A Trick of the Mind (13 page)

‘I’m being discharged soon,’ Patrick said. ‘Back into civilian life. You’ll get to see me with my clothes on again.’

I laughed.

‘When?’

‘Sometime this week.’

‘Would you like me to come and drive you home?’

‘Would you mind? Aren’t I asking too much of you?’

‘No, of course I don’t mind. Where do you want me to take you?’

‘To the flat. The one in Wapping. Matt and Suki said they’d leave some beer and bits, so it’ll be ready for me. I just need a lift.’

Wapping! Blimey, I knew that area. It was highly desirable, mostly inhabited by City types, with its converted warehouse apartments right by the river near Tower Bridge.

‘OK. That’s fine. When do I come?’

‘They haven’t said which day, but they want the bed. And anyway I’ve had enough. If I stay any longer I’ll get institutionalised. I’m on a processed carbs and
sugar-only diet in here! I’ve started craving tinned peaches and plastic cream!’

‘I’ve brought you some fresh fruit.’

‘Aha! I said you were an angel.’ I put the paper bag of oranges down on his locker and handed him a strawberry.

He ate it from my hand, taking my finger into his mouth and sucking it.

‘Lucky I just disinfected it.’

‘You couldn’t have germs,’ he said. ‘You’re too exquisite. Anyway, it’s time I was up and about and back to sushi. And learning to use this damn peg
leg.’

‘I’m not sure if I’ll be much help – I haven’t dealt with anything like this before.’

‘It doesn’t matter!’ he said. ‘Together, we can be strong. When the going gets tough, Ellie, the tough get tougher.’ He smiled, waved his hands over his poor
damaged leg. ‘I’ve just got to work at it. You will be an incentive! As long as you’re sure about this?’

‘I am. I’m sure.’

If they were discharging him later this week, then it was sooner than I had imagined it might be, given the extent and seriousness of his injuries, though I knew the NHS, short of beds, got
people up and about as quickly as they were able to.

‘I’m still amazed I forgot your beautiful face,’ he said, gazing up at me. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you each time you appear in the ward. An
apparition of loveliness. Come here. Pull the curtains around my bed. Just for a minute.’

And so it was happening. I was getting drawn further and further into his life and it gave me a curious, heady kind of energy.

It was two o’clock by the time I got in the car. It would be too late to do much work by the time I got home anyway so I decided to do the detour I hadn’t done last
weekend to see my mother. She wrote about complex relationships, maybe I could get some perspective from her about what was happening. And anyway, the teeth I’d found at Aunty May’s had
made me feel ill.

Who was the little girl? Why did I feel as if I remembered her, yet when I tried to grasp where I’d seen her she slipped out of my reach? She was the one whose name was on the gravestone,
so what had happened to her? I would ask Mum to tell me about it.

I was wary of taking the smaller, prettier country route since the hit-and-run. But it was light, no chance of half-visions of possible victims of my driving. The countryside opened out as I got
beyond Bury St Edmunds, flattened into large fields of rape, lurid yellow to either side, and the sky grew wider and murkier. I was at the junction to Cambridge in just over an hour and a half,
driving down its leafy streets, along the river past Jesus Green, where students sprawled on the grass. My mother’s house was in a narrow street off the road that ran along the river. I found
a parking space, walked back down the terraced houses, negotiating my way between bikes propped up against the walls blocking the narrow pavement. I knocked on the front door, which opened straight
off the street, and when there was no answer, used my key.

There was a vase of bluebells on the table in the front room.

‘Mum?’

Her desk under the window was covered in heaps of papers and books. Photos of women cut out of magazines, and chiselled handsome men, were pinned onto a notice board. My mother churned out two
romantic novels a year, sometimes three, and was in a constant state of anxiety that she wouldn’t be able to come up with another complicated relationship to untangle in time for her
deadline.

I called out again.

‘Hi, it’s me!’

No answer. She wasn’t here. I went upstairs, Pepper at my heels, to the little room in the back where I always slept when I came, and dumped my bag.

I ran down the stairs, Pepper behind me, turning around three times, performing my stupid rituals before I’d even realised I was doing it.

I put the kettle on in her kitchen area which adjoined her open-plan sitting room at the back of the house, and strolled over to her desk. She’d scrawled notes above the photos on her
board: ‘Sabine begins affair with her sister Marcia’s lover, Bella tries to attract attention of sales assistant at Apple Store to no avail.’

‘Hello?’ Mum came through the front door, her arms full of carrier bags, her hair, which was just greying, a little wild and unkempt, her brow furrowed. She looked older, and her
face had thickened, almost imperceptibly, but it gave me a tiny shock.

‘Darling! I didn’t know you were coming! Grab a couple of these bags for me, will you? I’m parched, let’s have a cup of something.’

‘You’ve been shopping . . .’

‘I had an appointment at the Apple Store.’

‘The Apple Store?’

‘They run free workshops. Been there all afternoon. And before you say anything, let me tell you, I bloody needed it.’

‘What is it, Mum? You look stressed.’

My heart sank. I needed to consult Mum about Patrick, to see if she might throw some light on the moral dilemma and vague feelings I had for this injured man that weren’t even coherent but
shimmered in the back of my mind, all mixed up with the confusion about his thinking he knew me and the accident and whether I’d caused it. Her own life had been complicated enough –
she of all people would be able to give me some pointers as to what I was doing, where I was blindly heading.

‘Stressed doesn’t come near it.’

‘Oh no. Nothing’s wrong, is it?’

I looked her up and down, fear that she was keeping something from me coursing through me. She looked healthy enough.

‘Nothing major. Just Life. With a capital L. Don’t do that, Eleanor.’

‘Do what?’

‘That looking over your shoulder over and over again. I thought you’d grown out of that. Come on, let’s talk.’

We went through to the kitchen area – an extension off her sitting room with a glass roof and French windows onto a small walled garden. She’d had the extension done quite soon after
she moved in with Miriam.

‘Use the tea temples, will you?’

‘
Tea
temples?’

‘Those Teapig thingies, whatever you call them. I’ll have Peppermint and Liquorice. I’ve given up caffeine. And there are some soya bean whatsits there we could have.
You’re probably on a diet. Are you?’

‘I don’t do diets, Mum. You should know that. And why soya? Ick. Haven’t you got cake? I haven’t eaten much today. I’ve been down at May’s cottage, Mum, and I
want to ask you—’

‘Soya’s good for imbalances.’

‘Imbalances?’

‘Hormonal ones, darling, of course. Help me unload?’

I took the carrier bag from her and pulled out industrial-sized brown jars of magnesium, Evening Primrose Oil, Black Cohosh and Red Clover.

‘I thought you were sceptical about these things?’

‘I was,’ she said. ‘Now I’d try anything. Look,’ she said, picking up a pot of cod liver oil. ‘For my brain. Red Clover for mood swings, St John’s Wort
for depression, fish oil for my nerves. Calcium for bones and Black Cohosh for the hormones. It’s got desperate. My flushes are catastrophic – if I could I’d peel off my flesh and
walk out of it.’

‘Ouch.’

‘My body’s a disaster zone. Eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, you name it.’

‘Mum, while I was at May’s—’

‘
And
I’m on an emotional roller coaster – euphoric one moment, in the depths of despair and confusion the next.’

She paused, and looked at me, her mouth turned down.

‘Not sure I like the sound of that,’ I said. ‘Are things OK with Miriam?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with Miriam, it’s being a woman. No getting round it. Puberty, menstrual problems, pregnancy.’ She stopped and looked at me oddly when she said
this. ‘If you get through those, you’re lucky to escape postnatal depression. Before you know it you’re hitting peri-menopause, which I hasten to add is like a second adolescence
– blushing, sweating, wanting to hide from the world. No wonder I need the Apple Store. It’s the only place I feel sane.’

She shook pills into her hand as she spoke.

‘Why the Apple Store though? Shouldn’t you be going to the gym? Or a therapist of some kind if you’re feeling like this?’

‘NO! I want hard knowledge. Apple men with clean fingernails. Apple men with their patience, explaining about Siri and how to download an app. They’re what give me
respite.’

‘Respite from what though, Mum?’

‘From inner turmoil! They’re so calm, and cool, and smooth-skinned. And young. So sure. They do what they love and they know how to do it. You can go to as many workshops as you like
and they never grow tired of showing you. Or maybe, maybe what I love is being taught again by people who have a greater knowledge than I do, yet who are so much younger, have so much future ahead
of them. I find it rejuvenating.’

‘You sound like you’ve found religion.’

‘Actually, sometimes I wonder if it perhaps
is
a kind of sect. But that’s my imagination running away with me. The fact is, those hours in that clean room among handsome
young men in blue shirts calms my mind. They don’t flirt though. I think it must be part of their training, not to flirt with the women who come to them in desperation. They listen, and they
offer solace, and they have the patience of saints. But it is all strictly non-sexual, so in this respect it’s definitely safer than therapy.’

‘Mum, you’re sounding cynical.’

‘I’m going to use one in my latest novel. He’s wedded to his Apple job, she can’t make him notice her. She tries everything. So how’s it all going? How’s
Finn? How’s work?’

My mother was so behind with where I was up to I felt despair. And this, in fact, was typical. My mother had always been wrapped up in her work, her thoughts elsewhere when I needed her. Right
back to those days in the school holidays when she’d packed us off to Aunty May’s instead of taking time off to spend with her two children. Yet I always hoped, against all evidence,
that this time, at last, she would tune in to me, give me her full attention.

‘I wish you could have made it to the Private View,’ I said. ‘I sold quite a few. And some Americans have commissioned a painting.’

‘That’s fabulous, darling, but I knew you would. You’re a star.’

‘I wish you could’ve come. Especially as Dad couldn’t.’

‘I know,
I
wish I could have come too, but you know how my work can be. And I can’t really face Southwold any more. That chapter of my life is closed. I don’t want to
keep on going over and over why May did what she did. If I’m not careful, it could haunt me. The only way I’ll get over it is once we’ve sold that house and had done with
it.’

I wanted to point out the house was mine now, and that she had no say in whether I sold it, but I sealed my lips.

My mother had lost her older sister and it was still raw for her. And lost her in such a painful, unnecessary way. This on top of the physical changes she was undergoing, did indeed sound bad
enough to warrant an afternoon seeking the advice of geeks. I made her a pot of Peppermint and Liquorice tea and put some soya beans in a dish. I put a bowl of water on the floor for Pepper.
Rummaged about in her cupboards looking for something vaguely sweet to have with my tea and finally made do with a handful of dried cranberries.

My mother had curled onto the sofa, her feet tucked under her.

‘Mum, I want to ask you . . .’

‘You’re doing it again, Ellie! Do you remember when you were a teenager you had to turn the light off and on five times before you went to bed?’ she said. ‘I had to say
night-night exactly the right number of times or you’d be distraught. But you’re nearly thirty now, you must have grown out of it, surely? Oh, here’s Miri.’

I looked up. Miriam had come in. The opportunity to talk shrank away from me.

‘Hey, Ellie,’ Miriam said, as if she was a teenager rather than a sixty-something woman.

‘Hello, Miriam.’

‘There’s some herb tea in the pot,’ my mother said. ‘Now, go on, Ellie, what did you want to say?’

I wasn’t going to tell her about Patrick in front of Miriam so I said, ‘I found some things in May’s house she must have kept to remind her of her foster children.’

My mother blinked. Paused, the tea halfway to her mouth.

‘What things?’

‘Kids’ stuff. A bib, a lock of hair.’

‘Tell me, what colour is the hair?’

My mother’s face had gone pale.

‘Blonde?’

‘Oh dear! So she kept bits of her. How macabre. After all that had happened.’

‘What do you mean? Did May do something? Something bad?’

‘Look, I don’t want to go into all this. It was done with and it was finished. That time spoilt my own love of that seaside town and now you’re digging it all up
again.’

‘But I don’t know what I’m digging up if you don’t tell me!’

Aunty May had been a little wayward, a little wild at times, but at least she had been
there.
My mother didn’t have time to spend with us. Even now I could feel that yearning for
a mother who I never really felt was present.

‘Your mother feels her sister’s manipulating her from beyond the grave,’ Miriam said.

I wished she’d go out again. She was hovering around, as if afraid she’d miss something.

‘It’s a shame. I wouldn’t mind use of a house in Southwold. But Sandy’s made her mind up and you know what your mother’s like when she’s made her mind up
about something.’