Dr Rachel Knightley is an author, presenter and business and personal coach. She works with adults, teenagers and children in communication and confidence – from presentations, auditions and interview technique to fiction, memoir and speechwriting. Rachel has recently handed in her second collection of short stories, to be published by Black Shuck Books in 2023. She is a visiting lecturer at Roehampton University and writes and presents for Starburst Magazine, Severin, Indicator Films and Green Ink Writers’ Gym’s Write Through Lockdown programme. Her non-fiction includes Your Creative Writing Toolkit (Green Ink Writers' Gym) and the GCSE Drama Study and Revision Guide (Illuminate/Hodder Education). She has a PGCert in Teaching Creative Writing (Cambridge University), a LAMDA Diploma in Speech and Drama Education and trained in Business and Personal Coaching (Barefoot Coaching/Chester University). www.rachelknightley.com. Rachel’s annual Green Ink Sponsored Write for Macmillan Cancer Support takes place on 15 October. To support this excellent charity and grab your new writing anthology, visit: https://justgiving.com/fundraising/greeninksponsoredwrite2022
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‘Green Lady’, from Beyond Glass (2021), Black Shuck Shadows 27. Written as part of Green Ink Sponsored Write 2018 for Macmillan Cancer Support and originally published in Legacies of Loss (2019), an anthology by Hull University Press.
Green Lady
‘And this,’ says Dad, ‘is the very, very important bit.’
He leans forward, eyebrows in a deliberately serious scrunch. But there’s a twinkle in his eye, like we share a secret. Which we do, of course. We always did.
Dad pushes the arms of the corkscrew down. He looks at me, making sure I’m concentrating. I nod back. He puts his other hand around the wide green skirt that makes up the bottom half of the corkscrew. The round silver face has its same old childish, lightly evil smile. I used to hate that smile. Mocking me, she was, for never being able to work her out. But I was used to her. We grew up together, that green lady and me. Only she gets to stay on her safe, happy shelf in the kitchen, forever. I never thought I’d end up jealous of the green lady.
‘Check the foil is already off the top, of course,’ says Dad, a little sharply, like he knows my mind is wandering. Then, lighter, ‘Make sure she’s sitting comfortably.’ He squats the green lady over the cork of the wine bottle. ‘The important thing is to be firm but gentle. Don’t hurt her, don’t surprise her. Otherwise she’ll be all flustered and you’ll get bits of cork in the wine.’
The green lady’s arms go up, gradually, like she’s cheering in slow motion. I’m struck by how easily Dad does this, how consciously slower he takes it so I can follow what he never even needed to think about. A white gold eternity snake, the wedding ring that was Mum’s first design at art college, curls around his finger. There’s just a suggestion of bottle green paint in his cuticles and stubble, from the latest theatre set being painted in the workshop that week.
Then Dad freezes. A lime rectangle appears across him and our kitchen. Mum, proclaims the rectangle. Home. It’s accompanied by my favourite ringtone – Star Trek: The Next Generation – that I downloaded ages ago for family calls. But the familiarity of it is hollow now. I look up from my phone screen where our kitchen is, to the kitchen I’m alone in. The counter I’m perched at is bare, encircled by industrial style worktops, beige, grey, none of the colours of life. If I look through the door I can see the beginning of the pokey student hall that stretches on forever, adjoining twelve strangers behind twelve shut doors. It’s the opposite in every way to our cheerfully awkward, quirky old bungalow. If I could only crawl into the frozen screen, out of this cold and anonymous new world that’s too big and too small at the same time. But even though I can’t imagine “home” ever meaning anywhere but that bungalow, and even though Mum’s calling me from it right now, I don’t want to answer.
The video clip of Dad is almost grey under the lime rectangle and the bright red and dark green of the two spots: green to answer Mum’s call; red to avoid the call and go back to the video of Dad. I don’t care which I do. It doesn’t seem to matter. The options don’t even seem like different colours. Neither option means hearing Dad’s real voice, ever again.
But the right thing to do is to answer, so I might as well go with that that. I’m not the only one who misses him, even if I’m the only one in this kitchen. ‘Hello?’ I hear my voice say. It sounds exactly like me, like I always have whether I want to or not. Calm, clipped, a bit underwhelmed. Like nothing has changed: a perfect parody of being the same person I always was. I’m doing a perfect impression of me.
‘Sian.’
My mum always says the name of whoever she’s calling, not her own name. It doesn’t matter whether she’s talking to her own child or the gas board. I listen to her drop my name into the silence like a pebble into a pool. I picture the rings spreading out, wait for them to dissipate before I reply, ‘Yes.’
‘All going well.’ It isn’t the question it’s supposed to be. It’s a statement, demanding confirmation not information. Most people would ask how your first month at university has been, instead of tell you. But not Mum. Mum doesn’t do questions. Mum only does certainties. Gives you the cue, so you can come back at her with the right answer. And of course that habit’s got a lot worse since the greatest certainty in her life has gone.
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘I would have come if you’d wanted.’
That’s one certainty that really does happen to be true. And I’m not lying when I answer, ‘I know that, I know you would.’ I’m just leaving out how very much I didn’t want her to.
I don’t blame Mum for the false certainties. It really isn’t that. I don’t blame her for the way she never said anything remotely pessimistic about Dad’s condition and diagnosis, nothing to even slightly prepare me for how wrong she was in her life maxim that everything was going to be a) for the best and b) alright. I don’t blame her that I had to learn how very, very wrong the ideas that shaped my mind for my entire eighteen years had been all the time, while simultaneously trying to learn how to say goodbye to my dad; learning that goodbye is a process that starts while everything still seems almost normal, when denial is the only realistic option, when they’re still apparently absolutely fine. That the before, when and after of losing someone you love means the weeks and months go on and on and you’re still saying goodbye and still haven’t even begun saying goodbye yet. I’m never going to burden Mum with how much I wish she’d protected me with even a little bad news, instead of trying to protect me from it.
‘But it’s going alright?’ I hear it, I’m pretty sure I do: the question mark creeping in at the edge of her voice.
‘Yes,’ I say. I hope it’s soft enough, not too much like a snap, like an order. I don’t find soft any easier than she does. That’s why I needed Dad, and why she did too. Dad, translating the world we both exist in to something less cold, something more gently and pleasantly alive. Something that wasn’t always such an intensely big deal. ‘Honestly. It’s good here. It’s fine.’ None of that’s a lie. Not really. It’ll be true soon. All of it. I’ll make it so.
‘Are the videos… are you watching the videos?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are they helping?’
‘Yes.’ I wipe my eyes and thank God Mum doesn’t know how to FaceTime.
‘That’s good.’
‘Yeah.’ Dad always helped me do practical things. He knew I struggled, just like Mum struggled. Things that happened two thousand years ago, me and Mum are great at. We know the history, and the mythology, and the signs on ancient pots and cutlery that tell you about the makers and the owners and the composition of the clay. Things that happen under our noses are more of a mystery, like where the scissors are (in the usual pot on the kitchen counter) or what the difference is between the oven and the grill (still unclear), and when you use one (fish fingers) or the other (baked potatoes) and when it doesn’t matter (chips).
Mum is Professor Emeritus at her university but in the kitchen she never got beyond being a bad apprentice. Before Dad’s diagnosis, he’d always done all the cooking. It was Dad who budgeted before and after all the bills went out, Dad who googled and booked family holidays. There was no question who wore the apron in our house. It was a black apron, with the Starship Enterprise on it and “Make it so” in a speech bubble coming from the saucer section – which always slightly irritated Dad because Captain Picard, whose catchphrase it was, would normally be on the Bridge and that was in the other section of the ship. Dad isn’t wearing the apron in this video because it’s only a wine bottle, but it was really clear in the spaghetti one. I remember when I first watched the final episode of The Next Generation, Dad shaking his head and saying, “There’ll never be another captain like him.” I haven’t dared watch Star Trek again.
‘I limit myself to one video clip a day,’ I tell Mum. I hope I make it sound like a choice, like I’m okay. The truth is I’m desperately rationing Dad’s videos. None of them are more than three minutes, because Dad and I worked out that was the best for getting the greatest number of different practical little video clips on my phone. I say “we”, really that was Dad too. There’s a few more of them on my iPad, and some up in the cloud, but then Dad made a joke about soon being up in the cloud that made me cry so much he put the rest on hardware.
Anyway, if I limit myself, and don’t get greedy, it’ll be like I can have a new conversation with Dad every day until the Easter holidays at least. I might have to start missing out weekends, because university terms work as semesters and I want to be sure they’ll last until the end of this one. I don’t tell Mum this because she always snorts at the word “semesters” because it’s an Americanism. But I always agree when Dad says – when Dad said – who cares whose idea it was if it means you get longer holidays?
‘Which one is today?’ Mum asks, and this time it really is a question. I guess it’s safe to not know the answer to which video your daughter is watching half way across the country.
‘Opening a bottle of wine,’ I tell her.
‘With the green lady?’ There’s a smile in the question.
‘Yes.’ There’s a smile in my answer too, at the confirmation I didn’t know I needed: that my memories are real, are shared between real people, are not just in my phone and me. That there’s a world beyond this empty kitchen where I haven’t even bothered to turn on the light; that I’m here, I exist in a present that has plenty of room for the past and even, perhaps, the future. “I’m not watching them in order. The videos. It’s a bit more urgent than that. We’ve got a dinner party at the weekend. I want to be able to open a bottle of wine and not have to ask someone else to do it.’
‘Who’s we.’ Back to the questions that aren’t questions. I roll my eyes, tell her it’s just me and two of the girls from my floor, work out how to play the video on silent so I can run the green lady back and forward, watch her twisting in silent, repetitive circles.
As I wind forward and back, and the green lady does too, it’s like I can hear the words Dad said after we switched the camera off. “Go for it,” was what he said after I’d stopped crying at the cloud joke. “Spending three years learning about the thing that is most interesting to you is amazing, Sian. It’s your job to learn interesting things! For three whole years!” I was still snivelling a bit, but I nodded, acknowledged that technically he was absolutely right while implying that that wasn’t the point at all. He read me loud and clear. “I don’t want to say you have to go,” he said, re-reading my A Level results and trying not to beam. “You do have a choice. You could stay here, forever if you really wanted to. But new is good, Sian. People, places, jobs, relationships, they need to renew themselves, shed skin, grow beyond their old limits, engage with whatever is happening now. Because alive things keep growing. Whether you want them to or not.” He was looking at his fingernails but I knew he was talking about the cancer.
“But I want you to be there.”
He put both his hands on my shoulders. They smelt of woodchip and that stuff you wash paint brushes in. “I am.”
(C) Rachel Knightley 2021