Bridget lost so much weight that Blue could see the shape of her kneecaps through her skirt. She took her mother to the doctor. Then to the hospital. The consultant said the word cancer, and Bridget Ford stood up and left the room.
The consultant gave Blue leaflets, explained the tests that would be carried out to determine the type, the severity, how best to treat it. Bridget wouldn’t be tested. Nature, she said, would run its course. She would carve some candles, lay runes at the altar, burn bundles of sage. Blue grew hoarse from trying to convince her otherwise.
Blue was on her third job in as many years: a packer in a warehouse, boxing items the pickers picked from vast shelves, eyes sore from the lack of daylight and the cardboard that spored dust. At lunch break, Blue stood outside with the smokers to get some sunshine, if not fresh air. One of the lads had an uncle with colon cancer, and she overheard him confess that his uncle took cannabis to help with the pain. When Bridget’s own pain worsened, Blue bought her a bong.
She needed it. Within a few months, Bridget was bedridden.
‘Do you see him?’ she asked Blue every day, her leporine face above the quilt, eyes hopeful. Blue recalled the years they had lived in the Preston flat, when Bridget would ask Blue if she had seen Bodhi or Arlo, would ask what they were doing, whether they looked happy, would put amethyst crystals by Blue’s bed so the spirits wouldn’t disturb her sleep.
‘No, he’s at peace,’ Blue said every day.
Routine was formed around Bridget’s needs. Blue woke a little earlier to get a tray of breakfast things ready for her mother and then left for work. When she came home, before she changed her clothes or put on the kettle, she would go up and see Bridget, kiss her forehead, remove the tray of breakfast things and make a mental note of how much she ate. She’d make her mother some more food, prepare the bong, change sheets that had been soiled, clean the bedpan, brush her hair. Blue had bought a small TV that she fixed to the wall, so Bridget had something to do in the long hours Blue was at the warehouse. Sometimes they would watch soap operas together. Sometimes they would just lie side by side, quiet.
‘Did you buy this with the money from your commercial job?’ Bridget said one day, after her fifth lungful of smoke. There was pain in her voice, and a timidity Blue remembered from those days when she was four or five and Bridget would spend hours sitting in the kitchen with her head rested on the tabletop. ‘Isn’t it killing you? Isn’t your soul being crushed by it? Aren’t you stifled?’
‘I like it,’ Blue said. She sat on the end of Bridget’s metal-framed bed. The room didn’t have space for much else – two bedside tables, a single wardrobe in the far corner by the window. It overlooked the alley where Blue and Matthew had kissed. It overlooked the garden, where Devlin had put his soft brown arm around Blue when Matthew had run away laughing.
‘It’s a normal job with normal folk,’ Blue said. Matthew’s family had moved. The boys that had egged him on had left too. The old man who had taught Blue to drive was in a care home.
‘I should have done more; you were so talented, had so much potential. Devlin would have done more. What would he say?’
‘he’d not mind,’ Blue said.
‘Do you see him?’ Bridget’s hair was still in a plait, braided by Blue. It lay over her shoulder in a thin grey rope.
‘No, Mum.’
Bridget turned her face on the pillow. Her hand relaxed around the bong, and Blue caught it before it fell to the floor. ‘I should have taken better care of him. After the first heart attack, I should have taken better care of him.’
You could have made him take his heart medicine, Blue thought. You could have made him go to his hospital check-ups, helped him lose weight, encouraged him to have a bypass instead of feeding him wheatgrass and carving symbols in witching candles. But what good are should-haves?
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Blue said. ‘You can’t predict a heart attack.’
‘You could have predicted it.’
‘I never read for him.’
‘you’d have saved him if you had.’
‘I think you’ve had enough for today.’ Blue sat the bong on the bedside table, next to the still-full plastic tray of yellow curry. Tomorrow she would buy a can of chicken soup. She could generally get Mother to eat chicken soup.
‘What a terrible mother.’ Bridget gripped Blue’s hand; her fingers clawed around her and knocked the dish. Yellow sauce spilt on to the carpet. Bridget was stoned, and her pupils were large, but there was something else in her eyes. ‘I should be looking after you; you’re my baby, my last baby.’
Cars could be heard on the street; their neighbours coming home from work. A few had offered kindness after Devlin died – sympathy cards, the odd cake. She hadn’t told any of them about Mother’s health, nor had she told the people at work. She couldn’t bring herself to explain. Whenever Bridget touched her, she felt her shame, her embarrassment, her awful sense of having let her daughter down. She could feel it now as Bridget held her wrist.
‘You have an awful mother, if you even knew how—’
‘Don’t you talk that way about my mum.’ She wagged a finger and mocked a frown.
‘You’re trying to make me laugh.’
‘Then let me,’ Blue said.
‘I always tried to make you laugh, but I was no good. I’m sorry I was no good; you deserved better. You all deserved better.’ She let go of Blue’s arm and patted her hand. Blue felt the very insides of her mother’s heart, and Blue wasn’t ready for this.
‘Devlin loved you,’ Blue said. ‘Almost as much as I love you. We wouldn’t love you so much if you weren’t deserving of it.’
‘They should have left me to rot.’ And Bridget’s eyes rolled, briefly, in her skull.
‘Never,’ Blue said, and she pushed them away – the thoughts, the feelings, the thing Bridget was trying to silently confess, and Blue wouldn’t hear it. ‘How about some pudding? Some ice cream? Maybe you’ll eat something sweet.’
It was dry outside, the autumnal sky clear and darkening by degrees. From her place on the bed, Blue could see the houses on the other side of the gulley and the orange leaves on their garden trees.
‘Do you see him?’ Bridget said, and the small terraced house felt big, too big to live in alone.
‘Devlin? No, I—’
‘Bodhi.’
Blue nodded her head, but Mother couldn’t see, asked the same question again, and blue remorse filled Blue’s heart, her mother’s remorse.
‘Turn your head, he’s next to you,’ Blue said.
The little boy stood by the splash of yellow sauce on the carpet. The scowl had dropped from his face; it had dropped the moment Bridget knew she was dying. Blue had thought that Bodhi knew better than to torment her with petulant looks and dark eyes, but now she wasn’t so sure. He looked like he might cry, like he needed and wanted to be comforted as much as Blue needed and wanted to be. If Bridget reached out a hand, she would touch the cold air of him.
‘I’m sorry, I was a terrible mother, I’m so sorry for all of it.’ She reached up for Blue, and she thought her mother was talking to her, that her sorry was for Blue and their dirty flat in Preston, for the lack of toys and food, for making her stay home instead of going to school, but Bridget said, ‘Tell Bodhi.’
The bedroom was dark now, but Blue didn’t turn on the lamp.
Bodhi wiped his eyes, the sides of his small hands wet with tears. The child’s shoulders heaved. Bridget’s shoulders heaved.
‘Aye, I will,’ Blue said, and she kissed her mother’s forehead. There was more Bridget wanted to say. Her mouth grimaced, her voice choked by tears, and she racked coughs into her quilt.
‘It’s OK, Mother,’ Blue said when the fit was over and she’d sipped some water. Blue lay down beside her, hushed her and soothed her. She held her mother’s hand and closed her eyes tight. She let Bridget’s despair flood her, but she couldn’t look at the boy. She couldn’t look at Arlo, sat in the corner with a blank look in her eyes, damp ringlets framing her face.
Mother was frail in Blue’s arms, each breath a rasp that stretched her ribcage and exhausted her lungs. Blue held her until she slept.