The summer my Mum had her last stroke I spent dragging my blue and white dinghy
to the seafront, eating hot pizza from the diner, rubbing salt into my skin. My
dinghy had become almost a minor celebrity amongst friends. We held beach
parties where the dinghy was wrenched across pebbles as guest of honour. We
went racing up the Adur in it. We huddled on Hove beach in the breezy evenings
comparing sea-faring stories, and drinking beer.
Out on
the waves I’d watch Brighton dissolve into a spray of lights, sunshine bouncing
off Sussex Heights. The Palace Pier was a blue and white haze, its tiny cable
cars rotating in a clear sky. Inside, however, I felt more like the West Pier –
a blackened edifice crumbling slowly into the sea, inhabited only by starlings,
cockles climbing over my limbs. I’d sail out in the dinghy as far as I could
go, until everything went silent and I felt the yellow buoy slippery under my
hand. I came to long for this silence once back on land again. I rowed to
forget myself, to forget what lay back at the shore. The last thing I wanted to
remember was what was happening to Mum.
One afternoon I went out in the dinghy with a friend – a clear spring day; the
hottest April in Britain for years. My friend took control of the oars as I
sank back against black rubber, warming my face in the sun. We were the only
people in the water. Soon we were going round in circles. The oars flapped like
broken wings, the current suddenly against us. After ten minutes of spinning in
circles and panicking, my friend regained control and we slunk back towards the
shore. However in the distance, a lifeboat was already sailing towards us, a
noisy helicopter circled overhead.
These were clumsy days. I
grabbed life where I could and fell through its cracks again and again.
Thirty-three and sailing about in dinghies; almost thirty-four years-old and
finally learning how to ride a bicycle again. I flew over the handlebars on the
cycle path along Hove Lawns one bright September morning, the sea to my left,
trapped under a tangle of metal; saved by three old ladies with purple rinses.
To some I was practically middle-aged. But I felt like a toddler with a cut
knee, wailing for my mother.
My vision of life felt crooked, bent out of shape. A part of me couldn't see
the point when all it came down to in the end was one plastic tube, a
ventilating machine and your own flesh and blood too terrified to look you in
the eye. So instead I swam.
There
was nothing more to be done for Mum to try and make her better, no more hoping,
no more reassuring words. The grueling years of listening to her say, "If
only I could just get up and walk to the television set, if I could just drive
to the Post Office, if I could just make myself a sandwich; if I could just
have your father back home again" finally were over.
The
wheelchair stood empty in the back of her bathroom. The hoist now hung limp
above her bed. She was far away in another bedroom, attached to drips and
machines, staring out of a window at robins that hopped about the bird-table
and pansies sprouting up from the ground. Which was the bird and which the
flower, I was never certain she knew.
Losing her speech had left her to a silent fate, a whiteness of language, the
two sides of her brain in eerie silence. She couldn’t ask for anything she
wanted. Maybe I hoped that finally the ghosts had left her.
I do believe that at times
during that summer, Hove seafront saved me. Whether crashing bicycles or adrift
at sea, lifeboat men booming laughter in my direction, there I was in the midst
of life, in the belly of colour, light, sound. Some nights as I cycled home,
I’d hear nothing but my own wheels on the tarmac, the sea stretching out before
me like a beaten sheet of metal – the moon, luminous, wandering.
The ideals of my twenties left me crashing and burning
in my thirties. I’d become so tired of the endless bullshit, the friends who
sharpened their knives, the disappointing lovers. How many men would pass
through my eyes before they’d finally grow dark and tired, before I could no
longer see, before the mechanisms of sex ground to a halt somewhere between my
vulva and my upper ribcage? Before all I wanted became too much, too impossible,
dreaming even higher, craving even more until I was nauseous – an excess of
life in the bloodstream, mainlining experience but unable to deal with its
consequences?
I
didn’t realise it then, but those long summer months of survival down at the
beach, flitting from England to Wales and back again as I visited Mum in
hospital, were the preparation for a major change in my life. My ideals had
swum away; no religion was going to prevent me from being alone, and no lover
either. The only thing that closed the gap inside of me was writing. It was
then that I understood the world again; it presented itself to me in colours. I
staked my game on it, put in all my chips. And it was worth it for those brief
seconds when the sky was luminous again and I was permitted to walk on the
inside of language. I saw my mother lying unmoving before me on her white,
sheeted bed, and by putting pen to paper I could articulate my love for her
more clearly than ever. In those moments I was content.
The
rest was just a ticking clock.
