Same Time Next Week

Chapter 3

Amanda put the plate down in front of her mother and watched her lip curl up like a child about to be force-fed spinach.

‘I wasn’t really in the mood for salmon,’ said Ingrid Worsnip.

‘It’s good for you,’ said Amanda, who did try and make sure her mother ate healthily, which was more than could be said for her half-brother, golden bollocks Bradley, who shoved something in the microwave and sat hovering over their mother, waiting for her to finish so he could shoot off home. He did it every single time he was on mother duty and then he’d lie and tell Amanda that he stayed a good two hours with her. She knew he was lying because she could clearly see him on one of the concealed cameras she’d set up in her mum’s house a couple of months ago, after she’d noticed a downturn in her mum’s mobility. There was one in the kitchen that covered all of the dining area as well, one in the lounge and another at the bottom of the stairs. She respected her mum’s privacy, the cameras weren’t there to spy on her, she just checked in occasionally to make sure everything was all right and her mum wasn’t lying there helpless, having had a fall.

But she would confess that she’d started spying on Bradley when he turned up to do his duty. He’d come in, give his mother a kiss and then slam something he’d brought with him in the microwave, which he’d take the money for from her change jar. Then he’d sit with her at the table as she ate, and either read her newspaper or fanny about on his phone, making the odd grunt of engagement when she tried to converse. On a couple of recent occasions, though, Amanda had tracked him going upstairs and into their mother’s bedroom and she wondered what he might be looking for because he seemed to be in there quite a while.

Amanda didn’t really like Bradley that much. There was too much of his father in him, a man whom Amanda had detested.

Her own father, Fred Brundell, had died on her eighth birthday and she’d adored him. He’d been a cobbler with his own shop but he loved a bit of wheeler-dealering, chasing the buck, buying bargains at second-hand markets and selling them for a profit; he was gifted at it. He’d left his wife financially comfortable, enough for her not to have to work, so she could carry on being a stay-at-home mum for their daughter. But within two years she’d coupled up with Arnold Worsnip, who worked in the local ironmonger’s and couldn’t have been more unlike her first husband if he’d tried.

He and Ingrid were married without much preamble. It seemed as if one minute he’d turned up to take her out and the next his feet were firmly under the table. He’d seemed quiet and amiable before the wedding but then he moved in and turned into a dictator. Ingrid let him be the disciplinarian, which involved him taking every half-viable opportunity to drag young Amanda over his knee, to pull up her skirt and spank her bottom. At first, Amanda thought he was just a nasty bastard. It was only later on she realised he was a perverted one. They’d had a talk at school about people touching you in a way that made you feel uncomfortable and it had struck a loud chord. So the next time he’d tried to do it, she’d been ready to spin and land a perfectly aimed knee in his goolies and with it the threat that she’d go to the police. He’d left not long after, though her mother had never gone into the nitty-gritty of why he moved out.

Arnold went to live in the flat above the ironmonger’s, eventually buying not only the business but the whole building. Amanda suspected the money her dad had left to provide for her had ended up providing for him instead. He and Bradley weren’t at all close but Ingrid made sure he stumped up for his son. He never married again, because he’d been lucky even to get married once, the creepy shit. Creepy shit with little soft doll hands that delivered a surprisingly stinging slap.

Ingrid doted on Bradley, spoiling him rotten in a way she’d never spoilt her daughter and she really hadn’t done him any favours. He’d been a spoilt, entitled little boy who’d grown up into a spoilt, entitled little man, one of those people who turned selfishness into an art form. When Ingrid’s health started to decline, the plan was to split the care of their mother equally between the siblings; yet Amanda seemed to have copped for three-quarters of it at least. He’d married a woman who for some reason looked at him as adoringly as if he was Richard Gere; as if his ego hadn’t been inflated enough over the years by a mother for whom he could do no wrong. Dolly Shepherd, who lived next door to Ingrid, once said about him, ‘He’d have eaten himself if he could,’ and Amanda couldn’t have put it any better.

Ingrid reluctantly lifted up her fork and prodded at the fish.

‘It’s undercooked. It’s pink.’

‘That’s what colour salmon is, Mum. It’s perfectly cooked.’

‘I don’t fancy it. I think I’ll just have a bun.’

‘Not until you’ve eaten your dinner,’ insisted Amanda, before it slammed into her from left field, that upset of world order, that she was having another of those moments where she was becoming her parent’s parent.

Ingrid cut a piece off and stuck it into her mouth, chewing it like an actor from Grease might chew gum, but with a recalcitrant grimace. It couldn’t have been too bad, though, because she went in for another forkful. And another. And when she had finished she said, ‘That was torture.’

Just for a second, Amanda felt like a bully, before her thoughts were replaced by sensible, kinder ones to herself that said, Mum really doesn’t do anything that she doesn’t want to.

Amanda took her plate away and brought in the sweet treat she’d picked up from the little Tesco around the corner. A strawberry tart, Ingrid’s favourite. She dived into it as if she hadn’t been fed for a month, cream and glaze sticking to her face.

‘Our Bradley and Kerry are having a marvellous time in Turkey,’ she said, spitting pastry crumbs. ‘They’re in the middle of a heatwave.’

‘How lovely.’ Amanda hadn’t meant it to sound sarcastic but that’s how it came out.

‘His hotel is four star, did I tell you?’

Just a few hundred times, Amanda didn’t say. And that he’d decided to extend the fortnight by another week and just expected her to pick up the slack, without even asking if that would be okay.

‘Did he ring you, Mum?’

‘Well, how else would I have known they were having a heatwave?’

Amanda ignored the snap. ‘What else did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything else. He just rang and said it was a very quick call to tell me they were having a marvellous time and how hot it was and he hoped I was well. And that he loved me lots and couldn’t wait to see me again.’

Then Ingrid sighed in the way she usually sighed where soppy thoughts of her baby boy were involved.

Amanda could imagine him saying that. He was very good at flannel, was Bradley and he knew that a ‘love you, Mother’ was all that was needed to convince her she was still the centre of his universe, when she was anything but. It wasn’t Amanda’s job to dismantle that belief, though, if it kept her mum happy. But she wished that she had the same effect on Ingrid, since her mother really was the centre of her universe. Ingrid’s health, her medical appointments, her quality of life dominated Amanda’s life and there was nothing she could do about it other than carry on carrying on.

‘What’s up with you? You look tired,’ said Ingrid, licking her fingers while staring at her daughter.

‘I’m not sleeping well,’ replied Amanda. She hadn’t slept well for over two years. And sometimes when she did fall asleep and had a chance of a good kip, the sensation of waking up in a bed so damp she thought she’d wet herself put paid to that.

‘Why’s that then?’

‘It’s the menopause, Mum.’

‘Well, we’ve all had to go through it,’ said Ingrid, as if Amanda was a weaker being for even mentioning it. She’d been lucky, flew through it as if she’d been on a greased sledge, give or take some joint pains and a little bone-crumbling. ‘My auntie Hilda had to go into the nuthouse with it.’

‘I know how she felt,’ Amanda muttered to herself.

‘She forgot how to talk. Came out with all the wrong words. They thought she was brain-damaged.’

Amanda also knew that feeling and she’d been so perturbed by it that it had driven her to the docs. The doctor wouldn’t give her HRT because she’d had her last period over five years ago, even though she’d broken down in the consulting room. She’d been palmed off with some anti-depressants that would make her sleepy at night and a leaflet about mindfulness and yoga. She couldn’t even get into the recovery position, never mind the lotus, with her unbendy limbs.

She’d thought that her only option was to put up and shut up, until she’d been in the hairdressers and overheard the woman in the next chair waxing lyrical to the stylist about her HRT. She’d had to go private, she said: the Hathor clinic. She’d had an adverse change of life with the menopause, she went on, and she could feel it was changing back again just for slapping a patch on her arse twice a week.

Amanda remembered the name from school when they’d done a project on Egypt. Hathor, the goddess of love and femininity, protector of women. She’d looked up the clinic when she got home and booked an online appointment. She’d had a consultation with a doctor who said that HRT might be very beneficial for her symptoms and Amanda could have sobbed with gratitude. The patches hadn’t kicked in yet, though, because today she’d been in the middle of a presentation to the new head honcho at work and she completely lost her thread, called the annual budget an animal budgie and her immediate boss, Philip, had had to step in and rescue the situation.

‘I’m on HRT now,’ said Amanda.

‘HRT?’ Ingrid scoffed. ‘Judith from two doors down went on that and died not long after.’

‘Judith who got run over?’

‘Yeah, her.’

Amanda shook her head. ‘Well you can’t blame HRT for that, Mum.’

‘I never said I did.’ Then Ingrid gave a small gasp, remembering something to gossip about. ‘Ey, do you know who’s died? Brian Unwin. I got the shock of my life.’

Amanda’s face registered complete bafflement, which annoyed her mum.

‘Brian. He used to knock about with your father. I’m glad I got some sympathy cards in the sale. Buy two get two free, I knew they’d come in handy. They’re having the wake at the Hoppleton Arms.’ She pulled an impressed face. ‘That would be a dream come true for me, to have a wake at the Hoppleton Arms.’

‘Lord, Mum,’ Amanda exclaimed. She didn’t even want to think about that sort of thing. Anyway, she didn’t have to because she knew her mum had written a will years ago and detailed all her demands in it, including her own funeral arrangements. She was very on the ball with her paperwork and refused to delegate the managing of it to Amanda because it was ‘my private business and mine alone’.

Ingrid had always been sharp mentally as well as physically able. She kept an immaculate house and wouldn’t let anyone else do her cleaning, even though Bradley had volunteered Kerry’s services – for a price, of course. She wrote longhand letters to people and toddled off to the post office to send them before she went to the local coffee shop in the mornings to meet up with her crew. She was still fiercely independent and Amanda liked that she was, but recently she’d noticed her mum slowing down and some moments where she wasn’t as lucid as she used to be; and the slipping of standards scared Amanda, because she knew they signalled the first steps towards the edge of an abyss.

She watched her mum get up from her chair after three failed attempts and rub her hip when she was standing. She had an eighty-year-old body and the stresses were starting to tell; and Amanda was aware of how quickly things could change at this age, they weren’t going to be given a year’s notice that Ingrid’s legs had given up. She moved around fine on the flat but she’d started to struggle with stairs and that was a worry, because there was no downstairs toilet in this house and her mother would cut off her head before she’d use a commode.

‘Mum, wouldn’t you prefer to sell this place and get a little bungalow?’ Amanda asked, not for the first time. She’d always been rudely rebuffed before, accused of insinuating Ingrid was infirm, and she was sure part of the reason for that was Bradley putting her off the idea of a move because he wouldn’t want to be roped into helping. He couldn’t even be bothered to boil some vegetables from fresh for his mum’s tea, so having to give up time to box up their mother’s life was something he’d avoid at all costs, even if it was in her best interests. This house was in a prestigious area and stood on a large plot; those that were put up for sale were snapped up as soon as they went on the market.

‘Bradley said if I did that, I’d not find one as good as here.’

Amanda growled inwardly; she was right then.

‘Of course you would.’

‘It might be nice, though.’

Amanda’s head jerked. Had she really just heard that? Her very first possible yes.

‘Darlene from the coffee shop has just gone into a council house bungalow up by the park. It’s got one of those bathrooms where you sit on a chair to have a shower and don’t need to have a curtain. She says she wishes she’d done it years ago.’

Amanda leapt on it. ‘Shall I start looking?’

Ingrid’s tone changed.

‘Oh, I don’t know what Bradley would say to that.’

Sod Bradley , Amanda said in her head.

‘Well, it’s not up to him, it’s up to you, Mum. Just think, in a couple of months you could be in a little bungalow all of your own.’

There was a bungalow-rich estate just five minutes away. They were a bit pricey but the sale of this house to downsize would easily cover one. The move would be laborious, but it was entirely doable. Their mother wasn’t a hoarder and what she had would easily fit into a much smaller property. Bradley would just have to get his arse in gear and help.

The further along things were before Bradley returned from his holiday in Turkey, the more chance there was of him not being able to change her mind back.

Ingrid thought about it for a few seconds and then said, ‘Well, you can have a look around, I suppose.’ She smiled at her daughter, and the sad part about that was that Amanda couldn’t remember the last time her mother had smiled like that without having said the word ‘Bradley’.