Page 2 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

Of course, when I’d promised my mother that I would call round to see her this morning, I’d not known that I would have a relatively sleepless night. Daniel was still not quite able to be trusted with his continence after chicken-gate and I had spent the night on the sofa so that I could let him outside approximately once an hour to do his business. The sounds of his pitiful whines as he scrabbled at the living room door to get out left me under no illusion I, and my lovely woollen rug, would regret any attempt to ignore him.

How I wished the twins were home from university and able to share the night shift with me – even if I knew I wouldn’t trust them to wake up in time to let Daniel out. But no, they are having the time of their lives in Manchester as a series of increasingly drunken messages sent between eleven and one reminded me. It’s always nice to hear my children tell me they love me. It’s not always ideal to hear it in a mumbled voice note after midnight accompanied by the sound of someone throwing up in the background.

Between that and a tsunami of night sweats, thanks to what I’m pretty sure – but don’t want to accept – is the menopause, I did not have a peaceful rest. In fact, I’d almost fallen asleep in the shower this morning, dreaming I was being waterboarded by my old Latin teacher. I’m not sure what was the scarier part – the waterboarding or the teacher. Thankfully I jumped awake in time to stop myself slipping in the shower, sustaining a fatal head injury, and having my splayed naked body discovered weeks later after the flies had been at it.

Daniel’s stomach has settled, thankfully, but instead of being able to finally take advantage of the calm after the storm to sneak in a quick nap, I’ve had to play the role of good daughter and check in on my beloved mother. Not for the first time I curse my sole sibling, Ruairi, for living on the other side of the country in Belfast. I love my mother deeply, but it would be nice to have someone to share the checking-in duties with.

I haul my tired and admittedly unfit body out of my car, and lift the bags of shopping I’ve picked up for Mum from the boot.

‘It’s just a few things, love. To keep me going,’ she’d said as she started to read out her shopping list to me over the phone earlier. Twenty minutes later, the ‘few things’ had morphed into a full weekly shop plus some extras for Mrs Bishop (first name Emily, and her husband was called Harold. I kid you not!) next door ‘to save her nipping out later’. I suppose I don’t mind. Mrs Bishop is a lovely woman, and always has been. Her own children – now, like me, grown up with families of their own – have scattered to the four winds and left poor Mrs Bishop to contend with her increasing frailty on her own. Not that she will hear a bad word said against them.

I heft the bags up the garden path, deposit them on the front step and rifle in my pocket for my keys before letting myself into Mum’s and carrying the shopping through to the kitchen. As usual, my mother has the thermostat in her house set to tropical heatwave and it isn’t long before I can feel sweat gathering at my hairline, and starting to pool in the increasingly lower dip between my breasts.

‘Mum!’ I call, as I begin to unpack her shopping to put it away for her. Her kitchen may be as dated as shell suits and acid perms, but it’s pristine and everything has its place. I find it quite soothing to tidy away the shopping in her well-ordered manner. It brings me back in time to my teenage years, huffing and puffing at being asked to help out and, on occasion, slamming cupboard doors shut because I felt so aggrieved that she had bought value label crisps when everyone else in school seemed to get Tayto in their lunchboxes. God, but I was a brat to her at times – never copping on to the fact my parents bought Yellow Pack crisps because that was likely all they could afford. A cloud of delayed guilt swoops down on me, bringing with it an Unexpected Wave of Sadness because I might have made them feel bad, thirty-some years ago.

Unexpected Waves of Sadness have become an almost daily occurrence for me as my oestrogen levels have started to deplete. I can be having a perfectly lovely, sometimes even happy day, when all of a sudden they attack without warning like the doom-laden ninjas they are and my mood will sink faster than Philip Schofield’s career.

‘Mum!’ I call again. ‘Will I put the kettle on? I stopped in at the bakery on Ivy Lane and picked up some buns.’ I don’t mention that I ate a jam and icing turnover on the way over after another UWOS washed over me when I saw a harassed mother struggle to get her car seat clicked into the frame of her pram. That brought with it the realisation that I will never battle to transport another baby of my own from place to place ever again. At that moment, it felt like the most crushingly sad feeling I had ever experienced – so I carb loaded.

I’m filling the kettle when it dawns on me my mother hasn’t actually answered. I’m just so used to this little routine of ours that I, it seems, take her replies for granted.

‘Mum?’ I call again, this time a question more than a greeting. I turn the tap off so I can listen for her response but the house remains silent. Prone as I am to random acts of extreme catastrophising, there is a part of me that is already planning her funeral, convinced that I will go upstairs to find that she has expired in the hour since we last spoke when she told me to make sure to buy proper Rich Tea biscuits and ‘not some sorry own-branded excuse for a biscuit’. I try not to let my repressed teenaged bitterness about the sorry own-branded excuse for crisps she bought sully the memory of what might have been my last conversation with the woman who gave me life.

‘Mu-um?’ I call again, and I hear a wobble of impending hysteria in my voice. I need her to answer. I am so not emotionally prepared to even think about losing her, never mind actually… I give myself a shake. I’m being ridiculous. Sure, she was fine an hour ago. Hale and hearty, as she would say herself. And just because I know how things can change in a heartbeat, it doesn’t mean they will.

Reverting to the emotional neediness of an eleven-year-old, I yell ‘Mammmmmmyyy!’ in a strangulated voice, as I walk to the bottom of the stairs, poking my head into the living room and downstairs loo as I go. There is no sign that Roisin Burnside is in residence, except for the holy candle she has lit in her favoured holy candle spot on the mantlepiece. Roisin Burnside would never leave the house with a candle lit. No matter how important the intention.

With my heart now in my throat, I run up the stairs and stick my head into her bedroom. Her bed is made. The window is wide open to let in fresh air despite the near artic conditions outside. Everything is as it should be, and I suppose I should be relieved not to find her corpse on top of the bed but she’s still missing and this is not typical mammy behaviour.

‘Mammmmyyyyy!’ I yell again, followed by a more plaintive cry as my chest tightens and the little hairs on the back of my neck rise. My deepest fears are doing their best to muscle their way into my head. This could be it. It could be happening. That’s the thing when you have parents who are getting up the years a bit, you start to fear the worst. It stalks you constantly, picking off the parents of your friends one by one until you know it’s only a matter of time before it’s your turn to grieve.

I’m shaking as I poke my head into the bathroom, and still shaking when I look in the spare room – which I’m surprised to find isn’t quite as perfectly ordered as the rest of the house. There are dusty boxes on top of the bed – my old bed – with a pile of clothes laid beside them. I recognise my father’s familiar handwriting on the top of the first box – ‘R’s Childhood Memories’ – and my chest tightens so much I wonder if I’m going to be the one who is found dead today. I’ve read that more women are having heart attacks than ever before – and younger too. Sure, Miranda Bailey had a heart attack in Grey’s Anatomy and she’s about my age, surely? I’ll have to google it if I survive.

But as my breathing eases just a little, the distraction of Dr Bailey working its magic, it dawns on me that this is not a heart attack, it is just a visceral reaction to seeing my father’s – my daddy’s – handwriting again. Instinctively I reach out and touch it; my finger traces the curves and swirls of his penmanship. ‘R’s Childhood Memories’ – as if a box could hold all those moments in one place ready for us to dip into whenever we wanted. If only.

If only time didn’t steal so many of our memories or push them aside to make way for the flashier kind. The older I get the more I realise it’s not really the big nights out, and the huge celebratory moments I long to recall with the most detail. Given the chance, those are not the days I would relive. It’s the gentle, quiet moments I want. Like reading – just existing quietly – in the same room as my father, the sun streaming through the window, dust motes dancing in the air. Warmth, contentment, the rhythmic turn of pages. I wish I could remember what books we read. What we talked about between chapters. I wish I could remember what biscuits I gave him with his cups of tea.

I want those middle-of-the-night moments with my babies back, when the whole house was asleep but us. When I rocked them, feeling the softness of their downy hair against my shoulder, smelling the sweet, milky aroma of their baby breath. Oh, I would relive those moments in a heartbeat. I’d sacrifice a decade of whatever time I have left on this planet to relive just five of those quiet minutes.

A loud crash reverberates through the house, hauling me by the throat back from my internal time travel to the here and now, and my mother’s voice as she shouts, ‘Rebecca! Is that you! Can you come and help me here, love? I’ve got myself into a bit of a mess!’

It sounds very much as if her voice is coming from the small box room at the back of the house – my brother Ruairi’s childhood bedroom which he remains bitter about to this very day. My parents were ‘playing favourites’ when they assigned the much bigger middle room to me, he says. I tell him he’s talking absolute nonsense, but secretly I agree with him. I was a goody two-shoes. Ruairi was a wee shite.

‘Mum?’ I call, the relief that flooded my heart at hearing her voice already replaced by a sense of impending doom at just what this stubborn old goat has done to herself now.

‘I’m in your brother’s room!’ she calls.

I’m already walking through the door to the smallest bedroom in Ireland, North or South, when she adds, ‘Well, sort of, anyway.’

At first I don’t see her, which, given the size of the room, is quite impressive. But I do see a battered cardboard box on the floor – which I’m going to assume is what made the godawful crashing sound – and a step-ladder. When I focus on the ladder and my eyes cast upwards, it’s hard to miss the slippered feet dangling out of the hatch to the loft.

‘Jesus Christ, Mum! What are you doing? How did you get up there? Have you a death wish on you? Christ alive, you could break a hip, or your leg, or take a funny spell and fall out of that damn thing and break your neck and then where would you be?’

‘Well, love,’ my mother calls from the cavern of darkness that is our loft. ‘I imagine I’d be dead on the floor, but I’m not, I’m just a bit stuck. I dropped my torch, and my eyes are struggling to readjust to the light in the room so I can’t really see the outline of the ladder and…’

‘I was calling you!’ I scold, in a voice I’ve only ever used before on my children when they disappeared in a busy supermarket and I immediately assumed they’d been kidnapped, only to find them hitting up strangers for pound coins to go on the Balamory bus ride. A mixture of relief and anger bubble forth from inside me. ‘I thought you were dead!’ I manage with a squeak.

‘No,’ my mother says, without a hint of acknowledgement of the mental trauma she has just put me through. ‘I’d never die and leave the house in this state! I’d be mortified if the neighbours turned up to the wake to find my box room in disarray.’

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