Chapter SIX
WHEN I RETURNED HOME LATER THAT AFTERNOON, THE DOOR OF the downstairs toilet was open and I could see my mother, a pair of blue nylon knickers draped around her ankles, reading the same battered copy of Woman’s Realm she’d thrown at me the other day. Without looking up, she called to me as I walked past. “I’m not talking to you.” I said nothing.
She called again, this time louder. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Yes, you are,” I answered, continuing down the hall. “No, I’m not.”
“Well, then, what are you doing right now?”
“You know what I’m talking about, young lady.”
“How can I know what you’re talking about if you’re not talking to me?” I stood at the kitchen door, calling back to her.
“Sometimes you’re too bloody clever for your own good.” She began pulling toilet paper off the roll. The holder had been there when we moved in; it was rusty and squealed like unoiled brakes with each turn. “If I’d talked to my mother like you talk to me, I would have got a good clip around the ear. Do you hear me?”
“How can I hear you if you’re not talking to me?” I asked, and pushed open the kitchen door.
“Look, miss!” she yelled after me as the door shut behind me. “You’d better not start getting clever with me!”
I recalled my promise to my father that morning and cringed. This was an agreement that was going to be even harder to honor than I’d anticipated. I sighed and began searching the cupboards for some food with which to make the evening meal. It was a quarter past five, and my father would be home from work soon.
I heard the toilet flush, and the shuddering rattle of the pipes all through the house. Seconds later, my mother joined me in the kitchen. “You know, we need a towel in that toilet,” she said, shaking water from her hands and spattering me with cold droplets.
“Maybe if you’d helped me unpack the towels, we’d know where to find them.” I was talking back again. I wanted to stop myself, but it was just so difficult. There was something inside me that resisted silence, like a bird caught in a room battering relentlessly against the illusory freedom of glass.
My mother snorted, pulled the two sides of her dressing gown tight across her chest, and sat down in one of the chairs next to the kitchen table. “There you go again, accusing me of things I haven’t done. I’ll tell your father when he gets home, and we’ll see what he has to say about that.”
“No, Mum, don’t do that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. After I’ve made the tea, I’ll put a towel in there.”
“I wasn’t asking you to do it,” she said, huffing. “I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself, you know. I was just pointing out that it’s something we need, that’s all. And where have you been, anyway?”
“Out. In the village. I made a friend. Her name’s Tracey.”
I was still giddy from my recent encounter. After buying an enormous haul of Mars Bars, Milky Ways, and Cadbury’s chocolate Buttons, Tracey had shown me around the village to get “the lay of the land”—a term she’d continued to tease me about for the rest of the day. After wandering the village’s limited network of narrow streets and walking out as far as one of the surrounding farms, we’d made our way to the churchyard. There, beneath the weathered stone tower of the squat little church, we’d stretched out on a big stone slab that covered one of the graves, while we munched on the remaining sweets and got to know each other. Tracey had done most of the talking. She told me about what would soon be my new school, Liston Comprehensive, which stood in the village of Liston six miles from Midham, the teachers she liked (her French teacher and her science teacher, who was leaving) and those she didn’t like (everybody else). She told me about her friends—all three of whom were called Deborah, and whom Tracey never seemed to talk about as individuals but simply referred to collectively as “the Debbies.” The Debbies, whom I’d visualized as identical triplets with matching outfits and black hair worn in ribboned plaits, all lived in Liston. Tracey told me she didn’t see much of them during the summer holidays. “So it’s great you moved here,” she added. “I won’t be as bored now.”
She’d gone on to talk at length about some of the boys she knew at school—a jumble of Petes, Mikes, Tonys, and Andys, who were alternately “gorgeous,” “dishy,” or “drop-dead bloody gorgeous.” When she asked me if I’d had a boyfriend in Hull, I thought for a moment of making one up, but somehow I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm for this particular lie.
Later, before we’d left the churchyard, Tracey wanted to take me inside the church. But when she tried the big wooden door it was locked. “Must be after the vandalism,” she said, explaining to me that the previous month someone had spray-painted “Black Sabbath Rules!” across the stained-glass window above the church altar. The vicar had discovered the graffiti, concluded that this was the work of devil worshippers, and, so the village gossip went, discussed the possibility of conducting an exorcism with the verger. Fortunately, before he could go to these lengths, someone had informed him that Black Sabbath was, in fact, a heavy-metal group, and though spray-painting his priceless stained-glass window was indeed a crime, it wasn’t quite the desecration he’d imagined. Still, after that he’d embarked upon a virtual inquisition, demanding to speak with every Black Sabbath fan within a ten-mile radius of the church. So far, no one had squealed, although attendance at the monthly Heavy Metal discos in a neighboring village hall had noticeably declined.
“Of course, if he’d asked me I could have told him who did it,” Tracey said, adding, “Not that I would have, mind you.”
“Who?”
“Oh, I can’t say,” she said, shaking her head solemnly. “It’s a secret, and I wouldn’t want to get him into trouble. All I can say is he’s drop-dead bloody gorgeous.” I sat impassively as Tracey let out a high little giggle, wondering if I would ever meet a boy who made me squirm and blush like that.
“Where does she live, then, this Tracey?” my mother asked, pulling her chair closer to the kitchen table.
“On the Primrose Estate,” I answered, tearing open a plastic bag of potatoes I’d found at the bottom of one of the cupboards. I watched as they tumbled into the sink. With those and the half-dozen eggs left in the fridge, I would make egg-and-chips for tea, one of my father’s favorite meals. “It’s nice there,” I continued, turning on the tap. “The houses are really new, and they have little gardens and flowers.”
“Hah!” my mother barked. “Well, in that case they’re not living in a bloody dump like this. I can tell you now, Jesse, this house is really getting me down.”
Of course, I shared her sentiments, but I couldn’t say that when I needed to buoy her spirits, to make sure she didn’t sink even further. “Dad’s going to fix it up. He told me this morning that he’s going to make a start right away.” I picked up one of the potatoes. It was muddy and full of eyes, and I remembered that I still hadn’t managed to unearth the potato peeler from among all the boxes.
“That’s a laugh, that is. Couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, your father. It was always me that did the decorating in our old place. Put hundreds on the value of that house, what with all that work. You remember what a lovely job you and me did of the upstairs? Looked great, didn’t it? Those lilies in my bedroom. And you loved that Rupert the Bear wallpaper, you remember?” She began singing the theme song from the television cartoon, gently swaying her head in time with the childish melody. “Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone knows his name. Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone come and join in all of his games.”
“Mum.” I was cringing. “That was years ago.”
“Yes, but you loved that program, you really did. And the Rupert the Bear annuals, your little Rupert the Bear scarf.” She sighed. “It’s a shame you had to grow up, really. You were lovely when you were little. It’s a pity you got so—well, let’s face it, you can be a bit of a clever madam these days. It’s really not very attractive, you know. I don’t think the young men will find that very appealing.”
“I don’t care,” I said, swirling the potatoes around in the sink, watching the water turn brown and murky.
“I don’t believe you for a second. When I was your age, all I thought about was boys, boys, boys. Of course, your grandma had a thing or two to say about that. But then your grandma’s always had a thing or two to say about everything.” Suddenly, her voice brightened. “I didn’t tell you, did I? I got a letter from her today.” She began rummaging in the pocket of her dressing gown, pulling out a blue airmail envelope and placing it in front of her on the table.
Grandma Pearson had emigrated to Australia when I was four. According to my mother, it had been her life’s dream to live there. When my mother was twelve, Grandma had pinned a map of Australia above the fireplace in her living room, and for as long as my mother could remember, Grandma had talked about the place as if it were a utopia at the opposite side of the world. Unfortunately for Grandma, Granddad Pearson hadn’t shared her sentiments. A dockworker almost his entire adult life, he spent his days loading and unloading cargo from around the world but had no desire to go anywhere himself. “As far as he was concerned, paradise was at the bottom of a glass of beer down at the local pub,” my mother often said bitterly. “If it wasn’t for him being so stubborn, I could have grown up in Australia. Instead, I had to grow up here.” She said this in a tone that suggested that a childhood spent in England was the worst fate one could wish upon a person.
After many years of complaining about the cold and damp and yearning for a land of marsupials, billabongs, and vast expanses of uninhabitable desert, Grandma finally got her wish. Four years after I was born, Granddad was killed when a container of Australian wool fell from the crane that was lifting it onto the dockside, crushing him beneath it. Grandma took this as something of a sign, and after collecting a sizable widow’s-compensation package and spending what she considered an adequate period in mourning (about three months), she sold most of her possessions, packed her bags, and left. She even managed to take along Granddad, who was now housed in the urn provided by the crematorium. “First thing she did when she got there,” my mother told me, “was scatter that stubborn old bugger’s ashes in Sydney Harbor. See,” she said with obvious satisfaction. “She got him to Australia in the end.” My mother had bemoaned Grandma’s departure many times, dramatically describing how she had watched the ship that took away her beloved mother become smaller and smaller until it turned into a dot that dipped over the horizon “never, ever to be seen again.”
It struck me now as strange that I hadn’t thought to put Sydney or Melbourne or Perth on my mother’s imaginary itinerary. After all, whenever she fell into one of her bad patches she would invariably begin talking about how Australia was as close to heaven as anywhere on earth, how happy she’d be if she lived there, and how she couldn’t understand how her own mother had emigrated there without her, leaving her all alone in this awful, miserable, damp country. My father would try to reason with her, telling her that there was no such place as heaven on earth, and, even if there was, it certainly wasn’t to be found in a continent that was “not much more than a wasteland with a few beaches patrolled by man-eating sharks,” and, in the not-too-distant past, had been used as a dumping ground for the dregs of British society. None of this, however, had very much impact on my mother. Throughout every one of her bad patches, she remained convinced that a ticket to Australia would be a ticket to ultimate contentment.
“It’s winter there now, you know,” my mother said, staring at the letter that she’d set down on the table. “Mind you, from what she says in here they have better weather in their winter than we do in our summer. That’s one thing she says she doesn’t miss—the bloody English weather.”
My mother scanned the letter as I slid the chip pan onto the top of the cooker. I turned on the gas, struck a match, and held it close to the burner. A huge bloom of purple-blue flames burst forth. I jumped back, wrinkling my nose at the smell of burned hair.
“You know, if your father’s serious about fixing this place,” my mother said, wagging a finger at the cooker, “the first thing he needs to see to is that gas. One of these days we’re all going to be blown to kingdom come. Your grandma’s got an all-electric kitchen, you know. She said it’s the best thing that’s happened to her in years.”
I put the pan over the burner and began slicing the potatoes into chip-size pieces.
“She says here that she went on a tour of the Sydney Opera House. And do you know what the tour guide told them? He said that when they built it they wanted it to have the best acoustics of any theater in the world. You know, so the voices of all those opera singers and such could be heard in the back rows. Trouble was, they made the sound carry so well that you could hear everything—even the sound of the loos flushing. Right in the middle of a performance. Now, will you think about that!” She started laughing as if she’d just heard the most enormously funny joke. “Oh,” she concluded, slapping her hand down on the table. “Your grandma could always make me laugh. She sent us a picture of herself—you want to see?” She took a photograph out of the envelope. I peered over to see a picture of a white-haired buxom woman in a knee-length cotton dress and flat, sensible white sandals. Her legs were bare, and they looked veined and blotchy—old women’s legs. “That’s her house.” My mother pointed to the flat-roofed oblong building that Grandma stood so proudly next to. “And those trees there are eucalyptus trees. She had a koala bear in her back garden. She saw it sitting right there. As close as you are to me.”
“I know, Mum, you told me before.” The fat in the chip pan was starting to sizzle and spit. I turned, lifted the wire basket out of the pan, and put several handfuls of chips into it.
“Yes, but don’t you think that’s brilliant? I mean, you’d never get anything like that to happen here.”
“I suppose not. But maybe things like that are just normal in Australia.” I placed the basket of chips into the pan and the oil rose, sputtering and hissing and covering the chips in frothing yellow foam.
“I know,” my mother said, sighing and staring through the window toward our garden as if she were picturing a koala bear scrambling through the trees back there. “Sometimes I think the best thing I could do would be to go over there and live with your grandma. You wouldn’t miss me, would you? And your dad—well, let’s face it. Your dad would be glad to get rid of me.” She began laughing again, even more hysterically than before, throwing her head back as if the thought of this was just hilarious. Then, abruptly, she stopped, letting one hand fall to her uncombed mass of hair. She began pushing her fingers into its thick tangles. “At least your grandma would appreciate me. At least she’d be glad to see me. At least she cares.” Then, as if collapsing on itself, her face folded, she let out a choked little cry, and tears began rolling down her pale cheeks. “Nobody cares about me here,” she said, pulling a wrinkled handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown.
“Do you think Dad will be home soon?” I asked, glancing at the wall clock, which was leaning against the kitchen window because no one had gotten around to hanging it yet.
“See,” she said, gasping as the tears flowed copiously. “Not even my own daughter cares about me.” She blew her nose in a loud, wet snort.
“Mum, I’m trying to make the tea right now.” I tried to disguise my irritation, but my words came out hard and slow through tightly clenched teeth.
“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this, I really don’t. Am I that terrible of a mother? Am I? Tell me, am I?” She blotted the edges of her eyes.
I felt the keen ache of wanting to calm her, of wanting her hopelessness to recede into the distance like a plane jetting toward Australia, leaving only a trail of dissipating vapor behind. “No, Mum, you’re not terrible,” I said. I walked over to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not terrible at all.”
She rested her head against me and wrapped her arms around my waist. “You don’t think so?” she asked, sniffing.
“No, I don’t think so. You’re just going through one of your bad patches right now. You’ll soon be all right.” I patted her back softly, as a mother might do to coax wind out of a baby who has just been fed. Firm but soothing, as if I were trying to press the sadness out of her, ease it from the place it occupied inside her chest. I patted her like that for several minutes, feeling the shudder of her sobs against my hands. Finally, when she had calmed a little, I brushed my hand over her knotty hair. “You know, you’ll start to feel better soon, Mum. I know you feel upset, but it’s probably the move.”
“Yes, love. You’re right. It’s probably the move.”
“It’s hard to move to a new place.” As I spoke, I had an idea—a means to perhaps goad my mother out of her desperation and, at the same time, get something that I wanted. “Hey, Mum, you know what?” I said, pumping enthusiasm into my voice.
“What?” She pulled her head back to look up into my face. Her cheeks were wet and smeared with tears, her features loose and slightly askew.
“Well, I bet you’d feel better if we got settled in a bit more.”
She pulled abruptly away. “But I don’t want to stay here. I don’t like it. It’s too quiet—it’s like a bloody cemetery out there.” She waved her soggy hankie toward the window. “I miss my home. I miss Mabel. And I miss my mother.” She paused for a moment, sighing. “Do you think she’ll ever come back?”
“I don’t know, Mum,” I answered, though I sincerely doubted it. As far as I was concerned, anyone who had koala bears in her back garden and sunshine year-round would have to be mentally deranged to consider returning to East Yorkshire. But then, knowing my family, that level of impairment wasn’t completely out of the question. “She might get homesick,” I offered feebly.
“She’s got a boyfriend,” my mother announced flatly. “A boyfriend?” The word seemed wholly inappropriate for a woman in her early sixties. I imagined my white-haired grandma gadding about the beach with a bronzed Australian teenager—Grandma dressed in an old-lady swimming costume with a frilly skirt to cover her puckered thighs, the boyfriend in the tiniest pair of swimming trunks imaginable.
“Yes, a boyfriend. Some chap she met at her whist club. He’s retired, used to run a furniture factory. Bill’s his name. They go out together—the pictures, the horse races. You ask me, it’s not right, a woman of her age.”
I thought a whist-playing pensioner seemed a fitting companion. “She’s just having fun, Mum.”
“Fun? What about me? I’m stuck here in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but stare at four bloody walls.” She buried her face in her hands and began to sob again.
“There, there, Mum,” I said, eyeing the chip pan. I noticed that the burner underneath was still set on high, and I felt a little uneasy about the way the fat continued to leap and froth and spit. But I stood over my mother, continuing to loosely pat her on the back. “It’ll be all right. It really will.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, letting her hands slide down her face. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “And you know what I think we should do?”
“What?” She looked at me with wide eyes, the whites patterned in fine red lines.
“Well, like I said, I think you’d feel better if we got settled in more, if we got the unpacking done and got rid of all these boxes.” I indicated the ten or so boxes piled in the corner of the kitchen. “Once that’s done, maybe we can get Dad to drive us into Hull to go and see Mabel. We can go and visit her for tea. Now, what do you think about that?” I listened to the ringing cheeriness of my own voice. It sounded odd, distant, as if it wasn’t really me speaking. “Now, that’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose it would. We could get her one of those nice Neapolitan cakes she likes. Or you know what?” my mother said, sniffing and nudging me excitedly with her elbow. “We could splash out and get a packet of Mr. Kipling’s.” She looked down at the letter on the table in front of her. “And you’re right about your grandma. She’s entitled to her bit of fun. I suppose I can’t begrudge her that.” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself.
“I’m sure she thinks about you all the time,” I said.
“Yes, yes. I’m sure you’re right,” she said, looking up to give me a weak smile.
“Better now?” I asked, again eyeing the chip pan nervously. The oil had begun to smoke.
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose again, leaving her handkerchief a crumpled and sodden bundle in her palm. “Yes, love, I think I am.” She reached up and took hold of my hand. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, darling, I really don’t. You’re an anchor, you know that? A real anchor.” She squeezed my fingers. “You’re always there when I need you, aren’t you? Always so sensible, always know what to do. Not like me. I’m so scattered sometimes, I—”
“Mum,” I interrupted, trying to pull my hand from her grip.
“Yes, love?”
“I think I need to turn the gas under those chips down.” The smoke from the pan had become thicker; it had begun to fill the room. It burned in my nostrils, and I could taste it as I spoke.
“Yes, love,” my mother said again, releasing her hold on me. I launched myself across the kitchen and turned off the burner. Then, my eyes stinging, I scrambled to open a window, not an easy task, since the frame, like most of those in the house, was soft with rot and had swollen into place. Finally, I managed to force it open. After gulping in the fresh air, I turned back toward my mother, who was still sitting at the kitchen table, squeezing her hankie in her fist, completely oblivious to this culinary crisis.
“So, when’s tea going to be ready?” she asked.
I strode over to the cooker and peered into the still smoking pan, where the potatoes floated in the sizzling oil, charred and blackened strips. “It’s going to be a while.”
“Good. Well, maybe I’ll go and get dressed, then. You know, put my face on and straighten myself up a bit. I bet your dad would appreciate that, don’t you?”
As I went about preparing the potatoes again, I listened to my mother clattering around upstairs, stomping across the bare wooden floors, slamming then opening then slamming doors. Then, when I’d got the chips in the pan once again (this time with the heat turned down), I sat at the kitchen table and picked up the letter my mother had left there.
My eyes scanned the introductory greetings, and then the couple of paragraphs that described the tour of the opera house. Grandma mentioned Ted briefly: “I got a letter from your brother the other day. He says he’s not doing so bad, considering. I wish you’d drop him a line, Evelyn. It’d be nice for him to hear from you. He is your brother. And I hate thinking how he’s stuck behind bars all day. He’s not a bad lad, really. I wish I’d managed to do more to keep him on the straight and narrow. But at least my girls are doing all right! I hope your new house is nice and that you’re out of the hospital and feeling much better now. I know shingles can be nasty, so I was very happy to hear you’ve made a full recovery.”
I dropped the letter onto the table. Shingles? So that was how my mother’s stay in the hospital had been accounted for. Why, I wondered, was everything in my family shaded in lies? Why did everyone, myself included, never stick to the truth? I knew the answer, of course, because it was obvious. In our case, the truth was always ugly and so very hard to swallow.