Click to play UPSIDE DOWN PUDDING MP3
Read by Louisa Gummer
It always started with the keys.“Where are my keys?” her mother would ask. “What have you done with my keys?” The tedium of persistence. “We can’t go out unless we have the keys. Help, Lucy. Help me find the keys.”
Lucy stifled a sigh. If Lewis hadn’t got coward-flu, leaving the house wouldn’t have been any easier, because his car keys were just as likely to have been disappeared – pouf! Anyway, important trip or not, it was fine Lewis not being there. They’d manage.
It was a Tuesday. Lucy didn’t like Tuesdays. Tuesdays were a sort of non-day. Too far away from next weekend when there might be some respite from her mother’s vagaries, but not near enough to the previous Saturday when Lewis and their girls had visited. Tuesday was a slushy sounding day, not dramatic like a Monday when you could moan about the long week ahead, whilst suffering twinges from a Saturday night’s razzle-dazzle, or be bleary-bloated from Sunday’s puddings and bang-bang potatoes hidden with garlic.
None of this Lucy could explain to her sad-eyed mother. Susan had still not found the blasted keys. That was their new game: hunting objects. The television remote control had been a humdinger. Once they would have thought it funny that neither of them had a clue as to how to change channel on the rabbitty slender box, its blank black shiny screen mirroring them in their confusion. An exasperated Lewis had found it wrapped in aluminium foil inside the microwave.
When Lucy had first returned to her mother’s, Lewis instructed them to switch off all electrical appliances at the wall socket each night. Lewis was good at predicting chaos.
They now had two remote controls: a simple one with big buttons, whilst the bells and whistles one had a notice sellotaped on its bottom reading: “I live on the blue side table below the painting of Venice.”
Venice had curly-whirly boats and sunshine.
There were lots of notices around her mother’s home made by the man with the optimism of one who had been given a laminating machine for his birthday. Sadly Lucy only occasionally missed him. Susan sometimes said cruel things about her jaunty son-in-law, which made Lucy wonder if Susan might be confusing him with Daddy, who had once left in a cloud of shame under the umbrella of a determined little Molly Maid. He had returned eventually clutching his chest and dearie-me whoops pop-popping gone, spoiling his granddaughter’s fifth birthday party.
Susan had adjusted well. The initial separation had given her the house and daddy’s death his pension. She had obeyed all the advice columns and kept herself fit and busy. Once a librarian always a Dewey advocate; thus several high street charity shops could have won a prize for England’s best organised bookshelves.
After a respectable amount of time she had dallied with a bemusement of gentlemen callers and had had a near miss with a dapper quantity surveyor. What was his name? Grey temples but black eyebrows. Probably might have still been nipping round had Lucy not been installed in the spare room with an only child’s bossy frowns.
Susan thought that Lewis had too readily agreed to Lucy coming to London rather than Susan trekking to Brighton where there was no lack of private doctors and sea air to boot.
“Mum!” Lucy’s lips pursed allowing the air to sneak out of her nostrils making the word hum like a religious chant. “Mum, do you know where we are going today?”
“Of course, dear. Do you?”
They said, according to Lewis, who was no better than he should be and, although it’s no one else’s business, it was indeed more than likely that there was something going on with him and what’s-her-face at the accountants.
They said.
Lewis said?
Oh yes, that’s it. Lewis had read on the computer that they said it was much better to ask open questions so long as such questions were unpressured. Yes or no answers, Lewis explained, did not construe a conversation. And. difficult as it was, he added, it was best to avoid the words, “do you remember.”
Susan accepted that it was sensible to have Lucy back in her old bedroom, back where the peeling silver birch tree shaded Lucy’s childhood barrow-buried time capsules. Even as an eight year old her daughter had been fascinated by the earth’s secrets.
The keys had been found in the fridge’s butter compartment. That was almost logical because the last time the keys had been seen was after a supermarket trip when they had talked about where various items should be stored. They had even discussed whether or not the small box of Lucy’s camomile tea bags did indeed belong in the said butter compartment, attempting to disassociate shape with content.
It was strange but not strange being back in the smug NW whatsit semi. In the twenty years since Lucy had left for university very little had changed, Susan preferring to spend her money on treats and whimsies. The house was comfortable but not hygiene rigid.
“There’s no need for the floor to be clean enough to eat on when you can afford a table.” Daddy once said when the hoover broke down.
As Susan had never been one for sentimental shrines, Lucy’s room mercifully had not remained exactly as she had left it to study, study and thrice study; a doctor of geology with papers published in journals and lecturing on a circuit that included South America and Sussex. She’d collected rocks and stones, here and there bits and pieces and, on the Sussex coast, a sailing husband and daughters of her own.
And now?
Now, back to the little box-room with its little bench under the little bay window where once the cabbage patch dolls had ruled but where now there was an insult of commemorative cushions; easy presents for granny with her penchant for The House of Windsor and 60’s memorabilia. Lucy had loved the snugness of sleeping in the room with the same street view as her parents, leaving the cavernous back bedroom for play, then study, then daddy’s banishment and now smelling of dank storage but not of wee, not yet, not that sick old smell of doom.
The local High Street, like her mother’s house, had barely changed. Whilst a shopping centre had popped up by the tube station, the drag from the bus stop to their turning remained hotchpotch if more ethnic. Lucy was comforted that the fish and chip shop was still ketchupped next to the newsagents and, although you could no longer buy chews four-a-penny, those scrapings from the squidgeon of cardboard coloured stuff that pirouetted above the chippy’s deep fat fryer were scrummy.
Kebababab-a-doo-dah.
Remember? Friday night treat: cod and chips but no vinegar, Susan hated vinegar, and home-made upside-down pudding for afters.
Their game.
“Any pudding can be upside down, silly mummy!” Lucy used to say. She had once stood on her head to prove some point or other and the kind man with busy eyes had smeared their noses with custard.
*
“We’re going on the bus.” Susan announced, fidgeting with the keys.
That was a good statement; clear and definite. Lucy was happy it was not a question.
Lewis had seen no point in Lucy taking her car to London what with congestion charges and parking charges and the frequency of public transport. Susan had never had the need to drive.
“A brain tumour. It could be a brain tumour?” Susan fell into the trap of turning a statement into a question.
“You could cope with that?” Lucy asked. “Chemotherapy and then radiotherapy?”
“You’ve been reading up on it?”
“Of course, mum. Some people’s hair falls out, some feel sick and their gums bleed.”
“Then?” Susan asked.
“Then, when it’s shrunk, they remove it.” Lucy made scissor gestures with her fingers.
“We could cope with all that. If,” Susan added, “it meant no more eggs in the kettle!” She laughed.
Lucy laughed too. It was a good moment; kettles weren’t that expensive nowadays, the sulphurous smell had lingered for a surprisingly short time. It was good to laugh together like bumble-bees in potatoes.
The keys safely pocketed, the gas rings sniffed to silence and the television unplugged at the socket, but no, “do not unplug the freezer” said the notice, and they were ready to leave, daughter’s arm d-shaped to accommodate her mother’s grasp. Both were sprightly, able to jog in slow tempo to meet the bus as it slithered round the corner.
“Upstairs?” Susan suggested remembering how Lucy always used to play look-out in the crow’s nest upon the top deck.
“Of course!”
“I couldn’t live anywhere not on a bus route.” Susan said. “And night buses nowadays are a boon. It’s good living here, isn’t it, darling?”
“It’s home.”
The moment they entered the consulting room they both knew, and mirrored each other’s sigh, sitting in unison opposite the doctor behind his desk. This was Harley Street so the desk had a green leather insert and pink blotting paper on top of which a fountain pen was placed at exactly the right angle to display its Mont Blanc logo. The room smelled of cinnamon and lilac or that might have been his aftershave. Whatever, unlike the main hospital’s waiting rooms there was no whiff of antiseptic and no sound of clanging kidney basins.
Dichotomy: archaic pen, blotting paper but MRI scans upon a shiny paddy tablet thing. The consultant’s expression of bland concern failed to mask the defeat in his eyes.
“I presume,” said Susan calmly, intuitively, “it’s inoperable.” Her throat threatened constriction.
“One lump or two, vicar?” giggled Lucy.
A sudden wave of clarity snatched the smile from her lips and her wrists began to throb. If, then and there, a scalpel had also nestled on that stupid blotter she might well have reached for it. They say sharp cuts are almost painless and when the blood flows there’s a warmth that might trap the shivers.
“No lumps,” her mother announced.
Words. Doctors words. Crusty lesions. Mum nodding, eyes transfixed upon the blurry screen. Not a tumour in sight.
“Drug trials? That Aracept. Anything?” Susan’s words hung in the air like drooping tulip heads.
Lucy went to stand at the window. It was only the first floor so jumping out of it would be bally-crud, so she thought she might as well play at counting taxis. Cars were parked upon both sides of the road and there were no blackberries.
“Well, there’s a thing.” Lucy said. “I went to the tall house with a kind man who wasn’t daddy and there was lapis lazuli but not pyrites because that’s rubbish. I’ve been practising the name of the prime minister and I embarrassed my daughter when we went swimming because I forgot to take clean underwear. I can fry an egg so the yolk doesn’t burst and if I had shoes with laces I reckon I could still tie them.”
“Sit down, darling,” her mother said.
“Thing is,” Lucy turned to face them. “Thing is.” She faltered then gabble-garbled. “This is early stages right? Me? Fit as a fiddle. Strong as an ox. Always been ahead. Sent off to Uni when I was only seventeen. Too clever for her own boots. Thing is, I’ve read the Google pages buried in the history bitsy-bit at top of bar thing across the screen. Early onset – sounds a good thing, no? Early! Well, until you, whatjacallit, clarify. Early onset dementia, not necessarily Alzheimer’s but, when it’s your brain deposits, not cancers, my splats, makes no upside pudding difference.”
Leaflets, appointments and support groups and home-helps.
“You’ll stay with me.” Susan said, aching as she remembered how once, in the darkness of widowed loneliness, wanting her baby back. “I can manage.”
“I’m sorry,” chorused the doctor and her daughter.
And Lucy giggled, surprised at the wetness dripping down her cheeks.
(c) Carolyn Eden, 2013
Carolyn Eden hates writing. Worse than writing is editing. Worse than writing, editing and cutting is, of course, not writing. She quit smoking on 5th October 2005. Her current hobbies are eating and dieting. She loves the Liars League for appreciating her work and has now written exactly fifty words.
Louisa Gummer is a Liars’ League regular. She can be heard shouting "Darling, the boiler’s broken!" in the current Pizza Express radio campaign. She is also one of three nominees for Best Female Voiceover in the 2013 VOX Awards, please Google them and vote!!
Comments