He held up a finger to tell me to wait, went out into the hall, and came back without his coat. He dropped down into his armchair and started unlacing his boots.
“I thought I should steer clear cos I’d never be able to cope if something happened. And you have to cope. If there’s little kids around. You just absolutely have to. Because if you don’t, then everyone’s stuffed, aren’t they?”
He sat waiting for me to go on, holding both ends of his laces tight, making me think of a cartoon of a bird pulling a worm I’d seen in a book when I was wee and hated.
“Something happened. More than I’ve told you.”
“I know,” he said.
“About my granny’s quilt.”
He said it again. “I know.”
“But I want to trust you,” I said. “I’m going to tell you. Even though it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. Unless you want to go first and tell me?”
He went back to his boots again then, finished taking them off, set them at the fireside to dry out-he must have been on the beach-and rubbed his socks together.
“I’m all ears, Jess,” he said.
“Please, please, please call me Jessie,” I said. “My mother calls me Jess. I can’t stand thinking about my mother when I’m here with you.”
“So tell me the rest of the story just one time,” he said, “and you never have to think about her again.”
Like he knew it was my mother all along and not my granny at all. Like he knew already what I was going to say.
The rest of the story. Where was I starting from? What had I said before? I pulled the stuffing out of the quilt and my mother tied me down. I’d told him it was in my room at home, but he’d seen through that. He knew it was my granny’s house. And he knew I couldn’t turn my face, but he didn’t know why. Could I tell him? I could try.
“My mother was going to some… jamboree,” I began. Gus laughed and I joined him. Where had that expression sprung from? Oh, yes, Kazek had said it to Ros’s sister on the phone. What a weird English word for him to know. Or maybe it was the same in Polish, like polka. But why was he talking about it anyway? “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “My mother was off to a jamboree. All weekend. But Friday was my granny’s whist night. So my mum bedded me down and my granny came in to check me before she went to bed.”
I remember the door opening, the look of the flowery landing wallpaper in the lamplight and Granny’s head, done up in rollers and shining with cream, coming slowly round the door. I squeezed my eyes shut. So ashamed for her to see me tied up like a dog in a yard. Suffer the little children, my mother had said to me and, a child is known by its doings. As well as the line about the rod and the spoiling, of course. She just loved that one.
“She’d carped on and on at me about the quilt-showing her up, how she had to sit through a lecture from Granny about how children were children and you couldn’t knock it out of them, shouldn’t even try. She was so angry. I couldn’t bear that I’d made her so angry. I couldn’t stand the thought of Granny seeing what a bad girl I was that my mum had to tie me.”
“Wait a minute,” Gus said. “This isn’t the night you pulled the stuffing out?”
“No, this was after. My mum tied me up so I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Was your gran still angry with you?”
“No, I was telling the truth when I said she thought it was funny. But she didn’t think it was funny when she saw me tied.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything. She just made this noise.”
She had walked over to my bed and bent down low to kiss me. Then she froze and slowly she pulled back the covers, showing my wrists and the ropes. She made a whistling, whooping noise and turned away. Couldn’t she bear me in her sight? Then she made a noise that was like a dragon in a cave, a horrible roaring, choking sound. Was this the wrath that my mum was always warning me I would bring raining down?
“I heard a crash and I opened my eyes. Granny was lying on the floor, rolling from side to side. And she was in brown puddle. Probably not brown, but it was dark in there. She’d thrown up. God, her hair and her shiny face with the face cream. And she was clutching at herself and making this noise.”
That noise.
“It was like a kind of gobbling,” I told Gus. He was right forward in his chair, right on the edge, holding his knees, staring at me with his mouth hanging open. “Wet and choked and just the most horrible thing I’d ever heard. I didn’t understand what I’d done.”
“What you’d done?”
“I know, I know, I know now,” I said. “But I didn’t know that night.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“I turned and faced the other way. Even though there was a feather end sticking in me. I kept facing the wall. And eventually she was quiet. She passed out. That’s what I know now, grownup me. Little me thought she’d fallen asleep.”
And I fell asleep too, the way kids do. I slept until her crying woke me. Her sobbing and the way she was calling my name. Jess, help Granny. Help Granny, there’s a good girl. Dehhh, hehhh Gannnn, goohh guuhhh. But I wasn’t a good girl. I was a bad girl and my mother had tied me up, so I couldn’t help Granny like a good girl would do.
“She wet herself,” I told him. “And she shit herself. There’s nothing dignified about dying, you know.”
“She-fuck sake, Jessie. She died? When you were tied up and couldn’t-”
“Eventually. It got light and I was hungry. Then I wet myself too. And I slept and so did she, then it was dark again and she was moving, thrashing about, and her head knocked against the floor and, God, the smell. The smell of the pair of us in there.”
When it got light again and I looked at her, it wasn’t Granny anymore. It was this purple thing. Lying there, crusted and twisted. I didn’t understand. I heard her talking to me a lot after that, but I know now I was dreaming. Or hallucinating.
“I was there another night and day after the day she died. One more and it would have been me too. But my mother came back and found me.”
Only that was a memory I wasn’t going to touch with a ten-foot pole. I wrapped it up, shrank it down, and threw it out to sea. So far out that it went over the horizon and hit the setting sun and it hissed as it shrivelled and disappeared.
“And so that’s why I thought to myself I should stay away from kids because I can’t handle feathers, and you’ve to handle things with little kids because they can’t cope on their own.”
Gus had put his head down in his hands and now he rubbed his face hard, but he hadn’t rubbed away all the tears when he looked up again.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “You were five and you were tied to your bed. How could you cope with that? How could anyone?”
“I know,” I said. “It makes no sense at all. Sometimes things just don’t.” Like Wojtek’s bracelet in Becky’s junk basket. But I wasn’t going to think about that now.
“Is that really really really what happened?” he said.
“Gus,” I said, “don’t even. It took me twenty years to get that night straight. Twenty years to sort out what was what.”
“How come? It sounds pretty clear to me. Hellish, like, but clear. And it’s no bloody wonder you can’t forgive your mother, by the way.”
I said nothing. I didn’t want to milk the sympathy. I didn’t want him to know that for twenty years and counting my beloved mother hadn’t managed to forgive me.
Twenty
Wednesday, 12 October
Which is why I ended up phoning her the next day. I only ever phone my mother when I’m dead angry and dead clear and there’s no chance she’ll gaslight me. As to why I phone her, I’m just keeping the lines open, just in case the day ever comes. And, she’s my mum. Caroline with the couch told me about these baby monkeys that get taken away from their mothers and put in a cage with a fur-covered box. It’s pretty useless, hard and hollow and that, but it’s all they know. And the thing is, if you take it away from them, they pine for it. Even if you take it away and replace it with an actual female monkey who cuddles them back, they pine for the fur-covered box cos it’s what they know. So I don’t beat myself up anymore about phoning my mum sometimes. I’m a monkey.