Mothers & Daughters (4 page)

I suppose you want me to go upstairs, wake her and tell her it's all OK, Ian's sorry, and she should be a good girl and take him straight back
, I heard myself say again. Lord above, why had I come out with that, when ultimately I wanted them reconciled?

I turned the page quickly.

Now it was Dad's lost and vacant eyes staring back at me. We'd picked confetti off his front, lifting his arms out of the way to get at the little horseshoes. ‘I think he enjoyed himself,' I remember saying to Jaz as we got him ready to wheel back. ‘I'm sure he knew what was going on.' You tell yourself all sorts.

The next page was a close-up of the happy couple: Ian now, to my eye, slightly shifty behind his metal-framed glasses, as though he'd pulled off something that he didn't deserve, and Jaz tragically radiant beside him. Her long hair was drawn back at the temples, mediaeval-style, and she had a circlet of artificial daisies on her brow. ‘We do some very nice tiaras,' the woman in the bridal shop had said. But Jaz wouldn't budge. ‘I want it to look as though I've picked them fresh from the fields.' The shop woman wrinkling up her nose when she
thought I wasn't looking. God knows what face she'd have made if she'd known we were having black ribbons too.

A memory came suddenly of a teenage Jaz getting ready to go out one night, popping her head round the living-room door and asking whether she could borrow my jacket, and me saying, ‘Which one?' Jaz tilting further so her body was hidden by the jamb, mumbling, ‘Oh, just that velvet one.' So I knew she already had it on. ‘But you've got a velvet jacket of your own,' I'd said. ‘Not like yours. Mine's a blazer-type. Yours is all silky and drapey.' She'd come in then and showed me, lifting up the tails, waggling the bell sleeves. I seem to recall her with crimped hair, or that may have been another time. ‘That's because it was very expensive, Jaz. It's meant for special occasions.' Of course she won, beauty over age, and the jacket became hers.
You want to borrow it back from her
, I imagined Phil saying, and then David's voice sliced in again:
I resent the implication there
.

I let my gaze fall one last time, then closed the album against the brightness of her smile.

Thing about Matty is, he's at that terrifically portable stage. True, I can't take him to the gym, or when I do my swimming, or on any of the Beavers excursions (or to work, of course, which is another bone of contention with Jaz). But aside from that, as long as the place we're going to can supply him with a container plus some small objects to put in and take out, he's fine. Failing that, there's entertainment to be had from anything that can be rolled, anything that can be hidden under, any object that can be used to strike another object, and all pipework and cabling.

So when I go to see Dad, Matty makes himself at home wherever we're based. If we're in the central lounge, he'll explore the toy box they keep there for visiting grandchildren,
and submit to being ruffled and cooed over by any number of elderly strangers. If he's in Dad's room, he'll make a bee-line for the yucca in the corner with its fascinating white gravel. As long as you check he's not putting any of it in his mouth, you can pretty much leave him be. Give him a mug to fill and he's occupied for half an hour.

These days, Sunday mornings are a good time to visit, because I always have Matty with me then; he's stayed over Saturday nights since he was weaned. I have him till tea-time, till
Songs of Praise
he's all mine. And visiting my dad is now part of the routine. What used to be a potentially upsetting part of the weekend is transformed, because I tell you, it's a heck of a lot easier to go along with Matty than it is to go on my own. He's a fresh, new thing in the land of the old. He's something to focus the conversation on, something to distract from the horribleness that is watching your father leave you by degrees.

This week we arrived to find Dad propped up in bed, having his tea out of a lidded cup. ‘Well, I'm glad you're here,' went the hearty nursing assistant, ‘because we're doing very nicely indeed today.'

‘Yes?' I wondered whether Dad had done something remarkable.

‘His chest's completely clear, what do you think about that? None of the nasty coughing that kept him awake before. He's had three really good nights, and today he's full of the joys of spring, aren't you?'

Dad, glassy-eyed and weary underneath her strong arms.

‘Great,' I said.

Once she'd finished and left, the first job was to go round the room moving pills, pads, hearing-aid batteries, unsuitable sweets, coins, pen tops. I plonked Matty with his changing bag by the yucca and gave Dad a kiss, and then I sat down to assess the state of play.

She was right, I thought, when I got a proper look at him. He was a better colour, and he was sitting up straighter than last week. The blue shadows under his eyes had almost gone.

‘I've brought Matty,' I announced brightly, as I always did. Matty paused at his name, then carried on shovelling stones with his fingers.

‘He's staying with me for a few days,' I went on.

Dad blinked.

‘So we're both enjoying that.'

‘Bee,' said Matty, pointing at a fly on the wall above him.

‘Not a bee,' I said. ‘Just a fly. Dirty fly. Bleah.'

Dad cleared his throat, like someone about to speak.

I waited, but nothing came.

‘Anyway, it's great to have him, but it is making life a bit tricky, because I'm having to take him to nursery the mornings I'm in the shop, and it's the wrong direction so that adds an extra half an hour to the journey. Cutting across from Nunheath isn't an option because I have to come back for Josh next door; I can't suddenly tell him to start taking the school bus. Although I suppose he could, but it's messing his mum about, and she's enough on. You remember Josh's mum? Laverne?'

We used to joke about Laverne, how thin she was. ‘Not as far through as a tram ticket,' Dad used to say. ‘She daresn't step over a grid in case she falls through.'

Matty laughed suddenly. ‘All-gone,' he said.

‘What has, sweetheart? Oh.'

He'd found a cup of cold tea I'd managed to miss on first inspection, had tipped it onto the floor in the space between his legs and was measuring the effect of liquid on nylon fibre. I took the cup off him and placed it out of reach. Then I dabbed up the pool with a handful of tissues. Not for nothing do they have mottled-pattern carpets here.

‘Hey, I've got your Scooby car with me,' I told him. ‘And let's see if Nanna doesn't have a packet of raisins for a good boy.' I extracted both items from my bag, then came and knelt beside him so I could lay the raisins out in a row across the little table. He likes it when I do that, and I needed him to be occupied, to let me think for a minute. There's a fine line between being a distraction and a nuisance.

Above me, Dad sighed. I got up and went back to the chair.

‘I was thinking on the way here,' I said, leaning forward in the hope I might catch his interest, ‘do you remember when Jaz was little, and you let her help make a bird scarer for your veg?'

For a second I thought he was nodding in acknowledgement, but it was just a wobble of the head.

‘Do you remember,' I went on, ‘all the milk bottle tops and foil pie cases and strips of tinsel she tied on? And there was a budgie bell and a couple of old forks, strung on about a mile of twine. How many pegs did you use in the end? I know it was more bird scarer than garden when she'd finished. I've a photo of it somewhere. And we were watching out the kitchen window, it had only been up an hour, and this jackdaw came down and started taking the tinsel off. Pulling away at it, like it was a worm. Do you remember, Dad? I thought she'd hurt herself with laughing so much. You said, “I reckon you've made a bird disco, Jaz”. She thought that was fantastic.'

I paused, because you can do that with Dad. Silences are OK. Over in the corner Matty was busy squashing raisins under car wheels, but overlaid with that was an image of his mother, aged about nine, clapping her hands to her face with delight.

‘It's different being a grandparent, isn't it?' I said. ‘I know there were times, when she was growing up, Jaz would talk to you when she wouldn't to me. Not that I minded. What I say is, thank God there was someone she
would
talk to.'

Outside the room a trolley rattled; someone shouted a greeting. Matty's car fell off the table, scattering raisins.

‘I went to a talk on nineteen thirties' suburban architecture last week,' I said, because as well as long silences, non-sequiturs are also fine when you're talking to Dad. Whatever pops into your head, really. ‘Gwen from the gym invited me. It was good, you'd have loved it. All houses like Sunnybank, and Pincroft. The speaker was saying how few Thirties buildings still have their proper metal windowframes, and I felt like sticking my hand up and shouting, “Mine has!”.'

Dad's eyes were empty, but I never let that put me off. Because it's like they say about comas: you can have someone lying there apparently unconscious, and then when they wake up they can tell you word for word what they've heard people saying around them. And Matty, months before he could speak, could point to all sorts. You'd go, ‘Where's the light?' And his arm would ping straight up. ‘Where's the car?' And he'd swivel to the window. So just because Dad's so quiet doesn't mean he's not still with us at some deep level. And the strange thing is, I can tell this dad things I would never have been able to before.

I reached out for his hand.

‘Do you ever wonder,' I said, ‘what would have happened if you'd taken different decisions in your life? I do. If I'd stuck with Phil, say, and made more of an effort to blot out what was going on, how Jaz would have turned out. Or should I have kicked him into touch right at the start, when I first found out? Would that have been better? I wish now I'd confided in you, but coping with someone else's upset on top of your own . . . And Mum would have gone, “I told you so”. Sometimes I used to imagine you coming round to our house and punching him in the face. I want to punch Ian. I want to sock him in the jaw.'

The shadows on the wall were focusing and unfocusing as the sunlight altered; Matty's fly crawled across the headboard.

‘Jaz must think it's all men ever do. Sorry, sorry, Dad. Not you, obviously.'

Someone far off was playing Glenn Miller.

‘Or David. Oh, did I tell you he'd rung? I made a hash of that, too. Typically. They'll put it on my headstone:
Tried Hard, Made Everything Worse
.'

And just as I was thinking I shouldn't have mentioned graves, the sun came out, making a tiny brilliant spotlight from my watch appear on the wall just by Dad's shoulder. Matty lifted his head, transfixed. ‘That?' he said. For fun I jiggled my wrist so the spot danced about, and within seconds he'd left his pot of gravel and was up by the bedhead, tugging at the nearest pillow in an attempt to reach it.

‘Careful,' I said, torn between delight and concern.

Matty slapped his palm against the wall. Slowly Dad turned his head, like a man trying to locate a sound in thick fog.

I made the beam slide down to the end of the bed, out of Dad's way, and Matty followed it, patting the bedcover. There I let the light play on his fingers and he stood still for a moment, puzzling. At the same time, Dad shifted so his right arm came out from under the covers, and now you could see both sets of flesh within touching distance: the chubby unblemished, and the freckled slack.

The scene held me. Were Dad's eyes watching Matty, or were they fixed on some point beyond him? If I had my camera, if I took a photo now, would the picture turn out happy or sad?

CHAPTER 4

Photograph: newspaper clipping between the pages of a Christmas 1967
Woman's Realm
inside Carol's bureau, Sunnybank
.

Location: the square outside the Red Lion, Tannerside

Taken by: the
Bolton Evening News

Subject:
The Big Switch-On
reads the caption
. Tannerside's Tree of Light is illuminated by councillors Bob White and Tommy Pharaoh.

At the base of this twenty-foot Douglas fir, the two men shake hands. There's been a good turn-out despite the drizzle – too many people for them all to fit into the shot. Carol, Councillor White's daughter, just squeezes in, though she's not actually that keen to appear in the local rag wearing this stupid tam o' shanter her mother forced over her ears before she was allowed out. ‘You want to try looking smart, for once,' said Frieda
.

For all the icy wind and headgear humiliation, Carol's enjoyed the walk up, just her and her dad together
.

‘How you doing?' he asks.

‘Happy as a sandbag,' Carol says
.

A standard and much-loved exchange
.

When they draw near the cemetery and a car slooshes through a puddle, soaking them both, Bob goes, ‘There's nowt like good manners, and that was nowt like it.' It's a turn of phrase which never fails to make Carol laugh
.

He has dozens of these sayings. They are who he is. Every time she drops something, he chirps, ‘Did it bite you?' If she complains that something's not fair, she gets, ‘Neither are th' hairs on a black pig's bum.' Then there are his nicknames: people from Horwich are ‘sleepers'; from Standish, ‘powyeds'; from Bolton, ‘trotters'; from Wigan ‘purrers'. Purrers sounds nice, thinks Carol, the first time she hears it. She pictures Tenniel's drawing of the Cheshire Cat, perched on the gates of Mesnes Park. But ‘purring', Bob enlightens her, means kicking someone with clogs on. It's all good fun
.

The only saying she can think of that her mother uses is, ‘Go rub it better with a brick.'