Make or Break

For the rest of the week I kept pretty much to myself. Dad had gone with a client to somewhere in the Canaries so it wasn’t difficult to avoid him. He’d tried to call a few times but I hadn’t answered. Mum was a little harder to avoid because there was always the chance we’d bump into each other if we were visiting Annabelle. I missed her, though, so found myself listening to her radio show in the mornings. She was fabulous and her callers loved her; that lying, recycling eco-witch. Both Mum and Dad still wanted the party to go ahead. But how could we stand in front of all the people who’d watched Annabelle and me grow up, whose children’s weddings we’d gone to, who we’d been on family camping holidays with and who’d dropped round casseroles when Mum was sick and Dad was away, and lie to them all that everything was normal. That we were normal. And Annabelle felt the same. I think. It was hard to get her to take a firm stance on anything. She always saw the variables in any situation whereas I believed there were two sides to every story. Well sometimes there just wasn’t. Goldilocks stole food, Harry Potter was nice/Voldemort was naughty, Ross and Rachel were definitely not on a break, and Dad had lied to us our whole lives. I hadn’t cancelled anything yet, though.

At home I worked hard at keeping positive. Or at least not depressed, bitter and wrathful. I followed every recommendation I could to cope with stress. I watched comedies and read Martha Beck. I made lists of the positives:

1. I have a sister in Cape Town and that was close to Jimmy
2. I have a sister in Cape Town and she might get me free diamonds
3. I have a sister in Cape Town, which means when I get old and infirm I have one extra person who can bring me prunes

I bought brightly coloured flowers, I played happy music and planned a weekend in Cornwall with Priya and Laurel for when they got back. I read Oprah’s What I Know For Sure three times and ended up grumpy at the story of the window of her private plane cracking. I wanted a private plane. I did all the things suggested by the half-page Life Coaching column from Be Happy magazine.

After three nights of barely sleeping I reluctantly made an appointment to see the doctor. He offered me a variety of scary-sounding hypnotic sedatives with a variety of scary-sounding side effects (black hairy tongue?!), and I said ‘no thanks, I’ve got the internet’ and went home and looked at baby raccoons, before-and-after pictures of dog adoptions and YouTube videos of elephants helping other elephants. And it did make me feel better. And my tongue remained pink and hairless. I have my own Diazepam, thank you very much.

But I was most at peace (well, the least wrathy and crazy) when I was running. And, I was starting to realise, when I was talking with Jimmy, Diego, Ian and Flora on Skype. Which I did every day. I felt like I belonged with them. I’d completely been myself at their place. But I couldn’t just turn up in South Africa and say, ‘My family . . .? Yeah, that didn’t work out. Can I join yours?’ Well I could, but I’d be viewed as very strange indeed.

The weekend rocked around and I stayed at home watching movies with Dave (and ignoring his advice: if life knocks you down – just stay there and take a nap), only leaving the house for runs and to pick up croissants; which reminded me of Diego and Jimmy on ‘Gluten Day’. I received an email from Dad asking to see me when he got back which I didn’t reply to. And Annabelle texted me an updated ‘Reasons Why Greta Cries’:

◾ not enough people realise the benefit of mono-mealing

◾ she was sad about all those years she abused her organs by eating meat and three veg

◾ daffodils

◾ she just realised she could follow David Attenborough on Twitter

On the Monday I swung by Annabelle’s after an afternoon run hoping I could play Monopoly with Hunter and have a Katie cuddle. I needed one and the need outweighed my desire not to see my mother. But when I arrived Mum had taken Katie for a walk, and Hunter was at a play-date after school with Annabelle’s new mum friend (apparently they’d bonded over their back tattoos), and Annabelle was sat in the kitchen doing accounts at the dining table. I grabbed a glass of water and sat in a chair that didn’t have a box file on it.

‘I don’t think I can forgive either of them,’ I said, continuing the conversation that had been going on all week.

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ she said, shuffling a pile of receipts, her eyes on her computer screen. ‘Look at me,’ she waved a hand around. ‘And nobody means any harm.’

‘Rubbish. Hitler did. Charles Manson did.’

‘Yes, but Mum and Dad—’

‘Those kids at Columbine did.’

‘Our parents have travelled their journey and it’s not your journey but—’

‘The Boston Bomber did.’

Annabelle looked over the top of her laptop. ‘Fuck it. Let’s watch Weekend at Bernie’s.’

Towards the end of the movie Mum came home with Katie, and Hunter got dropped off a couple of minutes later. I watched Annabelle’s face light up as she chatted to her new friend and I was so happy for her. Mum eyed me warily as I sorted a pile of ironed clothes. We’d not spoken or seen each other since the meeting with Dad a week ago.

‘I’m not at work because of your lies, you know,’ I said, putting Hunter’s clothes in a neat pile. ‘Your affair is ruining my career. If I end up on benefits I’ll fill in the form saying Reason for Benefits: Big stinky affair.’

‘Oh, surely you can still go to work,’ Mum said, as she joined me and began making a pile of Katie’s mostly pink items. ‘Why should that stop you?’

‘Lana says I need to work through some things before I’m allowed back in the office. And I do. Because you’ve been lying to me my entire life.’

‘Well . . .’ Mum said, folding tights and looking like she was scrambling for a good defence. ‘Not your entire life. You were a very late talker so it really wasn’t until you were about three and a half.’

I glared at her.

‘I think you should try some meditation.’

‘No thanks,’ I said, putting the neatly sorted piles back in the laundry basket for delivery.

‘It will be a good outlet for your . . . prickly emotions. It’s an excellent tool to learn, and once you’ve mastered it you won’t believe you ever coped without it.’

‘Rihanna singing her recent songs is probably my level of enthusiasm for meditation,’ I said, holding the laundry basket in front of me.

Mum looked perplexed. I explained that in her latest songs Rihanna was so unenthused she barely finished the words; instead just moaning an approximation of the lyrics with as much vivaciousness as a slow-draining sink. I’d imagined her lying on silk sheets (they’d be rose-coloured) with some minion music producer holding up a microphone from his crouched position on the floor, another assistant holding up sheet music and Rihanna droning out the mumbled. half-formed lyrics while appraising her talons and wondering what her personal chef was making down in the kitchen, and thinking she’d probably get down there around 2 p.m. Mum looked more perplexed.

‘Meditation is not for me,’ I summed up.

‘Meditation is for everyone.’

And because I had nothing else to do and I really wasn’t comfortable being angry with my cute, weird little mother, I allowed her to lead me into Annabelle’s bedroom.

I sat on the floor and crossed my legs like Mum instructed. ‘Annabelle and Marcus have had sex in here,’ I said, still feeling somewhat antagonistic towards my composting, worm-farming fraudster of a mother.

Mum looked scandalised. ‘Shhh!’ she hissed through tight lips.

She gave me a hard little glare then arranged her features into a vision of calm, closed her eyes and told me to do the same.

‘The intention is not to get involved with your thoughts,’ she said. ‘Or to judge them. Simply be aware of each mental note as it arises.’

‘OK,’ I said and immediately thought of the Blue Footed Booby from the Galapagos Islands and wondered who had been given that word first: the breast or the bird. If it was the breast, then I wanted to know what sicko pervert anthropologist had named the Booby after a boobie. And if it was the bird then that was really weird because a boob looks nothing like a Booby.

‘Muuum,’ I said, feeling overwhelmed by all the boobies in my head. ‘I think I accidentally got involved with a thought.’

I told her about all the boobies. Mum listened with one eye open, passed no comment then shut it again and I followed suit.

‘Think of your thoughts going past on a conveyor belt,’ she said in an airy-fairy spa lady voice. ‘Observe them and let them pass.’

‘Is it a supermarket conveyor belt, or like the ones at the airport?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Weeell, the supermarket ones go in one direction but the airport ones come back around. Do I want the thoughts to come back around?’

‘No. Go for the supermarket one.’

‘OK.’

I sat with my eyes shut watching my imaginary thoughts slide past on a supermarket conveyor belt. I imagined someone boop-booping each thought’s barcode and then I wondered where the thoughts get put. Do they end up in a big supermarket bag (reusable and probably made of hemp), which would mean I’d then have to collect my thoughts and carry them out? No, they were supposed to be going past, observed and discarded. So did the conveyor belt just finish and all the thoughts fall off the edge into a big thought pit? Did they rot or could they be recycled? I ran my concerns past Mum.

‘OK,’ she said, taking a deep breath in through tense nostrils. ‘Think of thoughts as wisps of wind that dissipate after you’ve recognised them.’

‘Outside or inside?’

‘What?’

‘Are the wisps of wind outside and is the wind making the trees move and are the leaves fluttering to the ground and has my brolly just turned inside out and—’

‘They’re inside. Inside a nice, calm, peach room.’

‘Oh, that’s much better,’ I said, thinking of a wispy thought floating across a peach wall. Gross. Who painted that wall peach? Who, apart from hospital boards and old folks’ homes, would ever think of painting a room peach?!

Five minutes later Mum and I entered the living room where Annabelle was sitting on the floor doing a puzzle with the kids. Mum walked past me, grim-faced, and collapsed on the sofa.

‘Some people are not made to meditate,’ she said, resting a palm over her eyes. ‘I’m exhausted. How do you live in that head of yours?’

‘I’m constantly entertained.’

Later, after Annabelle had fed and bathed the kids and Mum and I had tried to assist but just ended up tripping over each other, Annabelle sat in the kitchen helping Hunter with his reading homework, and I sat on the sofa watching Mum rubbing Marcus’s mad sister’s home-made cream into Katie’s elbows with all the tenderness I remembered from her as a child and thought, ‘Why couldn’t you have just decided not to love him?’ Why couldn’t she have looked at Dad and thought, ‘That door has closed. There will be others but that particular one has closed and locked and I need to walk the hallway of life looking for others.’ I was very proud of my analogy and sat down next to Mum and said it.

She looked shocked, but pleased that I was talking to her in a nice gentle manner, and also confused about the doors.

‘Why didn’t you just tell yourself not to love him any more?’ I said. ‘Then we wouldn’t all be living this lie.’

Mum looked at me through her giant glasses. ‘You wouldn’t be living at all, Plum,’ she said in her clipped Germanic tongue. ‘Did you think about that? And neither would this little love bug.’ She smiled and touched a finger to Katie’s nose, making her giggle.

I winced at the thought of Hunter and Katie not existing.

‘But didn’t you ever think you could have had it better?’ I said, treading carefully. ‘A real relationship that wasn’t based on lies? Someone who was all yours? Like, truly yours? Didn’t you ever think you were . . . short-changing yourself?’

Mum turned to me. ‘You can despair that roses have thorns or you can rejoice that thorns have roses.’

I frowned; did she just get the words to ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ spectacularly wrong? ‘What?’

‘You can either see the bad in the situation – the thorns,’ she explained. ‘Or the good in the same situation – the rose.’

‘Is Dad a rose or a thorn?’

‘He’s the rose.’

‘And the fact it’s all a lie is the thorn?’

‘No. His wife is,’ Mum said, then looked up in shock that she’d said it, gave a guilty titter and we both cracked up.

After telling Katie to go and get a memory card game, Mum turned to me, her little wrinkled hands resting on her little corduroy-covered knees. ‘You need to talk to your father, Jess,’ she said. ‘He told me you haven’t been answering his calls or emails.’

I sighed. ‘I don’t know what I want to say to him. I have too many questions and I’m not sure I’m ready to hear the answers.’

‘Your father’s actions, they were never malicious,’ Mum said. ‘He did what he did because he loved everybody.’

Mum watched me for a reaction but I didn’t have any. ‘Well, you’ll have to talk to him soon,’ she said, reaching for the lid of the smelly cream and putting it back on. ‘The party is coming up.’ She glanced sideways at me, a hopeful glint in her eyes, which I chose not to respond to. ‘Then he goes back to Cape Town. And I’m not sure how it’s going to work out after that . . .’ Mum stopped screwing on the lid of the cream and the corners of her mouth dropped.

I took the jar, put it on the table and held her bony hand. ‘I know.’

She gripped my hand and gave a watery smile. Then Katie came running back in and began setting up the Moana memory cards on the coffee table, her breath heavy and raspy. She signed to me to play and I signed ‘yes’ back and gave her a kiss. I shuffled closer to Mum, pulled Katie onto my knee and the three of us took turns flipping over cards.

‘When are you going back to work?’ Mum said after a short while when we’d played in harmonious peace.

‘When my wrath has cleared up,’ I said with a smile.

Mum smiled back.

I found a matching pair and received a congratulatory kiss and hug from Katie.

I was lying on my bed later that evening, surrounded by my old tween diaries and feeling microscopically happier now that I was talking to my mother again, when Jimmy rang through on Skype.

‘Hey,’ I said after his face appeared, tanned and grinning.

‘Hello! What’re you up to?’

‘Going through my old diaries to see if any of my behaviour was more Sagittarian than Scorpion,’ I replied.

I’d told Jimmy about the incorrect birthdate and consequent star sign identity crisis. Jimmy had sympathised. He heavily identified with being an off-the-wall Aquarian.

‘Right. What will that achieve?’

‘Nothing!’ I tossed my diaries to the side and pulled the laptop closer. ‘But if I don’t keep my mind busy I’ll spiral into self-pity and self-pity is ugly. I refuse it.’

‘OK,’ Jimmy said, nodding. ‘I get that.’ He smiled. ‘Do you want some external pity?’

I grinned. ‘Yes please.’

‘Oh there, there,’ Jimmy soothed. ‘You’ll be a fabulous Sagittarian.’