Page 128 of Where Do We Go From Here?
Sue nods quickly, embarrassedly.
‘You do remember the bottle of whisky, I take it?’ Neil asks. ‘At Christmas? A couple of years back?’
Wendy shakes her head. She has no idea what he’s talking about.
‘When I said you’d had enough and tried to put the drinks away? And you prised the bottle from my hands? You virtually fought me for it, here, in the kitchen.’
‘I did?’ Wendy asks, looking to Sue for confirmation.
‘You swigged it straight from the bottle,’ Sue says. ‘And Neil got actual bruises on his arm from the scuffle.’
‘Well, that was… I bruised more easily back then.’
‘But you still had bruises.’ She turns back to Wendy. ‘He had your fingerprints on his arm for a week.’
‘God,’ Wendy says. ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t remember that at all.’
‘And that was just one time,’ Neil says. ‘There are plenty more where that came from.’
‘Yes, it happened a few times,’ Sue says. ‘Not the bruises. But times we tried to get you to slow down.’
‘But you wouldn’t hear of it,’ Neil says. ‘You were offended even at the suggestion. So…’
‘So we started hiding the stuff before you came,’ Sue says. ‘It just seemed to be easier that way.’
Wendy starts to cry, silent tears slipping down her cheeks.
‘Oh, Wens,’ Sue says, standing and moving to crouch beside her so that she can slip one arm around her shoulders.
But Wendy shrugs her off. ‘I just…’ she says. Then, after accepting the tissue that Sue is proffering, she continues, ‘It’s mortifying. It’s so embarrassing and I don’t even remember. It’s embarrassingthatI don’t remember, too.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ Neil says. ‘We’re not making anything up.’
‘No, no, I believe you. And I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ Sue says, returning to her seat. ‘Right, Neil?’
‘Yeah. Sure. It’s fine.’
‘And you were going through a difficult time,’ Sue says. ‘We know that.’
Wendy nods and closes her eyes. She blows her nose and tries not to think about how much of an understatement that is. ‘So, about that,’ she finally says. ‘That’s the other thing I need to talk about. That’s the main thing, really.’
‘What is?’ Neil asks.
‘My “difficult time”,’ Wendy says, making the speech marks with her fingers.
Sue glances nervously at Neil and then, after pushing the box of tissues so that it’s right in front of Wendy, she takes Neil’s hand across the table – a visible sign of solidarity before the onslaught she can sense is coming.
‘I’ve never told you how Mum died,’ Wendy says. ‘And I’ve discovered that I need to do that. So…’
‘I think we know how Mum died,’ Neil says. ‘So there’s really no need to go there.’
‘Yeah, but that’s the thing,’ Wendy tells him. ‘You don’t.’
She tells them now. She tells them how she drove her mother to chemo and radiotherapy for months and how she nursed her when she vomited, back home. Through tears, fresh tears, intermittent floods of tears, she tells them of the routine check-ups and the good news, and their shared joy until that one fateful check-up when the results were not good, followed by the devastating follow-up when they announced the cancer had metastasised all over, a fact she had to keep explaining to their mother because it was a concept she seemed unable to hear.
And then finally, she tells them of the day she died, how she hadn’t slept for thirty-seven hours because she’d gone straight from a night shift to holding her mother’s hand in the hospice. She tells them how their mother had screamed in pain before dying alone, because she’d been stuck down at the main desk begging for morphine.
