She looks up at me and smiles. No. No, I didn’t.
I find the note this time on the kitchen table. It’s quite long, it’s apologetic. It tells me straight away that Ben and… Jessica, the young woman’s name is Jessica… understood quite quickly after I left her mind and she started apologising. She apologises too for not doing anything to stop what happened. But she says she really wasn’t setting me up for it. She says she’s still working at the Project. She says she’s still looking for a way to change time, but hasn’t much hope of finding one.
I put down the letter feeling… hatred. For her. For her weakness. For her acceptance. That whole letter feels like… acting. Like she’s saying something because she thinks she should.
From the other room comes the sound of Alice starting to cry. She’s hurt herself somehow. I feel the urge from this mind to go immediately to her. But I… I actually hesitate. For the first time there is a distance. I’m a stranger from years ago. This isn’t really my child. This is her child.
The next few visits were like an exhibition of time-lapse photography about the disintegration of a mother and child’s relationship. Except calling it that suggests a distance, and I was amongst it, complicit in it.
‘You get so weird!’ she’s shouting at me. ‘It’s like you get frightened every Christmas that I’ll go away with Dad and Jessica and never come back! I want to! I want to go away!’
But the next Christmas she’s still there.
‘Will you just listen to me? You look at me sometimes like I’m not real, like I’m not human!’ The mind of the future learned that from her memory of my experiences, I guess, learned that from her own experience of being a teenager with added context. Alice has had to fight for her mother to see her as an actual human being. I did that. I mean, I did that to her. I try now to reach out, but she sees how artificial it looks and shies away.
‘Do I… neglect you?’ I ask her.
She swears at me, and says yes. But then she would, wouldn’t she?
And then the next year she’s not there.
A note says the bitch arranged for her to stay with Ben and Jessica, and it all got too much in terms of anticipation, and she’s sure she’ll be back next time. She’s certain of that. She’s sorry, and she… hopes I am too?!
I go to the wall in the hall. I’ve always used bloody walls to do my fighting. I stand close to it. And as hard as I can I butt my head against it. I love the roaring of the mind I’m in as the pain hits us both. Feel that, you bitch, do something about that! I do it again. And then my head starts to swim and I don’t think I can do it again, and I get out just as the darkness hits.
That was why she ‘hoped I was sorry too’, because she knew that was coming.
I wonder how much I injured myself? She couldn’t have known when she wrote the note. She was so bloody weak she didn’t even try to ask me not to do it.
I am such a bully.
But I’m only doing it to myself.
There’s no sign of Alice for the next two Christmases. When the bitch was certain she’d be back next time. The liar. There are just some very needy letters. Which show no sign of brain damage, thank God.
Then there’s Alice, sitting opposite me. She wears fashions designed to shock. ‘Christmas Day,’ she says, ‘time for you to go insane and hurt yourself, only today I’m trapped with you. What joy.’
I discover that Ben and Jessica are on holiday abroad with their own… children… this year. And that the bitch has done… some sort of harm to herself on each of these days Alice wasn’t here, obviously after I left. Is that just self-harm, am I actually capable of…? Well, I suppose I know I am. Or is she trying to offer some explanation for that one time, or to use it to try to hurt Alice emotionally?
‘No insanity this year,’ I say, trying to make my voice sound calm. And it sounds weird. It sounds old. It sounds like I’ve put inverted commas around ‘insanity’. Like I’m trying to put distance between my own actions, being wry about my own weakness… like Mum always is.
I try to have fun with Alice in the ten minutes I’ve got. She shuts herself in her room when I get too cloying. I try to enter. She slams herself against the door. I get angry, though the weak woman I’m in really doesn’t want to, and try to muscle in. But she grabs me, she’s stronger than me.
She slams me against the wall. And I burst into tears. And she steps back, shaking her head in mocking disbelief at… all I’ve done to her.
I slipped the crown from my head.
I was staring into space. And then my phone rang. The display said it was Mum. And I thought now of all the times, and then I thought no, I have a cover to maintain here, I don’t want her calling Ben… I didn’t want to go home to Ben…
I took a deep breath, and answered.
‘Is there… news?’ she asked. I heard that wry, anxious tone in her voice again. Did I ever think of that sound as anxious before? ‘You are due today, aren’t you?’
I told her that I was, but it didn’t feel like it was going to be today, and that I’d call her immediately when anything started to happen. I stopped then, realising that actually, I did know it was going to be today; Ben said ‘Happy Christmas birthday’’ to Alice. But I couldn’t tell her that I knew that and I didn’t want to tell her I felt something I didn’t feel. ‘Merry Christmas,’ I said, remembering the pleasantries, which she hadn’t.
She repeated that, an edge in her voice again. ‘I was hoping that I might see you today, but I suppose that’s impossible, even though the baby isn’t coming. You’ve got much more important things to do.’ And the words hurt as much as they always did, but they weren’t a dull ache now, but a bright pain. Because I heard them not as barbs to make me guilty, but as being exactly like the tone of the letters the bitch had left for me. Pained, pleading… weak. That was why I’d slammed her against the wall, all those years ago, because she was weak, because I could.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Oh. I’m always sorry to hear you say that,’ she said.
I said I’d call her as soon as anything happened.
Once as she was off the phone, I picked up the crown and held it in my hands like I was in a Shakespeare play. I was so poetically contemplating it. I felt like laughing at my own presumption at having opened up my womb and taken a good look at where Jacob Marley had come from.
I had hurt my own mother. I had never made that up to her. I never could. But I hadn’t tried. I had hated her for what I had done. And I could not stop. And in the future, the reflection was as bad as the shadow. I had become my mother. And I had created a daughter who felt exactly the same way about me. And I had created a yearly hell for my future self, making sure she never forgot the lesson I had learned on this day.
I would release myself from it. That’s what I decided.
I put the crown on for the last time.
I’m standing there with my daughter. She looks to be in her late twenties. Tidy now. A worried look on her face. She’s back for a family Christmas, but she knows there’ll be trouble as always. She’s been waiting for it. She looks kinder. She looks guilty. The room is bare of decoration. Like the bitch… like my victim… has decided not to make the effort anymore.
‘Get away from me,’ I tell Alice, immediately, ‘get out of this house.’ Because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to stay inside this mind. I’m going to break it. I’m going to give myself the release of knowing I’m going to go mad, at the age of… I look around and find a conveniently placed calendar. Which was unbelievably accommodating of her, to know what I’m about to do and still do that. I will go mad at the age of fifty-six. I have a finish line. It’s a relief. Perhaps she wants this too.