I said I meant to deal with them but ending my marriage and trying to get a fitted sheet on by myself felt like too much at the same time. She stood at the end of the bed, stone-faced, and pushed the fingertips of one hand into the place where her ribs met the top of her stomach, as though she was in pain. ‘If you’re coming, come. The boys are downstairs and I’m not doing the A420 with them after four o’clock.’
I took too long to get up. I took too long finding something to wear, a bag to put things in. My sister’s rising impatience slowed me down even more. I gave up and lay back down on the bed, facing away from her.
Ingrid said, ‘Do you know what? Fine. I can’t do this any more either. It’s so boring Martha.’ She left the room and called out from the stairs. ‘Ring your husband.’
I heard her summon her children from the front door and a moment later, the door slamming shut. The television was left on.
It was the first time she had refused to do her job. I wanted her sympathy and she wouldn’t give it to me. I wanted her to make me feel like I was good, and right to make Patrick go. I was angry and then, at the sound of her car starting, lonelier than I was before she came.
I did not ring my husband. I could not call my father, who would be stricken and unable to hide it. I picked up my phone and dialled my mother.
I had not spoken to her since the day of my appointment and I did not want to speak to her then. I wanted her to answer and say, ‘Well isn’t this a turn-up for the books’ so that I could fight with her and she would hang up on me and then I could feel aggrieved and tell Ingrid and she would agree that it was classic her. Literally, so typical.
I had not forgiven my mother for what she had done. I hadn’t attempted to, or had to try and stay angry. Hating someone who was capable of seeing their daughter in pain and saying nothing, compounding it instead by drinking, was effortless.
It rang once. She picked up and said, ‘Martha, oh, I’ve been hoping and hoping you would ring.’
It was not her ordinary voice. It was from before, before I became the teenager who really brought out her bitchlike tendencies, her resident critic. The voice she used to call me Hum. She asked me how I was feeling and said, ‘Awful probably’ when I answered with a sound instead of words.
She continued on that way for ten minutes, asking questions and answering them herself – correctly. As I would have.
After we hung up, I went downstairs, found two open bottles of wine and took them back to my bedroom. I would not have called her again except her final question was, ‘Will you ring me back later? Any time. Even if it’s the middle of the night,’ and her answer to it was ‘Okay good. I will speak to you soon then.’
*
I was drunk when I called the second time, before dawn. I told her I didn’t know what to do, I begged her to tell me. She began to say something general. I said, ‘No, right now, what do I do? I don’t know what to do.’ She asked me where I was and then said, ‘You are going to stand up, and then you are going to go downstairs and put your shoes and coat on.’ She waited as I did each thing. ‘Now, you are going to go for a walk and I will stay on the phone.’
I walked slowly and felt sober by the time I got to the end of the towpath. She said, ‘Right, turn around and walk fast enough that you can feel your heart beating.’ I don’t know why she said that but I did.
It was light by the time I reached Port Meadow again. Fog was thinning on the far side, gradually revealing the line of spires. She said, as I got home, ‘Have a bath.’ Then, ‘Call me in twenty minutes. I will be here.’
*
I began to ring my mother every day.
People describe things as ‘the only way I can get out of bed’ but usually they do not mean physically. But I meant it that way – I rang her in the morning, the moment I woke up. I could not move, or eat or walk through the house, open windows or wash my hair unless she was talking to me and telling me what to do.
In the afternoons, I sat in the front window of the Executive Home, looking out at the street. The house on the opposite side was for let. We talked until the side of my face was hot from the phone or I couldn’t turn my head because I had been holding it with my shoulder, or I noticed it was night-time. We talked only about small things. Something she had heard on the radio, a dream one of us had.
We did not talk about Patrick but I wondered if she was talking to him too. I wondered if she knew where he was. We did not talk about Ingrid; our mother must have known we were not speaking. She must have known my father and his grief were best kept away from me for the time being because he did not call and I was grateful.