The Storyteller's Daughter (5 page)

Inside the cottage is tight and low ceilinged, but extremely cosy. There's an open fireplace in the lounge, original wooden beams and an Aga in the kitchen which my mother adores. The long garden is overflowing with leafy green vegetables, fruit trees and beanpoles. The patio is crammed with pots spilling over with berries and herbs. And past all this chaos, near the end of the garden, I can see the little orchard of apple trees with their fruit-laden boughs drooping to the ground. It's like a jungle out there.

“It's looking a little overgrown,” my mother admits, as we stand on the patio in the early-evening sunshine, in between a ceramic pot growing rocket leaves and an old tin bucket that's spouting green peppers. “I don't know why but I just don't seem to be able to keep up with it lately. I'll get back out there tomorrow and give it a damn good tidy up.”

I'm glad my mother's home where she belongs. It's where she deserves to be. The bland North London flat we used to live in never reflected anything about her. It seemed to strain against my mother's zest for life, as if struggling to contain within its walls the energy that she radiated. It was plain and characterless, with small, square rooms and no discernible features. Here in this cottage there are secret hiding places, there is history, there are quirks and peculiarities. Every room has a story attached to it, a personality of its own. There is fresh air, light, nature and room to breathe. And above all there are roots to my mother's past, roots which I hope will ground her, steadying her in reality as she faces the hard times ahead. I know almost nothing of her life before she had me, so skilled is she at avoiding any mention of it, but I know it was here that she grew up with her parents and a cat named Fluffy, here that she listened to records and danced in her bedroom, and here that my father came to call for her when they were dating. All of these things I know happened here, and my hope is that maybe as she nears the end of her life these memories – these
real
memories – will come back to her, shoving aside the fantasy world that she has created. I want my mother to be able to look back on her life with clarity, so that she may remember her time on this earth – good parts and bad parts – exactly as it was. No lies, no confusion, just pure lucidity and perfect understanding. What could bring her a greater sense of peace than that?

The cottage is filled with a sweet, sugary scent. My mother has been making cupcakes and twelve of them are lined up on the kitchen work surface, each decorated with pink icing and coloured sweets.

“This one's for you,” she says, pointing at a cake that's twice as big as the others, “and I'm going to top it with all of your favourite sweeties.”

I look at the bowl of rainbow-coloured jelly sweets sitting near the cakes and secretly tot up the number of calories that will be contained in this well-meant gift, not to mention the amount of additives and colourings. I never eat sweets these days, not after researching what's in them.

“Fantastic,” I smile, “and the other eleven are for…?”

“I'm taking those to the local cancer hospice.”

She shakes her head mournfully. “Those poor people,” she sighs, as if she's not one of them.

I always find it strange walking into ‘my' room. It's like revisiting my childhood in a feverish dream where everything is distorted and the wrong way round. All my childhood things are here – my pink flowery duvet, my framed photo of two little bunnies eating dandelions, my music box, my little plastic hand-held mirror – but this was never actually my bedroom. It wasn't here in this cottage that I bounced on the bed or played with my toys or read my books; and yet here is the bed I bounced on, the toys I played with and the books I read. My mother keeps it like a shrine to me, albeit a shrine that has been relocated from Tottenham to Cambridge. My school certificates and prizes are lined up on one shelf, my first science set sits on another. She has even kept all my old exercise books in a box at the bottom of the wardrobe. Feeling nostalgic I delve in and pull one out – English Literature, Year 9, Mr Hamble – and flick through the pages, recalling the pains I took to write in such small, neat letters. Everything is beautifully presented, with the dates in the margin and the headings underlined, but the pages are half blank.

I read the assignment title at the top of one page: ‘Write your own myth of 500 words explaining how penguins lost the ability to fly.'

In immaculate handwriting I have written: ‘I object to this assignment on the basis that it is fundamentally flawed. The Natural History Museum has told me there is no evolutionary evidence that penguins could ever fly.'

Mr Hamble has written ‘See Me' in big red letters at the bottom of the page.

Following my disgrace in Red Class I hated English, all those silly stories and poems that were full of fictional characters and unrealistic scenarios. I greatly objected being forced to read fiction, and told Mr Hamble it would certainly rot my mind.

‘It's completely unrealistic,' I told him, ‘that Romeo would think Juliet was dead and then kill himself, and then that she would wake up, see Romeo was dead and kill herself. What are the chances of that actually happening? I don't think that has ever happened to anyone. Ever.'

At parents' evening Mr Hamble told my mother that I was ‘a strange girl with an extremely underdeveloped imagination', and that I might benefit from some extra exposure to stories of a fictional nature. Huh! If only he knew!

On the shelf next to my science kit my old reading books are lined up neatly and hemmed in by two wooden bookends made to resemble caterpillars. I scan through the titles:
Who Am I? – A
Journey Round the Human Body, 101 Interesting Facts you
Probably Didn't Know, A Beginner's Guide to Keeping Hamsters,
Let's Explore the Solar System, A Frog with Your Tea? – Strange
Customs from Around the World, The Tale of the Jiggly-Wop.
I pull this last one out and study the aged cover, wondering what a work of fiction is doing in there with all my other educational books. This had been my mother's favourite book when she was a little girl, and I recall her reading it to me when I was about six-years-old. It was my favourite, too, back then, but I could have sworn I had thrown it out along with every other storybook I owned. It was the silliest of fairytales, full of talking animals and other ludicrous products of the imagination that could only serve to pollute my mind and lead me astray. I thought I had dumped it in the bin along with
Alice in Wonderland
,
The Hobbit,
and every other piece of nonsense my mother had subjected me to in a bid to rot my common sense, but obviously it managed to escape my mission of destruction. I listened to this story so many times that I can still remember the words.

‘In a land far away, there lived a creature that didn't know quite what it was… '

I run my fingers over the front cover, tracing the outlines of the strange Jiggy-Wop beast: his elephant ears, his feathery cheeks, his flowing mane, his zebra-striped body, his webbed feet… for a moment a smile plays at the edges of my mouth before I pull myself together and chuck the book into the wastepaper bin.

“No wonder children are so stupid,” I mutter.

Over a dinner of lasagne with fresh salad straight from the garden my mother witters on about her vegetable patch and Rick Stein and sea bass and turnips, anything to prevent me from questioning her about her illness.

“Mother,” I finally interrupt, “how are you feeling?”

“Wonderful,” she says cheerfully, quickly standing up and clearing the table.

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“You've lost a bit of weight, haven't you?” I suggest in what must be the understatement of the year.

“You know, I do seem to have lost a few pounds,” she says, tugging at the gaping waistband of her long, purple skirt. “I've had to tighten the elastic on this a couple of times now.” She bunches the waistband together in her fist, shakes her head and looks genuinely baffled. “I did need to lose a few pounds though,” she says, more cheerfully “too many puds. You know what I'm like.”

“Have you seen Dr Bloomberg lately?”

“Yes, just last week,” she says, plonking the dishes in a sink full of lemon-scented suds.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what did he say?”

“Oh, nothing much. You know how he waffles on. Now, I made treacle tart or chocolate mousse for desert. Which would you like?”

I shake my head slowly, incredulously, but she refuses to look at me. “Whatever,” I mumble.

The next morning I awake to the smell of sausages and bacon. For one dreamy moment, tucked up under my old pink sheets in the narrow bed with the sinking mattress, I imagine I'm a little girl again in our North London flat. I can feel the warmth of the morning sunshine stealing through the gap in the curtains, and I imagine I am running across Hampstead Heath, my mother holding her arms wide open, ready to catch me.

But suddenly I feel the hand at my throat, fingers rough and calloused against my soft skin, squeezing, constricting, pressing against my windpipe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe! And someone is shouting at me, words I can't decipher.

I sit up with a start, gasping for air, clutching at my throat ready to prise away the hands that are choking me. It's always the same, this horrible dream. I can't see anyone. There's no face, just this voice – deep and angry – and this feeling of suffocation. And the smell. The sweet, stomach-churning smell of raw meat. I almost told Mark about it the other day, such was my desire to share it with someone, but no doubt he would have thought me strange and perhaps even a little unstable. I flop back against my pillow, sweat cooling against my back and my heart pounding in my chest.

“Morning! I'm making pancakes. There's fresh coffee on the table and the sausages and bacon are nearly ready. Now, how about eggs? Fried? Scrambled? Do you want some toast? It's fresh bread, I made it this morning.”

“Mother, I can't eat all this,” I say slumping down at the kitchen table in my pyjamas.

“I want to feed you up while you're here,” she says, pouring batter mixture into a sizzling frying pan, “you're looking rather thin.”

I watch her straining to lift the frying pan with both hands. How much must she weigh right now? Seven stone? Not even?

As she tips the frying pan from side to side, spreading the batter round the pan, I see her body sway slightly. She places the pan back on the hob with a heavy clatter and stands motionless, gripping the handle as if for support.

“Mother? Are you alright?”

No reply.

“Mother?”

“I'm fine,” she says breathlessly.

“Let me do that.” I stand up and approach the hob.

“Absolutely not!”

She turns and glares at me as if I've attempted to assault her. By suggesting she may not be capable of cooking I have threatened her very way of life. She forces a little smile and takes a deep breath.

“Do you want syrup or sugar with your pancakes?” she asks sweetly.

Despite my protestations, my mother insists on getting out into the garden after breakfast and beginning her tidy-up. For the first twenty minutes I am surprised and encouraged to find that she appears to have more energy than I do. She is a whirlwind of pruning, snipping and trimming. As I work along side her, stumbling through the tangle of roots and leaves, gathering the cuttings into a black plastic sack, I am foolish enough to allow a tiny ember of hope to catch alight inside me. Maybe her earlier weakness was just a momentary lapse. Surely she can't be that sick when she seems so full of beans? She chatters away while she works, and hums tunes from the Beach Boys, David Bowie and Abba.

She picks various herbs and shoves them under my nose for me to sniff.

“Isn't that just delicious!” she beams.

The morning is warm and bright and the rich, earthy smell of the soil mingles with the scent of rosemary, mint and lemon balm. The birds twitter in the trees and for a while it's easy to forget that things aren't perfect, that this isn't just another Summer like all the others we've had before. That this may, in fact, be one of our last. But despite her zealous start, it's not long before my mother starts to wane. She drags her feet and rubs her back, gazes forlornly at the overgrown garden as if overwhelmed by the prospect of having to contend with so much work. The light fades from her eyes, gradually replaced by fatigue.

“Mother,” I say tentatively, pulling weeds out from between a row of lettuces and deliberately avoiding her eye. “I was wondering, do you think that perhaps it might be good idea to get someone in to help you with the garden? Just for a couple of hours a week?” I hold my breath, waiting for her to snap at me like she did this morning.

“Why would I want to do that?” she asks, tying an unruly bunch of runner beans onto a pole with a piece of frayed green string.

Immediately I go from being worried about upsetting her to wanting to slap her around the face. Her denial is starting to grate. I try to breathe deeply, but I feel like I am nearing the end of my tether.

“Because,” I say as calmly as possible, “it's an awful lot for one person to manage.”

“But I'm perfectly capable – ”

“I know you're perfectly capable,” I say, clenching my teeth, “but this garden is really a lot to cope with on your own.”

“Meg May,” she says, placing her hands on her bony hips and looking at me sternly, “I have been coping on my own since the day you were born. I have cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, tidied, washed and ironed. I have sewn your dresses, done the shopping and paid all the bills. I have fixed ovens, plastered ceilings, laid flooring and put up shelves. Do not tell me that I cannot cope on my own. I've managed to grow vegetables in the past with not a minute spare in the day and you clinging to the hem of my skirt, so if I could manage then I can certainly manage it now when I've got all the time in the world and no-one else to worry about.”