The Other Me (11 page)

At home the fake tree will be blinking in the corner, the yellowed cards hanging over the mantelpiece, smells of mincemeat and goose fat coming from the kitchen.

Paris was colder than London. The first flakes of snow had been falling as Meg waved me goodbye at Charles de Gaulle. I’d been worried that the flight might have been cancelled. But I’m arriving exactly when I said I would. I’ve got presents in my case: a bottle of perfume with a heart-shaped glass stopper: Mitsouko by Guerlain; I recognised the bottle in Galeries Lafayette, and thought it was about time Mum had a replacement. I can’t wait to see her face when she opens it. But first I’ll drop my bag on the floor and pull her to me for a hug. And I’ll remember how she only comes up to my shoulder, and how she smells of talc, and the mints she carries in her handbag to suck when she thinks she should resist another biscuit.

As the bus turns off the main road, past the Methodist Chapel, a sense of dread trickles inside me. Each street triggers another memory: the teenage humiliation of being seen going to chapel with my parents, dragging my feet in sensible polished shoes, as I hunch past the group of kids on that same corner: Amber and Lesley sneering with shiny mouths, teetering in heels, their laughter following me. There were no parties for me; no make-up; no boyfriends. My father’s hands tightened on my shoulders when I sat below him stuttering over the Bible text he’d set me to learn. I don’t want to see him. It’s only the thought of Mum, wiping her hands on her apron, coming forwards to pat my cheek that makes me impatient to get there. None of this is fair on her. I miss her. I can almost feel her fingers, dusty with flour, against my skin.

Our house is a dirty white, pebble-dashed semi. It sits in the middle of the row. There is a mean strip of front garden where rubbish collects – crisp packets, empty coke cans – and a low concrete wall where, to my father’s fury, teenagers sometimes perch. A stubby tongue of crazy paving leads to the half-glazed front door.

I ring the bell. I don’t know why. I have my key. My father opens the door and I understand at once that something is wrong even though his expression barely changes when he looks at me.

‘Klaudia.’

‘Where’s Mum?’

The words are sawdust in my mouth. A boomerang of blood ricochets against my ribs. The open doorway sways and my father reaches out a hand. He’s speaking but my brain is rejecting the words.
No.
I think I say it aloud. ‘No.’

I’m sitting in the living room on the velveteen sofa. My head droops between my knees. The carpet spins under my feet. I look up and realise that he’s in his best dark suit and the room is empty and bleak. There are no shiny baubles, no ribbons of tinsel wound around a plastic tree. It’s freezing. I shiver and hug myself. The wooden saints gathered in a group on the sideboard regard me with blind eyes, hands raised in blessing. My father slumps opposite me, looking older and greyer. He seems to have shrunk. His shirt is loose around his neck and his jacket sleeves hang below his wrists.

He clears his throat. ‘She was knocked down by a car. Near the house, crossing our street. She died in hospital later that day. Her injuries… were… they couldn’t save her.’

His voice is weary. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I am unable to imagine my mother dashing in front of a car. I remember her telling me over and over to wait on the kerb, look right and left, and right again.

‘What happened…?’ I stare towards the kitchen, thinking she will appear in the doorway. She doesn’t come. She will never come again. No. That’s impossible. ‘The driver… have they been prosecuted?’

Dad shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t drunk or speeding. She… she just walked in front of him.’

‘When?’ I whisper, hanging my head.

‘A week ago,’ he says. ‘I tried to reach you at university. But I had no number for you. I waited by the phone, but you didn’t call.’ He puts his hand over his eyes. ‘I sent a note to the address you left and that got no response either.’

I can’t look at him. Shame creeps through me, rolls like a suffocating fog through my limbs, filling my mouth, pressing behind my eyes. I can hardly breathe. I try to recall the last time I saw her. But I can’t snatch any comfort from a memory. I see her face when I left, remember the way she’d touched my dyed hair. Patient. Resigned. ‘Your beautiful gold.’ She’d hugged me close. ‘Look after yourself, cariad. Come back to me soon.’

But I didn’t come back to her. I’d let her down. I’d lied and I’d abandoned her.

‘The funeral at the chapel was…’ His voice thickens and he stops. ‘People loved your mother. Everyone came.’

‘Are her ashes buried there?’

He stands up and looks out through the open door into the kitchen and the garden beyond. ‘No. There’s a plaque. But she’s buried here.’

I glance up, startled. ‘Here?’

‘In the garden. Under the apple tree,’ he says. ‘I put her ashes in the Chinese urn.’

The urn is no longer on the mantelpiece. My heart beats faster. ‘Is that… OK? Is it allowed?’

‘It’s what she would have wanted. She loved that tree.’ He rubs his nose. ‘It’s what I want. To have her close to me.’

I think of my father decanting the granules and grains from whatever container the crematorium would have given him into the porcelain mouth. Did he use a spoon, or his hands? Had there been spillages?

I cross the frosty garden towards the apple tree. It leans slightly to one side; roots protrude through the grass like rheumatoid knuckles, ancient fingers tapping their way into the light. There is a darker patch of naked earth between the roots, recently turned. I lean against the cold trunk and stare down. I can’t take it in. My mother: nothing but handfuls of ashes in an urn below my feet. A thrush sits on a higher branch and looks at me reproachfully. The bird table is empty.

I go back into the house and fetch some water in a small bowl. There is only the mouldy heel of a loaf in the bread bin; crumbling it inside my fingers, I walk back to the bird table and leave my offerings. Wings flutter above me, a flash of yellow beak. A curtain twitches at an upstairs window next door. Mrs Perkins watching from behind a fall of lace.

I curl my nostrils in the cold, dim house. The kitchen smells of rubbish. The bin needs emptying. My father is sitting in the living room. His hands rest on his knees and he stares into space as if he’s in chapel and the preacher is in mid-flow.

I move around him, putting on lights. Reaching into the under-stairs cupboard, I locate the heating dial and turn, switching the setting to ‘high’. I open the fridge, look through cupboards. There is no food. I will make a shopping list. I move slowly, as if I’m fighting my way through treacle. But it’s helping to take action. Being practical is the only thing I can do. There’s no time for crying. If I start, I won’t be able to stop.

Mum, I tell her silently, you don’t have to worry. I’m home. I’m Klaudia again. I’ll take care of him. It doesn’t matter what I feel about him. I’ll do it for you.

I wish I could hear her now: her melodious words, soft as moss. I used to think she spoke the way clouds would if they had voices. I find a pen and begin to compose a list: bread, milk, apples, cereal. My closed throat aches.

1996

On New Year’s Eve I lock myself in the bathroom and wash my hair. As I bend over the bath, blood rushes to my head, bubbles trickling into my ears and stinging my eyes. I soap and soap, scrubbing hard, then rinse until the wet ends squeak between my fingers, and the hot water runs cold. But as I dry it off, staring into the mirror, I see that no colour has come out. The dye is stubborn.

I have a fleeting memory of my bleary face in the mirror as Cosmo waited in my bedroom. Missing him is a stone in my belly.

The third of January is the date we’d arranged to meet in Leeds. He’ll be there now, wondering where I am. He thinks I spent the whole of Christmas in Paris. Maybe he’ll presume I haven’t come back yet, that I’m staying on for a while, and haven’t let him know. I dig my nails into my palms. I’ve made so many mistakes. It’s important that this time I do the right thing. No more lies. No more Eliza. There are pale roots growing through my dark dye – feathery and light as a child’s hair – Klaudia coming back.

Every morning I haul myself out of bed and begin the slow trek through the day, counting minutes and hours until it’s late enough to go to bed. Each measure of time weighs heavily. There is so little to do. I shop and clean. I feed the birds. I cook for my father and watch him pushing the food around his plate.

I’m using the supermarket on the high street. My father insisted that I should. ‘Don’t go to the Guptas’,’ he told me. ‘I don’t trust them. They overcharge.’ He frowned. ‘Their things are out of date.’

Mum would call in at the Guptas’ several times a week for things we’d run out of – a pat of butter, loaf of bread or pint of milk – and she and Mrs Gupta always had a chat across the counter. They were friends. I’d never heard Mum complain of items being out of date or overpriced, although of course, my father was right about the supermarket being cheaper.

He’s kept everything exactly as it was when Mum left the house for the last time. Her side of the wardrobe is full. Nothing has been packed away. I go into their room when he’s not there and lean my face into her clothes, inhaling the talcum powder scent of her, Yardley English Lavender. I press my hands into her shoes, laying my fingers inside the worn leather, feeling the impressions her toes have made. The November issue of
Woman’s Own
is in the magazine rack in the living room; a recipe has been neatly cut out of the well-thumbed pages. Mum’s toothbrush and Pears soap are still on the sink in the bathroom; the bristles on the brush are dry, and her soap is riddled with cracks like parched mud.

There is a novel under the Bible on her bedside table. I sit on their bed, over the wires of the cold electric blanket, and open it at the marked page. It’s a love story – light commercial stuff – my mother had never been interested in literary fiction. Every week she borrowed romances from the library. The covers all looked the same. Purple lettering. Breathless women swooning in men’s arms. She was an intelligent woman. She just had a weakness for the idea of happily ever after.

I turn the leaves of the book to the front and see that it is long overdue. The library stamp is for the twentieth of November. My mother usually got through a novel a week. I expect that she’d begun her Christmas preparations. Once she’d begun on all her baking, she’d be too busy to read. And I think of Mum getting everything ready, excited about me coming home.

My father hardly leaves the house. I find him hunched in his chair in the living room listening to opera, and when his precious records reach the end, he doesn’t seem to notice or care that they go on spinning soundlessly except for the click-clicking hiss of the needle running on empty grooves.

As I put crumbs and bacon fat on the bird table, I notice snowdrops showing pale against the earth. Green leaves poke up from untidy beds and through straggly grass. I’m guessing they are crocuses. Other bulbs are fattening under my feet, new shoots exploring delicate paths through darkness towards the light. Inside the porcelain belly of the urn, my mother’s ashes are packed, cold and grey, like another kind of bulb.

I can’t ever go back to Leeds. How can I? I was Eliza there and now Eliza is dead. She died the minute I arrived home. Guilt and grief have finished her off. I will never forgive myself for running away from Mum. I wish I could explain to her why I’d disappeared.

Cosmo and I were going to have our own Christmas, a belated one, just the two of us. I have his presents in my case: a book about Matisse and a wallet engraved with silver. I chew my thumbnail, imagining him hurrying to the door each time the malfunctioning bell lets out its strangled sound. He’ll be worried. Lucy doesn’t know my real name, my address here, or my telephone number. He won’t find me. The girl he’s looking for doesn’t exist. The pain of losing him digs in under the pain I feel about Mum. Two losses. Two wrongs. A snag of nail rips off between my teeth exposing the raw underneath.

It wasn’t until I arrived at university and everyone was introducing themselves that I realised I didn’t have to drag my background with me anymore. I could leave it behind in Croydon. Be the person I wanted to be. I’ve always liked the name Eliza. It’s so English. It was easy to buy a packet of brunette hair colouring, and ask a hairdresser to chop it short. Then I dropped out of university, found a part-time job in a coffee shop and took my dancing seriously. Contemporary, ballet and tap lessons. It felt like I was suddenly set free from prison. In a different city, away from the bureaucracy of university, I could reinvent myself properly. I met Meg in a ballet class and moved into shared digs with her and Lucy. I had a post-office box for any mail with my real name. My surname was almost never used. If anyone asked, I said it was Bennet, because
Pride and Prejudice
is my favourite book, and Elizabeth Bennet the perfect heroine.

I made up a whole and detailed past for myself. It was like a game at first. Telling my new past to other people felt odd. I was sure that I would be exposed. Who would believe me? The story I was making up seemed incredible. But nobody doubted me. And I’d experienced a sense of power then – I’d altered my history. It made me feel in control of my destiny too. Despite the fact that I was living a lie, I’d never been happier, never felt more like myself. My lie seemed to be the truth.

But there is a cost for everything. And it was my mother who paid the price.

I can’t stop touching her things. I’m looking for her – even though I know that she’s gone.

I sit before Mum’s bevelled mirror in her bedroom and pick up her powder compact, an oval disc of plastic. I flip it open. The metal base is showing through the worn circle of make-up. I rub my finger onto the powder and press it onto my cheek. It looks ghostly against my skin. Her complexion was paler than mine. Her tube of lipstick is old too; the gold has been rubbed away where she grasped it. I twist up the tube of familiar apricot, smelling perfume and wax. Leaning into my reflection, I work colour onto my mouth. It looks orange on me. ‘Cariad,’ she’d cupped my chin in her hand when she’d discovered the ten-year-old me experimenting with her cosmetics, ‘you don’t need any help in looking beautiful.’