Nick
Nick
He’s in the middle of signing for a huge delivery of artefacts from a shipwreck museum, which are being used in his latest exhibition, when his mobile phone rings. He pulls it from his pocket.
It’s his mum.
‘Hey, Mum,’ he says, surprised. She rarely rings him in the day. She rarely rings him at all now they are living together. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Not exactly,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry to bother you love, but I’ve had a fall…’
‘What? Are you OK?’
Panic rises inside him.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just… I can’t seem to get up. It was so stupid, I tripped over that little stool in the kitchen, you know, the one I got from the car boot at the weekend. I suppose I haven’t quite got used to it being there, you know how I like everything to be in its place and… it’s hurting.’
‘I’m coming home. Stay where you are,’ he says, urgently. ‘Does anything else hurt? You’re not bleeding or anything?’
‘No, Nicky, it’s just my leg. I can’t seem to get up on my own. I suppose I must have twisted something.’
‘Stop trying. Christ, Mum. Thank God I bought you that lanyard for your phone. Stay there, I’m coming now.’
He makes his excuses to his boss and leaves the glasshouse. On the drive back to Woking, he races through the traffic lights just as they turn red, noticing the camera above once it’s too late.
‘Fuck it, fuck it.’
But it doesn’t matter. Not really. All that matters is that his mum is OK when he gets home.
It was only last week that she brought that stupid stool home.
‘Look, Nick love,’ she said, pleased as punch with her find. ‘It’s retro, isn’t it? Reminds me of those 1950s American ice cream parlours. It’ll be perfect for me to sit on when the potatoes are boiling. Did you know all kitchens used to have a special chair just for the cook to sit in? Jolly right too.’
He’d stared down at the sorry-looking stool, its once shiny chrome legs now scratched and stained, the vinyl top slashed down the middle, revealing the foam inside.
‘Mum,’ he’d begun, knowing it was futile. ‘It’s filthy.’
‘It needs a bit of a scrub, that’s all. And I can sew up that tear,’ she said and she took it off into the garden with a bowl of soapy water and a scrubbing brush, and set to work.
An hour later, it looked no different.
He should have put his foot down then. He should have said, NO. No, Mum, we don’t need this stool, the kitchen is already cluttered enough.
It’s his fault this has happened. He didn’t protect her.
He tears up the driveway, braking to an abrupt halt.
‘Mum!’ he calls. ‘Mum?’
He can see her crumpled body squashed up against a cabinet in the kitchen. Of course, she’s not lying flat on the floor because there’s no clear space, and so half of her body is slumped against the cabinet, her legs twisted awkwardly beneath her.
‘I’m sorry to call you at work,’ she says, but her voice is faint, and he’s immediately even more worried. How long as she been lying here?
She’s so frail, like a tiny delicate bird, and he reaches down to gently try to lift her from underneath her armpits.
‘Can you put your arm around me?’ he says, and with effort she manages it.
‘It’s my leg that hurts,’ she says.
‘I know, I’m just trying to pick you up.’
She weighs next-to-nothing, but she’s also a dead weight, and he’s scared of hurting her, so he moves very slowly.
Eventually, she’s in his arms and then he sees her face. The gash across the cheek where she must have gone down against the cabinet.
‘You’ve cut your cheek,’ he says. ‘Christ, mum.’
Suddenly he sees the blood, the blood which had been momentarily camouflaged by all the other shit in the kitchen. Now it seems to be everywhere – across the cabinet, pooling on the boxes, across her arm and now his too.
Something bubbles up in him: fear, rage, an instinctive burst of adrenaline as he looks around frantically at the fucking stupid mess of a kitchen and wonders where the fuck he can actually put his poor mother now that he’s finally got her in his arms, because there’s not a single safe place to sit down in this Godforsaken house.
And the blood, the blood seems to be everywhere now, rising up the walls and coating the ceiling and he closes his eyes tight so that it can’t get to him too, and he’s suddenly drenched in sweat but he’s still holding his mum and she’s moaning in his arms and he wants to drop her and run but of course he can’t do that, and so he opens his eyes again for a second and he can see that fucking stool, with its ripped vinyl cover and a smear of blood across one of the legs. And he realises then that this is what must have cut his mother’s cheek as it toppled under her, and without meaning to, without conscious thought, he kicks it as hard as he can. But of course it has nowhere to go and so it bounces against the cabinet and comes straight back for him, hitting him in the shin.
‘Ouch,’ his mother says, and he realises that him kicking the stool has jerked her leg, making it hurt again.
He can’t do it anymore.
Looking after his mother is a responsibility he has felt his whole life, but now it feels unendurable. It has often felt as though the weight of it might choke him, but over the years he has learnt how to manage those feelings. To create distance where really there is none.
Maggie once told him that they were ‘enmeshed’. That their relationship wasn’t healthy. After they got married, she bought him a self-help book called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents but he couldn’t bring himself to read it. It would have felt like a betrayal.
He thought he was coping. He thought he had moved on. But of course he hasn’t. He can never escape what happened to him.
Wherever he goes, there he is.
And things have been even worse since he pushed Beth away.
He crouches down on the tiny patch of floor beneath his feet, still holding his mother.
‘We can’t live like this,’ he says, leaning against something – God knows what – something that might topple on top of them both if he puts too much pressure against it, but who cares anymore. ‘Mum, we can’t…’
But her eyes are closed and he suddenly realises that she’s lost consciousness.
‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’
And just in time he takes her phone from her hand and calls 999.