What You Have Read online

  What You Have

  Faith Oxenbridge

  Contents

  Title Page

  What You Have

  Copyright

  You’ve been preparing for years. Composing eulogies at 2am when insomnia unhinges you, picturing yourself at the pulpit — vases of lilies bowing like swans beside you, the church hushed, heavy. Your siblings sob as you weave childhood memories with well-chosen homilies: She taught us … made the best of … was a loving … Later, at the afternoon tea, you float Moses-like, parting a sea of elderly relatives and friends. You’re praised for your tribute: Touching, beautiful. You are the star of your mother’s funeral.

  This is what you remember. Summer: the frilled sunhats she sewed on her black Singer at the dining-room table. Sunburnt shoulders after you refused to wear your hat on school sports days. Lanolin cream applied thickly, roughly. I told you so. Your mother at the kitchen bench, her head bent. Salads. Beetroot and lettuce buried in mayonnaise. The moaning. Do I have to eat it? Her pleading. Why can’t you be good? Winter: roast mutton, mashed potato and fruit sponges. Huddling around a rattling fan-heater on frosty mornings with your sisters, octopus limbs flailing, fighting for the hot spot. Stop that and get dressed. Gym frocks laid out on the floor beside you like ghost children. Porridge sliding lumpily into your raw, morning tummy. Why can’t we have cornflakes? Fidgeting at her feet as she read to you at night. The Wind in the Willows. Little Women.

  The phone rings at 5am. You know, of course, but then you’ve known many times before when its terrible clang has jump-started your heart in the black of early morning. You know when you hear your sister’s voice; it’s small, and scratched like an old gramophone recording. You put the phone down and think about what to do next. Make a cup of tea? Feed the cat that has jumped onto your bed and is purring like a tractor? Call your daughter, friends, or your boss to say you won’t be in today? Whenever you call in sick, guilt steals your tongue, but today you’re almost looking forward to the phone call. I’m sorry, you’ll say. No, I’M sorry, he will say.

  Your mother’s washing silverbeet in a steel colander and turns the tap hard to punish the thick white stalks. She sighs, stares out the kitchen window at the wall of pine trees blocking the milky winter sun, and empties potatoes from your father’s garden into the sink. She holds the plastic peeler loosely, carelessly, and bends her head. The peelings plop-plop as they hit the muddy water. You’re sitting at the kitchen table doing your homework. You are nine, maybe ten. You chew the end of your pencil and think about how to get the boys in your class to stop giving you Chinese burns, or perhaps talk to your mother about your social studies project on pollution. Your mother may or may not be listening. Her back is to you and her hair hangs thickly to her waist because she doesn’t have it cut or permed like your friends’ mothers do. When she picks you up from school, she stands alone at the gate in her hand-knitted sludge-coloured jumpers and corduroy trousers, her hair a heavy shroud. Your mother is different, and you don’t know if you’re proud or ashamed. This is how it will always be. She finishes peeling the potatoes and opens the cupboard below the sink. Saucepans and baking trays topple and crash. She swears. Stupid bloody cupboard. This is what you remember: the stupid bloody cupboard, the bottomless sighs.

  It is 11am. You’re at your sister’s house waiting for your other sister to arrive from Australia. Your brother — who’s a decade younger than you — is flying in from Japan tomorrow. Your sister’s eyes are swollen, but you still haven’t cried because you’re in a European film. The camera has a soft focus, grainy filter and a melodic yet sombre soundtrack: double bass, cellos; the occasional soaring clarinet. You’re with your sister in her lounge, drinking coffee as you have many times before, but today you don’t know what to say. Normally, you’d talk about your mother, roll your eyes, or laugh helplessly and think about how different it will be when it’s your turn. You will remember your grandchildren’s names and not give them collections of nursery rhymes with faded 50% off stickers for their seventh birthdays. You will kill yourself before you have to wear nappies.

  You’re twelve and your grandmother is staying with you because your mother’s in hospital having a breakdown. She brings an air of excitement and two fat panting corgis, which she cradles on her lap like babies. Your grandmother’s a stranger. She’s also a witch. You know this because she smokes cigarettes and ties scarves over her stringy witch hair. She pushes her false teeth out of her mouth and cackles when you scream, her face folding like your paper lunch-bag. A few weeks ago, your father came up from the garden and found your mother crying on the phone. He grabbed it off her and shouted, Leave my wife alone, you old bitch. Now the old bitch is here, cooking your meals and changing your brother’s nappies. You hear her telling a friend on the phone that her daughter’s in the loony bin having shock treatment. Yes, she says, a Pall Mall dangling from nicotine-stained fingers, ELECTRIC shock treatment. You sneak into your brother’s bedroom to check he hasn’t been poisoned. His room smells like dog.

  It’s the day before the funeral. You’re all here now, at a café in town. Your brother’s staying with you, as he always does when he comes home because you are his second mother. His real mother is dead, though, and you feel his grief like the band the nurse pumps around your arm to check your blood pressure: tight, but not unbearable. You wish it were unbearable, that you could feel something other than the fog that has befuddled your brain, chilled your heart. You’re here to plan the funeral. You’ll do the eulogy — it’s practically written. No one argues, which is unusual. You’d welcome a good scrap, some shouting; to see the careless families and silent couples around you stir their coffees, look away, then bond later in their cars. Did you hear? The café’s noisy with happy, chatty people, but you and your siblings are silent. You’ve hired caterers for the afternoon tea, a florist to deliver and arrange the flowers, an organist. There’s nothing left to plan. Nothing left to say.

  You’re sixteen and stick thin. Your mother is bloated. Fat. She blames the pills your father locks in a cupboard and counts out each morning and night. You blame her for your misery and loneliness, that you’ve never had a boyfriend with sun-streaked hair and tanned forearms that might wrap around your shoulders casually, or adoringly, as you walk home from school. You do well at school. Your teachers praise you for your diligence and intelligence, but your friends don’t understand why you can’t invite them to your house for sleepovers where you might stay up all night, laughing and talking about nothing, about everything. They’re disappointed that you don’t go to their parties, drink vodka screwdrivers and cheap sparkling wine, then throw up in the garden. You’re disappointed. You lie in bed on Saturday nights and write in your diary, I wish … to the soundtrack of your mother’s drugged dog-snores in the bedroom next door and your brother’s Brmm-brmms in the lounge. On Sundays, when your friends are hanging out at the ice-skating rink, smoking and flirting with boys from neighbouring schools, you’re babysitting your mother, who slumps on the couch staring at the carpet.

  Your daughter arrives early on the morning of the funeral. You drive to the airport through the city tinted grey by the pewter sky. You try to cry. You’ve written the eulogy and rehearse it as you drive, but get stuck on the delivery. Are you allowed to pause for effect and use pitch for emphasis when delivering the story — the Reader’s Digest version — of your dead mother’s life? Your daughter’s shitty. She has a paper to write and had to get up at 5am to catch the red-eye flight. She sits red-eyed in your car and moans. It’s not fair. You want to stop the car and push her out because your mother’s dead and you’re alive and a good mother. Too good. You’ve never cried in front of your daughter, never stayed in bed for a whole day, slumped under the covers like a dyi
ng whale, never not turned up to school concerts, parent-teacher evenings, nor forgotten to cook dinner. Today you have to bury your mother, and your daughter’s complaining about being tired.

  You’re at university, living in a student flat with mouldy carpet, rotten window-sills, your best friend and three engineering students, who vomit out their bedroom windows every Saturday night. It’s the most fun you’ve ever had, but you miss your mother and baby brother. You go home every weekend to see them and the house you grew up in, the house you couldn’t wait to get out of. It smells like bleach and stew, like home. Your mother’s thin again and almost normal. She wants to hear every boring detail of your boring lectures. What about sociology? … Coleridge? She’s thinking of going to university herself, to study history and anthropology. There’s a paper she can start mid-year. Her eyes blaze and burn you. You can’t. It’s embarrassing. Not fair. Your mother’s face is a balloon you’ve popped. OK, she says, and bends down to tidy up your brother’s Lego. OK, she says flatly. I’ll wait. She walks you to your car with your brother, who’s eight and squirms when you cuddle him.

  You dress for the funeral. You’re torn between wearing black, which’ll please your family, and red in protest against the tyranny of tradition, of death. Your mother didn’t care about convention, didn’t want a funeral. You dress. The camera moves in on a mound of discarded, lifeless clothes on the bed, then out to you in your black dress and black shoes.

  She’s sitting at the oak dining-room table, writing an essay. Her handwriting is medication-jagged. Mad. Beside her is the beaten-copper bowl she was given as a wedding present and was once polished and filled with fruit. Now it’s tarnished and stores ballpoint pens, supermarket receipts and broken reading glasses. You’re twenty-seven, recently back from Europe and wondering what to do with the rest of your life. Your mother’s at university and has a new life and new friends: women who’ve escaped domestic incarceration and, to prove it, wear steel-toed Doc Martens, their hair short and spiked. Your father hides when they’re here. He tells you — when you visit him in his workshop refuge — that behind every unhappy marriage there’s a wife who goes to university. But your mother’s happy. She tells you not to have children, not to marry. Get out while you can. Go back to Europe. Write a novel, or pick grapes in France, olives in Spain. Live for yourself. Do the things she would do if she could, if her son wasn’t fifteen, if she were brave enough to leave her husband. But you’ve had years of living for yourself, so you marry the first man who shows interest in you and call it love. Two months later you’re pregnant.

  You get to the church early with your brother and still-sulky daughter, who barely knew her grandmother. When she was six she was shocked to learn that the woman who lived in batik skirts and motley leather sandals, who gave her recycled cards for her birthday was her grandmother. Grandmothers wore their hair in buns, they baked cakes and bounced small children on their knees. You apologised to your daughter. She’s only just stopped being a mother, just started living.

  Your daughter smokes a cigarette in the adjacent graveyard, leaning lightly against a headstone. She has your mother’s thick black hair, her wary grey eyes. Your sisters arrive with their husbands and children. There’s hugging and small talk, and then the mourners come, pushing their walking frames with runner-bean arms.

  The phone rings on a Sunday afternoon: your mother’s in hospital. She’s had a turn, which turns into a stroke after a scan shows lesions in her brain. You sit with her in the ward as she sleeps and wakes. She’s rude to the nurses, to the doctors who shout at her. How are you feeling? Can you tell me your name? She tells them to leave her alone, to let her go home. Your mother has recently joined a book club, the Genealogy Society. She has a Masters in history. Your father grips the steel bed-end. He’s still wearing his farm overalls and muddy work boots. Will she be all right? The doctors come back and stand around the bed like road workers considering a pothole. Will she be all right?

  Churches make you childish, silly. You want to giggle. The organist’s hair is permed and she’s wearing a voluminous synthetic dress, the sort of dress your mother wouldn’t have been seen dead in. You talk to the minister, a young man with receding hair, who speaks solemnly and slowly, like a minister. You wonder what he would say if you said My mother thought religion was bull shit. The church fills. You want to goose step up to the pulpit and abuse the congregation, tell them their hats are ridiculous. Tell them to go home.

  Your mother can no longer butter her toast, control her bladder, or remember what day it is. A dour, dough-faced geriatrician makes her walk up and down a hospital corridor then gives her a memory test. You watch as she closes her eyes, scrunches her face like a child and tries to remember what year it is, her postcode, the name of the prime minister. She fails everything.

  The minister has delivered his singsong, potted version of your mother’s life. You walk up to the pulpit. Your siblings look up at you expectantly — just as they did in your 2am fantasy funerals. You see your daughter in the second row, her head lowered as she texts on her phone, a cousin beside her playing on a Gameboy. You read the first sentence of your eulogy. My mother, Mary, was born in London in 1935. She grew up during the Second World War and emigrated to New Zealand when she was seventeen. You pause and look up. The organist smiles at you. Your daughter’s fingers are still tap-tapping on her phone and your mother is lying in a shining coffin behind you, waiting to be burnt to ashes-to-ashes.

  You visit her twice a week at the rest home, which is really a hospital, despite the lounge with La-Z-Boys and a big-screen TV. Her skin is tissue thin, but her hair’s still thick and long. The nurses want to cut it — It’s a nightmare to wash — but you say no. Please don’t. You take her for walks in a wheelchair and talk about your job, your daughter in Wellington, who’s studying law and Spanish, who wants to be a diplomat, who tells you she will never marry, never have children. You have no idea if your mother hears or cares. This is how it always was, but, if you could go back, you’d do it differently. You’d ask a hundred questions. You’d take her to Europe to visit the medieval cities she studied, but never saw; to Crete to eat salads with salty feta and sweet sun-ripened tomatoes; to Turkey to the Cappadocia cave cities; to float miraculously on the Dead Sea. You’d betray your father and encourage her to have flings with European men after one too many glasses of Chianti or Beaujolais. You’d rescue her from the mental hospital, before they fried her brain, and slap the bearded bespectacled faces of the psychiatrists who put her there, and tell them to Sharpen up. You’d start her on blood-thinners in her forties, fish oil, olive oil. You’d go to London and slap your Grandmother for telling her daughter she was plain and slap her again, harder, for not breast-feeding her baby, for smoking when she was pregnant. You’d encourage your mother to go to university before she got too old. You’d discuss Coleridge with her, the Reformation, anything to see her eyes lighten, the despair disappear. You’d ask a thousand questions and listen carefully to every word of every answer. You would. Instead, you push her rag-doll body through suburban streets, babble about the weather, your work and what’s in the papers, and cry like a baby all the way home.

  You put your notes in your bag. Mum thought religion was bull shit, you say. The organist swivels in her chair, the minister fiddles with his robes, and rows of heads lift, stiffen. You pause, not for effect or emphasis, but because blood is surging through you. You see your siblings’ mouths open, your daughter’s grey eyes widen. You see your mother’s eyes. The church is hushed, heavy. This is what I remember.

  This is what you have. Photographs: a black-and-white wedding photo, her shy dimpled smile; your mother dangling you, your jelly-baby legs dancing. Her copy of Little Women, sewing machine and dented soup pot. The letters she sent you in Europe: Come home soon, we miss you. The card you sent her in the mental hospital: I miss you, Mummy.

  Copyright

  A RANDOM HOUSE EBOOK published by Random House New Zealand 18 Poland Road, Glenfield,
Auckland, New Zealand

  For more information about our titles go to www.randomhouse.co.nz

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  Random House New Zealand is part of the Random House Group New York London Sydney Auckland Delhi Johannesburg

  First published 2014

  © 2014 Faith Oxenbridge

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  eISBN 978 1 77553 694 9

  This book is copyright. Except for the purposes of fair reviewing no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Design: Carla Sy

  Cover photograph: Photos.com / Vvoe Vale

 

 

  Faith Oxenbridge, What You Have

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