Dying for Cake, page 6
For a moment she thought of cutting a slice, or a slab even, icing it and wolfing it down. No one need ever know. But she was strong. Besides, licking the batter had satiated her appetite and the desire was gone. She wondered how many points were in cake batter. Then she resolved not to bother counting points during moonlight baking sessions. She wrapped the cake tightly in Glad wrap and wrote Hummingbird Cake — March 30 on a sticky label. She looked at the clock again and rubbed out the 0 and changed it to 1. Then she wrapped the whole cake in foil and wedged it in the deep-freezer, somewhere between the pumpkin syrup cake she’d made last week and the mud cake she’d made at the end of February, after Amy disappeared. She put the icing in one of her last remaining Tupperware containers of an appropriate size, shoved it in the freezer and went back to bed.
She snuggled naked next to Tom’s warm body and closed her eyes. The house was still full of the smell of cake. That was how she liked it. Sleep drifted towards her, carried in the aroma of the hummingbird cake, and she cut herself a slice at last and closed her eyes.
VISITORS
I sit in the front of my car biting my thumbnail down to the quick and staring at the concrete greyness that surrounds me. What am I going to say to her now that I am here? I came ready to shame her for her treatment of William, of Steve, and even of me, but now I am actually outside the hospital my bravado has disappeared. In the back of my mind, I hear my mother’s voice, ‘Clare, don’t be so inconsiderate! After all the poor girl’s gone through, show a bit of sympathy. Please!’
I wish my mother was still alive. She would know how to handle Evelyn. She would cajole and soothe and comfort. And I would watch with jealous pouting lips, just as I used to do when we were children, when Evelyn seemed to be stealing the maternal affection that rightfully belonged to me.
Back then, Evelyn would come into our house, complaining of some little scrape or cut or some petty injustice I had done to her, and my mother would enfold her in her arms. Mum was never too busy or too tired for Evelyn. Mum would hold Evelyn when she cried and never even mind that Evelyn’s nose was running and had left little snotty trails on her best dress. And when Evelyn was finished weeping, and happily sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of sugary tea, Mother would come and cup her hands around my face. ‘Why such a sad sack, Clare? You’ve got no reason to feel so miserable. No reason at all.’
I sigh over my recollections, and as I reach under the seat for my handbag, I feel the guilt creep through me again. As a child I always felt so damn guilty around Evelyn. Guilty when I didn’t want to play with her and Mum had to insist, guilty when I refused to walk with her to school, guilty when I opened presents on my birthday in front of her.
On my sixth birthday, Mum and Dad gave me a beautiful Cry Baby Sue doll with sky blue eyes that really closed and curly blonde hair you could brush. If you fed her from her special bottle, she cried real tears. I carted her around with me all day and put her carefully back in her box before I went to bed. When I got up the next morning she was gone. We looked everywhere for that doll but we never found it. I knew that it was Evelyn who took it. Out of jealousy? Out of spite? She never owned up to it and Mum, out of kindness, never forced her confession. On my seventh birthday, Mum bought me a Sweetheart Barbie doll and gave Evelyn another one, exactly the same.
Well, I decide, clutching the handle of the car door, perhaps it is time Evelyn shouldered some guilt. She can’t just do God knows what with her baby girl, dump William on me and retreat into some form of psychosis. She just can’t get away with it any more. For the first time in my life I admit to myself that I actually don’t want to be ‘nice’ like my mother. Sorry Mum, but we’ve all suffered too much for the sake of Evelyn’s disturbed childhood. To hell with guilt! I take a deep breath and open the car door. It is time to face her. I want to break her and I decide that the best way to do that is to confront her about her responsibilities to her son.
I walk into the ward and register my name at the desk. It’s a secure ward and the nurse accompanies me down the white-walled corridor. The whiteness of the space makes me feel uneasy. Like an empty canvas, the space is soulless, a backdrop for whatever raw emotion is projected onto it — fear, dread, anger, hate. The nurse smiles thinly and lets me inside Evelyn’s room.
She is sitting in the corner in her lilac nightdress, her face pale and sunken. Her wiry auburn hair cascades down her shoulders. If I were to paint her hair, I would use a blend of magenta and a touch of cadmium yellow. For a moment she seems to register my face and her emerald green eyes stare at me, but then her gaze recedes, turns inwards and her eyes become as lifeless as two small stones.
‘Hello, Evelyn,’ I say in a lighthearted voice as if nothing at all has happened. I sit down and pull my chair closer to hers.
‘I thought that I’d come and chat to you about William. It’s been a while since you’ve seen him and you must be wondering …’ She is watching me. She is watching my mouth open and close, but is she hearing what I am saying?
‘Tomorrow I am going to take William and Sophie to the museum. William told me that he’s never been there before. I wonder why you’ve never taken him. Sophie just loves the place!’
Evelyn turns her head away and looks out the window, but I see that her fists are clenched and her knuckles are white and I am motivated to continue my monologue in the hope that some of what I say will permeate her thoughts.
‘Of course, I suppose you have your reasons for not taking him to the museum, and maybe I should try and work out what those reasons might be. Perhaps you’d like to tell me? You could save me some trouble …
‘Well then, I’ll take your silence as acquiescence. I thought we’d go early in the morning. There will be less of a crowd.’ I keep rambling because there is something flickering in the corner of her eye. I hear my mother’s words again, playing on my conscience. ‘Clare, how can you be so cruel?’ Shut up, Mum! It’s not only Evelyn who’s hurting now.
‘After we go to the museum we might do a bit of shopping. Steve gave me some money to buy William a few new pairs of track pants. Last year’s ones are far too short. He’s grown half an inch in less than three months — since you’ve been here. Steve measured him the other day, against the door frame in your kitchen. He’s big for his age, isn’t he?’
Of course Evelyn does not respond. I can see, however, that she hears at least some of what I say because she begins rubbing her clenched fists up and down her thighs.
‘He might be tall but he’s still only five. He really misses you, Evelyn. He cries at night. During the day he’s quiet. Sophie bosses him around a lot and he never complains. But when he’s sleeping over with us, and I walk past his room, I can hear him sobbing. It’s too much for him to bear, Evelyn. He misses you and he misses Amy too. If only you could tell us where she is.’
She is biting her lip now and rocking back and forth in her chair, her fists still clenched and her eyes still staring out the window.
‘Of course, you of all people should know what missing someone is like. How old were you when …?’
She looks at me. Stares at me with cold, hard emerald eyes and puts her hands over her ears so that she can’t hear any more. All the time she is rocking back and forth in her chair and I can hear a strange high-pitched whine, not really a human noise, more like the soft drone of an insect. Where is the noise coming from? I look along the window ledge to see if there’s a bug trapped inside, trying to get out, but there is nothing. I search Evelyn’s face which is blank and expressionless now and I realise that Evelyn is making the noise herself, behind her teeth.
Clare is here. In the room. Sitting on the green vinyl chair where Steve sits when he comes. She talks. Am I listening? Sometimes I hear words among words. These words are not mine. They are not the ones I seize and squash as they float through my mind like bits of refuse on a still sea. The words belong to Clare. She expects me to listen as I used to do. She talks to my face like she used to do and she doesn’t see that I am not inside my green eyes. I am behind her, hanging suspended into nothingness. I am the fly with the brittle wings trapped in the web behind her head. I am motionless and the blood is dried up inside me. Soon I will break, piece by piece, into the air and make dust on the floor because the spider that meant to eat me couldn’t be bothered. The dust will be wiped up by the cleaning lady with the pink socks and the dirty fingernails. Tomorrow.
Tomorrow. What is it that Clare is saying about tomorrow? She is talking about William. My son. How strange that a fly who is brittle and bloodless should have a son. A son made of flesh and blood. She is taking William to the museum tomorrow. The museum. The words make me want to pull away the threads that bind me and fly into her face. Not the museum. Don’t take my flesh and blood child to that place of dried skins stretched over bones. He might as well come and see me here. But I don’t want that either. That is why I’ve left him with you. You are someone who is alive.
Clare sees that I have come back into my old body. She sees that I am in front of her now and she keeps on talking about William. She tortures me more than my analyst, and her words punch my ears.
Big. She says he is big. The moment he turned five he was bigger than me. How could I mother him after he turned five? My mother went away when I was four and I haven’t had a birthday since then.
Missing. This word bothers me. Who is it that is missing? I am missing. That is true. I am not where they come to find me. I am suspended in the spider webs that hang from the ceiling. Some days I am a fly. Some days I am a beetle. Some days I am a moth. I am never the spider. That is someone else.
Missing. What? William is not missing. He is with you. Remember? He is with you so that he can keep on growing. He can grow past me now that he is with you. I never knew how to take him any further. And Steve was always too busy. Like my own father. Too busy to bother.
Missing. The word continues to fire. Missing me. Of course William is missing me but please don’t bring him here. The person he is missing is not here, and William would not recognise the fly or the beetle or the moth. He would not love the insects I’ve become. He will love you. In time, Clare, he will love you. And, when he does, there will be no need for me even to be an insect on the wall. And you will love him too. Just like you love Sophie. You will be his mother then. You will be a good mother just like your mother was.
Missing. The baby is missing, you say? What baby? I don’t have a baby any more. She is gone. Please go. You are hurting my head. You are making it ache and the sounds you make keep coming even when your mouth is shut. The sounds spin inside my head and spike through rememberings I buried long ago. Rememberings of Mother. I do not want to remember Mother. I must not remember the day she went missing …
Missing. The day has been full of sun and cicadas. Mother gives me a plate full of snacks — Iced VoVo’s, watermelon, devon sandwiches — and I sit by the letterbox and wait for my father. I eat my food and wait. I make a fairy house out of a ring of pebbles on the concrete path and I wait. Daddy doesn’t come. The sun bleeds into the clouds and I am tired of waiting. I look in the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom but she is …
Missing. I cannot find her grey shape anywhere in the dark house. I have tears in my eyes and I run. I run down the back steps. The paling door to the laundry under the house is locked but I know where the dog squeezes through. It is dark under the house. It is dark and spidery but, in the darkness, I can just make out the grey shape of Mother. She is hanging. She is hanging on her own thread from the beams under the house. She is a spider. I touch her shoe and it falls off. Her foot is still warm. I pick up the shoe and squeeze under the palings and I run.
I run to the rose garden and I break all Mother’s rosebushes with her own shoe. I break the green stems. I pull off the leaves until my hands are full of thorns. When Clare’s mother sees me standing in the rose bed, destroying the flowers, she jumps the fence and runs to me. I am covered in blood and dirt and spider web but Clare’s mother holds me close. She takes me home and gives me a bath. Only the dirt and the blood ever washes off.
Stop! Stop! I know who is missing. You are torturing me. How I hate you. Right at this moment I hate you. I do not want to feel any more. I am tired. I am going back to the web. I will thrash until the threads are wrapped around me again. You might as well leave. You can stay and sit if you like, but my visit is over and it is lonely when you are the only visitor in the room.
I walk out of the hospital doors into the golden winter sunlight, and I can’t shake that strange insect noise that is droning in my ears. I get back into my car and turn the radio on. Classical music floods the car and the insect noise is drowned out by more melodic sounds. I can’t help feeling a small sense of accomplishment because both she and I know that I almost dragged her back today.
When I started talking about William, I caught her off guard. She came back into her face for an instant and I knew that she heard some of what I said. Her doctor has told us that we mustn’t upset her too much. He says that as Evelyn recovers from the shock and stress of whatever has happened, and her medication is adjusted, she will come back to us. She will get better. It will just take time. Until then she must have peace and quiet and calm. Well, what about Amy? What about William? That little boy cries himself to sleep every night and Steve is so wrapped up in his own self-pity that he’s totally useless. Useless.
I merge onto the overpass with all the traffic and I think to myself that I can get through to her. I can shake it out of her and find out what happened to Amy. Everyone assumes that Evelyn killed her. The ultimate crime. The bad mad mother, consumed by depression, disposes of her newborn child and then conveniently forgets that she ever had her. Well, I won’t let Evelyn escape that easily. I don’t think Evelyn killed Amy, although for some reason she’d like us to think she did.
William needs a mother who’s not locked up in an institution. No one can replace Evelyn in his eyes. I should think that, of all people, Evelyn would know that. If Evelyn continues her bizarre behaviour, however, a psychiatric institution is precisely where she will stay. Even if the police find enough evidence to charge her, she won’t be fit to stand trial. She will stay in that psychiatric hospital until we forget she’s in there. Until we all stop visiting. Until we just let her go. That’s what she wants.
She wants to be left alone. She wants me to raise her child for her. As if I was somehow stronger, more competent, more loving, less exhausted than she. I’m making a mess of it in my own way. No matter what I do, Sophie will grow up slightly damaged because I was too neurotic, too controlling, too cold. But that’s not the point, is it? At least I’m doing it. I’m raising my own child. That has to count for something.
God, I need a strong pot of tea. I won’t go home yet. It’s not quite time to pick up Sophie and William. I think I’ll stop at one of those cafes in Rosalie and order a pot of orange pekoe. Maybe I’ll splurge and have a piece of cake too. I feel like I need some comforting. It’s been traumatic seeing Evelyn again. I wish I could extract her from my life. We are hopelessly entangled, Evelyn and I. I know too much of her past and too little of what goes on inside her head.
I get out of my car at Les Gateaux Grands. Strange, isn’t it, that a piece of cake and a cup of tea can be so comforting? Chocolate, oysters, smoked salmon, all those things quicken your desire. But cake? Cake makes you forget. It satiates. Maybe that’s what Marie Antoinette meant when she said to the starving peasants, ‘Let them eat cake.’ She knew, you see, as only a woman can, the power of a piece of cake and a cup of tea.
CLEANING OUT THE COBWEB
Thursday 2 May
10.30 p.m. — CAN’T SLEEP. Writing it all down to try to make some sense of it.
4.00 p.m., last Friday (26 April)
BEG Wendy to let me have the key to clean the Easterns’ house while Steve’s away for the weekend. Wendy says, ‘Don’t bother!’ (Steve doesn’t care about house.) INSIST. Argue that state of place is bad for William’s physical and emotional health. (Argument appeals to her sense of hygiene as a nurse. So she gives me the key.)
Wendy says, ‘Susan. It’s really good of you to want to help Steve but don’t expect him to show any gratitude.’ SMILE benignly and leave with key. Couldn’t give a FIG about Steve. Never liked him. A vain slob when Evelyn was home. Even worse now. Spends most nights sobbing at pub counter while being plied with rum and Cokes by dubious-looking female person. (Behaviour witnessed by Richard, after work, at 6.30 p.m. on Friday 22 March. Have told Richard that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES is he ever to buy Steve a drink.) Can’t abide weakness or stupidity in anyone. Steve obviously thinks he can afford to be spineless and idiotic because he’s got Clare to look after his son.
Saturday 27 April
Clean Steve and Evelyn Eastern’s house. (Not to be interpreted as act of Good Samaritan but as act of HYGIENE FANATIC OBSESSED by recurring nightmare.)
RECURRING NIGHTMARE = Me, Susan, trapped inside the stifling atmosphere of the Easterns’ house. Surrounded by discarded objects, food scraps, life’s general refuse. Frantically looking for something. What? Not her. It ought to be. What I’m looking for is an old English literature assignment I did for EN271 at university eighteen years ago. God knows why my final paper is at the Easterns’ but I’m filled with dread that if I don’t find that assignment I’ll fail the subject. Of course, I never failed anything at university.
