Carry You

‘No, no, you’ve got to listen. I want you to have the scarves because Naomi doesn’t suit a scarf. She’s too serious. But you mustn’t be upset if I give her the Wedgwood set. I just think it will be better for her because she’s got Russell and the house and everything.’

‘Mum …’

‘And then if she’s having that, you must have the jewellery box. It needs looking after, though, Daisy Duck. It’s over sixty years old so you’ve got to take care of it. My dad gave it to my mum on their wedding day, you know.’

‘Really?’ I did know. She’d told me months earlier. But she was on morphine by then and wasn’t always clear about what she’d already said.

‘And I need to sort out my jewellery. I need you to help me, sweetheart. I can’t ask Graham because he gave me most of it and it will only upset him to know I’m giving it away.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I don’t think he wants to face what’s happening here until he absolutely has to. Do you understand?’

I nodded. Of course I understood. He didn’t want to be reminded of the fact that she was dying. I totally got that. ‘Yes, I understand.’

‘So … will you do it for me?’

‘Of course I will, Mum. Anything. Just tell me what you want me to do.’

It turned out she had a folder in the house with photographs and a description of every item of jewellery she owned, for the insurance, and she asked me to bring it into the hospice, with Naomi, so we could leaf through it and choose what we wanted. I used my door key to visit the house when Graham wasn’t there, sneaking in and opening Mum’s bedroom cabinet. I felt like I was violating her. She lost her dignity in so many ways.

Naomi went first, while I sat on the bed with an aching throat.

‘I love this ring,’ Naomi said excitedly, pointing to a page in the folder. ‘Can I have it?’ She looked at me. ‘Daze? You don’t want it, do you?’

I shook my head. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted Mum to keep on wearing it for the next forty years.

‘Excellent.’ Naomi pulled the sheet of paper out of its plastic sleeve and wrote a large black ‘N’ on the page next to the photograph. ‘Lovely.’ She slid it back in and continued turning the pages until eventually she had labelled about ten things. ‘Here you go, Daze,’ she said, handing the folder to me. ‘You choose ten, and then we’ll fight over the rest.’

I took the folder but didn’t open it. Mum had gone to sleep and I stared at her for a few moments, watching her chest rising and falling, willing it to keep going. I started counting the seconds that elapsed between the end of an exhale and the start of the next inhale, and as it grew from three seconds to four, then five, I began wondering if today was going to be the day.

‘Wakey wakey,’ Naomi said suddenly, and I jumped a bit and turned to look at her. She wasn’t talking to Mum, though; she was talking to me. ‘Get a move on, Dozy, I’ve got to get going in a minute. We’re going to Ikea.’

So I picked my ten, and then Naomi divided the rest out between us. By the time Mum woke up again twenty minutes later, Naomi had gone and each item had either an ‘N’ or a ‘D’ next to it.

‘Oh, hi, Daisy Duck,’ Mum said, smiling at me. ‘When did you get here?’

I’m glad she did it now. It gave me a chance to wear some of it when I went to visit her, which she loved. She was so thin by this time that she hadn’t been able to wear any of it for ages, so she was happy to see it again.

‘Just don’t let Graham see you wearing it,’ she said, fingering a gorgeous aquamarine and diamond ring I had just taken off. She slid it onto her own pathetically thin finger and it dangled there loosely like a curtain ring, the heavy gem immediately sliding round to the underside. She laughed and slid it off again. ‘Here you go, it looks a lot better on you. But don’t forget, poor Graham would be devastated if he knew you had it already, before … anything has happened. Don’t let him see, sweetheart. Promise me.’

‘I promise, Mum.’ I slid the ring back on my finger, not realising how devastating that promise would turn out to be.

Of course, because she was so organised about all that, it meant she didn’t have to put any of those things in her will. Which meant the letter from Owen and Lake was about the house and whatever liquid assets Graham left. I knew that as I took it from Abby last Sunday.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Abby asked me, while I ran my fingers over the heavy paper.

‘Yeah, course I am.’ I folded the envelope in half and tucked it in my own jeans pocket. ‘Just not right now.’

‘Might be important.’

I shrugged. It would wait. Nothing was all that important any more.

This route that Abby and Tom have worked out for me isn’t too bad actually. It’s a circuit, which means I just have to keep walking until I get back again, minimal orienteering required. I start off along the road and go down to the park – one and a half miles. I skirt around the edge of the park and go through a little gap in the fence at the top end, which leads to a footpath – half a mile. I follow the footpath alongside the canal, then cross over the dual carriageway and keep on the same path all the way to the next town – four miles. Then I come back along the road for a bit, use the underpass to get back to the other side of the bypass and cut through a housing estate back to Abby’s – three miles. In total, it’s about nine miles. I know this because I have a brand new pedometer in my pocket, which counts my steps, multiplies that number by the length of my average pace, which I had to input in advance, and converts that figure to a measurement of how far I’ve walked. Also because Abby told me.

Daisy Mack

Clothed in cobwebs; feasting on flies.

Suzanne Allen Jesus, Daisy, do some shopping for the love of Gucci.

Georgia Ling LMAO! xxx

Nat ‘Wiggy’ Nicholson You sound like you need a makeover, hunni.x

I’m on the approach to the footbridge over the motorway now. I’m not happy about this part of the walk, for two principal reasons. Firstly, the path is a bit overgrown and I keep swallowing insects. They stay in your throat for ages and I never know whether to swallow them to get rid of them, or try to spit them out. I’m also finding this part of the canal path is permanently festooned with cobwebs, which of course are completely invisible to the naked eye. It’s not until you walk through one and find yourself trying to pull swathes of sticky strands off your face that you even know they’re there. And of course, as you’re trying to free yourself from their deadly little silken traps, you know that the eight-legged architect is no doubt now somewhere about your person.

Not that I’m scared of spiders. I’m not. Why would I be? They’re wonderful because they don’t live on leftovers, like some insects do, they set traps and hunt and provide for themselves without involving anyone else. OK, so they’ve got eight eyes and eight hairy legs, and let themselves down out of nowhere into your hair, and sometimes move really fast just when you’re least expecting it, but –

Shit. What was that? I think there’s one on me. I just felt something tickling the back of my arm. I swat at myself a few times, then rub my arm roughly, to make sure. Then I have to rub the other arm, just as roughly, then both my legs, the back of my neck and finally my hair, all while hopping about madly on the spot and yelping.

I think I inherited my casual indifference to spiders from Mum. ‘Spiders are fantastic,’ she used to say, letting one she’d rescued from the bath run across her hand. ‘They hunt and kill their own food. And you know what that food is? Flies. Flies eat poo and rubbish and give birth to maggots. The fewer of them on the planet, the better, as far as I’m concerned.’ She never used to hoover up cobwebs from the corners of the rooms at home either. ‘Cobwebs are nature’s own flypaper,’ she would say to anyone who questioned it. Although no one ever did, really. Only Graham. And only once.

Mum was pretty cool with just about everything. She could complain about bad service in shops. She could not tip taxi drivers. She could send food back in restaurants. She could even say she wasn’t happy with a haircut. But she was paralysingly terrified of one thing. Which brings me to the second reason why I don’t like this part of the walk. The footbridge. Mum was petrified of heights. And so am I.

When I was about eight and Naomi was eleven, the three of us went on a weekend away to London. I’m not entirely sure why – it may have been Mum’s birthday or something like that. On the first day, we checked into our hotel, before going out for dinner and a show. We had a family room, which turned out to be a quad. Mum was not happy about that at all, I remember.

‘It’s a quad room,’ she said to the receptionist half an hour after we’d arrived, ‘presumably because that is what this hotel thinks of as a typical family: mum, dad, little John and little Jane. But we are a family, and there are only three of us. Sadly our fourth member decided three years ago to follow his dream, and his colleague’s arse, to Peterborough in search of clichés.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘Do you know what that means?’

The receptionist smiled. ‘Well,’ she started to say, then realised very quickly that she didn’t need to.

‘It means,’ Mum went on calmly, ‘that we only have one income. I am supporting myself and my two children here on only one lot of pay. So probably roughly half as much as the standard family that this hotel would usually put in the quad room.’

‘Madam,’ the receptionist tried, but got nowhere.

‘So although I have half as much money as the people you would normally put in that room, you still want to make me pay exactly the same amount of money as they pay, by charging me a supplement for the empty bed.’ She smiled at this point, and tilted her head on one side a little, as if she was watching a chimpanzee juggle oranges. ‘It’s hardly fair, is it, Kirsty?’

We had a slap up meal that night. They must have refunded the supplement. ‘Don’t let hotel bastards wear you down,’ Mum said to us over dinner. ‘You fight for what is right, girls, and you keep on fighting, no matter what.’ She leaned towards us across the table and whispered behind her hand, ‘I’ve never lost one yet.’

She did lose one eventually. It was her final fight, last November.

Anyway during that London trip, the three of us got stuck on a bridge somewhere. I don’t know what bridge it was, but I remember it was over water, so it didn’t feel dangerous to me. Not at first, anyway. But apparently it did for Mum. Naomi and I hadn’t noticed that she’d slowed her steps quite a lot as we set out on it, and scampered off ahead. By the time we heard her faint voice calling our names and turned round to see what she wanted, she was motionless, white and crouching. I stared at her in horror as she moved one arm about two inches away from her body and pulled her fingers very slowly towards herself twice. I looked up at Naomi, not understanding what was going on.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Naomi said, taking hold of my arm. ‘Come on, we gotta go back.’

‘What’s happened, Nomes?’

She didn’t answer, just marched me back across the bridge to Mum’s side. When we got there, I could see that Mum’s left hand was wrapped around the lower part of the railing so tightly that not just the knuckles had gone white, her whole hand had. And, oddly enough, her face. I looked at her and was horrified by the terror in her eyes.

‘Mummy?’

‘It’s OK, Daisy Duck,’ she croaked, skinning her thin lips back from her teeth. I recoiled, and I remember wondering if this was really my mum squatting there or some other being inhabiting her body. A frightened, weak other being.