I was driving Mum to see Lillian and the new baby. Mum hadn’t said much in the car. She’d been acting weird ever since we’d told her Lillian was pregnant. I assumed it was with Dad not being around. It was a hot day in August.
I looked to my left, glancing at the fields and trees which were a blur in the foreground, and then back to looking at the road as if I was shaking my head No, but I caught my mother’s side-profile: her tired eyes and sad drooping mouth pursed shut with something to say but not saying it. She was lit up in the midday sun. The fields opened up and there wasn’t much to see anymore.
‘I used to live around here,’ she said. Her voice blended into the hum of the car. I glanced again, but this time her face was gone; she was turned away, looking out the window. ‘On a farm.’
‘When did you ever live on a farm?’ I said, my words spilling into a laugh.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said.
‘Don’t do what?’
‘Stop looking at me. Look at the road when you’re driving.’
‘I was looking past you, out the window.’
‘Well stop doing that,’ she said. ‘Watch where you’re driving.’
I did as I was told and let the harshness of her words stand sharp like the razor edge of a bread knife. It wasn’t so much what she said but how she said it. She’d always been like that. Spitting her consonants and hissing her vowels as if she’d been wronged so many times it was everyone else’s fault. ‘I lived there years ago,’ she said. ‘Well before you were born.’ The emphasis on ‘you’ sounded not quite resentful but kind of patronising since I wasn’t anyone when all that was going on.
‘It was years ago, in the 70s. We moved in together and we thought it would have been easier than working in the city. I was young and he was young and it was exciting to do something different, to create a life for myself. But it wasn’t easy at all. The place needed a lot of work, and Thomas didn’t know as much about DIY as your dad did.’
‘This wasn’t Dad?’
‘No, I hadn’t met him yet,’ she said. ‘Thomas was my first husband. I’ve lived a life, you know.’ She smiled. When my mother smiled it was like looking at a painting in an art gallery because I didn’t often get to see it, but when I saw it I liked to see it for what it was. Time had already met with her and her dark eyes, loose and soft, sat in a spongey, wrinkled part of her face. Her mouth was lopsided as though it had been stuck on in a rush. But it straightened when she smiled, whenever she found the time to do so.
‘We put a lot of work into that farm,’ she said. ‘But we couldn’t get anything to grow; the ground was frozen solid when we first moved there so there wasn’t enough time to wait until the Spring, so Thomas thought we could slaughter the chickens.’
‘Is that why you don’t eat chicken?’
‘I just can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat any kind of bird. The blood. Oh my god, it was horrible. So I just let him do it. He’d be there all afternoon slaughtering chickens or trying to. It made me sick to think of him doing that. But we had to. We had nothing else, and it was the only way to make money then. It was either kill the chickens or starve. He’d come in the house in the evening stinking of blood. It would dry orange and brown and get stuck under his fingernails like rust. He started saying it was rust, that he was sharpening his tools or fixing up the fence with a hammer and nails, but I had a feeling it was blood. There wasn’t much for me to do, so I used to stay in the bedroom because I didn’t want to be around him when all that was going on. The winter was really cold and because we didn’t have anything to heat the place, I usually stayed in bed. But by that point, I’d got sick and I couldn’t get out of bed for a long time. I had terrible back pain. I just didn’t feel well in those days. It was his fault, he should have been there for me instead of killing those chickens. And remember, I was by myself. I didn’t have any friends down there and my mum said she’d disown me if I went with Thomas to the farm, so I couldn’t exactly go back with my tail between my legs asking if I could come home. So I stayed in bed waiting for Thomas to finish slaughtering the chickens so he’d come to bed and I could go to sleep. But he stunk so bad I couldn’t even get to sleep. It was a lonely Christmas and New Year. Things had taken a turn for the worse and we weren’t really talking anymore. I just holed myself up in that bedroom like a hospital patient, tired all the time, avoiding him. He was a spiteful man. I think he always was, but I never saw it at the time. I loved him, but I didn’t realise how unhappy I was.’
‘You’ve never mentioned this before,’ I said.
‘That’s it there, coming up,’ she said. She’d turned to look out the window and I’d just about seen the shadow of a building. It was in the middle of the field where one side was just made up of dirt tracks, broken wooden pallets, rusty aluminium drums, a tractor missing a wheel. The whole place looked derelict, like no one had lived or worked there in years. I couldn’t tell if it was still used as a farm.
I asked if she wanted to go see it. I could take the next turn and I could park nearby. But she didn’t really answer me. She just made a sound like a groan or babble that contained about half of a word as though she wasn’t sure but was unable to admit that she didn’t want to. With that in mind, I decided to take the turn on the next slip road and looped around in the direction of the farm. When we got close by, I could see it was derelict. The walls were blackened, soot from a fire maybe, permanent shadows, and wild grass growing over the wood and brickwork allowing white and yellow weeds to sprout and force their way in, to consume it from the outside in.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ she said as she got out of the car. But I didn’t think of it as me bringing her. I felt as though she had brought me.
I walked around the gravelly path which merged into soil and rocks. The soil was as black as my mother’s hair. I walked to the building, towards the cold stink of absence. The walls had crumbled and the wooden structure had fallen apart revealing its insides like an open-heart surgery. There was nothing that was even remotely similar to my mother. I was half-expecting her to say this had been a joke, that she’d never really lived on a farm and start laughing. But when I turned to look at her, she was mesmerised by the place, taken aback by surreal memories where she’d spent a good part of her life.
‘That was where the chickens went, wasn’t it?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘Thomas used to go in and out there.’ She pointed to a wooden door hanging from its rusted hinges. ‘That’s where he killed his chickens. I tried working over there,’ she pointed to the overgrown field, ‘but nothing would grow. I liked being out there. I wanted to grow our crops from the ground up, but like I said, the ground was frozen and nothing would grow.’
The part of the building where my mum would have lived was so run-down it was dangerous to go inside. Part of the roof had collapsed; the rotted beams stuck out like compound fractures. The darkness to the exterior walls made me think of streaks of blood, and the lonely smell of damp came from deep inside. I touched one of the walls near a rusted aluminium drum and felt the rough texture like old skin, warm in the sunlight, and imagined my mother here as a young woman, with a man who was not my father, living a life completely removed from my life. I’d never been here like I’d never been in her memories.
Mum seemed to fall into a wave of sadness. She didn’t say much, just looked around. It was as though she’d forgotten I was there and slipped into a loneliness she couldn’t get out of.
‘What happened to Thomas?’ I said.
‘We separated a year later then I moved back home. That’s when I met your father.’
‘It just didn’t work out on the farm then?’
‘We wanted our own family,’ she said. ‘It didn’t work out.’
She wouldn’t say any more, and I couldn’t help but wonder how things would have turned out had my mother stayed with this Thomas and had a child. What would have become of me? It was a funny thought, and it soon passed and I became aware of where I was. I was me, and my mum was my mum.
Eventually, we got back in the car and drove off, back onto the road towards my home. Lillian was waiting for us with the baby. The afternoon was drawing in, getting heavier, and the sun grew large and bright.
When we got there, I kissed Lillian hello and we introduced my mum to the baby. She took the baby in her arms like she would, instinctively as a mother, and the baby took to her immediately and giggled. Later, when we sat down to have dinner, I told Lillian about our stop at the farm.
‘I can’t believe you used to live on a farm,’ I said, taking a bite of my shepherd’s pie. It was hot and delicious, the gravy and mashed potato with a salty tang with soft flavours of rosemary and thyme.
‘I’ve always wanted to work on a farm,’ Lillian said.
‘It’s hard work, you know,’ Mum said.
‘I know,’ Lillian said.
My mum didn’t say much about the farm after that. It was like her memories were just passing by. I watched her eat and thought about the life she’d lived. Her other life. The one she’d lived in the past. She held the baby a few more times, and eventually the evening ended and I drove her back home.
Later, after Mum had gone, Lillian put the baby in the cot upstairs. She stayed upstairs with the baby, and I stayed downstairs in front of the TV, not moving. I could hear the baby crying. There were so many things I didn’t know and would never know. I didn’t understand my mother, but I’d been given a glimpse of something in her, something beyond language like a land we hadn’t yet set foot in. And then the baby stopped crying and I heard Lillian shuffling around above me, getting ready for bed, and I sat there in my land, this warm and comfortable place where I hardly let anyone else in. And I stayed there for some time, and I felt myself drifting off to sleep before Lillian woke me, but I didn’t want to move.
© Michael Holloway
Cover image by LXS Photography on Unsplash