Mum’s manias were much more difficult. It is one thing to be brought low by a warring world, and the assured mutuality of destruction. It’s another thing to think that you can do anything about it.
Mum’s political convictions, her financial ineptitude and her frequent mood-swings were mutually reinforcing. I remember how, in her euphoria, it would occur to her, as if for the first time, that she had never been ‘depressed’. She had been
oppressed
.
Patiently, she would explain to me exactly how I oppressed her. Dropping her guard, she would then expand upon her theme, describing all the many ways – some of them wincingly intimate – in which Bill, my dad, oppressed her. Her chief oppressor, however, was money. Among the aisles of the supermarket (‘Marmalade (big tins)/Bleach/Serviettes’) I remember how she once attempted to anatomise for me the structural iniquities of a market-led economy.
I was less entranced by her philosophy than by her shopping. Ignoring the list Dad had given her, she was gathering all manner of unfamiliar stuff: dried fruit, porridge, soya meals, packet soups. It took Dad and me a couple of days to decipher this. It turned out that Mum, in her escalating mania, was preparing to abandon us for a protest camp that had grown up around a nearby military airbase. She would make friends there, she told us. She would meet like-minded women. She believed that friendships struck up around late night tea-brewing sessions were the soil in which her full potential would bloom, after so many false starts and wrong turnings.
She explained all this to us with a strange mixture of assertiveness, enthusiasm and sullenness, drawing us in and locking us out in the same breath. The camp. Its emergent structure. Its spontaneous spirituality. Its rejection of paternalistic hierarchies.
The camp became the site of an annual pilgrimage.
Dad was never able to visit Mum at the camp. Men were not welcome. The women of the camp believed that patriarchy was imbued with violence – that all men were rapists. These were the kind of things Mum would say to Dad as she packed for the camp – in the weeks of her euphoria, before the next bite of her dog.
Was it for better or for worse that Dad and I were forbidden to witness her first flame-outs, and the hours of her descent? Dad waited for her call. Her confused directions (‘I’m in a phone box.’). Her declarations of defiance and need. He would tell me to ‘look after the fort’ while he drove over and gathered up the wreckage. The camp wasn’t far. An hour by car. Two hours on train and bus, if you were clever with the connections.
At last, provoked and frustrated by Mum’s accounts of the camp, concerned for her and jealous of this other life she hankered after so much – though it had yet to do her any good – I decided I would visit her. I would do it without Dad’s knowledge, or the camp’s, or Mum’s for that matter. It would be, I told myself, a surprise for her.
Because of his work with blinded servicemen, Dad was invited to speak at conferences. These sometimes required an overnight stay. The next time I was on my own over the weekend, I put my plan into action.
Mum’s rooms smelled close and sweet. In the corner opposite her daybed was the mirror-clad make-up table. I turned on the lights framing the central mirror and sat on Mum’s plush-upholstered piano stool. The time had come for Mum’s mannequin to prove herself: to strut her stuff in the real world, she who had been for so long trapped between mirrors.
The big central looking glass was the only part of the table Mum ever kept clean. The table’s mirrored top was dusty and greasy, hidden under empty jewellery boxes, old Mother’s Day cards, tissues, a big plastic tub of all-purpose moisturiser. I piled this junk to the sides, clearing a space to work. I pulled open mirrored drawers, discovering foundations, eyeliners, shadows, gels. Not just Mum’s home-mades – real products. I laid them out. I knew what I was looking for. I knew what I was doing. Mum had taught me well. She had awoken these dark and liquid eyes. She had put this slim and swaying figure into motion. Now her creature sought her own life, through me.
I dipped a small, semicircular sponge in a bowl of water and squeezed it out, and again, until the water ran clear through my fingers. I picked up a compact and ran the sponge in circles through the foundation. The stuff was cold and clinging, tightening as it dried. I leant forward as I worked, dipping, wringing, dabbing, smoothing. My reflection entered the yellow cloud cast by the bulbs around the mirror. My face was as smooth as a doll’s. I ran a little purplish powder along my cheekbones, sculpting them. With brush and pencil I refashioned the sockets of my eyes, adding and subtracting shadows. I closed my eyes and ran blues in layers over my eyelids. When I was done my eyes were set like jewels. I drew a little kohl along the inside of my eyelids, behind the lashes, and leant forward, staring into my mother’s eyes.
I looked exactly like her. You could not have told us apart.
An hour by car. Two hours by train and bus. Around 4.30 on Saturday afternoon the bus dropped me off on a stretch of main road, woods to my left, fields on my right. There was a lane here the bus couldn’t negotiate, through woods and up a shallow hill to a hamlet that had fallen out of the usual channels of communication. I met no traffic on my way up the hill, no people. The air was still, the trees silent. My own movements sent cold fingers down the insides of my thighs, where mum’s nylon hose rubbed my shaved skin. Mum’s batik dress was long and tatty, tight and fitted round my belly and under my ribs.
At the top of the hill the trees gave way, the green tunnel parted and the village spread out before the eye, even and neat and simple as the setting for a model railway. There were no streets as such, just a horseshoe of houses around a rough-mown green. The houses shared no common style. It was as though a collector had gathered them here – someone with an eclectic eye for the rural vernacular. That this idyll came with a price tag was evident from the cars parked on the green. Aside from a couple of distressed 4by4s, they were all business saloons, showroom-clean.
The hamlet lay about a quarter of a mile away from the base, and far from the main gates. (There, young protestors had set up much livelier, more newsworthy camps than any Mum came near, though the woods they infested were hardly more than a large hedge, barely concealing the chainlink from the road. By night, tents and tarpaulins made looming, organic shapes in the headlights of passing cars.)
The camp Mum went to lay past the hamlet, and well out of sight of the base, where the ground fell away into a secret valley. It was an afternoon’s walk through woods to find the wire with its concrete fence posts turned to totems, painted with eyes, with snakes, with spiders dropping on wet silver ropes.
There was no centre to the camp, nothing to really ‘find’. Glimpses. A sheet of tarpaulin. A curl of pale smoke. Furtive things, hidden in plain sight. By then, of course, it was too late – the place had you surrounded.
There were women all around me, hidden, hissing at me. They were squatting in benders made from old tent canvas. They were crouching in teepees and yurts and behind screens of dead branches. They were hiding in nettle patches, hunkered down there like animals. Mum had told me they had their own religion here. Arachne was their goddess – web-weaver, binder of souls, symbol of the connected earth. Only now did I see that their trees were webbed with wool.
I ran my hand over a skein of black wool, knotted between the low branches. The hissing all around me died away. The oak was mostly dead. New growth burst where it could through the bark, so that the shape of the thing was hardly tree-like – more of a hedge.
I palmed the screen aside.
What had I expected? A room. A hollow tree that was at the same time a cabin. A home. A simple pallet bed. A rug. A pile of books. Not
this
. Between the roots of the great oak there was a kind of fox scratching. It was shallow. Filthy. It wasn’t even dry.
The tree wasn’t hollow. Lightning had split and scarred it, torn half its growth away, and over the years the trunk had swollen in a great horseshoe around the blighted part, making a crouch-hole only a dog could have sheltered in.
Ragged plastic sheets hung from low branches. Squatting among a heap of green nylon refuse sacks, Mum looked up from her work. Black wool. Busy fingers. Filthy hands. A web wove itself over the earth towards me. Mum stood up. She was wearing a striped jersey and sailor’s pants. Her feet were bare. Her toes clutched at the woollen web, tugging the clews.
I wanted to speak, to greet her, but words were dangerous here. My voice had begun to crack – it would have betrayed me. Mum cocked her head. She dropped her wool. Her fingers folded themselves into fists. Her busy toes. She followed the skeins towards me on shuffling feet. The blow was so fast, I didn’t even see it coming.
Now there were women everywhere. Running toward me. Kneeling by me. Wide-eyed. Hands upon me. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you want?’
My feet were tangled up in the woollen web. Women dragged me from Mum’s lair and the web followed me, tugging the branches towards me, shredding leaves into a green rain. Hands grabbed for me, but I was too heavy for them. Down I went.
‘What did you do?’ Hands tilted my head back. Blood ran into the back of my mouth. Through a pink mist, figures flitted back and forth. My feet were entangled. I couldn’t get them free.
‘Now calm down,’ someone snapped, as to a child.
Dad brought home the remains of Mum’s camping kit. The tent he’d bought her had vanished. Her sleeping bag was damp and smelly and there were green stains on it that would not lift. I laid the bag across the lawn to dry. Her aluminium cooker was more or less complete. I set the pieces out in a row along the conservatory steps and cleaned each in turn with soapy water and a wire brush. Just above me, behind glass doors, a serviceman wandered to and fro, eyes hidden behind black glasses. He put me in mind of an animal kept too long in a cage. Dad watched him from his desk, a dispassionate lion tamer.
That evening Dad and I drove to the hospital where Mum lay recuperating from a lung infection. The hospital was built on a chalk hill overlooking the port. Old barracks and defensive structures had been torn down and ground under to make room for the hospital which, from the sea, had all the appearance of a bigger, better fortification.
Dad went inside, leaving me to wander round the weedy paths, the flights of cracked concrete steps, the pot-holed roads. You needed first gear to reach the car park here, so there was this constant whine in the air – a common mechanical labour renewed again and again and again. In the dusty banks and verges that bordered every metal-railed stairway, I found nubs and flecks of red-pink brick – remains of the old fortress – and in between were thready weeds with bright blue, pink and yellow flowers.
From this high vantage, I could see how the port city had been constructed over a network of mudflats and channels. In between there were islands, but they were bridged over in too many places to really count as islands any more. In fact the whole estuary was so heavily built upon that roads and waterways blended in the eye, and it took an effort to pick them apart. I looked at my watch. Dad was taking a long time. I went inside to look for him.
I hadn’t seen Mum since I’d tried to visit her
incognito
in the camp. Dad had warned me that the sight of me would upset her, but my nose was already healed, more or less. If Dad had let me, it would have been the work of a moment for me to hide the bruising with make-up.
The hospital floor was a mottled red vinyl that looked as though it had been poured and left to set. Every few yards, at a stairwell or junction, there was a vending machine. I tried to get a carton of drink. I put in my money, typed the code. The metal coil shuddered, turned, stuck. There was a notice, red capitals on white self-stick plastic, telling me not to rock the machine, which anyway didn’t help and set off an alarm that everybody ignored.
Mum’s ward had this easy to miss open-plan arrangement – impossible to say where the corridor left off and the ward began. Mum was alone, lying with her back to me. I watched her a while, not saying anything, then I went away and looked for some magazines to flick through. My emotions were so mixed up, my attention so fractured, the articles might as well have been written in a foreign language.
Dad turned up eventually, approaching from the wrong direction.
‘Where’ve you been?’
Dad told me Mum was ‘on the mend’.
‘When’s she coming home?’
‘Have you been in to see her?’
‘She was sleeping.’ Of course, she might not have been sleeping at all. She could have been just lying there.
I wanted to go see her again but Dad was keen to get going. ‘School tomorrow.’ As though my bedtime were any different from his.
It was nearly dark by the time we got going and still Dad was hunting for words, the right spell to lock down whatever he’d seen, or learnt, or been told. No lid he tried seemed to fit. ‘The camp’s got your Mum pretty messed up.’ The form of words he picked – ‘your mum’ in place of ‘Sara’ – was a measure of the trouble we were in. He was trying to establish something. He was trying to set this down. To be clear. ‘She’s upset.’
They’d wanted his signature.
‘Signature for what?’
He hadn’t signed.
‘For what? Dad?’
‘She’s upset.’
‘Dad.’
He pulled the car to the kerb. We were nearly home; halfway through the housing estate. It was Dad’s usual short-cut, he knew the way. There was no need for us to stop. He rubbed his hand across his eyes, faking a headache, thinking that I could not see his tears.
‘Please Dad.’
Dad undid his seatbelt and put his arms around me and held me. It was horrible. Unbearable. I was pinned by my belt. I couldn’t reach to undo it. I couldn’t hug him back. I was stuck there – his object. And here he was, holding me, shaking like an injured dog, faking everything, telling me everything was going to be all right, pretending (this was worst of all) that it was him who was comforting me.