Chapter 18
It’s the early hours when I let myself into my mother’s empty house that stinks of cigarettes and despair. I’m not sleepy, sensible television is finished, and it’s too late to call Dave, so I go into the study. Rummaging through my father’s in-tray, I find an invoice from the legal practice of L Zoltán. Mutti has paid him £100 plus VAT to submit a claim for compensation to the Hungarian government. And then there’s something else. It’s been pushed to the bottom, but there’s no disguising what it is. A letter from the building society, headed in giant red letters: “Mortgage arrears – notice of default”.
Is this what did it, then? The thing that pushed Mutti over the edge? She’s run out of cash. At an age when most sensible people have paid for their home, Dad and her were still living on the edge. Borrowing was the way they coped with life’s ups and downs, and now she thinks there’s no way out. I imagine her sitting there in her kitchen niche with the vodka and pills lined up, brooding over the letter. But you don’t kill yourself because you can’t afford to go on living. Not these days. Any more than they sling you into debtors’ prison along with the ghost of Mr Micawber.
The one thing she’d never consider is just calling the building society to discuss the problem with a member of staff. Too easy. The concept of an affordable payment schedule wouldn’t appeal to her sense of drama. No, in a crisis she’s reverted to her national stereotype. However little I know about Hungary, one thing I have managed to grasp is that suicide is pretty much a participation sport over there. It’s not the last resort at all. It’s lucky I didn’t come in to find her swinging from the crystal chandelier that her mother schlepped out of Budapest.
I try to work out whether I’ve got enough spare cash to pay Mutti’s mortgage for a while. My account dips into overdraft at the end of each month, and surfaces into black after I’ve been paid, like a diver coming up for air. I’ll have to put in a call tomorrow and plead for a few days’ grace.
I take a shower, but I haven’t brought any fresh clothes, let alone anything to wear in bed and I feel grimy in every way, so I pop into Mutti’s bedroom to spray myself with some of her Madame Rochas and look for anything approximating to a nightie.
Then I notice. My father’s clothes are arranged on his bed, as though he’s the one taking a shower. Shirt, jacket, silk tie. Even underwear. I look in the wardrobe. A row of suits and jackets on wire dry cleaner’s hangers, with tickets stapled to the plastic film covers. I check the dates. She’s carried on having his clothes cleaned ever since he died. The waste of money is the least worrying thing about it.
As I brush my teeth, I’m thinking what on earth I can do to stop the madness and keep Mutti in the real world. In bed, I try to still the tornado of thoughts and breathe in. I run through a relaxation exercise that never fails to get me to sleep. Tonight it flops. Everything irritates. Even the air in here feels scratchy on my throat. I sniff. What is it? It’s the bedding. The sheets reek as they’ve been steeped in the contents of Mutti’s cigarette filters. It’s Air de Tabac. I try the spare bedroom, but it’s just the same. The acrid aroma of nicotine pervades the whole house. Breathing through my mouth doesn’t seem to help either. When I shut my eyes, I’m choking – suits and mortgage arrears jump around in my head. Madness and money, money and madness, swirling in puffs of cigarette smoke. I massage my forehead, but my fingertips feel as though they’ve been rubbed in ash.
I go down to the study, to choose something to read from my parents’ eclectic collection. I’ve grown up with these books. Worn leather volumes of Heine’s Gesammelte Werke and Ernest Jones’s two volume biography of Freud nestle side by side with a load of Agatha Christies and Dirk Bogarde’s autobiography. And, of course, the slim volumes of humorist George Mikes, my mother’s favourite Hungarian ex-pat. Then, pushed to the back of the shelf I find a tattered paperback. Unfamiliar, even though it’s been well read if the battered pages are anything to go by. The cover image is a collage of sepia photographs featuring a woman and a little girl with a teddy, overlaid on a map and a hand written letter. It’s some kind of memoir of a family who left Budapest for London. Something about it intrigues me.
I take it back up to bed, and start turning the yellowing pages. There are bits underlined here and there in a familiar looking soft pencil. The kind Mutti uses for her crosswords. Now and then there’s a bunch of exclamation marks.
It’s the story of a mother and daughter from a comfortable family of assimilated Budapest Jews, as they fight for survival against the tormented background of the war and its aftermath. It’s about a café society that turned rancid then murderous, about loathing and self-loathing, and terror. There’s lots of terror on every page, brutality and horror layered upon horror. It’s about all kind of things my mother never mentioned, and as I read it I understand why. There’s much here that I never knew before and plenty that one really should know about one’s mother.
Feeling sick and sweaty, I read on and on. Of course the book isn’t about Mutti’s family, but surely it must come jolly close. That’s what the scribbling is. She’s made it hers, because she feels it is about her.
And the stupid thing is that I’ve never tried to find out any of this before. I’ve avoided the facts, squashed my own curiosity. Even though the outcome was smacking me in the face every day of my life. Sure, everything was tied up in emotional knots. But that seems like a crappy excuse for wilful ignorance. It’s morning by the time I look up. I feel ashamed.
Light is breaking over the swaying birch trees at the back of the house. I stuff the book into my bag and leave the house.
When I get back to the hospital, Mutti’s still out cold. The nurse says she came to a while ago but it seems now she’s refusing to talk to me, as though I’m responsible for her misery. She lies there with her eyes clamped shut. I want to tell her I understand, or at least I’m beginning to.
So I sit in one of those awful green piss-proof upholstered hospital chairs, hoping to grab a few minutes with a doctor who has actually completed his training. He’s at the next bed but one, discussing the patient’s continence problems in a voice loud enough for everybody else in the ward to hear what size pads are required.
I’m clasping my scripts and call sheets just in case there’s a technical query about a piece of equipment, or some niggling actor’s agent gets on the phone. The crew will be meeting up around now for day two of the shoot. Everything connected with the film has begun to seem trivial beyond belief, but I still pop out and call Bill to make sure he’s OK.
When I get back to the ward, the doctor’s just leaving Mutti, so the gravity of her condition can’t have merited more than the briefest consideration.
“Excuse me,” I call, flapping towards him as he puts his hand up to pull back the curtain around the next bed.
“Yes?”
“My mother, Mrs Mueller.”
“Yes?”
“Is it possible to discuss her – er – condition with you?” He turns to look at me, with a face that says I have no business to interrupt his busy schedule.
“Sure. What do you want to know?”
“Well, nobody’s actually said what the outlook is. Or, er, anything.”
“She took a quantity of sleeping tablets which would have killed most ordinary mortals. Which means she’s got an extraordinary constitution. That and the fact that we pumped her stomach means she lived to tell the tale. What kind of questions do you have?”
“Will there be any after-effects?”
“The short answer to that is no. But there’s evidence of long-term alcohol damage. If she keeps on drinking the way I suspect she does, it will have the same effect in the long run.”
“Sorry?”
“She’s killing herself the slow way, drink by drink.”
“OK, what treatment is there?”
“I would recommend a psychiatry referral, which is standard. But Mrs Mueller was adamant that she does not want that.”
“She was awake then?”
“Oh yes, she was surprisingly lucid.” He opens the curtains of the cubicle and as he is disappearing, he turns his head towards me. “Maybe you should talk to her.” He jerks the curtains closed behind himself.
Talk to her. Does he think I haven’t tried? I want to yell back at him. And yet it all seems so pointless. A psychiatry referral, even if Mutti would accept it, now seems like so much sticking plaster for a broken leg. An aspirin for an amputation. But that doesn’t change anything. Especially as Mutti continues to lie with her eyes shut, her capacity for stubbornness apparently unaffected by the overdose.
I stroke her hand, saying her name over and over again. Then she opens her eyes a smidgeon and looks at me. The fug of confusion and fear is still there, whatever the consultant says. But there is far more. I read her disapproval and her anger, with me. Then she closes her eyes again. The eternal barrier between us is still there, solid as the Berlin Wall once was.
As the hours tick by, I watch the nurses check her vitals. I go down to get some breakfast from the tea bar and call Dave to tell him what’s happened. He offers to come down by train, and that makes me cry. I snuffle through my blocked nose that there’s no point because I won’t be staying long, I’ve got work to do and she’s asleep and cross with me anyway. She hasn’t spoken yet but words are not needed, I know how things stand. I’m somehow in the wrong again. But it’s difficult to drag myself away. Time creeps on, Mutti moans and moves her legs as though she’s trying to run away from a nightmare.
At noon, I reluctantly decide I can’t do any good here, she’s out of the woods so I leave Cardiff once more and head for home. With my call sheets wedged between my legs, I storm down the M4. Just past the Severn Bridge, I’m still stuck on the intractable problem of Mutti’s death wish and her money crisis when the mobile goes off. It’s the workie. I slide into the inside lane, slow down to sixty and tuck the phone under my chin. It turns out she wants to know where should she get the crew’s lunch from.
When I get home, a package of VHS tapes from the first day’s shoot is sitting with the letters on the communal hallway table. In my flat, the beans and eggs are still in the sink, smelling burnt and rotten at the same time. Everything else is just as I left it, the television on standby, my raincoat and briefcase thrown onto the table. It’s a touch after four, which means they’ll still be shooting for a couple of hours, but sod it. I decide to stay here and get on with Bill’s shot list.
I put a cup of tea down by the video player, slide a tape into the machine, and set up my laptop. But it’s difficult to focus. I’m pursued by images of Mutti with a black mouth, and marauding gangs of fascist thugs shooting Jews on the banks of the freezing Danube. Of course she should get compensation. It’s the least the bastard Hungarians should do for her. I’m as guilty as anybody. I’ve been using the whole claim thing as a distraction, to keep her off my back, like a toy you dangle in front of a cat.
And maybe it is the one thing which might distract her from her death wish. Of course, when she discovers it’s hopeless I’ll be back to square one. What if it isn’t hopeless, though? Not that I really expected Zoltán to come up with anything. Maybe it’s time to get stuck in myself.
Bill has used some exterior shots of Stamford Hill to build the atmosphere, with gaggles of black-hatted men standing on street corners, women pushing prams. Shop signs in Hebrew. He’s caught the mood with more charm than it has in reality, avoiding the boarded-up shops and illegal roof extensions that look as though they’re about to tumble onto the pavements. I work on in the stuffy room as it becomes dark outside. Just as I’m sliding the eighth tape into the machine, it comes to me. It’s not a solution, but a next step.