Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  *

  They let me stay. I am grateful for that. They bring a chair – the other people who have entered the room without me noticing – one of the grey plastic ones from the waiting room, and they put it by Betty’s bed so that I can sit by her and rest my hand gently on the covers while I wait for her father to arrive. They even leave me alone for a few minutes. A nursing auxiliary comes in with a cup of tea and, avoiding my gaze, places it soundlessly on the cabinet next to me.

  I am so thankful to have these few moments. When David arrives, that will be the beginning of all that must come next: Rees, our friends and relatives, the school. The rest of my life will have to start, then. For a moment, I attempt to peer over the edge of the cliff into that life, the life to come, but it makes me dizzy – literally, small spots appear before my eyes. To compensate, to right myself, I run through a brief, alternative narrative for what has happened to me in the last hour. The police came to my house to take me to the hospital. When I got here, Betty was lying white-faced on the crisp sheets hooked up to a drip. The consultant explained the seriousness of her injuries without euphemism. It was up to me to translate for her into terms that she could understand, so I told her she probably wouldn’t be able to take her tap dance exam in the autumn. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I said, ‘but it’s going to have to wait until next year.’ She has a way of bulging her face when she is indignant, distorting it, making her beautiful brown eyes monstrous. ‘A whole year!’ Now, she is asleep. The consultant has told me to go home and rest but I am staying here, just in case.

  I wonder how long I could keep this going, if it is possible to live with this alternative narrative for the rest of my life. I know – dear God, already I know – that this alternative is only mine as long as I am alone. Already, I am in love with alone.

  I rest, breathe in the simple fact that it is just me and Betty, here in this room. My thoughts are full of her but I can think of nothing to say that I haven’t said a million times, so I rest my hand on her and say, ‘Darling… darling…’ a few times. I watch her face and try and imprint the image of it on to my mind so that it will be there, just as sharp as it is now, forever; the scattering of freckles down her long nose – her heavy eyebrows and wide forehead. She has a grown-up face for a nine-year-old. It is already possible to see the adult in her. The chicken-pox scar just beneath where my fingers are stroking her temple – the curve of her lips. She has a lot of natural colour in her lips. It flatters her pale, freckled skin. She burns badly in the sun, as badly as any redhead. We have to be careful with her.

  I don’t want this small space of time to end, ever. I think of all the pictures of her I have in my head – the last time I saw her as she ran into school, chatting to her friends; and earlier this morning, before we left the house, brushing her long hair in front of the mirror in the hallway until it rippled in the milky light from the frosted glass panels on our front door. We were late, of course, but she would never leave the house without brushing her hair. Adolescent vanity had come to Betty early; the mood swings had started too. When she had finished brushing her hair, she stayed in front of the mirror to button her new corduroy jacket. We had bought it in a sale that weekend and she insisted on wearing it even though it wasn’t lined and she would freeze at playtime.

  ‘Mum, do you think the sleeves are a bit long?’

  My darling. If unconsciousness of any sort could come to me now, I would be perfected, complete.

  *

  A small eternity, the door opens; David is standing in the doorway, tall and straight, still in his working suit, grey hair combed neatly back. He looks at me and his face is blank with horror, eyes staring wide. We fix on each other’s gazes, locking in, conjoined by the paradox of shock and disbelief. Then his gaze shifts to the bed. He claps a hand over his mouth but it is too late. He cannot stop the sound escaping.

  PART 1

  Before

  1

  Muscle memory. My school friend Jenny Ozu was trapped inside Bach’s Minuet no. 2 in G major because of it. She was doing a public recital at the Town Hall, although not much of the public showed up: it was a Tuesday lunchtime in the Easter holidays. Her audience consisted of eleven people, I counted, scattered over a dozen rows of straight-backed wooden chairs, including Jenny’s mother and me.

  Jenny sat at the piano, marooned on a wide stage that was framed in its turn by sagging velvet curtains. The Town Hall was little used and the air heavy with dust. She began her first piece, the minuet. (The programme, designed and printed by her mother, declared in proud italics Jenny Plays Bach!). She played the first line and a half beautifully. As she approached the repeat, I dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand. ‘I’m really worried about the repeat,’ she had told me. ‘I just know I’m going to go straight on.’ She had practised it again and again. When the moment came, she sailed effortlessly back to the beginning. I smiled at her, even though she was concentrating on the music. Then, she approached the same point, the point where she should continue with the piece but instead, she sailed gracefully backwards, again, to the start. I felt my face flush for her and glanced around. Surely no one but I and her mother, sitting at the front, frowning no doubt, would notice. Three times instead of two – it wasn’t the end of the world.

  When Jenny came to the same place in the music again… again, she sailed backwards. After her fifth repeat of the same two lines of minuet, she stopped, lifted her hands from the piano keys, and burst into tears.

  Later, she told me, ‘I’d practised the repeat so hard, over and over, my fingers wouldn’t do anything else. I just had to stop completely. It was the only way I was ever going to get out.’

  We were gloomy adolescents, that was what bonded Jenny and me. Her father was Japanese and absent. Mine was dead. We made it our business to be intellectually superior to the other thirteen-year-old girls. We made suicide pacts and walked around carrying library books with titles such as Teach Yourself Swahili. We lay on her bed and ate KitKats and said we were Nihilists. I went through a phase of copying out verses from the Book of Job. I pinned them to the front of my cupboard in the common room, so that the other girls could see. It pleased me to excite their bafflement.

  One thing I feared, and it befell,

  and what I dreaded came to me.

  No peace had I, nor calm, nor rest;

  but torment came.

  The Book of Job, 3:25

  The things that impress you when you are twelve, thirteen, fourteen: they form in your bones. I have forgotten vast swathes of my schooling but one picture has remained, as clear as day: the grey and white of our form common room, Jenny Ozu weeping in a corner because her mother slapped her again that morning, and me sitting at a desk copying out verses from the Book of Job in black felt tip, furious in my desire to discomfort our happier contemporaries. My mother was a widow who had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I was an only child. Jenny and I were obsessed with unfairness – it bonded us more tightly than any shared hobby could ever have done.

  I may be righteous but my mouth convicts me;

  Innocent, yet it makes me seem corrupt.

  I am good.

  I do not know myself.

  The Book of Job, 9:20

  By the age of fifteen I was adept at changing my mother’s incontinence pads. ‘Right, Mum, let’s give you a little wipe, shall we? Here, what do you call a deer with no eyes…?’ My other friends at school apart from Jenny – my so-called friends, the ones who allowed me to hang around with them because I made them look cool and attractive – were making homemade skin treatments out of yoghurt and discussing barrier methods of contraception. I was learning that it was a good idea for my mother to skip the protein in her midday meal because it could interfere with the operation of the dopamines. She was already having problems vocalising, although she could still move her lips to mouth, ‘No-eye deer.’

  The district nurse visited once a week. I despised her even more than the social worker, who
wore pop-socks but at least didn’t keep calling me darling. The district nurse was as plump as the social worker was skinny. She wore tight jumpers and had breasts that began a foot lower on her body than they should have done. I saw her as a portent, a ribbed-sweater example of what I might become if I didn’t lay off cheesecake and steer well clear of the caring professions. Her constant praise drove me demented. ‘My,’ she would say, watching me tip and count my mother’s medication into her pill box. ‘I’ve got student nurses ten years older than you who aren’t this organised. You’re going to be a proper little nurse, my darling.’

  She wasn’t the only one who assumed I was going to be a nurse. Our neighbours, the Coultons, dropped by every now and then. Mr Coulton would tramp through our house in his unlaced, cement-covered boots and go out back to mow our small, square lawn. It took him longer to find the electric socket in the kitchen than it did to do the mowing. They had twin boys, aged ten. Whenever it snowed, the boys appeared at our front door with shovels. ‘Mam said to clear your path,’ one of them would announce sullenly.

  I knew I was expected to be grateful, although I couldn’t care less whether our path was covered in snow – it would melt of its own accord soon enough – and as far as I was concerned, the garden could become a wilderness.

  ‘I expect you’re going to be a nurse, then,’ Mrs Coulton pronounced firmly one day as she left our house. ‘Such a good girl. So brave.’

  In my GCSE year, I had a meeting with the school’s careers adviser. She knew nothing about my mother but, to my enormous indignation, came to the same conclusion. ‘You like the arts but still, that’s good, you also enjoy biology…’ she said, glancing through the form I had filled in.

  ‘I like doing the diagrams. The plants. And ventricles,’ I replied, sensing what was coming. ‘I’m good at the heart. Left and right ventricle. But it’s just because I’m good at drawing. I might be an artist, later, maybe.’

  ‘Have you thought about nursing?’ she said, rubbing the side of her nose with one finger.

  I wanted to bite her. ‘If I was going to consider that sort of profession,’ I replied haughtily, ‘I would want to – specialise.’ I racked my brain for a speciality, one that involved a long word. ‘Physiotherapy,’ I said. I meant to say psychiatry but physiotherapy had more syllables.

  The careers adviser made a small sound in the back of her throat, halfway between a cough and a bark. She was wearing a pen-on-a-string round her neck and it jumped every time she scoffed. ‘Physiotherapy isn’t just massage, you know, Lorna. It’s highly academic nowadays. It’s as hard to get a place as medicine, even harder some people say, and very difficult to get a position afterwards, but we’re always going to need good nurses, Lisa, aren’t we?’ She beamed at me.

  You’re not even a proper teacher! I wanted to shout, Who the hell do you think you are? I smiled back.

  A nurse? Didn’t these people realise I was an intellectual? What, precisely, did they think it was about my current situation that was going to make me want to do it for the rest of my life? I got As in my science GCSEs and Bs in nearly all my arts subjects. My only dropped grade was a U in Geography. I was proud of it, determined to be brilliant or fail completely, like a firework. A nurse? Didn’t they think that I might be getting enough of wearing thin rubber gloves as a schoolgirl? T. S. Eliot, I would say to myself, whenever I glimpsed one of the Coultons passing our bay window. Will no one rid me of this troublesome prelate? Photosynthesis. The Great Reform Act of 1832. My particles of knowledge were like the ingredients of a witch’s brew, magic that would keep me safe from the Coultons and the health visitors and the dread weight of what my mother’s illness was turning me into: a good girl, a little angel, someone of patience and understanding who effaced her own needs so effectively that she became a mere outline, helping others.

  In an attempt to be bad, I tried to take up smoking, standing in the garden one night after I had put my mother to bed, but I puffed too many Silk Cut in a row and had to lie down on the damp grass and was nearly sick. I bought a can of Special Brew from the off-licence at the end of the promenade one day after school because I had seen a homeless man drinking it in the shelter on the beach and so assumed it was as bad as you could get. I went and sat on the pebbles but it was cold and windy and the beer tasted of detergent. Being bad was no fun, I concluded. I would have to stick to being brainy.

  This was where Jenny Ozu came in. She was the only girl in my class less cool than myself. Nowadays, I suppose we would be Goths or Emos and revel in our oddness but popular culture reached our deserted stretch of coastline in diluted form, in those days – we were just odd. She got straight As, without even a token U. I pretended I didn’t mind. I did a mix of arts and sciences at A level partly so that I could take Biology with her. I was fascinated by the straightness of her fringe. If we had had more imagination, we might have become what the rest of our GCSE form assumed we were, teenage lesbians, but sex was never a feature of our discussions and I didn’t share my beer or cigarette experiments with her either – no, for Jenny and me it was pure brainache all the way through adolescence.

  We split up dramatically halfway through the sixth form. I fell in with a crowd of girls led by a skinny tomboy called Phoebe, who claimed she had tried skunk once and lost her virginity to the local swimming instructor. ‘Why do you hang out with that geeky chinky girl?’ Phoebe asked me one day, in front of her three friends.

  ‘She’s Japanese, or her dad is…’ I said, but without aggression.

  Phoebe shrugged. ‘Are you lesbians?’

  I should have walloped her, or at least stuck up for my friend, but instead I shrugged.

  ‘Cool!’ said Phoebe. ‘I’ve always thought it must be much more fun to be a lesbian. Men are so…’ she looked around in the air for the necessary adjective. The other three girls watched her, hanging on her words. So, to my shame, did I. Phoebe had an auburn ponytail and cheekbones and a level of insouciance that made her glow. She seemed to have leapfrogged adolescence altogether. ‘They’re so…’ then she burst into a fit of giggles. ‘Mind you…’ We all laughed like drains.

  My friendship with Jenny was over after that but I didn’t have the courage to tell her. Instead, I told myself that it was okay, that the bad things that had happened to me justified my own bad behaviour. I saw her around town occasionally, out on her own, or with her mother. If she smiled at me, I nodded and kept walking. I had had enough of being geeky. I wanted to be snide and happy, like Phoebe and her friends. I wanted to be normal.

  *

  Despite my lack of interest in boyfriends, my mother was obsessed with them. I was fourteen when she was diagnosed and a young fourteen at that: flat-chested, brown-haired and bookish, and with no idea how to pluck my eyebrows. Boys featured in my life in much the same way that creatures from a distant and disintegrating planet might feature, as something I really ought to be studying through a telescope to gain some idea of how to treaty with them when they came to visit. I was not convinced the visit would prove friendly.

  Sometimes, her obsession took a morose turn. ‘I want to see you settled, Duck,’ she would say as she loaded sugar into her tea, by means of a teaspoon that began heaped but thanks to the tremble in her hands was level by the time it reached her mug, ‘before I’m cold in my grave.’

  In those days I watched the trembles carefully. Her consultant was gradually increasing her intake of Sinemet and even though I knew it could be years before the long-term side effects kicked in, the increased dosage made me anxious. ‘I reckon I can hang on that long,’ she would often add. Nothing the doctors said could convince her that her life expectancy was normal. As her only child and carer, it had been explained to me very carefully by the social worker, a tweedy woman who wore not only pop-socks but skirts that stopped above the top of them – my scorn for her knew no bounds. My mother would live as long as she would have done before her diagnosis, but the efficacy of the dopamine drugs would wear off in between five a
nd ten years’ time. When the mental disintegration came, it would be as a side effect of those drugs rather than a symptom of her disease. Sooner or later, I would have to choose between a trembling, slow-moving mother who could hardly swallow but was mentally alert and manageable or a more physically able mother who might become aggressive. Most families, the social worker told me, chose the former.

  It became a kind of joke between me and my mother, her desire to see me ‘settled’. At the time, I felt mostly amused or irritated by it, often both – it was only when I became a mother myself that the true poignancy of her desire came home to me. I was the only child of a widow with a degenerative illness and she was terrified that when I could no longer cope and she went into a home, I would be left alone. Throughout my teens, as her Parkinson’s progressed, she came to regard it as her job to give me all the advice I might miss out on if she waited until I was sexually active. ‘Never trust a man who doesn’t look you in the eye,’ it would be one week. The following week would come, ‘If a man stares at you too keenly, he’s not to be trusted, mark my words.’

  My mother was forty-five when I was born, my father well into his fifties. I think it’s safe to say I came as something of a surprise. My father was the maintenance manager at the local reprographics company. He died of a heart attack when I was eight months old. My mother went from being half of a middle-aged, childless couple to being a single parent within the space of a year. Given the shock of that transition, she did a brilliant job. Whenever I looked at photos of my dead father, my mother would say, ‘He doted on you, did your dad, oh my yes, you were the light of his life.’