by Jo Walton
She struggled to press the button to ring for the nurse. “Is my friend waiting?” she asked.
“Try to relax,” the nurse said, taking her pulse professionally. “Don’t worry about anything.”
“I’ll worry myself into another heart attack this minute if you don’t let my friend in. She’s in a wheelchair.”
Bee was waiting, and they let her in. “They wouldn’t tell me how you were,” she said, wheeling herself right up to the bed and taking Pat’s hand.
“I had to threaten to have another heart attack to get you in,” Pat said. “You wouldn’t believe how much good it’s doing my heart to see you.”
“I called the kids, and Philip’s on his way. Flora said she’d come first thing in the morning, and I told her Philip was coming and we’d get in touch if it was really serious.”
“Having grown-up children who know what we want as next of kin is such a relief,” Pat said.
“He should be here any minute. He was in Glasgow.”
“Of course, it would help if they weren’t so far away.”
The Addison assured Pat that it was a minor heart attack. They gave her stacks of pills, a diet sheet that didn’t allow her to eat anything she liked, and instructions to exercise. “I get loads of exercise,” she complained.
“Get more,” Bee said, unsympathetically. “I can’t have your heart packing in on us.”
“Do you think I should ask them if the prohibition on ice cream includes gelato?”
“No,” Philip said. “Because you’re going to eat it anyway, so you might as well not ask. All this low-fat stuff is going to be hard. You love fat. You never cook anything that doesn’t have half a bottle of olive oil in it.”
“Except when I’ve run out of olive oil, and then it has half a pound of butter,” Pat said. “Though I have noticed that Sainsbury’s do a very decent olive oil these days.”
She took the pills regularly and tried to walk more. “I used to love rowing, but I haven’t done it since we moved out here. I’ll walk in Italy.”
“You’ll walk now. You can push me if you like, that’ll be good exercise.”
“Slavedriver,” Pat said.
The news was terrible, as usual. There was a massacre in China, repression in the Soviet countries, and yet another assassination of the president in the US. The war between Uruguay and Brazil threatened to go nuclear, and the Americans said that they’d regard any intervention from Russia or Europe as a hostile act against their hemisphere. “Well, keep peace in your hemisphere, then,” Bee snarled at the television. “No more nukes!”
That summer in Italy Pat found that she couldn’t remember Italian words she knew perfectly well. She’d launch herself into a sentence and come to a dead stop when the words weren’t there. She’d never had that experience before and it confounded her. “Do you think it might be your tablets?” Jinny asked.
Back in Cambridge she asked her doctor and had her prescription changed. She couldn’t tell if it had helped, she wasn’t speaking Italian. The next summer things didn’t seem to be any better. Pat noticed that she was sometimes forgetting words in English too.
“I’m afraid I’m going like my mother,” she confessed to Bee in the dark.
“You’re only sixty-four,” Bee said, holding her tight. “Don’t cry now, Pat love. Hush. You’ll be all right.”
30
Twins: Trish 1994–1999
George rang up one morning in the spring of 1994. “I was wondering if I could ask you to do me a big favor,” he said.
“Yes, of course, what?” Trish answered, looking frantically for her glasses, her notebook and her pen so that she could note down whatever the favor was before she forgot.
“They want us back on the moon, and it would be for a year,” George said, as she found the notebook on the counter and her glasses on their beaded chain around her neck. Tamsin had given her the chain for Christmas. “At least a year, maybe two. It’s really important for Sophie that she go.”
“But what about the twins?” Trish asked. “You can’t take them, can you?”
“Medical opinion thinks it wouldn’t be good for growing bones to be in gravity that low. That’s the favor. We wondered if you could take them. There’s room, and they always love visiting you. We could ask Sophie’s parents, but they’re getting old. Well, they’re younger than you are, but they’re somehow resigned to being old and sort of mummifying in it, not like you. I always feel I have to tiptoe in their house—whereas your house is always lively.”
“Of course I will,” Trish said, sitting down at the kitchen table and fumbling with the notepad. “When would you have to go?”
“Sophie would go almost immediately, but I’d stay here until the end of the school year. Then they could come to you for the summer and start school up there in September.”
“You seem to have it all sorted out,” Trish said. “I should really check with Bethany before disrupting her this way.”
“I thought they could go to my old school,” George said, disregarding this. “That’s another plus to them being in Lancaster. The schools in Aberystwyth are very dull. But Lancaster has great schools, it always has had. I know the Grammar School has gone comprehensive, but from what I hear everyone’s getting an excellent education up there.”
“The schools are doing fine. And so is the university. We saved the market. And we’re even keeping the old swimming pool open instead of opening a stupid new one in the middle of nowhere,” Trish said, well briefed on local issues by Bethany. “But why are you talking about the grammar school? How old are the twins now, exactly?”
“They were six in February,” George said. “Too young for the grammar school for a while yet!”
After she had put the phone down she found her pen and wrote firmly TWINS, JUNE and put it on the fridge. Then she wrote it down on all her other lists.
Bethany helped her get rooms ready for Rhodri and Bronwen. They got a man to come and help move beds and paint, and they bought new duvets—one with dolphins and one with dinosaurs. “That wouldn’t have been my top choice to say boy or girl,” Bethany said, shaking the covers on.
“They’re very pink dinosaurs, and the alternative was yachts or houses,” Trish said. “Boy and girl stuff doesn’t matter the way it used to anyway. Things are much less gendered than they were when my kids were small, or even when Tamsin and Alestra were.”
“It’s great really,” Bethany said. “Huge strides for women. Dinosaurs!”
George arrived with the twins on a rainy Sunday morning. “We’ve brought masses of books and toys and clothes,” he said, proceeding to unload the car and dash inside with armfuls of things. “But buy them whatever they need. I’ve opened an account for you to draw on.” He handed her a checkbook and a bank card. “The pin number is the year of your birth, change it when you get the chance.”
Trish wrote the number down on her pad. “I’ll change it,” she said.
“Would you really forget it?” George asked.
“Things fall out of my head like water sometimes,” she admitted. “And I never know which things.”
“You won’t forget to collect the children from school?” he asked anxiously.
“Bethany’s here to help,” Trish said.
“That’s a relief!”
The children had vanished into the house. “Helen’s coming over later with her kids so they can all play,” Trish said. “How long are you staying?”
“Just tonight I’m afraid. Tomorrow morning I’m flying from Manchester to Miami and from there to Kennedy. I’ll be on the moon before next Sunday.”
“Amazing,” Trish said.
“Thanks for doing this, Mum. It makes all the difference knowing they’ll be looked after properly.”
Rhodri and Bronwen ended up staying for two years on that visit. Trish enjoyed having children around again. She cut down her evening classes to one a week, for which Helen babysat. She taught two adult education classes in the afte
rnoons, which she did not enjoy as much—they were basic literacy classes. At her evening classes she had the fun of seeing people who had never had the chance to appreciate literature learning how to do it. Here she was teaching adults to read, which she admitted was necessary, but more of a slog.
She spent more time with Helen than she had for years. Helen worked while her children were at school. She did some programming for businesses where Don sold systems, and some time working in the shop selling computers and games and other programs. She stopped work every day at three and collected the children from school. Often now she collected all four children and brought them back to Trish’s house for a few hours.
“It reminds me of when Tamsin and Alestra were young,” Trish said, listening to the children chase each other around the garden.
Tamsin was in the third year of a professional nursing program in Manchester. Alestra was about to graduate from university.
“Not when all of us were young?” Helen asked.
“I was exhausted all the time when all of you were young,” Trish said. “It was no fun at all. I don’t know how I kept my head above water. And your father—and I was pregnant all the time.”
“You never found anyone else, after David Lin,” Helen said.
“I never had the opportunity,” Trish said. “You’re still happy with Don?”
“Yes, except that he’s so totally predictable. I know what he’ll say about everything all the time. He never surprises me. He’s very dependable, and I think that’s what I wanted when I first met him. But that’s all he is.”
“He’s a good man and he loves you,” Trish said.
“I know.” Helen put her tea mug down. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. It’s probably just working together as well as being married.”
One day in the winter of 1995 Bethany came home very excited. “I have a recording contract!” she said. “I can’t believe it. At my age! I’ve finally been discovered!”
Trish was thrilled and asked all about it.
The next day when Bethany mentioned it she had forgotten all about it. “A recording contract! How wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did tell you,” Bethany said, looking devastated.
“I’m sorry!”
“Not your fault, and it’s not important. I’ll tell you about it again. But I am worried about your memory.”
“So am I,” Trish said.
“We sell a kind of tea called ginkgo that’s supposed to help with memory.”
Trish bought some and drank it every day, even though it tasted disgusting. She couldn’t see any improvement.
George and Sophie came back from the moon in June 1996 and the twins went home with them. “This may happen again,” Sophie said when they came to collect them. “I’m going to be in Cambridge for a year, but after that would you be prepared to have them again?”
“Of course,” Trish said. She had got used to them and felt bereft without them. She was seventy that year and her family made a big fuss, with a cake and a party. She would have preferred to ignore the occasion. She didn’t like to think of herself as old, still less old and senile.
When the twins came back in the summer of 1998 they were nine, nearly ten. They were both wonderful with computers. Rhodri persuaded Trish to buy a new computer, from Don and Helen of course, a Mac. It was expensive, but Trish had enough money. Doug had left half his money to AIDS charities, but the half he had left to Trish made her more comfortable than she had ever been. She bought a new car every few years and could afford the Mac without asking herself how much money she had.
Rhodri showed her how to use it. All she had used her old computer for was making notes for her classes, like a glorified typewriter. This one was different. It could go online, and once it did it had Google. Google was what Trish had wanted for years, the ability to search for something she had forgotten. “If only Google would tell me where I’d left my glasses!” she said. But it told her the lost word “samurai” when she searched for “Japanese warrior” and the author of Sonnets from the Portuguese. It helped her fill in the blanks. The Mac also let the children email to and fro with their parents on the moon and their cousins and friends across town. “What a wonderful machine.”
The twins noticed that she was forgetful. “I told you that already, Gran!” Bronwen said when Trish forgot something.
Rhodri was good at thinking of ways to help. The computer had a “to do” function that reminded her to take her pills and collect the children from school and teach her classes. It beeped in a friendly way to remind her when she had to do something, and when she checked it told her what. She used it for her lists and notes. She wrote them down on a notepad that she carried with her and then transferred them into the computer at night. Doing that she was sometimes distressed at how many times she had written down the same thing.
Cathy, coming up for a weekend with fifteen-year-old Jamie, was skeptical of the computer, and of the twins when she caught Bronwen reminding Trish to take her pills. “Are you looking after those children or are they looking after you?”
“A bit of both,” Trish said, honestly.
Cathy’s son Jamie was sullen and spoilt in Trish’s estimation. He attended an exclusive private school where he seemed to learn less than Trish’s other grandchildren did in the state system. They went on a picnic to Windermere and Jamie found fault with everything from the food to the lake. What worried Trish was the way Cathy agreed with him and appeased him, as if she were afraid of upsetting him. Jamie reminded Trish of Mark, and of Doug as a child, enjoying bullying. She didn’t understand how he could be like Mark. He had only been a year old when Mark died. Surely a tendency to like bullying couldn’t be genetic?
The next year, when he was sixteen, Helen told Trish that Cathy was going to buy Jamie a moped. “A moped, in London! I’d never let Donna or Tony,” Helen said. “And they’re going to be on at me again now that Jamie has one. Cathy has no sense with that boy.”
“No, she doesn’t,” Trish said. “And it’s not being a single mother, because look at you with Tamsin, or Bethany with Alestra for that matter.”
“I was never on my own with Tamsin the way Cathy has been with Jamie. You were there, and Gran, and then Bethany too. Cathy had nannies and au pairs, but they were employees. She’s got too much money, that’s what it is. Did you know she boasts about being in the sixty percent tax band?”
Trish couldn’t remember. “Are you short of money?”
“We’re doing fine. Computers are the big thing. I’d rather do more programming and less selling, but that’s not the way things are these days. My only problem is that I’m bored with Don. He doesn’t want to do anything different, ever. I suggested we have a holiday in Greece or Italy, but he only wants to go to Spain like always.”
About a month later, in early December, Trish got an anguished call from Cathy very early one morning. “Mum!”
“What’s wrong?”
“He hasn’t come home!”
“Jamie?” Trish rubbed her eyes and looked at the clock: 06.17.
“He wasn’t home and I went to bed, and he still isn’t home.” Cathy was screeching into the phone.
“Call the police,” Trish said. “He’s only sixteen. They’ll have to do something.”
She made a note to herself “Jamie missing.” She didn’t think she’d forget, but these days she never knew what might go out of her head.
“Wouldn’t they have called me if they knew something?” Cathy asked, sounding a little more collected.
“If they knew something, probably, which means he probably isn’t in a hospital or anything like that. But if he’s gone off somewhere they can try to find him.” Trish calmed Cathy down and got her to agree to call the police.
She got up and had a hot bath and a cup of tea to get her mind working. Then she got the twins up for school. They were old enough to go by themselves now, but she made Rhodri porridge and Bronwen toasted cheese. “The
strongest correlation to doing well in school—” she began when Rhodri protested.
“—is eating protein in the morning, yes, I know,” Rhodri said.
“And your father always ate breakfast and none of my other children did, and look at him now.”
“I can’t, the moon has set,” Rhodri said.
“Smartass,” Bronwen said.
They went to school and Trish called Cathy back. “Any news?”
“Nothing,” Cathy said.
That afternoon the telephone shrilled, but it was Helen, calling to tell Trish that Donna had won a County Art Prize. Trish wrote it down before she forgot. “Did you speak to Cathy?” she asked.
“No?”
“Jamie didn’t come home last night.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Helen said. “Oh no. I hope it’s not something terrible.”
“Coming off the road on that machine would be terrible enough. There was ice last night.” Trish shuddered.
She called Cathy again and had no answer. She left a message. The twins came home from school, and Bethany came home from the food co-op and made dinner. She had a council meeting that night and was in a rush so Trish didn’t take her aside to tell her about Jamie.
Cathy called just after ten. She was hysterical. Trish caught “pond” and “dead” and “body.”
“What has happened?” she asked. “Shall I come? Where are you, Cathy?”
Cathy was at the police station in Twickenham. “Twickenham! That’s where Gran lived and I grew up.”
As it turned out, it was also where Jamie had died, skidding on an icy road and coming off his moped and going into a pond, where he had drowned. Trish went cold hearing about it.
“Shall I come?” she asked again, calculating how she would ask Helen and Bethany to cover for her with the twins.
“What good would it do, Mum?” Cathy asked.
After that she went to bed. She had thought it bad to outlive a son; now she had outlived a grandson.
She remembered it in the morning. She knew she had, because she had told Helen when she called in to the shop and spoke to her. Helen had been shocked that Cathy hadn’t called her, and that Cathy hadn’t wanted Trish to go. “Does she want me?” Helen asked. “Should I call and ask? She shouldn’t be on her own.”
