Getting Over It (10 page)

I spend a good forty minutes before managing to poke the pill down Fatboy’s throat. Then I spend twenty minutes dabbing my wounds with antiseptic. I am angry and upset. I call Tina. She’s out. I call Lizzy. She’s out. So I call Michelle, who has run up an almighty overdraft whinging about Sammy, so she owes me.

First, I pander to her lingering indignation on oily Alan’s behalf—“Michelle, to be honest, I’m in such a volatile state at the moment I didn’t think it was fair to, you know, burden him?” Bullshit over, I progress to my true agenda—ranting and raving about Tom. I am not quite sure how I want Michelle to react, but she puts on a satisfying show. Boy, does he sound like a piece of work! You owe him nothing! What a deadbeat! Messing with your head like that! But don’t sweat it! He should lighten up! He’s way intense! Et cetera!

I am inflamed and inspired to consult her on a matter that has been niggling for some time. I miss Jasper. I keep thinking about him. I want to call him. Again, Michelle obliges. He’s a cool guy and I should go for it. Encouragement and permission! So I do.

To my disbelief and delight, Jasper is “psyched” to hear from me. It would be “ace” to meet up sometime. “How are you fixed for tomorrow night,” I say (an hour of listening to Michelle and even Luke would start talking like a Hollywood Wife.)

“I’m around,” drawls Jasper. “Why don’t you stop by?”

I squirm with coquettish pleasure and purr into the phone, “I could do that… .” I replace the receiver, head swirling. Jasper Sanderson and Helen Bradshaw. The return of! To borrow a favorite Jasperian phrase: Michelle, you played a blinder. I make a beeline for my (de-defiled) underwear drawer and start choosing knickers.

Chapter 13

I
F EVER TINA AND
I want to irritate Lizzy, which we frequently do, we call her Xanax Girl. This is because Pure Unadulterated Elizabeth is petrified of flying, and before she’ll set even her littlest toe in a Boeing, she has to pop a great fat chemical horse pill. Of course, she tried hypnotherapy, acupuncture, and peppermint tea first but—to our private glee—they didn’t make the tiniest dent of difference and the Wholesome One was forced to resort to legalized drugs. We weren’t that mean, though. A while back, we spent an exhausting twenty minutes in the office trying to reassure her that God did mean for humans to fly.

“Lizzy,” said Tina patronizingly, “I fly so often I don’t even think about it. A plane is like a bus to me.” Feeling left out, I added soothingly, “All the statistics show you’re more likely to die in a car crash.” We even demonstrated—with an emergency plane constructed from a circular on illegal use of company cabs for social purposes—how air pressure forces the aircraft to stay at 33,000 feet rather than drop like a 360,000-kilo stone from the sky.

“Unless the wings snap off,” interrupted Laetitia, who hates me to be distracted from toil. “Then it plunges to the ground like a large sausage.” Unfortunately, Lizzy is always discovering new hazards. “What about clear air turbulance!?” “What about uncommanded slats deployment!?” “What about sparrows in the engine!?” When we crush these fears, Lizzy always comes back at us with her trump card: “But you don’t know. Plane crashes happen. It could be you. There’s no guarantee.”

Until four months ago when my father died, I couldn’t comprehend Lizzy’s fears. Before my father died, I was invincible. I’d read about a honeymoon couple whose plane erupted in flames over a turquoise sea, a woman stabbed as she walked home from work, friends blown up as they sat in a pub drinking on a warm summer’s night, a young man shot at a bus stop, and I’d feel pity and turn the page. I knew that kind of thing happened to other people.

Now, I read about other people and they are me. I am tearful, angry, and obsessed. I imagine their last carefree minutes before the end. I wonder if they comprehended the actual moment of death. I ache for their poor, bewildered families, the stricken mother saying, “Why him? Why do they always take the best?” The fiancé, face pale, eyes red, whispering, “She was my life. I can’t believe this has happened.” I want to comfort them, but my tenderness is vampirical. I feast sorrowfully on their pain with the self-loathing and monomaniacal compulsion of a bulimic devouring chocolate cake.

These days, my mouth is dry with fear. I get out of bed in the morning and I think,
This could be the day I die.
I feel my heart beating and I think,
This could stop at any moment.
Of course, I reason to myself,
Get a grip, you silly, silly cow.
But then I think, Princess Diana didn’t get out of bed on August 31, 1997, and know that day was her death day. And people do just drop down dead—people who, might I add, eat fewer Dime Bars than I do and exercise more regularly than once a month. There’s no guarantee. I’m jittery. Snappy. Tense. Unless I’m engaged in a specific and enjoyable task—namely, watching
Xena: Warrior Princess,
reading murder books, or sleeping—I feel hollow and detached from the world, and in the absence of anything better, my default emotion is terror.

For instance. Last weekend Tina drove to the Lake District for a shagfest with that prototype of man, Adrian—who I have so far managed to avoid because I feel unable to summon up the requisite awe that befits our premiere meeting—and her Escort conked out on the motorway at 200 miles per hour. She recounted her brush with early violent death as if it were a fairy tale! Something like: “We’re doing eighty down the middle—and there’s this bang on the underside of the car. Like something had dropped off. And we’re hurtling along in this bloody box! No acceleration, no engine, no gears. Adrian was shouting, but I coasted it to the side of road. Didn’t flap. It was just, ‘Bang, bloody hell, the car’s gone.’ And the brakes worked. Turned out the timing belt had snapped. Cost me a bugger to replace.”

And that was her last, carefree word on the subject! I said, “Tina, promise me you’ll be careful,” and she looked at me in a funny way and said, “I’m on the Pill.” I, meanwhile, lie in bed six days later, dry-mouthed, shaking like a geriatric, playing the scenario over and over in my head like a weasly tune from the Eurovision song contest. My pulse races and I think,
Tina, you could so easily be dead. There are so many reasons why you could so easily be dead.
I could have walked into the office on Monday and heard Laetitia say, “Did you hear about Tina? Tina’s dead. She died in a car crash at the weekend.” Death is so random. Tremble, sweat, wheeze… what if?

As I struggle in my neurotic pyschotic phase, my mother graduates from What Ifs. Possibly, the What Ifs are infectious and I’ve caught hers. Because in the weeks following my discovery of the pink paper mountain and literary fridge, she became obsessed. What if she’d forced my father to economize on his egg intake? What if she’d ordered him out for a brisk walk after dinner? What if she’d bought him
Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking?

To which I could only reply, in my head,
What if my father was
another person
—
specifically, one who didn’t come from a family riddled with heart disease?
To her face I said, “Mum, please don’t torture yourself. You did everything you could. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. And anyway, you know Dad wouldn’t have listened.” As these lumbering platitudes were as novel and astonishing as a model dating a rock star—what can I say that isn’t a cliché?—my mother sped on with the verbal self-flagellation.

What if she’d postponed plucking her eyebrows and was watching my father eat lunch? What if she’d made him a salad (no dressing, obviously)? What if his indigestion after Thursday night at the Harrises wasn’t due to the high density of Leila’s bread pudding? What if it was a warning sign of an impending coronary? “Mum!” I shouted. “Now stop it! If you’d made him a salad, he’d have thrown it in the bin and booked a table at the Dorchester. What if you were a specialist cardiac nurse, for god’s sake?”

I intended this retort to be ironic but—and I should have known—she took it seriously and embarked on a fresh and super-fertile woe-is-me route. What if she
had
chosen a medical career rather than the teaching profession? To which the honest answer was: There’d probably be at least ten more dead people in the world. So all I said was, “Mum. You were a brilliant partner. You made him very happy. You have nothing to feel guilty about.” This made her cry and I realized, with annoyance, that I had expressed to my mother practically the exact trite sentiments that, not so long ago, Lizzy had expressed to me.

However, after three cosseted months, my mother has perked up. She appears—as Leila Harris puts it—to be “coping better.” And Vivienne observes, “Your mother’s lucky. She’s young. She can find someone else. If they’d been married for fifty years, it would be different.”

Happily for my mother, who is napping upstairs, Vivienne makes this draconian observation to me. Unhappily for Vivienne, she makes it when I am feeling—ooh, let’s pick a mood out of the mood swing hat—snappy. “You what!” I snarl, banging my coffee cup onto the table and narrowing my eyes to slits. “That’s a fucking outrageous remark! Lucky! You don’t grieve according to a, a mathematical chart! You don’t grieve less because you’re fifty, not ninety! Don’t you presume to know the measure of her loss! Her life will never be the same again. And I tell you something. If she”—at this point, mortifyingly, my face crumples like a pink tissue—“if she should ever, as you put it ‘find someone else,’ she will be making do. Because for her, my father was The One. And if she knew he was coming back in thirty years”—now I’m sobbing like a footballer—“she’d wait.”

I am shaken and stirred by the violence of my own rage. I feel like a Molotov cocktail. Vivienne—who is equally shaken and stirred—jumps back like a startled cat and whispers, “Helen, Helen. Calm down, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, oh, how awful of me, I’ve so upset you, I feel ter—”

Here, I interrupt my own blubbing to shout, “You haven’t upset me! This isn’t about me! It’s about her!” Wisely, Vivienne clams up, nods, and says nothing. I feel a teeny bit guilty because, despite her limitations, Vivienne has been attentive to my mother. After the sympathy-surge subsided (halfway through month three as I recall), Vivienne continued to visit regularly, issuing tea invitations, dolling out gossip, and bearing cake. I’d go as far as to say that Vivvy has vyed with me to keep my mother afloat.

I win, though. I’ve become such a social worker it’s a constant surprise to me that I haven’t started wearing a smock.

I started off by cooking for my mother. I made vegetable risotto from the recipe on the back of the risotto rice pack (on the fifth attempt I stopped writing off saucepans and burning the rice), Tina’s coriander chicken recipe (chop and fry onion and garlic in olive oil, chop and add chicken, then coriander, white wine, and half-fat creme fraiche—in deference to my father), and—because I can—potato wedges. After our fourth potato wedge dinner in a row, my mother screeched, “I’m sick of potato wedges! They’re junk food!” and threw her plate across the room. At that point, I would have happily left her to starve. Instead I hissed, “All right, wiseguy. You’re so clever, you show me how it’s done!”

This rashly thrown gauntlet heralded the start of phase two—an unenjoyable period in which I spent every Monday and Wednesday night in my mother’s kitchen spoiling the broth and being shouted at. She had fun, though. I think she misses overfeeding my father. Our Monday and Wednesday night liaisons continue—breaking them off isn’t worth the aggravation—but gradually I’ve managed to wean her on to the odd takeout. And Lizzy has been a sweetie.

During an extended session on souffles, my mother confided (I tried to dissuade her) that one of the worst things about widowhood was “the lack of human touch.” I wanted to say, “Try being me,” but restrained myself and said, “Oh.” But when I told Lizzy, she nearly choked on her adzuki bean stew. “I’ve just had my first attunement!” she trilled. “I’ve got the perfect plan!”

Three days later, Lizzy started peforming reiki on my mother. “What is reeky?” she demanded when Lizzy arrived, brimming with positive chi.

“It’s an ancient art, a way of sending universal love and energy to heal people,” replied Lizzy.

“Do I have to be naked for it?” said my mother suspiciously.

“Oh no!” tinkled Lizzy. “You just lie there, and I act as a channel for the life force energy that will unblock your auras and chakras, and balance the left and right hemispheres of your brain and enable an emotional release.”

My mother looked startled, so I explained, “You lie down, fully clothed, and Lizzy pampers you.”

After the first session, my mother leapt up and cried, “Am I unblocked now?” Lizzy’s face fell, so I said hastily, “Mum, it’s not like a plumber clearing a drain.”

Lizzy smiled stiffly and said, “Didn’t you feel floaty or tingly, Mrs. Bradshaw?”

My mother shook her head and said, “I didn’t feel a thing!”

Lizzy replied, “Well, you might develop diarrhea and a rash—”

At which point I interrupted with, “Lizzy, she loved it, she’s just overwhelmed, no, no, of course you won’t, Mum, Lizzy was joking, yes, you were, say thank you now, all right, Liz, thanks so much, see you tomorrow… .”

The last four months haven’t been easy. Maybe I shouldn’t have shouted at Vivienne. I return to the flat and have a lie down.

With the benefit of hindsight, two Valium, and a coldish shower, I ascribe my hissy fit to the fact that yesterday—three months after I renewed my biblical acquaintance with Jasper—he suggested we “cool it.”

I was stunned. “Why?” I said, gnawing at the skin on my lip, “I thought we were getting on really well.” This, crazily, isn’t a lie. We only met occasionally. And when we did, we had proper conversations. Jasper told me about going to boarding school and being unfavorably compared to his brilliant elder brother. I told Jasper about wanting to go to boarding school. Jasper told me about his parents moving to Singapore and seeing him once a year. I told Jasper about my parents living in Muswell Hill and seeing me once a quarter. I thought Jasper and I were having fun. Admittedly, the sex wasn’t quite as fabulous as before, but that was mainly because I worried my father was watching.

“We
were
getting on well,” said Jasper. “We do. Babe, I really like you. You’re a great girl. And one day, you’ll make someone a great wife. But, don’t take this the wrong way, I think you need a break.”

Oh, here we go,
I thought, the wife jibe upstaged by the ‘I really like you’ alarm bell—
he’s not dumping me because he wants out,
he’s dumping me for my sake.
“Jass,” I replied crossly. “Don’t give me that! I do not need a break! If you want a break, say so.” I raised a combative eyebrow. “Is this because of my mother?” I growled. Jasper hesitated. I said coldly, “You know she’s got no one else. And you can always join us on our Sunday visits to the zoo and Kew Gardens and bloody Leeds Castle. Open invitation.”

Silence. “Well?” I demanded.

“Well,” he replied, “it’s partly this thing you have about spending time with your mother, but er, you remember my ex-girlfriend Louisa… .”

This is not a question. “
Yeeees
,” I said, “if she’s the same Louisa you’ve been mooching off for the past twelve weeks. What about her?” The penny dropped like a wingless plane. “Oh my god,” I shouted. “Not again!”

Jasper waggled a finger to silence me. “Helen, shush, it’s not what you think.”

I span round in one of those uncool I-don’t-believe-this circles. “What then?” Jasper coughed. “I’m broke, the lease is up here, and Louisa’s just bought a two-bedroom flat and needs a lodger.” To which my witty riposte was: “Bollocks.”