My Mother's Barrow

Vibrations of metal on metal whisper on in my sleep.

Shhhh tickety tic

Shhhh tickety tic

Shhhh tickety, shhhh tickety, shhhh tickety tic.

I’ve been going around in circles and I find myself back at the beginning again. I shift my listening. Voices separate out from the rush of the track and become words. Papers rustle. Phones beep and chime their punctuation and I know that it’s only a matter of time until I have to open my eyes – but I’m not ready yet.

You see I know myself quite well really these days. When I wake at times like this, problems get trapped in circles in my head, they go around and round so I can’t escape and the day becomes dreamlike. But at least while I’m asleep I can do no permanent damage.

There have been many times, times when I’ve felt out of control like this that I have woken up into a world that is completely different from the one that I went to sleep in.

Moods change, people disappear, promises evaporate. But this is a way of life for the child of a drinker. I have strategies now and I have learned not to be tricked: for as long as I keep my eyes shut, this is something I can control.

Someone is talking.

‘Would there be a lot of swallowing involved?’

Through the half-awake fuzz, the voice of the woman in the seat in front floats through my head in a one-way conversation.

‘Well, we could have a problem then because I’m not that interested in swallowing.’

Pause

A cold circle of hardness just above my left temple holds me in place while my body rocks slightly against the window of the train. Oh god not yet!

‘Yeah, exactly! Anyway, it’s communication that interests me - and I’d like spend more time out in the community. Most of the swallowing stuff goes on behind closed doors.’

(Pause – longer this time) then:

‘Well, they would say that wouldn’t they?’

The mood is changing. I recognize the nuances of anger.

‘Seems to me there’s a lot more dancing around to be done before we can get into the real action. I’ll call you again later’.

And I know that if it was possible to do this, while sitting on a train, at this point the woman in front of me would have slammed that mobile phone down with a bang.

The day that my mother died started out as a sunny day.

I had just got back from a night shift and was standing in front of the kitchen window wondering where the cat had been when the call came in. I have worked nights for ten years. You see less people when you work nights and less people see you. I prefer it like that. Either way, I hadn’t seen the cat for days when suddenly she appeared on the windowsill wearing a bright red collar - another bright red collar - and I’m not the sort of person who puts collars on cats. Collars can kill cats. They can get caught in the branches of the trees that the cat climbs, and when the cat leaps for a bird, the collar can cause a cat to hang itself.

I opened the window to let her in and was just unbuckling the collar when my phone rang. It was my mother’s neighbour. She had found my mother in her sitting room: collapsed on the floor. She said my mother was fully clothed so that you couldn’t tell whether it had happened that morning, or the night before. She said my mother was very cold, and the phone was in her hand when they found her, and that she was unconscious now but still breathing when the paramedics took her away.

I asked her if I should go. You might think that’s a funny question but you can never tell can you? I might be making too much fuss.

The neighbour told me ‘yes’.

From where I was standing, inside the house, the day had looked warm: deceiving me. It was so bright and the sky was a clear summer blue but as I set off to get the train, a blust of autumn wind caught the dead leaves hanging from the copper beech tree in the churchyard next to my home. It ripped them off the branches, and hurled them round in the air so that they rained down on the windscreen of the taxi in a shower of golden pennies.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving at Wakefield.’ A voice breaks into the background buzz. ‘When leaving the train please make sure you have all your belongings with you. On behalf of the onboard team I would like to thank you for travelling with Virgin Trains.’

As I hide behind my black lids I build a picture of the woman attached to that voice on the tannoy. Call me a control freak but it’s a pastime I enjoy. It’s just a guess but I’d say this one has dark red hair, with a hint of blue, dyed and tied in a ponytail above a navy and maroon uniform. Pale skin with eyebrows plucked into a fine line above butterfly painted eyes.

Before today I would have opened my own eyes to watch for this woman. I’d have given her a life. But, since that phone call this morning, things around me have started to crumble. I have a track record you see, and I’ve been known to do unexpected things. I know that I’m safer if I keep my eyes closed.

Actually, at this moment, mostly I’m numb, trying not to think about my mother on her sitting room floor with the phone in her hand. I need to get there quickly but I don’t want to get there at all. Deep down I know that I will be too late, that I will have let her down. For years we had been strangers and, although for a short while now I’ve been the best hope my mother has: even then, the bridges between us were always very shaky.

The train has stopped and I hear the doors wheeze open. People begin to move past my seat. The exchange of air is cold against the tight marbled skin that is the scar of my right cheek, and a smell of outside wafts in with the people and their bags. I draw in rain on wool, then stale scent with a hint of tobacco. I keep very still: I know if I catch an eye or draw attention to myself someone will think for a moment that they can move into the seat beside me. They can’t. And when they look closer at me they will see why.

Tension creeps up the back of my neck and over the top of my head pricking my scalp like a conscience. The doors shut, the train sets off again and I’m still alone.

Outside it has started raining. I breathe into the space and open my eyes a slit without moving my head. Through the window I watch the siding slide past the silky skin of my lashless eye. It looks dark now, like the late November afternoon it really is. The rain slashes sideways against the window into the dull deepening grey of the winter.

Grey towards grey towards grey towards grey, the train whispers along the track: and as I alter my focus in the half-light I meet my own eyes reflected back at me in the glass.

I’m looking older, I think, following the lines at the side of my eyes from where the lashes once grew: working nights is taking its toll. And although the scar on the skin that creeps up my neck like a flame makes me into my very own monster, even I am wearing out my identity.

But it doesn’t feel like time to walk in my mother’s shoes just yet.

I blow a mist onto the pane and watch it fade away again. Then, realising that my legs are aching where they press at an angle against the side of the carriage, I shift, sit up straighter, put my back against the back of the seat and turn my head to face the aisle.

At the table across the way, a man with a face like a painting of Jesus sits surrounded by newspapers. Although he isn’t small, his appearance is delicate, ethereal with a soft slight beard and fine hair that falls to his shoulders. Like someone in a bubble he works away quietly, struggling with huge sheets of print. His bag is on the seat next to him and opposite sit two men: strongmen, real men, big men with big hands and very short haircuts. They are obviously the Robbers to his Jesus.

The men sit with arms folded across their chests. They are clearly not travelling together: their clothes set them apart from each other but their equal focus on the table makes them brothers.

Every now and then the Jesus man picks up a small pair of very sharp scissors and cuts a word out of the paper. One word at a time. The words, scatter on the table in front of the three men and, like the shuffled tiles in a scrabble game, they lie there waiting to be chosen.

I let myself watch for a moment or two. It’s a distraction. Then, not wanting to be caught staring, I pick up the newspaper that someone has left on the seat next to me. It was waiting for me, folded open on the horoscope page, so it may contain a message:

Gemini May 22 to June 22: We tell the bits of the truth that we want others to hear. Or that we, ourselves, can handle. We ignore, deny or refute the truths that threaten or compromise our sense of comfort. Those truths though do not go away. They won’t meekly comply with our attempts to censor or suppress them. They wait for their chance, then come back to haunt those who will not recognise them. You can’t protect someone from this inevitable and ultimately positive development today.

There’s something homeopathic about the way horoscopes help your uncertainty by giving you even more uncertainty. That prediction could mean anything but the fact that I can make this one fit my life today, gives me hope.

Sitting here, even though I hope she isn’t dead,

I know my mother didn’t want to live anymore.

Back across the aisle, the two men sit motionless, as if frozen by their sins, while Jesus works away. A smattering of pictures has fallen among the words on the table. They sit there like flowers on a monochrome bush. Meticulous, Jesus folds the leftover sheets into neat squares and places them in a pile on the empty seat beside him. He reaches into his bag for the glue: no room for chaos in his world that is clear. He shuffles his words round on the formica table top, looking for one that he knows is there. He finds it, picks it up, holds it in front of his eyes for a moment, checking for size and texture and meaning.

‘Thank’ the word says, in very large, very tabloid print. He puts it down slightly apart from the melee of papers, smooths it gently and reaches into the bag again. Out comes something he had prepared earlier: the two centre pages of an exercise book. Carefully and lovingly, like an artist working on a masterpiece, he wipes the glue stick along the back of the word, turns it over, places it near the centre, right at the top of the front page, just slightly off to the left. Then he pauses, looking at it, considering.

I glance up at the faces of the robbers. Expressionless. Impassive. Scared? They follow every move. I try to read their thoughts. But there is nothing to see. There must have been other seats to be had when they first sat down. There certainly are now. They could always move if they weren’t comfortable. I wonder why they stay?

My mother was a tour guide in a stately home

Reciting other’s lives in different tongues.

But in the language of her family

The language of our birth

Nothing means the same thing twice.

‘God’ is the next word for the collage. It is taken from a much more discreet headline, a broadsheet this time. Jesus sticks it next to the enormous ‘Thank’ at the top of the page, so the words sit side-by-side like little and large. Then he goes looking for a picture.

He sifts through his options like a dressmaker choosing a button from a button box. Footballers’ faces, politicians walking, celebrities in skimpy eveningwear and a pouting topless model in full colour. They all rub up against each other on the table top. Jesus pushes them round and selects a huge head-and-shoulder shot of a grey-suited industrialist.

With his scissors he pierces the paper just beside the head and carefully cuts round the outline until the face falls out onto the table. He holds up the shoulders and stares through the hole where the face has been, turns it over, and carefully applies the glue. Then, he places the shoulders with the hole where the head should have been at the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet where it sits vacantly, taking up nearly a quarter of the whole page.

The train pulls into a station. People file past in both directions. The woman who didn’t like swallowing joins the exit queue. Jesus works on oblivious; the two men opposite sit motionless looking like bouncers. No one asked for the empty seat beside me. No connection.

By the time the aisle is clear again the words ‘For’ and ‘your’ are arranged in a slightly jaunty angle further down the top half of the page. In his hand Jesus holds a small full-length picture of the Prime Minister giving a speech. He carefully cuts round the politician’s head, and neatly decapitates him.

I relax back against the seat and let my head rock in rhythm with the train’s movement. This way I can watch without looking. Who am I to judge? I know I need to be careful. But in madness everything is relative.

I wonder if my mother is still breathing. If my sister has got there yet. If I will get there in time.

Jesus picks up the PM’s tiny face and glues it on to the shoulders of the huge industrialist. An enormous collar and tie with a minute head on top. The PM’s mouth is wide open, a speech in full flow: the head is a tiny bird sitting in a nest of huge shoulders, waiting for a worm to be dropped into his open beak by his mother. One of the robbers moves his eyes and catches me watching. Not moving his head, just his eyes. No expression says it all and the questions spread out between us filling the aisle.

My mother was a debutante who worked as a spy.

If she has died at least we can be proud that she once wore pearls against the enemy.

‘All tickets and rail cards’ the ticket man bustles along the aisle, so normal that he smashes into our silent vigil. Even Jesus has to stop, break off from his creation to deal with the ticket man. I find myself suspended between hope and fear. On tenterhooks to see how the picture has grown while my view has been blocked by admin, but frightened to think about what it all means.

When the ticket man moves on, the next word is ‘Marvelous’. What a marvelous word. It has magic in it. When it’s stuck down it stretches almost from one side of the page to the other, just nudging the edge of the PM’s tiny head.

Because of the angle of my sitting position I can’t look straight on to the face of Jesus, so I study him in profile. I wonder what he does for a living, who he shares his life with and if he knows about the power he is exerting over his fellow passengers. But there is no small talk with insanity. That’s the biggest problem with it: there’s just no way of finding out.

My phone throbs against my thigh. I pull it from my pocket.

‘Susie?’

It’s my sister’s voice. She wants my help. Its all in the name. I can tell from the way she uses mine. My name is such a flexible thing. I have my mother to thank for that: Susie, Suze or even Suki, and they want something from me. Sue and particularly Susan – well that’s something different.

‘How’s it going?’ I ask

‘Well, they wanted to know when you would be coming. I told them you were on the train and they said that they hoped you weren’t rushing because there’s no point. She’s still alive but only just. She’s had a massive bleed and her brain is basically dead. They’re just waiting for her body to shut down. It might be hours, or it might be days, but they say she won’t wake up again.’

‘And how are you coping?’ I ask, always the carer.

‘Ok. But I need to get to work. How long till you think you’ll get here?’

‘Probably an hour. We’re nearly in but it will take me a little while to get up to the hospital. I should get off if you need to.’

‘I’ll hang on a little bit longer. They’re going to move her onto a ward soon but once that’s happened I might go. So, I may not be there when you get here. Where will you stay tonight?’ She asks.

Anyone listening in might think we are close but we’re not. My mother’s house is one that is divided against itself.

‘I’ll walk up to Mother’s later and stay there. Check it’s all alright. If you’re not at the hospital when I arrive I’ll call you this evening.’ I don’t have to tell her that I am glad we are not going to be sitting together at her bedside.