It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's

by Lisa Blower

  You don’t know your mother’s sister because you’ve been told to keep away. You are uncontrollable. A lout. A thug with a reputation for being duff meat. Your aunt is smart. And rich. And married to a GP who plays golf and tennis and talks of backhand drives and slicing drives out of bounds and shows you how with his hands. That was the last time you saw him at any rate and you thought him smug. So when Moth asked if you had any ideas to bring to the table to prove you were worth more than a set of robbed exam papers, that it was worth him letting the foreigner in, you told him about the smug GP and your smart rich aunt but you forgot about the CCTV. And no matter how hard you tried, none of your stones were thrown high enough to smash the lens. You throw like a girl, man. You should stick to washing cars, like your old fucking man. And that’s when it occurs to you that your father is old. Older than you ever have thought and he’s not going to be around for ever.

  So you say to your mum—Did you marry him for his money or a visa?

  Your mother looks at you in the rear view mirror and says—Both.

  And me? you say. What the fuck about me?

  Your mother smiles.—I don’t know. Juke. What the fuck about you?

  —You made me! you shout. You and him. You made me!

  —And you scares me! she shouts back. I look for help. Someone who know what to do. Your father say ‘Ignore him! He just growing!’—and she punches your father then for his uselessness, his lack of everything, for telling her nothing about English life, and she says it again:

  —Please, Juke. You tell them it was accident. They believe you like I believes you.

  And she cries and asks for your hands. You give them to her. Not because you’re a sop but because you can’t be arsed arguing with her any more. You are done even if she’s not, and she takes both your hands in hers and kisses them sloppily. By the time she has done with you, your hands are damp with her saliva, his blood. Or her blood, his saliva. You have now forgotten who stabbed who.

  —Please, Jukey. Go tell them what happened. How it was accident.

  You pull away your hands at that. Not because your mother is lying, but because you hate who you are and blame her. So you tell her again how you’re ribbed for your stupid name, your flowing blonde hair and Asian eyes; your wiry little body neither black, brown nor white that won’t grow up, grow out, or do what normal bodies do. How you get taunted:

  —Is that your Grandad?

  —Does your mum give good head for ten dollar?

  How all you really want is a mum and a dad like everyone else. So stop it with the fucking Jukey and pretending this is all OK. This is not OK. You and him have never been OK.

  —Now you listen, she starts. Love is a bluddy funny thing and you is our son Juke. I just wish—but she runs out of words and speaks to you in Thai. So you give her some of yours.

  —Careful what you fucking wish for, eh? Because you know it wasn’t ever for you.

  #16

  You look out of the window at your aunt’s house. You don’t know what she does or why she has so much money or when she came to England and if her coming to England and having all of this is what drove your mum to come on the plane and pretend she was the stewardess—red or white, chicken or beef—because your aunt knew the pilot and the pilot said—For Favour—and if her sister could do it so could she.

  Moth keeps asking about your aunt. She on my rad-arrr, he says. What your family has out there is worth fucking gold, man—and he wants an in. But you can’t give him an in on a field full of cows and house covered in CCTV.

  —Moth man, you say. It’s just a fucking farm. A drive of cattle in a field.

  —But they’ve got guns, man, says Moth. With licence. With poss-i-bil-ity.

  And he wants you to get him a gun from the farm. Moth wants a gun. He has always wanted a gun. And you’re the only one who can get him one which makes you superi-ahh.

  —I’m talking the front seat man, says Moth, with his right hand on your back and his left about your throat. And like a moth to a flame you agree.

  While you’re thinking about all of this, your mother starts talking again. She says:

  —I have no ideas what drives you, what drives him, why I drove us all here, but I did and I’m out of ideas—and she gets out of the car to go knock on the door.

  #17

  You wonder if now is the time to get the gun. You got your distraction. It all went to plan and everyone’ll be busy with your father when they find him. No one will miss you. You could get one and stash it in the boot and cover it over with that big blanket you brought with you. The one you told your mother would keep your father warm in blood loss. Then you could drive away.

  You think about getting into the driver’s seat instead and just driving off. You could go anywhere. Just drive until the tank runs dry. You think about what to do with your old man. Except your father has begun to wake and it takes you by surprise. He lurches forward as if he’s just remembered how to breathe again and he brings up his hands to his face and sees the blood.—Oh my God he says and he sucks in his belly, looks down and starts to wail like a small child wanting chocolate. You tell him to man up and get a grip. It was only the blunt butter knife and he’d been cheating on his wife with her sister.

  —Anyway, you say. It’s probably only tomato ketchup because you were making a crisp sandwich at the time.

  So you tell him where you are to reassure him then get out of the car and go see if you can get your gun.

  The Trees in the Wood

  IT’S NOT THAT I don’t sleep. I know I don’t not sleep. I could fall asleep right now if I wanted to, but that’s not what they want me to do. And Mia was fine about it when I asked her, if not a little distracted. But then she’s always distracted by something. Her mobile phone rings all the time, then there’s the home phone and now her pager. ‘It’s just that I don’t remember giving you my number,’ she’d said when I called her again to confirm. And she still looks confused when she opens the door to me today.

  ‘What are you bringing me now?’ she says, pointing to my overnight bag. I try and distract her with my usual offering of wine. She says, ‘Laura, what do I keep saying about bringing me wine?’ But she still tucks the bottle under her arm, I could see she’d already got a glass on the go, and the bag gets forgotten because then her mobile goes. It’s her friend Liz and she’s told quickly, ‘Not really. Laura’s here. It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?’ And it sounds so very unkind.

  But then she was all apologies: it was just pasta and pesto for tea because she’d not got to the supermarket and she was sure that’s what she’d given me last week, which she did, but I didn’t tell her so. Besides, it was all the twins would eat. And then her mobile goes again and she sighs but when she looks at the number she’s smiling. She sticks her head in the fridge to answer it, as if looking for the milk which is already on the side, and her voice is muffled, low, but sweet. ‘Hi,’ she says, and, ‘No, not really, but I can later. Yeah, I’d like that too.’ And then she shuts the fridge and says, ‘Actually tonight is difficult. It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?’ And I see that she’s not washed yesterday’s plates, that the breakfast bowls are still on the table, that they seem to have acquired a cat because what’s down there on the floor by the patio door looks like a bowl of its food.

  ‘Right, drink,’ and Mia’s back in the kitchen, her mobile back in her pocket, and she’s still in her nurse’s uniform after a twelve-hour shift with her silver grizzled hair tied into a too-tight ponytail that sucks up her face. She fills the kettle, fills her glass and starts to swill out a mug for me. She talks with her back to me, asks, ‘What’s new with you?’ and then before I can speak she turns and says, ‘Oh my goodness! Did I tell you Rowan made Oxford?’ and because she suddenly looks so happy I’m forced to smile and say, ‘No.’

  Rowan is Mia’s eldest daughter and brilliant at science, chemistry’s her thing, and though this is good, that Rowan will finally be moving out—their relationship is a little fraught
to say the least—Mia covers her face with her hands and mutters something about the first from the nest and what will she do without her? I want to say, ‘Plenty,’ but the hands are removed and she suddenly shouts, ‘Oh my God, did I tell you my mother was attacked?’

  I look startled. ‘No,’ I say, and would rather not hear any more, as I’m sure Mia, if she was thinking straight, wouldn’t tell me either given how much she knows I detest the night, but she does and she says, ‘Do you know what the worst part is? I’m glad. I’m actually really fucking glad because now I can do what I should’ve done years back.’ And I wish she wouldn’t swear because she sounds bitter and cantankerous and she knows I don’t like it. But then the home phone starts up and she’s hunting it down and I see it flashing beside a pile of magazines on the seat of the armchair she keeps in the kitchen by the range which she had fitted almost two years ago and still doesn’t know how to use.

  Nor does she know how to use the home phone either, because when she answers it’s on speakerphone so I get to hear: ‘Mrs Onions? Edith Davenport. Davenport House. Just to say that the room is now ready for you and we can send a removal team for a week Friday. Does that give your mother enough time?’ And I can see that Mia’s panicking about me hearing this because she tells this Edith Davenport to hang on, she’s on speakerphone and she doesn’t know which button it is to get it off. Edith Davenport laughs and says, ‘Technology, eh?’ and Mia agrees: technology will be the death of her if lack of sleep doesn’t get to her first. And I raise my eyebrows at this and glare because she can’t have forgotten why I am here.

  Eventually, she asks Edith Davenport to call her on her mobile. ‘Because if I didn’t know how to use that I’d never speak to my eldest daughter at all,’ and she sounds so very sad when she says it. So the call ends and she suddenly remembers I’m here and goes, ‘Laura. Shit. Drink. At least let me get you a drink. Things aren’t normally like this.’ I tell her, ‘Actually, Mia, they are.’ She gives me the sort of look that makes me feel unwashed, except her mobile is ringing. She says, ‘I’m not sure there’s teabags but there’s coffee so help yourself. You know where everything is,’ and goes into the hallway to answer her phone.

  This leaves me in the kitchen with the twins, Margot and Henry, who have just turned five and are still in their school uniforms squabbling over jigsaw pieces under the kitchen table where they now also like to eat. I have told Mia that I don’t agree with them eating off the floor like dogs, but she says at least they’re eating and it keeps them quiet and I spot a few rubbery-looking pasta twirls on the floor and a dollop of what looks like hardened ketchup.

  I look down at the jigsaw. ‘I like a jigsaw,’ I tell the twins. ‘A doctor, though I use the word lightly, once prescribed me a jigsaw with a nip of whisky each night, and diagnosed me as still not grieving as if that were an actual medical term then sent me to a counsellor who never spoke. “I’m not the subject Laura, you are,” he said to me. So we talked about the art on his walls and his mother’s dementia and I tried to have him struck off but apparently depression is now two a penny and there’s not enough counsellors to go round.’

  I pick up a couple of pieces of the jigsaw and start to fit them together on the floor. Margot frowns at me. ‘We were doing that,’ she tells me. ‘We don’t need your help.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ I say, smiling. ‘You need to get the four corners in place which helps you to work on the edges, see? Then you fill in the main picture.’ I show them what I mean and as I do, I think about what Mia said to me when I told her about the counsellor. How she asked for my pills and looked them up in her medical journal and told me to throw them away. ‘I’ll help you,’ she said to me, and promised to speak to a doctor she knew, but what he said and if she did is something I still don’t know.

  ‘That was two years ago,’ I tell the twins. ‘And I’ve been on at least six different medications since then, none of which have worked, and now I’m with this new doctor and on this new medication which can’t be right because I’m not sleeping at all now, not a wink, and the pills are this funny shape.’

  I see that Henry has collected up the rest of the jigsaw pieces and put them behind his back. I ask him what he’s doing. He asks me what I’m doing here. ‘I’m here because this new doctor has prescribed enforced wakefulness and told me to be wakeful with someone I trust not sleepless alone,’ I say crossly. Though the doctor has warned me it could be short-lived. ‘Short-lived positivity,’ is what he said. ‘That could be lost once you sleep again but at least you will have felt something else that could become the flicker of light in the next darkness.’ It had sounded so beautiful I actually cried.

  I look down at the jigsaw again. ‘You’re doing it the hard way,’ I tell the twins. ‘You’re far better off getting your edges in place.’ But Henry pulls all the pieces apart and throws them about. I put it down to not enough attention. He’s normally such a docile little boy.

  I open the drawer that I thought had spoons but find a pile of official-looking documents and a plane ticket for the passenger Ms Mia Richer. So I look at one of the letters, it’s hard not to see their contents really, and see that she has changed her name from Mrs Mia Onions and accepted a position at a hospital in Christchurch, New Zealand, who are expecting her in February but will forward the files before, and suddenly everything stops and I can’t breathe.

  I manage to shut the drawer as Mia comes back into the kitchen shouting, ‘Right. Pasta!’ and just make out her ordering the twins to go and wash their hands because clean hands means ice cream. Then she places a hand on my shoulder and says, ‘What am I like, Laura? It’s almost six o’clock and I’ve not even asked how you are. Is this new doctor being a help?’ And though I am smiling—I must be because I feel my lip muscles stretch—the words ‘I’m dying, Mia’ still drop from my mouth and onto the floor like weights.

  But she’s too distracted to notice, too flustered about the tea, and she moves from my side to scrub at a pan and starts to tell me that she’s got her mother a room in a sheltered accommodation place because this cannot go on and she’ll at least know where she is and what she’s been doing, because if I remember this rightly her mother, though eighty, still likes a drink. And as Mia scrubs at the pan, which I feel down my thighs, it comes out again, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mia, I’m dying,’ only this time I’ve yelled every word.

  She drops the pan and starts rummaging in a drawer. She pulls out what looks like a Hoover bag. ‘It’ll have to do,’ she says, which means it is a Hoover bag, and she holds it up to my face and tells me to breathe—in, out, calm, that’s it—like she does, in that voice, one hand in my hand and the other reaching for kitchen towel which she dampens in the pan she’s been scrubbing and places along the back of my neck. She says, ‘There are no wasps Laura, only me,’ because I’ve started to swat, and she grabs at my hand and squeezes it so tight I yelp. I yell into the bag, ‘Don’t leave me! Don’t ever leave me!’ and she tells me to Sshh!

  ‘It’s all OK, Laura. I’m here.’

  She leads me to the armchair and chucks the magazines onto the floor where they will remain, I’m sure, until next Tuesday, when I come again, and she helps me sit and tells me to keep breathing into the Hoover bag. She fetches me a glass of water and says she’s got to get the pasta on for the kids, and even though she’s only three feet away from me, on the other side of the kitchen, she is already on the other side of the world.

  As I breathe, I hear pasta rattle into a barely scrubbed pan, the kettle boiling again, the clink of jars and tins as she roots for pesto which she does with a glass of wine in her hand, and I see that under the table the twins have spread out tea towels like picnic blankets and are holding forks that look like they’ve been everywhere except the sink. While Mia drains pasta through a sieve at ten past six, she asks the twins about school: ‘Henry, did you do your spellings and was it yoga today, Margot, or just gym?’ Their voices swarm as Henry says he spelt tablet with an i but still got his
name on the rainbow and Margot says she tumbled off the high horse and got a badge for landing with both feet. She scurries off to find the badge and Henry spells t-a-b-l-e-t emphasising the e and I call out to Mia, ‘My tablets, in my bag,’ but the bowls of pasta come first with a squirt of tomato ketchup that comes out like a sneeze, and she places both bowls under the table before she looks for my bag and unzips.

  ‘My clever kids,’ Mia is saying as she roots in my bag. ‘One day you’ll rule the world and look after me!’ Henry tells her he will buy her a swimming pool and Margot says they’ll go shopping every day for sparkly shoes, and Mia is on her haunches and ruffling their hair and as they blow each other kisses her pager goes and she takes it from her pocket and sighs.

  ‘Oh dear. He went without me.’ Which means one of her patients has really died, palliative care nurse as she is at the hospice where we met, three years ago now, when I was nursing my mother, and where she’d asked for the job there to help with her own grief because grief, she had said, was a killer. All I said, after Mother finally went, was that I couldn’t go home but knew nowhere else, I’d been sat at her bedside for so long.

  ‘Come and have a meal at mine,’ she’d said. ‘It’s only pasta. It’s all the kids will eat. But I do make my own pesto.’

  Which she did, back then, before the baby, before Rowan got into Oxford and when her husband was still coming home. When I sat at this kitchen table and told her all about my mother without the phones going, the twins still in high chairs, when she listened to everything I had to say. When I told her it was in my blood, that I had stopped Mother, found Mother, had Mother put away until the death she willed came of its own accord. When after a year of Tuesdays, when I’d become too frightened to sleep, she lost her rag and yelled: ‘Christ, Laura. Have my life for a day and you’ll know what sleep deprivation is. Try losing a child. Have twins at forty fucking four. Work in palliative care for a dying NHS. You think I don’t know depression? You think I don’t understand why you don’t sleep?’ And then the worst bit: ‘Where’s your family, Laura? Why do you keep on coming here? What is it that you think I can do?’