Today it’s five years since my mum died.
If you think you know what that means, you don’t. It’s much more complicated than that.
Her name holds a strange power over me, there is still a bit of fear in the hearing and seeing of it. I will call her V, which was one of her names; she had a lot of names. I feel the same when I see her photo in my room, I’m not sure if she should really be invited, it seems a gamble. But if you saw the photo, you would see a harmless looking crinkle-eyed silver-haired double-chinned older lady, head tipped to show how much she loves you, false teeth framed in perfect smile.
You wouldn’t know I took the picture in the garden of St Annes psychiatric hospital where she was hobbling round with a stick she didn’t need, or that she had just pissed al fresco in the garden while my brother held a coat up, laughing, to protect her dignity (although I do have that photo too). Or that they had both managed to get sectioned at the same time in the same hospital, so it was a two-birds kind of visit.
I believe she lost her teeth in a motorbike accident aged 16. She was on the back of a motorbike that got hit by a truck and she was flung unconscious over a wall. The accident clear-up didn’t find her as they found the bike and the driver and didn’t know there had been a passenger. She came-to six hours later – her leg was broken in three places and she was eye to eye with her foot. It’s true her leg was terribly scarred, and without feeling on the skin in places, and there were always those false teeth.
When she was dating my brothers’ dad, around 17, she pretended to be identical twins and he believed her to be two different people, with different names, styles and personalities. In some tellings of the story, he thought he was having a secret affair with one of the twins behind the other twin’s back.
Her mum Alice was 46 when she had her – Arthur and Alice had believed they could not conceive and went to Lourdes to pray for a miracle. Alice then fell pregnant, lo, a miracle. V had a certificate for being an official Catholic miracle, apparently (I never saw it) and only wore white for the first six years of her life.
I never met Arthur or Alice, they died before I was born, Arthur of a brain aneurism and Alice of suicide. She drowned herself in a canal – V liked to mention how she left her shoes and socks so tidily by the edge of the water, although V was in a post office in India when she got the news. And collapsed and shat herself, but that was later.
She had been a daddy’s girl as a child. Then one day she walked in on her dad having sex with her mum’s best friend, who was supposed to be looking after her while Alice was at bingo. The next day she told her parents what she’d seen. Her dad denied it and Alice refused to believe it. They decided she must be mad and started taking her to a child psychologist every week. She described how her dad would walk her to these appointments in cold silence, not holding her hand or looking at her. Then the doctor would try and get her to admit she had lied for an hour every week.
It’s no wonder she was messed up by the time I knew her. It’s hard to overstate how messed up she was, I don’t mean like, a bit eccentric but mainly normal, or endearingly kooky – although she could appear that way. She was deeply insecure, very jealous of women and myself, perceptive and offensive – a deadly combo. ‘When was the last time someone sat on your face?’ was a favourite greeting if she was feeling combative.
V was, became slowly, an alcoholic. If you’d crossed paths with her you would know about it. She was, and I don’t say this lightly, a nightmare! She lived in bed for days at a time with a bottle of vodka, sending us kids to the shop for fags and booze. She was also a horse better and we spent a lot of time in bookies, losing money and sometimes winning money. Catching taxis everywhere. She would put on an American accent for the taxi driver and pretend she and I were both famous actresses over from America. Sometimes she invited the taxi driver in.
She drank until she blacked out and turned into a horrible person, but she could never be properly sorry because she had no recollection of the terrible things she did. I used to empty her ‘potty’, a saucepan she kept under the bed. In the morning she would call me to her bedside to tell her what had happened the night before when loads of people had been round, and she would be horrified and mortified. ‘Oh no! How awful!’
Of course you shouldn’t say these things about your mum, especially in a memorial post. I feel like I have to temper it like I usually do by saying, also she was charismatic and beautiful etc, she was a very compassionate friend to the down-and-outs of the world (being one of them), and to taxi drivers and fellow gamblers – the old men in Ladbrokes. At her funeral, I gave a pretty honest speech and said dying doesn’t mean you were an angel, then one of her old friends stood up and said ‘I fucking loved her!!’ Which made me feel like a real bitch, but hey, you knew her before me. And I loved her too.
(Gathering outside the crematorium, her telephone buddy and pharmaceutical-swapping friend Tess, who’d left 38 answer phone messages and eventually sent for help when V was beginning her terminal decline in secret at home, said to me, ‘Your mum loved you so much. Whenever we weren’t talking about valium, we were talking about you.’
If you knew her too, you probably have a tale to tell about it, and probably lost some feathers and self esteem along the way, before eventually ceasing all contact like everyone (bar an eccentric few) did.
She wasn’t physically abusive, well hardly ever (flash of her kicking out at me with both legs from the floor while I try to help her up). No, the fun stuff. Humiliating, manipulative, belittling, dishonest, immoral. You learned to think like a chess player – what’s she saying? What’s she really saying? What is she trying to suggest? How is she trying to seem and why, what does she want me to think/feel/do? How can I sidestep it while we both pretend we don’t know the subtext? What’s my best move?
She once offered me a glass of wine, but what she actually poured was pink water, because she had drunk the wine in the kitchen, and refilled the bottle with water. She fully expected me to play along, and when I said ‘This is water!’ she just ignored me.
At a barbecue in her garden (I wasn’t there, I heard later) she started falling drunk into the fire. My brother instinctively reached out and grabbed her to stop her falling in. To save face, she shouted ‘you tried to push me into the fire!’
Once I was on the coach back from Norfolk with her, aged maybe 8? She instructed me to go and sit on my own in the adjacent seats. Then, without standing at all, she managed to wrestle her trousers and knickers down and, staring straight ahead, pissed directly into the seat, a large dark stain spreading across the orange velvet checkers. Then she half stood and hoiked her clothes back up, and came and sat next to me.
Another pleasant flash and she’s rolling round in shit-smeared white sheets on a hotel bed in India, lashing out spitefully as when cornered. Same trip, different hotel room, her boyfriend puking a waterfall of what I believe to be blood into a green bucket. Another hotel room in Crete, a different boyfriend is throwing a chair.
A more gregarious time, she insists we ‘dine in’ at the local kebab shop and makes the men magic up a plastic table and chairs and plastic cups for wine. They love her. During the meal she admires my ring. I remind her she gave it to me, and she says ‘great, I’ll have it back then,’ and takes it back.
She used to take me shoplifting for my clothes. Stuffing a child-size rainbow duffel coat into her handbag in Marks and Spencer while I, her reluctant sidekick, hop from foot to foot wringing my hands: ‘what are you doing? Are you going to pay for that? V? V? V?’ Blatancy was her strength though, she never got in trouble for shoplifting – such an innocent face.
I heard about another time at Christmas she took a trolley full of shopping into the toilets at Sainsbury and was busily unpacking it into her handbag when a security guard came in. She gave him such an earful (‘how dare you! I’m disabled! A woman alone!’ etc) that he backed away apologising.
Another time I only heard about, her friend John-the-bard was around, and so were my brothers, hanging in the front room. John-the-bard went off to the toilet and she got up and started riffling through his coat hanging on a chair, eventually pulling out a tenner and putting it in her handbag. My brothers are horrified, ‘what are you doing?’ and her, breezily, ‘oh, he leaves it there so I don’t have to ask…’
Yes, V was one in a million. One time we got back from India or somewhere in the middle of the night and she couldn’t find her keys. She marched us up to the local, St George’s Tavern, and found some young guy to tell her sob story to – alone woman, small daughter, blah blah blah. We took him back to the house and she made him shimmy up the drainpipe, smash a window, climb in and walk down through the house to let us in. When he opened the front door, he had blood dripping down both arms and hands. She said thanks and took me inside, shutting the door firmly behind us, leaving the poor man bleeding in the street.
One time she wanted some weed, so she took teenage me down the road where she claimed to have a cool dealer friend. Halfway down the road she stopped and looked up at a house where there was a guy playing on decks in the window. ‘Gareth!’ She shouted up at him. ‘Gareth! This is my daughter! This is my beautiful daughter! Isn’t she beautiful?!’ She shouted at the window, shoving me in front of her and pointing at me like her ticket in. I died inside and was probably shaking my head like, no no no, nothing to do with me and he was looking down and shaking his head and saying something but we could only see his mouth move behind the glass. ‘What?’ She shouted. ‘I can’t hear you! I said this is my daughter!’ Eventually he pulled up the window angrily and shouted down, enunciating every syllable: ‘I-SAID-FUCK-OFF!’ And I still had to explain to her that we weren’t welcome, practically dragging her back down the road, her looking all indignant, like what?
In my twenties she divorced me and we didn’t talk for three years, because I had ‘umbrages’. ‘I’m trying to start my life from now, yeah, and if you can’t let go of the past then maybe we should just say “ok, yeah, thanks for having me but let’s call it quits and get a divorce…”‘ so we did.
Halfway through she sent me an apology letter, ‘I’ve been a witch, let me be the mum you deserve etc’ but I was stubborn and pissed off, and ignored it.
She did AA and liked to tell us of the celebrities she met there – Eric Clapton, Michael Caine. I remember Nat flushing her sobriety medals down the toilet one night, and demanding that she GET REAL, could she get real even for a moment? She escaped by suddenly pretending to be asleep, even though she was sat bolt upright on the sofa.
Oh and she stole a wallet from an AA meeting. Classy. I remember how terrified she was when she’d run into the fellow alcoholic she’d been defrauding, near the petrol station where she’d been using his card to buy cartons of cigarettes from.
I know this isn’t how tributes are supposed to go. She’d be mortified, but she’s dead and so is her dignity, although that died a thousand deaths before her body finally gave way, anyway. And this is my story now. And she knew I loved her, it was never in question.
And we had 9 days together while she died, quite an epic journey while she withdrew from Xanax, Prozac, Tamazepam, Diazepam and about 12 other things I never learned the names of. But mainly cigarettes, her best friends that eventually killed her. She went cold turkey in hospital after 50 years of chain smoking, and it wasn’t pretty. One of the side effects was the compulsion to puff – she puffed on anything – the blanket, her wrist, my fingers, a beaker – she would grab something and slowly draw it to her lips, then just as though it was a cigarette, suck on it and sharply inhale, then blow it out.
I slept on an army bed next to her hospital bed. She never slept – ‘If I go to sleep, will I die?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘but you have to sleep either way.’
Another night: ‘Arv! Arv! Can you just give me 5 valium?’ Her tolerance was sky high, the pain relief was not enough. It became my mission to get her enough drugs, especially as I’d thrown away all her personal stash and tried to explain she was under doctors orders now. She had managed to hide a load of pills in a toy fox I’d brought her also, which I had also thrown away.
Her friend Gabriel came to visit. He was a disabled man who she used to visit once a week – the only time she left the house, having developed agraphobia and remained mostly indoors, floating round on pharmaceuticals or holed up in bed or supine on the sofa watching soaps, for her final 10 years. Gabriel used to give her a weekly foot massage – not sure who paid who – and she got a taxi both ways. Anyway, he showed up at hospital, hobbling along with his carer, and he brought weed cupcakes that apparently she’d asked for over the phone. And they absolutely reeked of weed. I tried to bury them in her locker but from then on the hospital room had an undeniable stink, but she did like to be fed the cakes.
(The day after she died, Gabriel emailed me to tell me she owed him £500. I consulted with my boyfriend-at-the-time, a lawyer. ‘Well, personally speaking I would tell him to fuck off,’ he said, ‘and legally speaking, it’s the same answer.’ So I wrote back and said I’m very sorry to hear that but she didn’t even leave enough to cover the funeral, so…)
In her final days, she became obsessed with her keys and needed to know where they were. I hung them on the wall in front of her. She made me pack for her, as though she was going away. We packed an overnight bag – her telling me what to put in it – a clean nightie, deodorant, a hairbrush, some shoes. She packed and repacked her handbag for hours, stuffing it full of photos, her cigarette case, ornaments from her hospital table, a banana, her wallet, rescue remedy, a bottle of water…then she would slowly sadly zip it up. Then unzip it again and take it all out and start again. Eventually she seemed satisfied and she zipped up her bag one final time and handed it over to me to take care of. This indicated she was ready for her ‘trip’. She had also handed over her debit card, got me to check the balance (£800 of accumulated disability benefits from her stint in hospital) and made me promise to hang on to the card.
Her teeth got too big for her. One morning I found she had attempted to eat some chewing gum someone had left on her side table and it was all tangled round her teeth. She showed me the mess she was in, with a nervous baring of teeth. I got her to spit her teeth out into my hand and scrubbed at them with a toothbrush, and she was very grateful to have the clean ones back in.
And she gradually lost her marbles altogether and started speaking a different language, some dementia-like nonsense, and some just not even words. And at one point she said ‘we’re alright aren’t we?’ and I said ‘what do you mean?’ and she said ‘we’re best friends aren’t we? There’s no problem between us?’ And I said ‘of course! No, that’s all water under the bridge now, don’t worry about it.’ And my dad forgave her too, over the phone from Australia.
And eventually she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer and she had to sleep. And she slept for 17 hours or so and I went away to have a shower and a rest and then we got the call, and me, my brothers and my nephew met back at the hospital and stayed with her while her breaths got further apart and then stopped. And now she’s not in pain anymore. And in my own complicated way, I miss her.
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