The Entertainer
During yet another uncomfortable visit to Mum’s flat, with Pascale crouched on the chair and me perched at the table, wittering away, filling the silences, I had an epiphany. Hang on a minute, I’m just the joker here. Always have been. I tried to quell the thought. But I couldn’t shake the idea. I mulled it over on the drive home and became convinced I was right. I’ve always been in the middle of this family, brokering the peace, distracting them with my antics. I felt like Ada Lovelace, I could see the mathematics of it all so clearly. I’d solved a puzzle that I was part of. That’s a very difficult thing to do.
I decided to test my theory next time I saw Mum and Pascale. All I had to do was not perform the role of entertainer for five minutes and see what happened. It would be a simple enough experiment to execute. I was aware that this might not be the best time to cut out all sentimentality and make a cold, calculating decision to change my role in the family but I was in survival mode. I felt I had to protect my sanity, even if it meant letting Pascale take the last few weeks with Mum from me. Such an inconsequential habit to change, you’d think, not to be the talking, sharing buffoon any more.
Bad Seeds
Suppose
you saw your mother
torn between two daughters:
what could you do
to save her but be
willing to destroy
yourself – she would know
who was the rightful child,
the one who couldn’t bear
to divide the mother.
Louise Glück, ‘A Fable’, Ararat, 1990
The next time I visited Mum I tested my Viv-the-jester, mother-and-sister-the-succubi hypothesis. I sat on a dining chair at the table as usual. Mum and Pascale were already in the armchairs, side by side. This time I waited for them to talk, to do the work, lighten the mood. I smiled but didn’t offer up any mishaps, failed attempts at relationships, stresses at work or worries about Vida. I commented on the weather and then stopped speaking. Silence. The family dynamic collapsed like a Yorkshire pudding whisked from a hot oven into a cold kitchen.
No one spoke. There was nothing to do but look around the room with a fixed smile and pretend that everything around me had become fascinating. The second-hand wooden dining table draped in a pink plastic tablecloth (it’s not that Mum had bad taste, she didn’t have any money) marked with blue biro squiggles and brown coffee-cup rings. The Victorian occasional table in the corner, the dining chair opposite that I dunked in bleach about twenty years ago to get rid of the varnish, exposing all the different shades and types of wood that had been banged together to make it (Mum wasn’t pleased). An old fridge right next to a new fridge with a television and two radios on top (in case one broke). Filing cabinet, pots, tins, piles of newspapers and a paper shredder. By the time I’d completed a circuit of the kitchen and my gaze alighted back on the two of them, Mum had a puzzled expression on her face and Pascale, still hunched in the chair, was glowering. This time I knew for certain she wasn’t going to move. The tension in the room was excruciating. I wanted to break the spell, to make it all OK again. I had to fight the urge to gabble but managed to push the words back down my throat.
Neither Mum nor Pascale knew what wasn’t right that afternoon. They hadn’t time to work it out, and anyway it was such a tiny shift, me not sharing my troubles, that they wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint what had happened. Before I did it part of me wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing, but sitting through those agonising minutes confirmed my suspicions and hardened my resolve to stop. When you change a pattern or a habit within a family you have to be brutal and slice it out. Families don’t like change. If one of you changes, everyone has to change.
Half an hour was all I could bear before I jumped up, said, ‘I’ve got to go now,’ put my coat on, let myself out and ran down the three flights of stairs – past Mr Shilling’s old flat – and into the street.
When I reached the front gate I looked up at Mum’s third-storey window to see if she was waving goodbye like she usually did, but there was no twitch of the yellow satin curtains this time. I felt giddy, like a true rebel, much more rebellious than when I was in the Slits. To revolt against a lifetime of habit and family expectations was much harder to do – and possibly mean and foolish, when your mother is dying and you’re supposed to be good and kind – than rebelling against society. I jumped into my car, pushed the key into the ignition, leaned back and stared through the windscreen. The first time I haven’t tried to entertain them. A momentous day. The day I knew for certain that all this time I thought I was being the good one, the loved one, the favourite, I was the fool.
The lamp posts flickered on. A man with big black spectacles and two tiny white dogs emerged from the house next door. Windows lit up, curtains pulled shut and I sat in the car outside Mum’s flat reflecting on what a cushy ride the so-called ‘bad one’ has. They don’t have to call, write or attend family gatherings, all the boring stuff. They mooch around like nobody understands them, flounce off if anyone dares question their behaviour, disappear for as long as they like and turn up again when they want something or suddenly get scared somebody’s going to die.
I turned the ignition key and revved up the engine. So this is what it feels like to be the dreaded misfit. The one the rest of the family moans and complains about after you’ve left the room.
An enormous relief.
26 The ambulance crew reappeared. A paramedic beckoned me over and said there was nothing more they could do for my mother and they were leaving. I nodded and tried to look calm. ‘But before we go,’ he added, ‘I must warn you that when your mother is about to pass she’ll claw at the air, gasping for breath as she runs out of oxygen. It’ll be upsetting for you to see.’ I nodded again, wishing Vida hadn’t heard him, but she was glued to my side. We went back to the bed. Pascale was still sitting on it but now she had her arm wrapped around Mum’s head and was flicking at her ear and talking to her in a sing-songy voice. Like she was petting an old cat.
The Yellow Wallpaper*
When the doctors and the council agreed that at ninety-five years old, nearly dead and having paid taxes since she was seventeen, Mum could go into a home, Pascale and I set about decorating her new bedroom. I found the care home through my friend Kate, whose own mother lived there. I knew from Kate that the carers were very kind to the residents. Pascale nearly mucked it up by losing her temper and slamming the phone down on the social worker who was helping. I had to apologise and coax her back on board. After all this, Mum announced, ‘Isn’t Pascale wonderful, finding the care home for me!’ I started to protest, but stopped myself and replied, ‘Oh well, it’s not about me versus Pascale, is it?’ Mum gave me a strange look, like she’d been rumbled. I didn’t understand her reaction at the time, but her expression was when suspicions about her character first started to form in my mind.
Pascale and I brought photographs, a chest of drawers and a rocking chair from Mum’s flat, and when she was wheeled into the little yellow room with daffodil-patterned curtains, she looked around and said, ‘This is the nicest bedroom I’ve ever had!’ I don’t know if she meant it or not. If she was telling the truth, I think it’s sad that the nicest bedroom Mum ever slept in was a yellow box in a purpose-built care home. Although it’s also possible she was thinking of Pascale and me rather than herself and trying to soften the transition for us.
Every time I visited Mum at the care home I brought her a fresh cream cake. What did it matter? She didn’t have long to live, she could eat as many profiteroles as she liked. She must have said something about the cakes, or maybe Pascale saw the remains, because within a week she was bringing in her own cream cakes for Mum. I didn’t know about this until Mum confessed she’d been forcing two cream cakes down every day so as not to upset either of us. I stopped bringing cakes after that. No point in mentioning it to Pascale, we’d only end up arguing about it. We could fight over any little thing. If we’d bee
n born in earlier times, we’d have murdered each other. Or had someone else do it. At the very least I’d have locked her in a tower.
This was not the first time cake had been our battleground. We often fought over whose slice was the biggest as children. Sometimes we resorted to getting the ruler out. Five years ago we fought over how much Christmas cake Pascale had eaten, almost all of it right before the Christmas lunch I’d spent hours cooking, which she then couldn’t eat because she was full. The row escalated and Pascale turned to Vida – then eight years old – and said she felt sorry for her for having such a shit mother. We didn’t speak again for a year.
On one of her visits to London Pascale accused me of accepting little bits of money from Mum. True, but only little amounts, a tenner here and there, much needed and not that well appreciated, I’m ashamed to say. But this time I didn’t let it go and argued back, I’m the one who’s here, and anyway, it’s only to help me with Vida. In response, Pascale told Mum that I said I found her exhausting and a bit of a pain to look after. I’d confided this to Pascale a few hours earlier. We didn’t speak for a year and a half after that one. Then she wrote and apologised: ‘Sorry if I upset you.’ I can’t stand that ‘if’ in people’s apologies. You know perfectly well the other person is upset, there’s no ‘if’ about it. Say ‘I’m sorry I upset you,’ admit what you did was wrong, or say nothing at all.
Our relationship followed this cyclical pattern for thirty years, similar to the ‘cycle of abuse’ theory developed by Lenore E. Walker in the 1970s. We’d try to get along, we wanted to get along (and I know Pascale let go of lots of things I did that hurt her too), but as soon as a conflict arose, over Mum or cake or something else, the argument would escalate, Pascale would say something unnecessarily hurtful and we’d withdraw from each other for a year or so. I don’t know if she did the same but I often swore to myself I’d never see her again. She once told me that it took her at least a year to realise she’d gone too far. Towards the end of Mum’s life this arguing and then ignoring sequence happened every single time Pascale and I met. Round and round we went, both feeling right, both feeling wronged.
* The title of a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892
27 I watched with horror as Pascale cradled Mum’s head and flicked at her ear. We both knew Mum hated being touched and fussed over. She was always telling Pascale to stop touching her at the hospital, to stop fixing her hair and wiping her face. It wasn’t personal, it’s just that Mum wasn’t brought up in a touchy-feely time. She wouldn’t even let me hold her arm when we crossed the road and she stopped eating during her last month because she couldn’t bear being spoon-fed. Pascale probably thought she was stroking Mum’s ear, but to me it looked like flicking. I still think it was flicking. Mum couldn’t say anything to stop it, she couldn’t speak. I wondered again if I should speak for her. A scene from Terminator 2 popped into my mind, the one where Linda Hamilton is strapped to the bed and the male nurse licks her face but she can’t do anything about it. Funny how I kept thinking of movie scenes. I must have been trying to conjure up a frame of reference. What were you supposed to do in this situation? I hadn’t been taught what to do at a deathbed, how to behave, what’s allowed, how to assert yourself. Who has more rights, the dying person or the bereaved? It’s us who have to live on. No one discusses these things. Restraint is the British way, so that’s what I did in the end, restrained myself. Pascale kept on flicking. Poor Mum.
Rug Rats
… her death had released us all to be the worst possible versions of ourselves.
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing, 2010
I gave Mum a handmade rug for her birthday about ten years ago, woven from thick deep-blue wool and patterned with random abstract twirls. I had it made especially for her. When Pascale visited from Canada she saw the rug, went out the next day and bought Mum a synthetic, yellowy-brown one. When Mum moved into the care home I brought the blue rug from her flat. It fitted neatly under the furniture along the back wall of her room – you couldn’t see much of it but it added some cosiness. Pascale put ‘her’ yellow rug in the middle of the room, but it was in the way of the equipment that the carers wheeled in and out every day – they needed to use a hoist to get Mum to the bathroom – so they rolled it up and put it in the wardrobe. This was explained to Pascale, but she put the yellow rug back down in the middle of the room. The nurses were intimidated by her. She defaced one of their pictures of the Queen in the hallway (funny in a different context), which was quietly removed and thrown away. I was worried the nurses wouldn’t look after Mum so well with all the effort it took to get their equipment in and out of her room and Pascale irritating them, but as far as I could tell they enjoyed spending time with her. They lifted their equipment over the rug multiple times a day without any more being said. I offered to take the blue rug out of the room and have no rugs at all, but Pascale said no. Mum couldn’t see either rug from the bed but she didn’t want to upset Pascale and leave the planet on a sour note. She desperately wanted us to be friends and not lose touch with each other. ‘You’ve only got one sister, surely you can get along? You only have to see each other occasionally,’ she said to me. But it was too late for that. You can’t mend such a deep rift between two people in the last few weeks of your life. Better to let it go, let the fools do what they have to do.
28 It must have been about midnight. I remember thinking the room wasn’t a happy yellow any more. It was ‘repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow’ with ‘a sickly sulphur tint’.* The walls seemed to have turned grey, shifted from sunny egg-yolk to that blue-grey tinge you get inside a hard-boiled egg if you don’t run it under cold water after taking it out of the pan. I looked out of the window at the bare branches fringing the railway line and watched them shivering in the wind. I’d read somewhere that when a remarkable person dies nature throws up a wild storm to mark their passing. Where was Mum’s storm? Didn’t the universe know how special she was? I looked back into the room and for the first time it struck me as odd that Mia was still there. I thought people were supposed to be left alone when their relatives were dying, not have a nurse standing by the whole time. Could Mia feel the tension in the air? Was that why she hadn’t left? Did she know Pascale and I weren’t to be trusted? That we were immature and unstable? I noticed Vida was trying to hold her grandmother’s hand, but it was difficult because Mum was still rolling down the slope created by Pascale’s weight on the mattress. I decided to say something, even though I was risking a scene. I thought if it was for her niece, and I said it calmly, Pascale might let Vida sit next to her grandma for a bit. And Mum would get some respite from all the ear-flicking and be able to lie flat.
I spoke slowly, kept the anger out of my voice, and suggested to Pascale that she let Vida have a go sitting on the other side of the bed. ‘Let her hold Grandma’s hand for a while,’ I said. ‘You can take turns.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘This is my spot.’
Two Dreams
Mum is bundled up in white bandages like an Egyptian mummy. She’s huge, a giant chrysalis, or baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, as heavy as a sack of stones. I keep putting her down to rest my arms, but as soon as I do, I feel guilty and pick her up again. I’m exhausted, distraught. ‘Mum, I can’t hold you any more,’ I tell her. ‘You’re too heavy.’
*
I’m straddling a rock face, my arms and legs stretched apart in a star shape. Mum is clasped between me and the rock’s surface. I press my body against hers as hard as I can, trying to stop her from slipping out from under me. But she’s sliding away and I’m losing my grip. She’ll fall a long way down if I can’t hold her. I can’t stop it happening. Mum drops away from me and crashes to the ground. Smashes onto her feet. I’m sitting in the shallow warm sea, my skirt billowing in the waves, wailing, ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
29 I wasn’t surprised Pascale said no to Vida, not after
she wouldn’t move for Mum’s throat to be drained. But I was shocked that she was willing to throw away the only family she had left. Surely she knows what’s at stake here? I thought, and said to her, ‘You’ll regret this behaviour for the rest of your life.’
‘Fuck off.’
She spat the words at me with such hatred. Over Mum’s body. It felt blasphemous. All the air smashed out of my lungs. I couldn’t have been more winded if she’d whacked me in the chest with a plank. More insults spewed out of her mouth. I can’t remember what she said, I was transfixed by her lips twisting and curling. Now Mia knew for certain that we weren’t a normal family, and I knew for certain that Mum’s gentle death and Vida’s tender goodbye weren’t going to happen. I gave up on Pascale right there and then, on Mum’s Last Night, in the last hours of her life. This is where it ends, I thought. I want a sister very much, but I can no longer endure this one.
Death Is Smaller than I Thought
Mum died at four o’clock in the morning on 4 June 2014. One last conversation would have been nice, one more laugh together, one more Liquorice Allsort. I’d have liked to congratulate her on having no debts and commiserate that she didn’t have much money to leave behind after working all her life. I would have loved to tell her all about the funeral; that she chose well, a plain, pale-wood coffin, two cars. There were no twigs though. I didn’t get twigs and leaves for the wreaths like she wanted. I chose yellow, purple and white spring flowers instead. It was easier and looked beautiful. Got away with that one. The coffin was carried into the chapel on the shoulders of four men – I didn’t think they did that any more. She would have chuckled at that. She entered like a queen to ‘Jerusalem’, her favourite hymn, and I thought, This is the first time Mum’s been treated as she should have, and she’s not here to see it. The service, conducted by a female minister, was elegant and understated, and just the right length. There was hardly anyone there: four of my close friends who knew Mum, a carer she was close to, Vida and me. Mum had lived so long that the few friends and relatives she did have were dead. It’s not a mark of anything important, how many people are at your funeral – especially if you’re a behind-the-scenes sort of person as mothers so often are – just as how much money you’ve earned or how may Facebook friends you have aren’t measures of your success. I saw some big fancy gravestones at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris last summer, but everyone’s in the same earth. (Although when we met at a funeral recently, I did ask my friend Mick to round up some people for me when I go. He will as well. He remembers things like that.)
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