The ambulance arrives with laudable speed and it’s hands-on emergency care by a skilled paramedic, before Caroline’s mother is carefully stretchered out of her house. And it’s 4 a.m. before the old woman, tagged, assessed and processed, is carted off for a brain scan. Finally Caroline goes home to the bus and catches two hours’ sleep. At 9 a.m. she is telephoned by a neurosurgeon from the hospital. There is evidence of her mother’s having had several previous small strokes, he says, probably over the past year and all of them undiagnosed. Right now she has a significant subdural haematoma, a blood clot the size of a bath sponge, pressing down on her brain.
The neurosurgeon plans to operate within the hour, he says, and he assures her that the prognosis for recovery is reasonably good – though age could be a negative factor. The surgery he describes sounds to Caroline like prehistoric trepanning. The surgeon will drill a hole in the side of her mother’s skull and draw out what Caroline envisages as a Petri dish full of half-set red jelly. Unfortunately, he tells her, there is a possibility that the cavity will refill with blood, in which case, after a second scan, he will need to operate again.
By now Caroline is in no frame of mind to focus on sanded floorboards. The home-improvement project is put on hold as she spends anxious days at the hospital, alternating between the League of Friends canteen on the ground floor and the neuroscience ward upstairs, where the old woman, her eyes firmly closed in sleep, lies motionless, with what look like several Frankenstein bolts jutting from the side of her shaven head. In between, Caroline pays brief visits to Garden Haven, gathering up basic toiletries, dealing with perishable foodstuffs, searching hurriedly through her mother’s drawers for address books and letters, in the hope of finding some way to make contact with her sister. Since she has no luck here or, being agitated, gives up too soon, she decides instead to contact the Australian Embassy and place the matter in their hands.
She then makes equally unsuccessful attempts to contact Josh at the beachfront hotel where he is booked in for the three weeks prior to the conference. Josh never seems to be in and he doesn’t respond to her messages. I will not worry about him, Caroline tells herself, though she’s feeling unusually vulnerable and just a little bit needy. I will not think of gun crime. Josh will be busy, she tells herself. He’ll be out of town. Visiting old friends? Old family servants? Something like that. Then there is Zoe. Caroline, with her first two calls to the household of her daughter’s French exchange, is unlucky enough to get Véronique, who is monosyllabic, ungracious and unhelpful to a degree, even when speaking her own language. On a third attempt she gets Maman, who tells her, somewhat abruptly, that her daughter Zoe is ‘out’.
‘Vueillez la dire que sa grandmère est très très malade,’ Caroline says. ‘Please, Madame, will you ask her to call me?’
‘D’accord,’ says Maman. ‘Certainement.’ But Zoe does not phone back.
Next day, Caroline calls again.
Zoe, Maman says, ‘est sortie’.
‘A school trip?’ Caroline asks.
‘Oui,’ says Maman. ‘Le school-trip. Exactement.’
By this time Caroline’s mother has begun somewhat feebly to open her eyes and has sipped a few teaspoons of Lucozade. Caroline, who has eagerly followed up this development by bringing in a jar of thin, carefully strained chicken broth and a small home-made pear smoothie, finds that her mother simply spits these out the moment tiny particles of either are deposited on her tongue.
‘Jam,’ she says. This appears to be her only available word. ‘Jam,’ she says again.
Caroline is convinced that her mother is asking for Janet; the estranged but favourite daughter.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ she says. ‘I’ll find Janet for you, I promise. The Australian Embassy has got it all in hand.’
‘Jam,’ the old woman says.
‘Is there anything you’d like me to bring in for you?’ Caroline says. ‘Anything at all, Mum?’
‘Jam,’ is all her mother says. ‘Jam. Jam.’ Her speech is barely above a whisper.
By the next day, she is relieved to find that the Australian Embassy has left her a message. They have a contact number for a person they believe to be her sister. Janet has not been difficult to find, since she holds the position of editor at a national family magazine based on ‘Christian values’.
Back home in the bus that evening, Caroline calculates the time difference and psychs herself up to phone her sister. As a preliminary, she checks out Janet’s magazine on the Web. It materialises as a cringeworthy publication of such unbearable homespun smugness that it embarrasses Caroline as a form of emotional bad faith in conjunction with intellectual death. Cosy advice, interspersed with judgemental harangues, advertisements for virginity merchandise and novelty reach-out projects for the promotion of community goodwill.
‘Do you experience negative feelings about a colleague, friend or neighbour?’ trills the editorial, under a small, homely photograph of Janet, sixteen years on from Caroline’s last sighting of her. ‘Try making a batch of our scrumptious Grudge Fudge and take it round with a smile (see p.52).’
On the telephone, Janet is distancing and cold.
‘It’s better you deal with Mum,’ she says. ‘My place is here at Mark’s side. His work is very important.’
‘Janet,’ Caroline says pleadingly, ‘Mum’s just had brain surgery. She can’t speak. She’s not eating. She can barely open her eyes. All she can say is your name. Just the one word, that’s all. Over and over. How important can Mark’s work be?’
‘Pardon me?’ Janet says, with that upward inflection Caroline has never before noticed she finds extremely irritating. She wonders, for a moment, whether she has it herself. ‘Mark is working for Jesus,’ Janet says. End of story.
‘Mum said he was an accountant,’ Caroline says. It’s a remark that Janet chooses to ignore. ‘Look. Please, Janet. Take my number,’ she says. ‘Think about it, won’t you? Try and find a flight. It would be so great if you could come over. It might make all the difference.’
‘Not possible,’ Janet says. ‘Unfortunately. Tell Mum we always remember her in our prayers.’
Then the line goes dead.
Caroline is shaking all over. She can hardly believe what she’s just heard; nor that her sister has simply terminated the exchange. Can this really be Janet; her whiny little invalid sister? Can she have morphed over the years into this judgemental, smug middle age? Why is she being so cruel? What for? No wonder she was so heartless with their poor mother all those years ago.
In some agitation, Caroline tries again to contact Josh. No response. She judges herself too upset to unload on Zoe, who is, after all, just a child, but she’s feeling distinctly inadequate, not to say frightened. Caroline concentrates on sleep, but tosses and turns in bed. She sucks her fingers. She tries reading detective fiction. Finally, she manages three hours’ sleep until, at 5 a.m., she leaps from bed, remembering the sanding machine. Oh God! She has left the wretched roaring machine in the living room of the little new house, during which time it will have clocked up four days of unscheduled hire charge. Oh shit and double shit! This is not the sort of oversight that Caroline expects of herself. She makes herself a cafetière of coffee and goes outside to calm down, cup in hand. She watches the sun rise over her vegetable garden. She plucks off the odd busy snail. Then she gets herself ready to collect the sander and drive it back to the hire firm, hoping that by putting in an extra-early appearance she’ll persuade the firm to waive a day of the fee.
In the hospital her mother is imbibing nothing but coaxed teaspoons of Lucozade and she’s barely opening her eyes.
‘Jam,’ she says impassively, when Caroline kisses her.
This time, Caroline tells herself firmly that her mother, who has a sweet tooth, is simply asking for jam.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she says. ‘I’ll bring in some jam for you today.’
‘Jam,’ the old woman says.
The neurosurgeon is concerned that Ca
roline’s mother is excessively lethargic and arranges for another brain scan. Then, two days later and with no prior warning, Caroline arrives to find that the old woman has been moved out of the gleaming neuroscience ward, with its generous supply of committed and highly skilled nurses. She has gone far down the food chain, into a slovenly and understaffed geriatric ward, where hollow-eyed and hopeless oldies are groaning feebly, calling out in vain for commodes, or shuffling on Zimmer frames in fluffy dressing gowns to a lavatory that’s doing its damnedest to scream a warning to all potential users. ‘Attention! Superbug! Please Do Not Enter!’ The whole ward reeks of diarrhoea. Beds are unmade, there are balls of stained cotton wool and discarded adhesive dressings dotted about the cracked linoleum floor and – try indefatigably as Caroline does, day after day, from now on – no senior doctor is ever available to discuss her mother’s case. No one appears conversant with her mother’s medical history, nor with the neurosurgeon’s previously stated intentions. The neurosurgeon himself is as if teleported to Planet Zorg.
Caroline’s mother, who is kept permanently attached to a somewhat grubby-looking catheter, is very soon found to have a urinary infection for which she is given antibiotics. For a day she appears to pick up a bit and even begins to eat; two sultanas and one quarter of a small sawdust biscuit, but she promptly vomits everything she eats. At this point, although she is still on holiday, Caroline arranges six weeks’ compassionate leave from her job and, after another week, lobbies to take her mother home as soon as possible. She is confident that her own twenty-four-hour, hands-on nursing care, away from the soiled dressings and the constant threat of infection, could provide the old woman with a better chance of recovery.
In anticipation of her new role, Caroline moves her mother’s bed downstairs and researches less dehumanising alternatives to the patient’s clumpy, in-dwelling catheter. She goes to Boots, where, for a gasp-inducing eighty-five pounds the box, she acquires two dozen single-use catheters that look like narrow drinking straws, and she teaches herself to use them. She has also researched various rehab techniques for stroke victims, in response to which she’s spent hours making picture cards – house, tree, apple, flower, dog, cat, et cetera – and has stuck white name cards on several household items in clear, bold lower case: fridge, door, table, chair, window, lamp, kettle, bed, mug. In between her visits to the hospital, she barely goes home to the bus. Nor does she visit the new house for further home improvements. She beds down, exhausted, night after night, in her mother’s house at Garden Haven, begging a God, in whom she no longer believes, to make the old woman well.
Over the days, she continues her attempts to contact her husband and her daughter, asking them please to ring her, or please to leave her a message, but she’s getting no response. Neither, of course, has a mobile phone. In between, she calms her nerves by embarking on a Garden Haven spring-clean. She sorts out her mother’s fridge. She squares up the clutter of old magazines. She removes the collection of china ornaments to soak in washing-up liquid – the hideous miscellany of shire horses and shepherdesses; the coy Hummel figurines, with their unpleasing crusty matt glaze. Only one little pair escapes Caroline’s clean-up: the dainty china lady on her china bed, with her devoted china gentleman standing alongside her, his little china hand in hers. She wonders idly where it can have gone. Caroline dusts her mother’s shelves. She neatens the bookcase with the large-print Catherine Cooksons and the copy of Codependent No More. Then, having previously rifled the desk drawers, jammed as they are, with old diaries, household clutter, junk leaflets and bank statements, in a frantic search for some sign of Janet’s contact details, she now turns her attention to sorting the desk.
There are no half-measures with Caroline and her efforts are nothing if not rigorous, so it is not all that long before a wallet file has fallen from her hands and spewed its contents to the floor. The file contains Catriona McCleod’s ‘Last Will and Testament’, dated 19 August of the previous year – 1994. Curiosity overcomes Caroline. First, the document contains her mother’s instructions for burial. No cremation, thank you. She desires that her body be conveyed to Australia and laid in a plot she has evidently purchased, near the domicile of her younger daughter Janet. In the will, Caroline notes that her mother has left all her property to Janet. That is to say, all her ‘capital’, as contained in an unexpected medley of ISAs and savings accounts, all duly enumerated, including an instant-access higher-rate account worth sixty thousand pounds. It’s with the same bank that holds her mother’s current account.
Caroline’s mother has bequeathed the Garden Haven house exclusively to Janet; the house bought and paid for by Caroline, who has done so by the sacrifice of all her own and her husband’s first savings. Pretty well all of it went to providing the Garden Haven deposit, while a twenty-year mortgage made up the rest, taken out in Caroline’s name and payable by monthly direct debit from Caroline’s bank account. Thus, though the ownership of the property is in Mrs McCleod’s name – a thing that her mother had been adamant about – Caroline has been footing the bill for the previous eleven years. She has nine years still to go. Yet the house, as she now takes note, will belong to Janet. If her mother were to die and the house be rented out, any rental income would presumably be Janet’s. Mark would doubtless find those fat monthly rental cheques a useful bolster to his ‘important work’. The cheques will all be for Jesus, while Caroline will be stuck paying off the mortgage. And were she to renege on paying it? Well then, she presumes that the mortgage provider would be within his rights to repossess her property. That is to say, not the one in Garden Haven, but the darling little terraced house with its newly sanded floorboards and its prettily renovated kitchen. The Last Will and Testament has started to swim before her eyes as Wonder Girl, can-do Caroline begins to feel ever smaller and more hurt. In fact it is easily ten minutes before she is able to read on. That is when she discovers she is not to be left entirely empty-handed.
‘To my adopted daughter, Caroline,’ says the will, ‘I leave all the contents of my house.’ The said ‘contents’ doubtless to include the large-print Catherine Cooksons and Codependent No More, the Hummel figurines currently soaking in Fairy Liquid, the mustard Dralon ‘suite’ and the two busily-patterned, Indian-sweatshop rugs. But worldly goods are, for the moment, not the primary focus of Caroline’s attention. ‘My adopted daughter,’ she reads. Then she reads it again. ‘My adopted daughter.’ ‘My adopted’ –
She stares and stares at the document. Her eyes brim with tears. Caroline, who has never allowed herself even a moment’s self-pity; Caroline, who never cries, now finds that the floodgates open. She weeps until she’s soaked through her sleeves. Then she gets up and fetches a roll of kitchen towel.
Caroline throws herself on the sofa, where the crying becomes a sort of howl. In between the wails and howls, she emits pitiful hiccups and sobs. The sky has gone dark around her. Shivering with cold, she hugs herself in a foetal ball and starts to rock back and forth. She has always so terribly – perhaps excessively – wanted her mother to love her; to admire and value her. And now, for eleven of her adult years – no, fifteen counting the four years before little Zoe’s appearance – she has bitten down her longing to have children; has obliged her family to do without holidays; to do without stuff; to live in a bus; has obliged them all, in spite of hard work, talent and two professional salaries, to do nothing but make do and mend. All for the sake of her mother. Caroline has been incessantly, relentlessly ingenious, with scraps of home-grown cabbage and handfuls of dried beans; with old linen sheets and recycled union cloth; with items found in jumble sales and dumped on skips. She has given up her Oxford DPhil along with her beckoning career in academe. Worst of all – oh, unforgivable! – she has consistently, confidently denied her own daughter, her sweet, good and only child, all those things that her girlfriends have; the things that little girls want and need; Barbie dolls, ballet lessons, riding lessons, gym club and mobile phones, Topshop clothes and music players. S
he has brooked no opposition; has always been firmly, know-it-all put-down – that’s if ever Josh has ventured to query the austerity of her regime. Let us, as always, count our blessings. Caroline Clever-Clogs. Problem-Solver Extraordinaire, who has never stopped laying down the law.
Caroline has been cutting her own hair for the last sixteen years. She cuts Josh and Zoe’s hair as well. And hasn’t she done an excellent job? Oh my, yes! She has never bought herself new clothes, not beyond her M & S basic-range knickers. Even her bras have come from charity shops. And now her cleverness, her triumphs of thrift, have all turned to ash in her mouth. How could her mother have done this to her? And why? Because she was ‘adopted’? Did her mother simply fall out of love with her when a biological daughter came along? More than that, does her mother actively dislike her? Resent her existence? Her brains? Her markedly better looks? Has she, all along, been wishing her older daughter ill?
‘I bought you this fucking house, you bitch, you witch!’ she says suddenly, right out loud, raising her voice to full volume, pitching it against the farthest wall. ‘This ugly, revolting house! And the monthly allowance – what a con!’ She bangs her fist hard on the wooden arm of the sofa and lets out a wail of pain.
Two hours have passed before Caroline has stopped crying. She has moved from misery to rage. She gets up and goes through to the kitchen, where, one by one, she removes the Hummel figurines from their washing-up water and throws them against the wall. Since the wretched things will not oblige and shatter, she smashes them to pieces with a meat mallet, grinding them into the floor. Finally, she is once more in control as rage gives way to calculation.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 20
