Sarah Clement writes memoir, autofiction, lyric essays and short stories. She has won a London Writers Award and a Creative Future Literary Award. Her work has been published in several anthologies and lit mags, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Story Prize. Sarah’s writing centres on the complexities of our inner lives, mining her own experiences and informed by her background in academic research psychology. At Goldsmiths she is working on two life writing projects. Below is the opening chapter of a hybrid memoir (or work of autofiction) which draws on the idea that whilst some people have a Black Dog, others, like Sarah and her mother, have a White Bear.
Email: sarahclementwriter@gmail.com
Website: www.sarahclement.co.uk
Twitter: @sarahclemwrites
Bear in Mind
The Bear sat on the end of the hospital bed. The weight of him created a small valley along the middle of the mattress and Mum rolled even more into herself. She lay in the dip, curled up like a foetus.
I sat on the grey plastic chair by Mum’s bedside and smoothed her hair back with the crook of my finger. Her hair was in a loose ponytail and was the colour of a cloudy sky, though strands of its old chestnut colour were visible underneath. The Bear’s hair was white and, at the same time, not white at all. I knew, from the animal facts book I used to read to my sons, that polar bear fur is translucent, the whiteness an optical illusion. The ward was full of whiteness – the white walls, white ceiling, white blankets, white pillows and white sheets and the whiteness of the hospital gown Mum wore only broken up by its pale blue forget-me-nots. Under the ward’s fluorescent lighting, the Bear almost shimmered.
Strangely, I wasn’t startled to see the Bear. Somehow it seemed no more crazy to find a polar bear in hospital than to find Mum there and to know she was dying. And could die in days, in weeks, or anytime in the coming year.
Now, twenty-four years on, this prognosis is still etched into my brain, but I have no recollection of the doctor who said these words. Did I see this unremembered doctor on my way into the ward the day the Bear appeared? Or on an earlier trip to the hospital? I don’t know. The doctor’s prediction clanged and clanged in my head – Mum might hold on for twelve months, but all it would take was a chest infection and she would deteriorate quickly, and wouldn’t survive. I can still picture the doctor’s finger tracing Mum’s envisaged future in the air and the finger plummeting to illustrate a fatal crisis. The world had become a place where anything could happen.
I was wary of the Bear, of course, though all he was doing was sitting there, upright, on guard, and very still.
Mum was motionless too. Her chest barely rose as she breathed in the oxygen that came from a box on wheels through a plastic tube which split in two and snaked over her ears and into her nostrils. The box made a gentle humming which was soothing.
As I smoothed Mum’s hair, her lips softened into an almost-smile. After a while she spoke, taking small gasps of air between the words. ‘Thank you for coming all this way.’
Windows spanned one side of the ward. Outside, the Devon sky was tank grey. There were six beds in the bay, one empty, the rest occupied by old women, including, I suppose, Mum. Her sixty-five years qualified her for this elderly care ward, but she appeared girl-like. Small and frightened. And even with so little personal clothing or belongings, she seemed a world apart from the other women on the ward. Perhaps it was her hippy bag on the top of the bedside cupboard, with its woven zigzags and stripes in orange, emerald, and teal.
I placed a carton of grapes, a Bounty bar and a Woman & Home magazine on the over-bed table and helped Mum to lie on her back, propped up by the two fat foam pillows. ‘Sorry, there wasn’t much choice,’ I said, opening the magazine to the horoscopes at the back. I read Aries for me and Taurus for Mum. I don’t remember the predictions that day, just their incongruity. Perhaps Mum’s had said things were going to look up by the end of the week. Or that a new romance was on the horizon. No sign of you-know-who, Mum said of her on-off-boyfriend. I squeezed her hand to convey the right mix of sympathy and relief.
I recounted anecdotes from my life up in London to fill the silences that kept descending on us. How my older son looked like a little businessman in his new secondary school uniform, the blazer all baggy to leave room for growing; how me and the younger one played eye-spy in the car coming home from his afterschool club and he always won, picking obscure answers like M for me; and how my husband said he’d try to get home from work a bit earlier, but hadn’t managed it yet. I wanted to chat with Mum about my job at the medical school, where I taught GPs how to do research and wrote papers about the effects maternity services had on how women felt in pregnancy and as new mums. But Mum had always seen my job as a bizarre hobby I was bafflingly attracted to – ‘your statistics’ she’d call it. And though she didn’t say it, I knew that, in her eyes, I was consorting with the enemy – doctors, medicine, the powers that be. Instead I told her I’d been reading the book she’d given me, Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, though this was a lie. I changed track. ‘Did the woman opposite go home?’ I asked, looking at the empty bed. ‘She died,’ said Mum, ‘In the night. It was awful. I could hear it all.’
Mum coughed and coughed, her eyes screwed up, her fists crossed over her chest. She spat into a tissue and put the balled up tissue on the bedside table where it joined a small collection. This collection reminded me of the scrunched up tissues that I would come home from junior school to find scattered on the black Habitat coffee table. Mum would be sitting crossed-legged on the floor, her eyes and nose red and she’d dab away the tears and ask what I’d done at school that day. The crying was part of ‘getting her feelings’ out so that, one day, she’d be better. Better from what was never clear. Her sadness I suppose. I remember lying in the bath, submerging myself until just my nostrils were out of the water and thinking about Archimedes, imagining Mum laying back like this and me being able to see how much the water rose, in this way calculating the size of Mum’s insides, then finding and squeezing the shed tears out of all the tissues, and, somehow, working out how many of Mum’s tears had already come out, how many were yet to come, and when, exactly, the crying was going to end.
A man in a loose blue shirt arrived to ask Mum what she’d like for dinner the next day. She shrugged. He said he’d put her down for fish pie and a yoghurt, was that okay? She said nothing which he took as a yes. He didn’t say anything about the Bear. I didn’t either. I’ll realise, over the years to come, that hardly anyone mentions the Bear.
I’d eaten most of the grapes without realising it. ‘Sorry,’ I held one out to Mum but she shook her head. Next to the grapes was Mum’s notebook and an opened envelope.
Mum pushed the letter towards me. It was from the Department of Social Security about Housing Benefit. ‘Ann brought it in,’ said Mum. ‘You know Ann, my friend who came to the yoga classes I taught when we first moved here. She’s been turning up at visiting hours most days. I don’t understand why she bothers with me.’
Mum had underlined the part of the letter which said, in bold, that recipients must inform them of any absences from home anticipated to last four weeks or longer.
‘Twenty-two days,’ said Mum, pointing to the tally marks on her notebook. ‘My benefits. The flat. What if?’ Her voice trailed away.
I’ll write to them, get it sorted, they’ll understand, I said. Would they though?
On the notebook Mum had written S for Sarah and underneath SS for Social Security. I thought of the on-off-boyfriend and how he’d do a Hitler salute at the mention of the SS abbreviation for Social Security and scoff about their officiousness while Mum would fret about the SS realising how often the boyfriend was staying at her flat, and them concluding they were a cohabiting couple, and cutting her already meagre benefit money.
I couldn’t read the other thing under S, her writing had become a scrawl. ‘Cancel human potential,’ said Mum, pointing to the scribbled words and then to her bag. Inside the bag was the October issue of Human Potential magazine. ‘It’s all rubbish now,’ she said staring into the middle distance. ‘The whole lot of it.’
Mum’s beliefs – in everything New Age and in therapies from the extreme end of the 1970s counterculture – ardently burning for thirty years, had fizzled to nothing, doused out by the doctor’s pronouncement of end-stage emphysema. She had lost her faith in alternative health. But she hadn’t gained faith in its opposite.
‘Will you do something for me?’ she whispered, glancing round to check no one was near. ‘There are some tablets in the zip pocket inside my bag. I can’t tell them I don’t want them.’ She raised her cupped hand to the side of her mouth. ‘I’ve been hiding them inside my cheek until the nurse has gone. Don’t tell anyone. Take the bag. Flush them down the loo for me. Can you?’
What to do? I carried the bag away, trying to look casual, pretending the distinctive bag was mine. The bag felt like a bomb.
I walked towards the Ladies toilet, then on past it. Wanting to cry, I leant against the wall. What to do? I walked back to the Ladies. Inside the cubicle I unzipped the inner pocket. Nestled there, were around ten round, red pills, inviting as Smarties. One was slightly sticky. Back at the medical school I looked them up and figured out they were steroids. They made tiny ripples in the water as I dropped them, one by one, into the toilet bowl, settling at the bottom. When I squeezed my eyes half shut, it looked like blood. I hesitated, then flushed and they were gone.
I thought of the medicine cabinet in our childhood house which held no medicine, only calamine lotion and a deep blue eye bath, next to Tiger Balm to soothe a cough, an ache or a fever, and the cider apple vinegar Mum would use to rinse our hair.
‘You told them, didn’t you,’ Mum said when I returned to her bedside. Her voice was accusing. I didn’t tell them. I wouldn’t take away the only bit of autonomy Mum had. It stung that she thought I might. Though half of me felt complicit in a kind of a slow-motion suicide.
Visiting time was ending. I gave Mum a long hug, and reminded her my sister would be coming to see her the next weekend. Mum hugged me back, weakly. I held Mum in my gaze as I walked backwards from her bedside into the ward, stretching the time I had with her. The Bear was still sitting on the end of Mum’s bed, his huge paws resting on his knees, keeping up his still, silent vigil.
I was about to go through the double doors out of the ward, when a nurse on the desk called me over. Oh no – perhaps the pills had floated back into the toilet bowl. But it was about something else. ‘How did your mother seem in herself?’ she asked. ‘Did she talk to you? Has she always been a quiet person? She won’t speak to us. We’re concerned she might have clinical depression.’
I don’t remember what I replied. It seemed such a huge philosophical question. Is her response to the dire situation – her silence, her refusal – a sane or a mad one? Was she depressed or was she heartbroken? And was this something new? How she was that day, and in the months that followed, was both familiar and strange.
As I walked along the corridor following the exit signs, I felt nauseous and the left side of my head was gripped by a sensation I knew heralded a migraine. I popped into the Ladies for some water and quashed the feelings away with two tablets of paracetamol and codeine.
I searched the expanse of car park for Dad’s car which I’d borrowed for this last leg of the trip down here. I sat in the driver’s seat and looked around, searching for something of Dad, for the comfort of him, amongst all the paraphernalia belonging to his partner, who he would go on to marry after Mum dies. In the back there was child car seat for her grand-daughter, on the front seat her woolly hat and scarf and a bottle of hand-cream. I pressed the button on the cassette player hoping to find one of Dad’s cassettes in there – the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, or Beethoven’s piano concertos – but the click just revealed a dark hollow space inside the machine.
I drove out of the town, past the patchwork fields, on towards Exeter in time for the last train back to London and back to my husband and sons. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. I should have looked before, but my mind was on Mum, not road safety. The White Bear was sitting on the back seat.
He was squashed in next to the child’s car seat, looking out of the window. The car had felt sluggish, I’d had to rev more than expected to get up the hills. In this small enclosed space, there was a faint whiff as if a damp dog were in the car.
I clutched onto the steering wheel and tried to concentrate on the road ahead.
In a low and quiet voice, the Bear said ‘What’s the point.’
And I couldn’t get his words out of my head.
Mum’s Bear had become my Bear.
Back then, I never realised the trouble he would cause. Nor how very long he would stay.