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The only one who really knew her

By ChristinePublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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My mum had died just over six months ago and I had been more than reluctant to start going through her stuff. Ever since she had bought the big house, I had been dreading the moment. I knew that one day she would die and that I would be left having to sort out the mess. To say that mum had been a hoarder would be an understatement. Well, she wasn’t a hoarder in the clinical sense of the word. She wasn’t like one of those people you sometimes see on TV who have to clamber over mountains of tied up old newspapers and huge balls of plastic bags, stuffed with nothing but more plastic bags. No, she wasn’t like that, she didn’t hoard rubbish, it was all valuable stuff, well, trinkets, really: little Bavarian porcelain dolls with chubby cheeks and cocked green hats, pairs of lead crystal swans with elongated necks entwined, drawers and drawers full of mismatched antique silverware - you name it, it was there, in this house. Mum had always jokingly quipped: “You’ll have to get a skip when I die.” She thought that was hilarious. I never found it very funny at all, as I always knew it wouldn’t be just the one skip that would be required. It would be more like a dozen skips and weeks, if not months, of tedious sifting through it all, piece by piece in order to determine which bits to chuck and which ones to sell. “Did I not want any of it for myself?” my friends keep asking me. Well, the answer is no, not really, I have everything I want and more in my own place, and mine and mum’s tastes have always been diametrically opposite. She loved chintz and tat, expensive tat, but tat nonetheless. Every surface in her home had always been covered in stuff, every sofa overloaded with hand-embroidered cushions and doilies. Opulent Persian rugs now covered the stone and parquet floors in this country house that she had bought 15 years ago. But even before then, even before the money, before the short lived fame and the well invested fortune, when we lived in a two bedroom flat without central heating, even back then, she would fill every empty space by cramming more stuff into it. Just stuff, and I had been sick of it for a long, long time.

I’ve always been suspicious of hoarders. What have they got to hide? What is it that they are covering up with all this clutter that surrounds them? Well, in my mum’s case, I didn’t think that there’d be any secrets left to be discovered. True, my mum was sly, two faced and incredibly manipulative at times, but she was my mum, and I knew her. I knew her better than anybody else did. In fact, I used to believe that I was the only person on this whole wide Earth who actually knew her, who actually knew her real, true self. Mum never had anything good to say about anyone. Sure, to people’s faces she was eternally polite, if not deferent. But no one, apart from me, had ever witnessed her benevolent and kind face turn to thunder the moment no one else was there to witness. I honestly believe that not even dad ever got to see her true face when he was still around. I am the only one who has ever seen it. I am the only one who ever bore the brunt of the full force of her rage. And man, could she rage! No one was ever good enough, no one could ever measure up to her ridiculous expectations. But no one knew what she was really thinking, apart from me. Anyone who ever met her adored her, admired her generosity and kindness. Oh boy, if you people had only seen what I have seen!

So, whilst I knew that there were masses of trinkets and knick-knacks to go through, I most certainly did not expect any surprises. Yet here it was, right there in front of me: a small metal tin with a hinged lid that had clearly been hidden at the back of a built-in cupboard, underneath piles of folded up tablecloths. Kneeling in front of the lower shelves, I had pulled out the entire stack of fabric in one go, when it clattered to the ground. At first I thought that it must have been there since before mum had bought the house, but then, I actually recognised it. I had seen it before, many, many years ago, when we still lived in our first council flat. Yes, we used to live in a council flat before our luck changed oh so suddenly and mum bought this ridiculous country pile with her newly won fortune. With the money, I was finally able to move out, too, at the age of 31 mind you! Mum gave me an initial £ 20 000 to spend however I wished and then a regular allowance that came with the the usual strings attached. It meant that I was very much financially dependent on my mother, but I also managed to get at least some distance between us. I moved to London, and mum moved in here.

I recognised this tin. I don’t know what its original purpose was, but I remember that it used to hold a bunch of broken crayons. It also still had Lucy’s initials scratched into its light blue coating, along with the little stylised birdie she always used to draw alongside her signature.

Lucy!

I said that I was the only person on this entire planet who really truly knew my mum, that I was the only one who had ever seen her true face. Well, that’s not quite true, there used to be someone else who had seen it, too. God! I just very nearly wrote “Lucy was my twin sister.” I can’t believe that after all these years, this is still so deeply ingrained within me. My therapist calls it conditioning. She says I need to recognise that the very first automatic thought that comes into my mind is the conditioning that my mother has imposed on me. According to my therapist, whenever this happens, I should take a deep, conscious breath and rephrase the sentence in my mind to reflect the actual facts. So here we go: deep breath, rethink: Lucy wasn’t my twin sister. Lucy was a whole year older than me. When I kept bringing this up in endless rows with my mum, long after Lucy had gone, instead of showing even the slightest bit of remorse or insight, mum simply kept insisting: “Well, you were Irish twins.” I had to Google what that term actually meant. It’s quite derogatory, if not racist, but hey, that just about summed up my mum. Lucy was a year older than me, yet she had always been presented as my twin sister. All her life, throughout school and university, she was always one year behind. Mum had kept her back a whole year in everything she did. Lucy had to wait to start pre-school until I was ready. Lucy and I started school on the same day. We were dressed identically, even though she was always just that little bit bigger than me. Bigger, because, of course she was taller, having been a whole year ahead in her development. Looking back now, I wonder if this might be where her long history of eating disorders had started. All of our birthdays were celebrated together. For years, I didn’t even know when her actual birthday was. Lucy. Even though she was the older sister, she spent her entire life in my shadow. Until that day, just about a week after our 30th birthday, sorry, no, I meant to say my 30th birthday when she suddenly and unexpectedly killed herself.

I say unexpectedly, even though I guess most suicides are unexpected. The truth is, we hand’t expected her to do anything like that, as we tended to dimiss her acting out as attention seeking. Mum always called her Drama Queen. Lucy had a long and complicated history of psychiatric episodes. There was the eating disorder, but there were also regular overdoses, the every-day self-harm incidents, along with the rest of her unstable and often reckless behaviour. Oh, and the scribbling, of course. The crazy, neurotic scribbling that started when she was about 4 or 5 years old and that was one of her main idiosyncrasies, as one of her psychiatrists called it, throughout her entire life. At first she scribbled onto walls, then after mum had beaten that out of her, onto any piece of paper she could get her little hands on, and finally, after she had been reprimanded for defacing bank statements and phone bills enough times, she graduated on to notebooks. She was always scribbling away in one of those notebooks.

Growing up, I never quite understood why Lucy had to be this way, but now, after years of going over the past in therapy, I can begin to see what she must have gone through. It is only now that when I look back, I can see that things weren’t always quite how they appeared to me back then. So here I was, holding a blue metal tin in my hands. Why had mum hidden it inside the linen cupboard? When I looked inside, instead of the crayons I remembered from when we were children, there was a little black notebook. I had never seen it before, and I wouldn’t have guessed that it was one of Lucy’s. Not in a million years. The ones that she used were usually shiny and brightly coloured, covered in puffy vinyl and garish. Yet this one was elegant, entirely black, and its cover felt velvety smooth to the touch, so entirely unlike Lucy with all of her rough edges. But when I opened the pages, I immediately recognised her scrawny, disorganised handwriting. This was no doubt Lucy’s. But why on Earth had mum kept it? She had thrown out everything else of hers. And why had she hidden it in this manner? I flicked through the pages, they were filled with Lucy’s usual bizarre drawings and schizophrenic ramblings. And then I saw it. On one of the pages, right in between all of the random, garbled nonsense, there was the poem. The poem! I read the first line, but the rest of it immediately reeled itself off automatically in my head. Of course I knew this poem by heart. A framed copy of it is proudly displayed in the magnificent entrance hall of this stupid house. After all, this is how mum had been able to afford this place. Shortly after Lucy had died, no, sorry, deep breath, shortly after Lucy had killed herself, mum, who had never had any regard for poetry, nor shown any interest in writing anything other than shopping lists, had entered into a poetry competition put on by this weird reality TV show. The prize money was ludicrous - I never even fully understood just how much money it was. I remember that it did seem odd at the time, her daughter had just committed suicide and mum had nothing better to do than to enter into a high profile poetry contest that was to be broadcast all over the entire country. I had brushed it off as being part of her grieving process. The money had bought this house, my flat in London, a couple of holidays, and overall, a very, very comfortable lifestyle for mum, which meant she never had to worry about money ever again. And I guess now, with mum gone, it was all mine. I looked back down at the page, where my eye caught the last line of the poem that had made all of this possible:

“And here I am, forever trapped inside the spider’s web.”

Lucy McDean July, 1997

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About the Creator

Christine

Christine is a Clinical Psychologist working exclusively online. She presents Metal Therapy, a heavy metal show, focusing on psychology and mental health topics on burwell.radio every Wednesday at 8pm GMT. Insta & FB: CambridgeTherapyCentre

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