Home Again
Every time I came home from school there would be a new strange object wedged onto a surface in my room. Tiny china plates that would only be good for families of aristocratic mice, teacups covered in chip but bearing faint possibly Wedgwood logos, and petite blue and red glass animals; all arranged with a stressful precision that kept shelves tight with dust. I simply ignored them. I didn’t use the space and could slide paperback books gently in and out from behind the depth of a cracked mustard teapot, so what was the point in causing any upset about the whole arrangement? My teenage bedroom turned into menagerie of broken and forgotten about tokens of love, murmuring over my head as I slept about how this was a language that was sacred between mother and daughter. Something she wanted to share with me and keep me safe in her four walls with, until I was clambering and trapped behind mountains of charity shop wares like a dark cobwebbed magpies nest.
The magpie eye developed as we got older and collecting nursery items became less essential. Pretty children’s books and dollhouse furniture warped into pictures on screens at first. Flashy under priced rings and pendants on daytime shopping channels came next. Presented with white teeth and glowing eyes by plump women who wore a lot of red, they always looked like they had been specifically picked to look like mothers to me. They told us how the peridot gem on a small gold band picked up the light perfectly when you reflected it at a very certain and calculated angle.Glossy white studio backdrops fell behind them as an obnoxious man came on and started to chart falling prices to viewers, reciting the phone to buy number like a mantra he whispered in his glossy white bed at night. I disliked him, he didn’t remind me of an inquisitive mother or someone who used their hands to touch and feel such delicate beauties. His hands appeared to a preteen me as dirty and untrustworthy but I didn’t tell my mother this.
‘Get me the phone’, she would shout with a mother full of pins as I walked awkwardly across the living room to pick it up. The pins in my folded up jeans jangled against my legs as I waddled back to her keeping the measurements in place.
Like the pretty earrings on the telly, most of the collections had a positive pay off for me in the forms of craft supplies or more book sets of famous classics. Some things that came from the wrinkly and fuzzy TV screen had negative repercussions. Weird step machines or yoga mats with a raise in the middle that worked only for specific videos that had a stern woman with a stripe of grey in her hair. She looked like she didn’t really care how much my mother tried to follow the strange aerobic movements and orders her voice barked out.
As I grew up I forgot to keep track of the collections that came and went, I had my own to focus on. Bruises from parties and cold cider glasses pressed against my lips as I watched someone collect tears in a calm white bathtub. I would sit swaying and imagine what on earth she was really crying when to me she had all the branded tops and scents that I wanted to keep in my baby pink teenage room. I scorned the collections of other young women, deeming them irresponsible or vapid whilst I picked up books and collected CDs of bands I didn’t like but boys told me about.
The collections became a direct issue when I became old enough to have conversations with my father again. We would raise eyebrows when she’d appear outside of a charity shop with something wrapped in a brown paper that scratched your hands and left a grey residue over everything it touched. Excitedly, she would peel back layers like a papery shallot to us whilst we sat down at lunch and present to us another item for a shelf. She would tell us all the details she knew on the spot and vow to navigate her way online and search the marking when we got home. Something I’ve still never figured out how she did so precisely and quickly. The tiny ship with a small line at its base would morph into a moving picture, ebbing back and forth in a small whispering wave at the bottom of the porcelain when it came to inevitably land on my purple windowsill. During the day, it would smile into the sun providing protection from the street once curtains had parted. At night, I still sleep with the curtains open. The orange retro glows would point onto strangle angles at all the clutter along the window and I’d lie in bed listening to the breaths form them all as the rain would warp the light. They whispered words of comfort from a clean white windowsill instead now. ‘She loves you really’. I’d nod slightly and pull away from the sticky warm man behind me. I just wanted to listen to their words and not those huge panting breaths from the mountain lion who slept behind me.
I moved back home between flats, during a strange period of transition in my life. Caught between jobs, still single recently I think the liability of a 23 year old daughter with no interest in her future stirred a dormant beast inside my mother. My earliest memory is watching her eat orange rinds, a pregnancy craving she had, and she picked this habit up again. Throughout evenings in their cosy turquoise living room, cheeks grew rosy on gin and tonics as she plucked half lemon pieces out the empty glasses and nibbled on the open wet pores. She shivered at the shot of sour whilst giggling and defending her right to do so in her own house as my father and I took her apart for this bizarre habit.
The couple of months at home crawled by, sleeping restlessly in a single bed thinking about salted kisses covered in the whiskers in pubs around town and missing the ability to spend Sundays naked and eating yogurts on my sofa watching US sitcom reruns. I joked on phone calls to friends that my virginity was growing back and made other crass comments. Later at night I’d let a select few tears in about how lonely I felt in a room that wasn’t my room and the sheets that weren’t my sheets. I was lonely for my own company, I missed my cool manic alter ego to the point of misery. Grieving her through dating apps late into the night. One night on the upstairs landing I bumped into my mother who saw my red puffy eyes as I moved into the cold glowing bathroom. She didn’t say a word but the next day she brought out an orange glass bull the size of a fingernail. It had small delicate white horns that curved out in a slightly lumpy fashion that reminded me of a root vegetable. I smiled and said thank you, he was exactly what I needed.
Two weeks later I had about five glass animals on a small green ceramic plate sunbathing at the window. They twinkled and I twinkled back at them. At night I walked past my parents room at two in the morning for a drink directly out the tap and to splash my face with cold hill water. The breathing from their room was altered as I paced back as quietly as possible to the spare room. At the door I climbed over some of my books in plastic bags I was yet to unpack. In bed, the tiny bull raised its front legs and pivoted away from the quiet street, whispered through angry teeth at me. ‘Shes awake’, I sighed and rolled to the wall. ‘I know’, I murmured back before sliding my elbow under my head and squeezing my eyes tight until they stung and the funny hurt in my chest subsided.
