Composite Creatures, Caroline Hardaker [best ebook reader for laptop txt] 📗

calls became further apart, Mum’s voice on the line became quieter and quieter, as if she was already travelling away from me at great speed. I took her for granted, and assumed that when the time came for me to settle down, I could catch the same train as always, sit with her, and it would be just like old times.

During third year, I decided to make a surprise visit home in the November. It’d been eight months since I’d seen the house.

I’d spoken to her earlier that week and she’d told me she was having a quiet week in, no stress, just enjoying the view. But that Friday night when I rang the doorbell and she answered it, reality turned inside out. Mum was a wraith, leaning on the doorframe with a purple hand. She swayed side to side as if drunk, and all the soft flesh around her cheeks had melted away. She was both small and childlike, old and sharp-boned. The greying. She stared at me like I was a stranger, a spirit visiting from a long-forgotten past. Without speaking, she turned away and walked into the dim light of the house, leaving the door ajar.

I felt sick.

As I followed her over the threshold, the house smelt different. The air hung thickly, still and cloying. I found her in her living room, sat on her usual yellow chair, her head bent low over her knees.

She said it started with feeling like she had a cold.

When it went on for more than a couple of weeks she wondered if she’d developed hay fever from all the days out on the moors. She stocked up on over-the-counter medication but when they didn’t help and she’d started to cough up phlegm, she decided to sit it out in the comfort of her armchair. It took her another month to phone for an appointment. Once she found out that she had stage four lung cancer she went back home to that velvet armchair and hardly ever left it. She just sat there, enjoying the view.

She didn’t consent to a day’s worth of chemotherapy or any other treatment, determined to let her body do what it wanted to do. She was adamant that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her days “vomiting into the kitchen sink”, and would do as she “bloody well pleased”. We fought. I couldn’t believe that she’d kept it from me all this time, and she was furious that I felt free to tell her how to live her life after (in her own words) “hardly seeing the world outside your shell at all”. And throughout it all, as I screamed and she bellowed back, wheezing, she never dropped that cigarette. She never gave up on the thing which killed her. I tried to knock it from her hand and she leapt away, hissing, “Are you trying to kill us both?”

I returned to university two days later, just as I’d planned to. She didn’t even try to stop me. She wanted me to go. I left her in bed on the Sunday afternoon, reading a pile of magazines she’d had delivered for as long as I remembered, but never before had time to read.

She waved me out the door with a careless flick of the wrist, “Go, I’m finally enjoying myself. I’ll speak to you in the week.”

But she didn’t ring me. And I didn’t ring her. She had kept this huge secret from me, and in my own way I was releasing myself from the problem by letting it be her secret again.

Aubrey was there for me those next months, listening, helping, and researching the outlook for lung cancer, even though Mum had already told me what would happen. But you never believe it, do you?

She died the following June, at home with her carer, Moira, by her side. Mum had needed a permanent shunt to drain the fluid build-up, and as time went by she needed help with everything, from making her morning porridge to lifting her head. Short and wiry Moira was militant, her hands thin and deft as blades but they always moved softly, slowly, as if trained to sweep through a flock of birds without frightening them.

I spoke to Moira on the phone a lot towards the end, but never saw her in the flesh until I went back to the house to see Mum before being taken away. Seeing Mum in her bed, she wasn’t her. There was nothing of the body that held me when I fell down, when I needed comfort. Her hair was streaked with white, and her skin had burnished, as if she’d spent her last weeks sunning herself in the garden. Looking down at her, I remember thinking this isn’t her. This isn’t her. Where’s she gone? And Aubrey held my hand and sobbed beside me. Moira wrapped her arms around Aubrey first and only then seemed to notice me standing there, and moved over with a sheepish drag of her feet.

It’s the natural way of it, for a child to see their parent die. But it’s cruel, isn’t it? It’s the death of a place, a time. When she leaves, a mum takes a part of you, the part where you’re still young and full of potential. That’s the version of you that could turn out to be anyone. She takes memories only the two of you share, and without anyone else to share them they may as well be made up. What you’re left with are all the things you’ve done on your own, which for some people might be a great load of good things. But me – I was fresh from the egg. I hadn’t done anything other than reading, studying, and staying in with Aubrey. I’d only lived through a thirty-eight-inch screen. I had no idea where I was going to go next or what I was going to do. Mum had always been the sun and I a body in her