Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten
I borrow Adam and Jay’s car the following weekend to drive to my mother’s flat, after finally getting hold of her to find the new address. Before setting off I carefully place the the box my father gave me on the passenger seat. I haven’t looked inside it, though the evening before I allowed my curiosity to stretch to shaking the box gently. It rattled, lots of small items sliding around one another, I could have guessed. My mother has always been a magpie, and something of a hoarder, storing piles of tiny glittering things like a dragon.
Her new flat is in a sad grey building with narrow windows, and I have to walk up the flights of stairs beside the broken lift. When I knock she takes a few minutes to open the door, but when she does she flings her arms around me and I breathe in the familiar smell of her patchouli and jasmine perfume, worn for so long that it’s baked into her pale freckly skin, her wild curly blonde hair, and everything she wears. The strength of the scent transports me to the tiny house we had lived in before my father had left us, the art supplies and pottery everywhere, the times I had pretended to be asleep in bed, listening to the arguments downstairs.
‘How are you my darling?’ she asks. The flat is cramped and cluttered, though it’s not the flat”s fault. It happens to every environment my mother occupies for more than a few moments. The fraying mauve couch, sagging with wine-coloured cushions and embellished throws, hulks in the centre of the room like a huge sleeping animal. The surrounding space is occupied with footstools and rugs, odd little figurines and lamps, stacks of books, candles and oil burners. I would live in constant fear of my mother burning her home down if she didn’t always lose her matches.
She’s set out a plate of biscuits and a pot of tea for my arrival, and I navigate my way onto the sofa which groans as though I’ve bothered it while my mother flits around the room. I pour tea into the chipped mugs, unsure what of she’s doing. She seems to be shifting piles of belongings from one place to another.
‘I bought the box,’ I say, trying to find a way to get her to settle.
‘Oh,’ as though she had forgotten I was in the room she blinks up at me, then returns to the couch. ‘Oh, I don’t know if I want that, Hydrangea, it must be things from so long ago.’
I try not to wince at the use of my full name, a name that only she ever calls me. Even my father hated it.
‘I don’t want them,’ I say, ‘I need you to take them. I won’t be able to do anything with anything in here.’
‘What if some of it’s yours?’ she says.
‘It won’t be. It’ll be earrings and perfume samples and tea lights. You might find some things you’ve been looking for.’
I know I’m being unnecessarily brisk. My mother is complicated, but not unkind, and when my father finally left us she took care of me as well as she could. It was hard being the child of two people so thoroughly unsuited to being parents, but I had happy memories of my mother. My father had guarded his spaces jealously, locking the door to his study while he was in there, ordering me away from his vinyl collection and his model cars. My mother, on the other hand, had always had an open door for me to join her in her passions. All her pots of paint were mine to borrow, all the clay she had used to make vases for art fairs had scraps rolled into balls and stored for me to play with.After my father had left she saved doggedly to buy another Star Girlz magazine subscription for my birthday, working at a museum gift shop while trying to sell her crafts at weekend art fairs, while my father had begrudged every penny I cost him. I take a deep breath and find, beneath the impatience, the kindness I feel for my mother.
‘I would like to look through the box with you,’ I say, ‘there might be things from my childhood here.’
Her face softens and she goes through to the kitchenette to look through the drawers for scissors. When none appear she goes through to the bedroom she uses as a craft room and reemerges with a box-cutter. I lean back as she slices through the masking tape sealing the lid shut. We open it together. It’s largely as I expected, bundles of sequinned scarves, a wind chime, a packet of incense sticks that now smell mostly of must, and a deck of playing cards that have been stained by coffee or tea being dropped on them.
‘Anything you want?’ I ask. I know full well my mother will keep everything in here, will absorb it back into the mass of objects she surrounds herself with. She’s been this way for as long as I can remember, and I wonder sometimes if all this fabric serves to absorb the echoes of loneliness I know she must feel. She seemed lonely when she lived with my father, lonely when she was raising me, and now she lives alone and doesn’t see me that much, she must be lonelier still. She never talks about friends or dates or places she goes. Her life revolves around pulling things into her orbit and never letting them go.
‘I’ll go through it this evening,’ she says, sifting through the box, then gives a cry of delight, ‘Oh Hydrangea look at this.’ She pulls out a wonky pink box made of thickly painted clay, shaped into a five-pointed star. ‘Do you remember this?’
I don’t remember it at all, but looking at it I realise I must have made it. It’s the shade of pink I would always gravitate towards in my mother’s paint pots, and the top is decorated with roughly made clay shapes that are just about recognisable as moons, dolphins, daisies, and other images I remember from the Star Girlz magazines.
‘I made this?’ I say, taking it carefully from my mother.
‘When you were little,’ she coos, ‘oh you were a sweetheart, so creative. You were going to give that to Frannie for her birthday remember?’
I privately feel relieved that I’d obviously given Frannie some other, better gift for whatever this occasion had been, looking warily at the patchy paint and poorly applied glitter glue.
‘Are you going to take that home?’ she asks, ‘It might be nice on a dressing table.’
I cannot think of a room dark enough to store this, so I go to hand it to my mother for ‘safekeeping’ but as I go to lift it I feel something slide inside the box, from one end to the other. Though I don’t know what it is, and have no memory of putting anything inside it, I instinctively pull it back and place it gently into my bag.
‘Yes, I’ll take it back with me.’
I sit on the couch for another half an hour, while my mother moves restlessly from one place to another, slowly finding space for every other item in the box, returning now and again to the couch to take a sip of tea and a bite of biscuit, like a hummingbird dipping into the nectar of a flower for a few moments before taking off again. When I leave I’m exhausted, just from watching her inability to sit still, and make excuses soon after eating dinner with Jay and Adam to go up to my room. The box in my bag, with its secret contents, sings to me while I get ready for bed, but I wait until I’m in my room, sitting cross-legged on my duvet, to take it from my bag and examine it.
It’s not as ugly and poorly made as I had originally thought. Away from the background noise of my mother’s flat, I can see the paint is slightly shimmery, which hides the worst of the patchiness. The star is formed with care, each point shaped into a soft rounded tip. I shake it gently side to side and feel something inside, again, sliding with the movement. The lid is stiff, stuck with age, and I worry I’ll break it but I prise it carefully off and set it to the side.
There, sitting on top of a yellowed envelope, is my Star Girlz charm bracelet, the one I had thought lost long ago. I lift it with my little finger and each of the charms swings slightly on the chain, as if coming to life. A moon, a star, a daisy, a silver heart, a music note, a dolphin, a feather, and at the end, the faux opal set in silver. Frannie’s birthstone that I had swapped with her.
It isn’t the full collection I had once had. I had lost a few, and some had been left at the house I’d lived in while my parents were married. The divorce had been quick and cruel, so a number of my childhood belongings had been lost to my little bedroom in that house, with its peeling wallpaper and plastered ceiling. I wondered sometimes about the stuffed cat I had had, the plastic dinosaur I found in a Happy Meal and kept on my bedside table, the boxes of colouring pencils and Jacqueline Wilson books that I had adored. I nurtured a faint hope that, though it was unlikely, my father had taken them to a charity shop where they had been bought by the families of other children who would love them. But he had probably swept it all into the bin, like he had tried to do with most of the things connected to that time in his life. It gave me a cruel satisfaction that occasionally a box of old things would materialise in his attic or shed, all these years later, his old life rising from the grave.
This, however, is my old life, looking at me. Each little motif attached to memories of Frannie, of school friends and dance routines and flashes of a smiling older boy who always stopped in the kitchen to say hello while I was doing homework at his kitchen table. Out of pure curiosity, I peel the envelope out of the box. At first I assume it’s an old utility bill or school report, something I grabbed off a table to line the box. But the front when I turn it over is blank, and opening the flap, I see that it’s a handwritten letter. When I pull it out I almost drop it to the floor. It’s a letter I had written to George, maybe a year before I had confessed to him, back when I was seeing him almost every day. I recognise my very best handwriting, painstakingly laid out in blue fountain pen. I had decorated the top with a sheet of holographic star stickers. As I look at it I experience a strange phenomenon. Before opening the letter I had forgotten that it had ever been written, and yet the moment I begin reading I realise that I still know it by heart. Like the lyrics of a beloved song that has been forgotten suddenly playing on the radio.
I had agonised over every word, thinking so carefully about how I could best express my feelings. Wondering how I could possibly say everything he meant to me in something so limiting as words. I read the lovelorn sentences of my past self, expecting to cringe, but instead I feel sympathy for her, and maybe even admiration for writing something so deeply personal and raw. I would never allow myself to be so earnest now, even in a private letter. I also realise that the George I had known then is almost exactly the same as the George I know now. Someone who was kind to a fault, protective and loyal to the people he loved, slightly self-conscious and self-deprecating, clever and ambitious while never losing the gentle side of himself. And I realise, as I read the words I had written over a decade ago, that everything that made me love him then, still makes me love him now. I don’t want to admit it to myself, to peel away the protective mask I had laid over those feelings. But there they are, as though they had never really gone away, and all of a sudden I feel clammy and sick, the rush of emotions I had pushed down are overwhelming and I clutch the bracelet like a talisman, the edges of the charms pressing into the flesh of my hand.
I’m not ashamed or embarrassed to feel that way about him. In fact, it seems bizarre to me that everyone George meets wouldn’t see him as I do. But I recognise the problems that my feelings could cause. I jeopardised my oldest friendship because of these feelings. I have altered my life in ways I can never take back. Because of these feelings, I gave up a home that felt like a sanctuary from the turbulence of my own life, and here they are again, as strong as they have ever been, and I don’t know what to do about it.