Oh Dear Silvia (16 page)

Why wouldn’t she? None of Cassie’s questions have been
answered because Silvia has inexplicably thrown her out and pulled up the drawbridge of her love, for Cassie seemingly never to experience it again. And why would anyone suddenly stop loving their daughter? Cassie fleetingly experiments with the thought of ceasing to love Willow. She can’t even entertain the idea because it is unthinkable. What happened? Did Silvia suddenly run out of love? Have ‘love-fatigue’ or something? Or … or …

Cassie’s most profound and dreadful thoughts start to emerge again, dangerously close to the surface now, so Cassie speaks internally, to steady herself.

‘Silly woman, doesn’t know what she’s missing, she’s a bloody twat. That’s all. Just an ordinary everyday twat from Twatsville. In the county of Twatfordshire. In the United Twatdom. In Great Twattain. It’s her fault. Not mine. Not Willow’s. Hers. She’s the one who can’t do the loving. Not us. Dad can love me. So I’m not
that
bad. It is possible. I’m not
so
bloody hideous. I’ve got mates for God’s sake. They love me. So does Ben. And Willow. And Jamie. And lots of people. So it def is possible. I know that … For sure …’

With those thoughts, Cassie circumnavigates around her biggest fear, a fear she has lived with for four years now, a fear that has pussed up to become a fully infected surety that she is too afraid to acknowledge. For Cassie, the awful undeniably obvious truth is that she is not good enough to love. That’s the fact. Her mother’s distance is just proof, that’s all. After the
divorce, Mum couldn’t pretend any more to love any of them. Not Dad or Jamie, or her. Especially her. Who had the most need of a mum, because she was about to be one.

Cassie often wonders when it was that her mother fell out of love with her. To know might be truly devastatingly painful, but frankly it would be better than this howling bottomless pit of not knowing. She wonders if it was when she was much smaller. Maybe she did something very naughty? Maybe she was unkind to another child and Silvia witnessed it and found it sickening. Maybe she was selfish and didn’t share nicely. Maybe she wasn’t very clever and Silvia knew that and found it unattractive. Maybe she was clumsy and broke stuff? Or lazy? Or a show-off? Or ugly? Or, most likely, all of the above.

What Cassie knows for sure, is that it is her fault. No one can disabuse her of that knowledge, not any of the others, not even her tiny cradling inner voice, which tries very hard. Cassie is just not lovable. FACT. Yes, she wishes that stagnant lump in the bed would love her, and more than that, she wishes she didn’t wish for that, because the gnawing pain of its continued and constant absence is virtually unbearable. In fact, at this very moment, it’s just that, unbearable.

So Cassie gets up, and after an agonizing ten minutes in that awful room, she leaves, having uttered not one word out loud.

Tuesday 10am

‘So there y’are, strapped to the top of the plane, on one of those standing-up bracket things, it’s one of those old-fashioned planes with the double wings, and I’m in the pilot’s seat, hilarious, and we are swoopin’ over snowy mountains and huge sandy orange canyons, and then oceans and then forests. You are completely safe because I am the best pilot in the world, but it feels edgy, y’know, because we’re takin’ this huge risk. I can see you, so I can, and you are screamin’ and whoopin’ with delight. The wind is in your hair and you are so utterly alive and … having every last jot of that experience … you are loving it … you’re free and happy and … well … awake. God. Yeah. It was amazing.

‘I haven’t dreamed like that since I was a kid. In proper full colour like that, and a moment that feels so wild and real and goes on for ages. I was devastated when I woke up Silly, truly
I was. Jeesuz help me, I plunged badly. Thank God I was comin’ here, otherwise I swear I would have pulled the covers back over my head and spent the day in bed, tryin’ to recapture it. And failing no doubt.’

Cat finds it hard to sit still, she is restless and jangled. She needs Silvia to calm her, but this is all she gets from Silvia now, a considerable amount of nothing at all. Silvia is a colossal torpid heap, and it isn’t fair. Cat has been through a lot to ring-fence this relationship, and look at her lying there. What was the point?

‘Hmm, Jung, I think, wasn’t it, who said, “We all dream, just as we all breathe.” Was it Jung? Someone, anyway. Yes. We all dream, just as we all breathe. So, we all dream then, all the time. I just don’t remember mine I’m guessin’. Not usually. Just the vivid ones like that. Wonder if it means somethin’? Maybe just me wishin’ it could be different. Wishin’ you were … back. Christ, Silly. This is torture. Please God, wake up. There’s so much to sort out. I’ve got to change … stuff. I can’t do that without you. So. Y’know … Come on. Bloody hell …’

Cat strides to the bottom of the bed where Silvia’s feet are exposed. The feet she was mesmerized by all that time ago. The same feet that skipped across the rocks. The elegant, strong, pearly feet Cat loved. They appear entirely different now. Cat catches her breath as she realizes that the feet are no longer thrilling or exquisite, they are the leaden, lifeless feet
of a dead person. They aren’t fascinatingly alabaster, they are deathly drained.

Faded feet. Of a pallid person. A sickly weak person.

Cat is, for the first time, repulsed by them. By her. By chronically ill Silvia. Surely, the point of Silvia is to feed Cat, in every way, to nourish and support her? A useless human fossil like this cannot do that.

Cat’s voice is low and hissing when she speaks. She doesn’t usually display this part of herself in public. This is the hidden Cat that few have witnessed. But now Cat feels private enough in this room to open her personal curtain a tiny smidge, revealing a glimpse of the darker Cat she hosts, but rarely acknowledges. This Cat is altogether more serious and chillingly selfish and was born all those years ago in Connemara.

She learned there that she could absent her empathetic, feeling self, so that what remained was cold and numb, impervious to pain. Perhaps not entirely impervious though, since some droplets of pain have leaked through the cracks in Cat’s façade, and diluted her resolve, to form a deep pool of shame and anger. A toxic mixture.

‘For feck’s sake, Silly. It will all fall apart if you … stay like this. Everyone is askin’ questions all the time. Suddenly now, questions about Philip again. After all this bloody time. I thought we were out of that. The story was so good. It fitted so well. Fitted exactly. He always said he’d go one day. His own mother had heard him say it many times, so she totally believed
it. She was even suggestin’ places he might be. Calling her son “a medical hero, the answer to the needs of the many unseen and unheard”. Blah Blah. Hero?!! The man was a feckin’ monster. Brutish bastard … good thing he never did get as far as the feckin’ jungles of Peru or wherever. It wouldn’t be disease the bloody Mascho-Piro tribe would be havin’ to fend off. He’d’ve had a ball with some as-yet-uncontacted-by-civilization people. Cos he was the bloody same. Savage.

‘
She
was comfortin’
me
, for Christ’s sake. “How could he? He’s so single-minded, I’m sorry it’s turned out like this Cat, he always was a selfish boy.” I hardly had to say a word. There was only her to convince, and she was doing a good job of convincing
me
! Once they searched the house, that was it. No further questions. Missing person. GP. Presumed abroad, or abducted, or both. Interpol alerted. Pity the abandoned missus.

‘Thank God there are plenty of misguided do-gooders out there wandering into dense foliage, intent on good-doing. Keeps the figures vague. Suits me. Suits us, eh, darlin’?’

Or did, Cat thinks.

Since Silvia came off that balcony, there have been some uncomfortable questions. Two unexplained incidents surrounding one woman. It doesn’t help that bloody Jo and Ed are pushing to know exactly what happened. She has avoided both of them thankfully. She hates them, they hate her. It was a deliciously equal stand-off until this happened. The great thing about long-held grievances is that they petrify nicely,
until no move is required on either side. That’s the stage Cat was at with Silvia’s family. No contact whatsoever.

Occasionally there might be a pinprick of communication to puncture the bubble. Like the very irritating letter from Ed early on, where he’d bleated about Silvia cutting herself off from everyone that loved her, and how none of them could understand it. He had said that no one in the family begrudged Silvia’s ‘friendship’ with Cat.

Friendship! Ha! How quaint.

Then again, other than to Philip on that awful day, neither Silvia nor Cat have ever defined their relationship outwardly, openly, to anyone. They have both thought it best not to, for different reasons. Silvia has always found it hard to commit to it out loud, and also neither of them have wanted the gossip which might promote further interest by the police. They have chosen instead to maintain separate flats, at Silvia’s behest, but of course, Cat doesn’t spend much time apart from Silvia. She refuses to.

Ed wrote in his letter about how, from an enforced distance, it appeared that ‘Cat seems to be the ivy growing around you, Silv. Looks like healthy foliage from a distance, but on closer inspection, might well be choking you to death? Please talk to us.’

How dare he? Ed was Silvia’s history. Cat is her present. Cat is all Silvia needs. They share important, private secrets that bond them inextricably. They both know what happened to Philip. Cat told Silvia all about it.

That’s the glue that binds them.

Cat was furious at Silvia’s response to Ed’s ‘ivy’ jibe. Instead of springing to Cat’s defence as she should surely have done, Silvia sat on the floor with her head in her hands, sobbing like a baby. Like a bloody useless vulnerable pathetic baby. After everything Cat had sacrificed for her. Cat had committed an act of such heinous magnitude for the sake of this relationship with Silvia. She had sunk lower than she ever imagined and gone to such a black, bleak place. It still haunts her in the form of jagged, fractured slices of gruesome memory in the many sleepless moments of the night. She often wakes to it. To the persistent thudding truth of it banging away in the pit of her stomach. A red mist descends around the appalling imagery that’s branded on her mind, and she packs it away somewhere very deep indeed. Usually. But when Silvia collapsed into a blubbering heap like that, Cat found it offensive. Found it spineless. Found it to be a betrayal. Cat couldn’t cope with Silvia being such a snivelling boohoo.

So, she hit her. HARD. A thudding blow to her skull. To shock her out of it, and to show her the price of her betrayal, and to teach her a lesson, and to assert some power. All of these, but mainly the power thing. That was the first of many such times.

Thump. Thump.

And now, in this room, alone with her, and looking at her colourless huge ugly feet, Cat feels an overwhelming urge
to hurt her again. To break her toe or punch her hard in the stomach. That would be satisfying. But she can’t. The nurses would see.

She stands still.

Low, under her breath, but loud enough for Silvia to hear if she is listening, Cat says, ‘Get back here to me, now. Do you hear me, you bitch? NOW! I want to love you. I need to love you. Please. Come on. Come back.’

Tuesday noon

Brave, tenacious, ever-hopeful Cassie is giving it another try. Round three.

When she got home last night and fed Willow, who immediately fell asleep on her lap mid-story, she realized that, however difficult it might be to come into this dreadful room, and sit looking at her mother, Silvia is truly out for the count and won’t suddenly sit up and snap at her. It seems that was what she feared the most – a swift, sharp shock with devastating recriminations. Cassie just isn’t strong enough to withstand that presently, and any remaining courage she does have needs to be channelled into Willow. After yesterday’s visit though, Cassie is reassured that there is no immediate danger around her mother.

How ironic. Silvia is in mortal peril, clinging on to the edge of her life by her fingernails, but Cassie senses no immediate danger.

Cassie stands up and moves closer to the bed so as to look at Silvia’s face. Everyone’s face looks a bit unfamiliar when they are lying down, she knows that, but Silvia seems to have changed a lot. She is thinner, yes, a little bit. Her skin has the sallowness of sickness about it, as if it has absorbed the shock and is still reeling. The colour of her is all wrong, just as the stillness is. Whatever else Silvia has been in her life, Cassie always remembers her mother as colourful and active. She is a force to be reckoned with. Loud and vital. Not lifeless like this pallid wodge of a person.

Is she even a person any more? Are you a person if you have no visible signs of a personality or a spirit? Perhaps, thinks Cassie. Perhaps you are simply only that, a ‘sick person’. Defined by illness. That would be a shame. Her mother has hardly ever been sick, in Cassie’s memory. In fact she has spurned sickness at every opportunity. She has always been rigorous about health, barely surrendering a day to feeling ill.

Silvia was as tough with herself as she was with the kids. Told them not to be ‘sickly’. Told them it was no good to give in to a ‘poorly tummy’ or ‘poorly head’. Perhaps she will emerge from this a changed person, Cassie thinks. Perhaps that is the purpose of this awful situation. Or maybe Silvia was supposed to be rendered motionless, completely still, so that, for once, she might listen. How ironic then that Cassie cannot bring herself to speak. This is her perfect opportunity, and she doesn’t feel able to take it. Not yet anyway.

Cassie looks at her mother’s features, reminded that she has often been told they look very alike. In the past, when she was much younger, she took it as a compliment. Firstly, her mother is quite a striking woman, albeit in a big, lumbering way. Secondly, and much more importantly for Cassie since she’s had Willow, she loves the fact that she belongs genetically to someone. Undeniably connected. That’s the part she marvels at. The actual, physical stuff.