picture of you as surely as if it were laid out on a canvas in oil.
I held up my camera and fired off shots, each one quietening the voice in my mind telling me that I’d better get back to work now, click , that I was screwing up my job and everyone was going to be saying I’d lost it, click , that I was never going to be able to manage a normal life, click, click, click . And with each click the pictures of those women faded from my mind, taking up less and less of the space they had occupied all morning – all weekend, in fact.
The pictures, when I downloaded them on to my computer that night, were disappointing. Most of them were faded and out of focus, not quite managing to capture the elusive double nature of the river and the chameleon-like quality that I’d imagined it to have. That second side lay just out of reach, locked in my imagination and failing to translate to the screen. I refrained from deleting them, each one a reminder that something intangible lay beyond the image, something that wasn’t there to the untrained eye but remained very real to me.
‘Mum, is everything okay?’ I threw on my bright and breezy voice like a silk scarf, but my body was tense, braced for the reply. Within seconds I would be able to tell if it was a good or a bad day – before my mum had spoken even. I had long been used to listening for the ragged breaths that signalled a bad one.
‘I’m good, darling, how are you?’ Her words were crystal clear, with a forced casual tone that made it sound as if we had this kind of conversation all the time. Her meds must be set to the right dosage, and she obviously hadn’t washed them down with too much whisky today. I could usually tell exactly how many glasses she’d had as soon as I picked up the phone. Today must be a one-glass day; there weren’t any zero-glass days, hadn’t been for years.
I had to bite my lip to keep from asking why she was calling; even on a good day she was hypersensitive, and the smallest perceived slight could send her spiralling towards bad before I’d realised what I’d done.
To the outside world, she was a reputable widow with a daughter to be proud of – the picture of respectability. But just like most pictures, the image she presented was a still life, a snapshot of what her marriage, our lives might once have been, frozen in time. It didn’t show what happened even moments before everyone plastered on their fake cheese. Careful lighting and heavy make-up hid the lines on my mother’s once youthful face, carved there by years of loss. Did I want that for myself? No, that was a pain I could live without.
‘I’m fine, Mum, just a bit busy at the moment.’
Despite my breezy tone I heard her sigh. This was the part where our conversation would go one of two ways – neither particularly appealing. It was a toss-up between abusive or suicidal. Sometimes it would be both. I suppose that’s the one thing I had in common with her, both of us with screw-up parents we so wanted to admire but couldn’t. I closed my eyes and braced myself for what was to come.
21
Eleanor
Eleanor hadn’t sat down since Karen had walked through the door; she’d flitted from room to room, throwing toys into boxes and bundling washing into piles on the kitchen floor. It was a mark of their friendship that she didn’t feel the need to give her guest her full attention – with Karen it hardly felt as though she was a guest at all. Lesley, Eleanor’s cleaner, was fantastic, but the idea of it being just a case of wiping the surfaces between visits had been slightly optimistic.
Karen had boiled the kettle and made them both a cup of coffee, moving around her friend’s kitchen as though it were her own, knowing exactly where to go for cups and spoons. As she waited for the kettle to boil, she’d busied herself washing breakfast bowls and sweeping up crumbs. If anyone else had presumed to start cleaning her kitchen, Eleanor would have lost her shit, but
I held up my camera and fired off shots, each one quietening the voice in my mind telling me that I’d better get back to work now, click , that I was screwing up my job and everyone was going to be saying I’d lost it, click , that I was never going to be able to manage a normal life, click, click, click . And with each click the pictures of those women faded from my mind, taking up less and less of the space they had occupied all morning – all weekend, in fact.
The pictures, when I downloaded them on to my computer that night, were disappointing. Most of them were faded and out of focus, not quite managing to capture the elusive double nature of the river and the chameleon-like quality that I’d imagined it to have. That second side lay just out of reach, locked in my imagination and failing to translate to the screen. I refrained from deleting them, each one a reminder that something intangible lay beyond the image, something that wasn’t there to the untrained eye but remained very real to me.
‘Mum, is everything okay?’ I threw on my bright and breezy voice like a silk scarf, but my body was tense, braced for the reply. Within seconds I would be able to tell if it was a good or a bad day – before my mum had spoken even. I had long been used to listening for the ragged breaths that signalled a bad one.
‘I’m good, darling, how are you?’ Her words were crystal clear, with a forced casual tone that made it sound as if we had this kind of conversation all the time. Her meds must be set to the right dosage, and she obviously hadn’t washed them down with too much whisky today. I could usually tell exactly how many glasses she’d had as soon as I picked up the phone. Today must be a one-glass day; there weren’t any zero-glass days, hadn’t been for years.
I had to bite my lip to keep from asking why she was calling; even on a good day she was hypersensitive, and the smallest perceived slight could send her spiralling towards bad before I’d realised what I’d done.
To the outside world, she was a reputable widow with a daughter to be proud of – the picture of respectability. But just like most pictures, the image she presented was a still life, a snapshot of what her marriage, our lives might once have been, frozen in time. It didn’t show what happened even moments before everyone plastered on their fake cheese. Careful lighting and heavy make-up hid the lines on my mother’s once youthful face, carved there by years of loss. Did I want that for myself? No, that was a pain I could live without.
‘I’m fine, Mum, just a bit busy at the moment.’
Despite my breezy tone I heard her sigh. This was the part where our conversation would go one of two ways – neither particularly appealing. It was a toss-up between abusive or suicidal. Sometimes it would be both. I suppose that’s the one thing I had in common with her, both of us with screw-up parents we so wanted to admire but couldn’t. I closed my eyes and braced myself for what was to come.
21
Eleanor
Eleanor hadn’t sat down since Karen had walked through the door; she’d flitted from room to room, throwing toys into boxes and bundling washing into piles on the kitchen floor. It was a mark of their friendship that she didn’t feel the need to give her guest her full attention – with Karen it hardly felt as though she was a guest at all. Lesley, Eleanor’s cleaner, was fantastic, but the idea of it being just a case of wiping the surfaces between visits had been slightly optimistic.
Karen had boiled the kettle and made them both a cup of coffee, moving around her friend’s kitchen as though it were her own, knowing exactly where to go for cups and spoons. As she waited for the kettle to boil, she’d busied herself washing breakfast bowls and sweeping up crumbs. If anyone else had presumed to start cleaning her kitchen, Eleanor would have lost her shit, but
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