Maya - Chapter 8 (The truth?)

He left when I was 11 but I don’t want it to be a sob story. Plenty of people have fathers who leave, parents who divorce, that kind of stuff. Statistics are such that it’s less common to have parents who are together these days than it is to have ones that aren’t. Anyway, who’d blame him? Who’d actually want to stay with her, with us? I bet every time he looked at us, Julie and I – saw Julie’s long lashes framing her blue eyes, the kink in my wild hair – he saw her – the person she used to be, the one that had disappeared long ago down the bottle’s neck. And anyway, his note said he’d come back for us and I think he always wanted to. I guess maybe when he got away, to head backwards into that hell, even for us, would have been regurgitating those wasted years of his life. I know how that feels; as soon as I could leave, I never went back. So no, I don’t blame him. I blame her. Entirely.

It was a Tuesday, the day we had Home Economics. I had this oversized wicker basket that would bang against my legs when I walked; an awkward oval shape it was. God, the bruises I used to get around my thighs. Bluish purple in colour, they were the kind that made PE teachers look twice and pass furtive, knowing looks to any other nearby adult. They remained for weeks at a time, or maybe they didn’t. Perhaps it was just that each Tuesday I’d accumulate more so that the originals would blend in with the new.

On that particular day we’d baked macaroni cheese. Mine hadn’t gone splendidly well which was unusual since I liked cooking, just not the transportation home. It had congealed and burnt, a feat to do both my teacher had commented. I recall that there were warning signs the dish wasn’t going to turn out as I desired. The melting of the butter in the pan was more like burning, the milk and flour glooped together into lumps – a far cry from the roux Mrs Heather had asked us to form. Talking with Patricia Limskin about Sandra Ormton’s new haircut – short on top and long at the back, spiky and dyed black, a bit like Adam Ant – had ensured I left the dish in the oven 10 minutes longer than required. A double whammy of fucking it up. I clearly couldn’t concentrate and maybe that was a sign. That, or Macaroni is a lot harder than it first appears to get right. I’ve never eaten it since but people tell me I’m not missing out.

I’d dawdled home even more than usual that day; a warm, spring afternoon in April. The rain that had poured incessantly the week before had finally stopped and freshness had descended on the village. Light dew clung stubbornly to the blades of grass packed trimly into the triangular village green with its mottled wooden bench a meagre centre-piece. By day, the fleshy derrieres of pensioners splayed themselves out over at least half of the sunken, pine seat, sitting and gossiping over neighbour’s nocturnal activities and the state of resident’s lawns. Often they’d take large bites of pork or cheese pies from Simpsons bakery and chew lengthily, words escaping in a washing machine of crust and filling. By night, the bench was draped with kids a few years above me in school, arms and legs looping around each other, predominantly keen to make as much contact with the opposite sex as possible. In the morning, as parents and toddlers gathered, the former bleary and irritable from lack of sleep and the latter squealing at passing dogs, there would be tuts at the carpet of plastic cider bottles and cigarette butts beneath the bench. I soon became one of the cider and cigarette offenders myself. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time.

How long did it take me to get home? At normal pace twenty minutes, that day about forty. No surprise that I would stretch it out now is there? I remember that my feet felt particularly heavy that afternoon, my footsteps especially laboured. There was a sickness in my belly but I wasn’t exactly anxious, even though it felt stronger than normal; it wasn’t as if I ever rushed to get home after school. Usually I’d take any other option: invites to friends’ houses would be whipped up, I was a member of more after school clubs than anyone in my year – from choir to hockey, drama to debating – I was ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. Sometimes, if it was a night without a club, I would purposefully hand in homework late just to try and gain detention. I’d always done it of course; it would be nestled at the bottom of my bag or in my locker. Our library was open until 6pm so I had time after some of my clubs. If it was nice weather, I’d do it outside in the park, stretching out time for as long as possible before inevitability sunk behind the clouds with the setting sun, light diminished and I could barely see the page of my exercise book before me.

When I arrived home the front door was open. This was the first of several things that were unusual. The front door was always closed and most of the time locked, sometimes double locked when the latch inside had been put down. That meant Julie and I would have to knock the ‘code’ so that dad knew it was us. If it was anyone else, particularly Emma, our social worker, dad would know and the white door, chipped at the edges from repeated slamming, would remain blocked. Without fail, having to use the code meant she was in one of her fits.

Stepping inside greeted me with the second oddity: it was so quiet. Apart from the black and white speckles buzzing on the TV screen where it had been switched to the wrong channel I could barely hear a thing. She was almost always home. Occasionally, they went out together – usually down to the post office to pick up her giro, or to the shop for milk, tea, bread –the basics. I hadn’t known her to go out without dad for years. He would go off to work when it came in, and on a good week she’d cook, clean and sew. Dad was a plumber and had a small ad in the local pages. Mostly it was work through repeat visits and word of mouth. Seeing this mirage of normality had so often lulled me into believing things would be alright but then the bad weeks would faithfully follow and then his return from work, ours from school, would be greeted with an altogether different scene. The best scenario of these weeks were that she would be asleep, finally knocked unconscious from the continual flooding of liquor into her blood-stream; the worst were that she were awake. On these occasions it was like sharing space with a prowling tiger, hungry to rip into the slightest movement, whimper or cough. The combination that day of the quiet and the open door meant something was out of place.

I remember making my way through the dim, musty living room with the towels strewn across the floor and into the kitchen. A mug of tea sat on the counter in dad’s blue ‘The boss’ cup, half-drunk and cold. Small droplets of tan liquid led from cup to bin, a few having run down the lid of it, leaving a stream of sticky brown mess. Crumbs scattered the worktop and the breadbin was open, a few slices of Hovis lying squashed together. It was like the shot you’d see in a movie before the protagonist swings slowly round to see their nemesis framed in the doorway. The quiet was the thing that got to me most; it was the stillness that made my heart thud. I put my basket down on the counter. It fell heavily from my hands I recall and I thought that would be it. If she was asleep that would wake her and I stopped. And I listened, one hand rested on the top of the basket. But nothing came, nothing except a distant, muffled groan. It sounded like someone having sex at first and then all kinds of crazy thoughts flashed through my head: my mother and father’s bodies entwined on the bathroom floor, arms pinned and outstretched like a yoga pose and him grunting over her. Was I going to have gathered one of those parent-sex stories so cringingly listened to in the playground, so stomach-churningly re-told?

As I pushed my weight onto one leg, I listened with every nerve rigid. Concentrating, I could hear that it was more prolonged than I’d first thought, a long, throaty moan that wavered slightly in its note, punctuated by quick breaths. My feet led me to the noise: up the white staircase with t-shirts draped and drying upon it, past the curve of the banister at the top with the Chinese print hung on the magnolia wall that I liked and Julie hated, towards where the noise, now punching my insides with each outburst, enveloped my ears.

I can still see clearly the frame of the bathroom door in front of which I stood.
The paint was peeling slightly from the woodwork and there were splinters that sprung out past the bolts that had been glossed over. The sunlight from the landing window was glaring down on my face and that’s probably why I didn’t see her immediately. That, and the fact that she was so small, crumpled up like an origami version of herself. The moans, which I now knew were her cries, were rolling out of her like she was vomiting them. Dressed in a torn, purple dressing gown scattered with butterflies, she was sitting- her back resting against the green plastic bath-tub- one slipper on, one strangely strewn across the other side of the room. Her body was hunched into itself and the cries coincided with a rocking back and forth, like your stereotypical mad-person I guess.

The third oddity was that there was no bottle next to her. Bizarrely, I wouldn’t have been as shocked at such a scene if there’d have been a half empty bottle of gin, her preferred tipple, nestled under her arm. But there was nothing. I checked in the bin. Nothing. This made me more nervous than anything so far.

I managed to call ‘mum,’ a few times I think, bleating like a pathetic lamb. She made no response which meant I had to move closer and she smelt awful, like decaying vegetables mixed with cigarette smoke. My face close to hers, my breath whispering onto her pale skin, she slowly moved her eyes to focus on mine. At one time they had been a brilliant, sparkling blue with hints of green. Dad liked to remind us of this with a wistful look followed by a resigned sigh. Now the gathering puff of skin on eyelid and below encircled any hint of life; the eye itself a slight, colourless slit.

I think we remained frozen in time like that for a while. I didn’t know what to say, I was eleven. At 37, she was also unable to find any words at first until she uttered the unforgettable, the words I can remember so clearly and repeat them to you now with absolute clarity. I remember them because they were so few and said with such weightiness that they pulled her back into her crumpled mess, unable to move for two days. ‘He’s gone, he’s left…..I drove him away,’ she whispered, the slits narrowing further to close. That’s when I saw the note lying to the right on top of the bathmat and the hatred for her solidified in my bones.