The Vale - Part 3

 

Lori’s mother, Linda, is just leaving when I return to the cave. She is a lovely woman, warm, level-headed, unassuming and ever mindful of being in the way. I can’t help feeling that she is the exact opposite of what my own mother would have been, had she lived. In my heart I feel that she would have been a nightmare and a meddler and that poor Lori would have tried so hard to include her, to please her and win her acceptance. 

 

This acceptance would likely have been withheld on account of my mother feeling cheated already and me never being enough for her to fill that hole. Lori’s apparent perfection might have made her a target for some silent penalty, intentional or not.

 

Eventually it probably would have sucked the life out of both of us but this is all just hypothetical thinking since my mother left us many years ago. 

 

‘Oh it’s lovely to see you, Jamie but I don’t want to hold you up. I expect you’ve had a long day and I need to be getting home to make dinner for Dennis. He’ll be wondering where I’ve got to. It’s just little Fox, I hate leaving him, he’s been so….so’, Lynda clasps her hands together so that all her diamond rings sparkle under the exterior lights, ‘delightful and Lori’s got some news about something he did today.’ She places her hand on my shoulder,  ‘I won’t spoil it.’

 

‘Oh?’ I smile and peek through into the hall where Lori is holding him and he’s grinning and holding out his splayed fingers to say goodbye to his nanna but now and again, turning away to hide his face. It’s as if he’s suddenly become aware that being the centre of attention incurs some physiological responses and a natural shyness has started to develope. 

 

‘Oh, it’s nippy out here,’ Linda says, wrapping her scarf around her neck. ‘Goodbye, Jamie, see you again soon and please don’t work too hard!’

 

I give my mother in law a quick hug, she smells of layers of expensive perfume, it’s embedded in her scarf. 

 

As I enter the cave, I notice Lori looks especially happy, she’s a bit more dressed up than usual and has painted her nails a soft beige colour. She tells me that they went out for lunch and Fox said his first word and it was, ‘Nanna’. Now I know that this isn’t true because he already said his first word to me when I was holding him, all wrapped up in his towel but I say nothing about that. 

 

‘Wow! A proper word, you clever boy. I thought you’ve been getting so close these past few days. I was hoping it would be dadda though.’

 

Lori gives me a quizzical look. ‘Really?’

 

‘No, just joking. Nanna is a great word, you’ve made us very proud.’

 

Lori nods and says, ‘Yes. And I’ve been thinking about going back to work.’

 

‘Oh, you don’t have to go back yet, you know that.’

 

‘Well I’ve been discussing it with Mum and I wonder if it might be better for me to retrain as a T.A. or something.’

 

‘What’s a T.A.?’ I ask while washing my hands, lathering them up for several seconds, pushing my fingers between the fingers on the other hand and then thoroughly rinsing them under the warm water of the kitchen tap.

 

‘A teaching assistant…but I don’t want people to think it’s, you know, a step down.’

 

‘What people? You know, my own mum didn’t work at all so…what I’m trying to say is, I’m happy for you to do anything you feel comfortable with.’

 

She frowns and holds up Fox. ‘Can you take him? He’s getting so heavy.’

 

‘Yes. Come here to your dad.’

 

‘Your mum was a full-time mum, a homemaker and that must have been lovely, Jamie but things are different now.’

 

I find myself stiffening up. ‘My mum was no homemaker,’ I protest, ‘she was just there, at home, she sat at the dining table all day. I mean she was present in body but that’s about it.’

 

Fox has picked up on my tension and he starts grisling and leaning back towards his mum, holding out his hands to her. Lori tutts and takes him back. ‘He’s tired, I’m putting him to bed. I was just worried that it seems like a step down from my I.T. career because it’s so much less money that’s all.’

 

‘Life isn’t all about more money.’

 

‘True and it’ll be a shorter day, plus, if Mum is going to have him then it’ll just be easier for everyone.’

 

I put my arms around Lori and Fox. ‘It’s not a step down. I don’t know why you’d think that. We can manage comfortably on my salary, as long as I don’t do anything silly and get sacked. I just won’t be able to buy that Masserati yet, will I.’

 

‘I don’t know why you keep mentioning these fast cars, Jamie! I’m beginning to think you actually want one.’

 

‘I do and Fox does too, don’t you. Either that or a bike, a motor bike that is.’

 

‘No way,’ Lori spins around and heads for the stairs, holding Fox tight who begins to wail when he goes out of my sight. She stops halfway up and goes back down a few steps. ‘Oh by the way,’ she yells, ‘your sister called me, she said she’s left you a message and can you ring her back when you have time.’

 

The mention of my sister is something which makes my heart sink and stay down there, sunk like a cold angular rock in the pit of my stomach. Christina is four years older than me and although we were occasionally close as children, we have well and truly drifted apart. She lives within a few miles of my old planet, somewhere within its sick radius. Christina loves to tell me how everything has changed since they blew apart its epicentre but she still sees old faces. I’m not sure if it’s changed all that much, the landscape is still flat, the wind still blows straight off Siberia. 

 

I suspect she was phoning about our father who is in a nursing home, he has Parkinson’s disease and he’s deteriorated quite considerably since Fox was born. We went to visit him when Fox was just over a month old but it was a flying visit. We were going through the motions of visiting my family and the fact that our baby was a newborn gave us a neat excuse to leave before I felt myself being too contaminated by the situation. 

 

Now I was feeling heavily aware that another visit was well overdue. Lori had mentioned it a couple of times and now my sister is calling probably for the same reason, to ask when we’re going to visit and whether we’ll be spending time with her and her family. I don’t want Fox in her home though. It’s not because her house is dirty, it’s because it reminds me of my old home and there’s something about that which makes my skin crawl.

 

I get my phone out, scroll down to Christina’s details, a message and two missed calls. She only sent the message this morning. ‘Ring me.’ it says. And now I feel as if I am attached to her by a horrible, rusty metal coil, it’s thin enough for me to move around but restricting enough for me to stop enjoying life and the metal is making me sick, as if it contains some toxic element, lead maybe.

 

I continued like that for a few hours, not enjoying my dinner, giving Fox his bedtime story and bottle while feeling drained and unable to savour it. In contrast, Lori is so upbeat, gesticulating as she tells me about her plans and the lovely day she’s had with her mum. I am not fully engaged with her as I load up the dish washer and being the intune person that she is, she senses it.

 

‘Jamie, what’s wrong?’

 

‘Nothing. I’m just tired after my meeting with that twat, Ian Rook.’

 

‘Oh, sorry I forgot. How did it go?’

 

‘Alright, I guess. Could have been worse. At least I’ve got Wendy on my side..’

 

‘Oh Wendy, how is she?’

 

‘Still Wendy, still doing her thing, travelling around, not giving a shit.’

 

Lori is spraying a product onto the granite work surface and then buffing it up with a soft cloth, going round and round all over until the entire worktop is gleaming like a mirror. Even cleaning, she carries out with some restraint, grace and finesse. There isn’t just one product to use, there are different ones, for stainless steel, for wood, for granite. I recall my mother scrubbing everything to within an inch of its life with Vim, pink rubber gloves covering her clawlike hands and a fag hanging out of her mouth.

 

‘There’s only so long you can enjoy that life for, surely. She must be getting on a bit now.’

 

‘I think she’s about three or four years older than me, so forty six maybe. She’s actually quite iconic, her attitude I mean.’

 

‘Have you called your sister yet? I’m just going to check on Fox. Call her!’

 

‘I don’t want to.’

 

Lori pauses in the hallway, looks back at me and makes a huffing sound. Doing things I don’t want to do, that’s a big struggle. We all have to do things we don’t want to, that’s what we’re told; going to work, going to the dentist, doing hard exercise, getting up in the morning, talking to people who don’t give us the space to be ourselves. People who make us feel as if we’re inside a very tight tube, struggling to move our limbs and stifling us as we attempt clear communication.

 

The phone rings four times before Christina picks up and instantly begins talking, holding me underwater so that I hold my breath and begin to feel panicked. ‘Hi Jammy, I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’

 

‘I know,’ I sigh, ‘that’s why I’m calling.’

 

‘Oh, I’m just on my break that’s all so I haven’t got long.’

 

‘Still smoking then?’

 

‘What? Why do you ask that? I still get to have a break whether I’m smoking or not.’

 

‘Not outside though.’ I find myself fiddling with a tangerine in the fruit bowl on the dining table, pushing my fingernails into the skin and making dents, lacerations so that the juice comes out and I can smell it. ‘Sorry, I can just hear traffic and fresh air…..and an ambulance, that’s all.’

 

‘The air here isn’t all that fresh. Can you hear me?’ Christina shouts.

 

‘Yes, I can hear you.’

 

‘It’s just dad. He’s gone downhill a bit since you were here last and Graham and I thought that because it’s dad’s birthday in a couple of weeks, maybe we could plan something.’

 

‘It’s my birthday too.’

 

‘Yes, I know Jam. It’s both your birthdays and then it’ll be Fox’s birthday then Christmas, we need to start making arrangements or it’ll all just pass us by.’

 

‘Mmmm, yes, you’re right. How are Louie and Gemma?’

 

Christina laughs inexplicably which makes me wonder if she’s surprised that I’ve bothered to ask about my niece and nephew but I’ve found a renewed interest in them since the birth of my own son. ‘They’re okay. Gemma’s enjoying college, her course isn’t as full on as we’d hoped but she’s made lots of new friends and Louie’s still doing his football, he’s got trials coming up.’

 

‘Good, that’s really good.’

 

‘Listen, let’s talk about arrangements. I’d like to get something pencilled into the diary, doesn’t have to be set in stone but just something in the pipeline, Jam.’

 

The word arrangements makes me shudder. I really struggled with my wedding, with all the tedious and endless arrangements, the pointless decision making. I hated it actually, although because of Lori’s family, the day turned out to be better than I’d feared. 

 

‘Yes, I agree, we can do something, if you want to.’

 

‘It’s not really about wanting to though is it. I think we just, must, we have to. I was thinking, maybe on your birthday weekend, you could pop up and then we could come down and see you for Fox’s birthday.’

 

I listened as Christina droned on about her arrangements. She had already thought it through, who would do what and when but she was right in assuming that without her input, nothing would happen. If it were down to me, I would be very reluctant to push for a social engagement with her and every cell of my body would resist a visit to my father. This is despite the fact that I know deep down that it was a necessary evil and avoidance would almost certainly lead to feelings of guilt when the inevitable happened.

 

It was so easy to picture Christina, standing outside the hospital in the dark, beneath the ghastly smoking shelter, protecting her from the foul wet weather, holding her cigarette and blowing smoke into the phone. I imagined her scuffed, black leather shoes with a velcro strap and her long, greying hair tied back with a scrunchie, pacing up and down slowly, gesticulating while she attempts to pin me down with her arrangements. 

 

Every year she looks more like the heavyweight version of our mother. It’s not that she’s physically heavy, she is of a normal build, whereas our mother was like a bird, saving half of her food for her dead son, Gary. Christina speaks with confidence, in fact she often verges on bolshy whereas our mother was quiet, barely speaking, saving her words for the afterlife, for Gary. She put her own life aside for him but he only lived for four minutes.

 

‘Yes, okay, that sounds like a plan. I’ll speak to Lori and get back to you.’

 

‘Please do, Jam,’ she says with a slight pleading in the tone of her voice. There is a few seconds of silence and I am just about to wind up the conversation, when she says, ‘How is work?’

 

‘Oh,’ I sigh, ‘work is work I guess. Busy..endless meetings and budgeting. I’d rather be at home with Fox.’

 

Christina makes an odd sort of snorting noise. ‘You high flyers, it’s tough at the top, ah.’

 

I pause, annoyed at her comment and with myself for allowing her to feel somehow licensed to say it. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

 

‘Oh before you go,’ I get the sense that she has been waiting to tell me something and now she’s pretending she’s just remembered it when in fact she’s been waiting to say it all along. ‘I meant to tell you, I saw Adam Berry the other day.’

 

‘Oh,’ I pause, trying to compose my voice. Christina is just dying to pull me into a bleak den of  reflected adversity. ‘How is he?’

 

‘We didn’t speak, we just looked at each other. He definitely recognised me though. I suppose he looked alright. He’s got a little scruffy dog now, it sits on his lap,’ she sighed, ‘there’s not much to his lap though so I guess it would have to be a very small dog. It looks like an old rag. Could be a Yorkshire Terrier.’

 

‘Mmmm,’ I say, feeling uncomfortable now.

 

‘It’s so sad when I think about it. I get the feeling he’d love to see you, Jam and see all this…this life you’ve made for yourself and how differently things have turned out for you.’

 

‘I’m not sure if he would, you know.’

 

‘Oh he would! I think his world has shrunk and for him to see, I don’t know, something different, outside of the way he lives, it would give him a bit of a lift.’

 

‘Perhaps. Look Christina, I’ll speak to you very soon.’ I wait for her to begin saying goodbye and then hang up.

 

There is always a snippy reference to my professional success but Christina is successful too, she is a nurse, she keeps people alive. It’s not my fault that her income falls far short of mine, it’s simply a reflection of our society in its current state. And Adam, he was my best mate but he was never like me, so things were always going to turn out differently for him. Adam Berry was a bright boy but he was too pure, too innocent, something was always destined to go wrong for him, I felt it the very first time I met him.