Chapter Seven
Sharon
Tainted Love by Soft Cell
“Danny!” I call out as I read the third page of this form for possibly the fifteenth time. It still doesn’t make sense.
There’s no answer so I lift my reading glasses to balance them on top of my head and I get up, walking towards his room. The door is ajar when I get there and I poke my head around the available space.
Danny is lying prone across his bed, wearing a red string vest and jeans that have seen better days, but I’m not allowed to say that. They’re his dancing jeans. They make his butt look like a roast dinner. They are not to be insulted under any circumstances.
I smile before I panic.
He looks so content, but then I question if he’s a bit too still.
Is he breathing? I rush over to his face which is pressed into his duvet, his mouth open and squashed.
Holding my hand about an inch in front of his nose and mouth, I finally exhale when I feel a rush of warm air hit my skin.
I then watch his chest rise and fall in a steady rhythm before I creep back out of the room and close the door.
He’s okay. He’s just sleeping.
Three weeks have passed since Danny was discharged from Queen Street West. Three weeks of him almost becoming the man he was before the pneumonia hit.
He’s returned to work part-time. He’s been going out most Friday or Saturday nights, and often once or twice during the week too.
He’s still not eating as much as I would like, and he’s yet to regain all the weight he lost, but he’s been in good spirits.
He’s smiling and laughing and dancing in his dancing jeans…
He’s also exhausted.
This is not the first time I’ve found him asleep when he was supposed to be getting dressed, tidying his room or just popping in there to find something.
At times, I’ve tried to discourage him from going clubbing until the early hours, and I’ve also mentioned how we’d survive on my salary if he didn’t work, but he bats these suggestions away with a comment about ‘sleeping when he’s dead’ that makes me bristle as much as it soothes me.
Because if he’s making jokes about it, if he’s got enough energy to head into town at the weekend and then make it to his Monday morning shift without too much of a problem, he can’t be that sick.
Still, I would rather he didn’t have to work, especially when his work in the BBC canteen is so far from how he actually wants to spend his time.
It didn’t take long to determine he almost certainly qualified for Invalidity Benefit but filling in these forms has taken considerably longer and a lot more effort than I expected.
This is not helped at all by the fact Danny is reluctant to help me, which I can’t blame him when even the name leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Invalidity. Invalid. According to who?
I let Danny have his space. I know there is still a bit of denial keeping Danny at a deliberate distance from his diagnosis, or rather, his prognosis, but we can’t both be like that.
Returning to the living room, I take my glasses off completely and fold them on top of the forms. I’ll get to it tomorrow, when Danny has sobered up, because there’s no doubt in my mind he’ll still be going out tonight.
He’ll wake in two hours, call it a ‘disco nap’ and be pouring us both gin and tonics before he rushes out the door.
As he always does, he’ll invite me to join him and, as I always do, I will refuse.
I used to go with him – not to the clubs for dancing, but to the bars – but even that was a struggle for me.
The noise, the looks, the people… I just didn’t feel like I fit in.
Everyone was so… queer, and comfortable being so.
I still battle to say that word without feeling like I’ve eaten something that’s disagreeing with me.
Besides, that week on Princess Diana Ward changed me, and not just because of Danny, but with regard to the hundreds of men like Danny.
I can now see things I never used to. Sallow skin, grey puddles under the eyes, gaunt expressions and bodies that seemed to shrink under the sheets, day by day getting smaller.
Sometimes I see hints of that outside the ward.
In the street, on the Tube, on the bus. Yesterday at work, I walked past a man who I vaguely recognised but couldn’t name.
It was hours later when I placed him as one of the internal audit team I’d worked with at length not eight months ago.
He looked like a literal shadow of himself, his suit not fitting quite right, his hair lank and limp and his eyes looking not at me but through me.
George Maynard. I looked up his name in my Rolodex and I have made a mental note to check up on him in a week or two. I hope he has people, or even just someone he can turn to right now. I spend a lot of time hoping they all have at least someone.
The shrill ringing of the phone snaps me out of my thoughts. It sounds louder, harsher than usual or maybe that’s just my fear it’s going to wake up Danny, who can always benefit from a bit more sleep. I rush to the side table beside the sofa and pick up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Sharon.”
My name. Her voice.
“Hi, Mum,” I say, closing my eyes and sinking down on the sofa.
“I’m sorry it’s late and Shabbat,” she says after a beat. Her voice is exactly as I remember it. Curt, precise, a pitch that somehow feels too loud and too quiet at the same time.
“It’s not that late,” I say, choosing not to remind her that I haven’t observed Shabbat in a long time.
“Well, my apologies if I’m interrupting.” Another apology, but there is absolutely no remorse in her voice. There never is.
“What’s happened? Are you okay?” It’s ironic it’s me cutting to the chase with her. She is the very reason I know how to do that.
“I’m…” She pauses and I hold my breath, which surprises me. “Fine. But.”
There’s more silence. I wait.
“Your grandmother died,” she tells me.
“Bubbe,” I whisper, a hand on my chest.
“Yes. She passed this morning. Well, last night actually. Her nurse found her this morning.”
“She died in her sleep?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I sigh. It’s a blessing, a relief even if the way my mother confirms it doesn’t suggest she thinks so at all. They weren’t close, my mother and her mother. Maybe that’s why I always felt a strong connection to Bubbe.
“The levaya will be on Sunday as tomorrow is Shabbat,” she says all matter-of-fact. “I suppose I shouldn’t be calling now for the same reason, but I wanted you to know.”
“Of course,” I say. I try to imagine where she’s sitting in my family home, what she’s wearing, if there’s a glass of sherry in her hand, or cognac.
“So you’ll come?”
I tense. I haven’t seen my mother in six years. I last saw Bubbe about a year ago. I have been meaning to visit her in her North Finchley nursing home for the last six months but Danny fell ill, got his diagnosis…
She didn’t seem anywhere close to death the last time I saw her. But I am starting to learn how little that means.
“I… I don’t know.”
My mother sighs, all impatience and disappointment. It’s far too familiar a sound even after so many years of not hearing it.
“Well, the thing is, Mum,” I say, a rush of bitterness twisting the way I say her name, “I’m still gay. Still a lesbian. So I imagine I won’t be welcome.”
Another sigh, and even more disapproval. “Unless you’re planning on wearing a T-shirt with it written on, I don’t see that being an issue. Besides,” this time she sucks in a breath and it’s just as scathing, “Bubbe never knew. Not that that matters now.”
I wish I could tell her that I told Bubbe and that she didn’t reject me, abandon me, push me away like my own mother did.
But that’s not what happened. I didn’t tell her. I was too scared. I didn’t want to risk losing another family member, especially one who I actually felt something like love from.
“Will Dad be there?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she tells me. “I’m calling him after this.”
“He won’t come,” I think out loud. “She won’t allow it.”
“As long as she doesn’t show up herself.”
I snort at the prospect of my father’s new, younger wife turning up at my bubbe’s funeral, maybe with one or both of the children they now share in tow.
A half-brother and a half-sister I’ve never met because when my father left my mother for Natasha Cohen, a woman only five years my senior, we ceased to exist.
“She won’t come,” I offer and maybe it sounds like reassurance but really it’s fact.
“Not if she’s got any sense,” my mother practically hisses.
It’s almost amusing; that the only thing we can share a consensus on is how little we think of the woman who broke up a family, although it was anything but a happy, loving unit.
Although, in reality, it wasn’t her fault.
It was my father’s fault, but to admit that would probably hurt us both more than we can cope with.
“Where will you sit shiva?” I know there will be one, for the full seven days.
“Here, of course,” Mum replies and I hear a hint of defensiveness. She has to maintain appearances that she is as orthodox as her mother was, especially when she claims that’s what forced her to throw me out of her house at twenty-two.
“Maybe I’ll come then,” I say, knowing I won’t, but using it as a way to confirm a more important decision. I won’t attend the funeral.
Silence stretches long enough for me to question if she’s hung up and I missed the click.
“I’m afraid you can’t avoid me completely,” she says with a new cadence in her voice; one that sounds a lot like exhaustion.
I always did exhaust her. “There will be a meeting soon that you will be asked to attend. The executor of her will is going to make contact and explain in more detail, but you should know she left you a significant sum of money.”
I hold my breath. “How much?”
“Really, Sharon. Are you that distasteful?”
“I’m not… I just… it doesn’t matter,” I say, shaking my head and wanting this conversation to be a thing of the past.