‘Michael, you are a very insensitive creature. I’ve just been to my mother’s funeral. I might not be ready to laugh about it right now.’
‘Ah, but I think you are,’ he says, sagely, pointing his flamingo in my direction and waving it. ‘I think you said goodbye to your mother years ago. I think you know that she’s barely been alive for a long time. That in fact she comes from a long line of women who have specialised in being barely alive, even when they don’t have strokes to use as an excuse. I’m sad to see Aunt Ruth go – but I’ll be even sadder if you don’t start living your own life again.’
I refuse to be bullied by a man waving a flamingo-shaped cocktail stick, but have to acknowledge that there is some wisdom in his casual insight, in what he says about my mother, and about me.
He might, annoyingly, have a point. And it might, also annoyingly, be a point that frightens me. Makes me admit that I am also standing at a crossroads, and am worried that the devil won’t even be interested in my soul. That I’m just too dull for him. I take the sensible option, and swallow the rest of the gin.
‘I need to clear some of this stuff out,’ I say, looking around me at the old-lady detritus and ugly pottery ornaments and health-care aids that are no longer aidful and were never caring.
‘You do!’ he says enthusiastically, leaning forward. ‘Let’s get hammered and wash the granny right out of this place – even if she wasn’t actually a granny, this house feels like she was!’
My breath catches in a choking gulp, and I feel a vein in my forehead throb, and a fluttering inside my ribcage. I haven’t felt those things for a while, but they’re like old friends you never want to see again. The harbingers of anxiety, and panic, and the close relatives of my throat closing up and a suffocating sensation of there not being enough air in all the known universe to fill my starved lungs.
My mother was a granny – but not for long. Not long enough. Michael doesn’t understand what he’s said, the response he’s accidentally triggered. He knows I have a history – that I was the black sheep of this family way before he could even baa – but he wasn’t old enough to live it with me. And he isn’t old enough now to understand the way that grief can sneak up behind you, like someone trying to catch a glimpse of your PIN at a cash machine, and cosh you over the head.
He doesn’t understand – and I hope for his sake that it’s a long time until he does.
He jumps to his feet from my mother’s chair, and announces: ‘I shall return with more gin. And with many binbags.’
I nod, and smile, and feel my right eye twitch in tension while I wait for him to leave. I take a slow, deep breath in through my nose, and out through my mouth. I go through the exercises I was taught long ago, in a place with dull green paint on the walls and alarms on the doors and gentle music on speakers that made you feel like you were trapped in a horror-film waltz.
A place filled with broken people, sitting in circles on plastic chairs, sharing their fears with a man who had studied pain for years but never truly understood it. One of the places my parents took me to when the real world simply disappeared – when I was sucked under, like a foal stepping into quicksand. One of the places they never spoke of again, erasing it beneath a code of silence that I willingly acceded to.
I still don’t know why we all had to pretend it didn’t happen. That I’d never been there. That the ‘problem with my nerves’ was something we all jointly hallucinated and needed to bury under layers of half-truths and evasions. Perhaps it was to protect me. Perhaps it was because it offended their sense of order. My mother and father are gone now. I will simply never know. Even if they were both still here, they weren’t the type to answer questions. Such curiosity would be offensive to them.
I am holding one hand to my chest when Michael returns, as though I will be able to soothe the pounding beast inside.
‘You OK?’ he asks, head on one side, gin in each hand and a roll of black bags tucked under his arm.
‘Fine,’ I lie, getting to my feet, taking the gin, gulping it down so fast that his eyes widen. ‘Where should we start?’
‘With a visit to AA, if you’re going to keep drinking like that,’ he replies.
‘I’m not,’ I say, firmly. ‘That was medicinal. This isn’t easy. I’m not easy. My mother wasn’t easy. If you want to go, then go – I can do it on my own.’
I sound aggressive, and know this is unfair. Michael has done nothing wrong, other than co-exist with me at a place and time when I am stretched, my control taut and vibrating so hard I can almost hear it hum like a tuning fork.
He stares at me, perhaps noticing the twitch in my eyelid, the paleness of my cheeks, the clenched fists that are crushing my fingernails into the flesh of my palms. Perhaps simply wondering if he needs to nip to the off-licence and buy more alcohol.
‘No chance, cousin dearest,’ he replies, passing me a binbag. ‘I’m in this for the cheap kicks. I want to see if there are any guilty secrets hidden around the place – you know, your mother’s dildo collection, your dad’s blonde hooker wigs, their Fifty Shades playroom in the attic…’
He’s deliberately aiming to shock me. He feels uncertain, and this is how he rolls, my cousin Michael, when he feels uncertain. He knows he can get away with it when he’s with me – he can flounce and swear and pout to his heart’s content.
When he’s with his parents, he has to play the role of the well-behaved, perfectly conventional son, studying law and planning a life and a career that they approve of. When he’s away from them, all of the outrageousness he’s bottled up comes pouring out, spilling over anyone who happens to be in the vicinity like an oil slick of eye-popping rudeness. I smile to show him that I’m still me – that it’s all OK.
‘I cleared out the gimp masks and sequinned nipple tassels already,’ I say, clutching the plastic of the binbag so tightly I feel my fingers plunge through. ‘The best you can hope for in the attic is some nudie shots of yours truly. Though I was only one at the time.’
Michael holds his roll of binbags in the air as though he’s a composer directing a symphony orchestra, and announces: ‘To the attic, boys and girls!’
Chapter 3
There is a staircase to our attic; steep and narrow and lined with towers of books and heaps of starched, folded bed linen that hasn’t touched a bed for a decade. There is barely room to put one foot in front of another, and each step feels like it could be the one that sends you toppling.
I suppose, long ago, it might have been used as an extra bedroom, or even, when the house was first built, for a nanny or maid.
In my lifetime, though, it’s been a mysterious but uninteresting domain used primarily as a dumping ground by my mother. A place to abandon shameful clutter, safe where nobody could see it. Coming up here was discouraged – and the few times I did, it was so boring that the whole concept soon lost any sense of intrigue.
This was my mother’s realm, and one she protected fiercely. My father, a tax accountant for a long-gone company that manufactured fishing rods, was only ever allowed in to store his old files – and that hardly sounds like something enticing and magical, even to a curious child. Mum rarely disagreed with my dad, but she would stare him into the ground if he ever suggested using her top-of-the-house empire for anything else.