part0004

M other finally stopped her histrionics at nine o’clock and graciously allowed me to make her a cup of cocoa. I took it up to her with two rich tea biscuits and kissed her goodnight. We’ve agreed that I’ll try harder to contain my nastiness and be more grateful for all that she does for me.

I come back downstairs and hover in the hallway until I’m sure she’s asleep. It doesn’t take long as she’s worn herself out. I go into the lounge and close the curtains, shut the door quietly and turn the television on. I flop down onto the sofa with a big sigh of relief and flip through the menu until I find the recordings of Coronation Street. I turn the sound down low so it’s a comforting background murmur. My mouth starts to water at the sight of the crisps and chocolate digestives which I’ve placed in readiness on the coffee table.

Secret eating, something Mother knows nothing about although she must know that I didn’t get to be this size by eating the same as her. There are lots of things that Mother doesn’t know about; I have a whole host of things that I keep from her.

I savour the anticipation of eating by delaying it a little longer and I pull my laptop onto my lap and turn it on. Mother doesn’t know that I have a laptop, in fact she doesn’t even know that we have broadband or wifi. The big, big plus about her not being able to get down the stairs is that she only knows what I want her to know.

For instance; she thinks that I’m totally dependent on her for money, that I have no income of my own at all.

I claim carers allowance for looking after her and she has no idea. If she did, she’d make me give it to her for rent as she never lets me forget that I live here for nothing. So I applied for it, got it and it goes straight into my own bank account which she also knows nothing about. It’s enabled me to buy things for myself that I couldn’t possibly have otherwise and has saved my sanity; it’s a very limited secret life but without it I think I’d be dead.

Mother does give me twenty pounds a week pocket money to spend all on myself which she says is very generous as everything is provided so what could I possibly need money for? Twenty pounds barely covers my crisps, chocolate and the like. I can’t buy my treats on the normal food bill because she would spot them instantly when she scrutinises the receipts. She also pays for a mobile phone for me, the most basic model available. It’s for her benefit, the mobile phone, so she can call me if I’m not at home. The house phone is the only number in the contact list. Mother won’t have a mobile phone, she says they warp the brain.

Mother receives a state pension and also a very good income from something called a bond although she has never admitted this to me, and she also gets benefits because of her condition, but every penny that I spend on shopping has to be accounted for. She scrutinises every receipt when I return and every bill that comes in. She gives me her debit card to pay for things but she won’t allow me to be named on her account.

I only know about all of the money she has because of another little secret of mine; I have access to her accounts. I set it all up online and when the letter of confirmation arrived from the bank it never got to her because I opened it myself.

I open up the browser and log on to check her balance. She has over ten thousand pounds in her current account and that’s without all of the savings accounts she has. Plus, she owns this house outright; inherited from my grandparents. It may be old fashioned and run down but it’s in a semi-rural location and is detached with a huge garden, so is worth a tidy sum. I Googled similar houses and even allowing for the work that needs doing the amount it’s worth made me gasp.

She always tells me she’s poor but I’d guessed she was lying. Lying is her default; Mother basically lies about everything. Whenever her bank statement came she’d make sure to not let me see it so for a while I was stumped as to how I was going to find out. I couldn’t even pretend it hadn’t arrived because it always comes around the seventh of each month and if she didn’t get it she’d ring the bank. In desperation I steamed a statement open but when I tried to reseal the envelope it was obvious it’d been opened. I contemplated throwing it away but then she’d have had to ring the bank for a copy. In the end I took it out in the garden, put it on the floor, put my foot on it and scuffed it around a bit. Then I gave it to her with the rest of the post which also got the scuffed around the garden treatment and I told her it came through the door like it. I think she believed me even though she looked at me in her usual suspicious way.

It was worth doing because before I put it back in the envelope I took a photograph of it on my phone which is how I applied for online banking. Much easier than trying to steam open envelopes.

I’m not making Mother sound very nice, am I? And I probably don’t sound very nice either but that’s because I’ve learned from the best. Mother.

Maybe I’m being a bit unfair about Mother because she’s always looked after me, done her best for me in her own way. It’s just that I feel so trapped. It’s not her fault that she’s ill. If I had a life of my own, some friends even, I wouldn’t feel quite so resentful.

I wasn’t always so fat and friendless, a bit chubby maybe, but I had friends at school, I had ambitions and I had a normalish life, although I was never allowed to bring friends home from school. Mother couldn’t be doing with it, she said. The thing is, if you’re never allowed to invite anyone round then people start to think you’re a bit weird and stop inviting you. So it makes it awkward to have friends, but I did have some. For a while.

I know this sounds completely stupid and impossible but sometimes I think how convenient it was that Mother had her stroke just when I was about to leave home and go to university. And that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s not as if she could make herself have a stroke is it? Although she was only sixty-three, which is very young for a stroke. And she didn’t smoke, or drink and she wasn’t overweight so she was just very unlucky and by association so was I. She’s only seventy-three now, so she could easily live another twenty years or more.

I never knew my father as he’d gone before I was even born. Mother doesn’t talk about him very much, usually just to say how selfish and gutless he was, leaving her in the lurch. And that I’m just like him and got all of his bad personality traits and none of her good ones. I must have been an accident, a mistake, no one in their right mind would get pregnant at forty-five, would they? I’m pretty sure that she couldn’t have realised she was pregnant until it was too late otherwise she’d have got rid of me. I can’t imagine Mother having sex; I can’t imagine any man wanting to have sex with Mother or even wanting to be around her to be honest.

I’m most likely biased; maybe she’s nicer to other people than she is to me but I have no way of knowing as we never see anyone else, except for people who try to sell us stuff. She doesn’t even see a doctor; her repeat prescriptions go straight to the pharmacy at Foodco. I think the last time Mother saw a doctor was three years ago when she had the flu, the doctor was in and out of the house in ten minutes and that included writing the prescription.

For most people getting pregnant at forty-five would be a disaster but luckily for Mother she has this house. We’ve lived here all of my life and most of hers. The grandparents must have left her quite a lot of money too because although she likes to say she’s always worked, the truth is that she worked a couple of days a week at the library and there’s no way that she could have lived on the wages from there.

I’ve never even seen a photograph of my father; mother says she doesn’t have any so I have no idea what he looks like. I thought she might have been lying about not having a photograph but believe me I’ve searched this house from top to bottom and I can’t find one. I think maybe I look like him because I look nothing like Mother. I’ve scoured the photograph album and I can’t see that I look anything like my grandparents either. Tall, thin and miserable looking best describes my relatives, they definitely look like they eat to live and not live to eat. Mother even leaves food on her plate from the miniscule portions I serve her. I definitely don’t take after her. I wonder if my father was fat?

I check Mother’s current account and I’m not surprised to see that the balance has increased; we live so frugally that she’s saving money. I log out and push the laptop off my lap and onto the sofa.

I feel unsettled; it’s not the row with Mother, they don’t even bother me now because it’s always the same thing and I’m almost bored by the arguments.

I stare at the coffee table and the snacks waiting for me; I could watch my programmes now, they’re all recorded and ready. Do the usual, settle on the sofa and binge watch and binge eat. I usually shovel it in and I can’t settle until I’ve eaten every single thing. Then an overwhelming feeling of self-disgust will come over me and I’ll vow that I’ll never do it again. That feeling will last for about two hours and will gradually fade and if there’s anything snack-like left in the house I’ll then eat that. I’ve read loads about eating disorders and what I do is sort of like bulimia only I can’t bear to be sick so maybe I’m just a fat, greedy pig. Eating your problems, I’ve read it’s called. Maybe I should eat Mother.

No, I decide. I’m not going to stuff my face. I heave myself up from the sofa and snatch the crisps and biscuits from the table and march out to the kitchen, pausing briefly at the bottom of the stairs to listen for any movement from Mother’s room. All quiet.

I continue to the kitchen but once I reach it I stand in the middle of the room, unsure what to do. The kitchen is unchanged from my childhood; orange laminated worktops and green painted cupboards. Seventies retro some would call it, to me it’s hideous, depressing, dated and battered, the worktop has so many chips in it that it must be a health hazard. Mother could easily afford a new kitchen but she won’t spend any money unless she absolutely has to.

I clutch the crisps and biscuits to my body and consider what to do. I want to stuff them into the bin in a grand gesture to show myself that I’m turning over a new leaf and I’m not going to eat them but I know from past experience that I’ll probably be pulling them out again tomorrow.

Besides, I’d have to empty the overflowing bin first.

Another secret from Mother.

There isn’t a spare inch of worktop space in the kitchen, dirty plates, cutlery and cups litter every available surface. I haven’t washed up for three days and my normal routine is to only ever do so when I run out of crockery. Five days is my personal best but I cheated a bit as I gave Mother microwave meals for two of those days.

Another of my secrets.

Mother doesn’t approve of microwaves, wouldn’t give one house room . She certainly wouldn’t eat such a thing as a microwave meal; not knowingly anyway. Fortunately, once I’ve dished it up on a plate and overcooked it a bit so it resembles my cooking, she has no idea she’s eating one. I have to be a bit careful when I give her the shopping receipts though; I daren’t buy them from Foodco as they give itemised receipts there which is a nightmare because Mother puts her reading glasses on and checks every single item. I can’t get anything past her. The Indian mini-mart in the town centre is the place to go, they’re not interested in giving itemised receipts so I get the microwave meals from there and pretend the receipts are for something else.

I have to make sure the kitchen door is shut when I cook them so there’s no possibility of her hearing the ding of the microwave. She makes out she’s deaf but you can never tell with Mother; I’m not sure how deaf she really is or if she’s even deaf at all.

Oh yes, there’s a lot Mother doesn’t know and never will know as long as I can dissuade her from getting a stair lift. Every couple of months she says she’s going to get one; the adverts are on TV the whole time. This usually results in a few anxious weeks for me while I persuade her not to get one, without her knowing I’m persuading her obviously; which means I have to encourage her and seem really keen for her to do something which has the opposite effect. It’s exhausting.

Mother’s extremely mean so the cost was enough to put her off last time; she kept on so much I rang up the company and they sent a salesman out to measure up and he then sent us a quote. He wanted Mother to sign up there and then but thankfully was really vague about the price which put Mother’s back up. Mother had to be got out of bed and showered and dressed before he came, I even had to wash and set her hair. Then she insisted on being seated in her armchair in her room and I had to cover her bed with a big checked blanket to make it look less like a bed, apparently that’s not decent, and all this had to be done before he arrived at ten o’clock.

All pretty pointless as the very fact we were considering a stair lift indicated that she was bed bound. But that’s Mother for you.

When I was letting him out of the front door I let him know that Mother was loaded and would only want the very best so he’d be sure to quote for the deluxe model. Mother went into a rage when she finally saw the inflated quote and that salesman’s name was mud, I can tell you. I could have bought a new car for the price of that stair lift. Although before she got the quote he was the best thing since sliced bread.

The salesman kept ringing up for weeks afterwards to try and get the sale and I was afraid to leave the house for a while in case he rang while I was out and Mother answered the extension in her bedroom. I couldn’t have her knowing that he’d quoted for the most expensive stair lift they had. Every time the phone rang I’d jump and then race to the phone before Mother picked it up, it was awful. I had to be rude to him in the end to stop him ringing and he got a bit nasty, implied that we were time wasters. I told him if he rang again I’d report him to his boss and then I put the phone down on him. Served him right; he barely spoke to me while he fawned all over mother; made jokey comments about weight limits on stair lifts and would Mother be the only one using it, all the while giving me snide looks.

I just wish they’d stop advertising them on TV, because you never know with Mother, she might suddenly get it into her head that she wants to come downstairs, no matter what the cost and then where will we be? She’ll be watching and inspecting everything I do and I’ll have no peace at all.

So, to wash up or not to wash up? The kitchen looks pretty rank and to be honest I feel a bit disgusted with myself. Or shall I just go and sit down and eat those crisps and biscuits to cheer myself up?

I turn around to go and resume my place on the sofa when the image of Bella pops into my head and I stop in the doorway. Would she sit and stuff her face and generally behave like a slob? I can’t imagine for a moment that she would, I’m certain that her house is just as perfect as she is. The thought of Bella lifts my spirits for some bizarre reason and a sprig of hope start to grow inside me and a little voice tells me that it’s not too late.

Decision made I throw the crisps and biscuits onto the floor, stamping carefully on the crisps so that they don’t explode and then I open the swing bin and pull out the overflowing liner. Once it’s out of the bin I manage to stuff the crisps and biscuits inside and tie it in a double knot. I open the back door and drag it out to the dustbin and shove it inside. I close the lid and stand for a moment; it’s freezing, the cold permeates the soles of my slippers and I shiver. Remember this moment, I tell myself, remember this moment because it’s the first step in the making of the new me.

I go back into the kitchen, close and lock the door and survey the wreckage. Bella would never live like this and I decide that I will behave like her. I put another liner in the bin and scrape the leftovers off the plates and make a space so I can pile them up by the sink. An hour later and everything is washed and put away and the kitchen looks a lot tidier. But it looks dirty so I fill the sink up again, find a bottle of spray kitchen cleaner and start squirting and scrubbing the worktops and cupboards. By the time I’ve finished it’s gone twelve o’clock and my eyes are drooping but I feel exhilarated; I’ve managed to not stuff my face all evening and I’ve cleaned the kitchen so that it sparkles and I actually feel quite proud of myself. I’m just about to reward myself with something nice to eat when I remember that I don’t do that anymore.

No. I will not give in.

I heave myself up the stairs, pausing at the door to Mother’s room to listen. I gently push her door open to the muted sound of her TV and snoring. I step across the room and turn it off then remove her glasses from her face before she crushes them in her sleep and place them carefully in their case on her bedside table.

I come out and pull the door nearly closed and pad along the landing to the bathroom. As I brush my teeth over the salmon pink sink I appraise the bathroom; decidedly grubby. The acrylic bath has a nasty black ring around it and the toilet could definitely do with a scrub.