43
Jem
A tense morningwith Ruby isn’t the best start to a day that will be a test of the new life I’m trying to hang onto. Another night unable to sleep hasn’t helped either. Ruby’s interfering, asking me what’s wrong.
Since when did we go back to the ‘talking about how we feel’ crap? We’ve discussed and dealt with everything, why rehash? I won’t allow Ruby into my safe place. This pissed her off because breakfast again involves slamming cups and bowls, and silence. I left without saying goodbye and hope she’s in a better mood tonight.
The hospice is in Reading, a short drive from London, and I intend to drive there and back in one day. If I do, I can pretend to myself the day never happened.
Sure, Jem.
Since Marie contacted me a couple of weeks ago, the walls between my childhood memories and reality crumbled. She left when I was twelve, and I haven’t seen my mum since. I vowed to myself I would never see her again or allow myself to be hurt on that level by anyone else.
Is there any bigger hurt in the world than not being good enough for your own mother? A part of me yells Ruby would understand, her mum left too, but I can’t talk to her about this. I just can’t.
Each rehab stay, a counsellor attempts to persuade me to open up and acknowledge the power this has over me still. I’m not fucking stupid, I know I’m screwed up by my childhood, but ripping open that wound isn’t helpful when my mental stability is already shaky in recovery. I always refuse. The past should be buried. Forgotten. Over.
So why the hell has the past become my present?
As I sit in the car, outside the single-storey building, I stare at the gardens full of yellow and white rose bushes that I bizarrely notice match the ones in my garden.
I’m dragged back to memories of helplessness, and confusion, of wounds piercing so deeply the damage severed my nerves and left me unable to feel again. Ruby crosses my mind and even though we argued again this morning, a small part of me wishes I was with her instead. I shake the thought away. See? I’m allowing in emotion and sitting in front of a reminder why I shouldn’t.
I don’t have any pictures of my mother, only the suppressed memories of her long, curly brown hair and a vague recollection of her face. Besides that, nothing. She wasn’t a hugging mum, but at least she didn’t hit me around like the guy she walked away with.
The middle-aged nurse in the hospice recognises me straightaway, of course, but doesn’t make a big deal as she leads me along a carpeted hallway. The yellow furnishings and watercolour pictures dominating the building don’t hide the institutional smell of the place. Not as bad as a hospital, but uncomfortably reminiscent of rehab centres.
The nurse knocks on the door of a room at the end of a bright hallway and informs the woman inside that I’m here, before smiling encouragingly and leaving.
Fourteen years.
I step inside. This woman doesn’t have curly brown hair; hers is short. Cancer patient short. Her sallow skin and frail frame shock me. The woman from my memories doesn’t match the person sitting in the high backed armchair by the bed. She could be anybody.
This isn’t my mum.
But she is.
Her eyes are my mum’s—they must be because they look like mine, brimming with tears she doesn’t deserve to shed. For a couple of minutes we stare at each other saying nothing. I stand in the open doorway, debating whether to turn and leave. Why the fuck didn’t I talk to someone about this rather than cope alone? Bryn, Dylan… even Ruby.
I close the door behind and rest against the wood. “Hello.”
“Thank you for coming to see me,” she says and her voice tears at me. There’s a weakness that drags me back to the bad times—the days she was weakened by the men. The days that they injured her.
I close my eyes and inhale. When I open them, she’s still there. My mum, broken as she always was but this time by something killing her, rather than by someone.
“How have you been?” she asks.
“Don’t you read the papers?” I reply a little too harshly.
“I don’t believe everything I read, Jeremy.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not Jeremy.”
Mum looks at her hands. They age her, the skin drawn across pronounced veins like an old woman’s would be. Mum’s mid-forties and the illness has pushed her looks into old age. “I know. Sorry.”
To her, yes. I’m Jeremy who had to become Jem to forget him. I pull up the plastic and metal chair from near the drawers containing a vase of white and pink flowers, and sit.
Shit, I should’ve bought flowers.