The Storyteller's Daughter (33 page)

Down, down into the abyss.

I wake with a start to find myself lying on my mother's bed, my heart thumping in my chest. The curtains are open and I can see the moon hanging in the sky, casting a ghostly bluish glow across the room. I quickly tug my jumper off, throwing it onto the floor, and flap the bottom of my tshirt, a chill running up my spine as the hot sweat on my skin immediately starts to cool. I look around for the clock before realising I have packed it away in one of the several cardboard boxes lying scattered across the floor. The house is silent and still. There is nobody here except me, all alone, surrounded by my mother's packaged up belongings.

I gaze around at my mother's empty room; the bare dressing table, the naked shelves, the wardrobe with its doors flung open and nothing inside but a few lonely hangers. There is only one thing that I seem to have missed and I spy it now from where I sit on the bed. On the windowsill, half-concealed behind the curtain, is something square and white.

I stand up and walk over to the window, picking up the little white book, slowly turning it over in my hands. Carefully I trace the title on the front cover, printed in large blue letters,
The Tale of
the Jiggly Wop.
How is it, I wonder, that this book keeps finding its way back to me? My mother must have taken this out of my wastepaper bin when I threw it away all those weeks ago, the day I arrived home from university. This story that she read to me over and over again when I was a little girl may have no longer had a place in my life, but it still had a place in hers. I open the front cover tentatively, my heart thumping anxiously, as if all the memories of my mother are kept inside and I am afraid to look at them.

‘In a land far away, there lived a creature that didn't know quite what it was… '

I bring the book up to my face and breathe in the scent of its pages. I'm sure I can still smell the rose water that my mother wore when I was a little girl, the scent of the hot chocolate I drank at bedtime, the washing power she used that left my duvet smelling of peaches. I close my eyes and see us there, me tucked up cosily in my bed, my mother sitting on the mattress beside me, stroking my hair as I listen to the soft tones of her voice.

‘It had huge ears like an elephant, a flowing mane like a lion, webbed feet like a duck, a stripy body like a tiger and its face was all covered in feathers that made it sneeze.'

In my mind's eye I see myself, a little girl with fine brown hair, giggling, finding something funny about the idea of the Jiggly Wop sneezing because of its own feathers. I am small and warm nestled against the pillows, sucking my thumb and gazing at my mother's beautiful face in wonder, thinking how clever she is to be reading this book with so many big words. There is Blue Bear sitting on the bedside table, and my colouring book on the floor. I am in a room that I have never before remembered, but which suddenly floods back to me with absolute clarity. This must be my room at our house in Brighton, I realise, the house we shared with that man that I called daddy. This is the first time I have ever remembered anything from before I was five, but there it is, a perfectly clear picture in my mind, as if it was only yesterday.

‘… and so the Jiggly Wop saw that the old baboon was right, and off he went on his merry way, back to the place where he belonged.'

‘Read it again,' I beg my mother, as she shuts the book.

‘No, Darling, it's time to sleep now.'

She leans over and kisses me gently on the forehead. Her hair, hanging in long auburn locks, tickles my face and smells of spice and roses.

‘Goodnight mummy,' I say, sleepily, as she tucks Blue Bear under the duvet with me, ‘I love you.'

‘Sweet dreams, Meg May,' she whispers, switching out the light, ‘I love you more.'

I open my eyes to find my reflection staring back at me from the blackness of the window, the little book clutched to my chest, fat tears rolling down my cheeks. The pain is so bad that I can barely breathe, my body shuddering with the great sobs that catch in my throat and make me gasp for air. I double over with agony. It feels like someone has reached inside me and grabbed my insides, twisting them mercilessly into a tighter and tighter knot. My legs give way and I collapse onto my knees, tears streaming down my face and falling onto the pages of the book, running over the beautiful lettering, soaking the colourful illustrations.

I don't know how long I have been lying on the floor, worrying the fringe of my mother's bedroom rug between my fingers, lost in thoughts of despair, when I hear a noise from downstairs. One hour? Two, maybe? Who knows. Time has lost its meaning now, just as everything has. I lift my head up slowly, my temples pounding from all the crying, and listen for a moment. There it is again. A small, scratching noise. It could be an intruder, I think, breaking in to murder me. I lay my head back on the carpet. I really don't care. Why would it matter anyway?

But the noise continues, getting louder and louder, and added to the scratching there is a high-pitched whining. After a couple of minutes I slowly haul myself to my feet, supposing that if it is an intruder I probably should make some attempt to find out. I stagger down the stairs, my head heavy and painful, flicking on light switches as I go, throwing the house into a brightness that stings my red, swollen eyes. The noise is coming from outside in the garden. Once I would have been anxious, terrified even, wondering who was lurking out there in the darkness so late in the evening, but right now I am too dead inside to care. I carelessly throw open the kitchen door and there on the patio, illuminated by a square of light from the kitchen window, sits Digger, looking at me with his head cocked to one side.

“What do you want?” I ask, confused, my voice groggy.

Cautiously, Digger comes towards me with his head lowered and his ears back, his tail wagging submissively. I crouch down and put my arms around his neck, burying my face in his fur.

“You miss her too, don't you?” I whisper.

He snuffles around my ear, licking my face.

“Me too,” I say.

“He was worried about you.”

I look up to see Ewan stepping forward out of the shadows.

“We both were.”

I stare at him, feeling dazed and numb. He has changed out of his smart suit and back into jeans, more like the Ewan I recognise. I have never seen him wearing a jacket before though, and there is something about the way he buries his chin deep inside his collar and pushes his hands into his pockets that makes me sad. Why can't things be just as they were a few weeks ago when the sun was warm, the vegetable patches still overflowing, and my mother still here beside me?

“I know it's late,” says Ewan, “but I tried calling and there was no reply. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” He studies me, an expression of concern on his face. “
Are
you okay?” he asks when I don't reply.

I am so exhausted, so defeated, that it doesn't even occur to me to lie. “No,” I tell him, wearily, fresh tears springing to my eyes, “I don't think I am.”

“I put all her stuff in boxes,” I tell Ewan, forlornly, as we stand in the doorway of my mother's bedroom.

In the full-length mirror on the wall opposite, the only thing I have not been able to pack away, I see us both, Ewan gazing around the room in dismay, and me shivering in my funeral dress with tousled hair and bright red eyes, chewing anxiously on my thumbnail. I look a state, but I am past caring.

“Do you really want all her stuff in boxes?” Ewan asks, gently, as if I am a dotty old woman who has done something incredibly foolish.

“No,” I croak, my voice hoarse from sobbing, “no, I want it all back exactly as it was.”

Slowly he opens the nearest box, watching me carefully as if he's not sure quite what I'll do next.

“Okay then,” he says, cautiously, “then let's put it all back.”

I am stressing Ewan out, I know I am. When he makes me a chamomile tea to calm my nerves he makes himself one too, something that I have never seen him do before. Every time he takes an item from one of the boxes and places it somewhere in my mother's room I tell him to move it an inch to the left, no, an inch to the right, slightly lower, a bit higher. Somewhere deep inside I know this is only temporary, that sometime soon, not very far in the future, I will have to pack her things away again, but for now everything must be exactly as she left it. For now it must feel, even if only for a little while, that she is still here with me.

As we unpack, I tell Ewan how my mother got that vase at a jumble sale in exchange for a treacle tart, how she painted that picture herself one warm Summer's day, how she gathered those pinecones for potpourri, how she found that shell on Brighton beach. I tell him all this because someone other than me should know. And all the time he listens patiently, working quietly beside me, not saying a word.

It takes us over two hours to put everything back where it belongs, and as I finally place my mother's clock back on her dressing table I see that it is nearly midnight. I am so exhausted that I can barely stand and the room seems to keep moving around me. Ewan switches on the TV to make sure it is working, having just re-connected the wires that I had pulled out and packed away in a box neatly labelled ‘Electrical Equipment'. On the screen appears an American woman with a pearly smile demonstrating the new five-way vegetable chopper. Her co-presenter, a man with teeth so white I think Ewan must have accidentally altered the colour, is helpfully handing her one carrot after another.

‘How long would it normally take someone to chop all those carrots, Jessica?'

‘Well, Brad, I'd say at least an hour, but look how quickly you can do it with the new five-way vegetable chopper. You just slide them in – '

‘Wow! That's incredible! Look how quickly they come out!'

“My mother used to love watching all the kitchen gadgets on the shopping channels,” I say wearily, sitting down on the edge of her bed, “it kept her entertained whenever she couldn't sleep. She would have bought everything on the show if she'd had the money.”

Ewan sits down on the little wooden chair next to the bed and gazes sleepily at Jessica and Brad demonstrating the different ways in which a cucumber can be sliced with various blade attachments.

I stretch out on the bed, exhausted. Digger jumps up beside me, snuggling next to me for warmth, and I put my arms around him.

“She was some woman, your mother,” murmurs Ewan.

I breathe in the reassuring scent of Digger's fur. He smells of mud and rain, reminding me of the garden, of my mother's love of nature. “She was my best friend,” I say, sadly.

We both stare blindly at the TV screen.

“I don't know what I'm going to do without her,” I confess, “I don't know how I'll cope. This house, the garden, I could never consider selling it, but it all seems too much.”

On the screen Jessica and Brad suddenly burst into laughter, as if cruelly mocking my feelings of inadequacy and incompetence.

“You don't have to do it all alone,” says Ewan, “it's okay to ask for help.”

“I'm not very good at asking for help. I can be stubborn at times.”

“Really?”

His sarcasm makes me smile to myself. How is it that he knows things about me I am only just realising myself?

“You always try to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.” “Like Atlas,” I say, yawning.

“Just like Atlas. And you don't have to carry all that weight alone.”

“But look at what happened to Atlas,” I say, sleepily, “he placed his trust in Hercules to help him carry the weight of the world and Hercules made a fool out of him. He tricked him and ran off laughing, leaving Atlas just looking stupid.”

“Maybe, but Atlas couldn't let that one bad experience tarnish his view of the world forever. He had a choice. He could choose never to really trust anyone ever again, or he could take a chance on someone new.”

‘So what's the catch, Jessica?' Brad is saying, ‘I mean, surely this offer is too good to be true.'

“So what did he choose?” I ask, closing my eyes, my words sounding distant in my own head. Digger's body is warm next to mine and his breathing is slow and deep. Even as I struggle to stay awake, waiting to hear Ewan's reply, I can feel myself drifting further and further away. The last thing I am aware of is a man's voice, perhaps Ewan's, perhaps Brad's, telling me I can trust him. In the weeks that follow my mother's death, my world takes on a dreamy, surreal quality as I go through the motions of starting to build a new life without her. There are papers to sign and solicitors to see, bills to pay, letters to write and people to notify. Throughout the day, as I go about my tasks, I switch the TV from one cookery programme to another so that in the background there is always something to remind me of her. I try cooking steak and kidney pie the way she taught me, and when the pastry burns I am overwhelmed with emotion and collapse on the floor sobbing. At night, in the silence of the empty house I cry, sitting on her bed clutching her jumpers to my face, breathing in her fast-disappearing scent. Each night I fall asleep with the image of her face in my mind, wondering how I will get through the next day without her.

But I always do. And slowly, without my even noticing, the agony turns to a pain that I can bear.

I receive letters from Gwennie who is holidaying in the South of France. She tells me what a delight it has been to find me after all these years, and in page after page of scrawled notes she shares her fondest memories of her friendship with my mother. She offers up further snippets of information about my past, slowly and cautiously drip-feeding me the truth, some of which hurts and some of which helps. I learn, for example, that Robert Scott died some years ago, and this seems to help me lay the past to rest. Whether my mother knew of his death I can't be sure, but the fact that he died in a freak butchery accident involving a pork mincer makes me wonder. I am grateful for Gwennie's honesty, but I don't ask her for information. There is always time, and besides, the truth doesn't seem so important as it once did. At the end of one of her letters Gwennie invites me to stay with her for Christmas, and to join her family at their home in Montpellier next Summer. “Any daughter of Valerie's is a daughter of mine,” she writes before signing off, making me smile and cry at the same time.