The Light Inside

In the morning, light seeps in, piercing and merciless, through threadbare curtains.
“Kiddo,” says Martha, “up with ya!”
I groan quietly and arch my back under the covers. I cannot face another day.
“C’mon, up!” I hear a shuffling sound and I know that she is beside me because the stench of cigarettes is seeping into every cell of my throat…she thumps the raised bump on the bed that is me and then I hear boots on wood as she exits the room.
When I first met Martha a good decade ago, she was young; dark haired and green eyed, resembling a youthful Megan Fox. Over the span of years, many things (among which pot and smoking are prominent) have turned her into the obese bag of flesh that she is. I descend the stairs and seat myself at the table, shoving my spoon into the sludge that she has readied for me. Disgust has become a habitual emotion: forever present but seldom noticed.
Martha bustles around the tiny kitchen, plating up the meal for herself. Breakfast is usually a silent affair; punctuated only by the sporadic clank of spoons and occasional speech: words exchanged to fill a space that is best left empty.
“So, what you gonna do today? Day off, innit?”
“I don’t know, Martha.”
“Like hell you don’t. I swear the minute I’m out of here you’ll be, like, jumping off to play with your little girlie friends…”
I think that sometimes Martha forgets whether I am myself or her. Her typical day constitutes spending anywhere between four to eight hours playing bingo with several other middle aged women from the Quarry.
“No, I’m off to smoke weed with Finchie,” I say. Finchie is Martha’s dealer, and we both know it’s a huge joke that I would go anywhere near him.
Still, she fixes me with a glare- “Do you smoke weed, kiddo?”
I sigh. “No, Martha. Of course not.”
She eases back into her chair, vast shoulders disappearing into a substantial bosom.
“No,” she says. “I didn’t think so.”
Our home was a tiny farm cottage about 2km uphill from the Quay, in a small village.
In the mornings, we would wake up early and listen to the birds singing. We’d bathe in the creek and eat a breakfast of fresh eggs and toast. Sometimes, Mum would run down to get supplies from a convenience store in the Quay, but otherwise we mostly kept to ourselves. We had a few chickens; they were all named after places, on my juvenile insistence. My favourite was a chick named Nychona, after our own village.
In May that year, Nychona started laying eggs. This was important; almost akin to a rite of passage. Mum and I made a right fuss; tying a ribbon onto her first egg and feeding her the freshest grains in the market. We treated Nychona like a queen. We never ate her eggs.
Then, one day, I went to feed her, only to find that she wasn’t there.
“Mum?” I asked, anxious for our bird, whose safety we so jealously guarded. “Where’s Nychona?”
She did not answer. I asked the question over and over again, becoming increasingly petulant. I willed her to speak. Then, finally, I heard her voice, harsh after the silence. “She’s gone!” screamed my mother. “And she’s not coming back.” She gripped my shoulders hard. “She’s not coming back.” I can’t recall how long I waited by her side, waiting for her to elaborate; to offer something resembling an explanation. She never did.
She simply sat there, knees bent; staring at something I could not see.
“The fuck you been?” demands Martha imperiously, when I get in. I can’t discern exactly what she has been indulging in during my absence, but the place reeks of stale smoke. I hold up the milk bottle in explanation.
“Oh,” she says mildly, “We did need some supplies.” She grins toothily at me. “Finchie came over.”
As if I needed her to tell me. I kick off my shoes and pluck my way through the rubbish into the room, heading straight for the derelict computer on the corner table.
When I first came to Martha, I used to scourge the net for any scraps of information I could find about my mother. There used to be the odd mention…an old newspaper article about when she won a writing competition; a picture from her college days; one solitary line in her honour on the hospital records…but, as far as the world was concerned, she was as good as gone already.
Once, when Mum had been in recovery for a while, we visited the local park for the day. She didn’t seem overly enthusiastic, but for me it was a huge step. I went the whole hog; bought a steamy baguette and cream cheese from the fresh bake section, and made lemonade out of slightly overripe lemons, stolen inconspicuously from our neighbour’s orchard.
My hopes weren’t high, to be honest, but she crunched into the bread and licked the cheese off her fingers. God, for a moment there I thought she looked….at peace. With herself; with the world. We cracked jokes over berries she plucked from the bushes by the lake, and come sunset she was smiling and my heart was filling with each word she spoke.
Then, I brought out the kite I’d packed, and we held it together- pale white on tan- and watched as it flew higher and higher, fighting the wind; staying moored to where we’d wound the string between our entwined fingers.
Suddenly, she shoved her hand out of mine, and looked at me with such fierceness in her eyes that, for I moment, I despised myself, without knowing why, simply because of the diabolical hatred I saw in them. “Get away!” she screamed, pushing me hard. She shouted the words over and over, and with the enunciation of each syllable I felt something flicker to darkness inside of me. Finally, she staggered back and collapsed onto a bench nearby.
I hugged myself, willing my heart to stay in one piece, although I felt familiarly paralysed.
After packing up our things I sat, cross-legged, on the wet grass. And then she spoke.
“Catherine!’ she called, and her voice was now devoid of the manic tinge that I associated with an episode. I approached her, knees weak but steps steady.
She didn’t say anything; just pointed to the sky.
The kite was floating higher and higher into the sea of black oblivion.
That night, Martha and I watch Titanic over fish and chips and, in her case, weed.
“Oi, kiddo, you okay?” she asks, but she never takes her eyes off the screen.
I nod in assent, though she can’t see me. This is untrue, as I have never felt less okay in my life. Focusing my eyes on the screen, I realize that this is the part where Cal saves the lost child. It’s funny…in films and books, it’s always the adults who save the children.
You wouldn’t ever believe otherwise.
In 1997, Mum sank into clinical depression. She sat there, cold and stiff, as I took care of the house, stocked the pantry with groceries, and updated the hospital on her progress. I had to feed her about four different medicines, six different times a day. Then, the mania began. She couldn’t make it through an hour without becoming estranged in some sort of mental frenzy, so that I had to rescue her from all sorts of alarming situations. I never tired physically, but my brain was always drained and exhausted. During the day, I was with her every moment, trying to appeal to the unaffected part of her brain that I believed remained somewhere deep within. The nights were filled with horrifying dreams; reflections of my worst fears.
After she was admitted to hospital for the second time, I watched as they took her away from me, into curtained quarters where she was quarantined from the world.
“Look here, Catherine, is it?” said a young nurse. “I’m Anna.”
She waits, but I give no sign of acknowledgement.
“Well, Catherine, your mother is seriously ill. Seeing as it is unlikely that she will ever permanently recover, I strongly urge you to consider your other options.”
This time I replied. “Options?” I echoed, “Like what?”
She gesticulated blankly with her arms as she formulated a censored response. “Well, at this stage I would be inclined to suggest a foster parent.”
I stared out the window, and saw a young woman cradling a baby in one arm and encircling a toddler in another. She bent down and gently bumped her older child on the forehead with her own. The kid laughed and captured its mother’s neck in an ingenuous embrace. I wondered if I ever did that with my mother…
“Catherine?” the nurse demanded, “Can you hear me?”
I turned my back on the family and looked into her eyes.
“I can hear you,” I said, “I just don’t want to listen.”
When I get back Martha has, uncharacteristically, set the table.
She doesn’t look at me when I walk inside; only bustles around the kitchen, cleaning around the stovetop where she’s clearly spilt pasta, and checking on the sauce where it’s bubbling away, creating its own rhythm of heat, unaware of the tension in the room.
“Martha?” I ask, “What is it?”
She sighs, shakes her head, produces a cigarette, and sits down on the table top. It creaks under her weight, but she swings her legs as if she doesn’t notice. Then she says it so quietly I almost don’t hear her. “Your mother,” she says. She doesn’t say anything more. She doesn’t have to.
I thought it would hurt. Feel like a vaccine; a quick sting and then a deep, protracted ache. But all I feel now as I place a hand on my heart is amazement that I feel nothing more. Disbelief that the place there for her has long been missing.
I glance at Martha, who is turning away, but through the haze of smoke I can see her borrowed tears.
That night I climb in with her, simply for human proximity.
At first, she rolls over and groans. “The fuck?” she mumbles, but then she grudgingly moves over. I don’t know how long I lie there, eyes open, with nothing but the memories, flowing fast and clear like winter water, icy to the touch and numbing to the brain. Sometime though, early in the morning, when my breathing slows and she thinks I’m asleep, she moves closer and folds me into her ample body. “Poor kiddo,” she breathes, so quietly that it’s not for me. Finally, I let the tears fall, and they warm everything, inside and out. We lie there like that, Martha and me.
I never knew it could feel this good.
The next day, she opens the curtains early.
It wakes me up, and I stare at Martha, her withered face smoothened by the morning light. She stares back, and this time words cannot fill the abyss between us.
“Why?” I intone finally.
“Because,” she says, looking outside, “It’s a beautiful day, and I think you should see it.”
Once, they let me bring Mum home for Christmas.
I remember how I did it up beautifully: the tree, the dinner, the presents… everything. I wheeled her inside and there was this perfect moment when she looked at it all and smiled. Then, just like that, something taut gripped her features and she rolled herself over to the Christmas tree and ripped the lights off. They crumpled, graceful even in destruction, to the ground- no longer luminous.
My mother came over to me, and took my hand. “You don’t need that,” she said, moving my hand and placing it over my heart. “It’s in here.”