Authors: Carol Mason
‘I didn’t have a job to take time off from! I’d been fired, remember? I was trying to work out what to do with my life.’ Is this her way of telling me she thinks I’m spending too much time in a state of limbo? ‘Anyway, it almost sounds like you don’t want me to come, Mam…’ This hurts. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe it’s easier for her to believe I’m doing okay if she doesn’t have to sit there face to face with the evidence to the contrary.
‘Why would I not want you to come? Do you want to come?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well don’t go rabbit with delirium!’
I picture ecstatic bunnies hopping all over the garden. ‘You mean rabid, Mam.’ My mother comes out with the oddest things. I remember when she’d play her John Lennon record. She seriously thought he was singing, Give
Peas
A Chance.
‘What?’ she says, haughtily. She’s taking my lack of enthusiasm about coming home as a personal slight. I know these things because I know my mother, because in many ways I am my mother. This is not just conversation, it’s subtext; it’s loaded with all kinds of weird business that we’re both aware of but won’t talk about because it all comes down to feelings, and we are both bad with expressing them. She loves me. I love her. We need one another. But neither one of us wants to admit it too much because she feels she lost me years ago, and I am too busy worrying about losing her now.
‘Whatever you do, don’t come on my account, Angela. When have I ever asked you to put yourself out for me? Sometimes you disappoint me. You of all people should know me better. I don’t think anybody in this world really understands me.’ Nobody has ever understood my mother. ‘You… your father… you’re both mad as marsh hares,’ she says.
‘Right, then if I’m a bloody March hare then it’s best I don’t come, isn’t it!’
Sometimes she’s got this knack for pressing my buttons.
‘Don’t swear, Angela! And don’t shout. I’m not at the North Pole. I’ve not got Lego for ears. Maybe you’re the one that’s deaf! I’m just saying,’ she goes sotto voce to prove that people can make a point without shouting, ‘Do what’s going to make you happy, don’t worry about me.’
I feel a ridiculous urge to cry because I’ve somehow affronted her dignity and she’s stuck a big knife in me in return, and she doesn’t realise she’s doing it—she never realises; she never seems to understand that hurting can be a two-way street. Because I don’t want to fight with her. I have a new litmus test for life. If I’m going to fight with anybody I love, I’m going to ask myself, Angela, if this were your last day on this earth, is this how you would spend it? Hurting each other’s feelings, breaking each other’s hearts? Sometimes the regrets mount up in me and they are truly backbreaking; I almost can’t take their weight.
‘Just because I’m old and my body’s breaking down….’ she adds, for dramatic effect.
‘You’re sixty, mam. And you’ve got high blood pressure, just like the rest of the world… And I do want to see you. I really do. I mean, don’t you know
me
better?’
She sighs, but it’s a tipsy, partially entertained sigh because she loves me and would rather have a silly argument with me than have nothing. ‘Well how very nice of you. Hang on while I fall on the floor and prostate myself with gratitude.’
Then she adds, ‘babsy’—another one of her pet names for me—which means she knows she has been over-sensitive, and she doesn’t want to fight either.
Can I really go to England? What if we end up killing each other? I’m not exaggerating. Dismembered bits of my mother lying all over the carpet are a distinct possibility.
~ * * * ~
The flight is delayed three hours. I’m in the middle seat of the middle row, right by the toilets. The man to my left has horrid breath. To my right is a teenage boy who keeps sticking toothpicks up his nose to impress his brother. I watch him out of the corner of my eye, wondering what our son might have looked like, if we’d had one.
I have six hours before my connecting flight up to Newcastle. The alternative was chugging through central London to Kings Cross to then take the train for four hours. Or there’s always the other joy of seven hours on the Victoria to Sunderland coach. I often wonder why my mother couldn’t have moved away and married somebody who lived closer to everything. She still could have found one that tripped off to the pub every night, and never brought her flowers on her birthday, only they could have been London pubs he went to, and London flowers he never sent. It would have made my life so much easier.
~ * * * ~
I roll out of the taxi at my mother’s front door coughing and wheezing like a bag of drowning kittens. The rest of the world has moved with the times: but not Sunderland. The taxi drivers aren’t supposed to smoke, but there’s always one who will try to get away with it, and I have to get him. When I bleat, ‘I have asthma!’ he promptly pulls out a can of lavender air-freshener and tries to simultaneously blind me and gas me, either for my benefit, or to hide the smell of freshly hatched fart that was potent when I came on board. On top of things, it’s raining again, and rain in the summer makes me uptight.
‘You’re looking uptight,’ my mother greets me at the garden gate, not minding that she’s getting seriously drenched, her arms wide open for a hug.
‘I’m fine!’ I growl.
Something about the constancy of her just triggers a silent sob in me, but I have to mask it by being stroppy.
‘You look pale, Mam!’ And older than when I last saw her, nine months ago. ‘Have you lost weight? You seem a little thinner.’
‘You look like a skeleton on diet pills, and I’m not saying anything am I.’ She pinches my cheeks. ‘Where did your little face go? Your little chubby cheekies?’
I peel her hands off me. ‘I never had chubby cheekies Mam. And if you’re just going to find flaws in me, I’m going back to Canada on the next flight.’ I drag my suitcase up the garden path, secretly trying not to be too happy that I’m back here.
‘My sour-puss daughter’s home,’ she says. ‘All’s well with my world.’
Coming into the home where I grew up always fills me with a confused nostalgia. Everything is as it has been for thirty years. Same withered carpet. Same tired chairs. The random addition of a new photograph with me in it. Same mother. My initial reaction was wrong; she doesn’t really look older. She’s every bit the Vivien Smith she always was. Hair the same style it’s been for as long as I can remember—a jaw-length, fringed, ash-blonde bob with wild, untameable bits kinking up at the ears ‘like a duck’s backside,’ (her words). I can picture her licking her fingers, staring in the mirror, and trying to plaster the wild bits down. Her face is not conventionally beautiful, yet it just is. There’s a fine mix of femininity in the soft, unusual, almost topaz eyes, balanced with strength in the aquiline nose (‘my beak’, as she calls it; ‘all the better to peck you with’ then she’ll dip her nose rapidly to your face then pop a fat kiss right on your lips, making you go, ‘Yack!’ and wipe your mouth—something I remember doing a lot of when I was little, and she was always attacking me with kisses). Perhaps the chin is too long, the mouth too wide, the cheekbones too low, and the eyebrows too dark against her porcelain skin, but it all adds up to a face you would look twice at, a face you would remember. Other than pronounced laughter lines around her eyes, her skin hasn’t a wrinkle. Other than a slight softening in the elasticity of her upper arms, my mother’s body could be that of any woman of indeterminate age who takes good care of herself. People do double takes of appreciation when they look at her—and not just men. Her dress sense is shamelessly modern. Like today she is wearing a knee-length slim-fitting denim skirt, with a low-rise waistband that coasts over a nicely rounded bottom and pair of hips, nipping in at an hourglass waist. And the rest of the package is a pair of large and high-sitting boobs that are still, unfairly perfect. You really would never think she was sixty. ‘I’m not sixty! I’ve just past fifty-nine!’—is another thing she’ll say, when she’s not trying to kid herself she’s really fifty.
‘Hello?’ she snaps, when the phone rings and interrupts our catching up. She’s ready to ward off strange telemarketers with the Venom of Vivien. ‘Hello Stan. Yes…. Very well….’ She makes a talking-mouth with her hands and rolls her eyes at me. ‘Yes, well, I have my daughter here at the moment… Angela… yes. Is there any other daughter I have that I should know about?’ She chuckles tiresomely and rolls her eyes again at me. ‘Yes she’s fine, but she really has just arrived, so, you know I really should go and, you know…’ She makes a garrotting gesture, then covers the mouthpiece and says to me, ‘They get all drippy when they’ve been on the beer, don’t they? Slopping on at you… It’s a pity they couldn’t swallow their false teeth in the process, then we’d be spared the ordeal of having to listen to them. We’d only have to hear them choke, which could be quite enjoyable.’
She takes her hand off the mouthpiece. ‘Yes Stan. Fine Stan. Very nice of you Stan I love you too, now be off with you Stan. Call me again in a few months.’
She hangs up and says, ‘Die!’ And I’m not sure whether she means that for the phone or for poor Stan.
Stan is one of my mam’s ‘admirers’. My mam refuses to admit that she’s the sex siren of the senior citizen’s community. Half the widowers in Sunderland get an extra kick in their leg just thinking of her. ‘I’ll give them a kick,’ she’ll say. ‘My ankle right up their anus.’
I’ve actually witnessed her telling one of them: ‘I have lots of friends. But they are all
lady-friends
.’ Which is a Vivien way of telling them that they can dream on, because their dreams are all they’re going to have.
‘No more men for me,’ she’ll say to me. ‘Your dad put me off for life.’
~ * * * ~
Three days after I arrive, I wake up extremely irritable. For one reason, it’s still raining, and feels more like February than early June. The trees droop in the garden. The dahlias droop their lovely big heads. I droop looking at it all, and my mother droops looking at me. Then there’s the added catastrophe of there only being Nescafe Instant in the house, not my
Illy
that I’m used to: the one small luxury I couldn’t give up when I had to start economizing. On top of that, I want to feel happy that I’m home spending quality time with my mother. I want to drag happiness out of me by its ears, for her sake as well as my own, but I can’t get to grips with it.
Sigh.
I make an excuse to pop into town today by myself, just because I’m feeling one of my ‘perverse’ moods (as she calls them) coming on and I don’t want to take it out on her.
She is happy to let me go. I wonder if she feels my glum face is cramping her style.
~ * * * ~
Could I live here? I ask myself as I wander around the city centre. Sunderland has changed for the better over the years. It is still very much a working class Northern town, but it has smartened up, when I think of the dump it used to be when I was growing up. The people haven’t changed. They’re still as nice and friendly as ever. Except for the scary, rough contingent, unique to the North East, who will confront you with a menacing look if you catch their eye on the train. And there really are some evil kids lurking around the dodgy council housing estates. I remember getting accosted by a group of tiny tots as I walked home from shopping. ‘Give us your bags, or else!’ one of them hollered. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old but he and his tiny friends got me trembling around the kneecaps.
I tried climbing up their small bottoms by telling them I liked their bikes, but they saw that as a sign of weakness. Next I attempted to be stern, but they started circling me on their bikes, preparing—obviously—to move in for the slaughter. Serious panic set in. I’d just spent two hundred quid in Debenhams and I was damned if I was going to give them my purchases! On the one hand, there was my pride: I was the adult; they were the kids. On the other, I decided my best option was to just leg it. So I legged it. I ran forever and they set after me on their bikes. When they finally got bored of chasing me, my heart was pounding so hard that I thought I might require hospitalisation. Even now, if I have to pass a group of kids, I walk the other way.
As I walk past the former train station, my mind goes back over old boyfriends. I honestly think I did date the best-looking guys in Sunderland. Even if they were uncouth, they were always good-looking-vulgar. Yet I was never going to marry any of them. I just somehow knew it. I blew up with pride those few times I brought my Canadian home. When his accent would get the sales girls in M&S falling over him to find him the polo shirt he liked in a forty-two-inch chest. Or when the single mothers on the train would gawp at us, as though they thought I’d bagged somebody famous.