Unbecoming (25 page)

Tears welled in Mary’s eyes. ‘I was there,’ she whispered. ‘Just now I was there.’

Chris stood up and peered down at them both. ‘What’s going on?’

‘No idea.’

The two of them watched Mary cry. Katie felt useless. Chris rocked backwards and forwards on his heels. Heel, toe, heel, toe. He was humming too, which was a bad sign.

Katie was going to have to call Mum to come and get them. Mum would definitely go mad. She’d feel betrayed by Chris and stressed by Mary’s bizarre new behaviour and furious that Katie had abandoned them again and she’d ask questions about where Katie had been and why she lied and maybe she’d insist on immediately dumping Mary in that stupid care home.

Mum picked up on the first ring. ‘You found them? Is everyone OK?’

‘Mary’s a bit upset. Could you come and get us please?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Um, sorry, Mum, but … we’re at the old house.’

‘What do you mean, the old house?’ The chill in her voice was instant. ‘You mean
our
old house?’

‘Dad’s not here though, it’s OK. The whole place is locked up.’

‘I want you to get out of there right now.’

‘There’s loads of post on the mat, Mum. I think he’s probably on holiday.’

‘You’re not listening. I want you to leave.’

‘We can’t. We’re in the garden and Mary won’t move.’

‘Then make her.’

And it landed slap in Katie’s head that Mum wasn’t worried about Dad turning up. If the house was empty and he was clearly
away, then why couldn’t they just sit in the garden and wait? No, she was worried about something else.

‘Has Mary been here before, Mum?’

‘Katie, I’m not going to have a conversation with you. Now, just get her out of there. Bribe her – I don’t care what with – and start walking. I’ll call you when I’m close and see where you are.’

‘She’s more upset than I’ve ever seen her. She said she recognizes the house.’

‘She says a lot of things. Please, Katie, just do as I say and I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’m going to put the phone down now.’

Guilty. Guilty. Katie could hear it in her voice. Mum was definitely hiding something.

Mum got the doctor round. She was kind and sat on the sofa next to Mary and asked her questions. Mary was slow in her responses, she struggled to find words and once lost the thread of conversation completely, at which point she patted the doctor’s hand and told her she was lovely and the doctor said, ‘Well, you’re lovely too,’ and they both laughed.

The doctor thought Mary might have had a vascular incident, where her brain had temporarily been deprived of blood. She stood in the hallway with Mum and Katie and told them there wasn’t much anyone could do. The disease was progressing.

All Katie could think of was the forest analogy and how a whole copse had been destroyed in Mary’s head in one afternoon.

‘She’ll probably plateau out for a while,’ the doctor said. ‘You might get a good few weeks or months before the next incident.’ She looked sadly at Mum. ‘It’s hard for you. Home-based care is tough on everyone.’

Mum went and ruined it by saying Mary wasn’t supposed to be living with them, how everyone was passing the buck and no one seemed to care. ‘Sixty nights she’s been here,’ Mum said. She made it sound terrible. She made it sound like she had a calendar where she crossed each night off with a permanent marker.

Mum asked the doctor if she’d write to mental health services
and try and get Mary up the list for a care home and the doctor said, of course, she’d do anything to help.

‘She’s wet the bed a couple of times recently,’ Mum said. ‘All the sheets had to be changed and the mattress wiped and aired and turned over. I had to persuade her into the bath and put her night clothes in the wash and make sure they were dry again by bedtime, because she’ll only wear one particular nightie. Once, it was more than just a wee, if you know what I mean. There was a terrible mess.’

Katie swallowed hard. Why hadn’t Mum told her any of this? Was it even true, or was she trying to make things sound desperate for the doctor’s benefit?

‘I can’t understand why dementia is treated so differently from other illnesses,’ Mum said. ‘If she had cancer she’d be whisked into hospital with board and lodging thrown in. But with dementia, we’re all fighting each other over care home places and we’re supposed to see it like a hotel and pretend it’s marvellous, and only fair that we top up the fees ourselves. All my mother’s money, every bit she’s earned over her lifetime, will be eaten up. It’s not her fault she’s sick, is it? Why don’t we ask cancer sufferers to pay for their care?’

The GP had no answer, but she patted Mum’s arm sympathetically and said she’d write the letter that evening, and Mum could pick it up at the surgery in the morning.

‘It was Dad’s house that freaked her out,’ Katie said as Mum closed the door. ‘Mary recognized it. I’m telling you, we just to need to find out why and she’ll feel much better.’

‘And I’m telling you,’ Mum snapped, ‘that I’ll feel much better when you stop playing the amateur detective.

‘She’s got a blue blank.’

‘A what? What are you talking about?’

‘Blue for sad and blank for forgetting. Jack made it up. She’s
mentioned it a few times. It describes how she feels when she gets upset and doesn’t know why. Do you think that’s what’s going on when she cries at night?’

‘Did you hear what I just said?’ Mum looked old and bitter as the words twisted out of her. ‘What she needs more than anything is reliable care. I thought I could trust you, Katie, and you left her. You lied to me, then rushed off on a date with some random boy and abandoned your responsibilities completely.’

‘I was gone a couple of hours. I didn’t know Chris would take her there, did I?’

‘Just imagine if Dad had been in! How mortifying that would have been.’

‘Has Mary been there before though? Did she ever visit or anything?’

‘Would you just stop with this, Katie! What’s got into you? I can’t be doing with this now.’

She knew something. She definitely did and there were only three ways to find out what. The first was to ask Mary, and given she was so unwell, that was a no-no. The second was to ask Dad. After all, Mary had mentioned his name at the care home.

‘Email him,’ Katie told Chris. They were in his room, away from Mum’s prying eyes. ‘Tell him to meet us.’

Chris was elated. He thought Katie was keeping her promise. It hurt to watch him write:
Do you want to meet up? I’d really like it
. He added a whole row of kisses and grinned like Christmas was coming when he pressed send.

It only took Dad fifteen minutes to send a reply saying how lovely it was to finally hear from Chris and how it had really made his day. He asked after Katie. He even asked after Mum. Then he asked if Mum knew that Chris had emailed? Because if she didn’t, Chris should probably tell her.

‘No way!’ Chris said.

Dad ended the email by saying that things had been tricky between him and Mum, but if Chris were to tell her that he was keen to meet up, perhaps she’d agree at last.
I’d love it
, he said. But then he went and ruined it by saying he was
on holiday in France
until August
(which explained the empty house)
so let’s do it after that
.

‘That’s another fortnight,’ Katie said. ‘Who goes on holiday that long?’

‘People with babies,’ Chris said gloomily.

When had Katie or Chris ever been on a holiday that lasted that long? Never, that’s when. But Dad didn’t mind gallivanting off with his new family for weeks on end. It made Katie want to cry, and that surprised her, because it was usually Chris who had all the feelings about Dad. It also made her want to go running to the café and tell Simona how shitty everything had turned out, but if she did that, Simona was hardly going to dish up sympathy, was she? She’d have a go at Katie for never replying to texts (seven, now), for pushing her, for acting like a coward, for asking for things she didn’t really want (Katie groaned inwardly whenever she thought of the words,
teach me
) and for generally wanting the strawberries and not the shit.

There was only one place left to look for the secrets of the past and it was the most illicit. If anyone ever betrayed Katie the way she planned to betray Mum, she’d never forgive them. But what choice did she have? She wanted Mary back. She wanted her well. She didn’t want her having vascular incidents every five minutes because she couldn’t remember something she wanted to remember. Katie had given her back her memory of the café and Victory Avenue and it had helped. Mary had been content. Well, going to Dad’s house had ruined that contentment and Mary clearly needed to understand why.

The next day, when Mum went off to collect the GP’s letter and take it the council offices, Katie made Chris a milkshake and set him up with snacks and her laptop so he could watch YouTube videos in the kitchen. She switched the TV on for Mary and then locked the front door and put the key safely in her pocket. She went upstairs to the room she shared with Mum and shut the door.

Katie told herself she could stop at any moment as she opened Mum’s wardrobe. She took a photo of how everything was in case Mum had set a trap – the gaps between clothes on the hangers, the particular angles of the shoes, the boots on their sides, the zipped plastic bags of jumpers, protected from moths in a neat row.

Katie put her winter gloves on. She knew it was ridiculous, as if not touching anything with her bare hands would make a moral difference, but she did it anyway.

She pushed the hangers to one side and picked up Mum’s grey box by its handle. It wasn’t heavy. She put it on the bed, then worried it would leave a mark on the duvet, so put it on the floor.

‘Only in an emergency,’ Mum always said. Well, given that an emergency is an urgent and unexpected occasion that requires immediate attention, this definitely counted. Although Katie imagined Mum wouldn’t agree with her if she ever found out.

The key on the hook was hanging at an angle and the green thread was twisted. Katie took another photo. It was useful growing up with a watchful mother. Katie had clearly learned some of her skills. They’d both make excellent detectives.

Her hands were trembling as she fitted the key into the lock and turned it. She could still stop, but she didn’t. She watched herself keep going. She lifted the lid.

There were four suspension files, all buff brown, each marked
with a sticker in Mum’s neat writing –
Finance, Insurance, Documents, Arrangements
. The writing made it worse, like she was about to look into Mum’s soul. If Katie went ahead with this, it would be, without doubt, the most terrible thing she’d ever done. This was Mum’s special box that she’d set up in the event of her death so that Katie would know what to do, how to handle things and manage her affairs. She was a cautious and careful mother who loved her children and Katie was about to betray her.

But Mary was downstairs with all her memories running out of her head like sand and Katie had to help. She had to keep guilt out of this. She nudged the file marked
Finance
tentatively open with a finger. She didn’t want to look at Mum’s bank statements, or take any money from the envelope marked ‘cash’, but she did need to check there was nothing relevant to Mary in each file. Knowing Mum, she’d hide the real secrets in the most unlikely place. But apart from her Post Office card and the savings book for the account Dad had set up (and Mum refused to use), there was nothing.

Insurance
was the thickest file, but only because Mum clearly never threw any policy records away, keeping old booklets alongside the current ones for both home and car insurance. Katie flicked through them all in case Mum had hidden anything between pages. Nothing. At the back were her life insurance documents. Sum assured: £500,000. Term of cover: life. There followed a list of things Mum wasn’t insured to do, which began with mountaineering and potholing and went through loads of activities she’d never dream of doing anyway and ended with skydiving, base jumping and motorcycle racing. Right at the bottom it stated they also wouldn’t pay out if Mum died during a war or if she took an accidental drug overdose or committed suicide.

Katie wondered if Pat’s life had been insured and, if so, if her
insurance company had refused to pay out. She’d never learned to swim, after all. Pretty silly to go in the sea …

The next file was marked
Arrangements
, which sounded odd – arrangements for what? Inside was a single typed sheet of paper, headed
Funeral
. The top half was a list of people Mum wanted contacted if she died. There were email addresses and phone numbers for Dad, people at work and organizations, such as the mortgage company and the bank. Christ, imagine phoning total strangers up and telling them Mum was dead. Imagine phoning Dad up! Would he come back from holiday? Would they have to go and live with him? The second half of the page was headed
Plot
and had the address and phone number of a funeral director, along with the fact – the gruesome and terrifying fact – that Mum had already paid for her funeral and gravestone and the plot was number seventy-eight in the cemetery in North Bisham – ‘
the plot can accommodate three, so depending on the circumstances of my death, there could be room for all of us
.’

Katie sat back on her heels and laid her hand in a patch of sunlight that splashed the carpet. She tried not to think of how deep graves were – how dark, how terrible to have all that mud pressing down on you. She tried not to think of the circumstances that would require her to be buried with Mum and Chris – a car crash, a psychopath, a gas explosion. She tried not to think of the girls at school who would come to the funeral and witness that even in death Katie wasn’t allowed to separate from her mother. But the thoughts came crashing in anyway, along with a feeling of utter claustrophobia, like she couldn’t breathe, like the walls were pressing in and the windows had shrunk.

If they all died today, Katie would be buried in North Bisham for all eternity. Her bones entwined with Mum’s, the same soil plugging their mouths, the same earth weighing them down. How dare
Mum make arrangements for Katie’s funeral when she wasn’t even dead! What if she wanted to be cremated? What if she wanted to be buried in a wood, somewhere beautiful? Why, even in death, did Mum get to make all the decisions?

Katie raced through the last file, but
documents
held nothing other than child benefit letters, medical cards, birth certificates and the divorce papers Dad sent months ago that Mum wouldn’t sign (let him take me to court). Dad had cited Mum’s unreasonable behaviour as cause for divorce, stating that she was emotionally absent from the marriage and frequently displayed a patronising and condescending attitude to him. Great! Another thing Katie didn’t need to know.

She felt furious as she spaced the files back along their runners. Her dad was prepared to say anything to get shot of them and her mum was planning everyone’s funeral. She felt sick. You can’t unknow things. You can’t shove information to the back of your mind and not have it hurt you. You can lie to yourself (she jumped me, honest!), you can refuse to think about it (just drop it, Katie, OK?). You can even get dementia and have memories fall away. But the really important ones are like blue blanks in your head – they have an emotional charge that never leaves. They spill and hurt and damage.

The files didn’t look right. Too neat? Too far apart from each other? She should’ve taken a photo of the interior of the box. She ran the files to the top end and squashed them together to see if that looked more familiar and that’s when she saw the book lying along the bottom of the box. It was grey, easy to miss, camouflaged. The story of Bluebeard flickered in her head – the last key, the last room, the secret that awaited his innocent wife behind a closed door.

Sod it. She swung the files to the other end and lifted it up, turned it over. It was marked
Diary 1968
in gold letters. On the first page,
Property of Patricia Dudley (née, Todd), Strictly Private
.