Andrea: Y is for Yesterday
Hello my darlings – Mother here! This will be my last note, so I’ll try and make it a good one. My pain levels are under control right now, which makes everything easier, doesn’t it? I can only hope that yours are under control as well. At least I have morphine, darlings – you only have gin!
Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon making a glittery dice with the names of movies on the side. I hope you enjoyed that game, and cheated as many times as it took until you gotX-Men. I would expect nothing less, and would have done the same myself. Hugh Jackman, yum.
Yesterday, I also had a visit from a frightfully handsome young doctor from Ghana. Lovely man, though sadly not a miracle worker.
Yesterday, I threw caution to the wind and had lime jelly instead of strawberry – I know, I know, how crazy of me!
And yesterday, after I’d done my dice, Lewis took me out in my wheelchair for a little walk. We didn’t go far – just to the park – but it was wonderful to feel the sun on my skin, and see the beautiful weeping willow trees draped over the grass, and to listen to the children playing on the swings. He brought Betty, and we had a good old slobbery cuddle. Darling dog.
So, all things considered, not a bad yesterday at all. But now, it’s gone – and a new day has started. The possibilities are … well, I’d like to say endless, but as I’m on a drip and wearing a nightie right now, maybe not!
The point, though, remains the same – our yesterdays make us who we are, but our tomorrows make us who we will become. That sounds suitably wise, and is my way of saying – girls, are you ready to say goodbye to yesterday? Are you ready to throw out the rubbish, to leave all of the pain and misery behind? Are you ready to move on?
My goodness, how I hope so. I hope that you have forgiven each other, and forgiven yourselves. If you have, then say so – because just thinking it doesn’t count. Look each other in the eye, and say goodbye to those nasty old yesterdays. Do it for yourselves, if not for me. And, while you’re at it, get rid of something else – those horrible guilt lists I asked you to write, what feels like an age ago now. The only reason I asked you to write them down was so that you could throw them away.
And when you’re done with that, the package contains a little gift for you. It’s a collection of some of my diaries, from over the years. I always wanted to be a good journal keeper, but never really had the self-discipline, so I was always a little hit or miss. There are some years where I write most days, others where there are only a couple of entries.
Some are funny, some are sad, and some, I am horrified to say, are just plain boring. These diaries are not for you to read now – now is the time to focus on your own lives. They’re for the future. For when you need to feel me close, and can’t pick up the phone.
For when you find yourself in a situation and wonder what I’d think … well, I can’t guarantee the answers will be in there, but at least something will be in there. Even if it is just me mooning over Ian McShane or complaining about the short shelf life of goldfish.
The diaries are a little bit of me, for you two to keep forever. I hope they bring you some pleasure, some comfort, and some consolation – I may not be there in person, but I can at least be on your bookshelves!
Anyway, as I said, I had a busy day yesterday, and am feeling a snooze coming on. Morphine, delicious as it is, doesn’t make extensive periods of lucidity especially easy. Enjoy the diaries, girls – and don’t forget. Talk to each other.
With love, as always,
Mum xxx
Chapter 70
Rose
Poppy, sharing my mother’s flair for the dramatic, has insisted on a midnight ceremony. I am counting myself lucky that she hasn’t insisted we dress up in pagan robes and smear our faces with golden syrup.
I’m also a bit tired, truth be told. I stayed up late last night reading one of Mum’s diaries. I know she said not to bother with them right now, but, well, what’s she going to do about it? I curled up in my teenaged bed, and spent hours enjoying her first-hand accounts of her show-biz exploits.
The diary I read covered the Penny Peabody era, and was perfect – not too much turmoil, not too much hand-wringing and trauma, just a lot of very amusing anecdotes about life on set, and actors who played tough guys insisting on having exactly the right blend of aromatic oils burning in their dressing rooms, and who was bonking who.
She has such a witty and engaging style, I have no doubt at all that, like Poppy, she could also have been a writer. Maybe we’ll edit her diaries and publish them; they could easily be cult classics. All those perverts who watched her nude carousel horse scene would buy them.
I know all the diaries won’t be so much fun. I know some of them, in fact, will be extremely painful – but that is a journey for another day. For now, it’s nice to imagine her healthy and happy and enjoying her twilight years.
Poppy has been in the mower shed again, and emerges brandishing a plastic petrol can. She pokes the ashes in the barbecue, and pulls a face.
I don’t blame her. The contents are pretty revolting – the half-melted face of our Tiny Tears Gareth effigy, distorted into horror-movie form, chubby arm folded over her head as though trying to ward off the flames.
Tonight, she has decided, we are going to get rid of our Guilt Lists in style.
It’s a pleasant night, the countryside sky draped with the kind of dazzlingly clear stars that you just don’t see in the city. I can hear an owl hooting, and the cows from the nearby farm, and it’s incredibly peaceful.
The lights from the cottage are casting a glow over the garden, and the gnome collective looks magnificently eerie – like they might come to life at any moment and frolic over the lawn, with their fishing rods and watering cans and little red hats.
‘So,’ says Poppy, grinning at me in the moonlight. ‘We’re all set. I have my list – do you have yours?’
I nod, and tug the huge wad of memo-pad notes from my pocket. It feels like a different lifetime, that night when I sat, destroyed, sobbing over all of my perceived crimes, still not quite believing that my mother had gone. I was in shock, and none of it felt real. Some of it still doesn’t.
