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EIGHT
My mother is on the floor kneeling by the coffee table. In front of her, a shoebox full of old photos. She’s poring over them, pausing only to sip her gin. I can smell it from the doorway. Juniper berries. Lemon. Pine. The smell of my childhood. My childhood after him, although of course the pills were her real poison. My little helpers, she called them.
She tried to hide her dependency from me, but she wasn’t very good at it. And then when she lost her job, she just gave up. Accepted she had a problem, didn’t accept she needed to deal with it.
‘I’m too much of a coward for suicide,’ she told me once. ‘These babies are the next best thing. If only it didn’t take so long to reach oblivion.’
I was fourteen. Matty had been in prison for over a year. My mother, a whole lot longer.
‘Don’t judge her too harshly, Soph,’ Linda said, helping clear up the place one afternoon while my mother slept off whatever she’d recently taken. ‘She’s one of the bravest people I know.’
I thought of the woman currently comatose in the bedroom.
‘Brave? What makes you say that?’
Linda put down the rubbish bag she was holding, wiped the back of her hand across her brow.
‘Leaving everything she knew to make a fresh start for the two of you. An ocean between her and her family. No man, no support system, nothing to fall back on. That takes guts.’
I glanced at the debris, the mess of our lives.
‘Not exactly the best trade-off.’
Linda pressed her lips tightly together, gave me a sympathetic look.
‘It’s just a blip. I promise.’
I hoped she was right but couldn’t muster her optimism.
‘You have no idea what it’s like,’ my mother told me later that same day. ‘The guilt I lug around. This bag of rocks stuck to my back.’
‘You couldn’t have known what he was doing. It’s not your fault.’
‘That’s not what the rest of the world thinks. I can’t walk down the street without people staring and pointing. Yesterday, an old guy stopped me in Safeway, told me I should be ashamed of myself.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That I am ashamed.’
She doesn’t look up as I watch her now, but she knows I’m there; this woman with bird-like wrists and big wide eyes who the wind could carry off with a single puff.
‘What are you looking at?’ I ask, not that I need to. That shoebox comes out a lot.
‘Do you think he ever loved us?’
How many times are we going to have this conversation?
‘I don’t think men like Matty are capable of love.’
She shakes her head like she knows best.
‘The way he used to smile at me, the warmth in his eyes. You can’t fake that.’
‘Can’t you?’
A sigh, right down to her soul.
‘I don’t know. Maybe you can. It seemed real though. The things he said, the way he was with me. With us.’
