Life Without Me Read online

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Word gets out, innit?’

  ‘Like?’

  He gazed at me as if I were a halfwit. ‘Like people got Jags and was told to get more of the same, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘So Ehler would take any Jaguar off your hands?’

  He nodded and spat through his teeth on the floor. It was bloody rude and he knew that, but he also knew that his testimony was more important to me than his manners.

  ‘Did he pay well?’

  ‘Cash on delivery. Always.’

  ‘Always? It wasn’t your first time then?’

  Smelling a trap, he glanced quizzically into space.

  ‘How many cars did you sell to Ehler?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Can’t. What’s the point trying?’

  ‘The point is you can land yourself in a sweet little cell where they have juicy fresh-faced eighteen-year-old dudes like you for breakfast. And then they pass them on …’

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ his sleepy lawyer intervened, feigning mild indignation, ‘My client has already agreed to co-operate.’

  ‘Lost count,’ Jason said, spitting again.

  ‘That many?’

  ‘I didn’t say how many.’

  ‘Don’t get smart, Jason, or we can terminate this interview here and now.’

  He pushed his weasel’s face forward towards me. I could see tiny thin hairs sprouting on his chin. He looked like a Kung Fu master. ‘Mr Ehler buys every vintage you bring him, yeah? He got the demand, we got the supply. He gets them off our hands and one way or another resells them to the same arseholes we stole them from in the first place. My flatmate says is called wealth retribution, yeah?’

  ‘Redistribution,’ I corrected him mechanically, ‘Wealth redistribution.’

  ‘… is what I said, yeah? It’s all business. No one gets hurt.’

  ‘Right … So how many – roughly – has he bought from you for redistribution?’

  ‘Roughly … eleven so far. But don’t quote me on it cause I will deny it in your face, yeah?’

  ‘That’s not part of the deal,’ his lawyer reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, fuck it,’ Jason conceded the point.

  ‘You will have to come up with an employer’s name, someone willing to take you on. It’s a condition of your –’

  ‘I got it, yeah? My flatmate got me a job in a joint where he works. They pay shit but it’s a shit job so what d’you expect, yeah? Dishwasher.’

  ‘Who is that flatmate of yours, Jason? I’m asking out of curiosity. He seems such a clever cookie …’

  ‘He is. Smart, he is. A good mate of mine, yeah. He looks out for me.’

  ‘Is he also involved with Ehler?’

  ‘What you mean, “involved”?’

  ‘Does he work for him?’

  ‘Brandon?’ Jason chuckled, genuinely amused. You never know what little things can make young delinquents happy nowadays. ‘I told you Brandon’s smart, didn’t I?’

  ‘You also told me he worked in some joint where the pay is shit. That doesn’t make him particularly smart.’

  ‘It don’t make you smart ’cos you’re a brief raking in shitloads of dosh, yeah? You still ask stupid questions, the lot of you. Told you, Brandon’s smart – that’s it.’

  I chose to ignore the derogatory allusion to my profession’s intellectual prowess. On some level I would have to agree with Jason: there were a few well-connected but intellectually handicapped employees of Crown Prosecutions who would struggle with the challenges of being a dishwasher. My understudy, Aitken, was one of them. He was in this job either because of his high-ranking relative or to fulfil some intellectual diversity quota or other. Still, stupidity could cast a long shadow and I didn’t enjoy sitting in it, being verbally abused by failed teenage car thieves. So, pushing professional sensitivities aside, I proceeded with the interrogation.

  ‘Does this Brandon of yours have a surname?’

  ‘He must of!’

  ‘OK. What is it then?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘You share a flat with him and you don’t know his name?’

  ‘Why should I? He don’t know mine. Anyways, he got no business with Ehler. Get my drift, lady?’ There was a warning in Mahon’s glare. I didn’t want to lose his confidence (if I had it, that was).

  ‘Fair enough … So you don’t live with your parents, I take it?’

  ‘My ma?’ Jason chuckled again, but this time there was bitterness to the sound he made. ‘You wouldn’t risk living with her.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Just wouldn’t. Trust me.’

  ‘OK, I trust you. What is your address for the record, Jason? Where can we find you?’

  And that was where I suddenly remembered! The address Jason had given me! He’d said, ‘18 Gaolers Road.’ I thought it pretty amusing: such an appropriate abode for a juvenile criminal. But that wasn’t it! Gaolers Road was where Becky lived. Number 8. The young man displaying the highly disturbing familiarity with my daughter wasn’t just Jason Mahon’s lookalike. – He was Jason Mahon!

  Mother was in the best care home money could buy. I visited her twice a week, or once at the very least. It was my duty to do so. Though she no longer knew who she was, I harboured an irrational fear that somewhere deep down in the recesses of her Swiss cheese brain, she was keeping a tally of my visits and before long would rise from her dementia like a phoenix from the ashes and hold me to account. Mother was a formidable presence in my life, even though my presence didn’t register with her at all.

  She was sitting in her comfy chair, propped up by several cushions. Her milky-brown stockings were twisted at her ankles, her cardigan collar up on one side and down on the other; the buttons were done up wrongly so that the last one had no buttonhole to go into. Mother’s pale fingers were playing with that stray button, rubbing and pulling it mechanically. The radio was on, loud, but she wasn’t listening to it. If I turned it off, however, she would become confused and might begin to cry. Her chair was by the window overlooking the park. Though she was facing that way, she wasn’t looking. Her eyes were glazed over with incomprehension. If I pulled her away from that window, she would panic, would dig her fingernails into my arm and scream obscenities at me. I knew it because she had done that before. It was a revelation to learn she had such a colourful assembly of swear words.

  As it was, she was at peace and perfectly indifferent to me. Her bottom lip was quivering slightly; it looked as if she was talking to herself, ignoring me on purpose. I didn’t take offence. She probably didn’t mean to come across as inattentive. She probably didn’t mean anything, but I had this distinct impression that whenever I came into her peripheral vision, she would become more animated: her bottom lip would quiver more emphatically and her fingers would pull and scratch at her buttons with greater gusto.

  As always I sat on the edge of her bed, folded my arms and started telling her about everything that had happened in the past few days. I knew she liked detail; nothing to be withheld as too trivial, let her be the judge. Mother had always been attentive to detail. In the days when she knew who we all were, she had kept tabs on us. She knew everything and what she didn’t know she expected us to tell her. So we did, usually at the dinner table, taking turns: Paula, Father, and I. Mother would listen and interrupt us unceremoniously with frequent reminders about our incompetence, stupidity, and limited prospects in life. I think it was her way of showing how much she cared about us.

  It wasn’t particularly graceful, but her criticism was the only way she could express her love for us. I felt it. Father and Paula probably did not. As I said before, Father avoided Mother. He was six years her junior and perhaps for that reason she often treated him like a child, chastising and telling him off, and generally putting him in his place. So he needed a safe haven: somewhere to hide and weather the storm. He found it in his work. He was the breadwinner, she w
as the homemaker. It had worked well for them for forty-five years of Father’s active employment. Two years after retiring, he packed up and died. I had a sneaky suspicion that he had planned it all along. Sitting at home with Mother and her constant nattering didn’t do much for his will to live.

  Paula had done a runner, too. She was the wilder of the two of us. Three years younger than me, she had always been the baby of the family, and Father’s favourite. Mother didn’t have favourites. We were equal failures in her eyes. I wasn’t much affected by Mother’s opinions; I guess, I understood where she was coming from – she wanted us to try harder and do better. Paula, on the other hand, took everything to heart. At eighteen she left home for good to study drama; she went to London, as far away from home as possible. It was as if she had run away with the circus. We hardly heard from her, not even birthday cards. She had turned up for my wedding with a black boyfriend, giving Mother a near-seizure. She then abandoned the boyfriend halfway through the evening and started flirting shamelessly with Rob, giving me a near-seizure. It was sobering – the moment they first set eyes on each other she went for him like a vulture for dead meat; he acted the part to perfection. It was so undignified, even to watch – a grown man unable to tell the cow to fuck off! I almost felt sorry for him.

  I was glad to see the back of her when she left at dawn. For me, she was a lost cause already then. I didn’t want to know her. I crossed her off my Christmas card list. She was as good as dead to me, and I rejoiced.

  Mother, on the other hand, had found Paula’s second disappearing act difficult to swallow. I think she waited for her to come back, for many years. She kept saying Paula would return, but Paula never did, leaving me to fill the hole in Mother’s heart and patch up the one in mine. I had the upper hand. I was the good child. I stayed close to my parents, especially Mother. I had to please her. I had to weed out every last memory of Paula. Banish the cow to hell.

  I followed the right path. I became who Mother had secretly aspired for me to become, even though she would never dare say it out loud: a strong, successful professional blessed with a happy family, respectable husband, and a big house in the best part of town. The only thing I couldn’t be was a man. I knew Mother would’ve liked that very, very much. She considered it a personal tragedy that both Paula and I were girls. She had toughened us up from an early age, but that would never compensate for the lack of what she most craved for us to possess – a penis.

  At least she had one male figure in her life: Father. Despite her regular chiding she loved him deeply. She clung on to him for dear life. He validated her. When he died suddenly of a stroke, two years into retirement, Mother’s dementia had kicked in. She didn’t want to know anything any more so she took it all out of her mind. I am afraid that included me. I was a stranger to her, a speck of dust on the perfectly clean and smooth surface of her mind – I just bounced off it.

  Our family photograph stood by her bedside. It had been taken thirty years ago, before our lives splintered in all possible directions, before Paula escaped, before I got married and had my own children to take me on my own path to dementia. Unwittingly, Mother had thrown a used handkerchief over the photo, obscuring everyone who was in it. I picked up the hankie and wiped the dust from the picture with it. I couldn’t help myself. For the first time I noticed that no one in that photo was smiling. We were all posing with a gravity that reflected the general tone of our family life. I passed the hankie to Mother. She blew her nose into it and pushed it nervously under the sleeve of her cardigan, like a hamster.

  ‘Disposable tissues are much more hygienic,’ I said without a hope of Mother taking any notice of me.

  After relaying to her the latest developments in Ehler’s case, I squeezed her hand and kissed her on the forehead, neither of which she acknowledged.

  ‘I’ll be going then. See you next week, Mum. Keep warm, the nights are still cold.’ I was heading for the door, expecting nothing from her. There she surprised me. I heard her say with lucidity that astounded me, ‘Should you be wearing a skirt above your knee? At your age?’

  For a split second I saw the old, familiar expression of severe condemnation in her eyes, and it made me feel warm inside.

  Rob had arrived home before me. He was in the garden when I got there. He was kneeling on the ground; his back was arched like a humping greyhound’s. He was stabbing the soil with a fork, eradicating weeds. Defeated dandelion leaves lay on a sacrificial pyre behind him. He knew I was home because I flung the window open and kicked the cat out. The cat scampered past him, jumped onto the fence and from there glared at me resentfully. Rob ignored both of us.

  I threw the dinner into the oven: grilled chicken and chips. I was working on the assumption that Mark would be turning up for dinner. If he didn’t, the cat would have the chicken and the chips would go to the pigs (if we had any). I hated wasting food, but I refused to abandon the hope that my boy would join us for dinner. Since the kids gained independence, Rob and I had lost the pleasure of their company. Most days it was just the two of us staring at each other silently over the salad bowl.

  I had just enough time to go for a run. It was my escape. Rob tended to the garden, I tended to my muscle mass. I would run religiously every day before dinner unless there was a snow blizzard or a torrential downpour. That day we had lovely weather. The air was calm and still, smelling of lavender. I changed into my tracksuit.

  My mobile rang.

  ‘Mum, hold the dinner off, will you?’

  ‘What time will you be here?’

  ‘Give us an hour.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Charlotte’s coming.’

  ‘Next time it’d be nice if you told me in advance.’

  ‘I am telling you in advance.’

  He sounded as if he was doing me a favour. Perhaps he was. He could’ve gone to Charlotte’s for dinner, sat down at a table with Charlotte’s parents, chatted and bonded with them instead of us. I should be grateful.

  I turned off the oven. When I came back from running, I would have to add more chips and another piece of chicken. The salad bowl would need to be shared amongst four but, lo and behold, it might even witness some table conversation!

  I smiled to my reflection in the mirror as I was pulling my hair into a tight ponytail and admiring my altogether rather tight body. History was repeating itself, I thought. Charlotte was a law student, in the same year as Mark. She had a razor-sharp mind and the determined strength of an ox. She reminded me of me. And Mark was just like his dad.

  ‘Out for a run!’ I shouted to Rob and the cat on the fence. Rob rose from his knees, wiped his trousers and waved to me, heading in as I was heading out. Sometimes I wondered if he waited for me to leave before coming back inside for a cuppa. The cat was coming back indoors too, doing his best to trip Rob up on his way.

  I slammed the door and ran into the front garden. There was a piece of crumpled up litter on our driveway. It must have travelled from the neighbours’. I picked it up fastidiously and chucked it into the neighbours’ wheelie bin, which was already out for tomorrow’s collection. Then I stepped into the road, heard a screech of tyres, and that was when it hit me.

  FULL DISCLOSURE …

  The doctor spoke with an accent, rolling his Rs heavily and emphasising words that didn’t matter. He articulated them slowly as if it was Rob who was a foreigner with poor grasp of English. Perhaps Rob needed that. There was a wild look in his eyes, a look of fanatical disbelief. He was still clutching the kettle, now with both his hands as if it was an urn holding my freshly processed ashes. I doubt he realised that he was wearing no shoes, just socks, and the left sock sported a hole over his big toe. He must’ve left his muddy boots in the garden. Although considering the state of his boots (no laces, soles coming off, and the forlorn smell and look of something fished out of a sewer) the bare socks were probably less embarrassing after all.

  ‘I AM Dr Jarzecki. Please TAKE a seat, Mr Ibsen.’

  The comma
nd seemed like the most sensible induction into what would follow next.

  ‘Oh, yes! A seat!’ Rob enthused. He went around in circles like a dog chasing its tail, found two chairs, sat in one, placed the kettle on the other one, lifted one leg over the other, peered with horror at his left toe, hid both feet under the chair, then picked up the kettle from the neighbouring seat and held it defensively in his lap. ‘Is she going to be all right?’

  ‘She eez in a critical CONdition. She suffered eg-stensive injuries to DA head and chest. Several brocken reebs, da collar bon … cardiac ARRest. She eezn’t out of da danger ZON. Not by far.’

  Both Rob and I focussed all our powers of comprehension on the good doctor’s lips. It was a bit like watching one of those Swedish crime series where something went wrong with subtitles and you have to try to lip-read and fall back on your common sense and imagination to follow the plot.

  ‘So she’ll be all right?’

  The good doctor stared, clearly baffled by Rob’s conclusion. Then he started again, only slower and louder, ‘Her heart stopped for MANY minutes. Da scan shows DIP fractures to her skull and seVEre swelling in her brain. Interior bleeding. She eez in an inDUCED coma, Mr Ibsen. We deed all we could, but you must PREpare for da vorst …’

  The subtitles were not back yet and it took Rob a while to catch up with Dr Jarzecki.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Der eez always hop, but your wife MY not make eet, I AM very sorry. We are doing what we can, but … What I am saying eez, BE prepared for da vorst.’

  ‘Can I see her, please?’

  Rob dragged the kettle to my room with him. He put it on the bedside table as if it was a vase of flowers. Having dealt with the kettle, he disintegrated into a plastic chair that stood next to my bed. His whole back caved in as if, suddenly, someone had pulled his spine out of it. He stretched his arm out to take my hand, but upon seeing all the plasters, tubes and needles stuck into it, pulled back, only his fingertips touching mine. His body shook with a sob.

  I wished I could hug him and make him stop. If only he knew I was still around, and kicking! Indeed, I tried to kick him but I didn’t seem to be in possession of any feet. I attempted to blow into his face – if I were a ghost, I should be able to generate some paranormal activities! Knocking. Whispering in the dark. Forcing the kettle to fly off the bedside table … Nothing worked. I obviously wasn’t a fully-fledged ghost. In simple terms I was neither hither nor thither. It was a strange state of affairs. You could say my inner lining had detached from my outer body. You could say my soul was born, the umbilical cord severed and I – the spiritual I – was free to romp. As far as I could see there was no dependency on the mother ship which was my material form, though I dreaded to think what would happen if the mother ship went into permanent shutdown. A coma was the best compromise I could hope for under the circumstances.