My maternal grandmother was a strange woman, to say the least. She was never very nice to us, and we could never quite figure out why my grandad, a nice and unassuming man, had married her.
Even he never had an answer when my mum would ask him. He’d been married before her and already had a little boy, but then his wife passed away. I think he was vulnerable in his grief and maybe needed someone to help out with his son and around the house.
Whatever the reason, they tied the knot and went on to have my mother. But when Mum met my dad, my grandmother hated him simply because, being French Moroccan, his skin was brown. She refused to speak to him whenever we went to visit, and I remember once she went so far as to call him the n-word.
‘Do you even know what that means?’ he asked her directly. But she just sniffed and turned away.
‘She’s just a stupid, ignorant woman who doesn’t know any better,’ he’d tell me, unphased by her blatant racism. But Mum would get upset, hating to see her mother treat the man she loved so badly.
And it wasn’t just Dad either. Because my skin was dark, she didn’t like me either. She’d always give me a sly nip when picking me up to sit me on the kitchen bench.
When everyone started to notice my bruised arms, my grandad started taking me out to his garage. I thought at the time it was just so he could show me what he was working on, but actually, it was his – and my parents’ – way of keeping me away from my grandma.
I was eight when she sent us home with the cake. The red and blue tablets were my grandfather’s heart and blood pressure medication. There were about 40 of them in there, but thankfully, they hadn’t melted into the mixture.
Goodness knows what would have happened if they had.
My parents didn’t say anything to her, but when we went around to see them a few days later, my grandmother’s mouth dropped open. She clearly hadn’t expected to see us alive again.
We laughed about her shock on the way home. Because, although her attempt to hurt us wasn’t actually funny at all, what else could we do?
Eventually, my grandfather realized his error of judgment and left her in 1980. It wasn’t long after, when she was living alone, that she started complaining about a problem with the screen door when we visited.
‘Can he take a look at it?’ she asked, not even looking at my dad. ‘The ladders are just there.’ But when my dad went to prop them up, he frowned.
‘There’s something wrong with them,’ he remarked. ‘A screw has been taken out of this rung; the step could collapse if I put my weight on it.’
My grandma grimaced. ‘I’ll get the other set,’ she said, marching out of the back door to the shed.
She was in there for ages and eventually brought out a wooden pair.
‘But this one has been cut,’ my dad exclaimed, pointing to a freshly hacked step.
‘Oh, it must have been like that for ages,’ she muttered. But it clearly hadn’t been…
From then, we started cutting down on contact; Mum only saw her when she really had to.
My grandfather passed away in 1987, and when his will was read, things started to make sense. Because I, rather than she, was his sole beneficiary. She could continue to live in her house while she was alive and use the interest, but the capital would go to me.
She was furious. And in an attempt to waste the money, she started moving house. Every year for six years.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Mum said, outraged.
In 1994, Grandma eventually moved into a care home – a move she was so angry about that she attempted to push my mum under a bus as they walked together along the street.
‘If I had been wearing high heels or the ground had been slippery…’ Mum said shakily afterward.
When Grandma eventually passed away in 1997, I didn’t go to her funeral. And Mum and Dad only attended because they didn’t want the priest to have to stand alone.
Afterwards, as we were clearing out her room in the home, we found some of Grandpa’s old glass syringes still filled with insulin. We have no idea what she was planning to do with them, but my skin immediately dotted over with goosebumps.
She was a dangerous lady who should have been feared in life and certainly isn’t missed in death.
