There is a crushing feeling that comes into your lungs when you know that your mother is dying.

I went home. I spent a month there. I pushed my daughter in her stroller past sunsets along the streets on which my teenage years were spent. I saw the churches and the old brickwork of a country so much older than the one I live in. I saw the different coloured sky. I ran through the farm fields east of my childhood home, whilst my mother and step father coloured pictures with my girl and got to know the person I made, sobbing and sweating and trying to exorcise the crushing in my lungs. I listened to my mother tell me how she felt. I heard no fear. I heard exhaustion. I saw her legs, like winter twigs. I searched for her in my daughter's face at night, but couldn't see her. I looked in the mirror in the morning, and accidentally found her there.

And then it was time to leave again.

We flew over Greenland on the return journey. There were no clouds. I had never seen icebergs before.

There is a photo I have of Mum and I, taken when I was five. We are in our old garden, and she is sitting cross-legged on the grass with me in her arms. She is bending her head down to kiss me. My arm is around her neck. Her hair covers her face, but you can see mine, and my eyes are closed and I am smiling my daughter's smile as I raise my face to be kissed. I remember that photo being taken.

That same year, we went to the Bahamas. We walked along the beach, me in my blue and white bikini with stars on it, Mum in her black bathing suit. We waded into the water and saw the tropical fish flitting by. Some men were playing steel drums. I could smell coconut oil and the cigarette Mum was smoking. She bought a conch shell from a seller on the beach, and held it to my ear. I thought it was a trick at first. I didn't know my mother could do tricks.

My head is full of these. They are wisps of vapour that I am trying to pin down in photographs. Her head must be over-flowing. Dancing at her wedding to my step-father, in her cream and black skirt with her unfeasibly high heels; holidays in France, eating meals that lasted hours and listening to the crickets; discos in the 60's in London, a whole youth I know nothing about; her year in Paris; the summer she built her own patio, chopping down trees and sawing the wood herself to make this lop-sided deck; having her babies; hiking through the Lake District and staying in B&Bs with log fires and a teasmaid by the bed. I don't know where these moments go when they finish. Things that one cannot hold in one's hand, change. I want to gather them in a bag.

This room is quiet. I can hear my pulse. It sounds like a clock, ticking.

On my 7th birthday, we moved continents. I remember sulking the day before because I wanted to wear a skirt on the plane, and my mother insisted I wore jeans. I didn't like my jeans. They were flared, with embroidered flowers on them, and they were too dark a shade of blue. I had a lovely long purple skirt that I wanted to wear. I still remember my indignation, that horrible sense of powerlessness. I slammed the bathroom door when my mother told me that my purple skirt was packed, and I could not wear it. My mother slapped me for slamming the door. My face stung. I was furious. I really did not want to wear those jeans.

It was a night flight, I remember that. We were leaving my father. It was all quite sudden, but my mother tried hard to paint it as an adventure, whilst biting the skin around her thumbs so much they started to bleed. She had packed seven suitcases. She was bringing nothing else. My father was going to drive us to the airport, but he changed his mind. My mother called a taxi. I remember this. Then, apparently, my father left the room, went down to the cellar, loaded his rifle and came back up the stairs, where he dragged me off the sofa by my hair and told my mother as she sat with my brother that if she tried to leave him he would shoot me. I don't remember this at all. It is like a film stopped just after my mother called a cab, and then the film starts again at the airport. I know something bad happened, but as far as my memory is concerned, it is no more than white noise.

When the film restarts, my father is at the airport too. He had cancelled the taxi, after my mother had made him believe that we were just going for a holiday, that we would be back, and had driven us to the airport. I doubt my mother had much choice but to let him. I remember very clearly the moment we left him, as we were going through customs; my mother crying and biting her thumbs, her face contorted, looking backwards at him, and my father standing, slumped, his back like a bracket, looking at her and at us and sobriety landing on him.

He wasn't crying. He looked lost and alone and very afraid.

It was nineteen years before I saw my father again, but at the time I really did believe we were just going on holiday.

I remember this, and I remember looking at my jeans and wishing that my mother had let me wear my floaty purple skirt.

Homesickness

My mother has had a reprieve. A stay of execution, as she calls it. How maudlin, one might think, How dramatic. She's entitled. I do not know the dark place a diagnosis of inoperable cancer takes you.

I wonder just how dark it is.

I wonder if it is so dark you cannot see anything but your own fear, like bile, bubbling over everything and souring it all. It doesn't seem like that, for her. She seems calm. She seems kinder. She listens more. But how would I really know? I am far away, and too poor for the air fare. How would I know how she feels?

The sky does not look the same here as it does at home. It's bigger. The sky looks bigger. The light is different. My mother hated it. It's different, for me. This is where I was born. I do not look up at the sky and holler my hatred for the land the way she did, for ten years, until she fled back, clutching her children's hands and a fistful of desperate dollars. I look up at the sky, though. I find no answers there. I wonder what I'm looking for.

In 1981, I was 6 years old. My mother had received a phone call and I remember it still, her clutching her stomach and bending over as if in pain and howling. My father hushing her, and trying to hold her, and her pushing him away and howling.

I don't remember if I said anything, or if I just watched. I remember feeling afraid that something could be so very wrong.

She was 3000 miles away from her father when he died.

Tomorrow, my mother will find out if her cancer has spread. I am 3000 miles away from my mother, and I am afraid.