Page 10 of The Second Chance Bus Stop

London

Today has cheered Mum up. Immensely. Her ankles are swollen from running around all day, trying to get me organised for my

trip. She’s created folders for me, each one with a different category. ‘To complement the letters.’ Letters we still have

to locate. And that I didn’t know existed until yesterday. She’s even started letting Swedish words slip into her daily vocab

again. This was one of the things that spurred a diagnosis three years ago. First, it was French. Will you be so kind as to pass me the sel, she’d say like some posh dame. She’d lived in Paris for six months, I knew that. Made sense. Then the Swedish words

happened.

‘Did you ever go to Sweden?’ I asked when she’d loudly proclaimed that her hat was a mossa and I’d consulted the internet to determine the language.

‘I almost did,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘When I fell in love.’ I knew she wasn’t in love with my dad: She’ll proclaim that and the irrelevance of men to anyone that

will listen. That he was useless and disappeared out of our lives as soon as he had the chance. So then, who ?

‘It was Sven. You almost moved to Sweden because of Sven,’ I state now, years later, as I watch her finish off another list, her handwriting wonky and wild.

‘ I almost moved to Sweden too.’ Images of a blond sibling show up uninvited.

A second language. A father figure. I was a toddler back then, if Mum has the year correct.

‘Everything would have been different if he’d turned up.’

‘Maybe you could have tried to move on. To meet someone else?’ I suggest.

‘Oh please, you turned out just fine. More good women are lost to marriage than to war. If I’d had a father figure for you,

you might have ended up an airhead. You might have become a general manager, middling about in some sort of generic life.

We may have struggled at times, the two of us, but struggle is good for children. Happy people are so much less interesting.’

I feel the fight rising inside me and decide to refocus. The days of arguing with Mum are behind us. Because her confusion

means she will sense my anger but not see the reason for it, which makes for a much crueller experience for us both.

I set the table, bright yellow bowls that I ordered off Amazon. Yellow to contrast the food. Unless we are having scrambled

eggs or korma, it stands out, and Mum sees that there is food on the plate. Because dementia doesn’t just affect memory, it

impacts sensory experiences involving touch and sight and smell too.

‘I have no idea where the table starts and ends,’ Mum says as if to confirm my thoughts just then.

‘Trace your fingers along the side of it,’ I say. ‘Find your way as if it were dark.’

She picks up a piece of potato with her spoon. Forks are only for cutting now. No more knives, something she’s accepted after

much protest.

‘Too hot.’

‘Okay.’

She goes in for a second one.

‘If the first one was too hot then don’t take a second one. Have some salad first,’ I say. I feel my frustration set in, an

irrational impulse to raise my voice, shake sense into her.

She goes for the potato a third time, and I give up. It’s not her fault.

‘What do you think happened, when Sven failed to show up?’

Mum pushes her thin lips together.

‘I don’t know. But he would have been there if he could. He was never late. Scandinavian and punctual. He never gave me reason

to doubt he’d always be right next to me, whatever happened.’

Mum in love. It’s an impossible picture. If she had relationships over the years, she hid them well. Timed them when I went

to camp or succumbed to daytime trysts during my school hours.

‘ There being the bus stop?’ I ask.

‘“Wait for me there,” he said. “I’ll have everything ready and tell you the plan, so you can start packing. Time to learn

Swedish,” he said.’

‘Right, but where, Mum? Where exactly were you meant to meet him?’

‘“At three o’clock,” he said. “I’ll be there at three. You’ll see me waiting at the bus stop.”’ She finally manages to eat

the potato, chewing it before continuing her answer. ‘“At the corner of Hornton Street, right between the town hall and the

library.”’

And there it is again, that damned street.

Waking up before Mum is becoming more challenging considering the summer light causes her to stir at six and either spring out of bed or call the buzzer I installed for her, until I come down the hall with a T-shirt thrown on to cover myself. The next morning is a new scenario entirely.

‘Please tell me there is a reason you are attempting to get into the attic at seven in the morning.’ Somehow, in the time

I had a shower, Mum has managed to locate a ladder and is now balancing on the second step.

‘We have to go through all our leads, Blade. Remember the letters?’ she says as if we are detectives solving a riddle. ‘They’re

up there.’

I gently guide her down under the promise that I will go up.

‘There is so much stuff up here,’ I shout down a few minutes later. Cardboard box after cardboard box full of books, summer

clothes and lampshades. ‘Fuck.’ My toe crashes into something hard, just as I finally locate and drag out a box of what looks

like old school crafts. I kick my other foot into a box just for good measure.

‘Are you all right up there?’ Mum’s faraway anxiety travels up the ladder and into the void I’m in.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s what I always say when things are going incredibly well.’

I manage to make the journey down, covered in dust but with the box of letters safely in my grip.

I carry the box downstairs, placing it on the coffee table.

When I open the box, I’m thrown by how few there are, a couple of single pages on the cardboard bottom, no more.

‘Where did you last see him?’ I ask, realising I might have asked that before but not gotten an answer.

She thinks. Sometimes the harder she thinks the less words she finds. Same way the more she looks for an item the more she

forgets. But she is clear today; it’s a good day to talk. She hasn’t even used the flash cards we made. Flash cards that say

things like Harriet is a physiotherapist who has two sons; one hopeless and one not so hopeless. They each have a label like Family (I’m the only content there apart from the one Australian cousin), Friends , Care Team , Society and Norms .

‘Two days before. All we had left to do was to meet up and for him to give me my ticket.’ Then she falls quiet, and I realise

that’s all that the information I will get for now.

‘Do you have a picture of him?’

‘He didn’t like being in pictures. But he took so many of me. Of you, too. Almost all the ones I have of you and me together

were taken by him.’

I stop rummaging in the box and look up at her. We have a lot of pictures from when I was a toddler, it’s true, and Mum is

in all of them with me. I never thought about who might have taken them, or why her smile was so wide. Or why she stopped

appearing in photos when I got older. There was no one to take them anymore.

‘Let’s go through our photos again this week and see if we can find him somewhere,’ I suggest.

We sit for an hour. Like I feared, there isn’t much, and all the gaps I’m trying to fill with Mum’s memories are still glaringly

empty. I read the letters quietly; they’re love proclamations. Begging pleas for him to return to her or let his whereabouts

be known. This can’t be Mum , I think. The image of her head over heels in love just doesn’t seem right. This is not how she talks or writes. Do I not know her at all?

‘Where are the rest of them, Mum?’ I ask her.

‘The rest?’

‘Yes, you, know, the other half of them. From Sven... Are there any?’ I say. Then it clicks. There are no replies. It’s

all Mum’s letters. Without envelopes and folded up into squares.

‘Why were they returned?’

I pick up another note and read it in my head. Not addressed to anyone, no greeting, just a single plea: If you decided that you didn’t want me any longer, I understand, just let me know that you are safely back in Svedala. E.

Mum has long discarded the envelopes. Knowing how she tears and rips paper, I’m not surprised, but that means we have no addresses.

Until now. What I hold in my hand is a postcard, an address scribbled across the righthand side, a postal stamp covering half

of it. It was returned because of an incomplete postal code.

Finally, maybe there’s something.

‘Svedala, is that the place, Mum? Is that where you were going to move with Sven? Where he lived?’

I see her reaching for the answer. It’s here on paper—I just need it confirmed from this version of my mum, not the hopeless,

pleading woman in these letters who I don’t recognize.

‘Yes. Sven from Svedala. Doesn’t that just sound like something you’d make up?’ she says eventually, and I draw a sigh of

relief as I am able to finally plan the first part of my trip.

Finally. With the help of the internet, I have narrowed it down to five Svens with the correct surname and birth year already, but

this could tighten the search further. I open up Google Maps and mark the small tiny dot before zooming out to find the nearest

airport: Copenhagen.

Right. To Svedala, then.