An elderly woman lay on the bed. I recognised her from the distant past, from pictures and the ghost of a memory, but still I couldn’t quite make out her features: they appeared smudged, the lines ill defined. Although I could conjure an image of the room, I couldn’t make out the exact form of my mother’s face. I saw myself standing there; open-mouthed, flat-footed, feeling as though a stone the size of a football was lodged in my gut. A hundred questions bombarded my mind, knocking me one way, then the other. How do you cram nearly two decades of wondering and questions, twenty years of yearning, into a solitary moment? There were no words. At last we were united and as that thought dawned on me, my body sang. I thought my legs would give way, but I steadied myself. All through this encounter, Mum held me in her stare, watching my every reaction. And then she smiled. Her translucent lips curled at their edges and in that second I forgave her for everything.
That was how I wanted it to be. Perhaps in some parallel universe, from where I sensed the faintest of signals, I lived on to sit on Mum’s bed, hold her hand, stroke her hair and discover everything that had happened to her since she’d left. But in this universe, in this shitty, grey, fucked universe, where I’d missed the chance to meet her, her image and that of the room faded like powder dissolving in water. It could have happened—if I’d been brave enough to take the chance of going to her.
‘Mr Mitchell? Mr Mitchell?’
Finally I acknowledged the woman standing with me. Just one question demanded to be asked. ‘Do you know where she’s gone? Did she leave an address?’
‘Sorry, no.’
‘How long was she here for?’
Heather noticed my unsteady sway and guided me to the mattress where we sat next to each other.
‘She came about two months ago when she answered an advert in the newspaper. At first she kept to herself, but slowly we started to talk. You know, she’d pop in for a cup of tea, or I’d come down here in the afternoon for a chat. Quickly we found we had things in common. Lost husbands, for one—in her case by choice, for me enforced. It’s ten years since Eddie left. He went to Thailand, you know. Went on some…tour and never came back. To this day I don’t know what happened to him. I expect he shacked up with some nubile Thai girl and probably stayed there.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘We’d sit together for hours on end. She was a lovely woman. Lovely. I really miss her now she’s gone. I hoped she would leave some way of contacting her, she said she would, but it wasn’t her style. I think she hated ties, hated any roots. No, I don’t think there was a chance she’d leave behind a piece of her future like that.
‘She told me about you. She had this big book of articles and magazine pieces. You see she kept an eye on you, like an angel. Always watching from a distance. She knew all about you, about Mary and Caroline.’ She talked as though the story was her own and even took the liberty of nudging me in the ribs.
‘How did she know?’
‘Didn’t say, but she had all these notes.’
‘Did she ever tell you…tell you why she left? Did she ever tell you which one of us forced her away?’
Heather tugged at the place where her bra cut her considerable girth. How strange that answers I’d sought for so long were held by this woman I’d met just minutes before. I hung on her every word as though she was a shaman, and, of course, in a way she was. She knew what I craved; she was privy to secrets I’d asked myself on endless sleepless nights and cold bitter mornings when only tequila kept me company. Her movements ceased with a final shake, much like a chicken finally settling on an uncomfortable egg. ‘It wasn’t you or your dad who forced her away, love—neither of you did anything wrong. Is that what you thought?’
‘It had to be one of us and I never forgave Dad because I thought it might be him and I never forgave myself because I thought it might have been me. What else were we supposed to think? Who else could we blame?’
‘She just wanted more, Jack, that’s all. I think you get that from her.’
‘Get what?’
‘That striving for something more, that need to push the boundaries. For your mum it meant a rejection of being a wife and a mother. She thought your father was much better cut out to bring you up.’ Heather shook her head. ‘What a shame you held him responsible.’
‘It was inevitable.’
‘With hindsight perhaps that’s right, but she meant it for the best, Jack. She said once that she didn’t feel she had room for you and her, and to let you grow she had to leave. I think she saw it as a kind of sacrifice, a kind of gift in a way. For you to bloom she had to give way.’
‘Whatever she meant, that wasn’t the outcome. We were left abandoned and what she said just sounds like self-justifying bullshit. She left us with nothing to fill the hole she left except unhappiness and shit. I tried to force it back, but it got to me in the end. Nothing she could have done as a mother could possibly have been as bad as what she left behind. And if she knew what was going on, if she was watching like an angel, she must have seen what was happening. Why didn’t she save us?’
‘I think that’s why she reached out to you in the past month. I think it was her way of trying to put things right. It was her chance to make amends.’
‘So she felt guilty?’
Heather merely nodded. ‘Terribly, but I think she thought returning would serve no purpose, that it could never put things together again.’
‘So why now?’
‘I’m not sure she really knew. I think she saw your life as being fragile, almost at breaking point, and felt she could have made a difference.’
‘Why didn’t she just say it was her? What was with all this cloak and dagger stuff? Why didn’t she just sign the fucking notes? I would have come, Heather, I would have come straight away.’ I felt the first tears come. They slipped down my cheek. ‘I would have come. I would have come.’ I wiped the wet away. ‘Why didn’t she just say it was her?’
‘Because she was afraid you wouldn’t come and see her. She couldn’t have lived with the rejection if you’d known it was her and hadn’t come. This way she knew there could have been other reasons for you to stay away.’
‘If I’d known I would have come, I would have come anyway, but it’s all too late now.’
‘Would you like some time by yourself, Jack?’ She noticed the slightest tip of my head and with considerable effort levered herself from the mattress and left the room.
All I could hear was the occasional hiss of tyres on a wet road. I tried to recapture what it might have been like with Mum and me in the room, but nothing came. There was just emptiness and now the additional sound of the baby crying as Heather opened the back door. Then that, too, was gone. The room was empty and I was empty. There was nothing in this place for me, but still I felt compelled to stay, as though some last trace of my mother was there that would disappear when I left. I needed to take in every last detail of the room, so I walked to every corner, along every wall. When I returned to the mattress and it sank under my weight I saw the smallest of white triangles against the wall. I reached over and pulled out a photograph. I thought it would be of me as a child, a treasured link with the past she had abandoned. To my surprise, no, to my disbelief, it was a picture of Dad. Taken recently, no doubt, on a prowl past our house. How old he looked, how bent and destroyed. I passed my hand over the glossy surface. Why had the photo been taken, and why had Mum held on to it? Did she pity Dad? Before this meeting I might have thought that she had kept the photo because she blamed him, but that was all wrong. I had conjured the darkest of thoughts about what he might have done behind closed doors to force her to leave, but now I knew it had been just my mother’s whim, just a fucking whim.