by Helen Slavin
My Mother smiled as I handed back her own words of wisdom.
‘She didn’t say anything…about her birth?’
‘Nothing.’
Now my curiosity was aroused. My Mother was bursting to tell me, but felt she shouldn’t. She sipped at her tea for a while and looked out of the window, watching a traffic warden write out a ticket for a blue Mercedes.
‘They found her you know.’
‘Found her? Aunt Mag?’
My Mother nodded.
‘Your gran and granddad thought they couldn’t have children. Turns out that it was just stress really. They’d got themselves so worked up about it they couldn’t relax enough. Actually, I think it’s because they didn’t know how to have sex, but anyway…One evening they were at the pictures and they came out early because they weren’t struck with the picture. I don’t know what it was… something with Clark Gable in, I think. Your granddad never did like him. Anyway, they were a bit peckish and thought they’d call in at the chippy. Your Aunt Mag was in the chippy doorway. Wrapped in a blanket in a string bag, hooked round the door handle.’
In the silence that followed this our tea turned cold and the traffic warden called in the tow truck and had the blue Mercedes taken away. As the car was trawled away she spoke.
‘They thought she was a gift.’
My Mother was definitely teary now and having to halt her speech so that she wouldn’t crack. ‘All parcelled up in the chippy doorway. If it wasn’t for your Aunt Mag they wouldn’t have had me, or Lorna or Marjie…Once they had her, you see, she took their minds off it all.’
See what I mean about My Mother and fairy stories?
Prince Charming. Not Sam and that’s for sure, although he tried his hardest. We went out at least twice a week to the pictures, to the huge multiplex they had just then built at the motorway junction.
I don’t know what I was doing. I liked the company and I liked to see films. I didn’t see how sitting in the dark for two to four hours every week with a man could make him imagine that you were falling in love with him. But of course it can, because as you’re sitting there completely engrossed in the film, losing yourself utterly in a non-existent, non-threatening dream world, your companion is sitting in the dark making it up in his head.
He is looking at the light from the screen as it moves across your hair. He is looking at your silhouette as you sit beside him. He is listening to you laugh or watching you sit tense or jump into the air at the thriller. He’s making up a fairy story.
If I had been braver. Fairer. Just different.
Then I suppose I would have gone out with him for dinner, or possibly ice-skating, or to the zoo and then he would quickly have realised what a sour old cow I was. He might have noticed that I was sitting in the zoo cafe thinking that perhaps Evan had got a job in the kitchens, somewhere that I couldn’t see. Maybe even as we sat there he was mucking out the elephants.
In the cinema I put Evan Bees to the back of my mind. Put him in a little box. One of those dog carrier things. Going to the cinema was not something Evan and I had ever done.
I let Sam into bed, too, which was pure evil. For then we were both making up our own personal fairy stories. I shut my eyes and thought of Evan and Sam opened his eyes and thought of me. Or at least the me that he imagined I was.
I was cruel then, and I should have known it. I knew what it felt like to be used. I remembered that day with Beck and Shell. I should have known better.
I think about Sam sometimes now and I realise that he is walking around with a fake set of memories about our time together. Our time together did not exist. I was not spending it with him.
My Mother had been spending a lot of time with Brian. Brian was a forest ranger at the Goatmill Woodland Park. He wore a green uniform with khaki trousers and big brown boots. He made me think of Little John—he was a tall bloke, broad across the shoulders. He was a fairytale giant I suppose, with his big hands and his big feet only too ready to take care of My Mother.
He was the end of the house guests. She had the Hungarian chess team staying again that year. They were over for a tournament. It is a measure of My Mother that their relationship was so tightly bonded. She had slept with them all at one point or another, solace for a lost match, stress relief for an aching head. Whatever, she had been with all of them. Now when they visited they brought photos of their kids and their wives and talked of their family lives as if My Mother was in some way part of this, had contributed something to their way of living.
Once they were gone Brian was firmly in the picture, standing over to the left a bit and squinting in the dappled forest shade. He was always squinting. He needed glasses.
My Mother imagined that I was with Sam and it was going to be permanent. Or possibly she chose to believe that. She needed Brian after all she’d gone through with me. It only took them three months to decide to get married and before you knew it the big house that had known so many lame ducks and lodgers was up for sale. She and Brian bought a small bungalow on the edge of the Woodland Park because Brian had to be up at the crack of dawn for his forestry work.
This is where she was starting to go quietly batty due to the lack of hangers on. Then she decided to open a tea shop.
The Glade was exactly what the Woodland Park needed. It began as a glorified shed which My Mother bought and painted up. She painted it Fjord Blue, and the window frames white. She put up galvanised troughs that she recycled from a farm sale and planted them up with flowers. She was one of the first in the town to put tables outside.
It was never quiet in there. People came just for the tea and never looked at the Woodland. And her vocation for helping people out shone through in her ragtag-and-bobtail selection of waitresses and assistants.
There was Zara who had been sacked from a hairdressers for selling the hair to an upholstery firm for stuffing. The story was that Zara had high hopes of being trained as a stylist. She was delighted to get the job as trainee at the salon. She didn’t mind sweeping up hair occasionally, in fact she considered it part of the training. However after six weeks of nothing else she opted to take her own action. She was selling the hair so she could afford to go to college and study hairdressing. My Mother thought this showed initiative. The happy ending for Zara is that she grew up to be a cafe owner. The cafe chain she owns now has elegant green parasols and patio heaters.
There was Aurora and Lynsey and Gemma. Aurora who was very shy but went on to become the manager. Lynsey who started doing some of the baking and ended up winning a national competition and running a bakery business of her own. She supplied The Glade. She still does. She makes this maple syrup and pecan sponge cake that is cosmic.
But no one makes rock buns like Valerie’s.
Mum’s Eye View: sideways on
I love The Glade. And my girls. They’ve all come on, you know. I don’t know if I see myself in them, the wild and the untamed.
Who am I kidding really? I wasn’t wild and untamed. I was lost and naïve. I needed someone to save me and no one bloody bothered. I mean, it worked out in the end. Not just my girl, but Brian.
Brian said a funny thing. He didn’t want to know. That’s it. He didn’t want to know. Not about Mr Bentley or that Dauntsey bloke. Not about my girl’s father or Patrice or the Hungarian chess team or ANYONE. He said simply that was the past. It was all the moments that were gone, not to be revisited and not available on video to be endlessly played back. I don’t even have a lot of photographs. None really. He said he’s just interested in me, who I am now and what we will do together.
If you made him up, no one would believe you. I look at him sometimes when he’s chopping wood or whatever, and I wonder how I got him, where he even came from. We live in the forest and it’s like some fairytale and he’s the kindly giant.
I always preferred the kindly giant to Prince Charming. There was always something so drippy about princes to me as a kid. I loved the Beast and I used to sob my heart out at the end whe
n he turned into the handsome prince because somehow Beauty’d lost. I wanted the Beast back. I think it was probably the fact that they always draw them in the storybooks with those silly periwigs on. You can’t fancy someone with a periwig and satin breeches on.
But there’s something welcoming about a man in a forest with a spotted handkerchief and a bit of cheese. Don’t you think?
March, the third
BY THE March after that, I lost hope. I simply put it down on the worktop one morning as I turned to the fridge for the milk. I never picked it up again. This was good for me—after all it was now two years since Evan had ‘popped out’. However, it was the undoing of me and Sam.
At last I didn’t have to use Sam as a cipher for Evan. I broke off the relationship with Sam. He wanted to remain friends. I didn’t. I felt that was giving false hope.
Sam stuck with it. We still went to the pictures together. I made it completely clear that I was not going to be in love with him ever. I did. I could have written it out I suppose, signed it, had it witnessed by a notary public.
It was Sam who came to tell me that My Mother was dead.
On the CCTV tape you oversee it. As if you are God and your eyesight isn’t too good. You can only see in grainy black and white. That’s what a few millennia of gazing down on the deeds of Earth probably does to you. Or should that be You?
You look down powerless and you can see My Mother sitting on a chair next to the suited man. You can see the moment that he begins to sweat. See the sweat darken his armpits on his handmade suit. And My Mother is so calm as she leans to talk to him. I don’t hear what she says. You can see almost from the outset that the sweating, suited man isn’t going to make it. He’s squirming, sweating, a boiler about to explode.
The robbers were the worst kind. Virgin bank robbers fumbling with their weaponry, unsure where to put what.
You see the suited man gripping the metal chair arms fit to bend them as his heart begins to stop. He keels over, slithers from the chair. My Mother is already helping him, cradling his head as he goes so he doesn’t concuss himself on the chair frame. She is moving to his side, pulling at his clothes, loosening his tie.
The robbery is by now second fiddle to My Mother. The man nearby is getting edgy, doesn’t know whether to watch what they are doing. Or not watch what they are doing because he can see that this man is going to die and he doesn’t want to see that. But he’s going to be in trouble if they get out of hand. He jabs at My Mother with his gun and says something we can’t hear.
My Mother ignores him. She is adjusting the suited man’s head so that his airway is clear. She is busy slapping her lips onto the suited man’s lips, trying to breathe life into him. The robber jabs her some more. Finally she pushes the gun away and tells him off. Then she turns back to the man and his malfunctioning heart. She turns and she is giving the man mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The Kiss of Life.
Only the virgin bank robbers have other ideas, and My Mother dies as she lived, kissing a man for all she is worth. The suited man is so taken with her he is swift to follow. The bank robber starts to shriek in panic like a frightened child.
Brian carried My Mother out through the doors afterwards in his giant’s arms.
The virgin robbers didn’t get the money. They got a murder trial. They were ushered out of a police van with blankets over their heads on their way to the courts. They were stupid. They were pointless. I didn’t care about their wives or mothers or sisters.
I remember noticing, as Sam and I sat there, the light from the windows fading as the day drew on, that Sam’s hands were shaking. He never stopped shaking and we must have sat there for over five hours.
I wasn’t crying. I didn’t feel grief. I was simply…waiting. My Mother had been killed that lunchtime in the bank. I didn’t seem to believe it. It wasn’t really believable, was it? How could this happen? We weren’t in a film. It was our ordinary bank on Tonge Street next to the Cheap Trick Shoe Store. My cousin, Karen, worked in the bank on one of the tills. After the robbery she gave up. She cashed in her life savings and travelled the world. Running away, she called it.
But on that day it was Our Bank. On a perfectly normal street with zebra crossings and traffic lights and a woman outside the video store pranging her bumper as she attempted to back into too tight a space. She was dropping off her video. A film titled Master Key about a bungled bank robbery.
I tried to remember what My Mother had been wearing that day. Whatever it was it would now be chocolate brown.
My Mother never came back. Maybe because chocolate brown was never a colour that suited her. It washed her out. She suited deep plums and lush aubergines.
I waited. I felt all right. I didn’t have any grief, assured in the knowledge that soon she would be back to talk to me, with her unfinished business to be solved. That unfinished business would be the rest of my life. She had my lifetime left to fill with good advice and understanding silences.
My Mother never came back.
I kept The Glade going. Brian only talked to the trees. I finally gave up my job at the university and opted to run The Glade full time. I simply changed allegiance. Instead of waiting forever in the university for Evan to find me I decided to wait for My Mother instead.
She would know where to find me. She had known where to find me at the university. When I worked too late and stayed too long she would roll up in her car and drag me out, drop me home. Now when I worked too late and stayed too long I simply fell asleep where I sat down and woke up the next day with my hair in a pat of butter and a crick in the back of my neck from lying in a draught.
I slept very well at The Glade. Whether I had my hair in a pat of butter or not. I could be propped up against the turquoise-blue tongue and groove panelling or simply slumped over the scrubbed wooden worktop. I rested.
My Mother never came back.
Eventually I realised I would have to change tack and I thought about the room, the little anteroom I often saw when those with unfinished business came to see me. I’d go one night and visit them. I had questions to ask. I had unfinished business.
April, the fourth. April, the first. Time for wrestling the angel
IT WAS hard to get there. Usually I was an outsider, looking in. I had to will myself into that small space. Not that it was my physical being that got there. That would have been easy. A bottle of pills.
Chucking yourself off the bridge at Endsea had become more difficult of late. The council had employed a man, a former wrestler, to keep an eye out for suicides. He had rescued five people in the first three months of his employment. He didn’t talk them down, he dragged them bodily. Then he locked them into the tollbooth next to his office whilst he brewed tea. The local paper wanted to run a story about him being a hero, but he wouldn’t have it. He maintained that it wasn’t him who saved anyone. It was the tea.
A journalist attempted to cross the bridge and break into his little office and talk with him. He locked her in the tollbooth, out of harm’s way.
Out of Harm’s Way. The Beast, Harm. With a lick and a promise to do you no good.
The bit of myself that I sent was my astral self. My dream self. And I had to keep myself there. Concentrate hard. It was like sitting an A-level Dreaming paper. As if I had three hours to accomplish this. To get there, argue my case and see My Mother.
I couldn’t argue. I had no case. My Mother was dead. The end. But I stayed there.
There were three people there, all with messages. This time I understood why they wanted to say what they did. Why it was important to have that last string attached to the world. But it is a piece of string. As cheap and tatty as that. There is the time and there is the end.
And as I stood, my dreamy astral self, I realised that this really was a waiting room. Just like a dentist’s waiting room complete with out-of-date magazines. No one was reading them. And I was in Technicolor. I was quite blinding and odd, most especially to myself. I had to stop thinking about my meaty se
lf, the self lying on my bed supposedly having a nap. Everything I was kept me in that odd little waiting room. It needed plants.
Hal stepped forward. Hal was still visiting me then and he looked very upset to see me there. Not upset that I was dead. Upset that I was dead and would therefore be unable to carry any more of his messages or settle his unfinished business.
‘What you doing here?’ was his greeting. How typical, you get to Heaven and you expect Hosanna in the slightest. But, of course, I was only in the anteroom.
Who else was there? Can I remember? I remember Hal because he was trying to move into me again and I knew the minute he did that I’d be back in my bedroom shouting obscenities and poor old Sam would come rushing up the stairs.
‘I’ve come to see My Mother.’
‘Can’t. Not if she isn’t here. Doesn’t want to see you if she isn’t here.’
I was not in any sort of mood to hear, ‘Your mother does not want to see you.’
Oh God, now I can remember, Mrs Berry was there. Cutting coupons out of the magazines. She looked over her glasses at me. ‘She came through. I told her what I thought, you know, about her cleaning the bath with her cast-off knickers.’
‘We don’t live there anymore. Go and haunt someone else,’ I snapped. And then I approached the door. It had a handle. A brass one. As I touched it Mrs Berry piped up, ‘Don’t touch that, I’ve just polished it. You’ll get finger marks on it.’
But I touched it anyway. The bland, chocolate brown MDF door. I was determined, pushing it inwards. Which is when I had the tussle with the angel. The door was rammed back at me, only it wouldn’t close because, as I had come prepared, I had jammed my astral foot in there. I pushed against the door and the angel pushed back at me. I could see feathers, strong feathers like the ones that fall from a swan. Feathers you could make things with, chieftain headdresses or efficient quill pens.
A muscular arm was reaching down now and it seemed to lengthen immeasurably so that the angel would not have to stoop and lose his/her/its traction on the door. But it wasn’t the force of the angel that made me stumble and fall back to my dreaming brain. It was the force of the grief. The force of knowing that now I had to realise that she was not coming back; that she was, indeed, gone.
