To Throw Away Unopened Read online

  ‘People don’t do that any more,’ I snapped. ‘I know what I’m doing.’ She looked hurt, but when I peeked over a second later, she’d nodded off again. I cocked up the meal: the sprouts were hard and I had to throw away the turkey – it was raw in the middle. We were both too ill to enjoy the rest, even the roast potatoes. And we were an eight-roast-potatoes-each family. Skinny as Mum was, she’d always had a good appetite, so when she couldn’t eat her roast potatoes I knew the end must be nigh.

  Apart from the exchange about the sprouts we had a lovely three days together, not a cross word. Then Vida came back and things livened up. We opened our presents and Mum put a polka-dot shower cap on her head and let us take pictures of her in it, which was most unlike her, she liked to be a bit dignified about things. This was another indication that she knew she was dying. Other signs to look out for are when an elderly person starts giving away their things – usually about two or three years before they die – and if they insist, rather aggressively, on returning anything they’ve borrowed or get annoyed if you give them gifts – they don’t want any more clutter.

  I’d forgotten about the roast potato and shower cap signals when I got the phone call. The trouble with having an elderly parent is that you have to treat every phone call, every fall and every Christmas like it’s the last one, because when you’re in the middle of something important – and when there have been so many calls, falls and hospital trips that you’ve become inured to them – it will be the last one.

  5 After writing lists and making calls for a couple of hours I thought I’d better check on Vida, so I went downstairs to my bedroom. The kitchen’s on the top floor: we swapped the rooms round as upstairs has a higher ceiling and gets more light. I was acutely aware of everything I did that morning, every move and every sensation was heightened, like I was on drugs. I registered the cold from the flat, grey lino through my socks and gripped the handrail so tight going downstairs that my palms sweated and the veins on the back of my hands stood up in snaky blue rivulets. I was afraid I might fall, even though I went up and down those stairs twenty times a day. I watched my feet, thinking, I must not slip, I must not slip, I’m all she has left. When I reached the bedroom door I stopped and listened before pushing the handle down, not because I thought it would squeak and wake Vida – I knew it wouldn’t, it’s made by Hewi, German engineering – but to hear if she was crying. Vida was fifteen at the time but she looked like a baby, curled up asleep in the king-sized bed. I studied her face for a while, fascinated by her eyes, which are green, darting from side to side under closed violet lids.

  Dirty Old Town*

  After my divorce I went to a financial adviser to see if there was any way Vida and I could afford to stay in the Camden mews house, but he said, ‘The only way you’re going to survive financially is if you take in lodgers or sell the house and downsize.’ He was right. The place had so many light bulbs I couldn’t afford to pay the electricity bills. Every tread on the staircase had two lights and they pockmarked all the ceilings – ‘builder’s acne’, it’s called.

  I was twelve when my mother sat my sister Pascale and me down during her own divorce and asked us whether we’d rather have lodgers or move to a council flat now that our father had gone. The word ‘lodger’ frightened me. I imagined leering old men in dirty raincoats; something I’d seen in a TV programme starring Tony Hancock put me off the word. So I said, ‘Move to a council flat.’ There’s a fine line between including your children in big decisions and burdening them so that they go through life thinking they messed up the family’s fortunes.

  After her divorce, Mum, Pascale and I moved from our semi-detached house in Woodberry Crescent, Muswell Hill, to a tiny, dilapidated, two-bedroomed council house next to the Victorian gasworks in Turnpike Lane. One of the three giant gas holders that loomed over our street was the famous Hornsey Gas Holder No. 1, built by Samuel Cutler in 1892. Until it was demolished in 2016, it was Britain’s oldest surviving example of a gas holder constructed with ‘a lattice of helical girders and vertical guides … a truly geodesic cylinder’.† I didn’t appreciate the elegance of Hornsey No. 1 when I lived in its shadow. All I knew was that coming home from school I was frightened to turn the corner into Clarendon Road. It looked like a Lowry painting in winter.

  * Ewan MacColl, 1949

  † Colin Marr, www.pmra.co.uk

  6 Vida was so sound asleep that she had no idea I’d slipped off and had been upstairs writing and making phone calls for two hours. I climbed back in beside her and edged under the quilt. I didn’t want to risk waking her up by getting right under the covers. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, listening to her breathe. I used to listen to her breathe every night when she was a baby, every inhalation and every exhalation. If I thought she paused for too long in between breaths, I’d lean over her cot and huff into her ear a few times to remind her what she had to do. It occurred to me as I was lying there, eyes stuck open, thinking about Vida as a baby, that if I let what had happened last night into my head slowly, one word at a time, I might not feel so guilty about how I’d behaved.

  Dreaming on a Bus*

  I kept thinking about the ointment-pink Hackney house, how it was near the shops, the park, a cinema and a theatre, and how warm tungsten light from the windows of a Turkish restaurant lit up the corner of the street – like the diner in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks – which meant walking home at night would be safer. As soon as you cleared the restaurant you could see the house, tall and plain, pink and green, linking arms with all the other tall, plain, pink and green houses. It was a comforting sight, like coming home and opening the door to a kind, reliable companion. The sort of person you’d be grateful to end up with after trying to date interesting, attractive people for years. I called the estate agent and made an offer.

  A few weeks after moving in I had a huge party in the courtyard. Magnus, my neighbour and old boyfriend from school, built a bonfire two storeys high and placed a giant wooden effigy of a woman on top. As soon as it was dark, on a signal from me the DJ played Arthur Brown’s song ‘Fire’, and Magnus, standing on a high balcony a couple of hundred feet away, released a contraption which shot like a flaming arrow over everyone’s heads and straight into the heart of the bonfire, which erupted in flames.

  I’ve lived in every compass point of London but moving east felt like coming home. I love that there’s no tube station in Hackney so I have to get the bus everywhere. The 55 is my favourite, it’s one of those new curvy ones designed by Thomas Heatherwick. I hail it at the request stop on Mare Street. There’s a group of modern houses opposite the bus stop called Sojourner Truth Way. The first time I passed them I thought, That’s an unusual name for a housing estate, and looked it up. That was when I found out about Sojourner Truth, the African American women’s rights activist, born around 1797 in New York. She lived forty years a slave and forty years a free woman. I read her speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ and was glad I knew about her now. We should have been taught about her at school.

  Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

  From Sojourner Truth’s speech given in 1851 at the Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio

  People hardly lift their arms up to hail buses nowadays, not like in the seventies. There were so few buses back then that you couldn’t take the risk of not being seen and the bus sailing past, so you thrust out your arm and made meaningful eye contact with the driver. Another old-fashioned custom was to call out, ‘Thank you, driver!’ every time you alighted from the bus. Mum used to do that, much to my embarrassment. No one counts their change in shops any more either, not cool. Shopping with my mother seemed to go on forever when I was young. She counted every penny of her change, twice, before she left a shop counter. Everyone did.<
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  When the bus heaves into view we all play a game of chicken to see who can last the longest before someone capitulates and raises their arm about two centimetres while looking down at their phone. I’ve noticed that bus drivers often pull up closest to the person who hailed so they can get on first.

  It’s a forty-five-minute journey into town. I try and be early for meetings and appointments so I can ride the 55 all the way from Hackney to Oxford Street. I run upstairs hoping one of the front seats will be free but they’re usually occupied by someone engrossed in their phone. (Bus etiquette dictates that you do not sit next to someone unless there are no double seats empty.) I’m tempted to say, ‘What’s the point of hogging the front seat if you don’t want to look out of the window?’ But I haven’t reached that level of outspokenness yet.

  I was sitting upstairs on the 55 one cold January evening when I tuned in to a slurred conversation between a man and a woman sitting behind me.

  ‘You know that little bit between Hackney Wick and Hackney Downs?’ said the man. ‘There’s a place there that’s a tattoo parlour, except it isn’t a tattoo parlour any more, it closed down and they sell drugs there.’

  I leaned back in my seat so I could hear better.

  ‘What? You mean over the counter?’ the woman replied.

  ‘Yeah, you go in the door and there’s like a double mirror and they push the drugs through a little gap and you put the money through. Except I didn’t, I grabbed the drugs and ran away. They’re looking for me now. I can’t go down that road.’

  ‘You ran away without paying?’

  ‘Yeah, done it twice. My mate stood outside and watched to see if anyone came after me. They all came out the second time. They’re Turks in there. Said they’ll cut my fingers off.’ His voice was flat and monotonous like a robot’s.

  ‘Can anyone go in there?’

  ‘I’ll have to move away from the area. I’m frightened, I’m not safe. Yeah, anyone can go in there.’

  ‘You really ran away with the drugs?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll show you it when we go past.’

  I glanced over my shoulder on my way downstairs to see what the man looked like. I knew what he smelled like – unwashed clothes, stale piss and rotting trainers. He was plump and puffy, with watery, unfocused eyes, glassy red marbles poked into a white doughy face like an uncooked pie. He didn’t look as if he could run very fast, he looked like a drug addict. The woman looked like a drug addict too. The same grey skin, red nose and wet eyes.

  I didn’t think I was better than them. I thought I could have been them. I’ve known lots of people like those two, they weren’t alien to me. There were a couple of moments in my youth when I could have been a junkie, if I’d said yes a few more times, if I hadn’t stuck with the loneliness and the not-fitting-in, if I’d given in to peer pressure, been a tiny bit weaker. If I hadn’t had such a strong mother. I wasn’t judging the couple upstairs on the bus but I was glad to have escaped that life and not to be them. They were my Ghosts of Christmas Past, especially the woman, in her leopard-print coat and motorbike boots, peroxide-yellow hair with grey roots, dying for a cigarette, spending all day with a person she didn’t like, trying to score. Always on the lookout for a scam, believing that this might be her lucky day, the day she got drugs for free. Every decision you make in life sends you off down a path that could turn out to be a wrong one. A couple of careless decisions somewhere along the line, that’s all it takes to waste years – but then you can’t creep along being so cautious that you don’t have adventures. It’s difficult to get the balance right.

  I didn’t look up at them when I reached the street. It’s not good to stare at people in London. I was tempted to jump back on the bus so I could hear the rest of the conversation and find out if the tattoo parlour that sold drugs really existed, but instead I stood outside the Brazilian supermarket and tapped out their words on my phone. Then I darted into the road and waited on the dotted white line in the middle for the next lane of traffic to clear so I could cross. I was perfectly comfortable standing between two lanes of heavy traffic going in opposite directions. That’s when it occurred to me that there are two types of people: those who wait for the whole two lanes of a road to be completely clear before they venture across and those who risk it and charge into the middle, not knowing when they’ll get the chance to make a run for it to the other side. Neither is better than the other. The first one will have fewer problems and fewer adventures, and the second one will have more adventures and make more mistakes.

  * Lyric from the Slits’ song ‘Ping Pong Affair’, Cut, 1979

  7 Lying next to Vida, vaguely aware of a football thudding repeatedly against next door’s fence, I let last night’s events drip into my head. A motorbike started up. Birds tweeted. First, Mum was dead. I wondered how come I was still breathing, still functioning, with my mother no longer on the planet? It wasn’t how I expected to feel. It’ll hit me soon, I thought, and then I’ll be lost. Another hour disappeared into the ceiling and I felt nothing. But I was cheating because I wasn’t letting myself think about the other thing that happened that night. I knew if I thought about that, the feelings would come. I listened to a squirrel scrabble its way across the fire escape. It made a clanging noise as its claws scraped on the metal. Still no tears came for Mum. The whole time I lay there I didn’t think about the other thing either. Which was unlike me. I’m usually good at facing things, no matter how unpleasant.

  Millie Tant*

  Thy valiantness was mine; thou suck’dst it from me.

  Volumnia to her son Coriolanus. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 1608

  My mother made me into the type of person who is at ease standing in the middle of moving traffic, the type of person who ends up having more adventures and making more mistakes. Mum never stopped encouraging me to try, fail and take risks. I kept pushing myself to do unconventional things because I liked the reaction I got from her when I told her what I’d done. Mum’s response to all my exploits was to applaud them. Great, you’re living your life, and not the usual life prescribed for a woman either. Well done! Thanks to her, unlike most girls at the time, I grew up regarding recklessness, risk-taking and failure as laudable pursuits.

  Mum did the same for Vida by giving her a pound every time she put herself forward. If Vida raised her hand at school and volunteered to go to an old people’s home to sing, or recited a poem in assembly, or joined a club, Mum wrote it down in a little notebook. Vida also kept a tally of everything she’d tried to do since she last saw her grandmother and would burst out with it all when they met up again. She didn’t get a pound if she won a prize or did something well or achieved good marks in an exam, and there was no big fuss or attention if she failed at anything. She was only rewarded for trying. That was the goal. This was when Vida was between the ages of seven and fifteen, the years a girl is most self-conscious about her voice, her looks and fitting in, when she doesn’t want to stand out from the crowd or draw attention to herself. Vida was a passive child – she isn’t passive now.

  I was very self-conscious when I was young, wouldn’t raise my voice above a whisper or look an adult in the eye until I was thirteen, but without me realising it Mum taught me to grab life, wrestle it to the ground and make it work for me. She never squashed any thoughts or ideas I had, no matter how unorthodox or out of reach they were. She didn’t care what I looked like either. I started experimenting with my clothes aged eleven, wearing top hats, curtains as cloaks, jeans torn to pieces, bare feet in the streets, 1930s gowns, bells around my neck, and all she ever said was, ‘I wish I had a camera.’

  One of the only times Mum was disappointed with me during my teenage years was when I messed up my education. I was nineteen and studying fashion and textiles at Chelsea School of Art when my grandmother Frieda died and left my sister and me £200 each. I bought an electric guitar with the money and left my degree course to form a band – the Flowers of Romance, with Sid Vicious. I’d already dro
pped out of Hornsey Art School to work in a music venue two years before this, and Mum was desperate for me to get a qualification. Now I’m a mother myself I can imagine how galling it was for her to hear me say something like, I’m leaving this art school halfway through the course too, Mum. I know that you loved learning and were made to leave school at sixteen and go out to work because your parents didn’t understand the value of education, and I know you’ve spent the last twenty years being overlooked for jobs you’re too smart to do because you don’t have any qualifications, but I’m not going to get a degree, I’m forming a band with this spotty, monosyllabic boy called Sid Vicious … great name, eh?!