Lozium

We pull up outside my mother’s house and Jess turns to me.
‘You okay?’ she asks. She switches the engine off, puts the handbrake on. I can narrate how to drive a car. But I don’t drive cars.
‘Yeah. Let’s do this, for fuck’s sake,’ I mutter. I open the door and haul myself into the rain, onto the quiet dead end of the Chingford cul-de-sac. Jess follows me up the path to the front door of my mother’s house, red chipped paint cheapening the look.
‘I need to paint that,’ I mutter, knocking absent-mindedly. We huddle close under the black ledge that frames the door.
‘We’ll wait for Summer,’ Jess reassures me. She tucks my wet fringe behind my ear, leaning in to kiss me when my mother fills the doorframe.
‘Alrigh’?’ she says, a cigarette hanging from her mouth.
‘You’re not meant to be smoking,’ I respond, stepping into the house. I am suddenly only vaguely aware of Jess behind me; I follow my jogging-bottomed mother into the living room, immediately swallowed by her presence.
It’s not a large space, but it’s room enough for her – the TV is placed on the centre of an IKEA-bought storage unit. One shelf holds a couple of old photographs of my brother and I with our dad. The one above has a photograph of my mother at six, her brother aged two besides her. Another holds an empty blue vase. The shelves on the opposite sides are filled with vinyl, except one which holds a portable record player. Every Christmas or birthday, I buy a vinyl record for her collection. I don’t think she’s ever used it.
My mother used to clean every day. ‘I don’t wait for the dust to settle,’ she used to say when my father made a face at the hoover on Sundays. But she doesn’t clean anymore; crumbs on the coffee table, the ashtray quite full, tufts of fluff on the wooden floor from the rug. The lounge curtains overlooking her garden are closed and the room is dark, and the light of the lone tea candle on the coffee table doesn’t quite stretch around the room. There’s a chill – she hasn’t had the heating on.
‘Spoken to that brother of yours?’
Her voice is heavy in the air.
‘Not since last Tuesday.’
‘He never calls me.’
‘You give him shit every time he does.’
‘Oh, he told you that, did he?’
‘He’s busy, Mum.’
‘Yeah, too fuckin’ busy to call his mother. He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.’
‘Mum, please. Come on. Not today. It’s the anniversary, the weather’s shit…’
‘Your brother could have made the effort.’
‘He sent flowers, Barbara. And he sent you a card,’ Jess says. I look at her, surprised. Never before has she so blatantly argued in my favour. She takes the card from my bag and hands it to my mother. My mother looks at me. I shrug.
‘You didn’t give me a chance to speak before jumping down my throat.’
She grunts in reply.
‘Shall I make tea?’ Jess asks. Without waiting for an answer, she turns towards the kitchen.
‘The flowers are out there,’ my mother says. I nod.
‘Ours – mine – are in the car. Backseat.’ I add, before she says something about them not being fresh enough.
My mother sits down on her saggy brown two-seater and lights a cigarette. I hear the opening and closing of cupboards, the chink of mugs, the kettle starting to boil.
‘I look at those photos sometimes,’ she starts. ‘The good ol’ days. When your dad was here…’
Her face starts to crease and then she is crying. My action is automatic: I sit down beside her, put my arm around her shoulders. And suddenly I am sixteen years old again, comforting my crying mother, without really understanding that I wasn’t going to see my father ever again.
‘I’m broken,’ she rants. ‘Look at me, all old… fucking broken. What would he think of me like this?’
I don’t say anything. I don’t know what he’d think.
Jess interrupts with our tea. My mother doesn’t make an effort to hide her face – Jess knows it’s the anniversary of my father’s death. This is the third time we’ve performed this ritual – his birthday, Christmas and New Year inspire the same process. Each time my mother cries like this. She shares her grief.
But I am ashamed of mine, it’s dirty and it’s heavy. I wipe my cheeks discreetly, inhale and swallow the rest. Jess’ eyes are on me. I cough socially, take my cup without looking at her.
‘You alrigh’ Jess?’ My mother takes hers, places it without a coaster onto the glass of the coffee table. She is starting again. Tea does that to her.
‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you, Barbara. How are you, in general?’ Jess resumes the usual politeness she holds with my mother.
‘Alrigh’, I ‘spose. Went round Deb’s the other night for a girl’s night.’
My mother inhales the last of her cigarette and stubs it out against the inner side of the ashtray. I stand up, pick it up, take it to the kitchen, and empty it into the bin. I return it to the coffee table. And I go back into the kitchen, lean against the worktop.
‘Hey.’
I don’t move. I don’t want to move.
‘Your mum’s gone to get ready. She thinks you’re pissed off.’
‘I am pissed off, Jess. With all this -’ I swing my arms. ‘It’s heavy shit, you know? I don’t want it.’
‘I know. Come here.’ She pulls me into a hug.
‘By the way, Deb got absolutely wrecked. And Leanne started karaoke in the street at half two,’ Jess mutters into my hair.
‘At their age, really. What did Mother Dearest do?’ I pull away.
‘Snapchatted the whole thing from Leanne’s phone.’
‘No, really?’
‘There it is,’ Jess says.
‘What?’
‘A little smile, that I was gunning for.’
I check my watch. ‘We better go.’

 

*

​

In the car, Jess puts on Magic 105.4, the station she considers the most inoffensive. I set it just above speaking volume, enough for ambience. My mother sits in the back, wearing black jeans and a thick jumper, holding her flowers for my father’s headstone in the dip of her lap.
We don’t speak on the way, it’s barely a ten minute drive from my mother’s house to the cemetery.
We roll into Chingford Cemetery and Jess drives through the greenery, turns at the first left and follows the road that curves and then straightens, past all the old gravestones from the 1800s. She takes another left, and on the grass on the right is a collection of sixteen or seventeen child-sized headstones.
The cemetery is, as cemeteries go, rather nice. In its suburban safety, with all its trees and greenery, it is forest-like. In my youth, I would visit my father’s plot with my mother, would walk along the rows and rows of headstones, reading the names and the tributes, all while watering the flowers, even if it was raining. I used to feel sad when I saw flowerless graves, wondered if the people buried beneath had been forgotten. Now I know better. Although they are peaceful, cemeteries are reminders of mortality, of futility.
We pull up in a lone parking bay. Jess cuts the engine and I don’t want to move. I close my eyes. I hear my mother sigh. She opens the door, struggles out trying to open the umbrella, with her flowers and bag in tow.
I take the same route through the headstones as I did when I was a child. But now Jess is with me, our little fingers looped together discreetly. I notice her watching me, as if I’m about to fall and she’s waiting to catch me. I smile at her, pout and blow a kiss.
We reach my father’s grave and my mother sets about tidying it, removing twigs and leaves. Crouching there in the drizzle, arranging flowers for my dead father, just ashes in a box interred, I feel sorry for my mother. Every time I see her, there is a new line or crease in her face that I don’t recognise.
I stand there hovering awkwardly, but Jess is helpful, as always. She holds an umbrella over my mother’s head, something that hadn’t even occurred to me.
‘I never thought I’d be doing this… Not so early. All the evil bastards out there, and he was forty-eight!’
I don’t know how to reply to her anger. Do I tame it, or encourage it?
‘Never saw his daughter and son’s eighteenths, or twenty-firsts. I’ve had to be a mother and a father. Is that fair?’
Jess looks at me. I mouth a sorry at her. But she knows.
My mother is crying again. I cannot do this. It is overwhelming and for a moment, I wish never to see my father’s grave again.
I ask Jess for the car keys.
‘That’s it,’ my mother sobs. ‘Walk away. So fucking easy for you, isn’t it? You never cry for your own father.’
‘I don’t want to cry,’ I replied sedately.
‘Oh, yes you fucking do. Look at you. A good cry would at least be honest.’
She continues her grief-rant, but I find myself looking at an empty patch of green, big enough for a coffee and ice-cream hut. Would ice-cream in a cemetery be wrong, disrespectful somehow? But I’ve eaten sausage rolls from the bakery down the Mount at my father’s grave before, on the occasions I’ve visited alone.
I come back to the rain, and my mother’s voice, the clumps of twigs and leaves and stray gum wrappers.
I’ll be in the car,’ I say firmly. My mother turns back to the headstone and Jess hands me the keys. Her hand brushes mine for a moment, and she brushes her little finger against my skin. It is a small warmth in the cold of the situation, but enough to remind me of her love for me.
My mother sighs and I walk back to my girlfriend’s car, and sit in it alone. I close my eyes, listen to the silence – gentle vibrations tingling in my ears. I am trying to cool the burn of anger in my chest. I am sick with a nameless longing, for time with my father that never existed, and time with him that never will. I remember his absence at my eighteenth well. I remember his absence even more from my brother’s graduation. I remember how he wasn’t there after Charlotte broke up with me. Charlotte barely said anything over the phone when I told her, only asked me if I was okay. But my dad was dead, and I was sixteen and she still had her dad. The dad she never bought Father’s Day or birthday cards for.
Yes, I’m angry. I’m thinking about Charlotte. I close my eyes and count to four. That was a long time ago. It says more for Jess that she allows me the space to grieve for someone she’s never met. And never will meet – he’ll never be a Father-In-Law to her. Is she not robbed too, somehow, in some small way?
I doze off, at some point, because I wake with a start when the car handles are pulled. Jess slides into the driver’s seat. I get out to open the backdoor for my mother.
‘Alright?’ she asks, not meeting my eyes.
‘Yeah,’ I mutter. ‘You?’
‘Fine.’
I close the car door behind her.
Jess starts the engine and the radio resumes. It is my mother and father’s love song playing, Bowie’s Absolute Beginners. Just the tune sets her off – I hear sobbing in the back, and I can’t help but start to cry in the front. I can see them in the kitchen after dinner, my father sitting on the worktop with a beer while my mother washed up. I stretch my hand backwards as far as I can until she reaches it with her own, and I don’t move from my awkward position until the saxophone takes over from Bowie.
I glance at Jess, wonder at her patience. And then I notice that she too is crying.

 

*

​

Jess pulls up outside my mother’s house with its red door with the chipped paint.
‘I’m staying here, Barbara. We’re going shopping.’
‘Alrigh’. Thanks for this, Jess.’
‘No worries. Mind how you go.’
‘Yeah. See you.’ My mother climbs out of the car, firmly gripping the
inside handle to pull herself up.
I see my mother settled in, kiss her on the cheek. She wanders into the living room, switches the TV on. From the doorway of the living room, I stare at the photos of my brother and I with our father. Once again, I feel the stirrings of anger. Never again will he say he loves her, and never again will she be happy. She lives as if she is counting down the days until she meets my father in death.
And it fills me with an unending sadness. A dry lump builds in my throat, and I rasp a goodbye to my mother, gag over the words. I leave forty pounds on the kitchen counter, and make to leave, but just before the front door I gag again, the sign of a panic attack. I take a quick deep breath, close my eyes and count to four. I don’t have time for this.
In Tesco’s car park, I hesitate getting out of the car.
‘Need a couple minutes, babe?’ Jess asks quietly.
I nod feebly, can’t hold my head up.
‘I won’t be further than the bread.’
Jess kisses my cheek, but I barely feel it. Even she feels like a ghost when this happens. She drops the keys on my lap and gets out of the car.
We’ve practised this – the routine for when I get stuck in a moment. It starts with my silence, only nods and mmms. Delayed responses. Only able to breathe. She’ll give me a few minutes, or however long it takes, really. But then I have to focus on the task at hand.
When I know she is out sight, I stop holding it in and I breathe out into crying and I slam my fists against the dashboard. I bend forwards and into myself, sobbing.

When I am done, I check my make-up in the mirror. But the waterproof mascara is true to itself. I wipe away a little smudged kohl. I go to meet my girlfriend, who is no further than the bread. But I cannot stop thinking about my mother, widowed, and resigned because of it.