Tummy Butterflies
Like the story of life itself, this tale begins with a small, pale circle.
I was living alone in a tenement flat in the West End of Glasgow. The flat had a spare room, a dining table, a piano, and the Internet. I’d started renting it after breaking up with James. James had helped me move in – we carried in the furniture, had sex on the carpet, then I bought him a pint and we went our separate ways.
Mum used to love driving up from England to visit me here.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, arriving at my front door one afternoon. ‘Traffic was terrible.’ She put down her things and we went into the living room.
‘Look at you,’ Mum marvelled.
I’d been going to the gym a lot lately, and was getting pretty toned. Dad had been diagnosed with cancer two months ago, and since then I’d been hitting the gym at least once – sometimes twice – a day. Mainly because I found it almost impossible to cry on a treadmill.
Mum, it transpired, had been exercising a lot too. ‘Let’s compare bodies,’ she suggested, so I closed the curtains and we stripped to our underwear.
Using the tape measure from my sewing kit, we checked our thighs, our waists, our arms, and our breasts. Mum had brought a special machine with her, which calculated how much fat you had. It turned out our bodies were almost identical.
We rubbed fake tan into each other’s skin and dressed ourselves.
After that we took a walk in the West End. We went to delis and boutiques, and Mum sighed over cappuccino, saying how much she’d love to live in a place like this, in a flat like mine, with a life like mine.
That evening, she grabbed her phone and announced that she was going for a walk. An hour later she returned with a bottle of wine. ‘Okay if I check my emails?’
She took my laptop, and the wine, into the spare room and closed the door.
In the morning, she called me to her room. ‘Look at this.’ She was holding out her palm. In it was a small, pale circle.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Contraception,’ she said. ‘Stops the sperm getting to the egg. Touch it.’
‘Um. No thanks.’ I went to make breakfast.
*
When Mum left that afternoon, I looked at my Internet history. Sites visited: Gmail (once); thetrainline (twice); and something called Tummy Butterflies (multiple times).
I typed tummy butterflies into the search bar, and was automatically redirected to a new site: www.illicitencounters.com.
‘Married but Feeling neglected?’ it said, capital ‘F’ for feeling. ‘In need of excitement? A discreet and confidential extra-marital dating service for women and men...’
After several minutes of searching, I could see that there were over 300 people registered on the site who lived in Buckinghamshire alone. The same phrases appeared again and again.
Discretion is a must.
Mornings are best for me.
Since we had the kids, the spark has gone.
I like socialising.
I have no intention of leaving my partner.
And their pictures; half of them with heads missing, just torsos and limbs.
I could see that my mum had been chatting to a guy called KristianB. I searched for his profile. Hertfordshire, two kids. ‘My marriage is perfect in every way except that the physical side has fizzled out. I enjoy going to the gym and drinking wine.’
Sitting at the dining table, I picked up my phone. Three missed calls before I got through.
‘I’ve pulled in at a service station. What is it, love?’
‘I’ve checked my computer,’ I said. ‘I know what you were doing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve seen that website.’
She hung up.
Half an hour later, she phoned back. ‘I can’t believe you’ve been spying on me!’ she shouted. ‘Anyway, it’s my life, and I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not like I’m meeting these people. Just chatting. I get lonely. I haven’t done anything wrong.’
She hung up again.
*
A birthday tea was being prepared: sandwiches, crisps, jelly and ice-cream. My sister was turning twenty-five. Her mental health was deteriorating rapidly. She had quit her job at the university, and, after one suicide attempt too many, had been taken into psychiatric hospital. The hospital had agreed to let her come home for her birthday, so Grandma and Granddad had driven down from Manchester, and everyone was going out of their way to make it the perfect day.
Before tea, Dad asked if I fancied a walk.
‘Shall we all go?’ Mum asked brightly.
‘I quite fancy just going with my Annie,’ Dad said, and I glowed with love.
As we left the driveway and walked along the roadside, Dad stayed quiet. After just minutes of strolling, he was out of breath.
‘I’ve finally finished writing my novel,’ I told him.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’d love it if you could read it.’
He stopped for a moment to rest. ‘My PSA levels are getting worse.’
I stopped too. ‘I thought they were stable.’
‘I’m afraid they’re rising again. The doctors have told me-’
‘Told you what?’
‘That if I don’t start chemo, I’ve got about ten weeks left.’
He started walking again.
I used every ounce of energy I had to follow him. I’ll allow myself the biggest crying fit I’ve ever had later on, I thought. As soon as I’m on my own, I’ll cry until my insides fall out.
A little further up the road, we stopped again. ‘Let’s rest here.’ Dad took a cigar out of his jacket pocket and I sat on the fence beside him.
I looked out over the fields, at the leaves beginning to reappear on the trees.
‘Can you keep a secret?’ Dad asked suddenly.
My heart fluttered.
‘I’m not talking about a little secret,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about something big. So big that you can never tell anyone about it. Not even Simon.’ Simon was my new boyfriend. ‘And not your Grandma or Granddad, your sister, or anyone.’
‘Er, I don’t know, Dad.’
‘Promise me.’
I looked down at my legs as they hit against the fence. One… two… three… ‘Okay. I promise.’
‘It’s your mum,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid she’s mentally ill.’
‘What?’
‘She thinks she’s deleted her emails, but I understand things about computers she never will.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She had an affair.’
I instantly remembered KristianB, the guy with the ‘perfect marriage’, who liked drinking wine and going to the gym.
‘That’s over now,’ Dad continued, ‘but since she broke up with him she’s been having sex with other people. Lots of other people. She’s been going to… clubs,’ he told me, ‘doing things that are barely legal. I’m worried she’s going to get in trouble with the police.’ He took several long drags on his cigar. ‘I want you to promise to look after her when I die.’
I looked down at my dad, at his thinning hair, and his scalp smeared with a thick layer of sweat. I knew that there was once a time, a long stretch of time, when he was the one cheating on my mum. When he two and even three-timed her, when he abandoned her before their wedding day, when he had affairs while my sister and I were babies. I also knew that my mum had remained completely faithful to him that whole time. And that, although my dad couldn’t see it, he had, in some way, driven her to this.
I slid off the fence and held him tight. I heard him take another drag of his cigar behind my back.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said when I pulled away. ‘I’ve started taking antidepressants. They’re magic.’
I felt a stabbing pain in my gut.
‘Do you promise?’ he asked.
‘Promise what?’
‘That you’ll look after her.’
‘I don’t know. Yes. I’ll try.’
‘Okay. We’ve got to go back now.’
I’d almost forgotten: my sister’s birthday tea.
‘When we get back,’ he told me, ‘you’re not going to say a word about this. You’re going to go in there and you’re going to give your mum the biggest hug in the world.’ He looked into my eyes. ‘I know you’re a good actress, Annie,’ he said. ‘Well you’re about to do the best performance of your life.’
*
The howl that I gave in the garden that evening was a howl that shook my bones; that shook the earth beneath my feet; and that shook the whole world I had known up to that very point in my existence.
*
‘Your mum’s got a designer vagina,’ Dad announced, late one night over the phone.
I was shaking, but couldn’t seem to hang up.
‘She’s had her labia chopped off.’
‘Please, Dad, I-’
‘She’s a slut, your mum. A slut.’
‘Dad, are you on your own? What are you doing?’
He was quiet for a moment, then I heard him exhale: a cigar. All his pauses were filled with smoke these days. ‘I’m at home. Graham’s here.’ Graham worked for my dad, and the call of duty often extended outside of office hours.
‘Okay. That’s good. You’re not still drinking, are you?’ I wasn’t sure Dad should be drinking anything during the chemo, let alone getting into this state.
‘No, no. We’ve stopped now. Graham’s made me a cup of tea.’
‘Good. How long is he staying?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve thrown your mum’s dildos onto the front lawn.’
I pictured an army of thick, veiny rods of purple and pink, raining down onto the grass from the bedroom window, shuddering and squirming as they hit the ground, then sputtering out, still and glistening, like chrysalises in the moonlight.
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about your mum,’ Dad growled.
And there’s a lot I do, I thought.
*
‘What-t-t-t?’ my sister finally answered her phone, after several missed calls. ‘I can’t really talk right now, Annie.’
‘I’m just missing you,’ I said, trying not to let her hear my tears. ‘Wanted to see how you are. Fancied a chat. How’s hospital? Spoken to Mum or Dad recently?’
‘This isn’t a good time.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve run away,’ she said. Her teeth were chattering.
‘Where are you?’
She hung up.
I sat on the small IKEA table by the window and looked out onto the street. I was living in a horrible flat now. No dining table, no piano, no spare room, no Internet. It was the only way I could afford to keep buying train tickets home to see Dad. My eyes re-focused from the darkness outside to the shape of my reflection in the glass. I was a mess.
I tried calling my sister again. No reply. And again. No reply. Then– ‘I don’t know where I am, Annie. I’ve been walking for hours. My phone’s about to run out of battery.’
‘Well… are you near any landmarks? What can you see?’
‘Why should I tell you?’
‘Please, just tell me what you can see.’
‘I can’t see anything. It’s dark. It’s snowing. I’m cold.’
‘Find a road sign. Are you near a road?’
‘I’m going to sit in the ditch until I die.’
She hung up.
I phoned my mum. ‘Oh for God’s sake. I’m trying to have a nice dinner with Fern. Why does she always do this to me?’
‘What should I do, Mum?’
‘I don’t know. I’m at my wit’s end. I’m exhausted. I’ve run out of ideas.’
Another hang-up.
Minutes later, my sister called back. ‘It says Aldbury,’ she says. ‘I found a sign. My phone’s about to run out. I’m going to sit in a ditch now.’
I phoned the psychiatric hospital, who hadn’t even noticed she was missing, so I called the police. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,’ they told me. ‘Sounds like she’s crossed the border into the next county. Not our area. You’ll have to phone the Hertfordshire police.’ So I did.
*
Dad had been texting me all night.
Have you heard from Mum?
02.20
No.
02.20
She’s gone out, probably shagging.
02.21
Maybe she’s at Fern’s.
Try and get some sleep.
02.21
I’ve emptied the wardrobe of all
her things. I’ve chucked them out
of the back door.
03.20
Dad, I’m worried about you.
Please look after yourself.
03.21
Dad, are you okay?
03.40
Dad? xxx
03.45
Did you know James was another
of your Mum’s conquests?
04.21
I called him straight away. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your mum slept with James while you were in America.’
‘No she didn’t.’
‘I’ve read her emails, Annie.’
‘What did they say?’
‘That time she came up to your flat while you were in America. She took him to a French restaurant.’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, love.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘She’s not well.’
‘Dad.’
‘She’s mentally ill.’
‘No, Dad.’
‘And that time she came to your flat and she was late. She shagged some guy in a motel on the way up.’
‘Dad, I can’t talk about this. I have to go. Please get some sleep. I have to switch my phone off now.’
I hung up, then jumped onto my bed and stood on the mattress. She didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t, I muttered, over and over again, until I finally collapsed.
*
‘Dad’s chemo has gone so well he might live for another two years,’ Mum told me.
The doctor had signed me off my studies for six weeks. I’d discussed Dad’s accusation with Mum, who said it was all lies, and I’d even phoned James, who was now teaching English in South Korea, and he said it was all lies too. Mum told me not to trust everything my dad said to me. He’s desperate, she told me. He’s paranoid. She thought the cancer must have spread to Dad’s brain.
At the doctor’s advice, I’d imposed a curfew on my parents: I switched off my phone between the hours of 9pm and 9am. And I’d been prescribed diazepam: one tablet per phone call, or two per day during visits home.
‘Obviously I don’t want him to die,’ Mum said, ‘but I don’t know if I can cope with this for another two years.’
I told her that that I didn’t know if I could either.
‘He’s told everyone at the pub I’ve been having affairs.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘And he’s ordered a load of Viagra off the Internet,’ she added. ‘Says if I don’t have sex with him he’ll divorce me.’
I reached for my diazepam.
*
‘I think your dad’s going to kill me,’ Mum confided in me one evening. ‘We’re going on holiday to Spain, to a remote town full of winding roads, and I think he’s going to drive us both off a cliff.’
But Dad didn’t kill her. While they were on holiday, Dad’s younger brother died of MS, and he spent most of the holiday on the phone to me, crying. When they got back, Mum moved into the spare room at Dad’s request. But without Mum there, Dad found it harder than ever to sleep. Sometimes, Mum told me, he would take a pillow into the porch, and lie on the phone to the Samaritans until the early hours. Other times, when he came back from the pub and was too drunk to find his house key, he’d sleep on the patio under the stars, shivering on the slabs until he fell asleep.
*
‘They’re going to let me try chemo one last time,’ Dad told me, after an unexpectedly fast drop in his PSA levels.
Mum had moved back into the main bedroom, but Dad couldn’t get upstairs anymore. He was sleeping in his office; the local hospital had lent us a bed. It seemed fitting, somehow, that Dad now lived in a room surrounded by computers: the machines he could always rely on.
For the last few months, Dad had been referring to his secretary, Joanne, as his ‘girlfriend’. He’d taken her and her 5-year-old son on holiday to Lapland two weeks before Christmas. My sister and I had been on that very same trip with him when we were that age. But recently, the ‘relationship’ with Joanne had been reduced to a series of text messages. Dad was working from home most of the time now, as he wasn’t well enough to drive into work. Sometimes he wasn’t well enough to do any work at all.
Mum, on the other hand, swore she had stopped having affairs. Actually it seemed plausible, since most of her time was taken up looking after Dad and my sister. My sister was out of hospital more than she was in it these days, though she still needed constant attention, and Dad had to wear nappies and surgical stockings, because his legs and feet were so full of fluid. His face had swollen up too, with the steroids, and he was using a Zimmer frame to walk even the most meagre of distances.
‘It’ll be a different chemical for the chemo this time,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve read the list of side effects. It might make the whites of my eyes turn blue. How cool is that?’
*
Two days after Dad’s chemo session, Mum called me. ‘You should probably come home for a visit soon, love.’ I’d imagined this conversation to myself so many times before that hearing it now was like a déjà vu.
I sat on the edge of my bed and grabbed a fistful of duvet. ‘Should I come now? What sort of ticket should I get? An open return?’
‘Your dad’s barely sleeping these days,’ she told me. ‘And when he does, it’s not on the bed any more. It’s too painful for him.’ She paused. ‘Last night, I got up in the middle of the night to check he was okay. I found him asleep in his armchair, head thrown back, with all the lights on, and the windows open.’ Her voice cracked. ‘There were moths flying around his head.’
My knuckles, still holding the duvet, had turned white. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’
‘I’m okay,’ she said, with a forced laugh. ‘I’ve bought some new outfits and I’m going to show my face down at the pub tonight, put some make-up on, let everyone see how well I’m doing.’
I remained silent.
I could hear Mum’s breathing, the way she kept swallowing away gulps of air, and I knew she wanted to say something. Eventually, she whispered: ‘I still love him, you know.’ And then she began to cry.
With those words, I knew that Dad was about to die. And that Mum had just become a butterfly.
Anneliese Mackintosh is a 29-year-old Scottish-based writer, with an M.Litt. in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. She has had fiction broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland, as well as been published in various UK anthologies and magazines, including the Edinburgh Review, Gutter and The Year of Open Doors. Anneliese has just finished her first short story collection and is currently working on a novel. Her website, with a full list of publications, can be found at www.anneliesemackintosh.com.
Like the story of life itself, this tale begins with a small, pale circle.
I was living alone in a tenement flat in the West End of Glasgow. The flat had a spare room, a dining table, a piano, and the Internet. I’d started renting it after breaking up with James. James had helped me move in – we carried in the furniture, had sex on the carpet, then I bought him a pint and we went our separate ways.
Mum used to love driving up from England to visit me here.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, arriving at my front door one afternoon. ‘Traffic was terrible.’ She put down her things and we went into the living room.
‘Look at you,’ Mum marvelled.
I’d been going to the gym a lot lately, and was getting pretty toned. Dad had been diagnosed with cancer two months ago, and since then I’d been hitting the gym at least once – sometimes twice – a day. Mainly because I found it almost impossible to cry on a treadmill.
Mum, it transpired, had been exercising a lot too. ‘Let’s compare bodies,’ she suggested, so I closed the curtains and we stripped to our underwear.
Using the tape measure from my sewing kit, we checked our thighs, our waists, our arms, and our breasts. Mum had brought a special machine with her, which calculated how much fat you had. It turned out our bodies were almost identical.
We rubbed fake tan into each other’s skin and dressed ourselves.
After that we took a walk in the West End. We went to delis and boutiques, and Mum sighed over cappuccino, saying how much she’d love to live in a place like this, in a flat like mine, with a life like mine.
That evening, she grabbed her phone and announced that she was going for a walk. An hour later she returned with a bottle of wine. ‘Okay if I check my emails?’
She took my laptop, and the wine, into the spare room and closed the door.
In the morning, she called me to her room. ‘Look at this.’ She was holding out her palm. In it was a small, pale circle.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Contraception,’ she said. ‘Stops the sperm getting to the egg. Touch it.’
‘Um. No thanks.’ I went to make breakfast.
*
When Mum left that afternoon, I looked at my Internet history. Sites visited: Gmail (once); thetrainline (twice); and something called Tummy Butterflies (multiple times).
I typed tummy butterflies into the search bar, and was automatically redirected to a new site: www.illicitencounters.com.
‘Married but Feeling neglected?’ it said, capital ‘F’ for feeling. ‘In need of excitement? A discreet and confidential extra-marital dating service for women and men...’
After several minutes of searching, I could see that there were over 300 people registered on the site who lived in Buckinghamshire alone. The same phrases appeared again and again.
Discretion is a must.
Mornings are best for me.
Since we had the kids, the spark has gone.
I like socialising.
I have no intention of leaving my partner.
And their pictures; half of them with heads missing, just torsos and limbs.
I could see that my mum had been chatting to a guy called KristianB. I searched for his profile. Hertfordshire, two kids. ‘My marriage is perfect in every way except that the physical side has fizzled out. I enjoy going to the gym and drinking wine.’
Sitting at the dining table, I picked up my phone. Three missed calls before I got through.
‘I’ve pulled in at a service station. What is it, love?’
‘I’ve checked my computer,’ I said. ‘I know what you were doing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve seen that website.’
She hung up.
Half an hour later, she phoned back. ‘I can’t believe you’ve been spying on me!’ she shouted. ‘Anyway, it’s my life, and I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not like I’m meeting these people. Just chatting. I get lonely. I haven’t done anything wrong.’
She hung up again.
*
A birthday tea was being prepared: sandwiches, crisps, jelly and ice-cream. My sister was turning twenty-five. Her mental health was deteriorating rapidly. She had quit her job at the university, and, after one suicide attempt too many, had been taken into psychiatric hospital. The hospital had agreed to let her come home for her birthday, so Grandma and Granddad had driven down from Manchester, and everyone was going out of their way to make it the perfect day.
Before tea, Dad asked if I fancied a walk.
‘Shall we all go?’ Mum asked brightly.
‘I quite fancy just going with my Annie,’ Dad said, and I glowed with love.
As we left the driveway and walked along the roadside, Dad stayed quiet. After just minutes of strolling, he was out of breath.
‘I’ve finally finished writing my novel,’ I told him.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’d love it if you could read it.’
He stopped for a moment to rest. ‘My PSA levels are getting worse.’
I stopped too. ‘I thought they were stable.’
‘I’m afraid they’re rising again. The doctors have told me-’
‘Told you what?’
‘That if I don’t start chemo, I’ve got about ten weeks left.’
He started walking again.
I used every ounce of energy I had to follow him. I’ll allow myself the biggest crying fit I’ve ever had later on, I thought. As soon as I’m on my own, I’ll cry until my insides fall out.
A little further up the road, we stopped again. ‘Let’s rest here.’ Dad took a cigar out of his jacket pocket and I sat on the fence beside him.
I looked out over the fields, at the leaves beginning to reappear on the trees.
‘Can you keep a secret?’ Dad asked suddenly.
My heart fluttered.
‘I’m not talking about a little secret,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about something big. So big that you can never tell anyone about it. Not even Simon.’ Simon was my new boyfriend. ‘And not your Grandma or Granddad, your sister, or anyone.’
‘Er, I don’t know, Dad.’
‘Promise me.’
I looked down at my legs as they hit against the fence. One… two… three… ‘Okay. I promise.’
‘It’s your mum,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid she’s mentally ill.’
‘What?’
‘She thinks she’s deleted her emails, but I understand things about computers she never will.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She had an affair.’
I instantly remembered KristianB, the guy with the ‘perfect marriage’, who liked drinking wine and going to the gym.
‘That’s over now,’ Dad continued, ‘but since she broke up with him she’s been having sex with other people. Lots of other people. She’s been going to… clubs,’ he told me, ‘doing things that are barely legal. I’m worried she’s going to get in trouble with the police.’ He took several long drags on his cigar. ‘I want you to promise to look after her when I die.’
I looked down at my dad, at his thinning hair, and his scalp smeared with a thick layer of sweat. I knew that there was once a time, a long stretch of time, when he was the one cheating on my mum. When he two and even three-timed her, when he abandoned her before their wedding day, when he had affairs while my sister and I were babies. I also knew that my mum had remained completely faithful to him that whole time. And that, although my dad couldn’t see it, he had, in some way, driven her to this.
I slid off the fence and held him tight. I heard him take another drag of his cigar behind my back.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said when I pulled away. ‘I’ve started taking antidepressants. They’re magic.’
I felt a stabbing pain in my gut.
‘Do you promise?’ he asked.
‘Promise what?’
‘That you’ll look after her.’
‘I don’t know. Yes. I’ll try.’
‘Okay. We’ve got to go back now.’
I’d almost forgotten: my sister’s birthday tea.
‘When we get back,’ he told me, ‘you’re not going to say a word about this. You’re going to go in there and you’re going to give your mum the biggest hug in the world.’ He looked into my eyes. ‘I know you’re a good actress, Annie,’ he said. ‘Well you’re about to do the best performance of your life.’
*
The howl that I gave in the garden that evening was a howl that shook my bones; that shook the earth beneath my feet; and that shook the whole world I had known up to that very point in my existence.
*
‘Your mum’s got a designer vagina,’ Dad announced, late one night over the phone.
I was shaking, but couldn’t seem to hang up.
‘She’s had her labia chopped off.’
‘Please, Dad, I-’
‘She’s a slut, your mum. A slut.’
‘Dad, are you on your own? What are you doing?’
He was quiet for a moment, then I heard him exhale: a cigar. All his pauses were filled with smoke these days. ‘I’m at home. Graham’s here.’ Graham worked for my dad, and the call of duty often extended outside of office hours.
‘Okay. That’s good. You’re not still drinking, are you?’ I wasn’t sure Dad should be drinking anything during the chemo, let alone getting into this state.
‘No, no. We’ve stopped now. Graham’s made me a cup of tea.’
‘Good. How long is he staying?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve thrown your mum’s dildos onto the front lawn.’
I pictured an army of thick, veiny rods of purple and pink, raining down onto the grass from the bedroom window, shuddering and squirming as they hit the ground, then sputtering out, still and glistening, like chrysalises in the moonlight.
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about your mum,’ Dad growled.
And there’s a lot I do, I thought.
*
‘What-t-t-t?’ my sister finally answered her phone, after several missed calls. ‘I can’t really talk right now, Annie.’
‘I’m just missing you,’ I said, trying not to let her hear my tears. ‘Wanted to see how you are. Fancied a chat. How’s hospital? Spoken to Mum or Dad recently?’
‘This isn’t a good time.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve run away,’ she said. Her teeth were chattering.
‘Where are you?’
She hung up.
I sat on the small IKEA table by the window and looked out onto the street. I was living in a horrible flat now. No dining table, no piano, no spare room, no Internet. It was the only way I could afford to keep buying train tickets home to see Dad. My eyes re-focused from the darkness outside to the shape of my reflection in the glass. I was a mess.
I tried calling my sister again. No reply. And again. No reply. Then– ‘I don’t know where I am, Annie. I’ve been walking for hours. My phone’s about to run out of battery.’
‘Well… are you near any landmarks? What can you see?’
‘Why should I tell you?’
‘Please, just tell me what you can see.’
‘I can’t see anything. It’s dark. It’s snowing. I’m cold.’
‘Find a road sign. Are you near a road?’
‘I’m going to sit in the ditch until I die.’
She hung up.
I phoned my mum. ‘Oh for God’s sake. I’m trying to have a nice dinner with Fern. Why does she always do this to me?’
‘What should I do, Mum?’
‘I don’t know. I’m at my wit’s end. I’m exhausted. I’ve run out of ideas.’
Another hang-up.
Minutes later, my sister called back. ‘It says Aldbury,’ she says. ‘I found a sign. My phone’s about to run out. I’m going to sit in a ditch now.’
I phoned the psychiatric hospital, who hadn’t even noticed she was missing, so I called the police. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,’ they told me. ‘Sounds like she’s crossed the border into the next county. Not our area. You’ll have to phone the Hertfordshire police.’ So I did.
*
Dad had been texting me all night.
Have you heard from Mum?
02.20
No.
02.20
She’s gone out, probably shagging.
02.21
Maybe she’s at Fern’s.
Try and get some sleep.
02.21
I’ve emptied the wardrobe of all
her things. I’ve chucked them out
of the back door.
03.20
Dad, I’m worried about you.
Please look after yourself.
03.21
Dad, are you okay?
03.40
Dad? xxx
03.45
Did you know James was another
of your Mum’s conquests?
04.21
I called him straight away. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your mum slept with James while you were in America.’
‘No she didn’t.’
‘I’ve read her emails, Annie.’
‘What did they say?’
‘That time she came up to your flat while you were in America. She took him to a French restaurant.’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, love.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘She’s not well.’
‘Dad.’
‘She’s mentally ill.’
‘No, Dad.’
‘And that time she came to your flat and she was late. She shagged some guy in a motel on the way up.’
‘Dad, I can’t talk about this. I have to go. Please get some sleep. I have to switch my phone off now.’
I hung up, then jumped onto my bed and stood on the mattress. She didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t, I muttered, over and over again, until I finally collapsed.
*
‘Dad’s chemo has gone so well he might live for another two years,’ Mum told me.
The doctor had signed me off my studies for six weeks. I’d discussed Dad’s accusation with Mum, who said it was all lies, and I’d even phoned James, who was now teaching English in South Korea, and he said it was all lies too. Mum told me not to trust everything my dad said to me. He’s desperate, she told me. He’s paranoid. She thought the cancer must have spread to Dad’s brain.
At the doctor’s advice, I’d imposed a curfew on my parents: I switched off my phone between the hours of 9pm and 9am. And I’d been prescribed diazepam: one tablet per phone call, or two per day during visits home.
‘Obviously I don’t want him to die,’ Mum said, ‘but I don’t know if I can cope with this for another two years.’
I told her that that I didn’t know if I could either.
‘He’s told everyone at the pub I’ve been having affairs.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘And he’s ordered a load of Viagra off the Internet,’ she added. ‘Says if I don’t have sex with him he’ll divorce me.’
I reached for my diazepam.
*
‘I think your dad’s going to kill me,’ Mum confided in me one evening. ‘We’re going on holiday to Spain, to a remote town full of winding roads, and I think he’s going to drive us both off a cliff.’
But Dad didn’t kill her. While they were on holiday, Dad’s younger brother died of MS, and he spent most of the holiday on the phone to me, crying. When they got back, Mum moved into the spare room at Dad’s request. But without Mum there, Dad found it harder than ever to sleep. Sometimes, Mum told me, he would take a pillow into the porch, and lie on the phone to the Samaritans until the early hours. Other times, when he came back from the pub and was too drunk to find his house key, he’d sleep on the patio under the stars, shivering on the slabs until he fell asleep.
*
‘They’re going to let me try chemo one last time,’ Dad told me, after an unexpectedly fast drop in his PSA levels.
Mum had moved back into the main bedroom, but Dad couldn’t get upstairs anymore. He was sleeping in his office; the local hospital had lent us a bed. It seemed fitting, somehow, that Dad now lived in a room surrounded by computers: the machines he could always rely on.
For the last few months, Dad had been referring to his secretary, Joanne, as his ‘girlfriend’. He’d taken her and her 5-year-old son on holiday to Lapland two weeks before Christmas. My sister and I had been on that very same trip with him when we were that age. But recently, the ‘relationship’ with Joanne had been reduced to a series of text messages. Dad was working from home most of the time now, as he wasn’t well enough to drive into work. Sometimes he wasn’t well enough to do any work at all.
Mum, on the other hand, swore she had stopped having affairs. Actually it seemed plausible, since most of her time was taken up looking after Dad and my sister. My sister was out of hospital more than she was in it these days, though she still needed constant attention, and Dad had to wear nappies and surgical stockings, because his legs and feet were so full of fluid. His face had swollen up too, with the steroids, and he was using a Zimmer frame to walk even the most meagre of distances.
‘It’ll be a different chemical for the chemo this time,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve read the list of side effects. It might make the whites of my eyes turn blue. How cool is that?’
*
Two days after Dad’s chemo session, Mum called me. ‘You should probably come home for a visit soon, love.’ I’d imagined this conversation to myself so many times before that hearing it now was like a déjà vu.
I sat on the edge of my bed and grabbed a fistful of duvet. ‘Should I come now? What sort of ticket should I get? An open return?’
‘Your dad’s barely sleeping these days,’ she told me. ‘And when he does, it’s not on the bed any more. It’s too painful for him.’ She paused. ‘Last night, I got up in the middle of the night to check he was okay. I found him asleep in his armchair, head thrown back, with all the lights on, and the windows open.’ Her voice cracked. ‘There were moths flying around his head.’
My knuckles, still holding the duvet, had turned white. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’
‘I’m okay,’ she said, with a forced laugh. ‘I’ve bought some new outfits and I’m going to show my face down at the pub tonight, put some make-up on, let everyone see how well I’m doing.’
I remained silent.
I could hear Mum’s breathing, the way she kept swallowing away gulps of air, and I knew she wanted to say something. Eventually, she whispered: ‘I still love him, you know.’ And then she began to cry.
With those words, I knew that Dad was about to die. And that Mum had just become a butterfly.
Anneliese Mackintosh is a 29-year-old Scottish-based writer, with an M.Litt. in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. She has had fiction broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland, as well as been published in various UK anthologies and magazines, including the Edinburgh Review, Gutter and The Year of Open Doors. Anneliese has just finished her first short story collection and is currently working on a novel. Her website, with a full list of publications, can be found at www.anneliesemackintosh.com.
