Underground

by Rosa Müller

My Mother and I were never close.

I put this down primarily to a deep, underlying melancholy that pervaded everything she did. Maybe melancholy isn’t the correct word, because that would imply she didn’t need an audience.

She couldn’t just put something down on a table. She had to put it down with a heavy sigh, or else let it fall, as if the effort of holding it was beyond her.

She was verbose for one so melancholic. My earliest childhood memory is of holding her hand while feeling an unstoppable wave of humiliation pass from my head to tip. She was telling a store clerk one of her stories.

These stories were autobiographical and were entirely fictional, but she was very convincing. Only I would know that she was lying. One of her favourite stories, that she insisted on telling over and over, was that I had been born a twin, and that my counterpart had died shortly after birth.

I would stand beside her, my face beet red, which people thought was with the effort of trying not to cry. Yet for whatever reason, despite my rage and shame, I could never bring myself to confront her properly.

My Mother looked at me in the car rearview mirror, reapplying her lipstick. All the lying had made it fade.

“What?” Smacking her lips together.

“You know what,” I said flatly.

“No, I don’t.” She inspected her teeth. “Anyway. Let’s go home now.”

We spent a lot of time at home. We lived in a basement apartment. It was cold, dark and damp. There were mushrooms growing in my closet. I loved them. I pretended they were part of a complicated fairytale world. I hunched-up beside them and whispered in case my size and volume scared the invisible fairy folk away.

When my Mother discovered the mushrooms she was beside herself. She made us scrub them away with bleach and carbolic soap until our hands were red raw. She heaved the entire time, while I rolled my eyes, ignoring my stinging fingertips.

She blamed the apartment for making her sick. She said the apartment wasn’t fit to be inhabited, and that my Father wasn’t fit as a man for making us live there. Despite claiming the apartment wasn't fit for inhabitation, she spent her whole time there.

Her outings became shorter and further in-between as I grew older. She’d grown tired of regaling strangers with her stories. She regaled me and my Father instead. She had constant aches and pains, shivers, allergies, intolerances, illnesses.

Once, fed up of waiting, she fainted outside the doctor’s surgery into a bush. Nobody seemed to notice that the bush was the only one that had no thorns. They just gave her what she’d wanted all along: an audience.

My Father was a quiet, unassuming man. He sat in the corner and read a newspaper, or else he was at work, or at the pub. He’d found that the path of least resistance with my Mother was the easiest.

“Try not to wind your Mother up,” he told me.

“Mother winds herself up,” I told him.

He shrugged his skinny shoulders into his coat. “I’m going now.”

My Mother and I sat in front of the television while we ate.

“Why can’t we ever do anything fun, like the other kids at school do?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, like anything.”

My Mother’s eyes returned to the television screen. Maybe they’d never even left them. Midway through the show, she clutched her chest dramatically. “Janie, I can’t breathe properly.”

I sighed and laid my fork down. Of course, this current scare was perfectly timed to coincide with the ad break.

She staggered to her feet. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

She wasn’t. The doctor had to be called to verify that. 

“Please come quickly,” I told him, glaring at my Mother who laid before me, studiously pale as a ghost.

“You’re in perfectly good health, Mrs. Miles,” he said. My Mother blinked winningly at him from her mound of pillows. A frail queen reigning over her kingdom of dis-ease.

“Well thank goodness for that,” she said. “I’m so grateful to you for coming out like this.” She laid a hand on his arm and an understanding seemed to pass between them.

“Run out and play, Janie,” she said to me.

She rarely sent me outside to play. Normally she was too worried about the germs I could pick up from the other children. I did as I was told, but unsure of what playing outside actually entailed, I didn’t stay out for long.

I came inside and sat in my bedroom. The light fixture was swinging slightly and I could hear my Mother and the doctor making yucky sounds. I hugged my knees close and wished I still had the mushrooms to talk to. She didn’t seem that concerned about germs, now.

Overall, what ensured that my Mother and I were never close the most was that she made me duplicitous. I was too ashamed to out her for her lies, so I was forced into being an accomplice.

We swelled and shrank within the confines of those damp walls. Sometimes we unwillingly bobbed too close to each other and I would recoil. She counted her pills out and made phone calls and examined herself beneath various bright lights. My Father counted down the hours till he could make his escape.

“Why are you even with her?” I asked him, one evening, in the kitchen. She was in a deep, sedative based sleep, in plain view on the chenille sofa. Or pretending to be. She was wearing a silk kimono which was becoming her daily uniform.

My Father took a fork out. “One or two eggs scrambled?”

“Why are you with her?” I repeated, louder.

“I’ll do two then,” he said.

  I followed him to the door. “Where are you going?” I asked him.

“I have to work.”

I cranked open the narrow slot window, watched his shiny black shoes walk past our apartment on the pavement above.

“You’re a coward,” I shouted in my mind, but instead I crouched lower into our subterranean abode,  hissing to myself like a snake. Then, when his shoes were gone, I shut the window tight again.

Eventually, my Father stopped coming back. He left us for a lady he worked with, who I can only assume was substantially more normal than my Mother. They got married, and had two normal children in quick succession.

At first, I visited him every other weekend, but he seemed to feel so uncomfortable with my presence, and my Mother so vitriolic with my absence. Whenever I came home, she would stage such dramatic illness flare-ups that I stopped bothering to visit him at all. He didn’t mind.

Having a Father became a Memory. I was indifferent, or at least trained myself to be.

Years later, when I would lie easily on the phone at work, to a client, a moment of sick triumph would hang in my chest, because I knew it was from how I’d been raised.

Something upsetting would happen and I would have to do the necessary arrangement of my facial features. “Oh, how awful,” I would parrot the others in the office, wringing my hands.

My Mother never forgave me for moving out and leaving her.

“I don’t know why you don’t just give up and become a normal secretary. Being a legal secretary is obviously not working for you. You’ve constantly temped. What a waste!” My Mother would say, not even hiding the glee in her voice.

I’d look at the carpet. It was wet and I could hear the sound of a leak dripping onto it over and over. She’d continue, “I don’t know why you bothered with those qualifications. Total waste of time and money.”

“You old bitch,” I wanted to say. “What have you done with your life to criticise mine? And look at how you live.” But I didn’t say it.

Eventually, I stopped bothering to visit her at all.

It was a form of self care, I told myself. Every time I did visit her, I left feeling incredibly depressed, both because of her nitpicking and because of the way she lived.

The apartment was now full of medical journals and papers, prescriptions, pill boxes, blood pressure cuffs, various supplements and physio devices. It was cramped with the trappings of poor health. I stood up too quickly at the end of my last visit, felt dizzy and had to sit down again.

She watched, her dark eyes shining like wet raisins. “Are you feeling sick too? Should I take your blood pressure?”

Mute, I let her, but only because I had decided that I wouldn’t ever be coming back. When she realised I’d stopped coming, she harangued me with constant phone calls. All times of the day and night.

“Yes mum?” I’d croak into the phone, half asleep.

  “Quickly, Janie. Write these readings down. 120 over-”

I would shut my eyes, roll over and wait for her to finish.

My Mother phoned me so very many times in crisis that I missed the signs of actual crisis.

I started avoiding her calls and eventually her sister, my Aunt Mel, called to say that she had died. Aunt Mel lived a few towns over but may as well have lived on the moon.

She told me that my Mother had a stroke, had fallen, hit her head, and laid underground alone for days. The only reason she’d been found was because a neighbourhood dog had started going crazy whenever it was walked past the half open window.

If it weren’t for the dog, she may well still be there, but it was too late.

“How can I ever forgive myself?” I said, my lips moving as if they were a totally isolated part of my face. Aunt Mel and I arranged to meet at the apartment, to sort through things and make arrangements.

The apartment was even smaller and darker than I remembered. The door creaked open, bringing with it the smell of decades of damp. Aunt Mel exhaled. “Wooooh. This is going to take some sorting out; I don’t envy you.”

I felt attacked. As if she was implying things had gotten so bad because I was remiss in my daughterly duties, should have visited my mother more, should have ensured that things hadn’t gotten so bad.

I let my unspoken words lie in my throat. And where were you Aunt Mel? Where was anyone? She was your sister and I was your niece. But you let us live like this, same us everybody else did, in this underground apartment of disarray and disease.

“She was crazy,” I said, instead, looking around at all the stuff. Piled floor to ceiling. All the prescriptions, all the pill packets, the helping hand grabber sticks, the crutches, the medical journals, the memory aids, the blankets, the hot water bottles.

All the detritus of her, so determinedly convinced that she was ill, that she’d made herself ill.

Things had gotten so bad. I’d let them get so bad but so had everybody else. But no one knew her. No one knew how impossible she was to live with.

My throat felt hot and tight and I couldn’t find a clean glass to get a drink of water. I wasn’t sure I trusted the taps, but just to check, I turned one on anyway. After a moment’s consideration, the water spurted out, red with rust.

“She was a nightmare to live with. All that crap she came out with all the time. Do you know she used to tell people I was a twin?” I said, idly sorting through some papers. There was a “throw away,” “possibly keep,” and a “God knows” pile.

Aunt Mel’s plump face suddenly became less affable. She laid a hand on mine. “Oh Honey. I don’t know how to tell you this but- “

I shrunk from the physical contact.

She went away and came back, held out a blue blanket for me to look at. It had initials that weren’t mine embroidered in the corner, and the baby soft fabric was stained with what could only be mascara from hundreds of tears.

“She wasn’t lying, Janie. Not about that.”

I clutched the blanket and couldn’t bring myself to look back at her. I looked at the initials instead. M for our last name, but C instead of a J. I looked at them so hard they blurred.

Then I blinked hard - once, twice, and before I could get ahold of myself, I was face deep in the blanket, which smelt like talcum, adding my own set of stains.