Nothing But Chanel No 5

By Gaye Jee

Mother is sleeping, the fingers of her left hand grasping the edge of the coverlet, liver spots against skin like yellow soap. Her wedding ring is too big for her now. Where it lies against the bedspread, it has been pushed up to leave a crescent of air above her finger. Inside it I can see the stamped indentations of the hallmarks.

   She is tiny in her soft white nest, like a newly hatched chick abandoned by its parents and stronger siblings. Her pillows can be arranged in a variety of ways to prop her up for eating, or to pad the rails, which stop her toppling out onto the floor. The nurses adjust the height and the gradient of her body by pressing buttons and two of them together can turn or clean her.

   The care assistant brings me a cup of tea. Annie is about fifty-five and has dyed glossy black hair scraped back from her forehead and tied into a long ponytail. Somehow she keeps things light, darting between beds like a worker bee, feeding, replenishing and nurturing the almost empty husks in the ward.

   “We washed her hair this morning and put on her favorite nightie,” she says. “Joan, your daughter’s here.”

   She turns back to me.

   “It might be nice if you could bring in some scent for her. She told me once she used to wear Chanel No. 5.”

   Mother identified with Marilyn Monroe when she was younger. I remember my teenage chagrin when she confided that on her honeymoon, she told my father she liked the idea of wearing nothing but Chanel No 5 in bed. She never forgave him for replying that as her feet were always icy cold, she ought to wear bedsocks. And I don’t think she ever did have a bottle of Chanel No 5.

  Annie’s voice seems to be able to penetrate the layers of fog clouding her consciousness and my mother opens her eyes. She looks directly at me and it’s the first time in weeks I’ve seen her smile. Hers lips are moving and when I bend my head to catch her words, she says, “I can see where I’m going. It’s so cool and clear. I can see the sea.”

   And I hope she’ll die then and there, while she feels so peaceful, so full of hope. And she closes her eyes for a few minutes more, but then suddenly opens them again and it is as though someone completely different is looking through them. Someone cornered, cunning. She’s trying to push herself up off the bed, one hand clawing uselessly at the sheet below her.

   “They’re keeping us all in here against our will. Look, they’ve even got Rosemary.”

   She pokes out a waxy forefinger. The old lady in the bed opposite is asleep, her eyes squeezed closed and head on one side as though she’s listening to someone talking close to her ear. Mother’s sister Rosemary died in 1987.

   This exhausts her and she lies back against the pillows. Soon she is sleeping again, her breathing coming in effortful rasps. I close my eyes too and wonder how much longer this can go on. She’s been in the hospice now for six months and each time I see the doctors, they say how marvelous she is to still be alive. I want to ask, but what’s the point?

  When I was six or seven years old, I would wait until she sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a magazine and then I’d take her hand in mine and turn it over to look at her nails. They were lacquered scarlet and cool to the touch as though they didn’t quite belong to her body. When I tapped them with my own nails, they felt hard and shiny, like the wing-cases of beetles. She would abandon her left hand to me and drink her coffee using her right. Then she’d swap the cup for her cigarette, flicking ash over the pages of Woman’s Weekly in between puffs. Sometimes she let me twist and loosen the ring, working it over her knuckle, until I could slide it off her finger and onto my own, turning it round and round, playing being married.

   The gold is 22 carat, soft and oval, molded to the shape of what my mother’s finger used to be. These days, the gold they use for wedding rings is harder, less pure – 14 or 18 carats at the most. 22 carat gold is like a good marriage: it flexes and fits itself to your aging body. Mother was divorced by the time I was six, but there was always a space in her life where my father had been, like the crescent of air between her finger and wedding ring.

   I stand up and bend over the bed. My lips almost graze her forehead. A kiss shows devotion, a good daughter.

   When I get home, Libby is already in from school, lying on the sofa, feet propped on the arm. She’s watching television with her head half hanging off the seat cushion, clumpy black boots propped on the armrest.

   “Hello, Darling. How was school?”

   “Okay.”

   I’m just drawing breath to ask another question, something that will elicit a more communicative answer, when she says,

   “Mum! I’m watching this. Anyway what’s for tea?”

   On the screen a group of bright green and yellow animals with googly eyes and tufts of nylon hair are singing about counting being fun. I go into the kitchen without replying and turn the cooker on.

   As she dissects her lamb chop to remove every morsel of what she interprets as fat, I say,

   “I went to see Gran today.”

   “Oh, yeah?”

   “She’s really very poorly now.”

   “Poor Gran.”

   “I think it would be nice if you came with me next time.”

   “I thought she was asleep all the time. It won’t make any difference to her, will it?”

   Maybe not, but it would make a difference to me.

   “Well, she does stir now and again. I think she can hear voices sometimes. Perhaps she could sense you near her.”

   “Is she all wired up?”

   “She’s just got one tube in her arm, where they put in liquid and medicines and so on. She’s quite peaceful.”

   I don’t mention the catheter that she sometimes tries to tear out, or the oxygen equipment standing at the ready.

   “Yeah, okay then. But not tomorrow. We’ve got drama club.”

   “Friday then. I’ll pick you up from school.”

The procedure for bedtime is this. She watches television with me until about 9.30. Then I remind her she has to be up for school in the morning. She huddles down under the tartan blanket that each morning I re-fold and lay across the arm of the sofa, and she tells me she’s not tired. I then either give in and let her stay up for another half hour, or I cajole and insist and finally threaten until she rises, grumbling and leaving behind her on the floor a crop circle of cake wrappers, orange peel and empty glasses. Just as she’s about to mount the stairs, she calls, apparently as an afterthought,

   “Come up, won’t you?”

   “I’ll be up in a few minutes,” I say, reflecting that this will bite neatly into the vital first part of the new thriller I’ve been waiting to watch for the past week.

   When I go up, she’s in her top bunk, reading the latest offering from R L Stine. She must have read ten or twelve Goosebumps books already, and I have to stop myself from telling her that at her age I’d already read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I bring her a glass of water and then she lies there staring at her book.

   “Don’t I get a kiss, then?” I ask.

   She dangles a languid hand down.

   “Is that it?” I ask.

   If I closed my eyes, I could feel her baby arms twining softly round my neck, her giggles and squirms as I give her pussy-cat kisses all over her satiny pink cheek.

   She leans down from her bunk, the Queen of Sheba bestowing largesse on a passing peasant, and squinches one side of her face up to receive my kiss. I know better than to ask for a hug. I go back downstairs, into the empty lounge and wonder whether it would be any less lonely if I was still married to her father.

   I was a little older than Libby when I told my mother that I didn’t want her to kiss me goodnight anymore. I detested the time between getting into bed and waiting for her slow tread up the stairs. I hated the way she always tried to get me to talk intimately to her, as though she wanted to take each thought out of my head and hold it up for thorough examination. Nothing could be throw-away or trivial. When she was satisfied I’d told her everything – and of course I became expert at making her think I had – she bent over me, her lips lingering on mine, her stale smoky breath in my nostrils. She always wanted to put her arms round me and I endured this though it made me think of being wrapped tight in a hot damp blanket. As she went back downstairs, I used to pray she’d marry again. Maybe then she’d leave me alone.

   She was painting her nails at the kitchen table that day, a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray next to her half-empty coffee cup. It was still morning and I remember the way a shaft of sunlight slanted in through the kitchen window and picked out a segment of wallpaper printed with a design of carrots, tomatoes and onions.

   I tried to keep it casual. She needn’t bother with coming up to tuck me in any more. I was a teenager now and could put myself to bed. She muttered damn under her breath and at first I thought she was angry with me, but then I saw that she’d smudged her nail varnish, the scarlet bleeding into the carefully pushed-back cuticle of her ring finger. When she looked up at me, she was smiling.

   “Alright then. You can give me a cuddle down here.”

   “No, Mum. I don’t want you to cuddle me, or kiss me, any more.”

   She rose from the table and fetched a bottle of nail polish remover and a cotton bud from the drawer next to the sink. Gripping the bottle lightly between thumb and forefinger so as not to spoil the rest of her newly painted nails, she dislodged the cap of the bottle and dipped the cotton bud in, carefully dabbing the smudged polish away. Then, spreading the fingers of her still-wet hand, she tapped the table top with the nails of the other, one after the other, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

   “Oh well, it’s up to you. You’re growing up, I suppose.”

   And that was the end of it.

 On Friday I park the car round the corner from Libby’s school and wait for her to appear. When she was at primary school, she always wanted me to wait right next to the gate. Unlike many of the other mothers who would arrive five minutes late, leaving their son or daughter hanging round the school entrance like little ghosts, I was always on time. Libby would pause on the threshold of the cloakroom and when she saw me, she’d begin to run,  gaining speed, her hair flying and her arms outstretched. She’d hit me at full pelt, and I’d sweep her up in my own arms, whirling her round before lowering her back onto the tarmac. Then she’d hold my hand all the way home, her chatter drowned out by the lorries thundering along the main road. She holds herself a little apart now, if we walk together, to avoid accidentally touching me.

   She’s quiet all the way to the hospice. I want to reassure her, to tell her that it won’t be horrific, that all the patients will be sitting about in brightly colored nightwear, awaiting their deaths with cheerful resignation, perhaps even cracking a few dry jokes to show it’s all part of the deal, and not so bad after all. I think of my mother’s waxy yellow hand and the half empty wedding ring and put the thought out of my mind.

   As it happens, no-one is crying out or distressed when we get there and a scattering of patients sit in the sunshine in their wheelchairs. In mother’s ward most of the beds are empty and have been neatly made up in preparation for the night.

   Annie is sitting at her bedside with her back to us, so she doesn’t see us coming. I can see from the movement of her arms she’s busy with some delicate procedure. I glance at Libby’s face. Will this be too difficult, too intimate for her? Mother’s eyes are half-open and she’s looking intently into Annie’s face. As we get nearer, I can hear that Annie’s singing softly as she works, her voice sweet, but not quite in tune.

   A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend …

   We stand watching her, not wanting to startle or embarrass her, but after a moment she turns to look at us, her hair, today worn in a heavy plait, falling over one shoulder. She’s holding my mother’s hand in hers, in the other an emery board.

   “We didn’t expect you just yet. We’re not quite ready, are we darling?” she says to Mother. “Hello, it’s Libby, isn’t it? I’m sure your Gran’s pleased to see you.”

   Libby ducks her head down in that way she does when she’s not sure how to react. I’m almost sure Mother’s mouth twitches in a smile and she slowly waggles the fingers of the hand lying on top of the coverlet. Her nails have been shaped into short elegant almonds, the surface enameled scarlet. Annie sees me looking.

   “When she woke up for a while this morning, she told me she’s always been very proud of her nails, so we decided to tart them up a bit.”

   Mother doesn’t seem to hear her. She’s become absorbed with working her fingers against the bedspread, one after the other. Her nails fall silently onto the fabric, but I’m hearing the tap-tap-tap-tap-tap on the Formica, seeing the shaft of sunlight illuminating the pattern on the wallpaper.

   I reach into my bag and find the tiny box. Unsure of what to do, I hand it to Annie.

   “You remembered! She’ll love this.” She unwraps the cellophane and prizes the lid of the box open. Then she unscrews the diminutive cut glass stopper and sniffs.

   “Gorgeous. Why don’t you put a bit on for her?”

   And I stand there and I know I can’t do it. After all these years, I still can’t bear to touch her. Libby reaches across and takes it from Annie.

   “Let me.”

   And she tips the bottle up to wet the end of her finger, then gently touches Mother behind her ears and on her wrists. Mother’s eyes flicker towards her and as Libby takes her hand, the fingers curl into my daughter’s palm like a child seeking comfort during a thunderstorm.

   They sit like that while Annie and I talk about what Mother’s eaten, how long she stays awake, how she drifts away more each day. I don’t ask how long she’s got; I know they can’t answer. For the moment she’s peaceful, her hand enclosed in Libby’s. Annie gets up.

   “I’m off for my break now. You don’t mind, do you? There’s someone in the nurse’s station if you need anything.”

   To my surprise, she leans down and kisses me on the cheek, and I realize that my eyes are wet with unshed tears.

   “It’s a difficult time, darling,” she says, and she squeezes me on the shoulder before turning to walk away down the ward.

It’s early morning and I’m dreaming. Libby and my mother are standing on a beach together. Dark clouds are scudding along the horizon. Mother looks the way she did when I was a child, blond permed hair tousled by the stiff breeze, and she’s laughing and trying to hold her skirt down as the wind whips up underneath it. Then she and Libby are standing side by side with their arms stretched out so their fingertips are almost touching. As they begin to drift apart I can hear the hissing of the waves as they suck at the pebbly beach and my nostrils are full of the sharp smell of ozone and seaweed.

The shrilling of the telephone wakes me. I fumble for the bedside light. It’s nearly half past five. Libby stumbles into the room, her face still blunt with sleep. She sits on the bed, and as I pick up the receiver, she shivers and slips under the duvet. In my head, the dream sea seethes against the shore.

I've been a contributor to QWF over the past few years and have had five or six stories published in the mag. I've also been included in anthologies and have four stories on the East of the Web short story site. Until the end of last academic year, I taught creative writing for the University of Kent and from January 2007 I shall be teaching for the University of Sussex.