To Throw Away Unopened

by Viv Albertine

  We brought Vida’s little electric piano to the funeral and she sang the Jeff Buckley song ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over’ to Mum (it was the song she knew how to sing and play best). We both wept throughout the whole thing. I didn’t know whether to stand up mid-song and tell her she could stop playing if she wanted to. It’s all right, darling, you don’t have to do it. I felt cruel sitting there not saying anything while she broke down, and I heard Mum in my ear telling me off for putting her through it. I let her finish though. I thought, If she wants to stop, she’s old enough to stop. (When I asked Vida about it months later she said she wanted to finish, it was important to her.) I said a few words about Mum and placed a pouch of rolling tobacco and a packet of green Rizla rolling papers on her coffin. I’d found them hidden inside a cooking pot secreted at the back of the kitchen cupboard when I cleared out her flat.

  Before she smoked roll-ups, Mum smoked Craven A cigarettes. The old Craven A factory is in Mornington Crescent, a large art deco, Egyptian Revival building with two giant statues of black cats flanking the entrance. The cats disappeared for years when the building fell into disrepair, reappearing when it was restored in the 1990s. There were rumours going around North London that one of the cats was found in a back garden in Jamaica, which sounded unlikely until years later I read that the owners of Craven A, Carreras, had a factory in Jamaica. Craven A cigarettes gave Mum an air of distinction: the square pack with strong red, black and white graphics; the gold strip that you had to tear right around the middle of the packet to rip the cellophane in half; the cork filter. Craven A were hardcore. No one else I knew smoked them, certainly no women. The only other woman I’ve heard of who smoked Craven A was the pioneering French–Algerian author Marie Cardinal’s mother. ‘They came in to serve the tea. Its aroma, interspersed with that of the Craven A cigarette my mother was smoking and the hot toast, forms a precise unit in my memories, so that any one of them encountered anywhere summons up the others …’* In between puffs, stray strands of tobacco clung to Mum’s lips and she’d push her tongue a little way out into the air, which I thought a very delicate gesture, collect up the tiny cluster of brown squiggles on the tip like a gecko snaring an insect, and then pinch them off with her forefinger and thumb. She told me that whenever Lucien shouted at her, she’d stroke the cellophane of the Craven A packet in her pinafore pocket and think, When all this is over I’m going to have a cigarette.

  When she became too unwell to go up the road to the shops on her own Mum sat me down at the kitchen table, said, ‘I’ve run out of tobacco,’ and asked if I’d buy her some more, even though her lungs were weak and she’d been told not to smoke.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘How much do you want?’

  She closed her eyes like her prayers had been answered. Her relief was out of proportion to the request.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I told my friend Sylvia I had to ask you to buy me tobacco,’ she explained. ‘And Sylvia said, “Now you’ll find out how much you’re loved.”’

  I was pleased I’d passed that test. Some may think it would have been more loving to refuse, but love is in the eye of the beholder.

  At the funeral – which Mum had arranged with the Co-op and paid for in advance (what a blessing) – I read a poem by Adrian Mitchell which I heard on Poetry Please on BBC Radio 4 about two years before she died. Lying in bed late at night listening to the programme, I was moved to tears by the words and called Mum immediately. You should always call a person when you think of them, I’ve learned that along the way. ‘Funny you called,’ she said, ‘I was just going to call you. I just heard this poem on Radio 4 …’ Mum never listened to Radio 4; she happened to have it on that one night. She was very affected by the poem too. She bought a copy of the book and left a little note in it for me, to be collected from her flat after she died. I adapted the poem slightly for the funeral; the following is the adapted version. The original is in Mitchell’s 2012 collection Come On Everybody.

  * Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It, 1975

  Death Is Smaller than I Thought

  My mother died some years ago

  I loved her very much.

  When she died my love for her

  Did not vanish or fade away.

  It stayed just about the same,

  Only a sadder colour.

  And I can feel her love for me,

  Same as it ever was.

  Nowadays, in good times or bad,

  I sometimes ask my mother

  To walk beside me or to sit with me

  So we can talk together

  Or be silent.

  She always comes to me.

  I talk to her and listen to her

  and I think I hear her talk to me.

  It’s very simple –

  Nothing to do with spiritualism

  Or religion or mumbo jumbo.

  It is imaginary

  It is real

  It is love.

  II

  My mother composed me as I now compose her.

  Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? 2012

  30 I closed my eyes and tried to summon up some self-control. You’ve had Mum all these years, had the best of her. If Pascale wants her death, let her have it. I must have stood there for a full three seconds, or five, I don’t know, trying to do the right thing, to be good and let it go. Next thing I knew my legs were moving – I didn’t tell them to move – and I was leaning over the bed. Everything was slow, really slow – like half speed. I watched as these two long disembodied arms stretched out across Mum’s body. They looked like spindly white branches, so far away. I felt as if I was perched high up on the top of a tree with a camera on my head peering down at them. At the end of the white branches were two knobbly red hands ribbed with blue veins and long twiglety fingers splayed out showing the webbing. Ordinary hands they were, middle-aged, female, no rings or jewellery, nothing of consequence. It’s all a bit of a blur after that. Time sped up. Teeth crunched, body lunged, hands grabbed … and I found myself trying to tear every last strand of Pascale’s hair out of her head.

  How to Kill Your Mother

  I think being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.

  Nella Larsen, Passing, 1929

  You have no idea how grief will take you. The same with severe illness, motherhood, any profound experience. You don’t know yourself. Others don’t know you. Those events show you who you are. And you’ll be surprised, shocked even. You’ll feel the way you feel when you’ve done a particularly offensive-smelling shit – That couldn’t possibly have come out of me – and start to rationalise it – Must be that whole bag of pistachios I ate earlier, or perhaps I’m unwell. You can’t believe you could do something so foul and unrecognisable. Something so outside of yourself.

  Instead of feeling sad after Mum’s death I kept thinking about how mean she was, how manipulative she’d been and how I’d been tricked by her. I had no control over my thoughts, I didn’t know why I thought them. They surged unchecked through my mind like sewage in a flood. I was cold and critical when speaking about her. Friends couldn’t believe it, they thought I’d be distraught. ‘But you were so close,’ or ‘Aren’t you being a little harsh?’ they’d remark as I sat across the kitchen table with a cup of matcha tea. This was when I cooked up The Favourite Theory with my friend Trace, whose own mother had also died recently. Trace and I think we’ve hit upon something quite interesting with The Favourite Theory, but the Greeks probably wrote about it centuries ago. I wouldn’t know, I didn’t study classics. Since I was a teenager I’ve picked my own way through literature, so my reading is specific to my interests. Now I understand the value of reading books that aren’t of your choosing: once you can decide what to read your education narrows. This is The Favourite Theory:

  A mother selects one of her children and grooms them to be her carer or companion in later life.

  The favourite can be the socially awkward one, the misfit or the only option. Fathe
rs don’t tend to regard their children in the same way. Heterosexual marriage is still an institution that expects the woman to take care of the man, so men don’t usually need a child to perform that function. And a single, solvent, middle-aged man can marry, or at least fantasise about marrying, a younger woman who will stay with him and remain fit and able while he deteriorates into old age. No woman, especially if she’s middle-aged and has a couple of children, would ever be deluded enough to think, Oh, I know, I’ll get divorced in my fifties and find a nice young man who’ll look after me in my dotage. It doesn’t happen. It’s not what young men do. (I’ve noticed droves of left-wing ‘intellectual’ men in their fifties and sixties are now marrying women twenty, thirty years younger than themselves. This was considered politically incorrect and unintelligent amongst the radical set in the 1970s.) But we’re all programmed to survive. Women are no different to men in that respect.

  Sistahood ain’t sainthood.

  Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, 2000

  We all have our strategies. Lions kill their cubs so they don’t become rivals, male otters hold their pups ransom for food, the black widow spider devours her mate after sex for vitamins (and because she was disappointed?). It’s all perfectly natural.

  In The Favourite Theory the mother starts scouting early for her prey. Consciously or subconsciously, she casts her eye over her children, mentally separating one off like a sheepdog teasing a weak lamb out of the flock. Her choice of favourite confuses the other children. They can’t understand why she’s so fond of the weak one, the hopeless one, the unsuccessful one, and she will profess that she’s only indulging the lamb-child because they are not quite as able as the others and need her help. But this child will have been chosen because they can’t run as fast or as far from her as the others can.

  I’ve known mothers who have offered a child money or to reward a child in their will. My mother didn’t have any money to bribe my sister and me with, or much of a choice in the training-a-child-to-be-a-carer stakes – we were both wild, undisciplined girls. Until my sister hit her teens, I’m sure Mum thought Pascale was her best bet. During our parents’ marriage breakdown and separation, Pascale’s fierce and unquestioning loyalty towards Mum made her indispensable. I was less malleable, although Mum interpreted my more impartial approach as disloyalty.

  Is that the reason Pascale stopped communicating with us in her teens and left England in her early twenties? Did she realise that she was going to end up being Mum’s carer or stooge if she stuck around? Did she sense that if she didn’t get out and break the ties she’d be shackled forever? This is purely conjecture on my part, but it’s possible, and very smart of her, if she did.

  After Pascale moved to Canada and I was all she had left, Mum couldn’t do enough for me. I was delighted that she was all mine at last. But was it love, I wondered after her death, or was she grooming me?

  One morning, two weeks after Mum died, and still angry, I clattered down the fire escape to the shed in the back yard, wrestled open the dented metal doors and hauled my father’s brown bag out onto the decking.

  31 Pascale’s hair was bunched up in my fists, twisted round my fingers and clamped between my knuckles. We were lashed together so tightly that the strands cut into my flesh like cheese wire. I braced my knees against the bed-frame to steady myself and ground my knuckles into her scalp to gain more purchase – if I lost my grip, I’d lose my advantage – and dragged her head towards me. I couldn’t stop. Not even a flicker of a thought about stopping entered my mind. I’d made my move, the only direction now was forward. To finish her off once and for all.

  The Brown Bag

  Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams,

  Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

  W. B. Yeats, ‘Fergus and the Druid’, 1892

  Anxiety hammered inside my chest as I emptied the contents of the brown bag onto the kitchen table, found the buff folder and pulled out photocopies of the letters Lucien wrote to Pascale and me after he left home. They were sent through the county court and forwarded to us because Mum wouldn’t give him our address. In every note he asked if he could meet us, and despite the disdain I’d harboured for him over the last fifty years, it was heart-rending reading the letters; to understand, now a parent myself, how devastated he must have been; to realise that he never gave up, repeatedly asking permission to see Pascale and me. His attitude was unusual in an era when it was generally accepted that men had little interest in or time for their offspring.

  Lucien 10.11.74 – To Viviane and Pascale: I regret what has happened for all of us. I made several attempts to renew our relationship. Life has been unfortunate enough for the four of us in the last seven years. I was hopeful of a friendly reunion but instead I received a letter from Kath saying that it could not be possible. In spite of it all I still say that I like you all and wish to be friends, we are not the only divorced family in the land, we would be better off helping each other. Bless you both, I hope you will have a happy life, give my regards and best wishes to your mother.

  23.08.76 – To Kathleen: Years now since we last met, please remember that we have all been through enough not to be afraid to meet and chat and that neither you nor I are any better or worse creatures than any other pair we may know.

  01.09.79 – To Kathleen: I would be pleased to meet you anywhere you care to name – and naturally I would like to renew my relationship with Viviane and Pascale. Please give them my love, hoping to hear from you soon.

  16.01.80 – To Viviane and Pascale: I hope you don’t mind me writing to you from time to time and I hope you are well. I would like to see you again and for the past few years I have been saving for a good holiday, if you would like to come I would be very pleased and grateful of course. I’ll pay for it all and I’m sure you will enjoy it.

  Mum showed us the letters. She wasn’t stupid, she didn’t want us accusing her of deception if we came across them, or Lucien, in the future. ‘Do what you like. Write to him, meet him if you really want to,’ she’d say, but I knew she would see it as a betrayal if I showed any interest in my father. Sitting at the kitchen table reading his letters forty years after he wrote them, I realised that my mother had put me in the false position of thinking I was acting with a free will in choosing not to have a relationship with him. She absolved herself of responsibility by behaving as if she’d given us a choice in affairs that she was manipulating.

  There was one more document I hadn’t looked at in the bag: his diary, a bundle of pale-lemon-coloured, tissuey sheets of paper held together with a large brass paper clip. Pages and pages, translucent with age, covered with neatly regimented blocks of type, the print faded to a delicate dove grey, enough words to fill two books. I lifted the bundle of paper up to my face and breathed in. It smelled musty and male, and I was transported to the inside of my father’s chest of drawers, each one lined with brown paper and containing a few ironed and neatly folded shirts. His clothes were always clean but they were impregnated with a stagnant smell. You could bottle the fragrance coming off my father during the last two years he lived with us, it was that strong: Resentment and Failure by Chanel – Pour Homme. Everyone would recognise it and no one would want to wear it.

  Cherry Trees

  I found out everything I ever wanted to know about my childhood by reading those flimsy, jaundiced pages chronicling the last two years of my parents’ marriage. Lucien writes at the beginning of his diary that his solicitor told him to keep an account of the marriage as evidence in the divorce case. It wasn’t possible to obtain a no-fault divorce in the 1960s. You had to prove adultery or maltreatment and wait three years until a divorce was granted. ‘And,’ he adds, ‘I have no family in England and therefore have nobody to talk to.’ He chronicled our home life from August 1965 to May 1967. Bearing in mind that he wanted to win custody of my sister and me, and was therefore skewing the contents of the diary to demonstrate that Mum was slack in her maternal and
housewifely duties, nevertheless I could recall every incident he documented. He started by complaining about our grandmother, Frieda. (I’ve added occasional comments in italics.)

  Lucien In the six years we spent living at Kath’s mother’s house, her mother never once did any babysitting for us. I’m sure the children remember that when we lived with their grandmother she didn’t want to know them. She never looked after them once, never gave them a penny, never bought them anything even for their birthday or Christmas and never allowed them upstairs to her flat.