OOOO
See part 1 for disclaimer…
Part 11
"No!" Cate spun back and halted her, taking everyone around her by surprise, "No… don't you call me that! My name is Caitlin. Grandma didn't want me named after my Father!"
"I'm sorry," Kim stuttered, "Cate, then…"
"Only my friends call me Cate," Caitlin cut her Mother off again.
By this point, Kim didn't know what to call Caitlin and that was perfectly fine with her daughter. She didn't want her Mother calling her anything, especially not her 'wee girl.'
"Don't be like that, love," Kim pleaded with her daughter, "I only want to be your Mother again."
Cate shook her head.
"Be my mother again? You never were; Mothers take an interest in their children's lives. Mothers take care of their children. They don't leave them in the A & E department of the nearest hospital when they're six weeks old!"
Kim just remained silent, taking in her daughter's fury.
"…Mothers protect their children. They take them on holidays and on days out to the beach, they don't abandon them in high-street shops, hide them beneath the clothes rails then walk out and leave them…"
"I'm sorry, Lexie, love," Kim told her daughter, tearfully, "I had a lot of problems back then."
"There was only one problem with your life, back then," Cate refuted, "and that was me. Well, you know what? I managed better without you. Tam may have been a drunk and a money-waster, but at least he never forgot to feed me."
"Tam's gone, Lexie," Kim told her, "He won't be back…"
"Tam's not the problem!" Cate emphasized, "The problem is that I've managed to get a nice little life together, something that's my own and nobody else's and now you want to take that away from me. Again."
"I don't," Kim promised, "I just want to get to know my daughter…"
"I'm not your daughter anymore," Cate cut her off, quickly, "Your daughter, your Lexie died a long time ago. I'm somebody else, now and you're not going to have any part of that to destroy."
Determinedly, she curtly turned on her heal and marched off.
Harm and Mac looked to one-another, wordlessly exchanging their thoughts before launching into action. Harm went to Kim, who was by this time in tears and guided her into a seat in the cafeteria. Mac went after Cate, who had stormed off to her room in the aid-worker's hut.
"She's just angry," Harm tried to comfort the woman, whom he suddenly realised was actually younger than him, "I'm sure that she'll come round…"
Kim blew her nose, noisily into a tissue then shook her head.
"No, there's too much time passed. I don't know what I was thinking coming here. Yet again, I've managed to fail her…She's right, I should have just stayed gone."
Meanwhile, Mac tapped softly on the door of Cate's room in the aid worker's hut.
"Cate? Hon, is it okay for me to come in?" she requested, softly.
Small sob.
"Cate?"
Wet sniff.
Mac gingerly poked her head around the door, to see Cate lying face down on her small camp bed, her face buried in a pillow. Her back trembled up and down erratically, her sobs muffled in the pillow.
"Aw, Cate! Don't do this to yourself," Mac comforted her, sitting down on the edge of the bed and beginning to stroke Cate's hair softly, "I know it may not seem like it, but the pain does get better with time."
Cate didn't reply, so Mac continued, "Maybe not better, but you are going to get better at learning to deal with it…I'd never try to presume that I knew what you went through, growing up, but I know what it is to have this sort of self-recrimination inside of you.
'What could I have done better?' 'Why doesn't she want me?' 'What do I have to do to get her to love me, to make her stay?' I know you blame yourself Cate, but none of that was your fault."
Cate looked up with red, puffy eyes, silently trying to convey a question.
"How? How do you…?" she croaked, her voice choked with repressed emotion.
"My Mum left home on my fifteenth birthday," Mac confided in her, "She left me with my with my alcoholic Father. For years, I thought that it was something I had done. My Father even used to tell me so, when he'd been out on drinking binges. But as the years passed, I realised that it wasn't my fault. All the time, I had been striving to be the best, to make my Father proud and he never once told me that he was. I realised, one day, that it wasn't me who had the problem. It was my Mother and Father who had the problem. I was doing everything right. Well, as right as a child can do…But I made my fair share of mistakes, too. Without meaning to, as a way of dealing with the pain, I unwittingly followed down the same path as my Father. But I worked hard to get back onto the straight and narrow."
"Sometimes," Cate admitted quietly, "I think that if I just work that little bit harder, then all of the bad parts of my life will just disappear."
"You can't make up for the things that have happened to you," Mac told her, "They were beyond your control. You were born into them. You were only a child, trying to deal with them. But your Mom was suffering too."
Cate snorted in scorn, "Yeah, she suffered alright. Going out partying, getting drunk. Boy, she suffered big-time! And when she had me, crying non-stop, day and night, I bet it was perfectly logical that she dumped me on the hospital's doorstep."
"Cate," Mac emphasized, "She may have had a lot of problems back then, but she was still a child, too. When you were four-years-old, she wasn't even out of her teens. Think about it. Could you have done that? Could you see yourself, right now, caring for a seven year old child?"
"No, Mac, that's why I didn't have a child when I was a teenager," Cate pointed out.
"What if it just happened? These things happen." Mac argued.
"Yes, but she carried on making the mistakes…Why did she keep me? Why didn't she do her best by me? Isn't that what a real mother is supposed to do? Do their best for her children? Why did she keep leaving me, only to come back, then to do it all over again? She didn't just walk out on me once, Mac. She kept doing it. After she'd failed to remove me from her life. It would be different if she didn't think that she was good enough to be in my life…but everything she said and did told me the opposite; I wasn't good enough to be in hers. Why do I have to keep reliving this? Why can't I have something for myself, something that is just mine? That is what Sepadan is, Mac. It's something that is mine, my own experience, something that isn't mixed up in all of that painful mess that I left back in Glasgow. It's something that she can't touch, can't demean. This is something that I've done right, something that I can be proud of."
From where she was standing by the semi-closed door, in the hallway, Kim Anderson took a deep breath. She turned on the spot and made her way back outside, past Harm and back to the boat. She had opened too many old wounds by coming here. She actually felt worse than she had the first time that she inflicted them, when Cate was still only a child. She had no right to be here, she realised. It was one thing, trying to come back into the home and life she had shared with her daughter in Glasgow. But it was totally another to trespass into the life that Cate had built without her. No, she had been right when she had left her home in Glasgow the last time. Cate was better off without her.
OOOO
The rest of the day was spent hard at work. Cate continued with her normal duties, although she looked as if heavy load-lifting was the last thing she needed. Harm tried to persuade her to rest for a while, but she refused, saying that she was fine.
"There's no problem, Harm. Not any more," she told him, insistently.
Harm just looked on, silently wondering if this was what her Mother had been like, in her young days. Had she refused to admit to her problems, too?
OOOO
The day passed and Harm and Mac returned home. An air of melancholy had settled onto the day's events, even those parts that did not concern what had happened between Cate and her Mother. Mac couldn't help replaying some of the memories of her own life. It was like looking in a mirror, all of the same symptoms, all of the same discords were there. And just like she had picked up the issues of abandonment from her Mother, so too had Cate. They both had different ways of dealing with it. Mac's way had been to drown out the memories with drink. Cate refused to let anyone close to her, refused to admit the problems of the past, that were still lurking beneath the surface, festering in the old, raw wounds. As Mac replayed her last meeting with her Mother, all of those years after her abandonment, she saw that there was some hope there. There were also a lot of painful memories, a lot of tender scars, but there was also a realisation there, too. Her Mother was a person as well. She had weaknesses, but she was fighting to overcome them. The first communication was a step in the right direction. Would Cate and her Mother ever have that? Could they ever see their way back to getting to know each other, if not as Mother and Daughter, then as the individuals they were? Or would the discord spread further? Into Cate's own family, when that time came?
As the tears began to slide down her face, Mac bowed her head. From his place by the kitchen worktop, Harm caught sight of this before Mac hid her face. Reciprocating these feelings he was seeing, he walked over to Mac and took her into his arms, holding her close as they both gave into the sorrow.
OOOO
That night, Cate lay dozing on her bunk. Finally slipping into deep sleep, her eyelids drifted open, slightly and her eyes began to move rapidly beneath the lids. Cate was dreaming, recalling memories of the past, from a long time ago.
OOOO
She was a child again, no more than three years of age and she was hurting. Delirious from fever and with a burning pain coming from her stomach, up her throat and into her mouth, little Caitlin Alexandra Anderson climbed from her bed on the living room couch. Her Mammy had pulled the duvet cover up over her, earlier that evening, telling her that she was to stay there tonight. Kim Anderson said that she could not put up with another night of lost sleep, with her daughter waking up from nightmares and wanting to climb into bed with her again. Nearing exhaustion and verging on a nervous breakdown, it was understandable that Kim Anderson needed a night to herself. But with her Mother only a few months in her grave and her new boyfriend away on one of his weeklong trips with his drinking pals, the sofa was as far as Cate, 'wee Alex' or 'Lexie' to her Mammy, was going to get. Caitlin simply acted on pure instinct, toddled along the hallway to her Mammy's bedroom. Would her Mammy be angry? She had said she was not to move from the sofa. Would her frazzled nerves be able to take any more? She was only eighteen years old herself, a mere child trying to cope with the demanding needs of another child with no help or assistance, now all on her own in the world.
Cate pushed open the bedroom door and walked over to the bed where the sleeping, inert form of her Mother lay.
"Mammy," the little girl cried, then louder, pulling at the bedclothes with her tiny hands, "Mammy!"
"Uhmmm?" Kim Anderson mumbled, still half-asleep.
"Poorly, Mammy," her child reported, now crying plaintively.
As Kim Anderson reached over and turned on the bedside lamp, little Caitlin felt a severe burning sensation creep in beneath her tongue, up into the back of her cheeks and around her neck. Before her Mammy could say anything, the tiny three-year-old vomited all down her pyjamas. Half crying, half coughing to clear her airways, Caitlin bent over and grabbed her tummy.
"Mammy!" she cried again then fell to her knees, where she vomited again twice, in quick succession. As Kim clambered out of bed, grabbed her child under the arms and went to lift her, the little girl went floppy and her eyes rolled back into her head.
"Alexandra…Cate? Caitlin!" Kim shouted, panic-stricken, "Alex, answer me! Talk to Mammy! Tell Mammy what's wrong!"
Caitlin wasn't able to say a thing, as her head fell back and she began to shake and convulse.
Gathering her child to her, Kim ran out of the bedroom and towards the front door.
Where should she go? The hospital was over three miles away. Should she call an ambulance? No, there was no phone in the house, it had been disconnected. Damn it! Her baby could be dying and she had no way of calling for help! A pay-phone? No…a neighbour! Who in the block had a phone? Her mind immediately spun to the couple in the flat below hers. In stocking feet and only a thin nightgown, Kim ran out the front door, down the corridor and down the steps to the floor below. She didn't even have her keys with her. If the door was blown shut then they would both be locked out of the flat. But that didn't matter; she had to find someone to help her baby. Kim's fist felt numb as she pounded on the flat door at the end of the hall with all her might. With the other arm, she cradled her shaking, unconscious baby. Would anyone answer? Why were they taking so long? Kim became hysterical again as she felt a trickle of wetness down her and realised that her child had wet herself. The wetness was leaking out of Caitlin's already soaking nappy.
"Open the door! I need your help! My baby's sick!" Kim screamed.
At that moment, a woman in her forties opened the door a crack and peered out. At the sight of the hysterical woman with the unconscious, convulsing child in her arms, she quickly unlatched the door and shouted to her husband.
"Peter, phone an ambulance! The baby upstairs is sick."
At this she turned to Kim and told her, "Let me take her, Kim. I know what I'm doing, I work at The Infirmary."
Reluctantly, Kim relinquished hold of her child, still sobbing hysterically.
"Please help my baby, I can't lose her. You've got to help her, she's all I've got, she my whole world."
As she examined the little girl, Nurse Clara McNair could see what the problem was. This child was running a sky-high fever and was way too hot. She had to be cooled down, straight away. Whisking the child to the bathroom, she cradled the tiny form against her as she bent to turn on the cold faucet of the bathtub all the way.
"Cate'sfar too hot, Kim," she explained to the distraught mother, "She's roasting in her own skin. We have to cool her down, right away. Don't you worry, the ambulance will be here, soon."
The bathroom was filled with the sounds of running water and Kim's heaving sobs. Clara carefully lifted the child into the cold water pooling in the bathtub and began to scoop water up over her with one hand, while cradling Cate in her other arm. As the minutes passed, the water soaked through the pink flannel pyjamas and nappy and cooled the skin beneath and Clara felt the convulsions in the little girl's body begin to slow.
"Where's the ambulance?" Kim despaired softly, wringing her hands, "It's been nearly twenty minutes…"
"Kim, you hold Cate in the water. Don't let her head go under," Clara told her, "I'll go and call the ambulance again, to make sure that they haven't got lost."
"But…but what do I do? What if she starts seizing badly again?" Kim stammered, panicking, "What if she wakes up?"
"The seizures should stop altogether, now that she's begun to cool down," Clara assured her, gently easing Caitlin into Kim's arms, "Just make sure that she stays in the cold water. If she wakes up, keep her calm. I'll be as quick as I can."
With that, Kim was left alone in the bathroom, cradling Caitlin in the bath of cold water. As the minutes passed, Kim's nerves settled and her shuddering sobs began to stop, her arms began to quit shaking.
A few seconds later, little Caitlin's eyes fluttered open and caught sight of her Mammy above her.
"Mamma," she groaned, her voice tired and weak.
"Alright baby, Mammy's got you," Kim comforted her daughter, instinctively holding her closer, bending into the bathtub so that Caitlin's little face was nuzzled into her neck. Her hair and one shoulder of her nightgown drooped into the bathwater, but Kim didn't even notice it.
"Mamma, cold," Caitlin bleated, wrapping her tiny arms around her Mammy's neck.
"I know, baby, I know. Mammy's got you now," Kim continued to comfort her, while Caitlin carried on crying, shakily.
Nuzzling her daughter softly, Kim began to sing to her comfortingly, the long-forgotten rhymes from her own days as a child, cuddled up in her own Mammy's arms. So much had happened to Kim since then, but it had not been all that long ago, no more than ten or eleven years since.
"Ally Bally, Ally Bally Bee,
Sitting on your mammy's knee,
Greeting for a wee bawbee,
To buy some Coulter's candy."
Peter McNair poked his head into the bathroom, telling Kim, "That's the ambulance just arrived. They got lost on the way here. Clara's gone down to meet them. They'll be up in just a few minutes. Everything's going to be alright now, Kim."
"Ally Bally, Ally Bally Bee,
Sitting on your mammy's knee,
Greeting for a wee Bawbee,
To buy some Coulter's candy."
OOOO
This song, 'Ally Bally Bee' was one of my favorites as a child, but please don't think I'm claiming it as my own. As far as I can find out, it isn't owned, but still, itis certainly not mine.