Left to Right
2001; Springer International Publishing; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0311-4198
Autores ResumoLeft to Right Standard Fare My grandmother is dying. Or so she says. According to her doctor, there's nothing clinically wrong with her. According to my mother, my grandmother can feel it in her bones. She gives herself a month. Batty old hag. She's trying to execute her own will. Sounds like something she'd do. Bloody control freak. She's set conditions, which apparently have to be met before she dies. In other words, within a month. Otherwise, she's going to give everything she owns to strangers. Before she's even dead. Absolutely fucking ridiculous. The worst thing is, she's trying to rope me into her morbid game. Like I told my mother, I don't want anything to do with it. But, naturally, there's a catch. The conditions my grandmother has set involve me. Specifically, I have to quit smoking. Within exactly one month. If I don't, I won't get my inheritance. It's all been drawn up, legally, by her solicitor. And here's the killer: if I don't get my inheritance, my mother won't get hers either. I don't know what my grandmother plans to leave me, and I don't care. Some magic mushrooms, her marijuana crop? Eye of newt, lizard's blood? It's meant to be some big secret, but I neither need nor want anything from her. I do, however, know what she's leaving my mother: money, and lots of it. Lots of money that my mother doesn't merely want, but desperately needs. I'd help her out myself, but I've tied all my own money up in investments. Long-term investments. Thus my dilemma. It's bloody blackmail. It makes my blood boil. I can just see her now, cackling away in that run-down, cave-like shack of hers, her filthy black kettle ever bubbling on that God-awful fire hazard she calls her wood-stove. I'm surprised she hasn't burnt herself to death, by now. Instead she sits alone, plotting ways to get the better of me. While my grandfather sits alone, crying old-man tears that fill the wrinkles in his cheeks like flood water, refusing to speak. I won't let her win. I went to the bank and applied for a loan. A big loan. If it's approved -- and it will be, considering my salary -- I'll give the money to my mother. She can pay off her mortgage that way. And my grandmother can go to hell. Arthur is not happy about this loan. He told me we'd be much better off investing the money in property, that he'd match my amount, that he'd been thinking...that rent money is dead money, and perhaps after eight years it's time we committed to each other more seriously -- in other words, buy a house together. Perhaps he's right, it's a practical idea, but the thought of signing my name next to his on a long-term mortgage makes me uneasy. I'm not sure why. I got the loan, and rang my mother straight away. She burst out crying, of all things. I mean, really. I told her to get a grip -- she had visitors over, at the time. What must they have thought? My mother thinks that it's not about the money. She honestly believes that. She told me that going along with the will's conditions would mean a lot to my grandmother. It would be showing my respect to Antony, who left her the money, since it's the cigarettes that killed him. I felt like telling her the joints killed him, more likely. Forty-year-olds should not smoke joints. It's asking for trouble. I also felt like telling her I have no desire to show my respect to a man who'd have an affair with my seventy year old grandmother. Somebody who'd pump her full of drugs and alcohol, like she was a bloody teenager. Somebody who'd agree to marry her even though she was obviously senile by then, and probably off her face when she proposed. Somebody who'd let my grandmother leave my poor old grandfather, after fifty-five years of marriage, all alone and unable to care for himself. But my mother's delicate, she can't take it when I talk like that. So instead I listened, silently, while she told me to cancel the loan straight away, because it wouldn't be right. …
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