1
Becky
I TAKE THE PHONE AWAY FROM MY EAR, END THE CALL and stand looking at the impression of oil and powder left on its blank screen, traces of make-up I so rarely wear. I wipe the mark away with my thumb and transfer the phone to my jacket pocket. It is hard to take in the words that have just oozed into my ear.
There was something on the scan…
Across the street two women are still engaged in the noisy altercation that started just as my phone rang. The woman in the red car drove into a parking space that the woman in the muddy SUV was preparing to reverse into. The traffic is halted on either side of them: people have stopped on the pavement to watch the argument. Some are taking sides. Heated words are exchanged, photos taken. A moment ago I had been diverted by this intense little drama; now, it seems absurd and I experience the urge to run across the road and tell them that life is too short to get angry over something so trivial. But I don’t. I am feeling dislocated from the world. Words from the phone call buzz in my brain like angry bees, then spiral away again, trailing bitterness and regret, tinged with fear.
It may not be anything, but we should scan you again, just to be sure.
I find myself thinking, ‘I must tell Mum,’ and then remember why I am here. I cannot tell Mum anything ever again, not in this life.
A commuter sounds two angry blasts of their horn, summoning me back, and I watch the muddy-SUV woman concede defeat and drive off with a screech of tyres. The tide of humanity resumes, flowing around me as I stand on the corner, a still point, a pebble in a stream. Then the horn sounds again and someone calls my name.
‘Becky? Come on, we’re going to be late. Honestly, women drivers, shouldn’t be on the road. I’ve been sitting in this sodding traffic for ten minutes!’
It is my brother, James, in his shiny Lexus, and beside him in the passenger seat his wife, Evie. My heart sinks. At the best of times Evie makes me feel like a bag lady, with her exquisitely put-together look and superior manner. Feeling self-conscious in my ill-fitting black skirt, which I have not worn in years, I scramble into the back seat and give them a tight smile, keeping my terrors behind my teeth. My brother and his wife feel like members of a different species to me.
Funerals are uncomfortable occasions, no matter what your connection to the deceased. In unfamiliar surroundings, in unfamiliar clothes, you bid farewell to someone who can no longer see or hear you, and are not sure whether to sit or stand, almost more stressed by the rituals than by the loss itself. There is always something to knock you out of the moment, something out of place: the brisk compassion of a celebrant who never even met your loved one; a child’s cry erupting suddenly into silent contemplation; a bum note sung during the parting hymn. And when this happens you stand alone in your own head, your connection to the departed suddenly stretched so thin it is like a span of spider silk trembling in the air, and you don’t know who you are. And then, just as abruptly, grief at the transience of life almost bowls you over and you find your hands are trembling so much that the words on the hymn sheet have become unreadable. And then you catch yourself wondering if you are honestly grieving for your mother, or whether a selfish grain or two of self-pity may not have crept in and salted the occasion with terror about your own mortality.
At the end of the service I look around. Apart from James and Evie, I recognize only a couple of Mum’s friends from the Ramblers’ Association – one chap accompanied by a grey-haired woman in a dark red hat with a net veil that has probably not been out of its box since a wedding decades ago – and a family of four: Rosa, a blonde Lithuanian woman who used to come in to help Mum with the housework, her husband and their two children. Rosa and I hug briefly afterwards outside the crematorium in the bright daylight.
‘I’m so sorry about your mother. The news came as a terrible surprise.’ She considers me. ‘You look so pale! How are you, Becky?’ she asks, and I give the usual reply. She peers over my shoulder. ‘And where’s your handsome man?’
That’s a good question. I experience a physical yearning for Eddie that rushes through me like fire. I mumble something about unfortunate timing and quickly change the subject, brightening my tone. ‘How about you and Lukas, are you well? You look well! And your girls have grown so much!’
‘Anna is just finishing Key Stage 2. It’s a good time for us to move.’
‘You’re moving? Where are you going?’
She looks surprised, as if the answer is obvious. ‘Back to Lithuania. To be honest, we don’t really feel welcome here any more. Besides, Lukas says there are good jobs to be had with the energy company, so it makes sense for us to go.’ She puts her hand on my arm. ‘You know, I would have come in and helped Jenny more if I’d known she was ill. Not for money, you understand,’ she adds quickly. ‘But she didn’t tell me she was sick.’
‘She didn’t tell any of us,’ I say. Her death feels unreal. Why hadn’t I paid more attention during our twice-weekly calls? I must have missed so many little clues. Had there been some small hesitation when I asked how she was? The answer was always, ‘Fine, dear. But more importantly, how are you?’ and I hadn’t recognized this as deflection. Mum had been putting others before herself all her life. I didn’t even know she was in hospital when we last spoke: my mother used the same mobile phone no matter where she was.
‘Why didn’t she tell us she was so ill?’ I had asked my brother when he called to break the terrible news.
An uncomfortable pause. ‘She told me,’ he said. ‘But only recently. She said there was nothing that could be done, and you already had enough on your plate. She knew I wouldn’t fuss and would just get on with doing what she wanted.’
The word ‘fuss’ cut deep. I had always unloaded my problems on Mum, because if you can’t tell your mother your deepest fears and your daily disasters, then who can you tell? Every time something awful happened I would think, Well, at least it’ll give me something to talk about with Mum, and would gather amusing or gruesome details with which to embroider the telling.
The realization was a sort of second bereavement, a mourning for the relationship we shared, as well as for the mother I lost. It is confirmation of how weak Mum must have thought me, and now I will never have the opportunity to change her perception.
*
The next day James, Evie and I make our way to Mum’s flat, which lies at the top of an unprepossessing building on the edge of Warwick. James turns the spare key in the lock and pushes the door, but it won’t budge more than a few inches. I drop to my knees on the dusty doorstep and reach around the frame to find that the obstruction is a pile of unopened post. I claw it away till the door opens a bit wider and James steps inside. I am about to get up to follow him, but Evie presses a hand down on my shoulder and steps over me, placing the spiked heels of her crocodile-skin boots carefully into the islands of floorboard revealed between the ocean of envelopes and flyers. ‘Good grief,’ she says as she passes. ‘Anyone would think she’d been dead for years.’
I stare at her retreating back in disbelief.
She stalks down the hallway and stares in passing at the framed pictures on the wall, dismissing them as worthless. Yes, Evie, they’re barely worth the cost of the canvas they’re daubed on: I painted them.