BEATS OF LOVE

174.  Dogatana LP by  Kazumi Watanabe

AFTER SORTING through the family album, I realized a pic of my smiling grandmother with the bulk that was baby me on her lap was missing. 

Not that it matters coz it imprinted this pic in my mind. She died not long after and it left us with her husband and mother, folk my father could barely stomach. 

Regardless, every fortnight we made the trip to Audenshaw to visit her husband in his sombre bungalow and every fortnight he gave us god-awful fruit polos that stuck to our teeth. We, as children, couldn't speak coz he'd get snappy, so we just fumbled about with his brass ornaments until the clock thankfully said it was pub opening time. To compound the pain of the journey, the misery that was her mother lived nearby in a dreary block of flats, so we visited there too.

While her brother's car was outside, we had to wait in ours until he had driven off. He'd somehow talked the misery into disinheriting her daughter, so my father felt compelled to continue the feud by blaming him. I now have sympathy for my father as the people he was closest to, his mother and grandfather, were dead before I could even walk. 

Things improved shortly before her husband died when I was in my teens and able to pick up his News of the World and take it into his bathroom before getting way too over excited looking at its racier pages. My parents were probably sympathetic to me splodging about and, though in no way encouraging my behaviour, recognized that it kept me quiet-ish. 

I think we all felt like we'd been to his funeral thousands of times before. I was philosophical about it, thinking, 'grandfather is dead, which is sad, but I never have to visit Audenshaw ever again or eat fruit polos.'

My mother always stated that things would've been very different had my grandmother survived. That pic of us both represents a love denied them, so seems apt that it is missing. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

173. Free Energy by Bananagun

SYMPTOMS OF bulimia; binging and purging got interpreted through the lens of other psychiatric frameworks prevalent in the late 1950s.

Leading to misdiagnosis or classification under broader categories of disordered or neurotic, so my mother got sectioned. I never knew this in her lifetime, but I was told candidly by my sister. When I mentioned it to her surviving partner, he flippantly said, 'your mother was in the bottom block.' I was sad as I recalled how upset we both were leaving Horwich after my father quit his job.

He took us to Middleton, which also unbeknownst to me, was mother's birthplace before finally taking us back to her hometown. The draw was being with her own mother, despite some folk knowing her history. They held a silence that seems impossible now in such a loud, confessional world. I recall my ambivalence after giving up on the Mancunian dream to return home myself and the one pull factor of my mother, who understood my sadness more than I knew.

I miss that tangible love like when she knotted herself around me prior to my major surgery, so much it hurts still.