Still Me

But I was wrong. She was bereft, permanently on the edge of tears. She berated herself for not having been in the room when he had gone, welled up at the sight of his belongings, and fretted constantly over whether she could have done more. She was restless, lost without someone to care for. She got up and she sat down, plumping cushions, checking a clock for some mythical appointment. When she was really unhappy she cleaned manically, wiping non-existent dust from skirting and scrubbing floors until her knuckles were red and raw. In the evenings we sat around the kitchen table while Dad went to the pub – supposedly to sort the last of the arrangements for the funeral tea – and she tipped away the fourth cup she had made by accident for a man who was no longer there, then blurted out the questions that had haunted her since he had died.

‘What if I could have done something? What if we had taken him to the hospital for more tests? They might have been able to pick up on the risk of more strokes.’ Her hands twisted together over her handkerchief.

‘But you did all those things. You took him to millions of appointments.’

‘Do you remember that time he ate two packets of chocolate Digestives? That might have been the thing that did it. Sugar’s the devil’s work now, by all accounts. I should have put them on a higher shelf. I shouldn’t have let him eat those wretched cakes …’

‘He wasn’t a child, Mum.’

‘I should have made him eat his greens. But it was hard, you know? You can’t spoon-feed an adult. Oh, Lord, no offence. I mean with Will, obviously, it was different …’

I put my hand over hers and watched her face crumple. ‘Nobody could have loved him more, Mum. Nobody could have cared for Granddad better than you did.’

In truth, her grief made me uncomfortable. It was too close to a place I had been, and not that long ago. I was wary of her sadness, as if it was contagious, and found myself looking for excuses to stay away from her, trying to keep myself busy so that I didn’t have to absorb it too.

That night, when Mum and Dad sat going over some paperwork from the solicitor, I went to Granddad’s room. It was still just as he’d left it, the bed made, the copy of the Racing Post on the chair, two races for the following afternoon circled with blue biro.

I sat on the side of the bed, tracing the pattern on the candlewick counterpane with my index finger. On the bedside table stood a picture of my grandmother in the 1950s, her hair set in rolled waves, her smile open and trusting. I had only fleeting memories of her. But my grandfather had been a constant fixture in my childhood, first in the little house along the street (Treena and I would run down there for sweets on Saturday afternoon as my mother stood at the gate), and then, for the last fifteen years, in a room at our house, his sweet, wavering smile the punctuation to my day, a permanent presence in the living room with his newspaper and a mug of tea.

I thought about the stories he would tell us when we were small of his time in the navy (the ones about desert islands and monkeys and coconut trees might not have been entirely true), about the eggy bread he would fry in the blackened pan – the only thing he could cook – and how, when I was really small, he would tell my grandmother jokes that made her weep with laughter. And then I thought about his later years when I’d treated him almost as a part of the furniture. I hadn’t written to him. I hadn’t called him. I had just assumed he would be there for as long as I wanted him to be. Had he minded? Had he wanted to speak to me?

I hadn’t even said goodbye.

I remembered Agnes’s words: that we who travelled far from home would always have our hearts in two places. I placed my hand on the candlewick bedspread. And, finally, I wept.

On the day of the funeral I came downstairs to find Mum cleaning furiously in preparation for the funeral guests, even though to my knowledge nobody was coming back to the house. Dad sat at the table looking faintly out of his depth – not an unusual expression when he was talking to my mother, these days.

‘You don’t need to get a job, Josie. You don’t need to do anything.’

‘Well, I need something to do with my time.’ Mum took off her jacket and folded it carefully over the back of a chair before going down on her knees to get at some invisible speck of dirt behind a cupboard. Dad wordlessly pushed a plate and knife towards me.

‘I was just saying, Lou, love, your mother doesn’t need to jump into anything. She’s saying she’s headed to the Job Centre after the service.’

‘You looked after Granddad for years, Mum. You should just enjoy having some time to yourself.’

‘No. I’m better if I’m doing something.’

‘We’ll have no cupboards left if she keeps scrubbing them at this rate,’ Dad muttered.

‘Sit down. Please. You need to eat something.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘For God’s sake, woman. You’ll give me a stroke if you carry on like this.’ He winced as soon as he’d said it. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’

‘Mum.’ I walked over to her when she didn’t appear to hear me. I put my hand on her shoulder and she briefly stilled. ‘Mum.’

She pushed herself to her feet and looked out of the window. ‘What use am I now?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

She adjusted the starched white net curtain. ‘Nobody needs me any more.’

‘Oh, Mum, I need you. We all need you.’

‘But you’re not here, are you? None of you is. Not even Thom. You’re all miles away.’

Dad and I exchanged a look.

‘Doesn’t mean we don’t need you.’

‘Granddad was the only one who relied on me. Even you, Bernard, you’d be fine with a pie and a pint up the road every evening. What am I supposed to do now? I’m fifty-eight years old and I’m good for nothing. I’ve spent my whole life looking after someone else and now there’s nobody left who even needs me.’

Her eyes brimmed with tears. I thought, for one terrifying minute, that she was about to howl.

‘We’ll always need you, Mum. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here. It’s like you’re like the foundations of a building. I might not see you all the time, but I know you’re there. Supporting me. All of us. I bet you Treena would say the same.’

She looked at me, her eyes troubled, as if she weren’t sure what to believe.

‘You are. And this – this is a weird time. It’s going to take a while to adjust. But remember what happened when you started your night classes? How excited you felt? Like you were discovering bits of yourself? Well, that’s going to happen again. It’s not about who needs you – it’s about finally devoting some time to you.’

‘Josie,’ said Dad, softly, ‘we’ll travel. Do all those things we thought we couldn’t do because it would have meant leaving him. Maybe we’ll come and see you, Lou. A trip to New York! See, love, it’s not that your life is over, just that it’s going to be a different sort of life.’

‘New York?’ said Mum.

‘Oh, my God, I’d love that,’ I said, pulling a piece of toast from the rack. ‘I could find you a nice hotel and we could do all the sights.’

‘You would?’

‘Perhaps we can meet that millionaire fella you work for,’ said Dad. ‘He can give us a few tips, right?’