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She tolerated it because it had warmed up his mood towards her. He was civil now, less snappy, but she still didn’t know if he’d contacted a doctor and she remained on the begging end of information. It was an interim measure that couldn’t last; they weren’t brother and sister and she didn’t want to live as if they were, but she had enough to occupy her mind for now and there were only so many fronts she could fight on.
She was worried about her mother most of all. She’d had to tell her eventually that there was nothing they could do about the Balls’s building work, and then wished she could have grabbed the words in the air and crammed them back into her mouth after seeing the effect they’d had.
‘I will keep trying though, Mum, so don’t lose hope,’ Shay had added hurriedly, a reverse thrust that came acrossas an obvious lie. That conversation signified the moment when Roberta packed up the ashes of hope into a suitcase, climbed on a slide and prepared for the descent.
‘Have you got time to wash my hair, Shay? My shoulder’s a bit stiff and I can’t reach over,’ asked Roberta when she’d finished her meal. She hadn’t eaten much, just moved most of it around on the plate as if she hoped it would shrink away.
‘Course I have,’ replied Shay. ‘You’ve not made much of an impact on your dinner, Mum, would you like an éclair?’ She’d checked the food stocks in Roberta’s cupboards and they were hardly going down. Not even the chocolate digestives that she liked to mainline with coffees.
‘No thank you, love. I’m not in the mood.’
‘Why don’t you come and stay with me for—’
‘No, Shay, I’m not budging from this house and that’s final.’ Roberta was adamant. ‘Theywon’t drive me out of my home. I’m sticking my heels in and staying strong.’
She didn’t sound strong, she sounded beat and she’d already let slip to Shay that she hadn’t been sleeping well. Shay took her plate and emptied the uneaten meal into the bin.
‘The builders are nice, no one’s blaming them. They’ve promised to put the grass in the circle right for us when they’ve finished.’
‘Well, that’s decent of them.’
‘They’re good lads. They don’t likehim, you know, they don’t like how he talks to people. He called Derrick “an old swear word coffin dodger” yesterday when he asked him if he’d stop blocking his driveway. He deliberately parks across them so you have to ask him to shift his carand then he can shout abuse. He laughs about it to the builders, but they don’t like him. Derrick gets to know what Balls says because his nephew is friendly with one of the bricklayers.’
What a piece of work, thought Shay.
‘Apparently Balls has told the builders to insulate the wall between us last.’
Shay nearly dropped the plate she was washing. ‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said. I don’t want to worry you any more. You do enough. You never stop. Are you all right, love? I forget, you know, you’ve a lot on.’
‘I’m perfectly fine, Mum, don’t you worry about me.’
‘You’re such a lovely woman, Shay, I do love you,’ Roberta said with a tender smile. ‘People don’t say that enough in this world, do they?’
Shay chuckled. ‘What’s brought this on? Have you been watchingLittle House on the Prairie?’
‘No, I just love you, that’s all.’
‘And I love you too. So don’t keep things from me. I can’t do anything about them if I don’t know.’
‘I won’t do it again,’ said Roberta, but she knew she would. She hadn’t told Shay that Balls had started playing a radio next to the thin adjoining wall all night at full blast, and if she could find Harry’s big hammer she’d bang hard on it and give him a taste of his own medicine. She hadn’t told Shay either that she’d learned two days ago that the converted garage between them was going to be Drew Balls’s party room and since she’d found that out she’d had a headache screwing into her brain that refused to abate. She relied on her daughter so much, she was ashamed to admit that she never asked her if she was all right, never said thank you enough, took for granted that she had no problems ofher own to deal with. Shay held everything together, but who was there to hold her together if she needed it?
Shay massaged the shampoo into her mother’s scalp as she leaned over the sink.
‘That’s nice,’ Roberta sighed; the sensation was far outweighing her headache and the relief was wonderful. ‘I could let you do that all day.’
Shay gave it an extra shampoo; why not, if her mum was enjoying it? As she rinsed off the foam, she saw her mother’s baby-pink scalp underneath the thin white hair that had once been such a shiny golden shade of strawberry blonde. Roberta had always worn it in a chic French roll, though it had tumbled almost to her waist when she released it from the pins. When had all the colours faded? When had it become so fine and wispy, like the down of a baby bird? Shay lifted it in her hands, felt the small weight of it. It seemed to embody how fragile the whole of her mum was, her strength and colour ebbing away a little more with every tide of time, and she felt suddenly tearful. She pushed some conditioner through it, her throat full of emotion.
Her father too was waning; a cruel double-whammy. These once strong people who had sacrificed so much of themselves for her benefit were being washed away by life, reduced to shadows, ghosts of their past selves. Last night Shay had been up to Whispering Pines and given her dad’s eyebrows a trim. The barber always used to do it for him with his haircut, because they grew wild and long if left and he never liked to look unkempt. Part of her attraction to Bruce was that, like her dad, he made the best of himself. She’d never understood why girls like her own daughter found scruffy, sour-smelling males attractive.
She wished her dad had opened his eyes. He’d had eyes that smiles swam in, kind blue eyes. She’d been jealous of Paula when she was younger because she had the same colour eyes as their father. She didn’t want to look like some old great great grandmother who came from Naples, she wanted blue eyes like her dad and sandy eyebrows. Paula would have asked her why she was bothering to trim them for him, what difference did it make; and she didn’t know the answer, only that she was doing it out of love, because she needed to do something for him to assure him that she was there, caring. It was a small task, like washing her mum’s hair, but it meant so much more than it was.
Shay blotted Roberta’s damp hair with a towel and then fetched the round styling brush that she kept in her old teenage room, curling the feather fluff of her mum’s hair around it as she blasted it with the still-working 1970s Vidal Sassoon dryer she had in the cupboard. Her mother’s head felt like a fragile shell in her hands.
‘I feel much better for having it done, thank you,’ said Roberta, as Shay was finishing it off with some hotbrush curls.
‘I’ll wash your hair any time if you can’t manage it yourself, Mum. You only have to ask me.’
