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Why Would She Be Sorry For Anything Else?
'I’m over reacting? I’M OVER REACTING? Are you KIDDING me?!' those are the exact words that ran through my head as I rocked a little in my seat, a paper bag with the words "Zoom Airlines" printed in a precautious blue clutched in my shaking hands. Who puts words on sick bags, seriously, is it so that I may constantly be reminded what airline I’m riding with? Just in case I forgot? It must be because it’s printed everywhere, on the sick bags, the food trays (on the inside, of course. So that you may stare at it while you eat, assuming you don’t want to watch the all too over played movie on the small TV). It’s even on the tiny little pillows that hardly support even half your head. I open my mouth to tell my grandmother, -who is staring at me with her lips pursed- that it is not my fault that I am being sick (and I remember this exactly) every 3 minutes. But unfortunately, my 3 minutes of breathing and rest is over and I heave hard, banging my head into the seat in front of me. Ouch.
"Stop that, your being ridiculous" my grandmother looks at me with a fake smile as she says this, because a concerned stewardess approaches us. Oh of course I’m being ridiculous, I’m only dizzy and my bile has just turned black and I’m heaving so bad that I’m rocking, but, hey, I’m being ridiculous.
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A muffled voice with a thick English accent stirs me from a dreamless sleep. The smell of bacon hits me full force like a mallet to the head. As I rush for a bathroom that –conveniently- was located across the hall. I fall to the floor and heave over the toilet, which was colored the most awful shade of yellow I had ever seen (The toilet, I mean, not my bile). The voices stopped and I heard someone huffing up the stairs.
"Are you alright pet?" my great granddad asks me from just outside the open door.
"Yeah ill be fine, can you open some windows please?"
He shuffles off to open windows and then proceeds to go back downstairs, as I wipe my mouth with some toilet paper, flush the toilet and lean against the tub I hear him arguing with my grandmother.
"I told you Jennifer! She's sick and it’s just rude!"
"We've been on an 8 hour flight, we had to eat something,” her sharp voice makes me wince as I get up and travel down the stairs.
"You could have eaten toast Jennifer" I hear my grandmother start to say something but she halted as the particular stair I stepped onto decided to creak.
“Oh precious, how are you?” My grandmother greets me with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes as she dumps the grease from the pan into the sink. The smell hits me again and I stumble over my words,
“Ohm…. sick, weird” I pause to gather my scattered thoughts
“Um…. Am I allowed to have a bath granddad?” I ask staring at my great-grandfather. As I realize I’ve miss named him he replies to me,
“Yes, yes of coarse you may, pet. I shall go run the bath for you, yeah?” he looks at me as if I haven’t made the slip and I think that maybe he too thinks it too much a nuisance to say ‘great-granddad’ all the time. My grandmother looks at me from behind my great-grandfather’s back with a you-better-bloody-well-not-let-him look.
“Oh no! It’s ok, I can do it I was just making sure it was ok.” I say, rubbing my arms nervously. I just want a bath, does it really need to include all this? My vacation package already came with the flu and I really didn’t want to see anymore of those hidden “bonus features” should I rub my grandmother the wrong way.
“Listen Pet, it’s no problem at all, now ill go run that bath and I’ll cal yeah when its ready.”
I looked at my grandmother helplessly as he shuffled up the stairs and she rolled her eyes at his back. My aunt Sue walked over to me and looked me over with a small snort.
“I’m sorry but you look dead on your feet, you are really sick aren’t you? Poor girl” She looks at me apologetically, sweeping the hair out of my face.
“Your uncle and I are going to have a look around for a store, would you like some ginger ale?” she asked, reminding me of my mother and just how much I missed her already.
“Well if its not too much trouble...” I moved to go fish out a 20 pound note from my purse which I found hanging on a chair when she stopped me.
“Oh no, its only a couple of pounds, ill get it myself, now get your butt upstairs and make sure he doesn’t nod off while filling up that tub.” She walked into another room, a room to which my deductive reasoning assumed was a living room, and I drifted upstairs.
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The next week passed in a flurry of sickness, techno music and classic English films. The sickness was due to the fact that, where my upset stomach did settle after 2 days, the new richness to the food, did not settle said stomach. The techno music due to me discovering the wonderful love Europeans have for dance music and also to the fact that MTV has a techno only channel. The classic English films due to, well hey what else am I supposed to watch at 3 am when I’ve been told to sleep on the couch because there are no more beds and I’m in a completely new country? Exactly, that’s what I thought. All in all hardly an event happened until New Years Eve. I had just dosed off whilst looking out the window when (I suppose) fireworks went off. Now I would NOT have woken up if it where not for the fact that my grandmother came down the stairs shook me awake and asked me:
“Did you hear that, what was it?” she looked at me and sat down at the end of the already too small couch and looked out one of the large windows. I gritted my teeth in an effort to be civil to her.
“It was probably just fireworks, you’ll be fine,” I glared at the window but my glare was softened by another set of fireworks that proved my point.
“Oh well, I’ll just stay down here until they’re over, its not like you could sleep through those bangs anyways, I’m surprised everyone else can” She laughed at this with one of her laughs that just screams ‘I’ve completely forgotten exactly how to laugh a real laugh because I’m too busy being someone else’. We watched the fireworks in a semi-awkward semi-peaceful silence, that was until I heard her snore, and quite loudly might I add. I stayed up for half the night while she slept through the fireworks until her husband came downstairs and woke her up telling her to leave me alone in the way an adult might tell a child. I lay down, finally able to stretch my legs and thought about why she turned this way. She had never acted like this towards me before, but then I have never spent anymore than an evening with her at a time. My thoughts carried me to sleep and the days passed with plenty of heated ginger ale (which strangely tastes like apple cider) and low grease food to get me used to the way the English cooked. I was already accustomed to it because of grand mum’s cooking but strangely, everything in England was so much richer. It took a while to get used to it, and of coarse by the time my great-grandfather’s birthday rolled around I was completely healthy (in the since that I was eating regularly and walking around extensively even if I was paler than before). I spent the morning walking through Trafford mall –one of the largest malls in Manchester as far as I know- however I was told to not spend long for we were only there to find something for my lazy uncle to give to great-granddad. The mall was so extravagant my eyes took a while to get accustomed to it. The floors where covered with black granite with gold looking ones outlining the paths. Marble statues of wild cats pawing soccer balls with pride lined the entrances and the grand fountains on the lower floors made me feel as though I where in a palace. Surely if a mall in Manchester, Trafford is this extravagant the ones in Paris must be double the grandeur. Soon enough my uncle found a gift, though I do not know what it was, because I was just too busy not paying attention. As we pulled up to the place they had rented for his birthday I took a deep breath to calm myself. There was no reason to be nervous I’m only meeting 50 people from my family that I don’t know but there is no reason to be nervous…I think. I walk up the steps with a smile on my face and a fussing grandmother at my side and we walk in. My grandmother drags me among the unfamiliar faces of people who apparently know me, but whom I do not recall. The names and faces are blurred together along with the all too generic compliments.
“Look how well you’ve grown.”
“Your beautiful”
“You look so much like your mother.”
That compliment (and yes it is a high compliment indeed) makes me pine for my mother now more than ever as I attempt small talk with all these strangers. Eventually giving up to sit down, tugging ideally at the balloon weighted down to said table. As I turn to look at my grandmother who is yammering at me about being nervous for her speech in honour of her father the balloon bumps into my face. I look around to settle on my grandfather, Roger who laughs and tries to do it again, close to him my great-grandfather laughs as well. While we are all basking in our merriment my grandmother purses her lips and mutters something about indecency.
“Ah, you’re so much like Tilly, pet, how is my granddaughter anyway?” by Tilly he means my mother, and the homesickness returns as I explain her current condition. Just then the caterers announce that lunch is ready and we go to eat, I pick the Lamb stew (or is it gumbo? I’m not too sure) and sit. My grandmother picked the same, -or rather I picked the same as her-, because I trust her taste in food; and we eat. It tasted wonderful, in my personal opinion but my grandmother turns to me and states:
“You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it”
I look at her, my fork halfway to my mouth.
“I do like it though” I retort. Of coarse I like it, it s the first thing I’ve eaten that reminds me of the food back home.
“No, you don’t have to pretend to like it for them” she stared at me expectantly and I dropped my fork with a sigh and a scowl. Eventually I let her yip my ear off, mmm-ing and ahh-ing in the right places and drifting off into my own little world, daydreaming about going to Reigate to visit Uncle David. When that day came I was shaking with excitement and smiling from ear to ear. Finally! More of England! Not just Trafford, Manchester and Yorkshire. Now I was moving onto Reigate and London and I could hardly eat because of said excitement. This anticipation mainly came at a couple of factors but the biggest one of them was this: I was going without my grandmother. I was going with my grandfather instead because she wanted to “take care of her father”. Haha! Now that’s funny. I was sitting with her at the table when she caught my eye and looked at me,
“We have to lower the weight of your luggage, those books of yours are a nuisance; I’m going to go check on the price to mail them today while your gone so leave them here”
“Oh. Ok would you like me to leave some money?”
“No. It shouldn’t be too much”
I nodded and looked at my plate hesitating.
“Listen its not that I don’t trust you but I still have 70 pounds ok? I really want you to call uncle David should you not want to pay for it. Please, those books are my favourite and its not like I can’t afford it.”
She looked at me over the top of her glasses and sighed,
“Yes, yes of course I will, now go drag your luggage downstairs”
I got up from the table and fetched my things, double checking the contents of my bag and mentally checking off my imaginary checklist. When uncle David got here I was rushed into his car and off we went. Much happened and I tried half my share of spicy food that I should never want to eat again but it was perfect. Perfect in the since that I was free from my grandmother, sleeping in a bed. And having FUN. So much in fact that I was more than upset to leave (not that I let anyone see that), I was informed that once we got back to Manchester I was to finish packing, double and triple check everything and make absolutely sure I was ready to go back home. Home?! Ah wonderful, glorious home! I may have loved England and the people in it to a very high degree but there is nothing like the pillow like comfort of home. Because I can guarantee you, when you spend a month away from home and without contact to home, you end up missing it more than anything. As I walked in the door to my great-grandfathers home and started packing something I noticed that one thing was missing. Actually make that precisely 3 things. Precisely 3 hardcover favourite things. I ran to my grandmother and looked at her,
“You sent the books home then right?”
“Oh, no I didn’t dear” she replied with a smile, and not just any smile; THAT smile; that damnable plastic smile.
“Then where are they grand mum?” I asked in a falsely sweet voice, colour and heat rising in my cheeks at an alarming rate
“Oh I sold them to a bookshop”
I stared at her in disbelief; she did WHAT? After I clearly explained that I could afford to send them home she does WHAT?!
“Excuse me?”
“Oh come ON Kally, you wont miss them, they’re only books after all”
ONLY BOOKS?! Only expensive hardcover books that I bought after months of saving every penny I got my hands on! How selfish! How rude, and last of all; how like her. I gritted my teeth and walked off, spending the rest of the time giving her the silent treatment and as I got in the car for the airport she pulled me aside
“I’m sorry”
“For what?” I waited for the answer.
“For you getting sick of course, I hope it didn’t ruin anything”
Of course. Why would she be sorry for anything else after all?
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