"Can I've my jacket, Gran?" Nina asks.
Nina is my daughter. Her hair sticks up from her head
in blondey spikes, but there's no point in telling her to brush it. There's
no point in telling her anything, these days.
My mother looks confused. "I haven't seen it."
"You're wearing it."
"Am I?"
"It doesn't matter." Nina is exasperated. She lifts
her school bag off the hook at the end of the stairs and heads for the
door.
"Wait, Nina. It's raining. She'll give it back to
you -" I say.
"I'll be late."
The door slams and she's gone.
My mother and I look at each other while the air in
the house settles.
I make a pot of tea and sit at the table to pour it
out. My mother hunches into Nina's jacket. The sad thing is that it fits
her. She used to be a big woman.
"I'll be late too," she says mournfully, sipping her
tea.
"For what?"
"Practice."
Her hands tremble when she puts the mug down. I move
it in from the edge of the table before it falls.
"The bishop is coming. We're going to sing for him."
She begins to hum an old tune, a hymn I grew up with but have long forgotten.
Her voice is thin and shaky, like her, but the notes are true. Mother
of Christ, Star of the Sea ...
She smiles at me shyly. "I could have been a singer,
you know."
My mother is confused about a lot of things. She thinks
she is a girl again, in school. She chats away to Nina with such conviction
that Nina chats right back to her. If I listen closely I can pick up clues
about what either of them is thinking. My mother is unclear about who
I am, although she seems to like me well enough. "How's your mother?"
she asked me the other day and I had to leave the room because she doesn't
like it when people get upset.
Get over it, Nina would say. It's her latest phrase.
Nina babysits for the neighbours and she used her money to buy herself
a mobile phone for Christmas. "I had to get myself something,"
she said, as if her best chance of a present, any present, was to buy
one herself. I bit my lip on the months of storing small things away -
the baby-pink sweater that was too small by the time she got it, the CD
that had vanished from the charts in late November. You may have gathered
that I don't know my daughter very well. I blame that phone, as much as
anything else. For one thing, I never know where she is any more. "I have
my phone!" she says, when I ask her where she's going. She could be anywhere.
When I was growing up, you could always guess what
was going on in a person's life by how jumpy they were when the phone
rang out in the hall, by how long they were willing to spend shivering
under the stairs talking to someone. I wish I could get as close as a
telephone to any of my daughter's friends. I'd learn to recognize their
voices. I'd watch her reaction to their names. I'd try to read her life
that way. She is only thirteen and I'm not ready to lose her yet.
I'm not ready to lose my mother either, but that's
not going to change anything.
She stops singing when Billy comes in to the room.
"They won't join in." She scowls in my direction.
"And we've got to get it right."
"Won't they?" Billy laughs. "They're an unco-operative
lot all right. What'll we do with them?"
I wish he wouldn't humour her like that. I think we
should do what we can to keep her anchored in reality. But my mother loves
Billy, and he likes her, so I've little to complain about when he offers
to sit with her so that I can take the car and drive over to the Square
before we run out of everything.
"Can I come with you?" she asks, like a child.
"Not this time." If I don't get some time to myself,
I'll scream.
My mother loves the Square. She hasn't lost that sense
of possibility that I remember feeling when it was first built. It seemed
foreign, somehow, with its terraces spread under the artificial warmth
of that pyramid of glass, and the sounds of music and falling water and
all those brightly-dressed people. There are shops there that you'd find
in London, or even Paris. But it's not new to me any more. It's just where
I shop.
Normally I'd walk. I like crossing the park and the
footbridge and it can be hard enough to find parking close to the
doors. But I've a lot to get, and with Billy home I may as well use the
car. I park in the multi-storey and try to remember what it was like when
we first moved here, when there was more open space. Before the car-park
and the civic offices. When my mother was still my mother. We used to
take Nina over to the cinema every weekend. The Little Mermaid
reminded my mother of her own drowned valley and she told Nina all about
it, but Nina was too young to understand the stories I grew up on.
My mother's people lived on the side of a hill not
far from here until the valley was flooded to make the reservoir, drowning
the land in a tide of progress - like the roads, now, and the houses.
She was Nina's age, then. The day the water came, the neighbours had to
go and take one man out of his house by force. Even while it was happening,
he couldn't believe that someone would deliberately cause water to rise
in his kitchen. He thought he could stop it, but there are some things
you can't reverse. For weeks afterwards, that man's bed bobbed around
on the surface of the water, like a boat. No-one could bear to look at
it.
The new lake was treacherous, neither one thing nor
the other. First, two local boys drowned, in a place where there should
have been air. Then the fish began to die. My grandfather's house was
above the water-line, but he said the place was out of luck and it was
time to leave.
Years later, when Billy and I moved out here, we brought
my mother with us. She said the line of hills behind our house felt like
home. To me, it seemed like the edge of something. But before long the
city caught up with us and overtook us, throwing the Square up like an
island of colour in the middle of all that progress.
Today, I can't get her out of my mind, the way she
asked to come with me and I told her no. It would have been easier to
bring her.
When I get back with the shopping, I bring her out
for a walk to make up for leaving her behind. We turn our backs on the
road and look out from the small hill of the park with its tufty grass
and its granite slabs to the blue of the mountains, scored by a ribbon
of silver in the sunlight. I tuck my arm in hers and remind myself that
things can only be what they are and that nothing lasts forever.
Later, when we are in bed, Billy brings up the subject
of a nursing home. It's not the first time.
While he's talking, our door swings open the way it
used to when Nina was little, but it's my mother who stands uncertainly
in the dark. I get up to bring her back to bed. She is crying, so I stay
with her and smooth her hair until she falls asleep.
Back in my own bed, I dream about the valley, the
water and the lost boys. I dream that my aching breasts leak milk onto
the sheets. But when I wake, they are bone dry and it is my mother's sheets
that need changing.
Over breakfast, she complains about the girls in her
class who talk through singing practice. "They don't understand how important
it is," she says. "About the bishop."
She is singing again when I go for a shower.
When I come back downstairs, the singing has stopped
and I can't find my mother anywhere. Billy's reading the paper in bed.
He hasn't seen her for a while.
Nina is listening to music in her room. When I knock
on her door, she waits just long enough to let me know what she thinks
about interruptions in general and me in particular before she opens it.
"Where's Gran?"
"She's in the kitchen."
"No, she's not."
Nina picks at her nails and looks sullen.
"Well, how am I supposed to know where she is?"
I want to kill her.
Billy gets dressed while I go to the door and look
up and down the street. There's no sign of her. I try to remember what
she was wearing while I ring the neighbours to know if they have seen
her. No one has.
Billy says that he will drive around and look for
her. Mary from next door offers to stay in the house in case she comes
back, while Nina and I go to look in the park. I am suddenly filled with
dread that she is out there on the motorway, dodging cars in her faded
purple dressing gown. I run out onto the bridge to look, but there is
no sign of her. The wind whips through the mesh and the cars speed by
underneath, indifferent, pulling the city behind them.
"Take it easy, Ma." Nina's calm voice surprises me.
"Maybe she's over there." She points to the red and blue mass of the Square,
its cone of glass.
I follow her down the ramp and across the car park
because I don't know what else to do. The doors slide open and the music
and the Saturday crowds wash over and around us. The suited women at the
service desk are kind, but busy. They haven't seen my mother, but they'll
look out for her.
Then I see her. She is standing at the entrance to
Bewley's, as if she's waiting for someone to tell her where to sit. She
looks frail but unremarkable in Nina's jacket.
I try to keep my voice even when I say, "There you
are, Ma."
"About time." She is cross. "I've been waiting ages.
Is that the curate?" She points at Nina. "I'm ready to sing if you like."
There's an empty table on the terrace. "Sit here and
we'll get you a nice cup of tea," I say. Her hands are ice-cold and her
face is grey and I don't want to chance walking her home.
Nina uses her phone to ring Billy and tell him where
we are. Then she goes off to get a tray, a pot of tea, three cups. She
is a different kind of stranger now, my daughter. Capable.
My mother complains that no one turned up for choir
practice. "I waited for ages and ages," she says. "They're a shower of
wasters, the lot of them. They don't care about the bishop."
"Never mind," I tell her.
"But we have to practice!"
She closes her eyes and starts to sing. Nina puts
the tray down and looks around, her eyes narrowed. For once, I feel sorry
for her. But then I hear her say, in tones fiercer than any she's ever
used to me: "What are you looking at?"
A woman in a camel hair coat at the next table shuts
her mouth and looks away. Nina slides into the seat beside my mother and
pours the tea. She looks around defiantly, daring anyone else to comment.
People below us stop and look to see where the wavering voice is coming
from: Mother of Christ, Star of the Sea.
Before I know that I am going to do it, I take my
mother's hand and hum along with her.
Nina shifts in her seat. "Don't."
When I begin to sing, my voice is clearer and louder
than my mother's. If she wants a choir, she can have one.
Nina could walk away, but she doesn't. She's embarrassed,
but she puts up with us. When Billy arrives, my mother and I are singing
our song at the tops of our voices, above the sound of clattering cups,
muzak and running water. Over the disapproval of the shoppers.
It is a rousing song, not for the faint-hearted. "Mother
of Christ, Star of the Sea! Pra-ay for the Wand-er-er," We call to the
glass ceiling, to anyone who will listen. "Pray for me."
Copyright © Lia Mills 2001. All Rights Reserved
