And now here I am a week later, at the pine table of my mother’s kitchen, in the silent aftermath of her wake. Seb and the kids are at home in south London – we decided that the girls were too young to face a funeral – and so now, alone, prompted by more than a few drinks in her honour amidst cheap sharp suits and signet rings, set hair and firm bosoms, I find myself thinking about that night in Blackpool in 1968, the year my parents decided it was a good idea to get married. And remembering my mother – I have done little else since I heard – I feel an overwhelming, indescribable, almost eerie connection to her. Something not of the mind but of the body.
Stage one, stage two, stage whatever, grief is the same yet different for us all. Perhaps what I mean is that the specifics of grief are individual. For me, raw and new as I am to it, Carol is knocking at the doors, asking to be let in. My mother is a spirit – not bad for an atheist like myself, for a woman of reason, of the law – and I am the medium. She’s here, she’s everywhere, inside and out, in the air, in the water, in the things she left behind. In her spotless kitchen, I open a drawer at random and find the red-and-white-checked tea towels that she favoured, the cloth napkins she never used because they were too posh, and, here, a handkerchief, laundered, pressed, initialled in bright blue cotton: TW. Thomas Wilson. Tommy. I know this handkerchief. Its whiteness is marked with an old, old stain. How that stain came to be there is the story of the night she bundled a few scant belongings into bags and took me and my older brother with her out of the fear and violence that was her life.
And here, now, this night, my mother’s bravery strikes me perhaps harder than ever. So much I witnessed as a child, only understanding its meaning many years later. So much I only knew on some foggy, intangible level. But now that she is irreversibly gone, I realise I want to piece the whole thing together. Because nothing brings home our adult status like the loss of both parents. I want to understand. Graham told me some of it, but only after the years we spent estranged from one another. My mother filled in other parts much, much later as we sat up together, two women talking – dry-roasted peanuts, cheap box of red, me cadging one of the cigarettes that ultimately killed her.
That I will never see her again, never feel the warmth of her next to me as we chat for hours on her soft old sofa, never hear her laugh when I say something clever or mimic someone we both know is as unbelievable to me as God. All that I have left of her, beyond the material remains, is this need to be with her, and to make final sense of her life. Call it survivor’s guilt, some vague desire to make amends for my career, my lovely home, my kind, boxer-nosed husband and my two children: well dressed, well fed, safer than I ever was. Call it the familiar floral scent of this bloodstained handkerchief that I press to my nose; call it the maudlin after-effects of too much fizzy wine drunk in toasts to her; call it, quite simply, love – for my mother, Carol, who one night in 1984, with no qualifications, no possessions and no home, struck out alone with her children into the unknown.
Three
Carol
Runcorn, 1984
Carol is in the hallway, putting on her make-up before Pauline and Tommy’s wedding. It is the last day of her marriage, but she doesn’t know that yet.
The bulb in the hall is dim. Carol Watson, née Green, has read in Woman’s Own that you’re supposed to have bright light when you apply make-up, but at this moment she can’t for the life of her imagine why. You’d never go out again if you did that, she’s thinking as she rubs a blob of foundation as thickly as she can over the bruise under her left eye. She pats at it with the ends of her fingers. In Woman’s Own there are never any tips on how to cover a shiner – this is a technique she’s invented all on her own. She tops the look off with her new red lipstick: Soldier Soldier by Avon.
‘Ted,’ she calls into the lounge. ‘Better get off soon, eh, love.’
She ducks her head into the cupboard under the stairs. Her jacket is stuck under Nicola’s anorak. Nicola, her princess, her too-clever-for-me girl. She lifts both coats, puts her daughter’s back on the hook and pulls her own free. Behind her comes Ted’s rattling cough. She steels herself and turns to face him, the war between dread and hope burning its usual hole in her chest.
His eyes go straight to her lips. Dread wins out. The lipstick. A mistake.
‘It’s only for the wedding.’ She covers her mouth with her fingers.
He knocks her hand away and grabs her chin. His fingers press hard on her jaw. In the dining room, the kids fall silent – an alarm system in reverse.
‘What is that?’ he says in his low, quiet voice.
‘It’s only from the catalogue,’ she says. ‘I got it with my points.’
‘Take it off.’ He lets go and heads through to the kids, who are eating sandwiches at the table. ‘Right, you lot, there’s two Lion bars in the sideboard,’ she hears him say as she wipes the lipstick from her mouth with a cotton wool ball and some of the Anne French cleansing milk she keeps on the phone table. ‘They’re not for you,’ he jokes. ‘Just keep an eye on them for us till we get home.’
‘Aw, Dad!’ The children laugh, and she tells herself that if the kids are laughing, then things must be normal. This is family life. Every household has its ups and downs. Women complain about their husbands’ bad moods the same way men talk about football, don’t they?
She steps out into the garden and lights a ciggie to calm her nerves. In the flower bed, the funny faces of her violet pansies shimmer in the breeze. Behind them, rooted by concrete posts, the green wire fence runs along the back of all the gardens, hemming everything in. If you were to lift it up, this fence, all the little strips of lawn, the wooden pickets and the gardens and the houses would dangle from it like washing on a line. On the other side of the fence, the field stretches away – out of the estate and beyond, to the railway track, to the expressway, to who knows where.
With no Pauline to talk to over the fence today, she smokes quickly and stubs her fag out on the wall. Inside, Ted is saying ta-ta to the kids. Once she’s sure he’s gone out to the car, she hurries back so she can say goodbye to them herself without him hovering over her.
The two of them are still in their pyjamas, watching Saturday Superstore, their weekend treat. It’s nearly midday.
‘Get dressed straight after, all right?’ she says. They nod, blank-eyed, chewing. She picks up the empty squash jug. ‘I’ll just get you some more juice before I go. Your dad’s waiting.’ She turns to make her way out to the kitchen to find Ted filling the doorway of the dining room. ‘Jesus.’ She almost drops the jug on her foot.
He throws his arms up against the door frame. ‘For Christ’s sake, I live here, don’t I?’ He glares at her like she’s mad, a fool to startle like that.
‘Sorry. Thought you’d gone to the car, that’s all. Do you want a sarnie? Don’t know when the buffet’ll be, do we?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I’ve made boiled ham and salad cream. Or there’s tongue.’
‘I said I’m not hungry, didn’t I?’ He heads back into the hall, shaking his head. The chink of keys as he lifts them from the phone table, another phlegmy cough. She hopes he’s not over the limit already. She smelled mint on his breath just now. He’s checking himself in the mirror, turning his head this way and that. Finding himself marvellous. He has on his best shiny grey suit from C&A, the sky-blue shirt she ironed for him yesterday and a new paisley tie she picked up in Burton’s in the Shopping City. The skin of his neck overlaps his collar in an oily fold. He’s taken trouble over his hair for once, combed a duck’s arse at the back. Usually he just does the quiff at the front and leaves the back flat, as if he’s run out of energy halfway through, but today, with it being next-door’s wedding, she guesses, he’s made an effort. He looks like a ruddy throwback. It’s 1984, for pity’s sake. Thirty-three years old and he still thinks he’s Elvis.