CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE TAWRIE GUNN

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

T AWRIE G UNN

A UGUST 2024

With the window open, bringing some relief to the stagnant air, Tawrie drew the curtains to keep the daylight at bay, hoping her mum might find some rest in sleep. She lifted the chair from behind the old desk, creeping across the carpet, sidestepping the clutter of clothes and crockery that made for a tricky obstacle course, before placing it down beside Annalee's bed. Her mother's eyes were closed. It had been a long, long night for them all.

The bedroom door opened and Freda crept in with a mug of tea.

‘You look exhausted, love. Was it busy at the hospital?' she whispered.

‘Thanks, Nan.' She took the mug into her hands and held it close to her chest, a warming thing against her heart where a chill lurked. The hot drink was restorative nectar. ‘It was busy when we arrived, then quiet for much of the night while we waited for her to get X-rays done and checked over and things.'

‘It's good she sleeps.' Her nan peered at Annalee.

Her mother was a pitiful sight, sitting propped up in the middle of the bed, leaning back on her pillow mountain. An insubstantial slip of a thing who looked as if she might float away, had she not been weighted down by the duvet and blanket that Tawrie had folded over her legs. Her tiny body sustained by little more than alcohol fumes, and her wobbly head loose on her thin neck. It tore at her heart to see Annalee so frail. The cut across the top of her right eyebrow, now artfully stitched, and her split and swollen top lip only added to her sorry state.

Tawrie chose not to share how her mother had railed against the doctors who tried to examine her, had practically fought with the paramedic who wheeled her into the A hers was a fatigue born of years of responsibility and she had almost had enough. Actually, no, she had had enough.

She felt low, missing Ed – or rather missing what she'd thought she had with Ed. Maudie was right when she'd said that if someone doesn't want you then they're not the person you thought they were and therefore what you miss about them, or the life you imagined with them, doesn't exist. It was perfectly succinct but no less hard for her to swallow. All she had to do was repeat it until it sank in: Ed and the life she had imagined did not exist! What she needed to do now was pull up her big-girl pants and go grab the life she wanted. It sounded so easy in her head.

Annalee stirred and Tawrie wondered what it must have been like for her dad, having to put up with his wife's desperate shenanigans. She wondered if things had been this hard for him. Quickly her mind fled to a familiar thought: what if he'd found it too hard, what if he'd had enough of her mother's erratic behaviour and so had taken his boat out, stowed his wallet and keys ...? It was no surprise that in this low moment this thought again bubbled to the surface, stoking the embers of her unhappiness, her regret, her anger.

She didn't know who she could ask. Certainly not her nan, who had lost her son, and not her mother, who just might have been the cause. Uncle Sten? They rarely spoke of anything at a deeper level and Connie, she was sure, would be just as much in the dark as she was. It was a mess. The whole thing was a bloody mess. Daniel ‘Dan' Gunn might have died in 2002, but she was still dealing with the repercussions of it here in 2024.

Annalee opened her eyes. Tawrie could tell by her blink and focus that she was no longer sloshed.

‘How you doing?' she asked softly.

Her mother nodded and sat up in the bed.

‘You don't have to sit and watch me.' Her voice was scratchy; she sounded beaten.

‘I know I don't have to, but I want to. You took quite a tumble yesterday.' It wasn't clear just how much her mother remembered.

‘Yep.' Annalee wiped a tear that ran along her temple and soaked into the pillow.

‘They've stitched up your head and your mouth is a bit of a mess, but other than that, just bruising.'

Her mother ran her fingers gingerly over the fresh wound on her scalp and forehead, as her tongue probed her swollen lip and her tears fell harder. Tawrie looked away from the finger with the ripped-off nail, the nail bed exposed, bumpy and bloody. The sight of it was enough to make her own finger throb.

‘I don't want you to sit there, just go. I'm okay.'

‘You don't look okay. You look sad and a bit beaten up, so I'm going to sit here and finish my tea.' She raised the mug.

‘As you like,' Annalee huffed, closing her eyes and pushing back against the headboard, reminding Tawrie of a petulant toddler.

‘ As I like? ' The words were like a lit match to the balls of angst and frustration that lined her gut. ‘Nothing is as I like, Mum. It's odd, isn't it, how everyone in the pub, all the regulars in the wine bar, they all tell me how you have them howling. "She's so outgoing, really funny, a right old hoot!"'

Her mother opened her eyes and stared at her.

‘Yet all I get is this woman.' She pointed at her mum. ‘This woman who slopes around the house, quiet, morose, thoughtful and broken. How come you save the funny, outgoing, hoot of a woman for strangers?'

‘I can get her right now if you want, all I need is a bottle of vodka and an eighties' playlist.' Annalee looked away and Tawrie took a beat, reminding herself that her mother was only recently out of hospital.

‘I want to help you, Mum. I want to help you not get into a situation where you fall down the steps in broad daylight and we have to spend the evening in the hospital. Because honestly? I'm done.'

Annalee wiped angrily at her tears, as she did whenever Tawrie attempted to broach the topic, which she had periodically over the years – usually after an event that seemed to bring things to a head.

‘I know we've had this conversation before and it all boils down to the fact that it doesn't matter how much I want you to get help, you have to want it too. It's you that will have to do the work, and I can't imagine what it must feel like, what a huge mountain it is for you to climb. I can't do it for you and neither can Nan, it's down to you.'

Her mother laughed once and folded her arms across her narrow chest. And whether it was because she was tired or because her heart was newly broken, or maybe because she was utterly, utterly at the end of her rope when it came to Annalee's behaviour, Tawrie saw red.

‘What's that laugh for? I'm sitting here trying to rouse you into action, for your own good, for you! And you just don't give a shit! You don't give a shit what this is like for Nan, you certainly don't give a damn what it's like for me and it seems you don't care that you could have snapped your neck yesterday, crashing down those steps as you did.'

To her intense irritation, her mother shrugged, confirming exactly what Tawrie had said.

‘You're unbelievable! It's not that I want thanks for sitting with you all night, although that would be nice, but to be so bloody indifferent is just—' She felt the rising tide of frustration in her throat, all thoughts of going gently on her mother now vanished. ‘I'm going through my own shit right now and I have no one to talk to, no one!' Her voice cracked and Annalee met her eyeline. ‘I loved someone.' It felt good to say it out loud. ‘Actually, I love someone, but it's going to come to nothing. He's engaged to someone else, and it feels like I've been kicked, kicked really hard in my chest and I can barely take a breath and I want to lie down, curl up, hide and be warm. I want to ... disappear.'

‘No, you don't, love.' Annalee sniffed. ‘You don't, not really.'

‘And how would you know how I feel, Mum?' she challenged.

‘Because I've had my heart broken, believe it or not,' Annalee snapped.

‘Yes, but how would you know how I feel? You don't know me, don't know me at all.' It didn't feel good to state, but it was no less truthful for that.

‘What are you talking about, of course I know you!' Annalee shook her head at the absurdity of it all.

‘But you don't, do you? Not really,' Tawrie pushed.

‘What are you getting at?'

And then it happened.

The volcano of honesty that Tawrie had regularly smothered with short replies or by removing herself physically from a situation, dousing the flames of truth that had been bubbling in the base of her gut for as long as she could recall, came firing out. All of it.

It was as if someone had lit the fuse and there was no going back, no slowing down and no time to offer things in a considered manner.

‘I have no ... no memory of you.'

Annalee laughed out loud. ‘No memory of me? I don't get it, I'm right here.' She tapped her fingers over her heart as if she had to make sure she was present. ‘I'm right here.'

‘No, Mum, you're never right here. You're always planning your escape, hatching a plan to get to the pub, or into some bloke's car or on to a beach, on a jaunt, a jolly, away, away from me.'

Annalee's eyes brimmed. ‘No, no, Taw, never away from you.'

‘Yes. Always away from me and then always returning drunk, slurred, blurred, gaze askew, clothes twisted, not present, stumbling up the stairs to bed, sometimes alone, often not. And I tell myself that you're a grown woman who can do what she wants with whoever she wants. I'm not your jailer or your judge, but one thing I know for sure, is that ...'

‘What?' Her mother's voice no more than a whisper, her pitch dismissive. ‘What do you know for sure?'

Tawrie found it easier to look towards the window where a gentle breeze brought the curtains to life. ‘I know that if I was a mum and my child had lost their dad, I'd be there, with her, holding her, telling her everything was going to be okay.'

Annalee too turned to face the big window with a view of the ocean, like her daughter, it seemed, taking comfort from the possibility of escape. Tawrie could make out the tremble to her frame.

‘What if you knew it wasn't going to be okay? What if you knew nothing was going to be okay ever again?'

‘Then all the more reason to stay close and hold them tight.'

Annalee now faced her. ‘You think you have all the answers.'

‘No, no I don't think I have any of the answers.' This was her truth. ‘I sometimes think if it wasn't for Nan—' She bit her tongue, there was a fine line between honesty and cruelty and Tawrie Gunn had never been cruel.

‘I think that too. What would we do without her?' Annalee gave a forced, ugly smile and wiped the tears from beneath her eyes where thin remnants of mascara pooled, mixed with dried blood.

‘All my memories from before Dad and after, they're all of her, with you on the edge, stumbling in and stumbling out.'

‘You have no idea! None at all!' her mother shouted.

‘I know you're always pissed and wobbling upstairs, or downstairs or tripping out of pubs and spraining your ankle on kerbs, blacking your eye on walls, or falling down the bloody steps to the beach or shitting yourself so Nan has to scrub up your mess! I know all of that! And I know I sit in my room or work in the café instead of doing what I think I'd be good at just so I'm close enough to come and mop up after you! You think that makes me proud? You think I like being your daughter?'

‘Get out!' Her mother extended her damaged digit towards the door. ‘Get out, now!'

Tawrie stood, welcoming the chance to get out of the room, to get away from the woman who invoked such a reaction, and to calm down.

‘I don't know who you think you are, Tawrie, but you have no right to speak to me like that!'

‘No right? And what rights do you have? You're not a mother, not in the way I deserved. And I wonder if you were a wife in the way that Dad deserved.' Her mother's eyes grew wide and her swollen mouth fell open. Tawrie had gone too far and she knew it, but the bull was battering the gate and in one more sentence it broke free entirely and came charging. ‘Did he get into that boat to get away from you? I mean, is that why he sailed all the time? Jesus, can you blame him? Look at the state of you! If I could escape I bloody would! And do you know what? I just might!' She practically bolted across the bedroom floor, cracking a china plate beneath her foot, and stomping on clothes, cigarette packets and empty beer cans as she went.

Annalee's sob was loud and visceral. It made Tawrie gasp as she slammed the door behind her.

Leaning now on the banister at the top of the half landing she did her best to catch her breath as her tears fell.

‘I might.' Eyes closed, she spoke into the ether. ‘I just bloody might run from this bloody house and the view of Corner bloody Cottage, and Ed bloody Stratton, and the bloody café and all the bloody misery!'

‘Have you finished your bloody tea, darling? I came to get the bloody mug.'

She hadn't seen her nan in the stairwell, who saw fit to emulate her outburst.

Their laughter was sudden and welcome. It was mere seconds before this turned to tears and Tawrie sobbed as her nan put her arms around her and held her close. It felt as if a volcano bubbled inside her. Rocks of pain, hurt and desperation were rising on the lava of regret. What scared her most was how unsure she was that she could keep it contained.

A hot shower had done much to restore her sense of calm. Guilt over her exchange with her mother sat at the forefront of her mind, a jagged boulder around which all other thoughts and ideas had to circumnavigate. It had thrown her and left her spent. It felt very much like she had reached a crossroads and was looking for a signpost. Did she have the courage to put herself first? This quandary on top of the sleepless night, preceded by another sleepless night, and the news that the feeling of euphoria that had gathered up and whistled her along was based on nothing true.

Connie did a double take as she walked in.

‘Didn't think we'd see you today, my love.'

‘Yet here I am!' She made her way to the sink and without further discussion, grabbed the scouring pad and a heavy pan and began to scrub, running the hot tap and dousing everything in suds.

‘Is your mum okay?' her cousin asked casually from behind the fridge door where she wrapped a block of cheese.

‘Oh, she's peachy!' She gave a false grin and a double thumbs up, before turning her attention back to cleaning the pot, scouring it hard on its blackened base and working mercilessly on the blobs of hardened food that clung on like limpets at low tide.

‘Hello, Taw! Didn't expect to see you, my lovely!' Jan smiled as she handed the order to Connie.

‘And yet, as I just said to Con, here I am!'

‘Ignore her, Jan,' Connie interjected. ‘She's pissed off at the world and it appears we are today's lucky recipients of all that anger. She's taking her frustration out on the washing-up and us apparently. So tighten your apron strings, I think we're in for a rocky old shift!'

‘Blimey, better hide the glasses,' Jan suggested.

‘And the sharp knives!' Connie winked and Tawrie couldn't help the thaw to her demeanour. It was almost impossible to be in the company of these women, this loving community, and not feel the benefit of it.

‘That's more like it, an actual smile!' Her cousin came up behind her and slipped her arms around her waist, resting her pretty head on Tawrie's shoulder. ‘It'll all get better; it'll all get easier. Your heart will heal. But I don't need to tell you that, do I, Tawrie Gunn? You're a survivor, a bloody warrior woman! You've got this. And as for that arsehole Sebastian Farquhar—'

‘No!' Tawrie shook her head, her voice firm. ‘Nope. We are not going to mention his name. We are not going to discuss him, and we are not going to analyse events or think about what might have been. He's like early morning sea mist: forgotten by lunchtime. Okay?'

‘Okay, my love. As you wish.' Connie whistled as she went back to the fridge.

Instantly she regretted snapping at her cousin, knowing her frustrations went way further than anything Connie said or did, and to react like this was as unfair as it was out of character. She paused with the scourer in her hand, understanding that what she needed to do was heed Maudie's advice and get a grip, take control! She stood tall, knowing that now was the time to galvanise her thoughts and make a plan.