Heather Cripps

Something is Happening

I thought I was going into isolation alone, but on the second day of the second week the ghost of my dead mother turns up when I’m getting out the shower. She is sitting on the closed toilet seat, a dark shape in the steam filled bathroom, turning a plastic starfish over and over in her hands.

‘Mum?’ I say.  She looks up at me and smiles, as if she is the one who should be surprised to see me. She is wearing a blue flowery slip dress even though it is still cold outside. I want to reach out and touch her bare shoulder. I don’t though because the only two options are that my hand will pass right through her, or I will grab flesh, and neither of those are a welcome outcome.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘You mean, in my own house?’ she says, still smiling up at me. She puts the plastic starfish down and goes out into the kitchen. I follow her, from a few feet behind, but she turns around and tells me to go and get myself sorted. While I am putting on my pyjamas I can smell onions and tomatoes, so I know she is still there, cooking, moving around. By the time I come out she has made soup, blended some root vegetables and heated them on the stove. I sit down at the kitchen table, which is big enough for two but for a long time has only had me. She sits down with a bowl opposite me, the steam curling up into her face.

‘Isn’t this cosy?’ she says, taking a slurp, ‘It’s almost kind of fun this, isn’t it? You and me, it’s like when we all used to go on holiday together, your dad, your brother and me, and sleep in the same hotel room. That kind of cosy.’

I’d facetimed my Dad earlier that day, to make sure he is still healthy, which he is and although he is alone he is fine because Sainsburys have given him a prioritized home delivery shop, and they’ve starting putting old football matches on TV to replace the live ones, ones he had lived through, ones where England had done well. He promised to call every day though. ‘I like being alone,’ he said. ‘You know me, I’m like you. We like our own space.’

I do like my space, but towards the end of last week of working from home, and watering the plants in the box sized garden, and reading, and scrolling online at the news and the pleas from the health service and the numbers, the numbers getting bigger each day, I spent three hours staring at myself in the mirror, trying to do the perfect ponytail and failing. I thought I could use the free time to learn new hairstyles, be a more girly girl, return to work with a few new looks. After three hours of trying, trying so hard I ended up scraping my scalp with my nails so it bled, I realised there was nothing less important in the world than my hair and the way it looked.

Mum and I settle into a routine. I get up later than I usually do because my work is now next to my bed, sign on, start emails, and Mum brings me coffee and hot porridge the way she used to when I was little on cold winter days before school. When I sign out for lunch, she has already made me soup or a sandwich, and we sit outside in the box garden and look at the flowers intently as if we can see them growing, or are hoping to see them growing, before our eyes. When I sign out for the end of the day I make dinner while Mum has a bath, and I can hear her giggling at a bath bomb fizzing, or the water sloshing as she moves. After that we check the news, our agreed once a day, although she doesn’t know that I check it sometimes throughout the day when I can’t bear not knowing anymore.

‘Over a hundred today,’ I say, hunching over my phone, scrolling and not really reading anything but the numbers. Mum comes over and sits opposite, reaches for my hand. I pull it away.

‘It’s okay darling,’ she says, sitting back again, ‘I’m here.’

She sleeps in my childhood bedroom and I sleep in the room she used to share with my Dad. I facetime him when I know she is asleep and he complains about the time, even though I know he is up watching the History Channel. I whisper and he asks why I’m being so quiet, and I laugh and say because it’s nearly bedtime and it feels like that is what you’re supposed to do at bedtime. I don’t want to bother him with Mum. I don’t want him to have to remember too. Before I fall asleep I watch her dying over and over, smell the hospital, see the sun outside shining even though it was the worst goddamn day of my entire life, see my Clarks school shoes stood by her bed, watch her take her last breath.

It carries on like this for a while, but then Mum starts coming into my room while I’m working. The first time she says she’s just looking for a book and slides one out the shelf and then leaves. Then she starts making my bed and rearranges the pencils on my desk. Then she leans over my computer and asks me what I’m doing. ‘Working,’ I say.

‘Well, doing what? I don’t know anything about you. What do you do for work?’

She comes into the room while I’m on a conference call and hangs around in view of the camera and waves to my colleagues. I end the call quickly and snap at her, ‘Please, I’m working,’ and she apologizes and says she is just interested in my life and then she leaves the room.

‘Are you okay?’ my colleague asks when I re-join the call and I realise that they didn’t see her, couldn’t see her. Of course they couldn’t.

‘Yeah, fine,’ I say.  

One night in week six Mum is singing while she is making dinner, and I’m trying to read a book and I feel so irritated it’s like ants crawling all over my skin. I close the book and just look at the window where she is reflected, twirling around so her dress lifts, spoon in one hand. I concentrate on my breathing, in and out, until she puts dinner in front of me.

That night we check the news and I can’t even say it out loud.

‘What is it?’ she says, looking at me. I don’t say anything so she asks again.

‘It’s just the numbers. It’s a lot.’

She comes over like she always does and goes to put an arm round me. I get up and step back from her. ‘Why? Why are you here? I don’t want you here. I don’t want to think about you.’

Mum looks like I have just slapped her in the face, ‘Wow. You’re being incredibly rude young lady. I’m just trying to help.’

‘I know,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t deal with this anymore. Any of it.’

I go to the door and pull my shoes on, my mum following me and saying no, you can’t, you’re not allowed out. I ignore her and slam the door behind me, the night silent and dark around me. I run around the park and then run home again. In that time, I see no one. When I open the door, it’s quiet and I check the kitchen and the garden and the living room and my old room and there is no one, so I breathe out and go to my room to get ready for bed, tired in my bones, thinking I am going to fall asleep so hard all I’ll see is black for eight hours.

Mum is folding my laundry on my bed in the lamplight.

‘You’re back,’ she says without looking at me. She picks up the pile of folded clothes and places them gently in the drawer. ‘Goodnight,’ she says and then leaves the room. I don’t sleep at all that night, I just see her hospital bed, many many hospital beds.

The next day when I’m working I get an email from her to my work account. What are you up to? Come and watch the flowers. I ignore it, and then ten minutes later she messages me on Microsoft Teams. Hi Darling. Look at me. I’m working too. Followed by four smiley emojis.

I get up and go out to where she is sitting outside in one of the plastic garden chairs. She’s reading. She doesn’t have a computer or a mobile phone. She’s not even alive. I stand there, staring at her, and then go back to my computer. I email my boss and tell her I am taking the afternoon off, for mental health reasons. I’m not the first of my team to do this. In fact I’m one of the last.

I sit on the chair next to her. She reaches up to  stroke my hair, without looking away from her book. I dodge her.

‘There’s my girl,’ she says instead. ‘Watch the flowers grow.’

‘I’m watching nothing happening.’

‘No, you’re watching something you can’t see happening. But something is happening.’

That night she makes soup the same way she made it on her first night here. She gathers up the dirty plates and says, ‘Time for the news, darling.’

I get my phone out and read it out while she squirts soap into the sink and runs the tap. The numbers have climbed, as they do every day. When she is finished she comes over and sits down beside me but she doesn’t reach for me.

‘It’s okay, darling,’ she says, ‘I’m here. I’m here.’

I get up and go to her, sitting in her lap, leaning into her chest, her arms folding around me and holding me tightly there. I hug her, holding the skin of her arms, her flesh.

‘You’re here,’ I say.

Heather Cripps is a writer, library assistant and editor for the Forge Literary Magazine. She has previously been published at Ellipsis, The Drum, Jellyfish Review and more. Currently she is working on her first novel, Beau is Fine, which was shortlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize in 2019.