Sam Cooke
A CHANGE IS GONNA COME
Whenever I stepped through the gates, I was greeted with a pronounced feeling that I should not be there.
I’d never bought into the ideas of auras or hauntings, or any of the wild theories that might fill the spaces between those two points.
But if there was anything that might tip me into at least entertaining the possibility that there’s something “out there” – she says, gesturing wildly at the open space around her – then it was the eerie sensation that crept over me like cheap fabric whenever I stepped under the archway of St Peter’s Church. Not that I did it often.
My mother had never been a big believer in birthdays.
As a child, I nursed a quiet idea that what she really didn’t like was getting older, which explained why we always celebrated my birthdays but never hers.
After I turned eighteen – the point at which she stopped making a fuss of my own spins around the earth – I realised that as far as she was concerned, they were just a waste of time.
And money. That’s why I never visited here on birthdays, even now.
Instead, I would always have a little something extra: another slice of cake, or an extra thirty minutes on my lunch hour from the shop.
I was never especially extravagant with it, but just enough to feel as though I was doing something to honour the occasion.
Her anniversary, though, that was different.
It was the one day of the year that David would definitely, without fail, be up and about suspiciously early.
Before I’d even stepped into the kitchen, he would have a strong cup of tea – one sugar, for the shock of the occasion, as though it surprised me annually that my mother was still not here anymore – and two slices of toast. There were no cooked breakfasts on anniversaries.
There were fresh flowers, though, a bunch for me that he would already have arranged on the kitchen window; a bunch for her, so I didn’t have to stop anywhere.
‘I went with yellow this year,’ David had said that morning when I’d noticed them, still wrapped, and resting on the kitchen worktop. ‘Do you think she’d like that?’
I smiled and held his cheek. ‘She loved yellow.’
Despite the awkwardness around my relationship with David, when it came to my mother – and despite the awkwardness of my relationship with my mother, too – her and David had always got along flamingly well.
She never knew what a heartthrob he was, instead choosing to believe that he and I were quietly living in sin; something she seemed to tolerate much easier than any suggestion of my living with a woman, which I think would have probably finished her off about twenty years prematurely.
‘I’ve booked us in at the country pub, just outside of town.’ David started to click his fingers. ‘Bugger, what’s it called?’
‘I know where you mean,’ I answered as I took my seat at the table. ‘After work, after…’
David nodded. ‘After.’
* * *
The work day was a quiet one. The yellow flowers spent the day in a pint glass of water on the counter, to save me a trip home.
Though, inevitably perhaps, that also meant that the three customers I did have that day all felt the need to ask, ‘Special occasion?’ I’d only nodded and flashed a quick smile in answer, then charged them and sent them on their ways.
As well as it being a quiet day for customers, it was a quiet day with Sheila, too.
She had texted in the morning to ask how I was feeling – I’d warned her in advance that this was often a difficult day – and when I didn’t reply to that message she left me alone for the hours that stretched after.
There was a horrible nostalgia that came with my mother’s anniversary that not only made me think of her, but also a cast of ghostly ex-girlfriends.
I never knew whether it was an appropriate thing to carry into the church with me, given that Mum had always been able to guess when I was having thoughts I shouldn’t have been – or rather, thoughts that she thought I shouldn’t have been having.
But somehow, my relationship with my mother and my many, many failed half-relationships with women had become inextricably bundled up with each other.
A psychologist’s dream…
I double-locked the door of the shop and trod to where my car was parked on a nearby side street.
Sam Cooke was playing when I turned the engine on, and I had an instant slap-in-the-face flashback of my mother singing it while she cooked…
Had it been a roast dinner? I turned the volume up and pulled out of the city, the ghosts of girlfriends past all clumsily stuffed in the car with me.
Alison had been my earliest attempt at a relationship.
She and I had been “involved” for nearly five months when she asked when she could meet my family.
I told her it was only me and Mum, as though that were an answer.
She pushed and pushed all the same, though.
‘Why haven’t I met your mum yet? Are you embarrassed to introduce me to your mum?
Do you think your mum–?’ In the end she’d stopped asking.
Then she stopped asking me to the cinema, stopped asking me out for drinks, stopped asking me how my day was…
Then there had been Caroline, Miriam, Olive, Gabriela.
Then there had been a brief pause in life where I’d wondered whether I was capable of having a relationship at all – not least because I had a solid streak of women in my recent history all of whom had said at one time or another that I wasn’t.
They hadn’t said it in rage, either. They’d said it sincerely, sometimes even kindly, like they were concerned that something was actually the matter with me.
After the pause came Sophie, Clarice, Leslie, and Daisy.
Daisy had been the straw that broke the proverbial, though.
She and I had been seeing each other for nearly a year when she called me her girlfriend; that’s how she introduced me to a friend of hers, someone we’d run into while we were in town one Sunday afternoon.
‘This is my girlfriend.’
And despite myself, I’d laughed.
‘I’m not really her girlfriend.’
For years since, I’d wondered why I’d felt the need to say that.
Of course, in between these many failed attempts there was my mother.
In the early days, she was asking why I hadn’t found myself a nice man yet.
In the later days, she was asking why David and I hadn’t made things official.
All the while, I was walking around like a guilty teenager with a baby bump hidden beneath my biggest jumper; this huge and significant part of me that was only growing larger with time, but one that I still felt a painful need to keep away from my parent.
David called it shame and I’d never liked to admit that he was right.
‘But what other name is there for it?’ I wondered aloud as I pulled into the car park.
David had messaged me at some point during the journey: The Mad Hatter. Bloody irony. Knew I’d remember it.
I chuckled and pocketed the handset. He had his moments of clarity, that husband of mine. He mightn’t have them often, but when he did, they were lighthouse beacon bright in their accuracy.
With the flowers tucked into the crook of my arm, I stepped under the archway and trod the however many paces to my mother’s headstone. It was clean, freshly traced by the stonemason so the gold was brilliant and bright, and I rested the bouquet right in the centre of it.
‘They’ll die out of water…’ I could hear her saying when I back-stepped from the stone and sat on a nearby bench. But we were having so much rain these days that it hardly seemed to matter. They’d survive long enough, I reasoned.
No sooner had I made myself comfortable – as comfortable as you can get on a hard, wet wooden bench, that is – and my phone hummed from inside my pocket.
I wondered what else David had remembered.
But to my surprise – delight? – it wasn’t him, but Sheila.
A short and tender message – Thinking of you xx – that I ignored.
It didn’t feel right to reply while I was there.
I couldn’t escape the trickle of thoughts that came after that, though.
The hand-holding, the kissing, the rocking chair that I’d had moved from the shop to the apartment, where it now lived in the corner of my room.
David had adored it so much that he’d suggested keeping it in the living room but, perhaps selfishly, I’d wanted to pocket it away somewhere as private, as my own.
Not to be skewed by the fact that Lucy spent more time curled up comfortably in it than I did, though at least that meant it was getting some use.
Otherwise, it would have spent the rest of its life sitting in the corner of my bedroom with me just staring longingly at it, puffing out the occasional sigh with heart-eyes drifting up around my head.
I was the older person’s answer to a lovesick teen, and it was both disgraceful and bloody brilliant.
I forced out a long breath before I trod back to my mother.
I crouched as best as I could and set out a hand to steady myself; my palm overlapped between damp earth, and the corner of her headstone.
When my sleeve hitched up I spotted my watch face; I hadn’t been aware of how much time had passed while I’d been sitting, staring, remembering.
But I’d need to make a move if I was going to be on time to meet David for dinner.
I smiled at that, thinking, at least it’s something Mum would understand.
‘Don’t keep him waiting forever,’ she’d said to me once. I couldn’t remember the context, but I knew it had been about David.
I traced the lettering of her name with my index finger. When it was clean of raindrops, I stood, smiled down, and said one of the many things I’d never admitted when she was alive.
‘Mum, I think I’ve met someone.’