My head feels like someone is sitting on it. The last time I felt like this was in Ibiza. I had one of those nights where I ended up in a bar in a wrestling ring, wearing a bikini. There was a sea of foam involved, The Weeknd in the background, a Viking hat and an inflatable palm tree that I’d stolen from the garden of someone’s villa. I wrestled a very skinny lad from Sunderland who tried to sit on my actual head so I flipped him over, trapped his bony arse in a body scissors move and it took four grown men to pull me off him. I won a voucher for a free seafood dinner that evening, and a medal that I lost in the sea.
Hold up.
Ibiza.
2015.
I was supposed to be on a yoga retreat. That didn’t last long. I stole the goat. I went into town and just checked myself into a hotel, partied and drank and joined a hen party. Laura from Wigan was marrying Jamie. Don’t tell Jamie but Laura had a bloody amazing send-off. We really did pay tribute to her single life for one last time. One morning at that hotel, I went to the breakfast buffet and threw up in a serving dish full of French toast. I remember. Lucy remembers little details like these for posterity but also for the anecdotes. She remembers. I really do bloody remember. I’d jump up and do a jig if my head didn’t hurt this much.
‘Mum,’ I whisper.
It’s the unmistakeable silhouette of Mum’s bob haircut that I see first and she drops whatever she’s reading onto the bed in shock.
‘Lucy?’ she whispers.
‘Yeah. That’s me.’
She grabs my hand tightly and kisses me on the forehead. ‘I need to get someone, wait…’
‘No, don’t. Just stay here for a moment.’
It’s normally quite difficult to get my mum to do what I say but she stays, the grip on my hand tight. I feel it all but, compared to last time, my brain feels like it’s been picked up and shaken around like a snow globe, the flakes settling.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘There was a blood clot, they went in and removed it but it explained a lot, it was hidden, pressing against lobes or something. Emma can explain it better than me but it was why your memory had gone. It was just bloody lucky you were in a doctor’s office when it happened.’
The memory floods back to me, the blurred vision of my Meg and Dr Jacobs over me, and it’s welcome, not to relive it but to actually have a memory, to have it and be able to put the pieces all together again, not have them scattered about and not fitting together. A tear rolls down the curve of my cheek and my mum scoops it up with her finger.
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘You’re Meg.’
She stops for a moment then smiles. ‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty, fucking thirty. How did that happen?’
She sighs with relief, her breath trembling.
‘Have I been asleep for long?’ I ask.
‘It’s now 2031.’
‘Really?’
‘Not really.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘You said I was Meg.’
‘Because that was funny.’
She does a very Mum thing of patting down the bed, studying all the monitors around my bed like she knows what all the readings mean.
‘Would you have sat there then for ten years, waiting for me to wake up?’ I ask, attempting to calm her down.
‘I’d have stopped for occasional toilet breaks. I don’t think you’d have appreciated me peeing in a bucket in the corner of the room. But yes. I’d have been here every day.’
We pause for a moment to take that in.
‘You’ve been asleep for about twelve hours. They explained what they did to your head and your dad threw up so they’ve taken him home. The sisters are doing shifts.’
I reach up to feel bandages, wires still flow out of every arm. They put that one up my pisser again, didn’t they?
‘Did the sisters all come back to London?’ I ask, slightly annoyed that I’d have disrupted their routines again.
‘Of course, they’re all crashing in various houses. I met Max, Grace’s new boyfriend.’
‘Thoughts?’
‘He’s pleasant. Possibly trying too hard to impress me because he’s scared of me. Also, so much hair.’
I smile. ‘Talking of hair… Did they shave my head again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hair grows.’
‘That it does.’
Mum can’t seem to find the words but stands there just as I’ve asked her to do. It’s a version of Mum I’ve not seen before and it’s slightly unnerving. I can’t tell if her stoicism is strength or fear.
‘Talk, Mum. You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring you…’
‘Do I look awful?’
‘Yes. Not as bad as when that bus hit you, mind…’ Her hand reaches to my mine. I remember this hand. ‘You have more lives than a cat, Lucy Callaghan…’
‘Where is my cat by the way?’
‘In my house. Her new favourite thing is to sleep on the toilet and then attack anyone who goes near it. I had to pee in a shower tray the other day.’
I try and laugh but even that hurts.
‘What’s my cat’s name? I don’t remember.’
She looks mildly perturbed. ‘Your cat is called Pussy.’
‘Oh yeah, I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say that word out loud.’
She laughs and shakes her head at me. I take a few deep breaths as the pain in my head starts to throb. I want to say it’s bad but I can liken it to a couple of insane hangovers I’ve once had.
‘Can I get someone now?’
I shake my head. ‘I quite like having you to myself. That rarely happens.’
She perches herself on the edge of the bed. ‘Are you in pain?’
‘Pain is relative. It was far more painful living without my memory for a bit. You replacing all my knickers. Or sharing a bathroom with four sisters again.’
‘I forgot how much shower gel you get through. Can I at least tell your sisters you’re up?’
‘Wait, just a few more moments.’
She studies the edges of my face, hands gripped around the steel railings of my bed. When I was in my first coma, Mum would spend weekends here camping out in the Premier Inn next door. Dad said she’d hardly slept, she’d just wander here in the night and read to me. My Lucy loved reading, she told the nurses, so she’d sift through the classics and read them to me, stopping occasionally for vending machine tea. We all have different versions of Mum in our head, she’s our fiercest critic and our loudest cheerleader, but I suppose we all love so hard because of her.
‘I guess you know why I was in a doctor’s office then,’ I ask her.
‘Your sisters did say. They tried to cover it up but I got the truth out of them. If you needed the money, you could have come to me or your father, Emma?’
‘It was more than that, Mum. I just wanted to put something out into the world that had meaning. It can’t always be about me even though I’d like it to be.’
She smiles. I was expecting more of a bollocking there but she seems to be holding back. It’ll possibly come later as not even she is so callous to give it to me both barrels when I’m in a paper dress.
‘Tell me what you remember,’ she says.
‘God, everything. It’s like a librarian has been in and helped me restock my brain but fuzzy memories of who I’ve seen and who showed up in the last few months.’
‘You saw Tony,’ Mum reminds me.
‘You have a thing for Tony.’
‘Because I think he’s one of the few men I’ve met who is your equal, Lucy, who understands your value. No one else really comes close.’ She puts a hand to my face, tears forming in her eyes.
‘You can cry if you want, Mum. I will allow for a public show of emotion here. I nearly died. Twice.’
‘But you didn’t,’ she replies a little smugly. ‘And I never really had any doubt.’
‘Because of your secret medical degree?’
‘Because you’re made of sterner stuff, Lucy.’
‘That’s all you.’
‘Well, that’s stating the bleeding obvious,’ she says, laughing.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, Lucy…’
‘What do you think about my last ten years? What I’ve done with my life?’
Hello, existential Lucy who has never really shown her face before this. I don’t think I ever sat still long enough to consider these questions. I just did what was in my gut and what felt right and time ticked along without me ever gazing at my watch in doubt or regret. Mum looks out the window for a minute, at a sliver of sky visible through closed blinds.
‘Lucy. I remember when I held you in my hands for the first time. You were so close in age to Grace and I just remembered, this mass of curls, and thinking, a fifth daughter. How the hell are we going to do this?’
‘I was a mistake, wasn’t I?’
‘A happy accident.’
‘A mistake. But well done for letting Dad hop on when Grace was only three months old.’
She ignores that last comment, which is standard Mum.
‘But there’s always a moment when you’re holding a baby and you’re studying its little face and these miniature little hands and you just wonder about the path, where they’re going to go, what they’re going to do.’
‘Did you think I’d end up on this path?’
‘No. But then did I think Emma would be divorced? That Grace would be a widow? I never thought that either. I didn’t think I’d end up with all these grandchildren.’
‘You’re avoiding the question.’
‘Your path is unfamiliar to me, Lucy, so I can’t comment. I never thought I’d end up with five daughters either. There is no wrong or right path. It is a bemusement to me though that your path seems to be laden in troublemaking and pictures of penises.’
‘They are funny though, aren’t they? The penises.’
‘You youth just have too much time on your hands. Back in my day, if you wanted to send a girl a picture of your penis then you had to set the timer on your camera, take the film down to Snappy Snaps and then probably be banned from that branch.’
I laugh. ‘Spoken like someone with experience. Did Dad make albums for you?’
She shakes her head at me.
‘Seeing as I’ve been at death’s door though and we’re alone, then why are you sometimes the critic, the judge? I never quite know what you think of me. I don’t think any of the sisters truly know…’
She smiles. ‘Lucy… All you girls are my proudest moment. But you’re my force of nature, my whirlwind baby. You’re not on a path, you’re raging through fields and you let people know you’re in the room. I’ve given up trying to understand it but I like your energy. I’ve always liked that. Any criticism of that always comes from a place of love.’
‘Of honesty?’
‘Maybe of trying to protect you all from the bad. Your dad describes it like this. He always says I spend far too much time getting in the way of you and your sisters. The truth is, I hate seeing any of you hurt or upset. It lights a fire in me. When it comes down to it, I’d jump in front of moving traffic for my girls.’
‘A fitting analogy.’
‘Apologies. But he’s right. I wished it were me who got run over and not you. I’d do that a million times over.’
I pause for a moment to hear the emotion in her voice.
‘If a bus hit you a million times over then you’d certainly be dead, Mum.’
She doesn’t see the humour in my retort.
‘So please don’t do that. I quite like you, Mum.’
‘Quite?’
‘Yes.’
She narrows her eyes at me as I cough and she encourages me to sit up in bed.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m bloody starving.’
‘What do you want to eat?’
‘Toast. And tea.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. What sort of tea?’
‘Builder’s brew. Sugar please.’
‘Strong as tits?’ she asks.
I nod, smiling.
‘Good. I’m going to get the doctor now.’
‘If it’s the same doctors from last time, can you get the one who’s reasonably good-looking? Not the one with the comb-over,’ I say.
‘She feels better, doesn’t she?’
‘She’s getting there. Tea would help. The service is so slow in this place.’
‘Oh, piss off, Lucy.’