Christmas is coming.

I am walking with my daughter, singing carols to her.

'What is holly?' asks my daughter.

'It's a plant,' I say. 'It has prickly leaves and bright red berries.'

And I tell her how it grew in our garden, and how every December, at the start of Advent, my Mum and I would go out with our oversized gardening gloves and shears and cut bits off from the hedges, and then go in and stick them in oasis to make a table display; one for the dining table, and one for the coffee table. And I would always do the coffee table one, sitting on the sofa with the fire crackling, Mum smoking a cigarette by the window, asking for her approval at intervals. The candles would be lit on the mantelpiece, and the nativity scene would come out and, at some point - although never early enough - we would go out to buy the Christmas tree, and she'd decorate it in a way my brother and I never liked, with the tinsel going in lines from the top to the bottom. We wanted it to go round, like in the films.'When you're grown up, you can do your own trees however you like', she said. And we do.

I tell her all this on the way to the library.

'When I'm grown up, can I paint my Christmas tree blue?' she asks. You can do whatever you like, I say. 

'Can we get some holly? Can we make table displays, just like you and your Mum did?'

Nowhere here sells holly.

My mother's birthday was yesterday. She would have been 67.

                                                                            ******


It is January.

There are shelves in a house too many miles away, big oak shelves, lined with books I was introduced to, one by one, throughout my teenage years. Austin and Eliot and Hardy and Dickens and Somerset Maughan and Emile Zola and Graham Greene and Wilkie Collins and the Brontes. She would connect them by style, or era, or theme. I would sit on the sofa by the fire and read and ask questions. 'What's hyperbole?' I asked. 'Like the Superbowl, but bigger', she answered. And she laughed, but I didn't get it.

I want to go through those bookshelves. Those books aren't mine, though. They're not hers anymore, either.

I cannot stop thinking about them.  All those worlds she gave me the spyglass to, all that walking across moors with my hair down pretending I was Eustacia Vye or Catherine or Arwen or anyone, really, with dark hair and a brooding look and disaster looming. '60's penguin paperbacks with their price on the front in shillings and pence, and her name written on the inside of the cover. Her maiden name, then my father's surname. Nothing with my stepfather's name on. When did she stop writing her name on her books? I don't know.

My grief is put in a box and packed away just like the things of hers I took. I am not sitting at a table looking at her empty chair. I am not sitting in my childhood home noting that I cannot smell cigarette smoke or Chanel 19 or mimosa candles. I can think of it, her chair, my Grandma's chair, her pictures on the wall, her books, her silk dressing gown, her furniture, the vase I bought her that she hated and she kept telling me to take whenever I was home, but I can't see it. My stepfather lives in a house camouflaged with my mother.

It is almost a year since she died. I have run and worked and parented and laughed and travelled and slowly accepted that the world will always be a bit darker, but the world is still the world. 

                                                                              ******

We rented a cottage in the village in which I was born, for the summer. I visited the church in which I was baptised. The school I briefly went to. I searched for the houses I lived in, and found one, but not the other. We drove around for three hours. I couldn't remember. My father couldn't remember when I asked him. It didn't matter. I saw the river we fished in, and the mountains we climbed up and tobogganed down, and that was enough. And I ran. I ran up mountains and through forests and got frightened by the sound of the coyotes. Sometimes I thought I'd found her. Then I'd stop running, and realise I hadn't. I ate a croissant at a baker's we used to go to after school. When I was little, I used to choose chocolate donuts. I remembered the colour of her coat.

I want to reach a conclusion.

I don't think there is one.

I miss her.

I am lying in bed, and I am trying to sleep. I can't. I am aware of some discomfort, but can't locate it. I lie there, still, with my body straight and my hands tucked behind the small of my back. I lie there for a long time. I listen to the sounds of the house, my husband, my daughter, sleeping. I stare at the dark. I start to feel pain. I realise, suddenly, that I am digging my nails into the palms of my hands. I don't know how long I have been doing it. I get up.

In the bathroom light I see I have drawn blood.

My mother had a favourite brooch. It is rose gold. It is a circle, with a five petaled flower and beautiful Victorian swirls inside it. I think she said that once there had been seed pearls in it too, but they fell out. I do not remember where she got it, but I know she would have told me, because I know I would have asked. She wore it all the time when I was little; I would sit on her knee, as she read a book and had a cup of coffee next to her, her idly stroking my hair and me, idly, circling the brooch with my finger.

One Mothers' Day, we went to a fete. Mum gave me three pounds to spend. I saw a small porcelain decorative plate, in a brass stand, with a poem about mothers on it. I bought it, and some biscuits shaped like hedgehogs that I did not know were biscuits. I kept them, for years, as ornaments. The poem on the plate was awful. Mum laughed, and I wasn't sure if that meant she liked it or she didn't. The next day, I saw it on her bedside table. It stayed on her bedside table for twenty nine more years.

In the drawer of her bedside table, these twenty nine year later, underneath the drawer full of tissues and medication, I found every mothers' day card, ever letter, ever postcard, every birthday card I had ever sent her. A lifetime of written love.  I took them away with me. I have them here, with her brooch, on the table. Letters, cards, photographs, a brooch, a tissue full of blood.


I had coveted that brooch. 'You'll get it when I die!' she would joke. I look at it and feel I have stolen it. I know what having it means. So I put it away, because I do not want it to be mine.

I hold her small wooden box in my hand. It still has buttons in it. If I squint my mind, I can pretend that I am five, and I am playing with the buttons, organizing them into rows of size and shade, with the sounds of the radio and Mum laughing behind me.

Happy Mothers' Day.

My first memory is of climbing, and falling, out of my cot. I remember the thump on the ground, the way my body hurt for the first time, and, most vividly, the look on my mother's face after she had raced up the stairs and come into the room. I remember her scooping me up - I would guess I was crying, but I don't remember that - and all was well. All was well.  It is like an imprint into clay, her making all things okay again.

How are you, people ask. I am fine, I say. I am fine, how are you? But sometimes I don't say that. Sometimes say I am not fine, and sometimes they ask why.

'My mother is dead.' I say. I am not fine because my mother is dead.

In the first days, I tried so hard to find somebody who could tell me where I could find her. I spent the days running across my old city, leaving my daughter looking confused with relatives whose rules were very different to my own, doing the jobs that needed to be done and telling anyone, everyone, that my mother was dead. 'My Mum has just died',  I would say, as I bought lip balm or ordered funeral wreaths or stood for too long looking at expensive black clothes. 'My Mum has just died.'

'I am sorry.' they would say, mostly. But nobody told me where she was. And nobody told me it wasn't true.

I sat on sofas in buildings I had passed but never thought about, looking through coffin catalogues. I chose stargazer lillies and hymns and readings and bidding prayers and readers and photos and wondered if the reason these choices were mine to make was because I sounded and walked and looked so like the woman all these things were for. 'She'd like this', I would say, and they would agree, even though I had no idea whether she would or not.

We buried her, in a cemetery in the countryside, overlooking fields, and it was cold. I was so pleased for her, that she was in her own country; I remember her telling a story of how when she lived overseas, she did not want to be buried under an unfamiliar sky. I wore her black leather gloves that I had found in her handbag. Her hands are bigger than mine. Her hands were bigger than mine.

I am not fine.

I wake up in the middle of the night. I feel like I have been hit in the stomach. I sit on the sofa in the dark. I hear her laughter, in my head, and I know what her hair smells like because I brushed it so often and I kissed her head so often and I think about this, the sounds and smells that have underpinned me and my life for all of my memory and I cannot understand how they are not here any longer.

People try and say lovely things. They tell she will come to me, they tell me she is in the song of the wood pigeon that wakes me up in the morning, that she is in my dreams, that she is communicating with me through animals and sounds and songs that come on the radio.  And I want to hit them over the head with a shovel, and I think how funny my Mum would find that, and I smile.



I read my stepfather's emails, of him keeping busy,  of the weather, with the gaps between words telling of the slow shattering of his heart. 'Who am I growing these carrots for?' he asks. 'The asparagus is doing so well, but there is nobody to say 'well done'.' Piles of vegetables are rotting by the back door, with nobody to cook for. 



I have dreams where I am trying to get to her. I am in an airport lounge, or on a train that is stuck, or she is trying to phone me and I can't reach the phone.  I keep thinking of things I need to ask her - when should my daughter start school? What seeds should I plant in my window box? Do you like this dress? I found this book, I shall send it to you, you would love it. I read a poem and it made me think of you, here it is, I shall email it to you. Just click on the link. The link is the writing in blue. Just click on it, with your mouse. I love you.



"Grandma had died." says my daughter. "I don't where she is, now, do you?"

I stand on the beach, holding her hand. It is a warm day. "No." I say. "I don't."

I am sitting in my mother's living room. There is a fire in the hearth. It crackles. I get up, and put another log on it.

I can hear the wheeze of my mother's oxygen machine. She sits in the chair she inherited from her mother. She sat in that chair, my Grandma, for fourteen years, after she had had her stroke. Every time I saw her she was in that chair, watching TV programmes she would never have watched had she been able to speak.

I sit opposite my Mum. She starts, looking for the words to tell me the thought she just had. She looks around the room, pursing her lips to begin a sentence. She gives up. She falls back to sleep.

I force myself to look at her face.

Time passes.

"You okay?" she suddenly asks.

"I'm fine," I say. The machine wheezes. "I love you."

She smiles, a sudden shock of teeth too large for her face, now. "I love you too." She closes her eyes again. "Don't worry about it."


The next day, I bring my daughter with me to the house. Mum has not managed to get downstairs this day. We go up to see her, and she is sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed, but wrapped in a towel to keep warm. The district nurse is coming round. Mum is scared.

"Are they going to put me in hospital?" she asks. She looks like my daughter does after a bad dream. My daughter looks in the full length mirror, making faces, dancing.

I say no. I say I promise. I say I won't let this happen.

She puts her arms out and I hold her. I kiss her head.



"Do you love your Mummy?" my daughter suddenly asks, moving away from the mirror.

"Yes," I say. "I love her the way you love me."

"Does she love you?" she asks.

"She loves me the way I love you." I say.

"And I love you." says Mum to my daughter.

"We all love each other!" says my daughter.

It feels nice for a moment.



My daughter moves towards the bedroom door.

"It's time to go, Grandma." she says.

"I know." says my Mum.



My daughter skips as we walk to the bus stop. "Can I have pizza for tea?" she asks. Yes, I say, because I can't thnk of the reasons why I should say no. "Do you want to dance with me?", she asks. We stand at the bus stop, where I used to wait for my school bus, and sing nursery rhymes and dance. A woman my mum's age smiles.


I will not let myself cry.

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.