Читать книгу Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection: Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets - Cathy Kelly - Страница 23

Her mother ran a hand over the floral fabric in the centre bolt. Pale blue with yellow and blue flowers, it was very Laura Ashley and very pretty. Just the sort of thing her mother adored, Emma knew. She could imagine the brief her mother would give the curtain-maker: ‘Frills, frills and more frills.’

Anne-Marie O’Brien’s hand moved to another bolt of fabric, also blue but with only a small cream design in it. ‘Lovely,’ she said absently.

They’d been in Laura Ashley’s fabric department for ten minutes and, so far, that was as much as Emma’s mother had said about anything. Normally, on a trip to buy material for her spare-bedroom curtains, she’d have been on a high of excitement, in raptures at the thought of re-doing yet another room in the house. Pete swore the O’Briens redecorated the entire house from top to bottom every two years. ‘Your mother is a decorating nut,’ he said each time the ‘What colour shall we paint the woodwork?’ shenanigans began.

Emma didn’t know why her parents didn’t buy their own wallpaper stripper. They paid so much in hire fees that they could have owned one twice over. This time, the spare bedroom was being done up because her mother’s second cousin was visiting from Chicago and, naturally, the spare bedroom was in such a state that nobody could be expected to sleep in it. Certainly not someone from Chicago, Anne-Marie would have said in scandalized tones.

Only she hadn’t said it, hadn’t suggested redecoration: her husband had. Although once she’d got the idea, she was all for it.

‘You’ll come with me to buy the curtain material, won’t you, Emma?’ she’d pleaded with her daughter.

Emma wouldn’t have dreamed of refusing. Another Saturday morning wasted, she thought with irritation. She and Pete had planned to start their Christmas shopping that day. Christmas was barely three and a half weeks away and they didn’t want to spend endless hours at the last minute trying to get into crowded city-centre car parks as the entire country went mad buying gift sets, novelty ties and other useless Christmas presents.

Perhaps if she and her mother weren’t too long looking for wallpaper and fabric today, she could nip down to Alias Tom’s and see if they had anything nice for Pete, Emma thought. A really nice sweater or a designer shirt, maybe. It’d be splashing out, but he deserved something special. He’d been working so hard lately, making lots of overnight trips because of the overtime money he got paid for them.

Emma had never mentioned her father’s horrible comments about how she and Pete had borrowed their deposit money from him, but it was as if Pete had somehow sensed what had been said and was now doing everything he could to pay it back. She sighed. Darling Pete. He was so good to her and yet she’d been like a bear with a sore head for the last few weeks.

‘Where’s your father?’ enquired her mother suddenly, breaking into Emma’s thoughts.

‘What?’

‘Your father. Where is he? I can’t see him anywhere.’

A moment passed as Emma stared uncomprehendingly at her mother. What had she said…?

Anne-Marie’s eyes, so like Emma’s, were pale with amber flecks. Always alert and watchful, looking for things she didn’t approve of. Now, the pale eyes were filled with some secret fear. She was looking anxiously around them, pupils darting here and there, blinking rapidly.

‘Dad’s not here,’ Emma said slowly, watching in horror as her mother’s mouth wobbled and she began to cry.

‘He must be, where is he? He was here. You’re lying to me!’ Anne-Marie’s voice got louder.

She was panicking, Emma realized.

Quickly, she took her mother’s arm, hoping to comfort her and remind her that Jimmy O’Brien was working that day. But her mother shook off Emma’s arm with surprising strength and started to run away from her, calling, ‘Jimmy, where are you?’ in an increasingly frantic voice.

Still in shock, Emma ran after her and, because she couldn’t think of what else to do, grabbed her mother again. They were beside a display of cushions and Anne-Marie seized one and started hitting Emma with it.

‘Get away from me! Get away from me! Where’s my husband?’

She must be having a stroke or an aneurysm, Emma thought wildly as she dodged the blows. Something terrible, something that had affected her mind in this way. She didn’t even seem to recognize Emma. Her face was distorted and her expression was quite manic, utterly frightening.

‘Mum, Mum, it’s OK. It’s me, Emma. Stop hitting me. We’ll find Dad, I promise. OK, Mum?’ Emma begged, unable to control the sheer terror she was experiencing. What was happening, why was her mother behaving like this? Anne-Marie kept roaring, her shouts overpowering the gentle shop muzak.

‘Where’s my husband? I have to find him!’

Emma kept a grip on her mother, scared that, if she let go, Anne-Marie might run away again. The screams and the frantic bashing with the cushion continued. Emma did her best to pull the cushion out of her mother’s hand but couldn’t. She was so strong. People were watching them now, a crowd had gathered in a wide circle around them, and one of the shop assistants approached tentatively.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

As abruptly as she’d started, Anne-Marie stopped hitting Emma with the cushion. She stared at it in astonishment, as if bewildered as to how it had found its way into her hand in the first place.

‘Emma?’ she breathed.

‘I’m here, Mum. I’m here.’ Emma hugged her mother’s rigid body gently, afraid to hold her too tightly in case she started screaming again. ‘It’s OK. We’ll find Dad.’ With one hand, she took the cushion and dumped it back on the display.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the shop assistant, ‘I don’t know what happened…She got confused or something.’ The girl looked at Anne-Marie, whose face was now quite normal, and then back to Emma. She clearly didn’t believe a word Emma was saying. Who would, Emma thought. This perfectly normal-looking woman and her daughter must have had some sort of row. What else would people think?

Her mother patted Emma’s cheek briefly, then smiled brightly and turned around to admire the cushions she’d been using as weapons only moments before. The onlookers drifted away and Emma was left, her legs like jelly with shock, her heart pumping like the drums in a techno-music song.

‘Nice,’ said her mother happily, holding up a tapestry cushion.

‘Let’s go, Mum.’ Terrified the whole procedure would start again, Emma led her mother out of the shop and into a café. Still holding Anne-Marie’s arm, she bought two coffees at the counter and a Danish pastry for her mother.

Emma found them a table, keeping up a stream of meaningless conversation about Christmas and buying fabric for the bedroom, like a parent trying to amuse a fractious toddler. She put a spoon of sugar in her mother’s coffee and pushed the Danish in front of her.

Not saying a word about how she could put her own sugar in her coffee, thank you very much, Anne-Marie took the cup and drank deeply before starting on her pastry. Emma, barely able to swallow a sip of coffee, watched her.

‘Will we look at wallpaper now?’ her mother asked in a normal, contented way.

‘I don’t know, Mum,’ Emma replied weakly. ‘I’ve got a migraine,’ she lied, anything to avoid more shopping.

‘Will we go home?’ her mother said eagerly, like a child.

Emma nodded. She couldn’t speak. Seeing her mother reduced to someone she didn’t recognize was the most terrifying experience of her life. As Anne-Marie drank her coffee, Emma ran through the list of possibilities behind her bizarre behaviour in the shop. Each time, she came painfully back to the one answer: Alzheimer’s disease. There could be no other explanation. It was warm in the coffee shop, almost tropical, to ward off the early December wind outside. But despite the heat, Emma felt a shaft of pure cold slice through her. Her very bones felt chilled, touched by an icy grip that had nothing to do with the actual weather. Her mother was ill. Very ill. Whatever could they do now?

‘Kirsten,’ Emma said with relief into the receiver. It was so comforting to hear her sister’s voice, the voice of normality. ‘I don’t know what to do. You’ll never believe what’s happened.’

‘Can you be quick?’ came the reply over the phone, ‘I’m just going out to the manicurist to get a nail fixed. We’re going to a ball tonight and I snapped my thumbnail on a tin of Diet Coke.’

Emma raised her eyes to heaven. No matter what domestic disaster was unfolding, Kirsten would be bound to have some much more urgent matter awaiting her attention. If the world was ending in a giant fireball, Kirsten would insist on getting her roots coloured first.

‘You won’t feel much like going to any ball when you hear what I’ve got to tell you about Mum,’ Emma said soberly.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kirsten said brusquely when her sister had finished the story. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Mummy. You’re imagining it. You know how she frets when Dad isn’t around, how every little incident becomes a full-scale disaster. That’s all that’s wrong.’

‘No,’ protested Emma. ‘That isn’t all. You didn’t see her, Kirsten, she was…she was crazy, hitting me with a cushion and yelling at the top of her voice. It was terrifying, I thought she’d lost her mind. I know what it is, I think. Alzheimer’s. Oh God, I even hate to say it.’

There was silence at the other end of the phone. ‘You can’t be serious,’ Kirsten said finally.

‘This is hardly a joke. Who’d make something like that up?’ Emma demanded.

‘Well, she’s fine now, isn’t she? It’s all over, so there’s nothing to worry about. You’re panicking about nothing.’

‘Kirsten!’ exploded Emma. ‘Will you listen to me. Mum didn’t know who I was. She’s been acting a bit strange recently, you know she has. She can’t remember words to things. She tried to tell me last week that the washing machine had broken down and she couldn’t remember the word for it.’

Emma recalled the phone conversation: ‘The thing’s broken,’ her mother had wailed. ‘There’s water and it won’t work. I don’t know how to fix it.’

‘What thing?’ Emma had asked gently.

‘The thing, the big…thing,’ her mother had yelled in frustration. ‘Kitchen thing, for clothes, I don’t know what you call it, just stop annoying me. It’s broken.’

But when Emma had called round that evening, her mother seemed in perfectly good form and the washing machine was trundling away in the kitchen.

‘I keep telling myself there’s nothing wrong with her,’ Emma told Kirsten now, ‘but I can’t do that any more because I’ve seen it for myself: she’s not well. She’s got something, some dementia, something like Alzheimer’s, I know it.’ Emma stopped, weary from trying to convince Kirsten. ‘We’ve got to decide what to do about it. I didn’t say anything to Dad. I dropped Mum off and came back home. I didn’t know what to say to him. That’s why I’m phoning you. We’ve got to decide what to do together.’

A snort from the other end of the phone told her that Kirsten had no intention of doing anything of the sort. ‘There’s nothing to figure out. We all forget things. I can’t remember people’s names half the time. Mummy’s fine, I know it. You think I wouldn’t know if my own mother was sick?’

‘This isn’t a competition, Kirsten,’ stressed Emma. ‘We’re not having a game to see who diagnosed it first, to see who is the better daughter. We’ve got to do something. Maybe Dad doesn’t know, maybe this has never happened before, but we’ve got to take some action.’

‘You can, I’m not going to. I think you’re over-reacting. Now, I can’t talk, I told you.’

With that, Kirsten hung up.

Emma stared at the phone in amazement. She knew Kirsten didn’t like facing painful things, had known it for years. Kirsten had taken two days to tell their parents she’d been suspended from fourth year in school for smoking; only the arrival of the official letter from the principal had forced her hand. But to deny there was anything wrong with their mother when it was so patently obvious there was…It didn’t make any sense.