Hard Word (9 page)

‘Grandma Vera's sick. She's got this disease.' Because I've put two and two together by then, and worked it out.

‘What disease?' Philip says.

‘Alts-heimer's,' I say. ‘It's a fear of heights,' I tell him, and I know this is right because she's been complaining of being dizzy all the time.
Vertigo,
the doctor had called it. ‘She's got altitude sickness,' I tell Philip. ‘And vertigo.'

‘Altitude sickness?' he says. ‘I see.'

And he goes vague then like he often does, and you can tell he's started thinking about something else. Philip's always like that. He's not like Mum at all, and you can get away with murder with him. If I've been hanging round the Mall or the Plaza with my friends instead of coming straight home like I'm supposed to, and Philip says, ‘You're late, aren't you?' or ‘Where have you been?', I can say something like, ‘I had to pick up a couple of things,' or ‘I had one or two friends I suddenly needed to see,' and he'll go ‘Ohh –' just like that, and that'll be it, the vaguer you are the better, which is strange because he's supposed to be a lawyer and ask questions like,
What couple of friends?
and
Who?
and
What?
and
Where
?Like it's a trial. But you can't do that with Mum. She wants to know What friends precisely? and When precisely? and Where precisely?
Precisely
is her favourite word in situations like that.

And the other thing is, once she's got over being mad at me because I'm late, she really wants to know things. Like, if I say I've been with Toni and Jane and I say one of them thinks some boy is a spunk, she goes, ‘Oh, and who said that, was it Toni or Jane?' And she's really interested. Imagine Philip ever asking if it was Toni or Jane who said some boy was a spunk – Philip can't even remember my friends' names, except Toni's because she's here so much and she's good-looking, especially her legs are long and very sexy – Mum says she's got the most beautiful legs and ankles she's ever seen on a girl her age – and Philip can't take his eyes off her especially if she's got short shorts on or tight jeans. I think sometimes Toni does it deliberately because she thinks Philip's a spunk himself – and I always have to say, ‘Philip a spunk? Yeeech' – and she flirts with him and says, ‘Oh, Mr Trent,' when he cracks one of his useless jokes. Though he's not as bad, I admit, as some of the kids' parents who are mostly about a thousand years old and bald or fat and can only come to Speech Night on walking sticks or in a wheel-chair and go to sleep as soon as they sit down and come up to you afterwards and go, ‘What a lovely play,' when it wasn't a play at all but choral singing, or a gymnastics display or something. But if I'm talking with Mum, instead of Philip, and I say it was Toni who said some boy was a spunk, Mum'll go, ‘And what did Jane say? Did she agree?' And it's like she's there and seeing it all, like a play or something, and it makes you want to go through it again and you see it all a different way when you're telling it to someone else, and I often think when I'm telling it, Oh, that was smart, or That was dumb, when I didn't think that at all when it actually happened.

Alz …
Alzheimer's.

I remember something else from that day – the day we first went to see Dr Gerontics. I was saying goodnight to Mum and she said, not mad or anything, but just like in a conversation as if she was asking you if you wanted a Milo or something before you went to bed:

‘You were rather rude at the doctor's today.'

‘Was I?' I said, knowing I was. But it didn't look like I was going to get a lecture or anything, so I said, as Mum herself often says, ‘Did that make it hard for you?'

‘No,' she said, ‘it didn't. And you were right to ask. I want you to do that. To learn to ask whenever you want to know something. And not be fobbed off.'

‘Teachers don't like you asking.'

‘Nor do doctors,' she said. ‘But that's what I want you to do.' And that's when she said it to me: ‘I want my daughter,' she said, and she smiled at me as she did so, ‘to grow up to be a difficult young woman.'

‘Difficult?'

‘You'll understand,' she said. ‘Soon enough.' And she put her fingers through my hair and pushed it back off my forehead like she does when she's being soppy or like she's remembering something from a long time ago.

And that's why – four years later – when we're arguing about my birthday party, I'm shocked when she gets really mad and shouts at me:

‘Laura Vassilopoulos, you can be a very difficult young woman.'

And I understand then there's difficult and difficult.

Philip

Laura's birthday party – Jesus, what a disaster. For her, I mean. Actually it was a storm in a teenage tea-cup, but you've got to see it from her perspective. I understand that.

We used to have these parties at home when I was her age – dozens of my father's business friends, their wives, girlfriends, golf partners. The men basically came to get plastered, and by ten o'clock they'd usually succeeded and there was no one left for the women to dance with. So I'd get wheeled out. ‘Dance with your Aunty Viv,' my mother would say, or Aunty Sarah or Chelsea – none of whom were aunts at all, of course. I'm not tall even now, but at fourteen I was a good foot and a half shorter than most of my aunts. And when they danced, they clung, and poured over me, and I was like a fence post or mailbox holding them up. I'd end the night with swollen eyes, not just from peering for hours into their cleavages but from the brooches and necklaces and pendants I'd have moulded into my face. I've hated dancing with older women ever since. Miriam apart, of course. But she's only eighteen months older than me, and exactly the same height, so I don't have to spend half the night trying to hide an erection or keeping it from getting caught between her knees.

For Laura's party we seem, in the end, to reach a neat compromise. The rest of the family – Miriam and me, Mother, Katie, and Yogi of course – all agree to stay at the back of the house in Mother's flat. That way Laura can have the whole of the main house to herself, and people can sleep over, and yet we'll still be there, near at hand, if she needs us. Katie and Yogi will sleep in Mother's bedroom, and Miriam and I will doss down on a couch in her sitting room. These are the arrangements.

By nine-thirty, so far as we can tell, the party's going just fine. We've heard cars pulling up in the street outside, and an occasional parent's or adult's voice calling out times, instructions, arrangements. Music's now pounding away in the front rooms – but not too loud or metallic – and boys' and girls' voices and laughter sometimes come through the wall to us. Miriam and I look at each other a couple of times, smile, shrug, begin to relax. We've even brought a bottle of champagne. Which we now feel it safe to open.

‘Can I have some?' Katie says.

‘A half-glass,' Miriam says. ‘Otherwise you'll be sick or wetting the bed.'

‘I like it,' Katie says. ‘I've had it before. It goes up my nose.' ‘Mother?' I say, raising the bottle. ‘Mother?'

Mother looks up from the TV, nods, and says, ‘But none of the things.'

‘Just a drink, then?' I say. ‘No pretzels. Is that what you mean?' ‘No,' she almost howls.
‘No things
.'

‘Mother,' I say. ‘I'm just asking you –'

‘Bubbles, Dad,' Katie says. ‘She wants it, but she doesn't want any bubbles in it.'

‘She wants me to take the bubbles out of the champagne?' ‘Just pour it for her, darling,' Miriam says. ‘Please?'

I pour, and she wolfs it down. And another – as if it were lemonade, the bubbles streaming up from the bottom of the glass. She looks at them.

‘That's a good idea,' she says happily, and holds out her glass for more. Just to watch the bubbles, I think.
Enough,
Miriam signals from behind her, and after that I only pretend to pour. Which seems nonetheless to satisfy her. At ten she and Katie retire to her bedroom, Mother still carrying her glass. Twenty minutes later Miriam goes in to say goodnight. She finds them in bed. Katie is reciting her poems, Mother lying mesmerized as she watches the last few bubbles drifting upwards in the yellow lamplight.

Miriam and I settle on the couch then to watch the late-night movie, hoping that by one or two o'clock, the music – which is louder now but still not offensive – will moderate enough to let us sleep. Or at least doze.

Which is what must have happened, because the very next second, it seems, Laura is at the door of the flat, yelling and distraught.

‘Will you please come and do something?' she cries.

Miriam – like me, half-awake – jerks up from the couch. ‘What is it? Laura, what's wrong?'

The music from next door is still going, but it's softer, and there's an eerie feeling that takes me a moment to identify. Where before there'd been voices, the occasional shout, sporadic laughter, now there's only – beyond the music – a strange kind of silence.

‘She's ruining everything,' Laura shouts. ‘People are laughing, and I hate her, and I wish she'd never come here.'

‘Laura, talk sense,' Miriam shouts back, frightened now. ‘Who? What? What are you talking about?'

Miriam's fear finally gets through to Laura. She takes a deep breath – she's still half-choking, and there's water on her cheeks, but she makes an effort to speak clearly.

‘It's Grandma Vera. She's ruined everything.'

‘Grandma Vera? But she's asleep,' Miriam says. ‘She's in her bed.'

‘She's out there,' Laura says, jabbing her finger towards the front of the house, ‘and I'll never be able to face anyone or go to school ever again.'

‘But she can't be –'

‘Stop saying that,' Laura screams. ‘She's out there in her nightie, and she's dancing with David because he didn't know how to say no. She's ruined everything.'

Miriam and I push past her through the family room and kitchen where a number of boys are standing around, looking at their feet and giggling. In the sitting room, Mother shuffles in a slow, clinging embrace with a young boy who gazes out over her shoulder. He looks startled and red even in these lowest of lights, and seems almost in tears himself.

‘Mother!' Miriam says, and detaches her from the boy. ‘Mother, what are you doing out here?'

Mother's eyes register nothing – point zero on the Richter scale of awareness. She's either walking asleep or miles away, lost in some time warp.

‘Aloe Vera,' her lips do just move.

‘Mother, please, you must go back to bed,' Miriam is saying. ‘I'm sorry,' she says to the boy. Laura hasn't followed us, and the boy is left dangling, isolated in the circle of space cleared around him by the other young people. They are mostly smirking, though one or two of the girls look embarrassed or swing about uncertainly on one heel. ‘I'm sorry,' Miriam says again, ‘I don't know how she …' She stops then, but all of us, I've no doubt, are left listening to the unspoken echo of
got loose.

‘S'alright, Mrs Trent-Harcourt,' says the boy, still scarlet, and now hunching and twisting his shoulders. ‘I didn't mind.'

Miriam takes Mother by her arms and points her towards the door. ‘I'll be back,' she says over her shoulder, but this just seems to worry the boy more …

* *

‘How on earth did it happen?' Miriam says later, as we sit again on the couch in Mother's flat. The party's still going next door, but it's obviously fallen flat now, a sad, dispirited thing. It's taken Miriam the best part of an hour to get Laura to unlock the door of her bedroom and rejoin her friends. The few who are left. Her life, she's made clear, is finished. She will never go to school again. ‘How,' Miriam now wants to know, ‘did Mother get past us?'

‘Well,' I say, ‘we obviously dozed off, watching that useless movie. And she sneaked past.'

‘But the alarm? You hadn't turned it off?'

‘No, of course not. But we'd never have heard it, with all the rest of that noise.'

‘Poor Laura.'

The next day – a Sunday – none of us is really at our best. Laura keeps to her room, while Mother gives all appearance of being hung over. Only Katie is bright, and has to be quietened. ‘God, poor Laura,' Miriam is still saying.

‘She'll get over it,' I say. Largely for Miriam's sake.

‘She feels she just can't face people. The boy in particular, I suppose.'

‘What happened to him?'

‘He bolted apparently. As soon as we'd taken Mother out.'

‘That was a bit extreme.'

‘Philip, he's a fifteen-year-old kid, sixteen at most. He'd just been humiliated in front of his friends. What would you have done? Stayed for lunch?'

‘Laura can explain. Surely?'

‘No, no, you don't understand,' Miriam says, pulling a face. ‘This boy – David – was actually the whole reason for the party.'

‘The whole
reason?
But it was for her birthday …'

‘You really don't get it, do you? David's
the
boy, the one from the swimming pool. The one Laura's had her eye on for ages. Remember, I told you about him …'

‘Oh. Maybe we
should
have gone away, then. To Brian's, or somewhere.'

‘Philip, how could we? Taking Mother anywhere now,' she says, ‘is like crossing the Red Sea.'

And suddenly then the party's behind us and we're into one of those endless, circular conversations. How we get there I'll never know, but it's as if this is where we've been heading all along.

‘You never get a break from Mother,' I say at some point.

‘Philip, I'm not complaining. I'm merely explaining how hard it is to get away. I talked to Laura before the party, and she understood.'

‘Still it
is
true. You never get a break.'

‘I haven't asked for one.'

‘Not in so many words.'

This, I realize, is beginning to get very tense. Neither of us has slept well. We both have headaches, guilt over Laura.

‘Well, thank you, Dr Freud,' Miriam says. ‘If I need psychoanalysis, I'll see a specialist.'

‘Miriam,' I say, letting the sarcasm go by. ‘You're pushing yourself too hard.'

‘So what am I suppose to do? Clone Mrs Johnson?'

‘Old Fatso?' I say. ‘You haven't even got one of her any more. Remember?'

‘Oh, Jesus, that's right. With all this …' she says, and puts her hand to her forehead. ‘I'll ring her this afternoon. She'll have come round by now. She has before.'

‘Besides,' I say, ‘Mrs Johnson's only here when you're out, doing things, shopping, teaching, exhausting yourself anyway.'

‘Teaching doesn't exhaust me.'

‘Okay, okay, but it does take energy.'

‘Philip, it
gives
energy.'

Miriam keeps saying this, but I simply don't see it. The college she works for is always under pressure, always short of cash, and every evening she comes back from teaching she's tearing her hair about some new insane efficiency drive the Principal has come up with. And usually in her area – migrants, refugees – where nobody actually cares. Christ, I've even had to write letters myself to get her students out of jail. Literally. Which reminds me.

‘What about Brian?' I say. ‘You'd think Brian would want to do something. To help out.'

‘Brian –?' Miriam says. In astonishment. ‘But Brian's a man.' ‘Now hang on,' I say. ‘That's stupid. I'm a man, aren't I? I'm here, I'm supporting …'

‘Yes, but what if it was
your
mother? Would you do what I'm doing?'

‘My mother?' I say. ‘What's my mother got to do with it? There's nothing wrong with
her
.'

‘Oh?'

‘Well, at least she's not a nut-case.'

‘My-mother …' Miriam says very carefully, and I remember what Laura once said to me about lip reading and Miriam being a great potential teacher of the deaf, ‘is-not-a-nut-case, as you so charmingly put it. She happens to be sick, that's all. And if you're so –'

Selfish, insensitive, egotistical, unfeeling –

‘Darling,' I say quickly, ‘let's not quarrel. We're both under pressure. I don't want to quarrel with you.'

‘Quarrel,' she says, opening the fridge door and letting a wall of icy air fall out into the room between us. ‘Who's quarrelling?'

It takes Miriam the rest of the day to thaw, but by the end of it she's talked Mrs Johnson into giving it one last go with Mother, and is feeling better.

‘You know,' she says, ‘I think deep down Mrs Johnson would rather miss Mother.'

‘You mean like Hitler would miss the Jews?'

She even allows herself to smile at that. For the moment, this leaves only Laura to worry about. By Sunday night Laura still hasn't appeared, and I know her words about hating Grandma Vera and wishing she'd never come here and her threat about never going back to school are still weighing heavily on Miriam. But this is territory I'm reluctant to get into. Laura is Miriam's daughter, not mine. Grandma Vera is Miriam's mother, not mine. The decisions about them have to be hers, and I've always supported her. But sometimes I feel I
know
Miriam actually wants me to press her more, even challenge her. To take some of the responsibility off her. But in the end, I don't. It's better, safer to stay out – even if it's a bit gutless. If I were more certain, I might have more courage.

‘Are you going to talk to Laura?' I ask her.

‘I've tried. I'll give her until the morning,' she says doubtfully. In her own mind, I think, she's already allowed Laura a day or two off school.

In the event, none of these worries are justified. Come Monday morning, Laura's up before any of us. She's already had her breakfast, has her uniform on, immaculately pressed, and is stacking the dishwasher when we come into the kitchen.

‘Darling –' Miriam says in astonishment.

Laura is transformed. Overnight she's emerged from the chrysalis of teenage rage and hurt and pouty-mouthed petulance. More than that, she looks as though she's made some crucial life decision. Her eyes, though dark ringed, are clear, her gaze direct. Instead of her hair tumbling in an unruly black mane about her neck and shoulders, it is pulled back in a tight, tidy ponytail, giving her face a stretched look – as Miriam herself sometimes used to have – suddenly making you aware of the fineness of her eyes and bones. Even Miriam is finding it hard to get her mind to adjust. To this new Laura.