From Sunrise To Sunset

I had a dream that I was being chased by a huge chocolate croissant, but just before I woke up I managed to take a huge bite out of it and scare it off.

I had nothing much on that day so I decided I would go to my favourite bakery in Manchester and get myself a chocolate croissant - a further act of revenge on the jumbo croissant in the dream.

Blue Moth Bakery was part of a row of box-shaped, glass-fronted businesses facing onto the canal in New Islington. When I got there, it was about to rain and everything was grey; the sky, the surface of the water, the flimsy-looking apartment blocks that enclosed the whole scene.  

I walked into Blue Moth and instantly felt better about the world. Quite often these days I found myself doing things to make me feel that way.  

The bakery was practically empty because I was there so early. It was just me and one older woman of Chinese origin wearing a beanie hat even though they’d racheted the heating up in there. She was drinking a cup of coffee and using a fork to attack some kind of round cake with a mountain of icing on it like shaving foam. When she looked up, I immediately looked away. I wasn't there to chat.

It started raining heavily outside and for some strange reason, this causd the old woman to drop her fork, gather up her things and leave. Perhaps she’d left her washing on the line.

I drank my coffee slowly, sitting by a window that looked out onto the canal. The rain was rippling the surface of the water in a way that I found mesmerising. There was an old bike chained to a lamppost and the rain hammered it with such force that I wanted to run over and move it to more sheltered spot.

To avoid having to think about the fragility of this bike, I looked at the barista behind the coffee machine, which was right by my table. He was staring out of the same window, perhaps he was thinking about saving the bike too.

He was remarkably good looking, blonde hair down to his shoulders, eyes so blue that they were cartoonish, and one of those square jaws that male superheroes tended to have, to match their perfectly ripped bodies.

Because of the way he looked, I was intimidated when he broke out of his daze and said: ‘Doing anything for Mothers’ Day?

Mother's Day? Was it Mothers’ Day?

‘No.’ I’d sounded more surly then I'd meant to.

The combination of the rain and the sky made it seem as if the whole bakery had been wrapped in a sopping grey sheet. I ordered another coffee, extra hot please.

‘I’m taking my mum out,’ he said, ‘I love Mother's Day. Love my mum. She's my biggest fan. She does everything for me.’

Part of me wanted to laugh; such soppy thoughts from such a macho-looking guy. But another part of me was distracted with thinking about my own mother.

How long had it been? Eighteen months? nineteen months maybe?

I wanted to turn over the situation with Mum over in my mind so to avoid having to talk to the Adonis, I looked out of the window again. A woman in a egg-yolk yellow raincoat with the hood up was walking a small white dog with twitching ears. A terrier maybe? I knew nothing about dogs despite having photographed far too many of people’s ‘beloved canine pals’ over the years.

This woman was walking her beloved canine pal right into the full force of the rain. That’s dedication, I thought, taking him for his exercise on a day like this.

‘Why don’t you like Mothers Day? What does your mum have to say about that?’ The Adonis laughed.

Was there no end to this guy’s perkiness?

‘I don't want to talk about it,’ I said, ‘well, I haven't spoken to my mum in a while.’

As I’d expected, the Adonis made a distressed face.

‘It's complicated,’ I said. The rain showed no sign of letting up even a little, it was like toothpicks coming down out there. ‘It goes back to my childhood. A longstanding argument.’

He nodded, sympathetic now.

‘It was about my dad. We fell out over my dad. Who's dead now.’ Was I going to go into the whole story?

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Child abuse.’ That ought to put an end to his questions.

‘Oh that's…really sad. Can I make you a coffee? On the house?’

His kindness made me feel self-conscious.

‘No, I've got to get going.’ I hadn't planned to leave so quickly, the last thing I wanted to do was go out in that rain.

Five minutes’ later I was walking along the concrete path alongside the wide canal, towards the main road. The rain stopped suddenly and the sky brighted and turned milky. What a relief, I could hold my head up again rather than walking hunched over. A few minutes later I wished I’d stayed with my head down, because there on the road was the body of the small white dog, blood melting across the tarmac’s wet surface. The woman in the yellow coat was crying into a tall man’s shoulder, he had the uncomfortable gait of someone who has a complete stranger going to pieces in his arms.

When I got nearer, I thought, shall I look away? But, like but most ordinary human beings approaching the scene of an accident, you cannot help but have a good old gape. That poor dog, its body was twisted like tissue paper and there was a poignancy in the way its nose was pointing into the air like it had just caught the scent of a cat that needed chasing.

Twenty minutes ago it had nothing to battle against but the rain and now it had to battle with eternal nothingness.

I had little concept of death, it wasn't something I thought about much. Probably because I’d been so unaffected by my own fucking bastard father's death three years earlier.

But looking at that dog, and its owner standing next to it, sobbing as if her insides had been ripped out of her too, I thought, death comes to us all.

There's no escape.

And when it's over it's over.

They’re cliches but they’re true.    

By the time the dog was so far behind me that I could no longer see it on the road, I’d made my decision. I would phone Mum. Wish her happy Mothers Day. Keep it bright and breezy. Not even refer to my unexplained eighteen (nineteen?) months of silence.

When I got home it took me a while to change out of my damp clothes, have a shower and put on my most comforting dressing gown and fluffy slippers, which were shaped like big cuddly dog faces. The more I thought about the call the more I needed comfort to prepare me for it. I couldn't believe how scared I was, and this made me annoyed with myself. But, if my sessions with Imelda had taught me anything, it was the importance of being kind and gentle to myself.

With this in mind, I carefully prepared for the call. I sat on my sofa with all its velvety pillows in colours chosen because they uplifted me. I covered myself with my duvet and my summer flowers patchwork quilt. There were lit candles placed all along the mantlepiece and I’d switched on the fairy lights that were woven amongst the the leaves of the indoor tree next to the fireplace. In front of me was a cup of hot chocolate made with nuggets of Lindt chocolate dropped into boiling milk and stirred.

If anything feels like going back to the womb, then this is it, I joked out loud.

Hang on, it was the womb, and more specifically the woman who it belonged to, that got me into this mess in the first place.

I looked around me, took a deep breath, and dialled The Sunrise Old People's Home. I'd always thought ‘Sunset Old People’s Home’ would’ve been a more appropriate name. Or maybe that would be too close to the bone?

‘Hello I'd like to speak to Judith Saffer? It’s her daughter, Lettice.’

The woman at the end of the phone sounded irritable and overworked. ‘Hold on, I'll get someone for you.’

‘Someone?’ I said, but she'd gone. She must have left the handset lying on its side because I could hear sounds in the background that took me back to when I was at primary school and they were serving school dinners. Doors closing. Trolleys being wheeled along cheap lino. Bossy staff calling out instructions to their juniors.

I looked at the round station clock I had above my mantlepiece. 12 pm. It had been a mistake to call at lunch time. Mum took her food very seriously and wouldn't want to be disturbed while she was eating it.

I smiled at the memory of her describing the politics of Sunrise dining room to me. ‘You have to get there early so you can get a place at one of the tables near the back, the ones at the front near the serving line are ridiculously noisy. You have to bring a novel with you, and when Harriet, or Joan T or Joan F come into the dining hall, you sure as hell make sure you’re busy reading that novel, and you don't look up until they've walked past you and have sat themselves down to torture some other poor sod.’ Mum liked to refer to the Sunrise residents who she had a problem with - and boy, were there a lot of them - as cretins.

I was still waiting for someone to come and deal with my call.

After Dad died, I decided to tell Mum everything that he’d done. Me and her had been sitting in The Flowerbowl, this vegan café in Chorlton, god knows why I’d chosen that as the place to tell her. I never went there again, afterwards. When she stormed out, she left three quarters of her gluten free brownie and I remember thinking that she was probably grateful that our argument had given her the chance to abandon it.

I’d been waiting on the line for almost ten minutes. In my experience with old age homes, you had to expect everything to take much longer than normal. But maybe I’d been forgotten about, with the staff caught up in the lunchtime chaos. Just as I was about to hang up, a deep female voice picked up the receiver and practically sang ‘hello?’ The jolliness of her tone threw me.

I used my ‘dealing with clients’ voice and said: ‘I’d like to speak to Judith Saffer, please. It's her daughter, Lettice.’

‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘you’re Lettice Saffer? Judith Saffer’s daughter?’ The tone had become gentle and no longer cheerful, this immediately put me on my guard. I felt like I was about to be told how miserable my mother had been over the past eighteen months because of my silence. How much she’d talked about me. How much she'd missed me.

I was all ready to be contrite. Not because I felt contrite (or did I?) but to get this woman off my back.

‘Is my mum available? If she's having lunch. I don't mind-‘

The woman interrupted me. ‘I'm so sorry. So very sorry. Your mother, she died five months ago.’

Without thinking what I was doing, I hung up. I pictured the jolly big bosomed woman, properly a senior figure in the home, standing there, listening to burrrr of a line that had gone dead. And she’d be wondering ‘What on earth? What on earth kind of person could this Lettice Saffer possibly be?’