Chapter 10
In a way, it was at least interesting to see how other people were reacting to a life lived in lockdown.
Every day I read about things going on in the world, from people organising mass appreciation for the National Health Service workers, to mastering sour dough starters, to multi-tasking working-from-home and homeschooling children from their living room.
Everywhere, all around the world, people were pivoting to a new way of living, and I was… stagnant.
It wasn’t that I was moping. I had gone through, and embraced the sadness I had felt – and still felt. I just didn’t know what to do. I was motionless. I was like the utensil in the back of a kitchen drawer that everyone’s forgotten about. I had no purpose.
I seemed to spend my time drifting through the house on errant breezes, without direction. I was here, but I was doing nothing. Not really.
I helped with chores, I kept my folks company – but maybe that was the other way around.
Mum had had her first round of chemo now. Because it was essential medical treatment, she was allowed to travel to the clinic, but Dad wasn’t allowed to go in with her. He had to wait in the car. He took a book with him, but I don’t think he ever read it.
The first few days afterwards, we’d all waited anxiously, expecting her to throw up any second, like on TV.
I kept looking her over, taking inventory, as though I’d expected her to look different, but she hadn’t.
For days afterwards she’d showed no outward signs at all, except that she’d said water tasted weird.
We’d just begun to relax, to joke that she was as resilient as we always said she was, when one morning she launched from bed, running to the toilet to be sick so violently that it woke me up.
Later we joked that Mum was as human as the rest of us, but it had come with a sort of forced levity. Really, it had been to cover any disappointment we might have felt knowing that Mum was, in fact, going to go through this the same way most everyone else did. That she would not get off lightly.
After the first bout, the anti-sickness medication seemed to kick in, which was a relief. Mum had switched every other cup of tea to the ginseng tea Jihoon had sent. At first, I’d thought she was doing it to be polite, but she insisted it really did settle her stomach.
We’d expected the nausea. What we hadn’t accounted for was when Mum said she’d swapped feeling poorly with full body pain.
The migraines confined her to the house for much of the third day, but the rest of the first week she barely left her bedroom. She said her bones hurt too much to get out of bed.
We had been prepared for so much. We had stocked the cabinets with hot drinks to help with nausea, filled the fridge with nutritious, but bland food to combat any sickness. But what did you do for a person whose bones ached?
Dad and I floundered. We didn’t know how to help.
Seeing my Mum go from the ever-in-motion force of nature to someone mortal was difficult. I hadn’t realised how built up she had been in my mind. How I’d equated her with something implacable, ever-present. An edifice like Hadrian’s Wall. In my mind, she had, and would always exist.
It was a strange realisation that she was human.
By the second week, she was mostly feeling better, but for the exhaustion.
She kept apologising, which was crazy to me, because what expectations did she think we had of her, that she felt the need to apologise?
She needed to sit down during making dinner, and kept saying she didn’t feel up to pushing the Hoover round, despite the fact we kept telling her to stop doing those things.
That we could do them, but she wouldn’t let us.
The time Dad had found her standing on a kitchen chair, dusting the oven hood, he’d scolded her so strongly it had turned into a proper argument. His point – a fair one, in my opinion – was that she might get faint and fall. He was cross she was taking unnecessary risks.
I opted to keep out of it, lurking in the door, watching as they stood across from one another.
“You keep acting like you’re back to normal, love, but you’re not.” Dad said in a measured tone.
“I’m bloody fine!” Mum shouted, waving the yellow dusting cloth around like a flag.
“Val, you’ve just had major surgery, and now you’re going through chemo. You are not ‘fine.” Even from across the room, I could see the way his jaw clenched, as though he were biting back the words he really wanted to say.
“You don’t need to remind me what I’m going through, Ernest Thompson, I was bloody there!”
“Then act like it, you stubborn woman!”
“Stubborn, is it?” Mum put her hands on her hips, staring him down, even though she was several inches shorter than him.
“As a bloody Ox,” he’d gritted out.
Half an hour later, I’d walked into the living room to see them cuddled up on the sofa, watching a nature documentary.
I’d had this conversation with Mum once.
I remember I’d just come home from school, and one of my friend’s parents were divorcing because they ‘used to argue a lot’ but were apparently not talking to each other anymore.
I must have been quite young, because I had come to the conclusion that my own parents would be due to divorce, if the qualifier was arguments.
But when I’d said this to Mum, she had laughed, and sat me down.
“Love, it’s when you stop arguing that you stop caring. If I didn’t love your dad so much, I wouldn’t care. Arguing can be cross, but it also means you care enough about something to get all riled up. It’s normal. If you can’t be bothered to argue with someone, you’ve stopped caring.”
It had taken me a while to understand that, but looking at them now, I thought it made perfect sense.
Mid April
It was a beautiful day. One of the first truly clear ones we’d had since I’d been back in the UK.
Dad and I were in the kitchen, washing up after lunch, while Mum was outside on the porch.
She’d been feeling a lot better this week, but her second round of chemo was in a couple of days, so she’d wanted to soak up the sun now before she couldn’t stand to look at it again.
Last time her migraine had been triggered by too much light.
I kept joking with Dad that she was a plant, growing roots in the garden.
The ring of the doorbell surprised us, heads snapping up like Meerkats before we looked at each other, our expressions equally confused.
“Did you place an order?” I asked, thinking of the weekly online shop we did from Booths.
“No,” he replied, “did you?”
“No.” I shook my head.
The doorbell rang again, but we seemed frozen to the spot, still-life statues, one holding a soapy dish, the other clutching a tea towel.
It was like we’d forgotten how to act during normal interactions, when every outside setting was rife with the implied danger that strangers possessed.
We lived in – as Becka had called it – interesting times.
The unknown person knocked on the door twice, and then a few moments later we heard the sound of an engine, and the crunch of tyres on the gravel driveway.
Dad and I shared a look, before he shrugged and said, “Better go see what that was.” And placed his tea towel to the side.
I quickly finished up the few remaining dishes in the sink, bunging them haphazardly in the drying rack, before grabbing the tea towel to dry my hands just in time to see Dad walk back into the kitchen.
Or, rather, an enormous bouquet of flowers with my dad’s legs walked back into the kitchen. It was so big, so… leafy, that everything above his belt was obscured – a fact that was reinforced when the walking spray of blooms and leaves bumped into the door frame.
“Bugger,” the bouquet muttered.
I walked over to help guide the foliage to the breakfast counter.
“Phew,” my now-unencumbered Dad whistled.
“Who the hell sent that?” I eyed the arrangement speculatively. “A friend of mum’s?”
“There’s a card.” Dad reached into the elegant tangle to pull out a small, cream coloured envelope. He slid out the card and began to read. “Jagy-ya,” he said, frowning as he struggled to pronounce the foreign word.
I snatched the card from his fingers and backed up, clutching it as if it was a prize I’d just stolen. Dad blinked at me, his fingers still held in front of his face, like they hadn’t figured out they were empty yet.
“From your fancy man, is it?” His eyebrows raised.
“Daaad,” I whined. “Jihoon is not my ‘fancy man’.”
I moved over to the sliding doors leading out into the garden, but didn’t step through, not wanting to bother Mum. I began to read.
Jagiya -
Do you remember the day we met?
That was when I knew.
When our eyes met for the first time, I was already yours.
That was our Day One.
Happy anniversary.
Saranghae.
I looked down at my watch to see the date, as my mind cast back to that day in April, when I’d dropped a box of cables in front of a K-pop artist, and his entourage. My cheeks warmed, even though the day was only mild.
“Bloody hell, where did that come from?” Mum’s voice shook me out of the memory as she walked in through the sliding doors.
“Kaiya’s fancy man,” Dad waggled his eyebrows in a way I found most distressing.
“Mmm, is that right?” Mum slid her gaze to mine, and her speculative look made my face heat even more.
“Special occasion?” She moved over to the brightly coloured spray of blooms and ran her fingers lightly over one of the delicate flowers.
“Today is the one year anniversary of the day we met,” I said, feeling inexplicably shy.
“Mum turned to look at me. “The day you met? Blimey, kid, you must have made some impression.”
I let out an involuntary snort.
“He calls her ‘jagy’” Dad proclaimed, stuffing his hands into his pockets and rocking on the balls of his feet, as though supremely amused, which, judging by the smug grin on his face – he was.
“Jagy-what?” Mum frowned.
“Daaad!”
He laughed. “Sorry kiddo, but do you know how long I’ve waited for you to bring a boy home? Let your old man have a bit of fun, eh?”