Single Mother on the Verge

by Maria Roberts

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘Yes, Mother?’ I can barely speak, my throat is so hoarse from shouting over the music in the bar.

  ‘Maria, I need you to get hold of Josephine. Are you dressed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Get dressed and drive to the hospital. Intensive care.’

  ‘Why?’ I panic. ‘What’s happened? Mum—’

  ‘Last night there was a terrible accident. It’s your cousin. You need to get hold of your sister.’

  ‘I will, I will, I’ll try. But, Mum, I can’t drive. I was drinking last night.’

  ‘Maria, you have got to be quick.’

  My mother’s voice cracks. I hear her sniffle, then regain control of herself. Mothers have a habit of being so strong that they trick you into thinking everything’s going to be easy.

  ‘Mum, tell me he’s going to recover. He’s just badly injured, right?’

  ‘Maria, he’s only got a few hours to live. They’ve given him until one o’clock. Get hold of Josephine. Phone a taxi.’

  I look at the time on my mobile. It’s almost eleven o’clock.

  I ring and ring Josephine. Jesus, Josephine, where are you? Come on. Not at home or on her mobile.

  I call my father. ‘Where’s Josephine?’

  ‘Shopping probably. It’s a busy time of year for women. How are you, darling?’

  ‘Dad, you need to come and get me now and take me to Hope Hospital. There’s been an accident.’ I fill in the details. ‘It’s urgent. Get hold of Josephine. Get her to yours and tell her there. Don’t tell her when she’s shopping.’

  I call Margaret No. 2. ‘Please can you hold on to Jack?’ I cry. ‘I need to go to the hospital.’

  When Josephine and I enter Intensive Care we’re escorted to the relatives’ room. We open the door to find our entire extended family of uncles and cousins there. We weren’t due to see them until Christmas morning, at my mother’s, for Irish coffee and the swapping of presents.

  My uncle John nods quietly. I scan the room: their faces are grave and white. My young cousin, who was in his mid-twenties, is going to die. One bad decision last night changed everything. He got into a car. The young driver had been drinking. The car skidded and flipped on ice. It landed upside-down in a garden. One other passenger is dead. Two more are in a critical condition. Outside the quiet of the relatives’ room, his young sons slide up and down the hospital corridor. His sons, his sister, his mother – my aunt Sophie – his little brother.

  My mother takes my hand. ‘Do you want to say goodbye?’

  Yes. No. I don’t know.

  She walks me to his bed. Aunt Sophie and his sister wait by his side.

  ‘But he looks so alive. He looks like he’s going to wake up.’

  ‘He’s not going to wake up, Maria,’ my mother says. ‘He’s brain-dead. The machines are keeping him going because he agreed to be an organ donor.’

  I take his hand. It feels warm. Josephine tells him all about her shopping trip. Poor love, I think, poor, poor love.

  I collect Jack and bring him to the hospital; he leaves a card and a teddy bear at the foot of my cousin’s bed. We wait some more in the relatives’ room. My cousin holds on for longer than they thought he would. When, finally, it’s time, and the priest arrives to read him the last rites, many of us stand around his bed, shaken with grief. At some point his spirit leaves. His youngest son reaches out with his little hand to hold on to his daddy.

  ‘Thank you, Father,’ says his mother.

  Uncertainly, we each kiss him and say goodbye for the last time.

  Shortly after, I leave the hospital.

  Christmas Day passed unnoticed. It’s Boxing Day morning when I receive the call to say the life-support machine has been switched off and my cousin’s organs are due to be removed by the transplant team.

  Much later, Jack walks into my room. I’m lying in bed, a towel wrapped around me, the duvet plumped between my arms. ‘You have to get up,’ he says softly, stroking my leg. ‘Come on, Mum. We have to be at Nana’s. You said we had to be there for five thirty.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘It’s five o’clock. You’ve been saying that for ages and you’re still in bed. Put your pants on, and a T-shirt. Come on.’

  ‘I will, when you leave the room. I’m naked under here.’

  ‘I’ll help you get dressed. But I’m not putting your bra and knickers on you. You’ll have to do that yourself.’ Jack is cajoling but insistent, using the tone I employ when he’s ill and tell him, ‘You must eat, you must take your medicine, you must rest.’ Closing his eyes, he takes my arm and pulls me from under the duvet until I’m on my feet.

  I feel light-headed. My feet are rocks at the bottom of my legs and it seems as though little pebbles are running through my veins, willing me to lie down again. ‘I’m up, see? Leave me now and I’ll get dressed.’

  ‘If you go back to bed, I’ll hear the bump from downstairs. I’ll be listening out for it.’

  What to wear? I have no clothes. I choose a hotchpotch from what’s hanging up. I dry and straighten my hair.

  When we arrive at my mother’s, Grandma is swinging on a high stool at the breakfast bar. My mother is taking buffet food from the oven while my stepfather is on the sofa, watching cartoons. I find a packet of soluble paracetamol in my mother’s medicine box. I drop a tablet into a glass of cold water. Grandma watches me. ‘Not too much water,’ she says. ‘You’re supposed to have just a bit of water with it.’ I grimace and gulp it down. My head hurts. My whole body aches.

  Josephine arrives with her boyfriend and the kids. Aunt Sarah arrives with her son. Great-aunt Katrina, who is here for the holidays, sits next to Grandma, at the end of the breakfast bar, scanning the kitchen for gluten-free food. ‘I can’t eat any gluten,’ she says. ‘Nothing with gluten in it for me. You have such good gluten-free food here in the UK. The food you find in Canada.’ She pulls a face and sticks out her tongue.‘It’s not like here anyway. It’s so cold over in Canada, and you should see the snow. It’s up to here,’ she adds, pointing to her shoulders.

  When the roast potatoes are out of the oven and on the table, my mother shouts, ‘Come on now, everybody, before the potatoes go cold. Tuck in.’

  ‘Come on, lads,’ says my stepfather, to the kids. ‘Get to the table, boys, and eat.’

  ‘Wait now,’ says Grandma, ever one for tradition, ‘until the men and boys have got theirs.’

  So we wait. When the boys are done, we load our plates with turkey, salmon, garlic bread, prawns, chicken-satay sticks and salad. We eat until we’re full. Then Josephine starts the call for Grandma’s sherry trifle.

  Grandma knows how much we all adore her sherry trifle. When I was a little kid she and I made trifle together in her kitchen, tipping sherry in by the glassful. I love her trifle almost as much as I love her treacle bread. Grandma and I haven’t made treacle bread together for years.

  Josephine pipes up: ‘How much sherry is in there, Nana?’

  ‘Two big beakers,’ says Aunt Katrina.

  ‘Two big glasses full,’ says Grandma. ‘Well, we had to – it was to serve eleven and it was a big bowl, you see. That trifle’s been here, there and everywhere, that trifle has. It’s been carried to three houses over Christmas and it hasn’t gone yet. Make sure you eat it.’

  ‘We poured the sherry into these big glasses,’ says Aunt Katrina, ‘and then we poured it into the trifle and we didn’t drink any of it, did we?’

  My mother’s in the kitchen, pulling off the clingfilm.

  ‘I can smell it from here,’ says Josephine. ‘We’ll all be drunk. Maria won’t be able to drive home. Will you, Maria?’ She laughs heartily, holding onto Grandma.

  ‘When someone opens a bottle of wine two miles away, Josephine can smell it,’ I chime in. I make a gesture like the child-catcher sniffing out children. ‘She has a nose for alcohol, our Josephine.’

  Aunt Sarah turns to Grandma and Aunt Katrina. ‘I bet you drank the rest
of it, didn’t you?’

  ‘We did not!’ says Aunt Katrina.

  ‘Ach, enough now,’ says Grandma. ‘You’ll be okay eating it.’

  My mother brings the bowls in, piled high with trifle. I don’t know if I can manage so much food.

  Grandma takes the first spoonful. We watch her and wait. ‘It’s good… Yes, it is. It’s good.’ She smiles, then giggles, like I’ve seen her do with her old schoolfriend. She giggles like a young girl, even though she’s on the other side of eighty.

  I take a spoonful. It is good. ‘This is amazing,’ I say.

  My mother’s sitting at the far corner of the table. The men have moved into the other room, captivated by Father Ted on the television. I don’t know how she found the energy to lay out such a feast, what with my cousin having died. But we’re eating, and we’re smiling.

  Only yesterday my mother said, ‘It’s been a difficult couple of years.’

  ‘It has,’ I said.

  ‘You’re looking better today, Grandma,’ I say. ‘You have colour in your cheeks. You were so pale yesterday, I was worried about you.’ She’d been as white as her hair.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘for being so observant. I’m glad I’m looking better.’ She strokes her cheek with a trembling hand, then smiles her winning smile. And she looks beautiful then. In her wedding photographs she looks like a film star. ‘He was only twenty-four,’ she says.

  We all fall quiet for a moment.

  ‘The doctors,’ my mother begins, ‘say that he’ll provide life for seven people.’

  ‘They can use,’ adds Aunt Sarah, ‘his heart, his lungs, his eyes, his kidneys…’

  ‘There are two of them,’ says my mother. ‘You only need one to live. He had two to give.’

  ‘And two eyes,’ says Grandma. ‘You can use the corneas to help blind people.’ And she tells us the story of a friend’s child who was blind but was able to see because of a donated cornea.

  ‘What else is there?’ asks my mother, because it’s hard to think straight, and the sherry trifle’s almost gone. We’re scraping for the cream and the custard at the bottom of the bowls. I can hear the spoons hitting the glass above Father Ted on the television. Upstairs, Jack and his cousins are laughing and playing.

  ‘Liver?’ I suggest.

  ‘It was in the news,’ says Grandma. She turns to me. ‘If you find the clipping in the paper, will you give it to me?’

  ‘I will,’ I say.

  ‘Seven families are spending this Christmas full of hope because he was an organ donor,’ my mother says. Then she brings out the After Eights. The coffee machine bubbles, and my young nephew, who’s asleep upstairs, wakes and shouts for Josephine. We eat more chocolates. And we talk.

  34

  Every day since Christmas Eve I’ve tried to speak to Toga. He’s in Manchester for the holidays, visiting his parents, and I’d hoped to see him. He was too busy to pick up his phone or return my calls, and when we finally spoke this morning he said, ‘You sound like you’ve caught a cold. If you have, we can’t meet up tonight because I’m going scuba-diving over New Year and if I catch a cold I won’t be able to equalize.’

  Jack is staying with my mother so that I can enjoy a birthday night out. Tomorrow I turn thirty. I want to wake up to find that my life has been transformed overnight. My cousin’s death has made me realize that I need to get my act together.

  Toga’s due to come over this evening so I’m on a last-minute mission to make my entire life seem perfect. I scrub the bathroom wearing a basque, a thong and stockings because I don’t want to get my new dress dirty. If Toga could see me now, I’m sure he’d want me for ever, for keeps. A girl who cleans the house in stockings: how could he turn her down?

  Original plan to celebrate my birthday with Toga: a romantic walk in the country followed by dinner and a night of passion in a four-poster bed at a rural retreat. This was changed to: a romantic afternoon walk across the river to Boho for something to eat. This became: after Toga’s shopping trip for his imminent scuba-diving holiday I’ll meet him in town. He’ll be grumpy and laden with bags. We’ll go for a quick bite to eat and afterwards to a bar. Then I’ll bring him home. ‘I don’t want a big night,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, thinking, I want a grand night with bells on it.

  I sit at the dressing-table and prepare to undergo some drastic renovations. I dry and straighten my hair, then tease in a few tempting curls. I slap on some foundation and create dark, brooding eyes, framed by incredibly long, sweeping lashes. I’m rubbing some Orgasm over my cheeks (what a ridiculous name for a shade of blusher) when my phone vibrates with a text message. Toga. What does he want now – to cancel?

  Didn’t go shopping. Will meet at 6.30 p.m.

  Where?

  I text back:

  Outside Cornerhouse. X

  This means we can pop into Odder on Oxford Road and have a quick drink with Zelda, Emmeline, Nancy, Sybil and some others who are enjoying a night out. The girls can meet Toga and give me the ‘pursue’ or ‘don’t pursue’ look.

  My phone vibrates again. Toga:

  Somewhere more central? X

  This is Manchester, not London. Once you’re in the centre, everywhere is central. Is it absolutely impossible for Toga to say:

  I’ll be there at 6.30 p.m. prompt. You may not be able to see my face because of the enormous bouquet of white lilies and red roses I’ll be carrying, especially for you, but you’ll be able to sense my passion and love. If you’re still uncertain, there’ll be two sweet doves perched on my shoulders.

  I text back:

  How about outside the library at St Peter’s Square?

  My lip is still swollen from the night I stepped out of the taxi and slipped on black ice. I try to disguise it with red lipstick. I don’t look sexy, I look like I’ve had a stroke. My arse and hips throb and the bruises on my knees are visible even through the stockings. I also have a scabby red streak on my arm where I burned myself on the grill. All in all, I look like a chick who’s heavily into S&M.

  Toga texts again:

  Low key. Then back to yours for adult fun. X

  Does a game of charades count as adult fun?

  Toilette completed, I change the sheets. Which is no easy task in these high heels. Finally I slip on my dress. Tonight I will drink slowly and steadily. I will not get drunk. I will gaze at Toga adoringly. I take a Beecham’s flu remedy to disguise my cold and prepare to leave the house.

  The pills were a bad, bad idea because now my body is on fire – and not in a horny way either. My ears and my vagina itch, and my legs, arms, neck and face sting. I examine myself in the mirror: I’m covered from head to foot in white lumps surrounded by angry red blotches. I’m allergic to it. What a time to find out. Oh, God, what if my throat swells? I might die here, alone in my bedroom. I strip off my underwear and run naked to the bathroom, rummage through the medicine box and pull out some antihistamines. Recommended dose: two small pills. I take four. I won’t die on four, but I may pass out in the throes of adult fun. I run a cold shower, then squirt freezing water into my ears, down my throat, over my shoulders and up my orifices. Minutes later I wrap myself in a towel and lie on the bed with relief.

  It’s now six twenty and I’m late as usual. But at least the red blotches are fading. Result!

  I arrive at St Peter’s Square and take a seat on a bench in the metro stop and begin to scan the surrounding streets for Toga. I can’t see him. My mobile rings. ‘Where are you?’ he asks. He’s playing the I’ve-been-here-for-ages game.

  I can play it too. ‘I’m here, darling. Can’t see you. Where are you?’ Then I spot him over by one of the white pillars at the entrance to Central Library and begin to stroll towards him. A little bag is swinging from his hand and it looks like a present for me. An expensive one.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. I stand on tiptoe to catch his kiss on my lips as he hands me a Jo Malone gift bag. ‘Happy birthday.’

  ‘Happy Chris
tmas,’ I answer.

  We walk down Peter Street in the direction of the Hilton Hotel.

  We’re standing in a queue, waiting for the lift to take us to the cocktail bar. ‘I should have put our names on the guest list,’ says Toga. ‘Last time I came here we had a booth.’

  ‘When did you come here?’

  ‘Earlier this year.’

  I hesitate for a moment. ‘You told me you couldn’t make it. You said someone came in your place.’

  ‘Did I?’

  Does Toga tell so many lies he doesn’t even remember the truth?

  ‘It’s no matter,’ he says. Then he continues to tell me about the room, and the bar, and his friends who joined him.

  ‘But you lied to me,’ I say.

  ‘I didn’t know how to tell you.’ He shrugs me off as if I’m being difficult. Then it’s our turn to step into the lift and be shuttled up to the bar.

  Toga buys me a ‘Shaker Maker’, a drink the barman recommended the last time he came here.

  I say: ‘I can’t believe you lied to me when you knew the nature of the relationship I had with Rhodri. If you were here with someone else, you should have said.’

  Toga doesn’t want to talk about that. He leads me over to the windows where we look out across the city. He says, ‘The architecture in London is so much better than it is in Manchester.’ He loves the buildings in London and so do I. But when I look out across the skyline, I think, This is my home.

  We end up at Wings, a Chinese restaurant on Lincoln Square. The service here is perfect. You don’t even have to lift a napkin yourself or pour the wine. They do all that for you. The minute the level in your glass dips, they top it up. I drink much faster than Toga so I’m rewarded with more wine. I’m just beginning to relax when he says, ‘I’ve been trying to figure out what we are to one another. I’ve never really known, but now I do. We’re friends, aren’t we? We get on well together and we’ve known one another for years.’ He studies his glass for a few seconds, then adds, ‘I can’t stay this evening. I can come back to yours for a while but then I must go home.’ He means to the single bed at his mother’s house. ‘I need to go shopping tomorrow and I don’t feel well.’