Authors: Carol Mason
Then two policemen stood on my step in the sunshine, and told me that Jonathan had suffered an epileptic seizure at the wheel of his BMW Z4. And that was the end of any desire I might have had to move myself forward in some small way.
But lately
Write Strategies
has been back on my mind again.
‘Can’t you think about all that career stuff after you have a vacation?’ Richard smiles at me. If Jonathan were the edgy, type ‘A’ lawyer, Richard is the patient, I’d like to say happy-go-lucky one, but Richard never looks deliriously happy about anything.
‘I’m getting desperate.’
‘For money?’
‘For a move forward.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘You’ve already done so much. You probably wish you’d never met me.’
He drops his eyes to the ground and stays like that for moments, and I think,
what’s come over him?
But then he looks up, smiles nicely, and says, ‘You might come back recharged. Go take your mother somewhere. Jonathan would have wanted…’
Me to start living again. The things we don’t say. Because talking about my husband, even all this time later, might mean I will have to cry in front of people, and I don’t do tears. I am best off when I am not being hugged, made to feel better, or told I am loved. Not by anybody but Jonathan. From everybody else it just tends to embarrass me.
‘Anyway, I have to rush. I’m supposed to be taking Emma swimming…’ He looks like he badly has to get out of here all of a sudden. Emma is his lovely nine-year-old.
I remember I’m still holding the ticket. ‘Oh God, Richard… I’m not good with charity.’
He turns when he gets to the door, pushes back that mop of chestnut hair. ‘I’m not good with a lot of things myself,’ he says. He holds my eyes for some moments, then does a ‘leave-taking’ salute, and then he’s gone.
~ * * * ~
Ms Elmtree’s house is directly across the street from where Jonathan and I used to live. It’s my first time in our old neighbourhood since I moved. Walking down the street makes me feel a bit like I’ve been regressed and I’m discovering I’ve lived a previous life.
Ms Elmtree came with me in the taxi to the hospital the day I fancied comfort food and made mashed potatoes because I hadn’t eaten anything other than crackers in about a week after the news. Using my electric whisk I somehow managed to break my finger in two places. The doctor who saw me was young and handsome and kind and wore a wedding ring, and I ran out of the treatment room before I broke down in tears.
‘I’m sorry I’ve not been to see you in so long…’ I perch on the edge of her sofa, trying hard not to stare a couple of inches past her head at where I used to live. I’m curious what it looks like in there now, but I’d not take a million bucks and go in. Memories detonate in me like little land mines. I’d tread on them everywhere and they would shatter me.
‘It hasn’t been all that long, honey,’ she studies me, watchfully; she’s really not much of a talker and is a bit of an odd duck, but I’ve always felt sorry for her because she has no family. Ms Elmtree is from the Caribbean, a product of a Jamaican mother and British expatriate father. She never married, and her twin brother was suffocated when a cat went to sleep on him when he lay in his crib. You might call her eccentric, with her shocking pink lipstick and aquamarine eye-shadow, badly-applied, (my mother looks at her like she has two heads). And then there’s the other thing. Ms Elmtree has some weird theory about how she’s a direct descendent of the artist Paul Gauguin. I tend to believe people and was convinced she had to be. After all, she’s an artist herself (not a very successful one; she paints rip-off Gauguins—portraits done in feverishly tropical styles and colours.). But Jonathan said, well, if she is, where’s the money? I did a bit of research on the Net once, and Gauguin certainly didn’t die rich, but another thing Jonathan said: if the Vancouver art community doesn’t think she is who she says she is, then she probably isn’t. Fair point.
Nevertheless, she was very fond of my husband. When a developer built a duplex next-door to her that sent all its drainage into her back yard, Jonathan sued for compensation on her behalf, and he didn’t take a penny when he won. Jonathan might have been driven to make money, but he was large-hearted and had a heightened sense of right and wrong.
We chat for a while and then I ask her, ‘Are you working on any new paintings?’
She smiles, hot-pink lips framing slightly yellowing teeth. She’s hard to age, given she hasn’t a single wrinkle, but I’m guessing early seventies. ‘I don’t paint any more,’ she says. ‘I haven’t painted in a long time.’
‘Oh?’ I look around the room at the garish portraits on her wall. ‘Why not? I thought you loved it.’
She briefly moves her eyes to where I’ve just been looking. Then she says, ‘I saw him once.’ For a moment I worry we might be talking about Gauguin, but then she says, ‘Jonathan.’
For some strange reason I think she’s meaning that she has seen a ghost. I feel sick. ‘Jonathan?’
‘Before he died,’ she adds, as though she senses clarification’s necessary. The shock passes. Of course before he died. What was I thinking? ‘He was sitting in his car, right there,’ she points across the street. ‘Just sitting, and sitting…As though he didn’t want to go inside that house.’
I gaze across the street. ‘Our house? Why would he not want to come inside our house?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Well maybe he was listening to something on the radio…’
‘No. Something very bad was on his mind,’ she says. ‘I could see the demon in his face.’
The word demon gives me the chills. I push away that disturbing image of him, wishing she’d never introduced it to me. ‘It was probably just his work. His mind was always on his work.’
She doesn’t answer, just watches me closely again. The room has turned cold. An atmosphere surrounds us that I don’t like. It creeps me out. I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. I get out of there pretty fast.
~ * * * ~
‘Hello blossom.’
It’s my mother’s bright little voice somewhere a world away in England.
‘Mam! I was just going to ring you after I put a load of laundry in.’
Just yesterday I went into Safeway and there was an elderly lady lying on the floor. A checkout girl was holding her hand while the manager hovered, on the lookout for the ambulance. All I could think was, what if that were my mother, passed out on a supermarket floor in Sunderland, with a stranger, instead of her daughter, holding her hand? Sometimes I think morbidity’s been grafted onto my personality since Jonathan died.
‘Crabs,’ she says.
‘Huh?’
‘You can get them from communal laundry machines. And I don’t mean the ones that walk sideways on the beach. Oh hang on… I’m just watching…. Ooh, you know… Irish chappie? Oily, rather prattish … Does the singalong with all the old snowies?’
Old snowies. Her name for anyone over the age of sixty.
‘Daniel O’Donnell?’
She makes a strange vomiting noise, then chortles. ‘It’s not his voice, you know. It’s him. Watching him. Urrrrrhhhh. He’s awful.’
‘Mam! He’s a very pleasing-looking boy. He’d make some mother a lovely son.’
‘Hide your mothers, that’s all I have to say. And your grannies. And maybe even your pet poodle.’
‘I think you’re tipsy.’ She sounds half wasted.
‘Excuse me?’ she says in that dignity-affronted tone.
‘You’ve been on the happy fluid.’
‘Girl! No I have not! I’ve just had a small glass of wine and I thought I’d give my only daughter-child a call.’ Another groan. ‘Urgh, he’s back on again. Hang on ‘til I switch his … There. I can talk now. How are you baby daughter?’
Baby daughter. This makes me smile. ‘Well I’m fine,’ I tell her. It’s not quite true. I’ve been unsettled since yesterday. ‘But how are you, more to the point?’
Just a few weeks ago my mother turned sixty. My mother is one of those rare women who has somehow become sexier and more head-turning as she’s grown older—the Helen Mirren of mothers. So she’s taking the big six-oh hard. On top of that, she’s just found out she’s got high blood pressure and has to go on medication. Lately I’ve had a heightened sense of my mother’s time left on this earth. I’ll think, if she lives another fifteen years, and I go back to England once a year, that’s only fifteen more times I’m going to see her. I can go to the corner store more than that in a week. How do you make fifteen times count, when you know they’re the last you’re ever going to get?
‘God, you’re a cheerful Charlie!’ she said to me, when I told her this. ‘I’m only fifty. I could have forty years in me yet!’
Here’s the other thing. Since she turned sixty she’s started knocking ten years off her age. I never know how she can say it to me seriously, but she can.
She might bluff, as she generally does, but I know, deep down, that she feels abandoned. Since I moved to Canada, Mam and I have been largely telephone callers in each other’s lives, except for my yearly trip home, where we’d try to squeeze all the bonding into two weeks. It was never good enough, long enough, or eased my guilt enough. Every time I got on that plane to come back to Canada I’d drape that blanket over my head and silently bawl my eyes out underneath. Even when my dad died I couldn’t be there because of work. I’m sure my mother knows I’ve let the side down, although she’d never say anything. Because my mother is one of life’s martyrs, which is convenient for me: she never lets you feel truly shit about the decisions you’ve made, even though we both know that sometimes she has to restrain the urge.
‘By the way, weren’t you going to look up the side-effects of my Beautiful-Pretty medication?’ she chirps.
Her other name for her BP pills. There’s a part of my mother that I sometimes think is a bit deranged.
‘Oh yeah.’ I find my piece of paper with the weird name scribbled on it. ‘I’m right on the computer now… Hang on.’
I clack away at keys. ‘Okey-dokey… side effects… shortness of breath, hives, swelling of the face or tongue.’
She groans after each word, each groan getting progressively deeper and more groany, which is sort of funny.
‘Headache.’
Groan.
‘Depression.’
Double groan.
‘Erectile dysfunction—’
I hear a muffled gasp. ‘Well that last one’s got me very worried Angela. How am I going to please all my paramours now then?’
‘With great difficulty, probably.’
She laughs a dirty laugh.
‘Does it say anything about dizziness though?’
I scour the list. ‘Why? Are you feeling dizzy?’
‘No.’
I tut and stop scanning. ‘Then why are you asking?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s lay this morbid topic to rest anyway.’
I click off the Net. ‘I was wanting to tell you something. I have some good news for you.’ I’m pretty sure she must be thinking I’m seeing a man, so I quickly add, ‘I’m coming home.’ Then I add, ‘Just for a visit, obviously.’ Just in case she gets the wrong idea there too.
There’s a brief silence. ‘You can’t come home! What about work?’ My mother loves having ‘a career girl’ for a daughter. She only ever worked as a make-up girl in a department store. She was a pretty, well-brought-up, working-class young lady, who might have gone somewhere, only she married my dad. My dad was going nowhere except to the pub. As she’ll say, ‘all our marriage he was having an affair. His mistress was the Ye Olde Fiddle.’ Even now, there’s a disappointment and a bewilderment in her that runs high. Because the life she got wasn’t the life she wanted. And now that my dad’s dead and she can’t blame him anymore, she’s got nobody to blame but herself, and that’s not sitting too well with her.
‘I’m going to tell him I need a leave of absence. It’s not like he’s really got any work for me as it is. Sometimes I think he’s just paying me to listen to him rant.’
‘You can’t do that! You had so much time off when Jonathan died.’
If that’s what you call confining yourself to the house, moving in a silent world between the armchair and the bed, listening to people intellectualise loss by telling you that there was a reason why Jonathan died at thirty-six, or that God had plans for my husband that didn’t include a long life. Yet you’re just dealing with the soft, speechless things, like the towel he last showered with, the smell of his T-shirt he last went running in, trying to convince yourself that because you can still smell him must mean that he’s still there.