My mother's bedroom

In response to 'Papers', by Roy McFarlane

Papers

The day I was called into my mother’s bedroom the smell of cornmeal porridge still coloured the air,

windowsills full of plants bloomed and dresses half-done hung from wardrobe doors

and her Singer sewing machine came to rest like a mail train arriving at its final destination,

foot off the pedal, radio turned down, she beckoned, touched me with those loving hands.

Shrouded in the softness of light from the net curtains, her eyes filled with sensitivity, hesitated as she spoke to me,

sit down son, there’s something I need to tell you.

She picked up her heavy Bible with gold-edged leaves, turning the pages as they whispered and somewhere

in the middle of Psalms she removed a sheet of paper which read, ‘In the matter of the Adoption Act. 1958’

and I’m lost in the reading of a name of an infant, sinking in to the cream background, falling between the lines.

Only the tenderness of her voice drew me out of the margins; words fallen now echo through the years.

We adopted you from the age of 6 months,

enveloped by this revelation I couldn’t move, imagined it couldn’t be right because I knew my mother;

the aroma of her Morgan pomaded hair, her olive oiled skin, the Y scarred throat that she hid under buttoned up blouses

and like a hymn I found myself telling her, it’s alright, it’s alright.

My mother’s bedroom. Strange realising I can’t think at all of what my mother’s bedroom was like when I was a young child. I don’t even think of it as “her” bedroom. If anything, “my parents’” room I would have said. A couple, not a separate individual, my mother always referring to herself as “we”. We think this and that. Now she is alone, my dad has died, and it is now “her” bedroom – not the same room, a different house, a different country. Deep pink carpet, plush. Not chosen by her, inherited with the house, as with the built-in pale blue-grey wardrobes and dressing table. Very little of the big items in the room speak of her. The curtains chosen to match the furniture – at pains to get something that “went”, as I recall it, taking a long time. Dissatisfaction with the colour scheme of the room, but everything was “too good” to change – my Dad’s view really. And my mum would have acquiesced - in all likelihood. Painting on the wall by my older sister, abstract, colours to match the room. Why does everything need to match? Inherited crystal dressing table set, unused. An old clock that no longer works by my Dad’s side. You have to open the drawers to find evidence of it being my mum’s room – a drawerful of jewellery, her flamboyant oversized earrings. Endless fruitless searches around the shops for clip-on earrings, unable to accept things have moved on, changed, they are hardly ever to be found now. Facts never phase my mother. She clings steadfastly to what she knows, what she believes, what’s familiar, what she has assumed. Immoveable. As the built in furniture and the nailed down carpet. No amount of prising can unpick, unseat these once rooted in her. Rooted. Tree roots. Verruca roots. Discomfort. Comfort of standing on the soft deep pink carpet, almost red, in my bare feet. One of the few carpets she’s had that are so soft. She must have liked it as the lounge carpet was then chosen also soft, also a single colour, a huge departure from the busy patterns of my childhood. So some change is possible, the power of softness. Writing, hard to keep writing today, aware of keeping an eye on the time. Change for me today. Strangeness. Some familiarity and some difference. Still the same process, the same pen and paper, the same motion of forming words. Inside things are different. Barefoot on a soft carpet – I don’t know.

It doesn’t really work for me to say ‘my mother’s bedroom’ as it was always my mother and father’s bedroom. From house to house they moved their bed with its elaborate wooden headboard painted green and gold with angels. In that longest settled time between my seventh and seventeenth birthdays, my parents’ bedroom was painted in magnolia and decorated with a border of acorns and oak leaves that my mother painted using a stencil. The bedroom faced south and was golden. We weren’t allowed in without knocking first which made me think they must always be having sex. At the end of the bed stood a wide, low pine chest of drawers. One day I slipped into the bedroom and, opening the second drawer, found a collection of basques and stockings, red-ribboned bras and tiny knickers all jumbled and tangled together. My mother’s bed smelt of musk, like an animal. I hated and loved that smell. It sickened me and yet was comforting. I don’t remember seeing my mother in bed. She was up and out, feeding animals, working on books, or gone, gone abroad or away to London. There is a photograph of all five of us in a row in that bed. Everyone is grinning but I am looking away, unsmiling. My elder sisters says I look sad in all the photographs from our childhood. I think we stole into our mother’s room. It felt like stealing. I was always searching for clues - letters, papers, notes, kickers. My mother and father were mysterious to me and I wanted the mystery unfolded. Now my mother’s bedroom is just my father’s bedroom. Except she’s still in it. That musk - I can smell it - and he hasn’t changed the photographs and books on her side of the bed since she died in there. I love being in that room now. But not to sleep. Just to slip in and see and slip out again. I slept in there at Christmas and it didn’t feel right.