The Broken Ones

by Sarah A. Denzil

  “You did,” I say.

  “And I was right, wasn’t I?” she says.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “I’m always right.” She moves a few strands of her hair back. She likes to have it set just so. Many hairdressers have been screamed at. “Aren’t I?”

  “Yes.” I wring out the rag in the kitchen sink and try not to say anything more. Erin starts on another batch of soup.

  “Did I tell you that I’d lost my keys?” Mum says.

  “No, Mum. I’ll go and look for them in a moment.”

  *

  After Erin leaves and Mum has been put to bed, I tidy up the kitchen and replace the filled bin liner. As it’s early July, if I don’t do it right away it will smell. Not to mention the fact that I once came downstairs to find Mum picking discarded chicken out of the bin. Even the memory makes my stomach churn.

  The evening is pleasant and warm, but the air is full of midges. I pad down the path to the outside bin and quickly throw the filled bin liner into it.

  Our garden needs tending. Mum always loved to garden, but since the Alzheimer’s, she’s not cared for it as much. I try to get her involved every now and then, but she’s too easily distracted.

  Perhaps I’ll enjoy a nice, cool glass of wine when I get inside. Or maybe I’ll take it into the garden and stretch out on the sun lounger. I don’t drink a lot, but there’s little that’s more relaxing than a glass or two at home.

  I frown as I step on an oddly shaped object. I didn’t bother with shoes to take out the bin. It didn’t seem worth it. Now my bare foot is standing on a small, round item. Too flat to be a stone. I step back, bend down, and pick it up.

  It’s a button from a coat or a jacket. There’s nothing unusual about that, but for some reason, it seems so out of place. I know it’s not from any of my clothes, and I know most of Mum’s clothes. I don’t think it’s hers. I suppose it probably belongs to Erin, so I pop it in my jeans pocket and open the French doors into the kitchen.

  “Has that shadow been hanging around again?”

  I start. Mum is standing in the centre of the kitchen with her hair bedraggled and her face vacant. Her nightgown has come loose, so I can see far more of her chest than I’d like.

  “Come on, Mum. I’ll take you back to bed.”

  But before I take her up, I make sure to turn around and lock the door. The word “shadow” pokes at a long-forgotten memory. It’s there, but I can’t access it, like a word on the tip of my tongue. All I know is that the word makes me shiver, and it makes me want to lock the door.

  Chapter Two

  Through sleep-filled, bleary eyes, I somehow manage to move my finger across my phone screen to turn off the alarm. My eyelids flutter as I force myself not to choose the snooze option. I don’t have time to snooze. I have too much to do.

  First, I wash and dress Mum. She never was an early riser, and now that we need home help, I have to force her out of bed at 6am. Every morning, I get called every name under the sun. She’s always more disorientated in the mornings. She flails her thin arms, scratches my skin with her fingernails, and hisses at me between her teeth. She finds old wounds to pick at, even in this confused state. My jaw is a favourite. I need exercise, because I’m too fat and I’ll never find a man. Then there’s blaming me for Dad’s death. I’ve never amounted to anything.

  I’m a disappointment.

  At 6:30 I make us both breakfast. Sometimes Mum still loves her favourite breakfast, which is toast and strawberry jam. Other days, she suddenly hates it. I manage to gobble down tea and toast while watching her like a hawk to make sure she eats enough. Then at 7am Erin arrives, and I bomb upstairs to get a quick shower and get ready for work. Sometimes I even squeeze in some marking if Erin is a bit early.

  It can be hard to leave the house if Mum is being difficult. I know Erin is being paid a wage to care for my mother, but I also know it’s not easy, not even when she’s more lucid. She’s always been a difficult woman, but I suppose I found ways of dealing with it early on. I fell into a book or into my studies.

  Mum never wanted me to go to university. She wanted me at home. I think she was afraid of being alone. We compromised, and I lived at home and travelled into Derby to study there. I managed to find a work placement on the outskirts of Derby, and then a position opened at the local primary school. Everything fit perfectly, and I got to stay close to her. That’s how it’s always been. The two of us.

  Until Jamie came along. We met in the pub one Friday night at the end of term piss-up with the other teachers. You could say I was a late starter in life. I managed to get through university without any hook-ups and without many messy nights out. I’m ashamed to admit I was twenty-five before I was intimate with a man. Jamie was the first guy who was interested in me, and I grew to like him after a few weeks of him pursuing me.

  He was the brother of one of the teachers at school, and worked as an electrician for a local firm. At first I wasn’t interested. He was quiet, and short, and there was nothing remarkable about him. He had milky-blond hair and small blue eyes. He offered to buy me a drink and I said yes because I was drunk. Later that night we were kissing, but I went home alone after giving him my phone number.

  Alisha, my colleague at the primary school and best friend, was determined that I should go out with him, but I avoided his calls for a few days until he turned up to the pub again and insisted on buying me a drink. After getting a little drunk, I finally agreed to go out with him to dinner and a movie.

  Jamie never gave up. There were flowers and chocolates and bottles of wine. Mum told me that all he was interested in was a quick shag, and once I’d put out, I’d never hear from him again. But that didn’t happen. He stuck around for seven years, and I finally began to love him. But Mum drove him away with her snide remarks and backhanded compliments. Every argument we ever had revolved around Mum: about the things she said to put us down, about how I wouldn’t move out of her house, and when I did move out of her house, the arguments became about how we spent too much time with her. Jamie wanted to get married and have children, but there was always something holding me back. Now, I think it might have been Mum’s influence. Her little comments might have planted the seeds of doubt, but I let them grow until they became tangled weeds strangling the life out of our relationship.

  “If you marry him, you can’t get out of it. Marriage is for life,” she’d say. “Do you honestly want that lump for the rest of your life? What if there’s someone better out there? Jamie couldn’t find two brain cells to rub together. Is that the man you want to spend the rest of your life with?”

  Somewhere buried under all her insults was a nugget of truth that wore away at me. I didn’t want to marry Jamie. I did worry that there was someone else out there for me. After seven years we finally called it a day. I still blame my mother, but perhaps that isn’t fair. While I rarely ever disobey her, I think I would have if Jamie had been right for me.

  At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

  One thing I do know is that Peter is not the guy, either.

  At 7am on the dot, Erin steps into the house and waves cheerfully at us both. I’m sat next to Mum making sure she eats her cereal, with a cooling mug of tea clutched in both hands. Mum eyes Erin and frowns.

  “You again,” she says. “You’d best not feed me poison this time.”

  “Mum, this is Erin—”

  “I know who this is,” she snaps. “I’m not a child.”

  I roll my eyes for Erin’s benefit.

  “Good morning to you, Mrs. Howland. You’re looking well today,” Erin says, knowing that compliments work best with my mother.

  “She almost got my hair right,” Mum says.

  I can’t help but smile. That’s about as good as it gets when it comes to compliments from Mum.

  “I’d best get to school,” I say. “There’s ham in the fridge for sandwiches and some chocolate in the cupboard. Help yourself to whatever you fancy.”

&n
bsp; “Have a good day,” Erin says. “Don’t work too hard. Oh, and make sure my nephew doesn’t give you any lip!”

  I laugh. “Oh, he’s cheeky, but sweet with it. But I’ll tell him that his Aunty will be having words if he goes too far.”

  Eddington is a small village where everyone knows everyone, and if you work at a school you get to know all the names and faces. It’s the kind of traditional place that still has a village fete at the school attended by everyone—part of the haemorrhaging English culture that everyone bemoans as it dies, but no one actually wants to revive. Erin’s nephew, Noah, is in my class. He’s a sweet kid, with the same blue eyes as Erin. But she’s right, he can be lippy. They all can, but I don’t mind. At ten years old, a little bit of cheek is expected from happy kids. It’s the quiet ones I worry about the most.

  I leave Mum and Erin and hop into my Fiesta, piling up the passenger seat with marking. At 7:45am I park the car, carry the pile of marking into my classroom, sit down in my chair behind the desk and breathe for the first time this morning. I fill up my lungs, close my eyes, and breathe. The place smells like whiteboard marker and glue, but I love it. This is my break from it all, and yes, it’s stressful, loud and chaotic, but it’s a part of my life that I control. This is mine.

  There’s work to be done. I have photocopying to do, posters to hang, notes to make, and a little extra marking to finish up, all before the kids get here. First things first: the photocopying. If I leave it too late, there’ll be a queue. I pick up my lesson plans and worksheets and head down to the teacher’s lounge. A cup of coffee would be good, too.

  “Soph!”

  I grin. “Morning, ’Lish. I see you got to the photocopier early this morning.”

  “Just avoiding the hoards.” Alisha exaggerates an eye-roll. We’ve worked together for almost ten years, after both starting within six months of completing teacher training. We were a crutch for each other, both completely in it up to our ears and struggling along. “Fucking thing. I’ve changed the toner twice and unjammed it already this morning.” She gives the ancient printer a little kick. “There’s fresh coffee if you want some.”

  “You’re a life saver. I had to peel myself out of bed this morning.”

  I head over to the small kitchen area to pour a cup into my favourite mug—one with a bust of Shakespeare on the front and the caption 2B or not 2B, that is the classroom—a present from Alisha when I first started teaching in 2B.

  “How is the old battle-axe?” Alisha’s posture changes when she mentions my mum. She folds her arms and narrows her eyes.

  Alisha has only met Mum once, when she picked us both up from a teacher’s convention in Nottingham. Unfortunately, Mum talked to Alisha like a child the whole way home, raising her voice and talking slowly, as though Alisha couldn’t understand English. Alisha, whose heritage is Indian but who was born and bred in Manchester, gritted her teeth and put on an over-the-top Indian accent to make light of the situation. But I know it annoyed her—rightly so—and she’s disliked Mum ever since.

  I’d never gone into a lot of detail about my childhood, but I think Alisha saw who Mum truly is. Though I already knew Mum’s true colours, I saw them reflected back to me from Alisha’s reaction. It unsettled me.

  After that incident, we almost drifted apart. It was around the same time that she became pregnant with her first child. As well as feeling incredibly awkward about how Mum had treated my best friend—and how I’d failed to stand up to Mum yet again—the sight of my best friend going through pregnancy was almost too hard to bear. It took me a long time to realise how jealous I was of her, and then I felt like the pettiest person in the world. So I shouldered the pain, and I bought presents for her newborn. I went to the hospital and I took her flowers and I held her child in my arms. I saw her happiness, and I was glad she got to experience it. I loved them both.

  I try to shake the thoughts away. “Confused, frustrated, difficult. The Alzheimer’s is progressing quickly. She has her good moments where she’s exactly as she was, but there are times when she looks at me and I’m not sure she even knows who I am.”

  Alisha’s expression softens. “That must be hard.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and an awkward silence follows. I know exactly what she’s going to say next, and I automatically tense up. “Have you given it any more thought?” She raises her eyebrows, clocking me with a serious gaze.

  “I have thought about it,” I say. “But I can’t.”

  It’s almost imperceptible, but Alisha’s lips tighten, as though she knew I was going to say that and is disappointed in me. “I’m just going to say this. I know it’s not my place, but you’re my best friend and I can’t hold it in anymore. Why are you still caring this for woman when I know she’s been a terrible mother to you all your life?” She holds her hands up when I’m about to interject. “It doesn’t take a genius to work it out. That woman is emotionally abusive. She tried to talk you out of going to university, she picks on the way you look in front of other people, and she broke up your relationship with Jamie. God knows what she was like when you were a child. This is your opportunity to get rid of her for good and finally move on with your life. Take it. Sell her house, move her into a home, and finally live the happy life you’ve always deserved.”

  My spine straightens. “Opportunity? I’d hardly call watching my mother deteriorate into a child an opportunity.”

  Alisha sighs. “You’re right. I’m sorry. That was a poor choice of words.” She collects her papers and taps them against the top of the photocopier to get them straight. “Maybe I overstepped. I don’t know. I just want to make sure that someone is on your side. I want to be on your side, and I want you to be happy. You know you deserve to be happy, right?”

  I blink, trying to process everything that’s going on: Alisha’s sudden plea, Mum’s difficulties at home. It’s all happening so fast. A few months ago Mum had mild memory loss and lapses in concentration; now she’s deteriorating faster than even the doctors expected. “I know.” But I speak quietly, without confidence.

  Alisha places a hand on my arm. “If you need any help, I’m right here.”

  I believe her, but I wonder how much help she’d be willing to offer. There’s only so much anyone can do when you’re in this situation. They can’t clean up my mother’s urine or put her to bed. They can’t fill out the paperwork needed to sort out financial aid or finalise Mum’s will. They can’t be there 24/7, watching her to make sure she doesn’t burn down the house or try to eat uncooked bacon from the refrigerator. No, they can’t do any of that.

  Which is Alisha’s point, isn’t it? That I can’t cope on my own, so I should put Mum in a home. I place my paper in the photocopying machine. No. I can’t do that. Mum would give up in a place like that. I wouldn’t be able to afford the best, and I’d be leaving my mother at the mercy of people who probably don’t give a shit about their patients. There are horror stories in the press all the time, detailing how care assistants abuse their patients. I can’t let that happen to Mum, no matter what has happened to us, no matter how hard the next few years will be.

  *

  The classroom is one of the few places I can clear my mind of all the things I need to do to help Mum. This is all about the children, and giving them a good start in life. But I’m the first to admit that my head is all over the place today. I even mess up teaching a simple grammar lesson to the children, prompting Isaac—who is very advanced for his age—to question me. My face grows red, and all the children make oooh and ahhh noises when I realise my mistake. Erin’s nephew calls out, “Miss, Miss, you got it wrong, Miss!”, delighted that a grown-up can make a mistake.

  Lunch time is a sandwich at my desk followed by playground duty. I quickly check my phone for messages. Erin has texted: Mum doing well today. Ate all her lunch and is watching Loose Women on TV! See you later. Xoxo. I couldn’t ask for a better nurse. She truly is a godsend.

  I also have a text from Peter: Enjoyed o
ur coffee (Coke for me!). Hope your mum is ok. Shall we rearrange? There’s also a missed call from him. He’s put a lot of effort in so far, although it verges on creepy. Maybe I should give him another chance. I mull it over in my mind, thinking about his attitude toward books. That could be a deal-breaker. Maybe it’s best to leave it. He seems pretty keen, though, which could result in an awkward telephone call. I cringe at the thought.

  The bell goes for playtime to end, and the children start filtering back into the school. There’s one girl lagging behind the others, Chloe, a sweet but quiet girl who tends to play on her own during the break. My heart breaks when the others tease or ostracise her. She’s not quite as developed as the rest of the class. She often struggles with her reading. I watch her as she makes her way into the school. There’s something else about Chloe… something odd.

  “Come on, Jessie,” Chloe says, holding her arm out as though she’s dragging someone behind her, except that there’s no one behind her. She gives her wrist a little shake as though yanking them forward. “You’re too slow! I have to get to class.”

  “Hi, Chloe. Are you ready for this afternoon’s class?” I ask, trying to get her attention away from her imaginary friend. I read a little child psychology during my training as a teacher, so I know it’s normal to have an imaginary friend, but it’s odd for her to be ten and still have one, and for her to play with her imaginary friend at school rather than make actual friends.

  “Yes,” she whispers. Her small head of blonde hair passes me, and she walks into the entrance of the school and down the hall. I frown, worrying again about the quiet children in my class, the ones who are forgotten and ignored. It’s my duty to look out for them. That’s how it works. Those of us who live through it grow up and give back because we know how hard it was.

  My mind is still on Chloe as I travel home from work with a daunting stack of homework to mark. Most teachers I know hate how much homework young children are forced to endure, and how many standardised tests they’re made to sit to. We hate the stats and the OFSTED side of teaching. We want to give the children the best education we can, but the restrictions force us into becoming clones of each other, delivering clone messages to mini-clones.