Chapter 14 #5
Wendy reaches out to touch the flowers on the table and is surprised to discover they’re plastic. They’re exceptionally realistic.
‘The weather’s been awful,’ Sue says, glancing out of the window.
‘Yes, it has.’
‘So how was France?’ her brother asks. ‘Did you enjoy it? Or did you hate it, hence the early return?’
‘No it was good, thanks. Interesting.’
‘And worthwhile?’ Sue asks.
‘Yes. It was quite life changing, actually.’
‘Oh, gosh,’ she says. ‘Do tell.’ She’s trying so hard to be enthusiastic that Wendy feels a bit sorry for her. Her efforts to be upbeat seem proportional to how far their friendship has waned.
‘It’s not that easy to explain,’ Wendy says. ‘But spending that much time alone was interesting, to say the least.’
‘So did you have…?’ Sue asks. Then, ‘I think Fiona said something about you having a revelation. Or hoping for one? I’m not sure which.’
Wendy laughs. ‘Did she? Our Fiona said that?’
‘Something like that. Maybe I got it wrong.’
‘That’s funny. I don’t remember saying anything like that. Not to Fiona, at any rate.’
‘So no bolts of lightning?’ Neil asks, sounding dismissive. He smiles at the end of his sentence to soften his unintentional blow.
Wendy forces a laugh. ‘No bolts of lightning. I haven’t become a Hare Krishna or anything.
It didn’t really happen in the way I thought it would.
I did expect something… I don’t know. Well, I didn’t expect anything.
I was hoping for some sort of revelation, I suppose.
But it didn’t really happen like that. I did have lots of new thoughts, though.
But it was more a case of little insights than one big one.
I do feel quite different now I’m home, though, so hopefully it wasn’t all for nothing. I’m blathering, aren’t I? Sorry.’
‘No, that’s great, isn’t it, Neil?’
‘Yeah. Totally.’
‘Neil! Do try to wake up a bit, honey. I’m sorry, he can be a bit vague sometimes after his snooze, can’t you?’
‘I’m not being vague at all. I’m just waiting to find out what this is all about. You said you wanted to talk, Wens. And I’m assuming you didn’t mean about the weather.’
Wendy blinks at this sudden slip of cordiality, at the glimpse of animosity it reveals.
‘Neil!’ Sue says, shooting a frown at her husband. ‘Sorry, Wendy. Why are you being like this, hon?’
‘I’m not being like anything.’
‘Well, please just stop it, then.’
‘And please don’t talk to me like that in front of my sister.’
Wendy raises one hand. ‘Please, stop, both of you! It’s fine. You’re both right. It is nice to see you and chat after so long. But I also do need to get to the point. Because Neil’s right. There’s no point pretending everything’s, you know… And it’s true. I didn’t come to talk about the weather.’
‘Right,’ Neil says, crossing his arms. ‘Well, good.’
‘Though I didn’t expect you to be so…’
‘So what?’ Neil asks.
‘So… I don’t know… combative?’ Wendy offers.
‘No?’ Neil asks. ‘How did you expect me to be?’
‘Just… Look. Can we start over?’
‘Sure. Go ahead,’ Neil says. ‘Start over.’
‘So first of all. I want to apologise,’ Wendy says, launching into the speech she prepared during her train journey.
‘I’ve come to the realisation that I’ve been drinking too much.
And that I’ve been… a bit difficult, lately, let’s say.
And I’ve stopped now – the drinking that is.
So I’m sorry if that affected you. Affected us. ’
Neil pulls a strange pouty expression combined with a raising of the eyebrows that seems to imply, And…?
‘Gosh,’ Sue says, visibly trying to counterbalance her husband’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Well done you on the drinking. That’s great news, isn’t it, Neil?’
‘Yeah, great. If it lasts.’
‘And I actually have a question about that for you, so let’s start with that one. Because – unless I got this wrong – you told me way back when that you’d stopped drinking too. I feel sure you said that to me, didn’t you?’
Sue glances at Neil, who remains poker-faced.
‘But Fiona told me that I’d got that wrong,’ Wendy continues. ‘So I was wondering what that was about.’
‘Well, Neil did stop for a while, didn’t you? For what was it? Almost a year?’
‘A bit more than a year, actually. For sort of medical reasons.’
‘And I did kind of slow down, too,’ Sue says. ‘The way you do if your partner stops drinking.’
‘But you did tell me that, didn’t you?’ Wendy asks, addressing Sue.
‘I’m sure I remember you saying repeatedly that you’d both stopped drinking.
I remember because you no longer even had any drink in the house.
’ She remembers this because she had started smuggling a small bottle in her handbag whenever family gatherings took place at Neil and Sue’s.
Facing their thin-lipped smiles had felt impossible without a drink just as it feels almost impossible right now.
‘No. Yes. I mean… uh…’ Sue splutters, turning to her husband. ‘Neil?’
‘OK. So, we said that for your benefit,’ Neil says, stepping in brutally to save his wife. ‘If you must know, that’s what happened.’
‘For my benefit?’
‘It’s just… the conversations,’ Sue explains. ‘When you were drinking. They often got a bit… excitable… So we thought it was easier this way.’
‘Excitable? You were downright argumentative,’ Neil says. ‘I’m sorry, but if we’re going for the truth here: you were absolutely bloody exhausting.’
‘Oh,’ Wendy says. She can feel herself blushing. ‘OK.’
‘You weren’t that bad,’ Sue says unconvincingly. ‘But it’s true, we didn’t want you drinking when you were here because that seemed to make everything… awkward. So the easiest way seemed to be to stop drinking with you.’
‘But you used to smuggle in your own and swig it in the bathroom,’ Neil says. ‘So I’m not sure it helped.’
‘Gosh,’ Wendy says, blushing even harder.
‘OK. I didn’t know you knew about that. But OK.
’ She’s imagining all the conversations they must have had about her behind her back and feeling mortified.
‘Couldn’t you have said something, though?
Couldn’t you have asked me to slow down, instead of, you know, lying to me? ’
Neil laughs sourly. ‘Oh, we tried, didn’t we, Susie?’
Sue nods quickly, embarrassedly.
‘You do remember the bottle of whisky, I take it?’ Neil asks. ‘At Christmas? A couple of years back?’
Wendy shakes her head. She has no idea what he’s talking about.
‘When I said you’d had enough and tried to put the drinks away? And you prised the bottle from my hands? You virtually fought me for it, here, in the kitchen.’
‘I did?’ Wendy asks, looking to Sue for confirmation.
‘You swigged it straight from the bottle,’ Sue says. ‘And Neil got actual bruises on his arm from the scuffle.’
‘Well, that was… I bruised more easily back then.’
‘But you still had bruises.’ She turns back to Wendy. ‘He had your fingerprints on his arm for a week.’
‘God,’ Wendy says. ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t remember that at all.’
‘And that was just one time,’ Neil says. ‘There are plenty more where that came from.’
‘Yes, it happened a few times,’ Sue says. ‘Not the bruises. But times we tried to get you to slow down.’
‘But you wouldn’t hear of it,’ Neil says. ‘You were offended even at the suggestion. So…’
‘So we started hiding the stuff before you came,’ Sue says. ‘It just seemed to be easier that way.’
Wendy starts to cry, silent tears slipping down her cheeks.
‘Oh, Wens,’ Sue says, standing and moving to crouch beside her so that she can slip one arm around her shoulders.
But Wendy shrugs her off. ‘I just…’ she says. Then, after accepting the tissue that Sue is proffering, she continues, ‘It’s mortifying. It’s so embarrassing and I don’t even remember. It’s embarrassing that I don’t remember, too.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ Neil says. ‘We’re not making anything up.’
‘No, no, I believe you. And I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ Sue says, returning to her seat. ‘Right, Neil?’
‘Yeah. Sure. It’s fine.’
‘And you were going through a difficult time,’ Sue says. ‘We know that.’
Wendy nods and closes her eyes. She blows her nose and tries not to think about how much of an understatement that is. ‘So, about that,’ she finally says. ‘That’s the other thing I need to talk about. That’s the main thing, really.’
‘What is?’ Neil asks.
‘My “difficult time”,’ Wendy says, making the speech marks with her fingers.
Sue glances nervously at Neil and then, after pushing the box of tissues so that it’s right in front of Wendy, she takes Neil’s hand across the table – a visible sign of solidarity before the onslaught she can sense is coming.
‘I’ve never told you how Mum died,’ Wendy says. ‘And I’ve discovered that I need to do that. So…’
‘I think we know how Mum died,’ Neil says. ‘So there’s really no need to go there.’
‘Yeah, but that’s the thing,’ Wendy tells him. ‘You don’t.’
She tells them now. She tells them how she drove her mother to chemo and radiotherapy for months and how she nursed her when she vomited, back home.
Through tears, fresh tears, intermittent floods of tears, she tells them of the routine check-ups and the good news, and their shared joy until that one fateful check-up when the results were not good, followed by the devastating follow-up when they announced the cancer had metastasised all over, a fact she had to keep explaining to their mother because it was a concept she seemed unable to hear.
And then finally, she tells them of the day she died, how she hadn’t slept for thirty-seven hours because she’d gone straight from a night shift to holding her mother’s hand in the hospice.
She tells them how their mother had screamed in pain before dying alone, because she’d been stuck down at the main desk begging for morphine.