Nowadays, when I examine this photo – my mother looking down at me protectively, my father smiling at the camera, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other – I can’t help remembering Janice’s words. About how parents decide who they are before the child has any awareness of it, how they develop a front which the child will never be able to penetrate. Whether intentional or not, there was something poisonous in her remarks. ‘You want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum.’ And then: ‘There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’ What am I to do with that thought? Even if I were to pursue it and find it led nowhere?
There’s nothing mimsy or flaky about my mum and nothing – note this, please, Janice – nothing neurotically self-dramatising. She’s a solid presence in a room, whether talking or not. And she’s the person you would turn to if anything went wrong. Once, when I was little, she managed to gash herself in the thigh. There was no one else in the house. Most people would have called an ambulance, or at least disturbed Dad at his work. But Mum just got a needle and some surgical thread, pulled the wound together and sewed it up. And she’d do the same for you without turning a hair. That’s what she’s like. If there is a secret in her life, it’s probably that she helped someone and never told anybody about it. So fuck Janice, is what I say.
My parents met when Dad had just qualified as a solicitor. He used to maintain that he’d had to chase off a number of rivals. Mum said there wasn’t any chasing to be done because everything was perfectly obvious to her from the day they met. Yes, Dad would reply, but the other fellows didn’t see it that way. My mother would look at him fondly, and I could never work out which of them to believe. Or perhaps that’s the definition of a happy marriage: both parties are telling the truth, even when their accounts are incompatible.
Of course, my admiration for their marriage is partly conditioned by the failure of my own. Perhaps their example made me assume it was more straightforward than it turned out. Do you think there are people who have a talent for marriage, or is it just a question of luck? Though I suppose you could say that it’s luck to have such a talent. When I mentioned to Mum that Janice and I were going through a bad patch and trying to work at our marriage, she said,
‘I’ve never really understood what that means. If you love your job, it doesn’t feel like work. If you love your marriage, it doesn’t feel like work. I suppose you may be working at it, underneath. Just doesn’t feel like it,’ she repeated. And then, after a pause, ‘Not that I’m saying anything against Janice.’
‘Let’s not talk about Janice,’ I said. I’d already talked enough about Janice to Janice herself. Whatever we brought to that marriage, we sure as hell took nothing away from it, except our legal share of money.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer? I don’t know. Only that I don’t blame my parents; nor, really, do I blame Janice.
My mother promised that she would go to their GP if Dad saw a specialist about his anosmia. My father was typically reluctant. Others had it far worse than him, he said. He could still taste his food, whereas for some anosmiacs dinner was like chewing cardboard and plastic. He’d been on the internet and read about even more extreme cases – for instance, of olfactory hallucination. Imagine if fresh milk suddenly smelt and tasted sour, chocolate made you retch, meat was just like a sponge of blood to you.
‘If you dislocate your finger,’ my mother replied, ‘you don’t refuse to get it looked at because someone else has broken their leg.’
And so the bargain was made. The waiting and the bureaucracy began, and they both ended up having MRI scans in the same week. What are the chances of that, I wonder.
I’m not sure we ever know exactly when our marriage ends. We remember certain stages, transitions, arguments; incompatibilities which grow until they can’t be resolved or lived with. I think that for much of the time when Janice was attacking me – or, as she would put it, the time when I stopped paying attention to her and just went missing – I never really thought this was, or would cause, the end of our marriage. It was only when, for no reason I could comprehend, she turned on my parents that I first began to think: oh really, now she’s crossed the line. It’s true, we’d been drinking. And yes, I had exceeded my self-imposed limit – well exceeded it.
‘One of your problems is, you think your parents have the perfect marriage.’
‘Why is that one of my problems?’
‘Because it makes you think your marriage is worse than it is.’
‘Oh, so it’s their fault, is it?’
‘No, they’re fine, your parents.’
‘But?’
‘I said they’re fine. I just didn’t say the sun shines out of their arses.’
‘You don’t think the sun shines out of anyone’s arse, do you?’
‘Well, it doesn’t. But I like your dad, he’s always been nice to me.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, mothers and only sons. Do I have to spell it out?’
‘I think you just did.’
A few weeks later, one Saturday afternoon, Mum phoned in a bit of a fluster. She’d driven to an antiques fair in a nearby town to get Dad a birthday present, had a puncture on the way back, managed to get the car to the nearest petrol station, only to find – none too surprisingly – that the cashiers wouldn’t leave their tills. They probably didn’t know how to change a wheel anyway. Dad had said he was going to have a lie-down and -
‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll be along. Ten, fifteen minutes.’ I didn’t have anything else to do. But before I could hang up, Janice, who’d been monitoring my end of the conversation, shouted across at me,
‘Why can’t she call the fucking AA or RAC?’
It was obvious that Mum would have heard, and that this was what Janice had intended.
I put the phone down. ‘You can come too,’ I said to her. ‘And lie under the car while I jack it up.’ As I fetched the car keys, I thought to myself: right, that’s it.
Most people don’t like to bother their doctor. But most people don’t like the idea of being ill. And most people don’t want to be accused, even implicitly, of wasting the doctor’s time. So in theory, going to the doctor is a win-win situation: either you come out confirmed as healthy, or else it’s true that you haven’t been wasting the doctor’s time. My father, his scan revealed, had a chronic sinus condition for which he was prescribed antibiotics followed by more nasal spray; beyond that lay the possibility of an operation. My mother, after blood tests, EMG and MRI, and then a process of elimination, was diagnosed with motor neuron disease.
‘You’ll look after your father, won’t you?’
‘Of course, Mum,’ I replied, not knowing if she meant the short term or the long term. And I expect she had a similar exchange with Dad about me.
My father said, ‘Look at Stephen Hawking. He’s had it for forty years.’ I suspect he’d been on the same website as I had; from which he would also have learnt that fifty per cent of MND sufferers die within fourteen months.