We came to rest in a small, dim, overpriced restaurant which was almost empty, in contrast to the bar on one side and the fast-food cafeteria on the other. I saw by my watch that it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. We ordered coffee, causing the middle-aged waitress to sigh heavily and stump away.
‘Actually, I’d rather have a shot of Tullamore Dew,’ said Jane. ‘Or a large snifter of brandy.’
‘Did you want – ’
She shook her head. ‘No, no. Better not. It’s just that the thought of seeing my mother again has me wanting reinforcement. But I’d be less capable of dealing with her drunk than I am sober.’
I looked at her curiously because she had struck me from the first as a capable, almost fearless person. ‘You don’t get along with your mother?’
‘Something like that. I moved out here to get away from her, and she still won’t let me be. She calls me every night. Sometimes she cries. She won’t believe that I’m grown up and that I have my own life to live, a life I’ve chosen. She’s still waiting for me to give up this silliness and move back home. My sisters got away because they got married. But in her eyes I’m still a child.’
The waitress returned, setting our coffees down before us with unnecessary emphasis. I watched the dark brown liquid slide over the rim of my cup, to be caught in the shallow white bowl of the saucer.
‘You’re lucky if you and your mother can relate to each other as people,’ Jane said.
I nodded, although I had never given the matter any thought; I’d simply taken it for granted. ‘We have disagreements, but we’re pretty polite about them,’ I said.
This made Jane laugh. ‘Polite,’ she said. ‘Oh, my.’ She peeled the foil top off a plastic container of coffee whitener. ‘You’re so lucky . . . to have had a happy childhood and a mother who knows how to let go.’
It seemed at first acceptable, the way she so calmly passed judgment on my life, as if she knew it; then, suddenly strange.
‘I think I had a fairly normal childhood,’ I said. ‘Very ordinary. At least, it always seemed that way to me.’ It had been suburban, middle-class, and sheltered. I saw my experiences reflected in the lives of my friends, and I found it hard to believe that Jane had come from a background terribly dissimilar. ‘You were unhappy as a child?’
Jane hesitated, stirring her coffee from black to brown. Then she said, ‘I don’t remember.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that. I don’t remember my childhood. Most of it, anyway. It’s as if I went to sleep when I was five and didn’t wake up until I was twelve. The years in between are a blank.’
I stared at her, trying to understand. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t doubt that I had forgotten much of my own childhood, but there remained a satisfyingly large jumble of memories that I could rummage around in when the need arose. Some of the things that had happened to me remained as vivid in my imagination as if they had just happened: the day I had broken my bride doll, a rabbit-shaped cake my mother had baked one Easter, the taste of water warm from the garden hose at the height of summer, the Christmas when I had been ill, games of hide-and-seek, classroom embarrassments . . . I had only to let down the barriers to be flooded by memories, most of them far more intense than the recollections of anything that had happened to me as an adult. To be without such memories was to be without a childhood, to lack a certain identity.
‘I can remember a few things from when I was very young,’ Jane said into my stunned silence. ‘None of them pleasant. And my sisters have told me things . . . it’s just as well I don’t remember. The things I’ve forgotten can’t hurt me.’
‘But why? What happened to you? What was so terrible?’
‘I’m sure other kids survived a lot worse. In fact, I know that for certain. There’s no telling what will make one kid break and another survive, or what kind of defence mechanisms are needed. I work with emotionally disturbed children, and some of them have every right to be, given their backgrounds, while others come from loving families and just . . . crack over things that other kids take in their stride. All I can say about the things that happened to me – well, I had my way of dealing with them, whether it was a good way or not. Forgetting, blotting it out, was part of it.’
She sounded defensive and apologetic. I tried to look reassuring. ‘You don’t have to. If it makes you uncomfortable, don’t talk about it.’
‘No, that’s it, I do want to talk about it. But I don’t want to bore you. I don’t want to burden you with my old stories.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to listen, if it helps you to talk.’
‘I think it might help. Well . . .’ She cleared her throat and took a sip of coffee, looking at me self-consciously over the cup. ‘One of my earliest memories is when I was about four. My mother was forty-nine and menopausal. She was crazy that year, more than usual. Any little thing could set her off, and when she got angry, she got violent. I can’t remember what it was I did, but it was probably something as minor as interrupting her while she was thinking – I got swatted for that more than once. At any rate, she started screaming. We were in the kitchen. She grabbed the carving knife and came for me, yelling that she’d cut off my hands so I couldn’t make any more trouble.’
‘Jane!’
She shrugged, smiling wryly. ‘I’m sure I remember the knife as bigger than it really was. And maybe she wouldn’t have hurt me at all. But what did I know? I was a little kid. And when somebody comes at you with a knife, the instinct is to get the hell away. She chased me all through the house. I finally hid in a cabinet and listened to her looking for me. One of my sisters got my father, and he managed to calm her down. But nobody knew where I was, and I was afraid to come out. I crouched there in the dark, beneath the bathroom sink, for hours, until I decided it was safe to come out. I hadn’t heard her screaming for a long time, but I was afraid that she might be tricking me and that I’d open the door to find her on the other side, the knife in her hand and a horrible smile on her face.’
‘Was she insane?’ I asked quietly.
‘No.’ The denial came too quickly. Jane paused and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Define the term. Generally, she could cope. Was she really over the edge, or just trying to scare me into being good? It’s hard to decide even now. She was very unhappy at that time in her life, and she’s always been a very self-dramatizing person. We all have our own ways of dealing with life. What’s insane?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, although I thought I did. ‘Was she violent toward you most of the time? Did you go in fear of your life?’
‘Sometimes. It was hard to know where you stood with her. That’s the worst thing for a kid. I couldn’t count on her, I didn’t know how to get the right responses. Sometimes she would be very loving, sometimes what I did would make her laugh. At other times the same thing would have her screaming at me. But more often she turned her anger against herself. She must have tried to kill herself – or at least she pretended to – half a dozen times. I remember her lying on the floor in the living room with an empty bottle of pills and a half-full bottle of vodka. She told us she was going to die, and she forbade us to call for help. We were supposed to sit there and watch her die, so that she could die looking at the faces she loved most. We didn’t dare move. Finally she seemed to have passed out, and Sue, my oldest sister, tried to call Dad. But the second her hand touched the telephone, my mother sat up and started screaming at her for being a disobedient bastard.’
‘Lord,’ I said, when Jane paused to sip coffee. I tried to imagine it, but could not quite achieve the child’s point of view. ‘How did you survive?’