Gill Horitz
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About Time: Published in Cheatin’ Heart: women’s secret stories (Serpent’s Tail)
‘These are the great circles of time that hold the months together.'
Pages turn. 'In this Book of the Universe are all the episodes that link the days and the months. As the wheels turn, see how the curves of the planets echo our thoughts. In this model of circular symmetry you will see our beginnings.'
A gentle voice asks, 'Why don't you get back into bed now, Myrtle?
She replies, 'Is this anybody's bed?' and the sheets shush and crackle in my ear. Into her bed she steps, into the adventurer's galleon, and sets sail
'What is the exact time? she asks.
‘Quarter past five?’
'Is that exactly? Electric silence. She answers herself,
‘This is Saturday night. All the days of our lives join up...’
A journey begins.
Myrtle was a science teacher and my mother, born seven years into the new century. When she was five she discovered a picture of Sir Isaac Newton floating in a river, which thrilled her father, Henry, for he had once proved that the family were Newton's descendants
Myrtle's father taught himself Latin and Greek. And he made cabinets and chests, and within each he carpentered a secret drawer. Myrtle's favourite game was to discover how to release the drawer: each had a different, intricate mechanism but her fingers always solved the conundrum, for uncharted regions were a joy to her.
Some people have a need to get to the truth, draw things into the open.
Some nights, Henry woke her, led her up the steep stairway into the attic to look at the moon and the stars through his home-made telescope.
Everything that could be revealed, would be.
One day, he eased open the secret drawer in the mahogany chest in his bedroom and took out a folded paper.
He led Myrtle down the winding path to the garden shed hidden behind borders and the vegetable garden; there lay more uncharted territory, woody and perfumed with pipe tobacco where light came to life, suffused with motes. Seeds and dust orbited their heads. In that impressionable atmosphere the rules of the home had no place: things were not put away but opened out. Myrtle was shown the insides of things, the wheels of watches, the lenses of a telescope. She handled intricacies, interior workings.
She watched Henry's fingers unfold the paper, saw soil-encrusted whorls, and wondered about the things in life he might yet bring to her attention.
On the page were lines and words plotted like a puzzle; the whole sheet was covered with them and he called it a family tree. Its branches were a canopy of names: Myrtle, Edith, Wilhemina, Henry, Muriel, Edwina, George, Elizabeth, William, Joseph, Alexander, Hannah ... In the tree's crown sat the eagle roosting: Isaac in the year 1642.
When things went missing, when her car was stolen from outside the supermarket, when the fridge filled up with the same goods, when the man across the road entered her house at night, then I knew our lives were changing.
There is a space in the cranium, I imagine at the base, where protein amyloid begins the unsettling of the universe. It is a silent, painless working. But nothing ever again can be relied upon. My mother has Alzheimer's disease; once it was diagnosed, no one ever again asked her to play bridge.
I was forty years younger, yet I had to stop her driving her white Morris Minor, which was a chariot of sorts that took her out of the doldrums. For sixty years she drove off whenever she wanted, her prerogative most certainly; we should all have that much control over our lives.
Mother said I was out of my mind; she said she would step under a lorry in Commercial Road if I took away her car. Every afternoon she drove to the sea. It was the last vestige of independence. A way out into the world. Turn right, left, to the roundabout and straight over, on for about five miles, past the garage, then left at the hotel and park at the sea front. There the light stipples the sea, its moods flood over the watchers in their cars. They stare and stare. Always their eyes are held by its constancy. It doses them with elemental calm.
When she failed an eye test and it became illegal to drive, it could be avoided no longer. Still she made me follow her the five miles to the sea to observe her driving, and never once lost her way.
It was like a mother telling her daughter what to do. I practised in bed the words I would use and they made me cry.
I forced her to give me the keys for ever. She sat huddled on the edge of her bed, holding them like a dagger. I heard the tone of my voice, subtlety was not possible. The words sounded like someone who always plays by the book, who never takes risks.
She said, rising up, the dagger close to my chest, 'The trouble with you, Caitlin, is that you're so dull, you always play things by the book, always try to do things for the best. You always mean well!?
'Mean well' is ditch water, low and stagnant - there is no reflection of self there. Mother was fighting me.
Fierce voice, eyes ablaze, she gathered herself up, all strength, status, dignity into her right arm, and I felt the sword enter. Oh sad day. Between Mother and me there had always been so many different ways to look at things.
Outside the room hovered Mr and Mrs Evans, the Rest Home proprietors; they made me do it, for the best. Always for the best in the long run. The doctor made me do it - she told me that I could not live with myself if my mother caused an accident.
That night I cried, sought refuge in the dark's desert, soared up into the heavens and down into the earth's core, but could only go so far. Once I felt my mouth slacken into an O as the owl sang in the wood opposite. Its note entered my head, or the owl itself flew into my cochlea, spiralling me and Myrtle into other dimensions.
We sailed on a liner in the Aegean Sea and Myrtle sat at the captain's table discussing brain haemorrhages. Her hands lay like shells in her lap all through dinner and I longed to hold them.
And while I dreamed, Mother, lying in her bed, would see her car and daughter and keys hover on the lip of a black hole, about to be swallowed.
And under her skin, molecules continued their work, suffusing clusters of memory. Although I didn't realize it then, as one life came to an end another was being revealed. In those regions, cranium dark as galaxies, something was germinating. No brain scan can show the secrets I now surmise and intuit.
In the morning, as she woke, she felt the wound in her palm where I had forced the keys from her hand.
It takes time to realize how much people are changing.
Myrtle was no actress yet she became addled with voices: slow, philosophical soundings of self-knowledge. She was her old self yet not so, speaking about things she knew but had never spoken about. Context and language seemed to slide away from each other.
She told me, 'There is a universal belief that I shall die before my next birthday. There is no point now in taking interest in what's happening around me. I see only too clearly it won't lead anywhere. For one thing, I have no responsibilities; it's no longer necessary to make decisions for other people. I may as well leave.'
She was unable to go anywhere. Over the two years since the Home had become her home, her body had grown heavier, noticeably so each week as though the food piled up inside and needed movement to shift it. She was like a frail dormouse, soft and round, tottering on hind legs. It was for the best to sit all day, and all the other underling mice, Wally, Emily and Dorothy, were happy to sew and snooze beside her from breakfast to tea.
One autumn afternoon, I arrived and she was rising from her chair when I entered the room, on the move. She looked slimmer: recently there had been a change, less of a totter when she walked, less
softness when we hugged.
Up she got, I full of vitality, and began to climb the forbidden stairs. I hovered behind her in case she fell. She and I sat in her room to rest.
'Be a bit braver, Caitlin, you've got to get out of yourself, see your own potential. You're missing something.'
The thrill of my own name; it was like being nursed with a mother's soft croon, a lullaby in my ear.
'You seem different today. What have you been doing?' I asked.
‘What on earth would I do? I am fixed here, fixed with a bloody great anchor. You get used to sitting all day in one chair. Falling asleep is our salvation.'
Then she fell asleep and I watched her eyes dart beneath their shining lids. Behind her, the curtains were open and outside in the darkening sky I saw us both sitting in the bright room.
For a woman like Myrtle, the ache of apathy was too much to bear. Something occurred, some physiological change to mind and body. We must not be deterred by what we cannot understand. Watching my mother, I realized I was finding out about the workings of the universe.
With anchor weighed, she rose up out of her chair into the night: her arms become wings and eased her over the town centre towards the north. As she flew away, I realized the present need not constrain us. It was no apparition, a journey began there although I didn't that time see where she went.
When she was almost out of sight, I leaned over and covered her with a rug.
At about that time, the night sitter reported that Myrtle woke frequently, sat up and spoke aloud as though people from her own past came to life before her eyes. To understand how senility was liberating her, letting her slip between layers of memory, I began to study physics. Newton's laws of motion became my everyday reading:
‘Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it’
Soon, she was in the present less and less. Once, the family photograph album had been a catalyst, being so full of evidence. On many occasions we turned the pages over and over; there was a sensory magic which conjured smells and sounds out of the silver granules.
One day I pointed again to my daughters, Rachael and Alice, and their cousins, all climbing rocks, spellbound in youth. And I pointed to myself wearing the same bright woollen jumper that we both could see on my arms holding the album.
My mother turned to look at me, and asked, 'Did I have any daughters?'
Speech lay mute in my chest, all the words piling up around my heart. For a moment I was in jeopardy.
The album became a closed book and slid off her knees. A book full of unborn. Who is to say we are happening now? Were we both in a coma or out of one? No one can tell.
When I spoke, the words, never before spoken, sounded unreasonable in the bright lounge light.
‘I’m your daughter - Caitlin.'
Then I remembered that nuclides have daughters, formed from other nuclides, caused by radioactive decay.
I had became unrecognizable, seen as I was from such great distances.
Where are you, Mother? Can I go with you?
She closed her eyes. Her head fell to one side and in the orifice of an ear, I saw her hurtling through dark midland tunnels, felt the rhythms of the steel pulse and scents of the journey, saw the word 'Darlington' on the platform.
I no longer existed. I had not yet been born, no one could see me.
I decided to eavesdrop on Myrtle's nights, record her awakenings into the past. I gave a small tape recorder to the night nurse, who agreed to switch it on when Mother began to speak.
‘This is Saturday night. All the days of our lives join up the months and I have reached a mid-January far from now. We can go forwards or backwards like the proverbial arrow: it depends which way you face. We have always known that space has no preferred directional characteristics and I have found from my own experience that this is also true of time.
‘Take out your books and we shall look at ways to measure time. The lunar cycle has twenty-nine point five days between crescent moons. Numbers are merely coherent sounds to help us visualize our measurements. Now, I've found a crevice in this understanding, a high-up cranny, where you can go either way.
‘To move into the past is not cumbersome or weird. Rethink, all of you, begin to rethink the dimensions you know.'
For several minutes she said nothing, yet I was bound to go on listening to the surfeit of rustles, the breathing.
‘I am entering the tunnel, here I go; pack up your books and I'll see you again another day. I am going home to visit my parents.'
My face was inches from the black gauze pulled taut over the speaker. I leaned closer and through the cloth's fibres saw her pass down the platform; her parents were waiting by the ticket barrier, as they waved to her, she began to run towards them, her thick, dark hair spread like a cape on her back.
They took her to their home at 47 The Mead. I saw inside the back room; there was a domestic vapour; the hearth was a nugget of heat and the dark corners of the room were frozen. A meal was laid out on a white cloth on the table in the room's centre, a dish of white cod, baked, steaming. They were about to sit down to eat.
At first their voices were indecipherable but as I played the tape over and over and watched their mouths move, words became distinguishable.
Then click. The night sitter turned off the machine. Myrtle's voice was trapped. It was Thursday afternoon again in Dorset.
Apart from that tape, I have four others wound up tight:
'Myrtle watching the night skies with her father from the attic', 'Myrtle playing with friends on a railway embank-ment', 'Myrtle watching her father carpenter in the garden shed' and 'Myrtle working in a laboratory at Birmingham University'.
No one except the night sitter knows what I have done.
The tapes, coiled in their plastic cases, contain time before I was born. That's how I know about the family tree and the atmosphere of the shed. I saw Henry take the folded paper from the secret drawer in the chest in which I now keep my jumpers. As Myrtle's voice relives the day, the place comes into view and I follow them out of the house, down the garden path into the shed. I notice shade and sun slice the rhubarb leaves in the vegetable plot. There is no sign of my grandmother, Wilhemina.
They stay in the shed making calculations from birth and death dates. Eventuallv. Wilhemina must call them, although I don't hear her. Henry hurriedly folds the paper and puts it into his waistcoat pocket. Myrtle speaks about tea, how they will be in trouble if they are late. Just as they are about to step out into the garden, my mother's voice stops as she falls asleep. The scene diminishes at that very moment, in the shed doorway.
In the university laboratory tape she talks indistinguish-ably to herself about measuring chemicals and I am there standing against the dark wood bench. Then two friends enter, Vera and Kathleen, and they speak about a plan to go skiing in Austria. Vera's hair falls over one eye just as it did when I knew her as my godmother twenty years later. Myrtle puts away the equipment, and they go outside, chattering all the time. I am behind and above them, following them through the morning. In spite of the realism, I notice it has limitations. Not everything is visible. As we walk down the street, the windows of houses are opaque and we pass no one.
On the railway embankment she is about eight. Six children slide down to the tracks until they hear them hum and crackle.
‘There's no time to lose', my mother calls, and I see rather than hear them scream and shout as they clamber to safety. When the train has passed, they walk on the iron lines and speak about the presence left in the air by the furious engine.
The attic tape starts on the landing. Myrtle is about fourteen. Her father has woken her and they climb the almost vertical steps into the attic. As I follow, I look down at the blue woollen dressing-gown and glimpse her ankle, mw mother's unswollen and smooth ankle. They talk knowledgeably about the moon's surface until the night sitter tries to make Myrtle settle down and sleep.
One day she may relive the vears in which our lives coincide. But I expect nothing.
Her ancestor unfolded a verbiage of mathematical equations: time runing forwards is replaced by time running backwards; the numbers do not alter, for the sum of two negative numbers, like the sum of two positive numbers, is always positive.
Now I believe that Newton's mechanics cannot distinguish between the two different directions of time. Myrtle and I have no way of knowing whether we are growing older or younger.