The Exit (15 page)

About my first memory of her. I was three, or four. She had to go to work, and left me at Gran’s house to bake fairy cakes. I cried. I didn’t want her to go.

About my first boyfriend. I was fifteen. She didn’t like him. She was right not to like him.

About my first job. I was twenty-three. She organised it for me. It was the hardest and the best experience of my life.

I talked and I talked and I cried and I cried and—

Maureen died at 4.55 a.m.

She had wanted to die in bed, in her room in Dear Green Care Home. She had wanted to die alone. No music, no priest.

She died in her room in Dear Green Care Home. No music, no priest. Her daughter Catherine was holding her hand.

Her final words: ‘That’s not music, is it?’

Her last breath: like a sigh.

She looked very tired.

There was no reflection in her eye.

There is no jpeg.

Everyone at Dear Green was sorry for my loss. I am sorry for your loss, said Marcus, said Gavin, said the cougar doctor, said Harriet, said the ambulance driver. I am sad for your misplacement, I am apologetic for your failure. Nonsensical!

Rose didn’t say that. She stood with me as my loss exited the drive. She helped me pack my loss’s suitcase. She kissed me after I cut her tag off with a Swiss army knife and said: ‘Bad things happen here, Catherine.’

I gave her my mum’s mobile phone. ‘Turn it on here. Press 1 for me, 2 for the police.’ I made Rose practise ringing me a few times. ‘The ringer’s off but it’ll vibrate very quietly if I ring you, like this:
bzzz
. Have you got somewhere to hide it?’

I watched as she lifted the bedside cabinet and tilted it so it leant against the bed. Underneath the unit, she’d taped half a dozen stuffed envelopes, a few fifty-pound notes poking out of one, and over twenty packets of matches. She took some tape from the art materials on her desk, and taped the phone there too.

I forgot to ask Marcus about the cars that had come and gone last night. I went home to look for my loss in the clothes I’d rescued from Oxfam, in the three photo albums Mum had carefully compiled for me, in jobs just done, in the freezer. I wasn’t hungry, but even if I had been, I couldn’t have eaten the dead food, only slightly colder than she was now, probably. I couldn’t throw it out either. Thoughtful, misguided Mum.

Curtains drawn, lights off, I put on her favourite windcheater, lay on the sofa, photo albums open and spread out on the coffee table, the teddy she gave me for my fifth birthday at my chest, and waited for tears to fill some space, some time, but they didn’t come. I urged them: the photos on my phone in Rothesay would do it. Ten selfies taken on the ferry; me and Mum making funny faces, laughing. No, no relief, just a rumbling stomach as empty as the rest of me.

The phone rang twice but I didn’t answer. Antonio with a kind ‘Hey, Cath, I’ve heard. Call me.’ And Paul: ‘Are you there? Can I come over?’

What I needed now was to rummage through boxes for insurance documents, to pay bills that hadn’t been paid, to tidy away the mess that illness makes, to organise a funeral. I rang the funeral director Mum had decided to use and he reassured me that everything had been done: music, eulogy, humanist minister booked; he’d invited everyone on the small invitation list, organised the catering at St Jude’s after. ‘All you need to do is turn up at ten on Monday.’

Misguided Mum! She’d taken away all the rituals that keep people going in the dark days that follow death. I didn’t even have any family to fall out with. What I’d do to yell at a brother for trying to steal the inheritance, to punch at a sister for taking the ring I wanted, to make a regretful remark to a grief-stricken father: I wish it was you!

A father! Mum had left me the number of his parents. Where was it? In one of those envelopes. I dialled the number without thinking. ‘Hello, this is Catherine Mann, can I please speak to Mr or Mrs Marks?’

‘This is Mrs Marks speaking.’

I already hated the posh clipped voice of Mrs Marks, my grandmother. I decided to remain aloof, matter of fact, just passing on some information, that’s all. ‘I’m Maureen Mann’s daughter. Your son was my biological father. I’m just ringing to let you know that Maureen died last night.’

Mrs Marks didn’t speak for a moment. I waited for the tears and the speech – You poor sweet thing, all alone in the world. Come here, live here! You are all we have of our beloved son! Take our money! Be ours! Instead: ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Catherine . . .’

I hung up. I kissed the sapphire ring on my finger: my gran’s ring, my mum’s, now mine.

And then I did what I always used to do to avoid real life. I went online.

I read articles and blog posts about the stages of grief. I scanned conversations on forums, where people talked about the loss of a parent. I Googled Mum. Maureen Mann had 49,000 search results on Google.
Managing Director opens new school in Zimbabwe
.
Maureen Mann on forced marriage
.
Maureen Mann, keynote speaker at Heywood Charity Ball
. Ms Mann says this about injustice and that about poverty and this about a new government policy and that about generosity. The most recent result was written in one the of the blogs related to her charity titled
RIP Maureen Mann
, which used words like saddened, passing, brave, battle, dedicated, tireless, inspirational, survived by her—

Stop!

Rose Price had 349,870 search results on Google, pages and pages of photos of her at fifty, fifty-six, sixty-three, sixty-five, all the way up to four years ago, when she did a reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival. So successful and pretty and happy and sharp-looking! I Googled myself. There were lots of Catherine Manns: a lawyer, an economist, and some young idiot on Twitter whose posts were always about being drunk or hung-over. (Me.)

I messaged Gina and Rebecca.

I Googled Jimmy – Jim Thornton. There were 7,050 search results for him. A few articles about some members of his old band trying to make a comeback. Two about the lead singer who’d died of an overdose a year since. He’d been done with Internet offences in 2003. No details, except that when his neighbours found out two years ago they firebombed his living room. After that, he’d moved into a care home.

I checked Facebook. Gina and Rebecca had both seen my message, neither had replied. Composing would take time, probably.

I Googled Marcus Baird. Lo and behold, he had a blog:
It’s no Fun to Be Yellow – Marcus Baird on Writing
.

His posts were as dull as his book – ‘Coping with Writer’s Block’, ‘The Genre Debate’, ‘Views on Perspective’, and ‘
The Little Death
– read the first chapter for free here’. No one commented on any of them, and no wonder.

I Googled
The Little Death
. Someone had already written a book called that, the dickwad. A bestseller, too. If it was me, I’d use the French expression. What was it again?
La petite mort
. Don’t know why I Googled that or why I clicked on the first page of links, but I did.

Link ten produced a blank screen with just the title: ‘La Petite Mort’. It had the same background colour and the same font as Marcus’s blog. Under the title was a box: ‘Enter Referral Code 1 here’.

My phoned beeped – a text from Paul, same as the voice message:
You okay? Can I come over?

I scanned my texts. God, Natalie had left so many messages:

Lots of missed calls after that.

I tried her number, but it went straight to voicemail. I Googled her. The last entry for her was an article in the
Herald
written six months ago.

She wasn’t a thief, then. Wasn’t crazy. I went back to her first text and typed the code into the website I’d found, not expecting for a moment that it’d work.

And it didn’t.

I badly needed a funeral to organise.

I checked Facebook. Gina had come back:

That was better than expected.

Rebecca, however, had not replied.

I opened a Word document and stared for so long that I synchronised my blinks with the cursor. I could just imagine the eulogy Mum had prepared. A factual thank-you speech, like the ones she gave for her charity events. She was an excellent public speaker. I didn’t want an excellent speech. I wanted one that’d make the people she’d invited weep.

Mu mum
. I retyped, realising I’d made a mistake:
My Mum
, no,
My mum
. Nothing else came. All the ideas in my head were facts and thank yous. Perhaps Mum’s eulogy was the only kind you could really do at a funeral.

God, my typing was atrocious.

I opened the website again, retyped the password very carefully. Maybe I’d made a mistake.

zKgy48r9fP2_9b, then repeated it, as requested.

This time, another page opened, grey background. The only words: This site requires special software, download here for £34.99.

I needed to cry.

I closed it down, cried, and fell asleep.

Would you rather grief or anger? Anger. Would you grief or a broken nose? A broken nose. Grief or greed? Greed. In the days that followed Mum’s death, I chose obsession. Over a password. This seemed far better than a freezer filled with dead food and a heart filled with nothing.

I’d paid £34.99 for the software at 4 a.m. Friday morning, now installed on my MacBook, and another page had opened asking me for Referral Code 2. I had no real reason to be obsessed. Once I started, it just took me over. Like making the decision to stay on hold to British Gas. You simply cannot back down.

In desperation, I tried zKgy48r9fP2_9b again. Incorrect. Marcus had to be behind the website. The font, the title, the colour of the background. What would he choose as a code? I focused exclusively on him. Baird, Mbarid, mbaird, marcusb and every permutation of his name possible, writing down each and crossing it off if it didn’t work. This took all of Friday morning.

I don’t recall much about Paul’s visit on Friday afternoon. Before letting him in, I must have hidden the dozens of pieces of printing paper covered in possible passwords. Soup was involved, and I assume he must have put a blanket over me, as I woke late that night to find it there; a glass of water, two Valium and a note on the coffee table: ‘You might want one of these at night, to calm you down. Please call me when you wake.’

I spent Friday night typing in words relating to Dear Green. You’d be surprised how many there were, especially if you use capitals and lower case and numbers. Seven hours and I believed I’d exhausted that idea.

Saturday and Sunday I moved on to what I knew about his book,
The Little Death
. I read the chapter he’d put online, using character and place names, playing around with the English title and the French translation.

People knocked on my door a few times. I think, anyway. I heard the rustle of paper being posted through the door. Notes from Paul, Antonio, probably. Possibly Gina and Rebecca. I didn’t bother to look, too busy.

When I woke Monday morning, I realised the living room was covered in pieces of paper which were covered in incorrect access codes. What on earth? Avoidance they’d call it, I suppose, or madness. I gathered the sheets of paper, tossed them in a bin bag, and had a shower. Looking through my wardrobe later, I noticed a sweet black dress on a hanger, tag still on. Mum had even bought my funeral outfit.

A fat woman in a trouser suit worked through Mum’s agenda:

All forty-three people there knew Mum well, and loved her. She chose her mourners wisely. Paul and Antonio didn’t budge from my side as colleagues and friends and two aunts and three uncles and five cousins and Rebecca and Gina expressed their sorrow for my loss, adding a more meaningful one-liner to the usual blurb – She was the kindest boss I ever had. She never stopped talking about how proud she was of you. She didn’t realise how beautiful she was. She was just so honest, the least phony person I’ve ever known. She never forgot a birthday. She was cool. Yeah, there was not an ounce of phony in her.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘thank you so much.’

I felt heavy, that’s the only word I can think of. Heavy. Like the earth should crack underneath from the weight of my feet. Like my legs couldn’t hold my torso up, my neck couldn’t hold my head up. I wanted that earth to give way, so I could sink down into it. I remember the video screen at the foyer of the crematorium. Maureen Mann, it said.
That’s my mum’s name
, I thought. A lot of people wept during the service. But my tears were as heavy as the rest of me and stayed behind my eyes. I remember someone asking me if I wanted to see her before we went into the service and me saying, ‘No.’ I know I’d seen her as a body already, but only just after she died, and while she did look different, her expression set as a dead one, I hadn’t adjusted enough to the new state of things to be appalled by it, for her to be a stranger. I didn’t want to see her now. I wanted to forget ill Mum, dead Mum; to remember her well and alive. I sat at the front, knowing everyone behind was looking at me, thinking,
Poor Catherine, all alone
, and I didn’t cry and I didn’t turn around to smile and make them feel better about me.

At St Jude’s I sat between Paul and Antonio and picked at a fairy cake, accepting hugs and sorries as they came, leaving as soon as it seemed appropriate. Paul dropped me off, begged to come in. ‘Thanks, Paul. But I want to be alone.’ He hugged me, said he’d check on me later.