The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  There’s a blackbird singing full pelt in the street, the first of the day creeping above the curtains. On the laptop I watch peregrines. There are two eggs now, mottled red-brown. I see glimpses of them only, as the parents change shifts, one standing up and stretching its legs, the other rocking from side to side as it settles, shifting feathers out of the way so its brood patch – the area of bare skin on the breast – is in contact with the eggs to keep them warm. It’s calming, somehow, to watch two giant birds raise young on top of a block of flats on a webcam on my laptop. Life goes on and here it is. 4.30 a.m. Nearly light. One of the birds shifts and stretches, lifts its great wings as if yawning. And then jumps up, drops down and out of sight. Breakfast time.

  I look up GCS online. It stands for Glasgow Coma Scale. A normal waking person is a fifteen. After the op Mum was a nine but not any more. The scale starts at three; one and two must be coma. Mum’s slipping into a coma and there’s nothing I can do.

  My head crashes back into the pillow and I lie, staring at the ceiling, blurred through tears. I have to go back up.

  A line of cars, a racing heart. It’s been ten days and I’m less than a mile from her. Is she awake or dead? I pull up on a single yellow. I have to. I run out and all the way to the main entrance, up two flights of stairs. Past people shuffling on zimmer frames, pushing drips and oxygen tanks. Sorry, excuse me, sorry. At the entrance to the ward I ring the bell. Silence. There’s another queue now, another line of anxious, desperate people begging to see their loved ones. I’m breathless but I don’t care. People look at me. I ring and ring and ring and eventually they let me in.

  Her bed’s empty and I stand and flail about, still catching my breath and now in tears, as the nurses come to see me. Where’s my mum? They must see this every day. Grown people reduced to babies crying for their parents. Who’s your mum, darling? I tell them. It’s OK, she’s just been moved. Moved? Why? They mumble something about having an even mix of patients across a section of ward ‘in case something happens’. I wonder where Mum sits on that scale of awfulness. Has she been moved because she’s deteriorated? No one will say.

  I’m shaking as the nurse takes me around the corner and points to a bed with a bruised and swollen lump from which a thousand wires and tubes connect to a beeping machine. Ellie on the chair next to her. Look who it is! Mum opens her eyes and moves her head to take me in: a sweaty, breathless, tearful thing aching for my mum. She greets me with a giant smile and a rusty Herrrro! My God.

  The doctors and nurses have given her extra oxygen and raised her blood pressure so the blood pumps it faster around her body. It’s had the desired effect: she’s woken up. I can’t hug her properly because of the wires and I’m worried I’ll hurt her. I lean in to kiss her and take her hand. It’s all I can do not to climb into bed with her. She looks at me with giant searching eyes. Hi, Mummy. Hi. Hello, Mummy. I take her hand and kiss it. I can tell she’s using all her brain power to look at me. She looks and looks until she can’t any more and she sinks back into the pillow and closes her eyes. Gone again. Ellie says she’s been ‘talking’ for an hour only. What’s she been saying? Herro. Yes, no. Early days then. Yes. Ellie leaves and I sit with Mum, desperate to wake her so I can have a piece of her. But I don’t, I can’t, she needs to sleep.

  She’s been moved to a bed by a window. There are workmen on the roof opposite and I wonder if they can see us. I wonder if they have any clue about what goes on in here, Mum sandwiched between someone about to have her life-support machine switched off and a man trying to pull his breathing tube out. I stroke her arm. There’s a giant bruise around the blood pressure line that feeds into her wrist. She’s been having problems with that, says the nurse. Has to be at the right angle. We keep taking it out and refitting it but it doesn’t work, she’s too fidgety. Fidgety’s good though, right? He tells me her GCS has climbed a bit. He checks her responses as if bang on cue: shines a light in one eye and tries to do the other. She jams it shut. She’s a fighter, this one, isn’t she, he laughs, as he ignores her refusal to open her left eye and ticks the box saying she has anyway. He tries to get her to speak and stick her tongue out. She opens her eyes to look at him and then jams them shut again. I try now: Mum? Will you just do what the nurse asks? She ignores me, resolutely determined to sleep. GCS back down again. That’s it? That’s what measures consciousness? She’s not slipping into a coma, she’s just being bloody difficult.

  I drive back to hers along roads hard-wired into my brain, along roads where I used to ride my bike, past the street lamps Mum attached Labour Party billboards to for the 1987 election, past my primary school, to the roundabout and – I stop. Park up for a second and drink in the view. They’ve had new windows put in. Tastefully done, Mum always said they were tasteful. New doors on the garage and side gate. Nice car on the driveway. Sticky rhododendrons coming into flower, that awful variegated holly still on the lawn. I look up at what was my bedroom window, imagine what lies beyond it now. The honeysuckle that grew up to the window is gone. I had the best room in the house, Mum said, because I got to smell honeysuckle flowers each morning in summer.

  I’ve been sitting here long enough. I don’t want to be seen. I pull out onto the road again, drive past the cherry trees in full, pink April blossom, as they have been every year for the last thirty years. The blossom that falls like autumn leaves. Do children kick it now, throwing it up in huge gusts? Do they gather the browning petals together like a snowball, throw them at their siblings? Past the big house where I used to sneak in and hide behind the conifers. Past the corner where those kids asked me if my bike came from Oxfam; where an old lady took me in one day and fed me ice cream.

  Before I know what I’m doing I turn into the sports club, drive past the mere on the right, as far as I can go through to the end of the car park. Park up, sit in the car. Heart on fire.

  It’s different now. There’s been an extension, I think, a second floor put in. There’s a big gate now blocking my way to the fence I climbed all those years ago, to peer over into the garden. Peer at the manicured ornamental borders where my swing and the greenhouse once stood. The new fence that replaced the broken one that allowed me to sneak next door and gawp into their pond. The perfect lawn in place of the fire pit, the compost heap, the masses of cow parsley. The tennis court where runner beans and gooseberries once grew.

  The ten-year-old me eyes the fence. It’s 7 p.m., there are people about. People with tennis racquets and cricket bats, people heading to and from a gym which didn’t used to be there. I get out of the car, stand on the kerb and peer as far along as I can but I’m not tall enough, not near enough, not young enough to get away with it – a 36-year-old would have far less bargaining power with the police for trespassing than a child. I return, reluctantly, to the car and drive off. But I’m not done. I drive around, past the house again and then down to reach the other entrance, past what used to be Mum’s garden. I just want to see it. I just want to have one more look. I find the other entrance to the sports club and it’s all barbed wire and CCTV now, a far cry from the 1980s where you could sneak in and pinch cricket and tennis balls to play with your mates. What is this obsession, these days, with shutting everything off?

  At Mum’s I pop my head through the door and greet three people in ruins. Hiya. Attempts at eating together have failed, we’re better dealing with this on our own. None of us can really eat anyway. I change and head out for a run. Down the lane and around the lake, past the black swan and black-headed gulls, the fishermen with their spliffs and tins of lager, their bags of kit to catch fish they’re not even there for. I stop and watch a pair of grebes rooting around in the depths. They seem ignorant of each other, indifferent, perhaps. They dive down, disappear, resurface elsewhere. Diving for what, I wonder, they don’t surface with anything. They’re far apart, these grebes fishing beneath the flight path. The cloud-spattered sky, pylon lines, planes and fishing rods reflected in the water. Oyster catchers peep-peep at each other, walkin
g in circles as if on padded feet, one foot gently placed before another. A little gull soars and dips for insects. Around it other gulls gather into the sky, wheel around as the scene changes. The sun is setting. The fishermen are packing up. The grebes are diving down, resurfacing, diving down. Gradually, intentionally, they surface opposite each other. Oh hello, says the grebe to the grebe. They swim towards each other now, beaks slightly open and pointing downwards, eyes locked. They stop when they meet. Sit still for a moment. Then one flutters its head gently, coyly, as if to say, Look at me and my pretty grebe crest. The other follows suit. The first reaches behind itself as if to scratch an itch beneath a wing. The other follows suit. And then the dancing begins, tentatively at first, as if making allowances for early stumbles: a look to the left while the other looks to the right, a flutter of the head, a scratch of an itch. Look at me, no, look at me, you pretty thing, no, you are. Again and again in sequence. They swim away from each other, swim in tandem, swim towards each other. Dance again, part again, dance again. As the sun sets on the lake, as fishermen pack up their expensive gear, as people fly above us in giant tin cans to faraway places. As Mum lies in her hospital bed.

  The sky burns. I leave the grebes to their seductive dancing and run another circuit of lake. Most of the fishermen have gone now, their litter discarded at numbered ‘fishing’ stations every few metres. I pick it up, zigzagging across the dimly lit path. Red and white clover, bird’s foot trefoil and vetch are coming into flower as the grass thickens and greens, the trees in full leaf. How Mum loves this time of year. I press on, harder, blocking her out, working up a sweat. Each pounding of the path is a release, a break from the stress. If I run every day I will be OK. Somehow, by some means, I will continue to function, Mum will continue to breathe.

  The path twists, putting the lake on my right and a small patch of trees and a stream on the left. It looks damp here, a carr. There’s willow, alder and birch – trees typical of wet woodlands. I run fast alongside it to be quick. The sky is darkening now and the scene is changing again: cars pull up on the outskirts for other activities. Souped-up cars with big engines and loud stereos. I don’t feel safe, suddenly. But there’s something in the distance that makes me stop. Something like someone blowing on a siren whistle but not quite. I stand panting in the growing darkness and think of Sheba straining on her lead, of Granny. The sound fades and I convince myself I imagined it. I start to run on again but then it comes back. Yes! It must have flown closer; I can hear it more clearly now. Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. The first of the year, the first in a few years actually, and the first, I realise, as tears well for the hundredth time today, that I’ve heard in this neck of the woods since Granny first taught me the cuckoo’s call in 1989. It’s all I can do not to sink to my knees and cry for the rest of time. What homecoming is this, that I nearly lose my mum and in the process remember every last thing else I’ve ever loved and lost?

  She’s getting better but ‘better’ is measured in horrifying quantities. She’s not dead. She no longer has a burst aneurysm or an aneurysm at all. She’s not slipping into a coma; there’s no life-support machine, no ventilator, no extra oxygen, no help with breathing. She can cough; for a few days we were worried she couldn’t. And she can regulate her own blood pressure. She still has that awful octopus of lines coming from her neck, the line in her wrist still surrounded by the biggest blue bruise. The oxygen thing on her finger. She keeps taking it off and I put it on my finger to stop the machines beeping and the nurses fussing. It reads 98, same as Mum’s. The same oxygen coursing through our veins, the same blood.

  She’s a little old lady with a faraway stare. Someone I wasn’t prepared to see for twenty years. Fragility happens to those lucky enough to live long but it’s hard to see at 63. She’s a hybrid of Grandad and Great-aunt Maureen, as she always knew she was, except she looks like they did when they got really old and frail. She looks like they did before they died. I’ll never be able to erase this vision of her. If she gets through this I know what she’ll look like in twenty years. I know what she’ll look like when she’s dying.

  Slowly she turns to me. I take her hand and sink into her eyes. Hiya. She mumbles something in response, turns away to stare ahead again. It’s as if she knows now that something terrible has happened. She knows she’s broken. Her faraway stare is the stare of someone who can’t believe this has happened to her, who’s terrified she won’t recover. I know her. And I can see through all the swelling and bruising, the beeping of machines and the care of the nurses: she’s furious.

  She opens her mouth to kiss me but it’s like a fish kiss, a child’s kiss, lips open, the kiss not fully formed. She closes her eyes again and the tears I’d been fighting back start to fall in great, heaving drops. I think of raindrops on leaves. The sound of summer, of replenishment. Stop crying, for fuck’s sake. I look out of the window at the grey hospital roofs and think of my garden. Is it raining at home? I blow my nose and Mum opens her eyes again, catches my grief. She pulls a there-there face. A sorry-there’s-nothing-I-can-do-about-this face, an I-barely-know-who-I-am face. I feel guilty. I don’t want her to see me like this. I want to be strong for her, bear the cross for her, but I can’t help making a little of this about me, about not knowing how much of a mum I have left. She’s not dead but how alive is she, really?

  The nurse asks for five minutes with Mum and I head out to the waiting room. I open the door to a family wailing in the corner. I close it again, head back into the corridor. I fire up the peregrines on my phone, watch the female sit on eggs. Four now. Nothing happens; I just want to watch them, just want to see someone else’s reality while I lean against this hospital rail, antibiotic gel drying on my tightening skin, my barely conscious mum being rolled over and cleaned by a nurse with a giant heart. Four eggs. Four eggs in a nest on a tower block looking out to sea. Four eggs, two peregrines, my mum, this hospital and me.

  The bell rings into the house. I see Ellie on the step, dressed in her blue and green checked dress with the white frilled bib, long hair draped over hunched shoulders, scowling face. Stand on the step, says Dad. Stand on the step and smile, no, smile! He takes a photo of a grimacing child: snap.

  The man opens the door and I recognise him. He’s older and rounder but otherwise the same. He welcomes me in through the door into the hallway. Into the living room. It’s smaller than I remembered, of course. But everything is as it was. A new floor but . . . the old fireplace and shelves, ceiling beams, patio windows. My heart leaps into my throat. What am I doing?

  It’s been twenty-six years. Twenty-six years and I’ve spent three weeks driving around my old haunts to and from the hospital, and ended up here. It wasn’t hard to arrange a visit. I searched online for the address and she runs a photography business out of here. The couple Mum and Dad sold the house to when they eventually divorced. I email her using the ‘contact us’ form on her website and she gets back to me straight away. A strange request but go on, she says.

  We exchange pleasantries, my eyes on everything. I live in Brighton now, yes, write about gardening. Yes, I look like my mum. She’s in hospital. Brain haemorrhage. Yes. Not really talking but moving limbs. It’s difficult, yes. They’ve dug out photos, bless them. Photos from when they moved in, as it was when I left it. A far cry from the battered 1983 photo I keep in my bedside table.

  She opens the back door through the new conservatory where the patio, hydrangea, lily of the valley and blue-tit box used to be. Out onto a long lawn with borders on either side. I drink in the view.

  There’s no tennis court.

  I stand, speechless for a minute, as they chat about this and that. I look around, taking it all in. My eyes feast on a million things at once, brain recalculating and recalibrating. Things that were huge now appear small, things that were small now tower above me. There’s forget-me-not, lily of the valley, rhododendron, but little sign of lemon balm or cow parsley. There’s no long grass, brambles or ashy remains of fire. No vast, wild
compost heap, no gooseberry bushes swamped through years of neglect. The canopy has closed above us; birds flit through unknown trees.

  There’s no tennis court.

  There was a tree trunk here, he says, and a hundred-year-old greenhouse there, and in the undergrowth we found the remains of a swing.

  A swing.

  The ground was so uneven, we had it all levelled off, he says. Yes. I don’t blame them, but it’s harder to make dens on level ground. Harder to play King of the Castle or get a good aim when throwing mud pies at your sister. There’s no vantage point, no little mounds you can claim as your own, dressed in shorts and a hand-me-down vest, oversized wellington boots, feather in makeshift bandana.

  It’s beautiful. Really, and it couldn’t have been more nicely done. Primroses have sprung up in the lawn, travelling through it like a yellow brick road towards Emerald City.

  That’s an elm or an ash, apparently, he says, pointing at an elm that didn’t used to be there. It’s rare now due to some disease or other, he says. I pick off a leaf and show them the tell-tale sign of an elm leaf – the unsymmetrical base by the stalk. Elms break all the rules, I tell them. Most of them flower and fruit before a single leaf bud unfurls. I’ve seen quite a few lately, and I wonder if they’re fighting back after Dutch elm disease brought them to the brink of extinction. Or if I just notice them more now I live in Brighton.