Berthold: A Blue Butterfly

Next day I cycled over to the hospital, locked up my bike against the railings and stowed my cycle clips in my anorak pocket. The ward was on the first floor, at the end of a long corridor that smelled of antiseptic and had branches named for unpleasant-sounding procedures like Spectroscopy, Oral Surgery, Trauma. In my experience hospitals are like condemned cells, best avoided, but sometimes you have no choice.

It took me a moment to recognise the frail, dishevelled old woman propped up in bed as my mother. Her appearance shocked me. Dishcloth-grey hair, limp and uncombed, pink lipstick that overshot the edges of her mouth, a dab of bright blue eye shadow on one eyelid but not the other. Dear Mum: even in extremis, she was still trying to look her best.

‘Bertie! Get me out of here!’

‘How are you, Mum?’

I handed over my bag of grapes and kissed her, continental style, on both cheeks. The ritual of gallantry perked her up.

‘There’s nothing wrong with me, Berthold.’ She swivelled her eyes around the ward. ‘I want to go in an NHS hospital.’

‘This is an NHS hospital. You used to work here, remember?’

‘No, I used to work up Homerton.’ Her blue-shadowed eyelid fluttered like a lost butterfly. ‘They’re trying to kill me, Bertie. To get the flat.’ The spark of conspiracy brightened her eyes.

‘Nonsense. They wouldn’t …’

But maybe they would. A stab of panic caught me between the ribs. Mum had always promised that after she died the flat she had rented from the Council, ever since it was built in the 1950s, would pass to me. But lately she had started muttering darkly that there was a plot to take it away from us.

‘It’s global capitalism that done this to me, son.’

‘It’s probably just sherry, Mum.’

‘I didn’t touch a drop, Bertie. Nor any food.’ She sat up, hitching up her nightie with agitated hands. ‘They’re starving me to death. All you get in here is a few lettuce leaves and a pot of yoghurt. And bloody fresh fruit. In the NHS you get tinned peaches in syrup.’ She glanced dismissively at my grapes. ‘Did you bring my ciggies, son?’

‘I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in hospital.’

‘That’s what I mean. They’re killing me. It would never happen in the NHS.’

At that moment, a violent spasm of coughing from the next bed made us both turn around. An ancient crone with grey, wrinkled skin was clearing her throat with a horrible outpouring of phlegm into a cardboard receptacle on her bedside table.

‘Shut up, Inna,’ said Mother. ‘That sound is disgusting. This is my son, Berthold, come to see me. Say hello.’

‘Nuh, Mister Berthold.’ The crone peered at me between drapes of long silver hair and held out a hand as bony as a bunch of twigs. ‘You lucky you ev lovely son, Lily. Nobody come visiting to me.’

‘Stop moaning. Don’t be a Moaning Minnie,’ said Mum. ‘Keep on the sunny side!’ Her voice quavered into her favourite song, which I remembered from childhood. ‘Always on the sunny side!’

‘Sunny side! Ha ha! No sunny side round here, Lily.’ The crone struck out defiantly on her highway of negativity. ‘Too many bleddy foreigners. Every day somebody get dead.’

‘They’re dying because it’s private.’ Mother pursed her lips severely. ‘It’s wrong to be racist, Inna. We should be grateful to all those coloured people leaving their own sunny climes to come and work for us.’

‘Aha! Good you tell me is privat.’ Inna smoothed her sheet with her twiggy hands. ‘I was think we in Any Cheese.’

‘No,’ asserted Mum. ‘There’s less death in the NHS.’

‘That doctor got pink tie.’ The old lady pointed at a young doctor leaning over an elderly cardiac arrest at the far end of the ward, and whispered, ‘Pink mean homosexy?’

‘It don’t make no difference what he is,’ replied Mum. ‘Being queer don’t harm nobody.’

‘You always right, Lily.’ Inna cleared her throat and spat again. ‘Good you tell me. I know nothing. In my country everybody normal.’

Then her eyes rested curiously on me and on the crimson T-shirt I was wearing, now faded to a dusky pink from years of washing.

‘Take no notice,’ Mother murmured to me, ‘she’s from Ukraine, like my Lucky. Got beetroots on the brain. Emphasism. She gets everything mixed up. Don’t you, Inna?’

The crone’s wrinkles realigned themselves merrily like an obscure script on her aged face. ‘Better mix it up than dead!’

‘We’re all dead in the end.’ Suddenly, Mother reached for my hand, and pulled me down close to whisper in my ear. ‘Are you thinking of getting married again, son? You might need someone to look after you, if I don’t come out of here alive.’

‘Ssh. Don’t talk like that, Mum. You’re going to get better.’

This talk about marrying again had me worried, for Mother had always been hostile towards any woman I brought home ‒ especially Stephanie, my acerbically beautiful ex-wife, on whom I had doted beyond the normal call of husbandly duty. Stephanie had realised right from the start that Mother was her only serious rival and the two had regarded each other with mutual loathing scarcely concealed under a mask of kiss-kissy politeness. When we had finally divorced, Stephanie handed me over into the care of my mother like a recycled mattress whose springs have gone: ‘You can have him back, Lily. All yours. He’s completely fucked.’ Now it sounded as though Mother was preparing to pass me on again.

‘The doctor said …’ she pointed in Dr Pink-tie’s direction, ‘he said I’ve got …’ she rummaged in her memory for the right phrase, ‘a fibreglass atrium.’ The words sailed out with an air of adventure like a galleon with sails puffed by the wind. ‘Atrium! Who’d have guessed it? In Madeley Court! My Berthold always said he wanted to put an atrium in there. Or a skylight.’

There was no atrium in Madeley Court, the block of council flats where we lived, though there was a grimy skylight over the stairwell. And Mother’s claim that she’d had a passionate affair with Berthold Lubetkin, the architect who designed the block after the war, probably had as much substance as the atrium.

‘It’s there somewhere, Bert. Under the sofa, I think,’ she insisted. Poor Mum, I thought, she’s really losing it. Who ever heard of a skylight under a sofa?

I squeezed her hand and murmured, ‘Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile.’

‘Ah! You can’t go wrong with Shakespeare! Did you hear that, Inna? Shakespeare, the Immortal Bard? Say some more, Bertie!’

‘Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain, which with pain purchased doth inherit pain …’ I repeated Biron’s speech.

The crone looked baffled. ‘Is Pushkin, no?’

‘See what I mean?’ said Mother. ‘Emphasism. Now, Inna, sing us one of your foreign songs.’

The old woman cleared her throat, spat and started to drone: ‘Povee veetre na-a Ukrainou … Is beautiful song of love from my country. De zalishil yah-ah-ah …’

The other patients were craning in their beds to see what the racket was. Then the pink-tie doctor came up to the bedside consulting his notes. He looked hardly out of his teens, with tousled hair and long pointed shoes that needed a polish.

‘Are you Mr … er … Lukashenko?’

This was not the time to go into the complexities of Mother’s marital history.

‘No. I’m her son. Berthold Sidebottom.’

For some ignorant people, the name Sidebottom is a cause of mirth. The teen-doctor was one of those. In fact Sidebottom is an ancient Anglo-Saxon location name meaning ‘broad valley’, originating, it is believed, from a village in Cheshire.

The doctor smirked behind his hand, straightened his tie and explained that my mother had atrial fibrillation. ‘I asked her how many she smokes. Her heart isn’t in good shape,’ he said in a low voice.

‘What did she say?’

‘She said first of March, 1932.’

‘That’s her birthday. She was eighty-two recently. I’m not sure how many she smokes, she keeps it secret – doesn’t want to set me a bad example.’

The teen-doctor scratched behind his ear. ‘We’d better keep her in for a few days, Mr … er … Lukashenko.’ He glanced down at his notes.

‘Sidebottom. Lukashenko was her husband.’

‘Mr Sidebottom. Hum. Have you noticed any variation in her behaviour recently? Any forgetfulness, for example?’

‘Variation? Forgetfulness? I couldn’t say.’ I myself have found that a bit of selective amnesia can be helpful in coping with the vicissitudes of life. ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,’ I said.

To my embarrassment, my eyes filled with tears. I thought back over the years I’d lived in the flat at the top of Madeley Court with my mother, assorted husbands and lovers, the politics, the sweet sherry, the parrot. In my recollection, she’d rambled a bit at the best of times, but the core of her had been steadfast as a rock. ‘Shakespeare,’ I said. The teen-doctor looked miffed, as if I’d been trying to get one up on him, so I added, ‘When you live with someone, you don’t always notice the changes. They hap-pen so gradually.’

‘You still live with your mother?’

I detected a note of derision in his callow voice. Probably he was too wet behind the ears to understand how suddenly everything you take for granted can fall apart. You can reach half a century in age, you can have some modest success in your profession, you can go through life with all its ups and downs – mainly the latter, in my case – and still end up living with your mother. One day it could even happen to you, clever Dr Pointy-toes. People come and go in your life but your mother’s always there – until one day she isn’t any more. I was filled with regret for all the times I’d been irritated with her or taken her for granted.

‘Yes. We sup-port each other.’ My old stutter was spluttering into life. Must be the stress.

Mum had slipped further down the bed. Her breathing was laboured. A frail filament of saliva glimmered between her open lips like a reminder of the transience of life. She let out a shuddering moan, ‘First of March, 1932!’ The filament snapped.

The doctor dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘Of course we’ll do all we can, but I think she may not be with us very long.’

Panic seized me. Big questions raced into my mind and took up fisticuffs with each other. How long was very long? Why did this have to happen to her just now? Why did it have to happen to me? Had I been a satisfactory son? How would I manage without her? What would happen to the parrot? What would happen to the flat?

The teen-doctor moved away and the ward sister sailed up, shapely and black, a starched white cap riding like a clipper on the dark sea of her curls. ‘We need to change her catheter now. Can you give us a minute, Mr Lukashenko?’

‘Side-b-bottom.’

‘Sidebottom?’

Our eyes met, and I was struck by how beautiful hers were, large and almond-shaped, with sweeping lashes. The beast in my pants stirred. Oh God, not now. I withdrew outside the drapes, thinking I’d better find the canteen and have a calming cup of tea, when from the next bed the old woman hissed, ‘Hsss! Stay. Sit. Talk. Nobody visit me. I am all alone.’

As a penance for my unruly thoughts, I pulled up my chair closer to her bed and cleared my throat. It’s hard to know how to strike up conversation with a total stranger who thinks you are gay. Maybe I should put her right?

‘You think people who wear pink are homosexual. Well, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual, but –’

‘Aha! No problem, Mister Bertie,’ the old woman interrupted. ‘No problem wit me. Everyone is children of God. Even Lenin has permitted it.’

‘Yes of course, but –’ I really needed that cup of tea.

‘You mama, Lily, say we must treat all people like own family. She like good Soviet woman. Always look at sunny side, Inna, she say.’

‘Yes, Mother’s a very special person.’ I glanced at the curtain around her bed, my heart pinched between anxiety and tenderness. There seemed to be a lot of whispering and clattering going on. ‘What about your family, Inna?’

‘Not homosexy. My husband, Dovik, Soviet citizen,’ Inna declared. ‘But dead.’ She leaned over and spat into her bowl.

‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ I put on a faux-sympathetic voice, like Gertrude in Hamlet, trying to avert my eyes from the revolting greenish fluid that was lapping at the cardboard edges of her bowl.

‘Why for you sorry? You not killed him.’

‘No, indeed not, but –’

‘Killed by olihark wit poison! I living alone. Olihark knocking at door. Oy-oy-oy!’ This sounded delusional. She fixed me with dark agitated eyes. ‘Every day cooking golabki kobaski slatki, but nobody it wit since Dovik got dead.’ She wiped her nose on the sheet. ‘Husband Dovik always too much smoking. I got emphaseema. Heating expensive. My flat too much cold.’ She reached for my hand with her dry twiggy fingers and gave it a flirtatious squeeze. ‘You mama tell me she got nice flat from boyfriend. Now she worry if she will die they take away flat for under-bed tax and you will live homeless on street.’ Behind the silver curtain of hair, her eyes were watching me, dark and beady. What Mother been telling her?

Mother had lived in the flat since it was built in 1952, and she used to tell me with misty eyes that Berthold Lubetkin, the architect who designed it, had promised it would be a home for ever for her and her children. But since then the buggers hadn’t built enough new homes to keep up with the demand, she fumed, and the ones instigated by the council leader, Alderman Harold Riley, and built by Lubetkin’s firm Tecton had been flogged off to private landlords – like the flat next door, which had once belonged to a dustman called Eric Perkins and now belonged to a property company who filled it with foreign students who played music all night and littered the lift with takeaway boxes.

‘Under-bed tax?’ Could they make me move out because of that?

‘Is new tax for under-bed occupant.’

I kept mainly dog-eared scripts, odd socks and back copies of The Stage under my bed. Nothing you could call an occupant.

‘You mama very much worrying about break-up of post-war sensors. She say it make her sick in heart to think they take away her apartment and put you into street. This tax is work of Satan, she say. Mister Indunky Smeet. You know this devil-man?’

‘Not personally.’

I’d heard of course of something called a bedroom tax, which Mother described variously as an affront to human decency, the final death-blow to the post-war consensus, and a pretext for squeezing more money out of poor people who happened to have a spare bedroom. But it never occurred to me that it might apply to me, so I hadn’t taken much notice. I did recall Mum and Flossie swearing at some minister on the television news recently; though, to be fair, this was not an uncommon occurrence. I sympathised with her righteous anger, of course, but I had my own problems to contend with, and you can’t just live in a permanent stew of rage, can you?

‘But I tell her no worry, Lily, this under-bed tax for lazies scrounging in bed all day. You hard-working decent, Mister Bertie?’ She eyed me sideways.

‘Oh yes. Absolutely.’

‘What work you working, Mister Bertie?’

‘Actually, I’m an actor.’

I always dread this question. It raises such expectations.

‘Aha! Like George Clooney!’ Inna cooed. ‘You mekking film?’

‘I’m mainly a stage actor. Best known for my Shakespearean roles. And some television.’ If you can count a stint as a proud football dad in a washing-powder advert back in 1999. ‘But I’m not working at present.’

The old woman was still impressed. ‘I never met actor before. I would like met wit George Clooney. He got nice eyes. Nice smile. Nice teeth. Everything nice.’ She pursed her lips and discharged some more green phlegm. I looked away.

Bloody George Clooney. If he and I didn’t happen to share a common birthday, I probably wouldn’t care; in fact I probably wouldn’t even notice him. As it was, I couldn’t help comparing his success with mine (lack of). Of course someone who has dedicated his life to Art, as I have, cannot expect to wallow in the excesses of materialism. We have our spiritual consolations. But still, it would be nice to have more than an occasional latte at Luigi’s to look forward to.

Take the case in point: it was George bloody Clooney with his affected smile and clean-cut chin that this old crone lusted after; yet it was I, Sidebottom, who sat here at her wretched bedside watching her phlegm-bowl fill to overflowing. How could that be fair?

The beautiful nurse was still making busy sounds behind Mum’s curtain. It seemed to have been going on a very long time.

Inna’s hands fiddled with the sheet. She gave me a sly look. ‘You got good apartment. Your mother tell me about her.’

‘Yes, it’s a nice flat. Top floor.’

‘Aha! Top floor, good flat, bad lift. She say lift always broken, nobody repair her because she got hysterity.’

‘Hysterity?’ It’s true the lift was getting cranky but I personally would have described it as unreliable rather than hysterical.

‘She say banks made creases we give money. Now banks got all our money we get hysterity.’

‘Ah, you mean austerity! There’s a lot of it around nowadays.’

‘Yes. Hysterity. You mama explain to me. Very clever lady. Almost like Soviet economist.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t go so far –’

‘She love this flat, you mama. It is so beautiful, she say, she got it from arshitek boyfriend.’

Why was she going on about the flat? What had Mother been saying? Suddenly she crossed herself and fell silent, listening. I listened too. Behind the curtains around Mother’s bed a machine had been beeping constantly. Now in the silence I became aware that the sound was becoming intermittent. There was a flurry of scurrying and scuffling and low voices talking in urgent whispers.

Suddenly the nurse drew back the curtains, and murmured, ‘Mr Lukashenko, your mother has taken a turn for the worse.’

I leaned over her and peered into her dear old face, so familiar yet so mysterious, already sealed behind the glass wall of the departure lounge, checked in for the one-way journey to the undiscovered country.

‘Mum. Mum, it’s me, Bertie. I’m with you.’ I took her hand.

Mum let out a long rattling sigh. A single blue butterfly fluttered on the withered garden of her face. Pulling herself up in bed with immense effort, she gripped my arm and drew me down towards her, to whisper into my ear, ‘Don’t let them get the flat, Berthold!’ Then she fell back on the pillows with a groan.