One for My Baby (27 page)

It goes on. We push and yield and neutralise, push and yield and neutralise, and soon I trust myself enough to close my eyes too, letting go of everything around me, to forget about the suits and Josh and person-hours and thinking outside the box, to forget that we haven’t spoken since I disgraced myself at his dinner party, to forget about hospital waiting rooms where they tell you there’s nothing that can be done, to forget the mist on the bare trees and my swollen lips and my chipped tooth, to just feel the light touch of skin against skin, to embrace the giving and taking, relaxing into the ebb and flow, just feeling what I need to do, and becoming what I need to become.

part three: oranges for christmas

thirty-one

Suddenly the little white flat is too much for my nan. Suddenly it is full of traps to remind you that it’s not the getting old that kills you. It’s the getting sick.

The stairs to her first-floor apartment are all at once too steep. She needs to pause to catch her breath on the little half-landing, gasping for air as if she is drowning, her face raised to the ceiling. The bath is suddenly too high to get into without somebody supporting her, so my mother or Plum or one of my nan’s female neighbours – and all of her neighbours are female – has to be there to help her in and out of the water. And the well-meaning bureaucrats of terminal illness are suddenly all knocking at her front door.

There is a cheerful district nurse who organises a social worker, meals on wheels once a day and a scarred metal air tank that stands guard by my nan’s favourite chair.

My nan wants to please the district nurse, just as she always wants to please everyone, but the little white flat is her home and although she knows these people are just trying to be helpful, she does not approve of the commode provided by the social worker (“I’m not doing my business in that, dear, thanks all the same”), the fetid meals on wheels are left untouched (“I’ll just have a bit of toast, sweetheart”) and the air tank makes no difference at all to her fits of terrible breathlessness (“I think it’s empty, love”).

But she carries on. She meets her old female friends for coffee and cake and talk, and the talk, the human connection, the human thing, is the point of those meetings. She comes to my mother’s house for lunch on Sunday, she makes her daily trips to the local shops for the tiny supplies of white bread and “a nice bit of ham” that she seems to live on, plus the river of tea and the biscuit mountain.

When she starts to feel uncertain on her feet, the social worker kindly produces a walking stick. My nan rolls her eyes that it has come to this, and brandishes her walking stick in imitation of a doddery old pensioner, which is pretty funny coming from her at this time.

“Ooh, I remember the good old days,” she jeers, waving her walking stick, and we all laugh, even the social worker.

My nan faces cancer in exactly the same way that she has faced life – with good grace, with endless stoicism, with quiet humour.

As she would say herself, she doesn’t like to make a fuss.

Despite the nagging pain in her side from the tumour and despite the desperate battles for breath, for a while life seems to go on in the same old way. There are trips to the shops in the morning, some gentle housework in the afternoon and nights spent watching television, her favoured programmes circled in shaky blue biro in the newspaper’s TV guide, forever tugging at my heart.

But in the middle of all this ordinary life, I become aware that something extraordinary is happening. The people who love my nan show that they are ready to walk though fire for her.

My mother and my father are there, of course, there every day, although rarely at the same time, and there are countless visits from elderly ladies who live in the nearby flats or who know my nan from the old neighbourhood, the old house where my dad grew up, the
Oranges For Christmas
house, friends from the old life before children grew and husbands died and busy specialists said there was nothing that they could do.

Then there is Plum. Among my parents and the elderly friends, there is this awkward girl who has somehow formed a real bond with my grandmother. Enduring endless hours on trains to and from Bansted, night after night Plum sits with my nan watching the programmes that have been circled in the TV guide and selections from her personal collection of wrestling videos featuring The Slab in all his large-breasted glory.

Plum holds my nan’s hand, strokes her forehead, and brushes her thin, silver hair, as if this old woman is the most precious thing on the planet.

The district nurse and the social worker look in once a week, but I do not know how we would cope if my nan didn’t inspire so much affection in the people whose lives she has touched. If we had to rely on the kindness of the local council, everything would be lost.

Because someone has to be with my nan all the time now. It’s just too dangerous for her to be alone. We realise that she can lose consciousness at any moment. My nan still calls it “falling asleep”, but the doctor who comes round says these fainting spells are blackouts caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.

One night I watch as my nan’s eyes close while she is staring at the news, without her usual running commentary of “ridiculous” and “disgusting”.

Her head suddenly drops, her mouth falls open and she pitches forward towards the little fireplace. Before I can move, Plum catches my nan, as Plum has caught her before, and very gently eases her back into her chair.

And after a while it becomes what we think of as normal, an unremarked-upon part of our lives, these blackouts that my nan waves away as nothing that a good night’s sleep couldn’t cure.

The staff room of Churchill’s International Language School is empty. It’s still early. There are a couple of students sneaking a spliff down on Oxford Street but nobody is upstairs yet. I dump my shoulder bag on top of the coffee table, and a yellow flyer is lifted up by a gust of wind. The flyer is not one of ours. I pick it up and read it.

Dream Machine.

Cleaning your work place the old-fashioned way –

on hands and knees

There’s a line drawing of what looks like a fifties housewife with a feather duster, both sexy and domestic, like Samantha in
Bewitched
, and below that there are two telephone numbers. One is an out-of-town number, the other for a mobile. I recognise both of them.

I can hear the sound of her vacuum cleaner across the corridor in Lisa Smith’s room. She’s in there, giving the tatty green carpet what she would call a good going over.

“What’s this meant to be?” I say, waving the flyer.

Jackie smiles brightly. “Didn’t I tell you? Business is booming. I’ve been putting flyers all over West One. I thought I’d drop a few around here. Even though I’ve got the job already.”

She seems very happy. God knows why.

“Dream Machine,” I snort. “You mean
you
. Dream machine – that’s you.”

Her face falls. “What’s the problem? Even if I get some extra work, it’s not going to interfere with our class. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind?”

“I don’t know. But you do mind. I can tell. What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? I can’t say what’s wrong.

I know I don’t like her working in Churchill’s, cleaning our rooms the old-fashioned way, on her hands and knees. I don’t want the teachers and the students staring straight through her, as though she is nothing. And yet I don’t want her working for the toffee-nosed snobs in Cork Street or – now I come to think about it – anybody anywhere else. I don’t know what I want. Something more worthy of her than this. I know I don’t want her here. Not any more.

“The whole cleaning thing. I don’t know. It’s getting me down.”

She has a laugh at that. “Getting
you
down? What’s it got to do with you? And if it doesn’t get me down, why should it bother you? I thought there was nothing wrong with cleaning.”

“There’s not.”

“I thought there was dignity in labour.”

“I didn’t say that. Come on. I didn’t say anything about dignity in labour.”

“You told me there was nothing to be ashamed of in doing what I do.”

“That’s right.”

“And yet you are ashamed.”

“I’m not. I just want something better for you. Better than cleaning a toilet that Lenny the Lech has recently taken a leak in. Why should I be ashamed?”

“I don’t know. But you are.”

“That’s ridiculous. I just don’t see why you have to do it here. The place where I work.”

“I have to do it wherever I can. I have to make a living. To pay my bills. Dead simple. I can’t rely on any man to keep me, can I?”

“Is that you, Alfie?”

Vanessa is in the doorway. She stares at Jackie. Jackie stares back. I don’t know if they recognise each other from that first day at my mother’s house. I can’t tell.

“
Pardon
,” Vanessa says.

“Come in,” Jackie says. “You’re not disturbing us.”

There’s only a few years’ difference in their age but they seem like different generations, Jackie in her blue nylon coat, Vanessa in some little red-and-black number from Agnes B. They look as though they come from different worlds, different lives. And I guess they do.

“I’m looking for Hamish,” Vanessa says. “He has some notes for me.”

“Hamish is not in yet.”

“Okay.”

She looks back at Jackie, as if trying to place her.

“
Je crois qu’on se connaît?
” Jackie says, and I am dumbfounded until I remember that her two A Levels are in Media Studies and French.

“
Non
,” Vanessa says. “I don’t think we have met.”

Jackie smiles. But she looks as though she wants to argue about something. “
Pourquoi pas?
”

Vanessa hovers uncertainly in the doorway. “I go now, Alfie.”

“See you later, Vanessa.”

“
C’était sympa de faire ta connaissance
,” Jackie laughs. “
Ne m’oublie pas!
”

“Leave her alone,” I tell Jackie when Vanessa has gone. “She hasn’t done anything to you.”

“Want a bet? She was looking down her nose at me.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because I’m cleaning up after her and all the little snot-nosed bitches like her.”

“I’m so glad you’re not bitter.”

“I’m entitled to be a little bitter. So would you be if you saw the world from down on your hands and knees.”

“I thought you boasted about that. In your stupid flyer.”

She shakes her head. “It’s funny how dirt seems to stick to the people who clean it up. Rather than the people who make it.”

She picks up her light little modern vacuum cleaner and heads for the door.

“But I’ll tell you something for nothing. I’m not ashamed of myself. I don’t feel the need to apologise for making a living any way I can. I thought you’d be pleased about the flyers. I thought you’d be happy that I’m trying to drum up a little extra work to pay my way through college. How naïve of me.”

“Sorry.”

“Forget it.”

“The flyer caught me off guard. I don’t know. You’ll be an undergraduate soon. That’s how I think of you.”

This is meant to placate her. It doesn’t.

“No problem. I’ll try to be gone by the time you arrive in the morning. You and all your hot little students. Then you can all pretend that the place was cleaned by magic”

“Don’t be so angry.”

She turns on me, nearly catching my face with one of the vacuum cleaner’s furry attachments.

“Why not? You’re the worst kind of snob. You can’t clean up by yourself, but you despise the people who do it for you.”

“I don’t despise you.”

“But I embarrass you. Jackie the cleaning lady. Who wants to be a student, as though it’s the greatest thing in the world. When it’s nothing at all.”

“You don’t embarrass me, Jackie.”

“You don’t want to be around me. You don’t like the way I talk, the way I dress, the job I do.”

“That’s not true.”

“You felt like sleeping with me the other night. But only because you were drunk.”

“I like you. I respect you. I admire you.”

I realise that all of this is true. She doesn’t believe me.

“Sure you do.”

“Come out with me on Saturday night.”

“What? Come where?”

“My friend Josh is getting engaged. An old friend. We lost touch for a while but he’s invited me to the party. And I’m inviting you.”

“I don’t know. Plum – I don’t know.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Jackie. You can’t hate the world for shutting you out and then hate the world when you’re invited in. Stop feeling like a martyr, will you? Do you want to come out with me or not?”

She thinks about it for a moment.

“But what should I wear?” she says.

“Wear what you usually wear,” I tell her. “Wear something pretty.”

The day comes when my nan can’t carry on as normal. The pain is too bad, the breathlessness is too fierce. She is afraid of falling asleep in public, afraid of pitching into the road with no Plum to catch her and ease her back into her favourite chair.

So she stays at home. And then increasingly she stays in bed. There will be no more trips to the shops, no more coffee and cake and talk with her friends. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

I sit with her thinking that she is the one person in the world whose love for me was uncomplicated and unconditional. Everybody else’s love was mixed up with other things – what they wanted me to be, what they hoped I could become, their dreams for me.