‘Oh, we’re very modern here.’
The clock begins striking in the hall beyond us. There’s always something ghostly in that sound. The sound of a clock striking the hour in another room always seems like a door back into memory, into lost worlds, forgotten possibilities. I know the clock calling out belonged to my great-grandfather once; he carried it with him when he travelled from Wales to London, and he carried it again when he travelled from London down to Wiltshire, where he lived, where Grandad was born. The sound of it striking has sounded in the ears of my family for a century, or even longer. How many minutes has it counted out? Has the millionth hour chimed out and passed without anyone noticing? It might well have done. Milestones like that must be reached and passed all the time, and no one notices them.
‘I’ll see you in a bit then,’ I say, stirring myself.
‘All right. See you later.’
He turns to leave, and I think maybe I should tell him that Sam isn’t coming. I don’t want to admit it to anyone, really, but it’s Grandad’s party and he said I could bring someone when I asked. He effectively invited him. I should tell him so he doesn’t feel kept in the dark.
‘Oh, Grandad, I meant to say. My friend who was going to come can’t come.’
He turns back and looks at me, and I have the eerie feeling that he understands all of it. He somehow heard everything I didn’t say.
‘All right. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Sorry about the late notice.’
‘Don’t worry at all.’
I load the dishwasher, then put on my shoes and step outside, closing my eyes for a moment to drink in the heat of the sun as it falls snow soft on my face. I feel bad leaving Grandad on his own. A few minutes ago, I was worri
ed about talking to him; I thought I shouldn’t bother him, like when I was younger and he was in his study with the door shut. But he didn’t growl at me, and now I can see a kind of vulnerability he carries with him like a cloak. It’s so strange to find I don’t know who he is at all, not really. It makes me feel uneasy to think I used to be small enough for him to hold, and even then he seemed old to me. A moment ago, it feels like, I was starting secondary school; now I’m twenty-five, and all the plans I made have collapsed like old houses, like sandcastles at high tide. How can I be flying so fast through everything? There was optimism in me once; there was a great open future like snow no one had walked in. How could it all have fallen apart so suddenly?
Mum was the start of it all. The root of what happened, the trouble that brimmed in my life and cut me off from everything – from love, from people, from mirrors, from hope.
I suspect Mum never really wanted children. She might have once liked the idea of having a child in the abstract, but she ended up feeling let down by the reality, the tiredness, the work. When I left home to go to university, Mum said as we were carrying my stuff out of the house that she felt she was getting her life back. That was the sound of the lid closing finally on our relationship, I think.
I cross the mounting yard, happy at the sound of the gravel crunching underfoot as I approach the quiet freedom of the road beyond the walls of the yard, a road that leads out to the wide world and home and anywhere you can imagine. I set off out of the front gates up the hill into the village. In a place like this, walking past the pub and hearing the bells of the church, you can almost believe the world is beautiful. Of course, at the back of my mind I know that places like this are only possible if other people have nothing, but the old lanes here still make my heart lift. That’s one of the struggles I always have with socialism – it’s such a shame, but it seems, in the end, like you can’t be fair about things and still believe in nice houses. It seems like a flaw in the plan.
I feel awake enough now to talk to Sam. I know I have to speak to him, or he’ll be there at the edge of my mind all day, casting a shadow over all the celebrations. I want to feel angrier with him for letting me down, but I can’t, because it’s so entirely predictable. If what you expected goes and happens, can you really claim to be disappointed? I call, and hear the Vodafone woman’s familiar tones instructing me to leave a message.
‘Hi, it’s me. I got your text. I’m sorry you’re busy. I’m sad you won’t be here today. I’ll be busy now so I can’t speak, but maybe we can speak tonight. OK. Bye.’
I should have demanded more of an explanation, but I’ve always preferred to hide myself away when anything hurt. I’ve never liked asking for anyone’s attention, asking for anyone to care. It always felt like weakness, like failing. Mum used to make me feel like asking for any help at all was only putting a burden on her.
It used to feel like Mum didn’t want me there, as far back as I can remember. Like I was a trouble that couldn’t be cleaned up or mended. First she got tired of doing things for me, and would tell me I was old enough now to open my own curtains in the morning. Then she would decide I was opening the curtains wrong, and rush into the bedroom to do them again, as if she was putting out a fire.
‘You have to get it neat,’ she’d say, tugging at the curtains so they hung straight, framing the window. ‘It’s ugly if you just leave them half-open; you have to get it neat.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s how it’s supposed to look. You can see that, can’t you?’ She would gesture exasperatedly at the window, arranged now just as she wanted. ‘Can’t you see that’s how it ought to look? Really, Kate, it’s easy.’
Whatever happened, whatever I was doing, I was always doing it wrong. And there were other ways she let me know how much trouble I was. I remember the locks on the kitchen cupboards that stopped me eating except when I was given my three meals and my snack after school. I suppose it was a way of controlling the household spending. It was a way of exercising control, too.
I’ve walked as far as the church, so I go into the churchyard and start wandering in between the graves, watching the light as it comes through the trees and reading the names on the stones. I decide to call Lizzy, and dial, and remember too late that it’s still quite early on a Saturday morning and she might be asleep.
‘Hello?’
‘Hey. I didn’t wake you, did I?’
‘Little bit.’
‘Shit, sorry.’
‘It’s OK. I should get up anyway.’
‘It’s a beautiful morning.’
‘Yeah? Oh, yeah.’ I imagine her sat up in bed, reaching across to the window in her bedroom to lift back the curtain and take in the sky.
‘How are you?’
‘Er … I don’t really know yet.’
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have called so early.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You sound a bit grumpy.’
‘Sorry. Funny morning. I’m just a bit pissed off with Sam.’ I feel ashamed to have called her now, to have ruined her lie-in with my problems. She doesn’t need to hear about this, doesn’t need to hear from me.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing really. I’m at my grandad’s eightieth and Sam was going to come down, and I knew he wouldn’t, and he texted this morning to say he couldn’t, and now he isn’t picking up. It’s just boring, you know? He could have just said when I asked.’ It’s sad, anyway, now I say it aloud. Nothing much has happened at all; there’s no reason to have called her, except that I felt alone. But perhaps she knows that. Perhaps Lizzy always knows that’s what makes me pick up the phone and call her.
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing really.’
‘Do you feel like you don’t want to be with him?’
‘Not really. I don’t know. I do want to be with him. The trouble is I feel like I never actually am with him. You know? He’s always so fucking far away.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sorry. I know what you think.’ Lizzy doesn’t have much time for Sam. The whole situation’s too difficult for her, really. She’s Joe’s sister, after all. I wish I had another friend I felt close enough to talk to, wish I hadn’t rung her like this.
‘You just have to try and have the conversation with him, don’t you?’
I’ve arrived at my grandma’s grave. I stand over the flourish of grass and the stone at the head of it, and look at the dates. It’s terrible to imagine Grandma’s body in that ground beneath me, under the mud weighing down like years, like memory. I turn and walk away as quickly as I can. ‘I’d better go now. Got to help setting up.’
‘Are you having a party?’
‘Yeah, big one.’
‘Will she be there? Your mum?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you’ll see her?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is that why you’re freaked out?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you called me. And I can hear it in your voice.’
‘I’m sorry. I guess that is why I’m calling, yeah. I feel like a bit of a wreck. I hoped Sam would be here. Now I’m on my own.’ It’s pathetic of me, really, not to be able to face things by myself. Why can’t I do this by myself? Why do I wish Lizzy could be here, holding my hand?
‘You’re not. I’ll be thinking of you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m always here for you, mate, remember that.’
I stop for a moment when I reach the road. My throat feels tight. It’s weird, but it always throws me when someone shows me kindness. I never think I deserve it. Even when I need someone’s sympathy, it still makes me feel sick to ask them for some understanding, because I’m sure one day, when I want reassurance, I’ll call someone and they’ll tell me I’m not worth their time, they’ve seen through the act, they don’t want to know me any more.
It can be very unhe
althy, depending on your mood, to come back to the scenes of your childhood. All around you, wherever you look, there are layers on layers of memories, glimpses of who you were when you came here before, and who you can never quite be again. And I think you always find you were someone else back then. More optimistic, more naïve.
I used to wish Dad could have calmed Mum down, and held us together when we started to fall apart, but he was never the one who made the decisions. Mum was always more driven than he was, and he was too happy to let things lie.
Because Mum was the busy one, she only cooked dinner for the three of us one or two nights a week, and it was always a time to steer clear of her. She would make me peel carrots or potatoes if I came into the kitchen, and then I’d have to concentrate on getting that right, on not causing Mum any trouble, or she’d lose her temper and shout at me for things I didn’t even know I’d done.
‘You have to get those bits out with the end of the peeler! Can’t you see them? Why would you want to eat them? They’re disgusting. You have to get them out like this.’ She would snatch the potato and the peeler from my hands, and finish the job for me, sighing and harried. By the time dinner reached the table, and I sat down with Mum and Dad to eat, the air in the kitchen was usually thick with the threat of her censure.
‘Well, I’ll be up far too late getting through the work I have to do tonight,’ Mum would say.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dad would reply. ‘You should have let me cook.’
‘Why would that make any difference? The work would still be there, wouldn’t it? That wouldn’t make any difference.’
‘Sorry, darling. I just meant it would have been possible for you to get started on it earlier.’
‘Can’t you let me have some pleasure in my life? Am I not allowed to enjoy cooking for my family?’
Mum loved the martyrdom of bearing so much on her shoulders. She savoured the tiredness, the endless midnights, she let them breathe like wine and then drank them down. She loved to make everyone else feel she worked harder than they did. And she’s never seemed to get a handle on her temper in the whole of her life. She never found ways to stop herself snapping at the first sign of stress.
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