Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
What’s it like to be Irene Hedges? Or Linda Jones or Dawn Cooper, or any of the others who are not like you; who are normal? Do they know how lucky they are?
You have no idea which piece is missing from your clockwork, what has made you such an anomaly, but you wish that, just for a second, you could slip inside the skin, not of one of the more outstanding girls, not the ones who are top of the class, nor the ones at the bottom, but someone in the middle, someone like Irene Hedges.
Irene Hedges, dark-haired, self-contained, in her navy-blue uniform – a polished aura of contentment – a velvety sheen.
What makes you think of Irene Hedges, as you turn your rubber gloves inside out, searching for your dead mother’s wedding ring? Your dead mother’s already at your ear: you can’t take care of anything, she says. Maybe the ring came off while you were gardening, in which case there’s no chance of ever getting it back, unless a jackdaw drops it on your windowsill like in a fairy tale.
But how could the ring have wriggled loose when it was jammed beneath your knuckle? You could lose a bit of weight, your mother often said, which would have been true if you’d ever aspired to be a supermodel. Your mother kept the same trim figure throughout her life, her fingers slim and manicured, even when the skin on the hands was mottled with old age. When the undertaker handed over the ring in its little velvet bag, the safest place to keep it seemed to be on your body.
Over the next few days, other objects vanish — your glasses, keys and phone, which is not unusual, except they take longer than ever to reappear, always in the first place you looked for them. A bar of chocolate you were saving for later. The birthday card you left by the door so you wouldn’t forget to post it. The black dress you wore at your mother’s funeral — you rummage round the dark wardrobe, thinking it must have slipped off a hanger. You empty out the whole wardrobe, re-ordering your clothes and shoes, bagging up everything you never wear for charity. The next time you open the wardrobe, it’s hanging right in front of you.
There was never a speck of dust in your dead mother’s house. No smell, except for lavender polish. Every night, your uniform was laid out neatly, the labels with your name on them sewn inside every single item. You weren’t supposed to wear jewellery at school, but your mother had an identity bracelet engraved with your name and address. Your briefcase had your name inside, your pencil case, the purse with your bus fare and dinner money. Being at grammar school was expensive, the uniforms made to measure by a firm that visited from Ipswich. Hockey sticks and tennis racquets had to be ordered from a special catalogue.
‘Well,’ your father said, as the three of you dithered over pictures of hooked wooden sticks at different prices. ‘Get the best.’
You lost your father many years before your mother, not unexpectedly since he was a whole generation older, though from the extravagance of her mourning you would have thought he’d been snatched in his prime. What you didn’t know then, but were about to find out, was that your father was also your uncle by marriage. During the war she’d been sent to live with her mother’s sister up in Yorkshire, then afterwards she stayed on to help the aunt who had TB, or something of that kind, and once the aunt was in her grave her widower found a bride right on his doorstep.
Your dead mother hated Yorkshire. Yorkshire people were two-faced, she said, you couldn’t trust them as far as you could throw them. Your dead mother corrected your dead father if he ever said ‘nowt’ or ‘fair to middlin’. Sometimes he said it as a tease, which drove her wild with fury. When you were young, you thought of Yorkshire as a dim, boundless space to the north. No other place existed beyond the tight circle of your home, surrounded by the familiar territory you crossed every day to reach the universe inhabited by girls like Irene Hedges.
There was no point in buying the best hockey stick. Irene Hedges didn’t, nor any of the others. Your team always lost anyway; and within a week the new hockey stick had vanished from the cloakroom. You spent hours searching, knowing it was not your fault that the thing you never wanted had gone missing, but also knowing you’d be blamed eternally, as if you’d lost it on purpose.
Still no sign of your dead mother’s ring. The third finger of your right hand feels naked and exposed.
Since you lost the ring, you’ve become paranoid about your purse and credit cards, and less valuable items such as your lipstick and comb, not because they’ve been misplaced but, in a moment’s panic, that they might have been. You make sure that the family albums you inherited from your dead mother are correctly labelled. You make an inventory of the documents you need for probate, storing them in box files, which reminds you to make sure your passport and your birth certificate, your divorce papers and your marriage certificate, are all safe in one place. You tidy your jewellery box, matching earrings correctly, checking the moonstone pendant your husband gave you is still in its little blue box. Your heart jolts when you see the case is empty, but when you check again later, you discover the chain has slipped beneath the satiny padding.
Your dead mother always kept her paperwork organised – her bank statements, utility bills and council tax, premium bonds, life insurance and a copy of the will. Exactly where she told you everything would be, in the sideboard next to an unopened box of crystal wine glasses. You are proud of your own diligence in carrying out her wishes. Only one thing has not been possible. And for once in your life that is not your fault.
Her wish was always to be buried with your father. ‘I’ll be with you soon my darling,’ she called, tossing a rose onto his coffin as he went into the grave. They were such a tight unit, you often think having a daughter must have got in the way of their romance. Children always jarred your mother’s nerves – little beggars, she’d mutter, pressing her forehead with three fingers. Too messy, too noisy, too uncontrollable; the neighbours’ kids never came to play at your house. Now, at last the time has come for your dead mother to be re-united with the only man she ever loved.
Everything seemed straightforward – a date was fixed, the arrangements slotted neatly into place. You were already on the train home to Yorkshire when the call came from the funeral director. Your mother had neglected to buy a double plot.
You checked. You checked again. You hunted for evidence amongst the hoard of old utility bills, bank statements and council tax receipt. You still can’t quite believe it. But it’s true. Your mother slipped up. There has been a change of plan.
Not many people attended the funeral; your dead mother did not have a gift for friendship and had fallen out with most of the family. Nevertheless, a pair of distant cousins turned up with memories of your mother quite different to your own. If they were surprised that she was left behind in the chapel after the service, they didn’t show it . No questions were asked about why you weren’t all trooping off to see her buried. No need, after all, to explain anything about the ‘unattended cremation’ that would follow within a day or two.
Unattended cremation. It sounds like the kind of thing that happens to the bodies of prisoners or paupers. And you’re not sure your dead mother would have approved of the banana-leaf coffin, laid on the trolley like a giant laundry basket. Now you wish you’d yielded to the impulse to check that she really was inside. A scandal has emerged at a funeral director’s in Hartlepool — corpses mislaid or wrongly labelled, – unwitting families keeping a stranger’s ashes in their sideboards, or else mourning at a graveside while their loved one’s cadaver lies mouldering in storage. Weird stories like this crop up in the news, only to vanish just as quickly, as if you made them up.
You should have gone back to collect your mother’s ashes. But it seemed safer to leave them where they were for the time being, while you waited for her name to be added to the headstone. No way could she have fitted in that grave as she envisaged, her dead bones mingling with the bones of your dead father. You’re doing your best, you tell yourself.
Sometimes you imagine the lost hockey stick is your Rosebud, the secret key to your childhood, and hence your whole existence, like the sledge at the end of Citizen Kane. Your father resembled the elderly Charles Foster Kane, as played by Orson Welles – the big bald forehead, the silvery moustache, the tender mouth, the stooping gait. You dream of him sometimes, and when she was alive you dreamt of your dead mother. Surprisingly she has not chosen to visit since her death. But then you haven’t dreamt at all. You’ve barely slept.
There is still no sign of your dead mother’s ring.
You convince yourself you weren’t even wearing the ring when you thought it was lost; you must have put it back inside the blue velvet pouch that it came in. So you sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to check the box of leftover Orders of Service where it’s kept, but of course there’s nothing there.
What made you wear the ring when you were bound to lose it? That’s what your husband would say, and that’s why you haven’t mentioned anything. He’d say that, unconsciously, you wanted to be rid of the damn thing.
Your search turns up all kinds of oddments, at the back of drawers, beneath the bed, in coat linings and down the sides of armchairs. Postcards from exotic places, the faded ink no longer legible; hair grips and handkerchiefs; not one but three apostle spoons, and a commemorative fifty-pence coin, marking Britain’s entry into the Common Market. Keys of every size and antiquity – your dead mother would be shocked at the detritus in your house, all sticky with dust and fluff. A briefcase, its leather hardened with neglect, the catch jammed shut. You can’t take care of anything, can you?
You don’t think it actually is the briefcase you took to school. It looks similar. But it’s not the same.
You wipe the dust from the musical box you were given on your sixth birthday. That’s where you should have kept the ring, in the tray beneath the lid that’s become a rarely-visited repository for unmatched ear studs, discarded watches and the identity bracelet engraved with your name. The wooden box is shaped like an old-fashioned telly. A miniature ballerina can be seen through a window representing the screen, her figure duplicated by mirrors on three sides. If you turn the key at the base, her dangling legs quiver on their pin to the hesitant tinkle of a tune without a name.
You remember choosing that box yourself, fascinated by the ballerina impaled like a butterfly in her satin skirt, one arm raised as if in salutation. Her torso fixed, her movement restricted to a sideways twitch, the ghost of the pirouette that she could execute in full when she was new. Did the child ever notice her own image in the rear mirror, trapped as yours is now, every imperfection magnified? Six years old, the birthday girl.
‘Are you ready?’ your husband calls.
‘Nearly,’ you lie, rummaging for a lipstick, and picking out a bracelet to match the moonstone pendant. Then you open the lid of the music box.
The moonstone pedant. The one your husband gave you for your anniversary.
You put it carefully inside its blue case. You placed the blue case slowly and precisely inside the music box, taking a mental snapshot of each and every gesture.
The moonstone pendant your husband gave to you.
The room tilts like a shipwreck. Your hands are shaking as you check the lining in the case a second, a third time. You tip the overwound watches, the backs of earrings, the identity bracelet, from the tray. You check inside the dressing-table drawer where you used to keep the pendant until it was moved so deliberately. And then you have to go or else be late. This is your first night out together since your mother passed away.
All night long you can think of little else. On the drive to the concert, waiting at the door for your bag to be inspected, you’re longing to be home to look again, because the pendant must be there. It has to be. As you find your seats in the half-empty hall — what’s happened to the audience? — your mind’s running back to the last time you wore the moonstone pendant, which was also the first time, your anniversary. Your husband shortened the chain so the little stone, the size of a tear drop, rested just beneath your collar bone.
You’re aware, as if through a camera, of the Qawwali band shuffling onstage, all in white except for the mop-haired young vocalist in a sparkly jacket. The compere whips up the sparse crowd. Dillagi, he says, is the theme of the concert, dillagi is a special concept that is hard to translate. Then he explains, but you don’t take it in. The plangent music circles round endlessly, voices calling and responding to the slap of the percussionjust as the pressing urgency circles round your head, to get back home. Gradually the hall fills up with latecomers who have travelled from afar – family groups and coach parties held up along the motorway. Young women in hijabs swoon as the star of the show reaches out his arms to them, his voice quavering and swooping with desire.
‘We can go on for hours,’ he says, pausing to draw breath. ‘We can go on all night.’ The hall surges with appreciation, the stage lights pulsating from blue to red and blue again.
You make your silent prayer; let the pendant be back where it should be. You’ll give up on your dead mother’s ring. That doesn’t matter anymore. All you want is the moonstone.
Your mother was not impressed by your choice of husband. She preferred the first one, the one that you divorced. The more your new husband tried to charm her, the more she resisted any sign of pleasure in his company. She didn’t soften in her frailty, yet her attitude shifted until there was almost a complicity between them, as if they shared a joke at your expense. He’s a practical man, your husband, one whose patience has been tried by your tendency to knock over wine glasses and bump into furniture and leave CDs lying around without a case. He says being with you is like being married to a poltergeist.
You make your wish again, grasping your husband’s hand as you do so, and he smiles wryly back at you. This is not quite the spiritual occasion you were both anticipating, more Bollywood than Sufi ritual. Yet even as your mind puts you at a distance, your body can’t resist the rhythm. You watch the modestly dressed teenagers further to the front, wriggling with excitement, and nudging one another, and comparing pictures on their phones. They remind you of the girls at school — Linda Jones, Dawn Cooper, Irene Hedges — gathered round a record player, transfixed by the heavy breathing on Je t’aime. After break time they’d switch back to being sensible — prefects, midfielders and house captains – ties knotted tightly, brown hair tucked behind the ears.
Not so long ago, you nearly lost your husband. Sitting by the hospital bed, you wanted to drag his body free of the magnetic pull of death, envisaged it so urgently you could barely stop yourself from grabbing hold. How quickly you forget all of that. How quickly you get back to normal.
Your husband’s rummaging in the freezer, ice crunching: ‘What’re we having for tea?’
You don’t care. You’re reading a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions. Your dead mother has been inadvertently paid the sum of four hundred and seventy pounds.
‘Time we had a bit of order in here.’
Just pay the money. Write a cheque, place it in the brown envelope, make a note of this expense in the spreadsheet you’ve drawn up for probate.
‘What have you done with the kippers? We never have kippers.’
Your husband loves kippers. You’re not so keen, finding them sour and mummified, and the business of extricating the bones, at which he is so skilled, not worth the faff. But okay, whatever you like.
He’s taking all four drawers out of the freezer, re-arranging the contents systematically. You lick the prepaid envelope, resting it next to your glasses so you don’t forget to post it.
‘Look at this,’ he calls.
Now what have you done?
‘No, come and look.’
There, on a ledge at the back of the empty freezer – your dead mother’s wedding ring.
You close the lid on the musical box, with the single earrings, stopped watches, identity bracelet and your dead mother’s ring inside. Still no sign of the moonstone pendant. But you’ll never give up on it. You’ll always believe that one day you’ll be looking for something else and there it will be, nestling in a handbag, or down the back of a settee, or simply returned to its first resting place. That’s what you pretend. That’s what you hope.
____
Ailsa Cox has published fiction in numerous magazines and anthologies, and twice been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Precipitation, a mini-collection in collaboration with the artist Patricia Farrell, is available from Confingo . Other books include Writing Short Stories (Routledge 3rd edition 2025) and, as co-author, Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books (EUP 2024). Ailsa Cox is Professor Emerita in Short Fiction at Edge Hill University. She is Associate Director of the European Network for Short Fiction Research, the editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice and the founder of the Edge Hill Prize.