Mice

33

On the surface, Mum seemed to be making an excellent recovery too. Her eye healed up quickly and she was delighted when she didn’t have to wear make-up to work any more to camouflage the bruising.

She carried on in the office as if nothing had happened; she settled several small claims and even won a case that unexpectedly went to trial. This win gave her an enormous amount of pleasure, partly because the circumstances of the accident — a fall on some stairs in a restaurant — had been difficult to prove, but mainly because the losing defendant, the Love Shack Rib House, was represented by Everson’s, her old employer. It was the closest she’d ever come to scoring a victory over Dad and she was absolutely ecstatic about it.

But there were signs that, behind the facade, Mum wasn’t finding things anywhere near as easy as she made out.

The sleeping pills that cured my insomnia had little effect on Mum’s. Although she still went up to bed at around eleven, she was rarely able to fall asleep. She tossed and turned for hours, but sleep evaded her desperate pursuit. Eventually, unable to bear the futility of it any more, she’d get up and go downstairs. I often heard the sound of the television drifting faintly up the stairwell when I got up to go to the bathroom in the night, as she whiled away the long sleepless hours. For someone like Mum, insomnia was the worst type of problem she could face because it couldn’t be solved intellectually: the harder you try to sleep, the less likely you are to sleep. She tried to out-think it instead of just not thinking about it at all. And so the insomnia utterly defeated her.

She’d go back up to bed around three o’clock in the morning and finally succeed in falling asleep as dawn was breaking. When her alarm beeped urgently an hour later, she’d wake up more exhausted than if she’d had no sleep at all. At breakfast her eyes would be puffy and watery, her face pale, her brow furrowed — a furrow that didn’t disappear even when she smiled. I’d ask if she’d slept badly again and she’d just shrug it off. ‘It’ll pass,’ she’d say, ‘it’ll pass,’ or else she’d quote a line from Dorothy Parker — ‘How do people sleep? I seem to have lost the knack.’ But she didn’t want to talk about it, and if I kept on, she’d quickly grow short-tempered and snappy.

Mum drank every night now, something she never used to do. Often the very first thing she did when she got in from work was to pour herself a glass of wine, before she’d even taken off her jacket or kicked off her shoes. I don’t think she drank because she liked it. She drank, at first, to anaesthetize herself. The wine dispelled the demons that were haunting her, or at least rendered them more manageable. After all, she was the one who had actually killed Paul Hannigan with that second deadly blow of the chopping board; she was the one who had dug up his corpse and searched through his blood-soaked pockets. Later on, I think she drank in the hope that the alcohol would bring her the undisturbed night’s rest she craved so much; and which, of course, that false friend never did.

While I’d gone back to playing my flute almost immediately after that night, Mum wouldn’t touch the piano. When I asked her to play a duet with me now, she always had an excuse — she was too tired or she had too much work to do. But I knew full well what the truth was. I knew she avoided going near the piano for exactly the same reason that I avoided going near the oval rose bed. (Was The Gypsy Wedding still playing in her head when Paul Hannigan marched us down the stairs?)

Mum became obsessed with security, and regularly came home with new locks that she’d bought in the hardware shop in town. She installed two new heavyduty chains on the front door and two on the back, and put sturdy locks on her bedroom door and mine. She bought a decoy alarm system (the packet boasted that a burglar won’t be able to tell the difference), since the real thing was prohibitively expensive, and fitted it in a prominent position at the front of the house. She bought clever clip-on locks for every window, as she’d concluded that Paul Hannigan had probably got in by forcing the one in the downstairs toilet.

I watched her going up and down the stairs with her screwdriver, climbing up and down the stepladder outside the front door, and managed not to say what I was thinking: The lock hasn’t been invented that can keep our own fears out.

But the most worrying change I noticed in Mum was in her relationship with Graham Blakely. When she talked about her run-ins with him now, she appeared less the victim and more an equal and willing belligerent in their office wars. She backed down less readily when he lost his temper with her, and — to Brenda and Sally’s amazement — often gave as good as she got in their exchanges. If this had been all, I wouldn’t have been concerned. I was sick and tired of hearing about how this office Hitler intimidated her. But it was more than just standing up for herself. Ever since she’d had that first row with him on my birthday, it was as if Mum had actually begun to relish her confrontations with Blakely. Sometimes it seemed to me that she actually went out of her way to provoke them. And if she got the better of him in an altercation, she would recount it with breathless enthusiasm over dinner, her hands swooping wildly around her as if they had a life of their own, brushing blindly against her glass and threatening to knock it to the floor.

One night during dinner we were playing highs and lows when Mum, with an anticipatory giggle, announced that her high that day had been slapping Blakely’s face.

‘You did what?’ I asked incredulously.

‘I slapped Blakely’s face!’ she repeated with a selfsatisfied grin, like a child who’s proud of a naughty prank.

‘What — what happened?’

‘Well,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as if it were just another piece of office gossip, ‘he came into my office when he saw that I was on my own and started to talk to me about holiday dates for August. As we were talking he came round behind my chair and I thought he was going to touch my breast. I didn’t even think about it, I just hit him hard across his cheek!’

‘Mum! Did anyone see?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Nothing! Nothing at all. He just walked out holding his cheek. You should have seen the look on his face!’

I didn’t know what to say. The recollection clearly exhilarated her. She couldn’t stop talking about it, bursting into laughter every time she remembered the look on Blakely’s face.

‘He didn’t say a word!’ she cried. ‘He couldn’t believe it! He was in total shock! It was the last thing he expected me to do!’

I laughed along with her as best I could, but there was something about the whole thing that I found deeply disturbing; it left me feeling unsettled for days afterwards. Mum had always been the calm hand on the tiller and I didn’t want her to change. This new recklessness of hers scared me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow her into the uncharted waters she seemed set on exploring. I was worried that in this mood she’d say something in front of Sally and Brenda that could be our undoing. And it irked me that after everything that had happened I’d managed to find some balance, some equilibrium — so why the hell couldn’t she?