The Missing One (3 page)

But my mother, sitting upright on her white wooden garden chair, was so alone that it hurt to look at her. She would never find comfort in videos of other people talking about this disease. The new section on the website wasn't even worth mentioning to her. I couldn't bear to look at her, so I looked at Finn instead, ruddy-cheeked, squatting in his dungarees with his fat fists buried in the dirt.

Doug obviously felt the tension rising because he pointed at the tall flowers, and said, in a slightly desperate voice, ‘They're such a nice colour, what are they?'

‘Wolf's bane.' She gave him a grateful smile. Even at the end, when she was so thin and her cheekbones so sharp and huge, her green eyes sunken, she still had dimples on each cheek when she smiled. Then she told him how the roots of the plant are used in Nepal to make a deadly poison, but in Chinese medicine, detoxified, they are a healing tonic. ‘Death and salvation,' she said, ‘all in one lumpy root.'

Finn set off in a crawl towards the blue flowers. I leaped up and hoiked him back, but my mother didn't even move. She just turned her face to the blue sky.

‘Granny's flowers are poisonous,' I said, pointedly. ‘Don't touch them. Yuk.' But I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and scream, ‘Oh my God! Your grandchild is right here! Don't you even care? Can't you see him? Don't you want to know him before you die?' But of course, I swallowed that back down, too, and turned away from her, setting Finn down on the grass, far away from her wolf's bane.

We stayed out in the garden for too long that day, and in some ways it was as if nothing had changed at all. She was solicitous of Doug, as always, asking about university politics, his latest book, cutting him a second, thicker slice of cake. She didn't offer cake to Finn and I had to ask – is it OK? – and then she looked surprised, and a little embarrassed.

‘Yes, sorry, of course.'

She smiled at Finn in her distant way as he ate the little corner of cake I gave him, sitting on my lap and spraying crumbs over us both. He looked up at her, and grinned back and I saw her face melt. She leaned towards him, and touched her fingertips to his toes. ‘Do you like that cake?' she said, softly. ‘Do you?' Then a film came down over her eyes, and she blinked, and looked away, leaving him gazing up at her with his big brown eyes. I felt my throat tighten and put my hand on Finn's head. Doug stiffened next to me, perhaps anticipating trouble. But I started to talk – something about Finn's eating, the first time I tried him on solids and how he didn't spit it out the way the baby books said he would, but wolfed it down madly. As I babbled she just stared at the sky, nodding vaguely, gathering whatever it was back into that dark place.

I couldn't bring myself to ask her directly, that day, about the treatment she had refused. I couldn't find a way to lift my hand and touch hers; to say I was sorry, beyond sorry, and that I loved her despite all our difficulties and misunderstandings and furies; that this was unbearable – that she couldn't die. I couldn't tell her that I didn't just blame her for the way we were – I blamed myself too. This was both of us. I couldn't tell my mother that I loved her.

Only one thing was different between us that day. After I'd strapped Finn into his car seat, found his lost teddy bear, packed his wellies and board books and bottles and clothes into the boot, and snapped at Doug for not getting the travel cot down, we all stood for a moment by the car. Suddenly, she held out her arms and pulled me towards her, and kissed my face, ‘Take care, my lovely darling.'

She hadn't called me that for years and years. Her words knotted themselves around my heart so tight it was all I could do to breathe and smile and get in the car with Finn and Doug, and roll down the window to say goodbye, see you soon.

But I didn't see her; I didn't visit again until the last day, just a week ago, when Alice called at five in the morning, and I had to get out of the leather armchair and come.

*

I straighten up. I really can't be in this room. This is hideous. I am so cold now, cartoonishly cold – my teeth are actually chattering. I wipe at my wet face with both hands. No wonder Alice couldn't face it up here.

*

As I come out of the studio I see a shape at the bottom of the stairs, standing in silence. The hall light isn't on and for a disorientating moment, I think it's a ghost, waiting to claim me. Then I realize it is my father.

‘Oh!' I say. ‘Are you off to bed?' But his bedroom is the other end of the corridor. He must have been on his way to the studio but heard me up here and stopped, not wanting to deal with my grief too. ‘Are you coming up?'

He says nothing, he doesn't move. For a second I wonder if he is about to collapse.

But as I come down the stairs, I smell the whisky on him. I notice that he is swaying, gently. I have never in my life seen my father drunk and I know without even hearing his voice that this is going to be appalling. The smell on him is all wrong. At seventy-two, he is still tall and upright. He doesn't move, but his faded grey eyes settle on my face.

‘She loved you very much,' he says, with no lead in, as if we're in the middle of a deep conversation, which has never, ever been the case. His accent, I notice, has become much more Edinburgh.

I lean away from the fumes. ‘Yes, well, I loved her too.'

‘Good God, Kali. You are so like her, that's the real problem: the two of you are just so stubborn – and so
entrenched
. But she loves – loved – you so very much. She loved Finn too – you need to know this … '

‘No, it's OK. I do know it, Dad. It's OK.'

‘She just had … she had … she had awful … She had so many complicated memories – they got in the way of everything for the two of you – it was … '

‘Dad, please—' I don't want to be reminded of how nightmarish I was and how perfect Alice has always been. But he holds up a hand so I close my mouth.

‘She never,' he enunciates carefully, ‘ … there are so many things you don't know about your mother – oh Lord, Kali, so many things.' He swallows, his upper body swaying slightly, forwards and back. He rarely calls me Kali, almost always
Kal. Hearing him call me by my full name has a strange effect on me: one part of me melts while another freezes.

He is, I assume, alluding to my mother's unhappy childhood – the death of her mother when she was just a child; the father she disliked so intensely that she could never even talk about him. Perhaps he's talking about his affair, in California. He probably wants to give me details, as if this will explain why she found it so hard to be my mother. Maybe I reminded her of her hated father.

‘OK,' I say. ‘So, what things don't I know about her?'

He takes a long breath in.

‘Dad?'

‘I probably wasn't here enough.' He clears his throat. ‘When you were growing up. I just left you all to it and I am sorry about that. Truly.' He looks into my eyes then. His are set deep, pink at the rims. I desperately want to look away, but I force myself not to.

‘But good Lord! I just couldn't stand all the drama. You and your mother were,' his voice is loud now, and suddenly outraged, ‘impossible!' We are back on slightly more familiar territory now.

I consider telling him that, yes, he probably should have been there more, but I'm not sure this is really true. What good would he have done if he had tried to be more involved? He kept his distance because all these messy female emotions were alien to him and no sane person could blame him for that. It must have been unbearable when I was a teenager, with my mother and me ranting around the house, me yelling and slamming doors, her shutting down
and cutting me off, both of us crawling under each other's skin all the time, wriggling inside each other's heads.

Then there would be the remorse – I'd sob and she'd stroke my hair and tell me she loved me, would always love me, no matter what I did or said. I remember the softness of her body under my ear, the rumbles and sighs inside her belly, her steady heartbeat as we settled into a temporary truce. And then hours – minutes – moments – later we'd be at it again, something would change, some switch would flick in her or me, and we'd be at each other again. No wonder my father stayed up in London as much as he could.

I am suddenly extraordinarily tired. ‘Listen, Dad, it really doesn't matter.' I lean one shoulder against the stairwell. ‘You did your best. You really mustn't feel bad about anything.'

‘I always treated you and Alice exactly the same, didn't I? Always. Exactly the same.'

‘Yes.' I realize this is true. ‘Actually, you really did.' It was only my mother who openly found my sister so much more delightful and easy.

He reaches out and grabs my hand, and pins it to his forearm. The tweed feels rough and his hand is chilly and leathery, but surprisingly strong. ‘I should have let her … We should have … ' he says. ‘It might have made things better. She wanted to … '

‘What, Dad? Wanted to
what
?'

‘Oh God.' He closes his eyes. ‘Oh dear God. This is not right.'

‘Dad. Please, it's OK.' I pat his hand a few times with my free one. He is incoherent. He doesn't really know what he's saying. I realize that even if he does have something
to tell me, I actually don't want to hear it. This is too much. I want to erase myself from this stairway. I just want to be somewhere else. ‘Look, Dad, all this is just ancient history, all this, and anyway, we were fine, in the end, weren't we? Mum and I really got on fine.'

He sways and his face is suddenly distressed. The muscles seem to collapse, presaging the elderly man that is just round the corner. It's as if a layer has been stripped off him by the grief and whisky and he's just pulsing there in front of me, exposed.

All my life, my father has been this beacon of self-control: a tall, dignified, priestly man with his unwavering routines, anchoring the family from afar. But now the structure of his face is unsteady; he might actually cry.

But then he stiffens, raises himself upright again and clamps his jaw tight. He would never let that happen, even in this terrible state. He lifts his chin and looks up the staircase behind me, and I turn, too, and I think we both half-expect her to emerge from her studio, Medusa-haired, and order us to stop this nonsense and go to bed. The landing is dark and the door is shut.

‘Well,' he says, and clears his throat. ‘Bedtime, I suppose.'

His legs fold at the knee as he slowly walks away.

As I stand in the stairwell, listening to his footsteps recede, I feel an emptiness spread through my bones, as if I too have failed him. How can he bear to go and sleep in that room, in the bed where she just died? He must feel so alone. But maybe that is just it – maybe you cling to the space because the space is all you have left.

It is only as I begin to read the Emily Dickinson poem out loud that I realize how totally inappropriate it is.

I chose it because I found the book under the coffee table, and my mother had marked this poem with a card. I wasn't thinking clearly. Finn was toddling around, pulling books off the shelves with methodical focus. I didn't really read it properly, I just saw that the poem was about loss and thought she must have wanted it, or she wouldn't have left it out like this, as a sign – and that reading it would mean I didn't have to talk about her in front of all these people.

But now, too late, I see that the poem is about the death of a lover. It is so completely wrong, and I feel my face getting hotter and hotter as I read on. My father will be mortified, Alice baffled. I can't look at either of them as I come back to the seats. I feel all the faces, some familiar, some not, turned on me as I walk.

I reach out and take Finn from Alice – he holds out his arms to me and I feel unspeakable relief as his solid little
body anchors mine back onto the bench. I bury my face in his neck.

‘Ba,' he says. ‘Blah, ba, ba.' He pats my head, reassuringly.

I kiss the side of his head, and smell the nape of his neck and close my eyes as if I might suck in some of his imperviousness to the awful event that is going on around us. There is an eerie silence in the crematorium, broken only by the sound of Finn's toy ambulance running up and down my arm. Finally, Alice gets up.

My sister is spookily beautiful in grief. Her eyes are red-rimmed, even more strikingly green today because her face is so pale. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She's all bone structure, like our father. She's wearing layers of grey cashmere and her slim feet are slotted into ballet pumps. She's a couple of inches taller than me, and we're so clearly made from different materials that no one would ever guess we were sisters. It always seemed ironic that I was the one to take after our mother physically. But Alice got the beautiful green eyes.

She stands and talks movingly and simply about what an inspiration our mother was: friend and confidante, protector, and how she hopes one day to be half as good a mother herself. If I had stood up and spoken from the heart like this, rather than reading a bizarre poem, we would sound as if we had been raised by two completely different women: Alice's mother stable, loving, balanced; mine steeped in sadness, stormy, rising and falling like the tide, giving love only to withdraw it again the next instant.

But being so much younger, Alice has never seen the
aspects of our mother that I remember all too clearly. Her first newborn summer, when I was six, our mother lay in bed on her side day after day, staring at the wall with one arm under her own head and Alice attached to her nipple like an afterthought. This seemed to go on for weeks, though I have no idea how long it was really. I just remember her dull eyes, and how she kept the curtains closed and spoke in a hoarse voice, saying, ‘Go play. The baby needs to sleep.' I remember Alice's constant mewling and the horrible sickly smell that my mother's body gave off, as if she was sweating out stale milk.