Flying Under Bridges (12 page)

This
was followed by a short treatise from Pe Pe who was about to embark on a series
of seminars on how to achieve a more meaningful orgasm. ‘Isn’t that what we all
want?’ she said. ‘To feel good about ourselves, to have good physical health,
emotional fulfilment, gratifying sex and positive ageing.’

Martha
was not convinced. ‘Pe Pe, you sound like a bloody women’s magazine. What about
our brains, our intellectual lives?’

John
was right there with Pe Pe. ‘I couldn’t bear not to be fit.’

‘I can
see that,’ she replied, eyeing his thighs beside her. ‘Stay fit and you won’t
be stressed. It’s the theme of my new book — it’s not stress but too little joy
that’s killing people.’

‘Bollocks,’
said Martha, which was either her opinion or an attempt to get back to the
subject of William’s sperm. Pe Pe smiled at her in her tolerant and loving way.

‘Martha,
I know you are a very feeling person, but you should use your emotions as a
biofeedback mechanism to stay in touch with the causes of your unhappiness.’

That
gave everyone something to think about.

William
came back to the table in time for pudding. It was trifle. No one really wanted
any and there was at least half a bowl left when John started to read out the
will.

‘It’s
not very long,’ he said.

‘I’ll
get coffee,’ said Mother.

‘No.’
John shook his head. ‘I think you’ll want to hear this,’ and he began to read. ‘I,
Derek Cameron, being of sound mind and body, do hereby make this my last will
and testament. To my son, William, I leave Cameron Builders and Decorators, all
its assets and any goodwill remaining in the business.’

William
helped himself noisily to another prawn. It had been what he expected. John
took a sip of water and read on.

‘To all
three of my children, William, Eve and Martha, I leave everything else,
including my house. To my wife, Lillian May Cameron, I leave nothing. I have
given her everything I could. For forty-eight years she has had everything she
wanted. I did everything she asked and now I am free. I was a good husband, a
good father and I hated my life. With the money I leave them I ask my children
to get on with their lives. Please don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t sit
and wait till it is too late. I did and I am sorry. I love you. Dad.’

There
could not have been greater shock at the table if a chapter of Genesis had
appeared in the grapes and cheese.

‘The
house?’ Mother managed, gripping her beloved and unblemished table.

‘Yes,’
nodded John. ‘I’m afraid everything was in your husband’s name.’

‘Well,
of course, but….’

John
couldn’t have been nicer. He reached out and patted Mother gently on the hand. ‘As
the children are fully grown I’m afraid there’s nothing. .

Eve
knew Mother would do something, she just didn’t know what. Everyone was looking
at her when she sort of went rigid and her eyes glazed over. Then she fell
forward into the pudding basin. It went everywhere. It is a terrible fact of
life that when something really serious happens it often has its comic side.
Mother had had a stroke. It was dreadful but as she fell she got a maraschino
cherry up her nose. Eve thought she was dead and found herself wondering what
she should do with the three olives she’d wrapped up so carefully. And Eve
thought about her life. And her father smiled down at them all. In that moment
both the father and the mother that Eve had always known disappeared from her
life. Nothing seemed certain any more, and all the time John was watching.

Chapter
Seven

9
January

Holloway
Prison for Women

London

My dear Inge,

The
Darkness

And God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.

And God saw that the light was good…

(GENESIS
1.3)

I am writing this at two o’clock
in the morning. It’s not easy. It is dark at night in my cell. I’ve never slept
in the dark before. I lie here and worry about stupid things. About whether
they will let me have clean pants every day. I think a lack of clean pants is
the one thing that would drive me to distraction if I were ever kept in
difficult circumstances. Some of the women cry through the night. Maybe they’re
crying for what they’ve done. Maybe they’re crying for what they’ve never done.
I wish I had a candle. I love candlelight. It is amazing how the small glow of
light from a candle can transform a place.

How
far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Do you
remember that? It’s funny. All that 0-level English and that’s the only bit
that stayed in my head. I like the idea of the world being simply naughty. Not
wicked or evil, just a bit of a tinker. Much more comforting than what’s
actually going on. That’s what my Sunday supplement ads were — just a bit
naughty. I didn’t start out to be wicked.

Thank
you so much for the picture of Shirley. She looks so thin, but I thought I saw
a little smile. Was that a smile? I couldn’t tell because she had her hand up
against the sun. The place looks lovely. I can see why you and Kate loved it
so. Is that helping you too? I hope so.

I
battle on with trying to find the right words. Shirley gave me a revised
standard version of the Bible some months ago. It has printed in the front that
it was ‘translated from the original tongues’. It’s hard to know just what that
means. How do you tell words that are inspired by God from those that aren’t? I
mean, it can be the same words, grammar and everything as if it were written by
humans. And if humans can make mistakes, which we can, then could somebody have
been wrong about which are the holy words and what they mean? Of course, there
are people who think they don’t make mistakes. The pope doesn’t. He’s not
allowed to. He’s a man but his job makes him infallible. That must be nice. Like
having one of those Home Highway Internet connections to God.

Fact
—
during the Kosovo War, the pope, His Holiness the Pope, refused
permission for Catholic women in danger of rape by Muslim soldiers to use the
pill. If they became pregnant it was the will of God. Some 20,000 women were
abandoned by their families for carrying alien children. Abortions are a sin
but some carried the children to term and then killed them. The Catholic Serbs
did not want Muslim babies in their midst for they were making a Greater
Serbia. Why would God send such a message to the pope? Couldn’t he get through
to anyone else?

I keep
thinking about the lunch where Mother had her stroke. I think I seemed very
ordinary at that lunch. Just middle class and ordinary, but I’m not. I’m not
just a polite middle-class lady who’s been secreting trinkets from the High
Street into her raincoat pocket on the quiet. I don’t mind prison. Perhaps it
might even be rather nice to stay. There’s no cooking and I can read. I like
reading. I might learn French. I was going to have evening classes in French
once, but Adam said he couldn’t see the point. He told me
cheval
means
horse and it’s like that all the way through. They have a different word for
each one of ours. The psychiatrist asks me what I think about John now that he’s
dead and I say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, of course, but he was very religious. I mean,
if he was right he’ll be just fine by now.’ He would be fine in death but he would
have ruined Shirley’s life, only I don’t say that.

‘What
happened after your mother had the stroke?’ The psychiatrist never seems to
tire of his job.

Get
off your Bed and Walk

… if you will not
hearken unto me and will not do all these commandments… I will appoint over
you sudden terror, consumption and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine
away…

(LEVITICUS
26.14)

I don’t want to talk about
Mother. I want to talk about my dreams. The little I do sleep is so full of
strange dreams. Last night I was in a plane. Actually, first I was standing
next to the plane. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with two wings. What
do you call it? A biplane. I was laughing and people were taking pictures with
really ancient cameras that flashed and banged. I was thin, which was nice, and
I jumped up on to the plane, which was scary. Then I got in the cockpit. The
plane started and I was in charge. I was ready to fly but I looked at the controls
and I didn’t know how any of it worked. I woke up sweating and I couldn’t
remember where I was. I lay there wondering why I can’t seem to sleep and then
what good would it do anyway.

Nobody
really knows why we sleep. The body doesn’t actually need to shut down ‘the
system’ for as long as most people find they need to sleep. I think it must be
some kind of safety valve to let the brain sort out all the input from the day.
Time to put one’s internal system in order. Unfortunately the office of my mind
seems to be perpetually strewn with scraps of paper and untidy bundles of
discarded information. I know all these things and they are of no use to me.
Why did God give me a brain? To sort tea towels by colour so they don’t run in
the wash?

Margaret
Thatcher needed only a few hours’ sleep each night to feel refreshed, which I
think is all the proof you need that she wasn’t a real person. I always thought
the most telling aspect of the Brighton bomb at the Grand Hotel was that at 3
a.m., when it went off, Thatcher was at her desk working, while Denis was fast
asleep. The other curiosity was that Norman Tebbit was carried out with the
top button done up on his pyjamas. What a fun chap he must be.

What
did happen after Mother had the stroke? Well, they were nice in the hospital. Edenford
General. Perfectly pleasant to me and Mother. I wasn’t worried at first. She’d
had a stroke but the doctors said there was every reason to suppose she might
recover, although when I was with her it seemed hard to believe. She had
descended into a hell where I could not find her. I tried. I did try. I went to
visit every day and she would be sitting up in her bed jacket loudly calling, ‘Who
ha! Who ha!’

The
stroke had left her unable to see at all without her glasses. She was confused
and frightened and flailed about, still refusing to put them on. She was also
speechless apart from the phrase ‘Who ha’, which she had once used when she
forgot the occasional word. Now it seemed to be the only thing she could
remember. She sat up in bed calling ‘Who Ha! Who Ha!’, an old woman who looked like
my mother, dressed like my mother, but who in the middle of the night had had
her soul stolen by an incontinent and blinded owl.

She had
the most staggering ability to urinate. It’s not something you want to know
about your mother or any grown-up really. The nurses were very busy and I had
to keep getting Wet Wipes to sort her out. We were supposed to meet with social
services but William had a conference and Martha can’t/won’t deal with
hospitals. When the man arrived, Mother was asleep. I sat looking at her. Her
whole face had sagged down on to the bed. She looked a hundred years old. This
was my mother. I tried to imagine that I had started life inside her, grown
inside her, first heard the world through her, but I couldn’t see it. We seemed
to be nothing like each other. What had she done to my father to make him
remove her from the will? How could he have been so cruel? Why didn’t he just
leave? Why did he wait till after the end? I had so many questions and nowhere
to take them.

The
social worker was very nice, very young, very tired. I got him a cup of tea
from the machine.

‘How
old is your mother?’ he asked.

‘Sixty-five,
I think, yes, sixty-five.’ Four years older than Shirley Bassey. Who ha, who
ha…

He
flipped though endless paperwork. ‘Right, and the prognosis?’

I
smiled. ‘Good. They seem to think she could recover. She’s just… confused at
the moment, that’s all.’

‘Oh
dear.’ The young man sipped his tea.

‘Oh
dear, she’s confused or oh dear, she’ll recover?’

‘No,
that’s good, it’s just we have to decide what to do with her in the meantime.’

I didn’t
understand. ‘Do with her?’

‘Well,
care … Who will care for her?’

‘Won’t
you? Social services?’

He
shook his head. ‘Not entirely. We’re not a cure-all, you know.’ He looked at
me, frowning, and became a bit less businesslike. ‘Have you dealt with the
elderly before?’

The
elderly. My indomitable mother was suddenly ‘the elderly’. I shook my head.

‘Let me
explain. Your mother could live for some time.’