Mandy’s notes – I have seen them – are stored in a binder as thick as my fist. Mandy being Mandy, she read them cover to cover, policing her care. I turned the pages for her. ‘You missed one.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You turned two over. There.’
‘Right.’
‘You see?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now get your hands away.’
My hands are always getting in the way. My hands are a necessary nuisance for her, now she has lost her own.
The straps around her arms are wet. She has been trying to unbuckle them with her teeth. This is what she is supposed to do; why, indeed, the straps are made of a flexible raw leather. But she needs practice – the hands are heavy, and she has not yet worked out how to cradle their weight while she undoes the straps. There is an art to this. This is what the physiotherapist said to Mandy at last week’s appointment. An ‘art’.
Mum’s old mirrored dressing table is unexpectedly useful to Mandy, now that she has to shed and reload limbs twice, sometimes three times a day. Whatever happens between us, I can see I’m never going to get the table back.
‘Hold still.’
‘Yes. Thanks, Conrad.’
The hands, electrically warm, more or less flexible, more or less intelligent, give and shift in my grip like freshly killed rabbits. I am very careful not to show any revulsion as I lay them on the table. ‘You want fresh socks?’
After a few hours’ wear, no matter how carefully she washes, the socks around the stumps of her wrists begin to smell. She uses all the gels. They lie across the mirrored surface of my mother’s table in bitter, medicalised parody of past times.
‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘I haven’t done my face.’
I look into the mirror, see her china-white and staring. The fillers smoothing her scars require a special cleanser to loosen the collagen. The rest is routine enough. I know how to do this. ‘Let me help.’
Mum used to test her make-up on me in front of this mirror. On its bright glass surface, thumb-sized pots containing micas and gels were laid out like the controls of a starship. I can remember the feel of my mother’s fingers, the heat of her breath on my neck as she ran her brushes over me. Her laughter, and her head beside mine in the mirror, her eyes the same colour as mine. You could not tell us apart.
TWO
I had grown up in a big, overblown red-brick inn built originally for commercial travellers plying the coastal resorts of the north-east. Mum and Dad had bought the business for well below the market rate when the bypass was announced. They had imagined that, with the road relieved and an uninterrupted view of water meadows under low chalk hills, city people would come and visit them for a bit of easily-accessed rural quiet. But even with the bulk of the traffic drawn away, the road was always too noisy to be ignored, and only a few years after their purchase the water meadows were grubbed up to make a housing estate.
When I was a child, I used to pretend to myself that I was growing up in the country. Once the water meadows were sold to developers, I had to come to terms with the fact that we lived in this weird, free-floating, light-industrial suburbia, unable to guess which of several nearby towns would swallow us first.
I never liked the housing estate. I tried to avoid it. I tried to avoid even looking at it. I rehearsed constantly the look and feel of how things had been. Buttercup games. Nettle stings. Mum’s impatience (‘You should have had a drink before we came out.’). The roil and bark of dogs someone had let off the lead to go snuffling after water rats. Sometimes there had been horses, their paddocks marked out with lazy fences – a couple of strings of barbed wire on rickety grey posts jammed in the ground. Mum would wrap a bit of old fruitcake in silver foil and let me feed the horses. When I closed my eyes, screwed them up tight, concentrated, these memories would parade past, always in the same order, as though, rather than naturally remembering, I was tuning into the same reassuring story, again and again.
Whenever I had to walk through the estate, I could feel my childhood recollections falling away from me, the way dreams fall away on waking.
My mum, whose name was Sara, poured everything she had inherited from her family into the hotel, then spent her whole life struggling to ‘recover her financial independence’. She had no idea – none – how to make money. I remember one spring I kept catching colds because I had to keep my bedroom window open all the time to get rid of the stench of clary sage – one of the more obnoxious essential oils she had convinced herself she could sell in industrial quantities to her friends. She even included that muck in her food sometimes – self-medicating again.
Fancy bathroom goods. Headscarves. Distressed furniture. Modern antiques. She set up business after business. She had cards printed. Often these featured figures from the Tarot. The hotel paid for all this, of course. Materials she never unwrapped, solvents and pigments she never used, brushes she never cleaned. Though she never made money, an entire self-contained apartment on the hotel’s top floor was given over to her experiments in commerce. There was a room for dress-making, a room with a sink where she made her own cosmetics and toiletries, and a room you could barely get into, piled with hand-made paper, stacked with boxes of ribbon, easels, unopened acrylic paints and business cards by the boxful. Days went by and Dad and I did not see her. She had a little kitchen up there. A sofa bed. She spent weeks at a time designing and making her own clothing. The sweet roast scent of her coconut, honey and beeswax facial scrub wafted every so often through the corridors of the hotel, down the stairs, sometimes as far as the dining room and the bar.
Each of her businesses followed the same arc. Each began with a market research trip to her preferred department store, reached the top of its curve with the arrival of a box of business cards, and came to earth with the rearrangement and further filling of the glass-fronted cabinet next to the check-in desk. The cabinet was not so much a point-of-sale as a small museum of wasted effort. Once in the middle of the night I came downstairs to find her trying to wrestle it off the wall.
‘Help me.’
‘Mum. There are guests.’
‘Help me get rid of this stupid thing.’
‘Mum, you need to put some clothes on.’
I remember, near the end, Mum turned the whole of her apartment into a Bedouin marquee, every straight line softened with a piece of hanging fabric as she chopped her way through hundreds of pounds-worth of silk and brocade for home-designed wedding dresses. She had me come upstairs to model them. I was her maquette.
In the room she kept for dress-making, and opposite her little sofa bed, sat the mirrored dressing table. She’d dress me up and turn me this way and that in front of the mirrors, asking me what I thought. I said to her, ‘I think you need to clean the mirrors.’
Bit by bit she made that apartment her private world. She painted everything white. She got rid of the sturdy red carpeting that ran through the rest of the hotel and left the floorboards bare and unvarnished. Come the evening, when we were doing our own thing and not just eating from the hotel kitchen, I had to go and stand at the foot of the stairs and call her down for meals.
‘I think I’ll eat up here.’
‘You could have said before. It’s chops.’
‘I’m fine up here.’
‘Do you want a glass of wine?’
‘I’m fine.’
For all Dad and I knew she had bottles of her own up there.
In vain the doctors explained to us that she was not going to get any better; her highs were only going to get higher, her lows more abyssal. Mum had a horror of what she called, with aplomb, ‘iatrogenic medicine’. She had, in other words, a terror of pills. She wouldn’t even take aspirin for a headache. When required, she self-medicated with alcohol and cigarettes and managed to disguise her despair very well, right up until the time I found her in the boot of our car with a plastic bag over her head.