Page 54 of The Tapes

I sit on a stool in the kitchen and reread the three paragraphs of the article. The paper feels brittle, as if it could crumble if I hold it too hard.

Someone has kept this for three decades. Someone who seemingly thinks I’m the girl in the photo…or someone who knows I am.

I’m not sure what’s worse.

The more I stare at Jane and her ear, the more I see the similarity to myself. It’s not only that the straight slice is on the same ear, it’s that it’s at the same angle. The light catches it in the same way. Everything is the same.

It’s like looking in a curved mirror at the fairground, where everything is the same and yet it isn’t. It has to be a coincidence.

I take my keys from the hook in the hall and then leave the house and get into the car.

It’s around a twenty-minute drive from where I live in Macklebury to where I grew up, in Elwood.

They’re both small towns that are surrounded by countryside.

The sort of places where people either live their entire lives, or leave the moment they finish school.

I suppose I’m an oddity in that I left one place but then moved to the other. I got out…but not really.

As I pass the Welcome To Elwood sign, there’s a second banner a little past it with a large ‘Save Our Jobs’ slogan painted across it. A pair of men in bright orange vests wave their fists in a salute as I beep my horn in the customary fashion while I pass.

My home town never makes headlines for positive reasons.

Last year, Elwood was in the news because of a hit-and-run where a young boy was left for dead.

This year, it’s all about how the large shoe factory in the centre is on the brink of closing for good.

It’s the place that employed a large number of men throughout the area, a factory around which the town itself was built.

It’s been downsizing for years and nobody seems quite sure what will be left of the town once it’s gone.

I try to think of that instead of the article that came through the door but the picture of Jane with her damaged ear keeps drifting to the front of my thoughts. That and the date of the article. Jane and I would be the same age.

I navigate the streets of Elwood on autopilot.

All roads through the town seemingly lead towards the shoe factory and I find myself easing past it, where there’s a second protest happening close to the gates.

More men in fluorescent tabards thrust a banner high and cheer as I beep my horn for them, too.

I wonder if my support is to make them feel better, or me.

We likely all know the truth that the factory is closing and that jobs aren’t coming back.

No amount of protests or honked horns are going to change that.

Elwood is not a large place and it’s only a few more minutes until I’m parking outside Mum’s house. I let myself into my childhood home without much thought, using the key I’ve had since I was eight or nine years old. The sort of thing I’ve also done tens of thousands of times before.

‘It’s me, Mum,’ I call, as I close the door behind me.

She shouts back to say she’s in the living room, not that there are many other places she might have been. If it wasn’t there, it would have been the kitchen.

I poke my head around the living room door and she’s in her chair, with the headrest back and her feet up.

She motions to stand but doesn’t make a real effort as I wave her back down.

Coronation Street is frozen on the television but, from the time of day, it’s either a rerun or a recording.

Her relationship with Corrie is perhaps the longest with anything she’s had in her life.

‘I didn’t know you were coming over,’ she says.

‘D’you want a brew?’

I give the universal hand-to-mouth sign while holding an invisible mug and Mum reaches for the empty Little Miss Wise cup that’s already at her side.

‘I’ll do it.’

She doesn’t move to stand as she says this, although we both know the ritual by now. I take her mug and then head through to the kitchen, where I fill the kettle and set it boiling. After that, I rinse out Mum’s mug and then grab a couple of teabags from the cupboard.

Mum has already set her programme playing again in the living room, with the volume approaching sonic boom levels. She insists she doesn’t have a hearing problem, although, if that’s true, then ‘What?’, ‘Pardon?’ and ‘Who?’ must be her three favourite catchphrases.

I stand in the doorway that links the kitchen to the living room, slightly behind Mum where she can’t see me.

In the two years since Dad died, she’s changed almost nothing about this room.

The walls are still covered with a succession of family photos that almost all contain the three of us.

If not that, then it’s me by myself. There are class photos from primary school, and then the posed photographs of me in school uniform with a discomforting number of bewildering haircuts that makes me think my ear was the least of my worries when I was young.

There are holiday photos from caravan parks and the seaside.

Something from when I rode a donkey at Elwood Summer Fete when I was seven or eight.

I’m at a wildlife park, then a water park, then Alton Towers.

We visited Edinburgh when I was around twelve and there’s a photo of me sitting on one of the cannons near the castle.

My entire childhood is chronicled on these walls.

The kettle clicks off and I move back into the kitchen, where I pour two cups of tea. Mum has a splash of milk and her customary three sugars, and then I carry everything back through to the living room.

Mum thanks me for hers as I put it on the small side-table next to her chair. She won’t be touching it anytime soon as the only way she has hot drinks is when they’re cold. Dad teased her about it for at least the thirty years I remember, and likely another decade before that.

It’s those little thoughts, as simple as putting down a cup of tea, that bring the memories crashing back.

I sit across from her and cradle the mug in my fingers as Mum pauses the television again. The ear-crushing sound is gone in a flash, leaving only the relative silence of the unassuming house on an unassuming road.

‘I didn’t expect you today,’ Mum says.

‘I’ve been thinking about my ear.’

Mum’s eyes narrow as she stares across the room towards me. ‘Oh, love…what has someone been saying…?’

I shake my head. ‘It’s not that. I suppose it’s been on my mind recently.’

‘How come?’

‘I’m not sure. I was wondering if you could tell me about it again.’

She wriggles in her seat, confused, which isn’t a surprise. This is the story she used to tell me when I was much younger. She wanted me to understand why I was how I was. It’s not something she’s had to say out loud in anything close to twenty years.

‘Are you?—?’

‘Sometimes I need to hear it, Mum.’

She straightens herself and clears her throat. Any eye contact is lost now as she stares off towards some of the photos on the wall. It’s as if she’s aged in front of me. She’s suddenly frail and confused where, moments ago, she was confident and content.

Or perhaps I’m seeing something that isn’t there.

‘It was a complication with the umbilical cord,’ she says with a slight cough.

‘You were already partly out when they realised it was wrapped around your neck. All these people suddenly appeared from nowhere. Doctors, I guess – although I don’t know for sure.

It was so long ago. They managed to get you out but, in doing so, the cord ripped across part of your ear.

If it wasn’t for that, you probably would’ve choked to death. ’

She reaches for her tea, hot or not, and sips from the top.

It’s the same thing I was told as a young teenager and, perhaps, as an even younger girl.

I didn’t know what an umbilical cord was when she first told me but finding out meant that I was ahead of the class when we first started doing biology.

I’ve never questioned it, because why would I? It feels like something that could have happened. Like something that did happen.

I take the envelope from my bag and then step across the room and hand it to Mum. She asks what it is but I don’t answer as she reaches inside and removes the article. I watch her face but she’s unmoving as she either skims the piece or pretends to.

She doesn’t look up when she next speaks. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘I was given it.’

‘Who by?’

I don’t know the answer, although that’s not why I remain quiet.

‘Jane would be my age,’ I say, ignoring the question. ‘She’s missing the same part of her ear.’

Mum continues to look at the clipping, perhaps at the photo itself.

From nowhere a memory returns of me lying on my bed upstairs.

I would have been fifteen or sixteen and obsessed with boys and acting older than I was.

It occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t look much like either of my parents.

My hair has always been a naturally mucky blonde, while both of theirs was dark.

They had brown eyes, while mine were blue.

I asked Dad about it once but he said something about getting genes from grandparents.

It was the sort of conversation that was forgotten about until all these years later.

So distant that I’m not certain it even happened at all.

Mum looks up from the article and blinks. All of a sudden, she’s speaking quickly and decisively, as if telling me to clean my room and that she doesn’t want any backchat.

‘What’s this got to do with anything?’ she asks.

‘I’m not sure.’

She pauses for another moment, her eyes squinting as if trying to figure out how to phrase whatever comes next.

‘I remember giving birth to you,’ she says. There’s the hint of steel in her tone, as if she’s disappointed in me. ‘I don’t know why you’re showing me this.’

There’s a hint of hurt, too, which I guess is understandable. A moment in which it feels like she might rip the article in half. Her fingers grip the two corners and her arms tense.

Instead, she stuffs it back into the envelope and then offers it to me. I step across the room and take it from her, before depositing it back into my bag. It suddenly feels important, as if nobody should touch it except me.

‘I’ve never met anyone with an ear like mine,’ I say. ‘And she would be my age…’

There’s silence for a good twenty or thirty seconds until Mum turns her attention back to the television.

She starts her show playing once more, although the volume is muted.

Her hand trembles on the remote as she presses a button to set subtitles blinking along the bottom.

It could be age-related, except that I’ve never seen her tremble like this before.

She might be feeling ill or, perhaps…it’s something much, much worse.

***

Keep reading here!