By Fiona Sinclair
In the taxi from the station, Emily hugged her freedom as if it was an expensive handbag. At twenty-nine, she was returning from her first ever weekend away from home.
London had meant an orgy of sightseeing that her old friend Hannah was happy to accommodate. Like a time poor tourist, Emily had galloped through St Pauls, The Tower of London and Westminster Abbey until her friend had begged for a sit down and some food. “These buildings have been here hundreds of years,” she panted, not understanding that Emily’s default setting was playing catch up.
Now Emily trotted up the bungalow’s short driveway, a suitcase in one hand and, in the other, shopping bags ripe with new clothes. ‘No more hand me downs’ she thought with a smile.
It was an exceptionally warm spring that year, as if the weather, too, was in cahoots with her. Inserting the key into the front door, Emily knew from experience that the pokey bungalow trapped extremes of weather. So, with windows and doors shut up for four days, she knew it would be like entering a forge.
But, stepping into the hall, she was struck by an uncanny chill, as if an air conditioner had been switched to its maximum setting and left unchecked for many hours. It did not provide a welcome contrast to the unseasonable spring weather outside. Instead, she began to shiver, the hairs on her arms raised like hackles and a rash of tiny goose pimples spread across her skin.
Emily instinctively pulled on a cardigan and wrapped it around her. She waited for the chill to dial down. It did not. In fact, if anything, it intensified. Her next response was to move into the small kitchen to see if the freezer door had swung open, reasoning that in a place little more than a bedsit, the chill from the freezer might well have filled the place with cold air. But the door was secure. She then went methodically room by room, trying to find some other source for the cold. She found no answers, but the bedrooms, bathroom and sitting room, were all equally as chilled as meat lockers.
This frosty atmosphere did not frighten her. Emily was accustomed to weird and little phased her now. Standing with her hands on her hips in the sitting room she suddenly recognised the atmosphere as the brooding anger that was her late mother’s trademark. Since childhood, she had been familiar with this withdrawal of affection for some minor misdemeanour, anything from ripping her jeans in some Tom boy escapade to playing out with friends, ignoring her parent’s curfew. At these times, her mother’s beautiful features became an ice queen mask as maternal love was switched off, a punishment that stung far more than a slap or being confined to her bedroom.
Now the adult Emily, suspecting that death did not dissolve a person’s worst traits, knew that the house was overwhelmed by her mother’s disapproval of her daughter’s behaviour in the aftermath of her death. From her mum’s perspective, she had betrayed her on many counts. So, this was, Emily suspected, a sort of supernatural sulk.
Decades before, her mother’s life of delicious domesticity was ruptured by dad’s sudden death at 40. Now there were bills to settle, a living to be earned and a daughter to raise. But mum was unable to face the challenges. She was proactive only in seeking a replacement for dad, a knight on a charger who would solve her troubles. However, she soon found that she was considered more mistress material than wife. Her beauty was too showy for a rural backwater and millionaires with money to purchase shiny things were in short supply.
She had begun drinking just to take the edge off her problems, in the days following her husband’s death. Failure to find a new man sent her mother’s moral compass spinning off its course. Liaisons with a series of rogues paid the bills. Sex was anaesthetised by copious amounts of booze then. It also helped to blur the truth of herself in the dressing table mirror.
For Emily, her dad’s death was the death of her childhood. As family and friends peeled off with mother’s plunging reputation, at eleven she was promoted to confidante. By eighteen, when her own life was becoming fecund with opportunity, her mother’s needy ‘You won’t leave me too’ tethered Emily to her and the bungalow. She procured her wine in the morning and put her to bed when it finally overwhelmed her.
Emily did this because she adored her mother. She was absolutely partisan, saw her as a beautiful victim relentlessly kicked by fate. Decades passed in this dreary routine. Mother and daughter’s lives contracted to the parameters of the tiny bungalow. Even the rogues fell away, except one who visited weekly, left money discreetly on the sideboard, claiming he expected nothing in return. However, his eyes constantly alighted on Emily like a fly, suggesting he was, in fact, watching an investment develop.
Then, in her mid-fifties, the knight she had always sought rode in to save mother. Sadly, it was more black than white and arrived in the guise of a tumour. Turning her back on treatment and determined that cancer would not run riot in her body as it done with her husband, she decided that suicide would be the cleanest exit.
The finding of the lump winded Emily. She crawled like an invalid through those early days of diagnosis. All the while mother insisted there would be no discussion and life would default to their version of normal. Emily’s shock was compounded when she understood that her mother expected her to facilitate death. Sick to her stomach, she nevertheless agreed, thereby giving her mother peace of mind. But she secretly offered up desperate prayers that it would not come to it.
The origins of the suicide pact were hazy. Looking back, it was like trying to accurately recall a nightmare. Had her mum suggested it? Or had Emily been unable to contemplate life without her? Either way, mother’s relief was evident. In her addled mind, it was an elegant solution to an ugly problem.
From her contracted perspective Emily could not envisage a future for herself. She was isolated as a heroine in a Victorian novel, having had no contact with her family since she was eleven. In a sense she had grown up supernumerary to her mother who took precedence even in something as basic as clothes. Emily had not had her own new garments since childhood. As she grew into a young woman, mother would rummage in her own chest of drawers to provide underwear, jeans, and tops. Largely because all surplus money must go on alcohol.
Mother had also guessed that the one remaining rogue who kept a seemingly friendly eye on them, in fact had an agenda. Whilst Emily lacked her mother’s beauty she had the asset of youth. Some residual maternal instinct must have kicked in here. She knew that her protection was finite now. The rogue was playing a not so long game for the prize of a vulnerable young woman. In retrospect, Emily thought mother’s advocacy for the suicide pact was a blur of all these factors, with perhaps a jigger of jealousy as well for her daughter’s youth and health.
In the months before the cancer overwhelmed, Emily basked in her mother’s praise, “You are so brave.” Even at 28, she still craved the approval that was dealt out so meagrely. Of course, mother had no idea that it was all bravado, but it helped ameliorate the prospect of the pact and almost made her decision worth it.
But in truth Emily was horrified. It was as if the cancer had invaded both their bodies, decided both their fates. At times she was able to park her terror by bingeing on classic literature and junk food. Other times, at night, she lay awake, horrifying images running riot in her mind, silently screaming, “I don’t want to.” At these times, her love of life fought with love for her mother.
Mum sensed when the cancer was making its final move. Laying claim to her brain, it was gradually stealing her mobility and reducing her voice to a whisper. That day, Emily downed a bottle of wine herself to take the edge off proceedings. Unaccustomed to alcohol, she worked in a haze. The afternoon took on a ‘down the rabbit hole’ unreality. She talked her way through the preparations. This served to focus her mind and subdue fear. But there were still moments when she felt like a prison warder forcing her petrified body towards the noose.
A lack of basic physics saved her. The flex caused the water in the bath to merely ripple like a mini tide. There was an element of dark humour about the botched attempt, but neither laughed. Emily took the failure as an intervention by fate. As she clambered from the bath the truth tumbled from her mouth. “No, I don’t want to.”
In contrast, her mother sobbed at the abortion. Having lost all agency to cancer, she could not now determine her own death. Her daughter, with strength gained from years of practice, now supported mum back to bed.
And then her mum performed the only selfless act of the past twenty years. She instructed Emily to phone her estranged grandmother. As is often the case, the two hit it off. Whilst Emily had never resembled her mother, she now saw her genes were gifted from this woman. They shared the same brown hair and eyes. Their temperament was similar, too. The granddaughter inheriting her indomitable spirit.
Of course, Emily knew there would be a reckoning in the future. At some stage she would have to make peace with the guilt she had stashed away in a corner of her mind; the broken promise of living on after her mother, the disloyalty of accepting her grandmother’s protection, the process of carving out a future for herself. But, at the moment, Emily was distracted by the sheer novelty of living.
And now, suddenly, she began to throw open all the windows and doors. The heat waiting outside burst into the bungalow, seeing off the cold from every corner, melting the ice of her mother’s anger until, standing bathed in sunlight, Emily smiled, knowing that, for now, her mum was routed.
.
Fiona Sinclair lives in a village in the UK. She is a poet with several collections published by small presses. Fiona has just begun writing short stories especially about subjects that cannot be covered by poetry.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles
Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International
Borderless 