At the next table in the café, an elderly man is nursing a latte in a glass cup and reading the Guardian. He has a baldish head and a morose expression on his face. Jessie’s mum once said that reading the Guardian makes you morose compared with the Telegraph. Maybe he does not know this. Apart from him the café is empty. On the main road, buses and lorries are thundering past, but Luigi’s is calm and cosy, with soul music playing quietly in the background, the gentle hiss of the coffee machine and the rustle of the old man’s newspaper. She finishes her coffee, and is about to go in search of some rubber gloves and a load of bin liners to start clearing the flat, but instead she gets out her phone and calls the agency in a cool assertive voice that matches her new status as a City worker.
‘The flat has been left in a disgusting condition. Please send someone round to clear up and make it fit for habitation. Thank you so much.’ Ha! That feels good.
Then she sits down and orders another coffee.
Berthold: A Blue Butterfly
Next day I cycled over to the hospital, locked up my bike against the railings and stowed my cycle clips in my anorak pocket. The ward was on the first floor, at the end of a long corridor that smelled of antiseptic and had branches named for unpleasant-sounding procedures like Spectroscopy, Oral Surgery, Trauma. In my experience hospitals are like condemned cells, best avoided, but sometimes you have no choice.
It took me a moment to recognise the frail, dishevelled old woman propped up in bed as my mother. Her appearance shocked me. Dishcloth-grey hair, limp and uncombed, pink lipstick that overshot the edges of her mouth, a dab of bright blue eye shadow on one eyelid but not the other. Dear Mum: even in extremis, she was still trying to look her best.
‘Bertie! Get me out of here!’
‘How are you, Mum?’
I handed over my bag of grapes and kissed her, continental style, on both cheeks. The ritual of gallantry perked her up.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me, Berthold.’ She swivelled her eyes around the ward. ‘I want to go in an NHS hospital.’
‘This is an NHS hospital. You used to work here, remember?’
‘No, I used to work up Homerton.’ Her blue-shadowed eyelid fluttered like a lost butterfly. ‘They’re trying to kill me, Bertie. To get the flat.’ The spark of conspiracy brightened her eyes.
‘Nonsense. They wouldn’t …’
But maybe they would. A stab of panic caught me between the ribs. Mum had always promised that after she died the flat she had rented from the Council, ever since it was built in the 1950s, would pass to me. But lately she had started muttering darkly that there was a plot to take it away from us.
‘It’s global capitalism that done this to me, son.’
‘It’s probably just sherry, Mum.’
‘I didn’t touch a drop, Bertie. Nor any food.’ She sat up, hitching up her nightie with agitated hands. ‘They’re starving me to death. All you get in here is a few lettuce leaves and a pot of yoghurt. And bloody fresh fruit. In the NHS you get tinned peaches in syrup.’ She glanced dismissively at my grapes. ‘Did you bring my ciggies, son?’
‘I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in hospital.’
‘That’s what I mean. They’re killing me. It would never happen in the NHS.’
At that moment, a violent spasm of coughing from the next bed made us both turn around. An ancient crone with grey, wrinkled skin was clearing her throat with a horrible outpouring of phlegm into a cardboard receptacle on her bedside table.
‘Shut up, Inna,’ said Mother. ‘That sound is disgusting. This is my son, Berthold, come to see me. Say hello.’
‘Nuh, Mister Berthold.’ The crone peered at me between drapes of long silver hair and held out a hand as bony as a bunch of twigs. ‘You lucky you ev lovely son, Lily. Nobody come visiting to me.’
‘Stop moaning. Don’t be a Moaning Minnie,’ said Mum. ‘Keep on the sunny side!’ Her voice quavered into her favourite song, which I remembered from childhood. ‘Always on the sunny side!’
‘Sunny side! Ha ha! No sunny side round here, Lily.’ The crone struck out defiantly on her highway of negativity. ‘Too many bleddy foreigners. Every day somebody get dead.’
‘They’re dying because it’s private.’ Mother pursed her lips severely. ‘It’s wrong to be racist, Inna. We should be grateful to all those coloured people leaving their own sunny climes to come and work for us.’
‘Aha! Good you tell me is privat.’ Inna smoothed her sheet with her twiggy hands. ‘I was think we in Any Cheese.’
‘No,’ asserted Mum. ‘There’s less death in the NHS.’
‘That doctor got pink tie.’ The old lady pointed at a young doctor leaning over an elderly cardiac arrest at the far end of the ward, and whispered, ‘Pink mean homosexy?’
‘It don’t make no difference what he is,’ replied Mum. ‘Being queer don’t harm nobody.’
‘You always right, Lily.’ Inna cleared her throat and spat again. ‘Good you tell me. I know nothing. In my country everybody normal.’
Then her eyes rested curiously on me and on the crimson T-shirt I was wearing, now faded to a dusky pink from years of washing.
‘Take no notice,’ Mother murmured to me, ‘she’s from Ukraine, like my Lucky. Got beetroots on the brain. Emphasism. She gets everything mixed up. Don’t you, Inna?’
The crone’s wrinkles realigned themselves merrily like an obscure script on her aged face. ‘Better mix it up than dead!’
‘We’re all dead in the end.’ Suddenly, Mother reached for my hand, and pulled me down close to whisper in my ear. ‘Are you thinking of getting married again, son? You might need someone to look after you, if I don’t come out of here alive.’
‘Ssh. Don’t talk like that, Mum. You’re going to get better.’
This talk about marrying again had me worried, for Mother had always been hostile towards any woman I brought home ‒ especially Stephanie, my acerbically beautiful ex-wife, on whom I had doted beyond the normal call of husbandly duty. Stephanie had realised right from the start that Mother was her only serious rival and the two had regarded each other with mutual loathing scarcely concealed under a mask of kiss-kissy politeness. When we had finally divorced, Stephanie handed me over into the care of my mother like a recycled mattress whose springs have gone: ‘You can have him back, Lily. All yours. He’s completely fucked.’ Now it sounded as though Mother was preparing to pass me on again.
‘The doctor said …’ she pointed in Dr Pink-tie’s direction, ‘he said I’ve got …’ she rummaged in her memory for the right phrase, ‘a fibreglass atrium.’ The words sailed out with an air of adventure like a galleon with sails puffed by the wind. ‘Atrium! Who’d have guessed it? In Madeley Court! My Berthold always said he wanted to put an atrium in there. Or a skylight.’
There was no atrium in Madeley Court, the block of council flats where we lived, though there was a grimy skylight over the stairwell. And Mother’s claim that she’d had a passionate affair with Berthold Lubetkin, the architect who designed the block after the war, probably had as much substance as the atrium.
‘It’s there somewhere, Bert. Under the sofa, I think,’ she insisted. Poor Mum, I thought, she’s really losing it. Who ever heard of a skylight under a sofa?
I squeezed her hand and murmured, ‘Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile.’