The Exit (7 page)

There was a long pause. Marcus was typing. Marcus was still typing. Maybe he was on for a sex chat. I sighed, got into bed, and prepared for twenty minutes of lying. He was still typing . . . Shit, he wasn’t going to get mushy already, was he? Or feel the need to chuck me? I reassured him before his message came through.

After all that typing, this is all he wrote back. Must have deleted his first attempt, having seen mine.

Mum had gone to work by the time I woke. While I was making a pot of coffee, I noticed the menu on the fridge. She usually put up a weekly menu on Sundays, but today was Friday, and she’d done a new one for two full months. Eight weeks’ worth, typed and printed and placed neatly under an Oxfam magnet beside the emergency numbers. She’d left a note on the table:
I love you Catherine. See you soon, my darling.

She left notes like this every now again, when she felt guilty. I sat down to choose a cheerful movie that did not involve old people, icky sex or guilty mothers.
Blades of Glory
– perfect.

Five minutes into the film and I started thinking about Costa Rica. I could go any day now, which meant I’d have to tell Mum.

Plan A: Just leave her a note.
Bye Mum! Gone to see the world! I’ll call when I can
. After all, she left me notes all the time, didn’t she? I grabbed the one she left for me and started composing a similar one:
I love you, Mum. See you soon.

Plan B: Pack my bags and as I’m heading out to my preordered taxi tell her v casually that I’m off to find myself. Nah, she’d tell me she knew exactly where I was and that was 1. At home with 2. A huge credit-card bill and 3. No career prospects.

Therefore I should unpack those bags immediately and focus!

Plan C: Ask her to sit down with a glass of red and really talk to her. I could tell her I loved her, but that she controlled me, and that sometimes I felt a bit useless around her, like I was a disappointment and a mistake. I could say I needed some time alone; time to get to know myself, to be independent. Hmm. That might work. Maybe it was true, even.

I was a mistake, did I tell you that? My dad wasn’t the one Mum married. He was the drug user she lived with beforehand. He died of an overdose in the one-bedroom flat they shared in Partick. ‘He was a great person,’ Mum would say. ‘Creative and spontaneous and clever and funny!’ They first met when he was studying English literature at uni while she was doing medicine. She flunked her final exams and spent the next few years with him as an unemployed hippy – i.e. smoking dope and marching against injusti: that’s plural for any-old-issue. She was twenty-five and studying International Relations when he died. Mum had a small photo album which she’d mope over on his anniversary. One photo is of the two of them drinking in a campus bar. He had messy dark blonde hair and a huge toothy smile. My dad was a cutie pie – and I had inherited several pieces, with a big dollop of ice cream on top. God knows I didn’t get my looks from Mum, ungracefully-grey non-smiler that she was. In another photo, they’re in their living room. Their eyes were bloodshot – not, I suspect, the red-eye of the camera. A few friends were with them, strewn on the floor of what looked like a middle-class drug den (Victorian fireplace, polished floorboards, whisky bottles, bongs). Mum’s drug problem was short lived, and limited to cannabis and the occasional trip. My father’s got more serious. Impure street heroin had killed him. Apparently, Mum found him in the bath. He was smiling, Gran told me, with all those teeth of his. Way to go, Daddy-o. I don’t blame his parents for not wanting anything to do with the bump in my mother’s belly. The owner of that belly had led their son astray and then to death. She and her bump could fuck the hell off.

A year later, she married a man called Martin Watson, who built apartments on vacant Glasgow lots that had previously been used for burying bodies. He’d known her since she played Maria in
The Sound of Music
at the Eastfield Youth Theatre. He’d played the oldest son, Friedrich. He’d wanted to kiss her back then, but after four months of rehearsals and five 7.30 p.m. performances as her stepson, he started to feel wrong about it. Five years later, when she inspected one of his river-view penthouses, he finally had the courage to make a move. Gran was ecstatic, the marriage an excellent one. Soon, her daughter would don an apron and stand at the kitchen bench of a large Kelvindale townhouse, making Scottish Tablet with her first child while pregnant with her second. Alas, Mum got tired of Martin’s traditional expectations and capitalist views after a year, and moved us out. I was two, so the only family unit I remember is me and my manic mum, who set about climbing the ranks of non-profit organisations, taking over, saving, the world.

‘Your mother adores you, she’s just torn between roles and role-modelling, like so many women are,’ my gran told me when I was twelve. The hormones had kicked in and I’d run away to Gran’s – seven blocks in total. We’d had an argument. Not the usual mother–daughter type like this:

No, no, Mum was too busy and too serious to waste time arguing about such things. These trivialities were agenda items, swiftly ticked during meetings at the dining room table. ‘You won’t get a tattoo? Good. 2: I’m not going to swear any more. You’re right, it’s a bad example. So you won’t swear?’ No pause before ‘Good. 3: Sunday nights are a good time for you to tidy your room. This, Catherine, is something I would like you to do from now on.’

I got a tattoo when I was nineteen btw – Bacchus, the god of wine, in a black circle on the inside of my left biceps. Gina and Rebecca got Pegasus, but I thought that looked wank. I think they’re jealous of mine now.

We didn’t argue about tattoos, swearing, and tidying, but we did argue, like the time I ran away to Gran’s. We yelled at each other about issues that Mum cared a great deal about, ones I didn’t even know about, let alone give a toss. Refugees, the Middle East, female circumcision, for example. One night she had a dinner party with Antonio and a bunch of colleagues and made me join them. I’d zoned out of the conversation, which was both dull and passionate. I was in the middle of a scintillating text chat with Gina about how chubby Rebecca was getting when Mum said: ‘What do you think about the situation in Gaza, Catherine?’

‘I don’t think about it.’

‘Shall I fill you in?’ She’d gone bright red, angry. She’d probably guessed what I was going to say.

‘Nah, you’re all right.’

After everyone left, she yelled at me: ‘You should be interested in the world! How can you be so self-absorbed?’ She scratched a fresh list there and then:
1. Read at least two
articles from the
Guardian
every morning. 2. Watch the
Channel 4 News
with me each evening. This. Catherine. Is something I would like you to do from now on!

She threw the list at me, slammed the door.

But that wasn’t the argument that made me run away to Gran’s. That argument was about porn. She’d checked my browsing history and found the site I’d been viewing as a novice masturbator. Gina and Rebecca had been on at me to try it for a long time. You’re so prudish, Catherine! God’s sake, woman, get with the wank! They’d instructed me to use the shower head while thinking of Harry Groves in Third Year. No luck. Maybe because our shower head only reached as far as my belly and the spray wasn’t forceful enough, or because the only image of Harry Groves that stuck was him eating a peach and it wasn’t sexy at all, messy and kinda pukey – a lump of pink flesh stayed on his chin and I’m sure he noticed, but he didn’t bother wiping it off. After several attempts to hone the shower head and the image of Harry Groves, they lent me a dildo and told me to use it in bed while thinking of Brendan Xavier from the telly. No luck (the dildo terrified me and Brendan Xavier’s thick short eyebrows took up the whole screen in my fantasy. He looked like the devil.) After that they’d given me a bullet vibrator and the name of a porn site and instructed me to browse till I found something that worked. I’d tried a few times, but the sites had all made me a little queasy. Not sure I was into – or ready for – all that inside-out stuff. I don’t know if I’d have kept on trying, but before I could even decide, Mum confronted me.

I was embarrassed, being caught, but livid at her response. She made me watch one of videos in front of her.

‘Do you know who that girl is?’ She’d paused the vid, pointed at the woman whose hair was being pulled, eyes open and looking up as a faceless man shoved himself down her throat.

‘What?’

‘Do you know how old she is?’

‘How would I know?’

She zoomed in on her face. She had tanned skin, barely any make-up.

‘Look at her. Eighteen? Seventeen? Maybe sixteen? Maybe younger. Look at her eyes. What do you see? Who do you think her mum is? You think her mum’s seen this? Where do you think her home is, Catherine?’

I wanted to kill her. I’d need therapy about this later in life.

‘She might have been kidnapped, trafficked, stolen. Her family might not know where she is. Or she might have been sold by her father. Or her neighbour might have paid her to do this, taken her to some strange house in some strange place and hit her if she didn’t do what they told her to do. Do you know what her dreams are, Catherine? You know what’s on her list?’

She’d zoomed in even closer but I was too angry to look. My mother’s bullying righteousness was making me want to pay someone to kidnap and kill her. Also, I’d found Mum’s bag of goodies in her bedroom cupboard – vibrator, videos.

‘You are such a hypocrite, Mother! I’ve seen your porn stash.’

She blushed, paused. ‘But I did my research. Those are made by women. This one here, what do you know about it? What do you know about her?’

‘Why don’t you watch the short interview with her before the vid, Mother? Her name’s Rixie and she’s from Texas. She won best blowjob at the LA cock awards last year and wore a glittery gold gown! It’s an industry, a business, and she “like totally loves her job!” Not everyone’s dodgy, God!’

‘Oh yeah? And in the interview did she say what’s on her list?’

‘Not everyone has fucking lists.’

‘Maybe this week she wanted to train for a 5k run. Maybe she wanted to start learning to play the guitar. Maybe she wanted to try and stop swearing. Don’t you realise that by watching this you’re keeping that girl in that room? You’re almost as bad as the traffickers who kidnapped her!’

‘No one trafficked her! She’s from Texas!’

I ran to Gran’s. And I didn’t get with the wank till I was seventeen. (And btw, it was always Paul I imagined. Worked every time.)

I loved spending time with Gran, I clung to her, relished her traditional maternalism. Her shortish dyed light-brown hair was always perfect. And right up till she died she wore foundation, mascara and lipstick, all the time. I think she even wore it to bed. She lost her husband when I was five. I don’t remember him at all, but Gran talked about him very affectionately. Apparently he made puns all the time, and believed eating out was a waste of time and money. (‘He’d say: “My wife is a better damn cook than any restaurant chef!”’) They had a happy marriage, Gran told me.

I often visited Gran after school. She would remove my stains and make me three-course meals from scratch, unlike Mum, who at that stage was always too busy during the week to make more than one-course meals from Marks and Spencer’s.

I realise now that as much as I needed to spend time with Gran, I always went home afterwards, home to the mother who was not really a mother. And the reason I always went home, was that I wanted to. She and Gran were the two halves of me that hadn’t quite fitted together yet.

I was eighteen when Gran died. Heart attack, it was. In the kitchen, apron on.

I believed my mother loved me in the same way as she’d loved Martin Watson. I was an attempt at conventionality that failed. I was even clingier than him, after all. I got in the way of several promotions. She told me so. ‘I stayed in Glasgow for you, Catherine! London would have been a much better place, career-wise.’ As it was, she had to commute there at least once a week after she’d reached director level. Gran was around the corner from ours, and I slept there when Mum was away, moving myself back home on her return, often feeling a nuisance and a mistake.

I’d go with Plan C: wine, chat, difficult truths. I decided it would happen tonight after work, even checked we had a bottle of her favourite Sangiovese in the cupboard.

On Skyscanner.net, flights to Costa Rica were around £800. On the way to the travel agency, cash in pocket, I ummed and ahhed about the best date to go. I know it’s callous, but one of the most significant factors was how long Rose had left. I Googled dementia on my phone in the taxi, but Marcus was right – there were many different types of the illness, and I had no way of knowing how advanced hers was, although she was connected quite often, so maybe not too advanced. If she lived another year, I could make a shedload more money and have enough to travel the world for months. From what I could gather, the old dear would probably not last years, but may well hang around for at least another twelve months. She was attached to me, and a lot of the time thought I was Margie, so she might well keep paying me to run pointless errands. I decided I should stay at Dear Green for another month at least, and make myself indispensable to her. I booked a one-way flight to Costa Rica leaving in four weeks’ time, making sure it was a flexible ticket that I could change, in case the money was still rolling in and it was worth staying a while longer. I whistled all the way to Dear Green. Mistake-girl was getting outta here. She would be list-free, agenda-free, job-free, post-grad-in-social-work-free and mother-free.