I’m not sure she even hears me.
When I went over to Alan’s the other night, he said I should join Tinder. I said OK, because that’s what he wanted me to say, and then had to go to the loo, as if to flush away, turd-like, the horror I felt.Tinder?Nobody warns you that life continues to be complicated after you’ve Done the Right Thing. That there is no reward, beyond some intangible sense of moral fortitude. I’ve been back eleven days now, and if anything, I feel worse than I did when I left Sarah standing on the beach.
Tinder! I mean, for fuck’s sake!
‘Where’s Arun?’ Mum whispers. ‘We’ve been waiting ages.’
I check my watch. We’ve been waiting ten minutes.
‘Do you think he’s off sick, Eddie?’ she asks. ‘Do you think he’s left?’ Her face clouds at the thought.
‘No.’ I tuck her hand into my elbow. ‘I think he’s just running late. Don’t worry.’
Mum’s psychiatrist, Arun, is one of only two non-family members she can talk to without reaching overwhelm. The other is Derek, her community psychiatric nurse, who handles Mum better than any of us. She does have the odd visitor from elsewhere – the local vicar, Frances, pops in when she can, because these days Mum finds it too stressful to go to church with ‘all those people’. And indeed Hannah Harrington, Sarah’s sister, used to visit every now and then, although Mum hasn’t mentioned her in a long time, so I wonder if those visits have dried up. But neither Hannah nor the vicar ever stayed for long. After about half an hour Mum would be up and cleaning, glancing anxiously at the clock as if she had somewhere to be.
Arun’s ability to get through to Mum is partly because he’s a really nice man, and great at his job, but partlybecause she has, I think, got a shy little crush on him. And of course he hasn’t left. Nor is he off sick. They’d have cancelled us if he were, probably sent out the community psychiatrist. But the idea has lodged itself in her head now, just like those infuriating thoughts about Sarah have lodged themselves in mine.
What if Sarah died? Would you still think you’d done the right thing?The question continues to seep into everything, like rising damp. Where has it come from? Why won’t it go away?
Sarah is fine, I tell myself sternly. She would almost certainly be asleep now, thousands of miles away in her friend’s little bungalow. Breathing in and out. Limbs soft, face quiet.
When I realize I’m imagining lying next to her, sliding a sleepy arm around her waist, I get up. ‘I’ll go and check how much longer,’ I tell Mum.
The lady on reception knows I’m not asking for myself.SUE, her security pass says. ‘You’ll be seen next,’ she says extra loud, so Mum can hear. There’s a picture behind her of her family. A pleasant-looking man, two children, one wearing a lion costume. I wonder if Sue looks at families like mine and thinks,Thank God I’m not in their shoes!That’s pretty much what my last girlfriend, Gemma, said when we split up. She ended things after three months because she couldn’t handle me running off to deal with a Mum-related emergency once a week.
I felt bad about Gemma for a while – she was the third girlfriend in six years worn down by Mum’s demands – but I bumped into her in Bristol a few months ago, holding hands with a bloke who called himself Tay and told me he did street art. He had a man bun. And I’d realized, as Gemma and I exchanged bland pleasantries on the pavement, thatneither of us had ever been all that mad about each other anyway.
Madabout each other – like Sarah and me – that’s how you have to feel. That’s how good it’s got to be.
When I sit back down, Mum’s checking her hair in a pocket mirror. Her hairstyle has the contours of a rugby ball today. ‘It’s a beehive,’ she says. ‘I used to have one in the sixties.’ She peers at it. ‘Do you think it’s over the top?’
‘Not at all, Mum. It’s lovely.’
In truth, the beehive is a) hollow and b) leaning to the right like theTorre de Pisa, but I know she’s done it for Arun.
She puts her mirror away and starts doing something with her phone. After a few seconds I realize she’s pretending to message someone so she can take sneaky photos of the poor guy in the corner, presumably to be used in evidence when he has brutally murdered her. If Arun Sopori doesn’t come out soon, with his beautiful Kashmiri features and his warm smile, today is going to go very badly indeed. And I really need to get back to work.
Then: ‘Hello, Carole,’ says Derek’s voice. He ambles in – Derek never strides – and shakes my hand, taking a seat on the other side of Mum. ‘How are you doing today?’ He stretches his legs out in front of him and I feel her begin to relax as she tells him she’s had better days, if she’s honest.
‘Storming hairstyle you’ve got there,’ he tells her, when she’s finished.
‘You think so?’ She’s smiling already.
‘I absolutely do, Carole. Storming.’
Thank God for Derek! Week in, week out he visits her. He’s like a magician, I sometimes think – he can spot things nobody else can see; he can make her talk when no one elsecan get through. He’s never once lost his cool, no matter unwell she’s got.
‘Does your mother have a specific diagnosis?’ Sarah asked one day. I’d just mowed the lawn of my clearing because I was hoping to lure her back to England with the smell of cut grass. When I’d finished, we’d sat down with some cold ginger cordial, and she’d sniffed the air happily. Then she’d just turned to me and asked that about Mum – straight out, no pussyfooting around, and I’d liked her even more.
Still, I hadn’t wanted to answer, at first. I’d wanted to be the man with a Cotswold stone barn who bakes bread and makes ginger cordial and leads an extremely appealing life, not the man who has to field several phone calls a day from his mother. But it was a reasonable question, and it deserved a reasonable answer.
So I prepared myself to reel off the list of diagnoses she’d been given over the years – the chronic depression; the generalized anxiety disorder; the cluster-C personality disorder that hovered somewhere between anxious and dependent and obsessive-compulsive; the PTSD; the psychotic depression thatmightbe bipolar – but when I opened my mouth, a great weariness washed over me. Somewhere along the line I had given up on labels. Labels gave me hope of recovery, or at least improvement, and Mum had been sick for nearly twenty years.
‘She just struggles,’ I’d said eventually. ‘If my aunt wasn’t with her this week, I imagine I’d have had to answer the phone quite a bit. Probably go and see her at some point.’
I wish, now, I’d told her more. But what would that have achieved, other than to end our time together? We’d have worked out who each other was in minutes, and then I’d never have known what it felt like to be that happy. Thatcertain.
‘Mrs Wallace.’ I look up; Mum’s hands fly to her beehive/rugby ball. Then she tucks herself into my side, suddenly shy, as Derek and I lead her over to Arun and the open door.
