Cuckoo (aka Claire, Darling)

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Eight

It’s funny, the things we remember. You remember a film character, but not the name of the film. Or a landmark, but not when you visited it last. My childhood feels like a strobe light. Flashes of memories and then darkness; no context or framing, often leaving me confused and unsure if what I remember is the whole story. Am I misremembering or was it as bad as it now seems?

For example, I remember being ten, crying in my room after Mother had shouted at me. That’s the light part, but beforehand all is dark. I can’t remember what we argued about, what she said to trigger my tears. I can’t remember if it was my fault or hers. But what I do remember is hearing her next door to my bedroom, on the phone to a friend. I tried to stifle my sobs, embarrassed that she had the power to reduce me to a weeping little baby. And in the moment when I’d swallowed the last of them, I heard Mother say, ‘She’s having a tantrum as we speak… Yes, I know, you’d think she’d have grown out of that by now. I’m so bored of her crying all the time, but I leave her to it and eventually she exhausts herself.’

I remember hearing her say those words so clearly that it’s as though she’s standing next to me right now, whispering them in my ear. I recall how my tears dried almost instantly, to be replaced with venomous loathing for her. Mother had a total disregard for anyone else’s emotions. She certainly didn’t care in the slightest about my feelings. There was never any apology after a fight, never a conversation or compromise after an argument. All there was for me was shouting, followed by tears, followed by silence. I was ten when I decided that I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing me cry anymore. I’d set my jaw and curl my fingers into tight fists and tell myself that if she didn’t care about my feelings enough even to check on me, then I would just have to take care of them myself; and that meant not allowing myself to cry.

Of course, I’m human. I have cried since then. I cry at the Battersea Dogs Home advert on television. I cried reading that book about the little girl with cancer. I cried watching the news when the war broke out in Ukraine. I cried when Noah proposed. And again when he left me. But I didn’t cry over Mother again. Not while she was alive anyway.