And Then There Were Two

Whenever there’s a monumental change to the way my life works, or the way I consider it to work, I worry about my teeth. I’m not sure where the association comes from, but there’s certainly a deep seated connection somewhere in my mind between the big, inevitable changes in the way I live as I grow older, and the gradual decay of my teeth.

I’m not even sure if it’s the degradation of my teeth that worries me so much… I don’t feel very consoled by the knowledge that they’re alright, I just keenly feel the need to make sure that they are, or even that they aren’t. As long as I’m aware, I’ll figure things out.

With that in mind, I should explain that I’m writing this blog having come from the bathroom, where, with the aid of a hand mirror, I established that my teeth are in fine working order. The reason I felt the need to check that my teeth were intact is because my brother leaves for foreign climes tomorrow and we’re not sure when (and indeed, if) he’ll be coming back.

With the brother’s departure so imminent, the father was kind enough to organise a family dinner, something we haven’t had in this house in quite some years. Present were the father, brother, myself, two sisters and close family friend Mary. Having left when we were all still young enough not to hold it against her, the mother phoned in from overseas, spoke briefly to the brother and promptly broke contact. No greetings passed on to the rest of us, but that’s life.

This seemed a strange state of affairs to Mary, but it’s entirely in line with my working theory of our relationship with the mother. Effectively, our mother was a wonderful, maternal figure for the first few years of my life (though slightly fewer for the siblings). Unfortunately, to borrow from physics, she had a relatively short half-life; while she was our mother she burned bright and beautiful, and accordingly, those years are incandescent in my memory.

I remember them now as warm, sunny times, times spent collecting blackberries to be made into a jammy preserve, which would later be spread on some kind of pastry I’ll never know the name of, but seem to remember enjoying tremendously. In subsequent years we would still gather berries in the field behind our house, but I remember the making of jam being as a once-off. I wonder now if that was the point, that the fun was in the collecting; my mother, the brother and I plucking berries from bushes, learning to avoid the ones that looked unripe while the sun beat down on the knee high grass around us.

Afterwards, I remember the buckets of blackberries standing, monumental on the drainer and, to borrow a phrase, sitting there until the growth of (to borrow a phrase) a rat grey fungus, glutting on our cache. In my child’s mind, they had sat there forever, huge buckets of fruit and pulp, sweet and warm, just waiting for someone to take the care to make it into a sugary food. It seems more likely that they’d just been there days, but that’s speculation – I don’t know how long picked berries last.

Unfortunately, as is the way with such things, the happy state was destined to be short lived, and slowly the relationship grew dimmer, eventually degrading into a kind of a “dirty bomb” of a relationship, with fallout effecting all sides. She later left the father under terms that have never quite been made clear to me, though I’m happier in my ignorance.

In the years that followed, we were raised by a kind of compilation of maternal figures who were kind enough to lend their efforts to our upbringing. Together they formed a kind of quantum mother, and it would be their collective influence that guided our development, alongside that of the father.

A solid 70% of this involvement came from Mary (a neighbour, close friend of the mother and mother to Ross, who I still consider my second brother). That should go some way towards explaining why, when the (biological) mother expressed so little interest in 75% of her progeny, I felt no deep desire to investigate my current dental status.

The fact is, I now associate the making of jam with Mary, rather than the mother. This is despite the fact that I can’t honestly say I remember Mary ever making jam. Moreover, those memories I do have of picking berries with the mother seem interchangeable with those of picking blackberries with Mary; again, I can’t honestly say this ever happened, but that’s the way childhood memories are I guess. The smells and tastes are so very vivid, but the people seem interchangeable as long as the feeling is about right.

What’s interesting is that, despite my having understood it to be the case for most of my life, I’m quite sure Mary hadn’t considered herself a mother figure to us and I’d worried that saying it might cause offense… I’m not entirely sure why, but I imagine being accused of being a kind of consummate (if accidental) mother might not be the perfect end to a day.

All that aside, we had a pleasant dinner and reasonably cheerful conversation and picture-taking, though all with a vaguely uncomfortable undertone. The fact is, I don’t see my brother nearly as much as I should, and the reminder so close to his leaving that we get on well while we are together seemed a little unusual.

What really summed up the evening though, and the reason I decided to write this blog before we drop out to the airport tomorrow morning, was the game of backgammon that my father and brother started while waiting for a taxi to arrive and take him away. Naturally, the wait for the taxi wasn’t quite long enough to allow for a full game of backgammon, and their game was interrupted.

I happened to walk back into the kitchen before anyone else had had a chance to clean up and saw the backgammon board open on the table, dice and pieces lying strewn across the board as they had been in play. I thought there was something very sad about that board and its father-son game, sitting open and unfinished, abandoned just as it really got started.

I imagine there’s a very shrewd observation to be made about the fact that backgammon is a game fundamentally about getting all of your pieces home, coupled with my brother leaving home and their game being interrupted, but that kind of observation is a little too visceral for me to really get at elegantly, Jane would do better, and I’ve always been clumsy with sentiment.

I guess the other reason I’m writing this now is because I’m not sure how I feel. I know there should be some amazing depth of feeling, and indeed I do feel loss, but at the moment I’m more disappointed that I didn’t get to see them finish their game than anything else.

At times like these I always wonder how I should feel, and I imagine that’s how everyone feels, which should probably make it alright. For now I’ll have to satisfy myself the same way I always do. My teeth are big, white and mostly okay. There are a couple of fillings and some wisdom teeth coming in, but overall they’re alright. Some staining, but that’s to be expected.