I didn’t bother to tell her I kept it that way purposefully to avoid the upset of breaking a new screen. Mother wouldn’t understand the value of keeping things broken so they can’t be broken again. She’d say that kind of pretentious navel gazing is why everyone thinks I’m weird and dislikes me. She’s got a way with words, my mother. By everyone, she means her and her mid-life-crisis friends who she keeps around to make her look normal. Their interpretation of being middle-aged is very similar to history’s description of the Middle Ages: nasty, brutish and short, which as it happens is also a very neat description of Mother.
As I walked around the front of the car, she stopped and looked at me as if she was about to begin dissection. She spoke quietly, almost to herself, but we both knew better than that. ‘Why you had to shit on my one weekend away in the entire year, I have no idea.’
‘I thought you said I’d pissed on your one weekend away.’
‘Selfish, just like your father.’
‘He’s dead,’ I muttered. ‘Or had you forgotten?’
Her face turned bleak. That’s as much as she emotes really. She’s tried all manner of prescriptive facials, massages, ointments and injections, yet they all just make her look infuriated and solidified. She is, however, what you would call ‘well groomed’ — although that does make her sound faintly horsey and she hates all animals. All living things, really. Her philosophy is that life is awful and we should just accept that. This was the stoic, no-nonsense attitude she adopted when my father passed away.
A spiked silence rolled over us as we stood by the car and the November wind circled. The smell of damp decay hung in the air, mingling with a faint trace of cinder smoke from distant bonfires.
The leaves murmured along the gravel path that led up to the dark oak door of Ambergris Towers. The blank eyes of its windows reflected mists silvering the fields. A shroud of fog sat on the shoulders of the distant hills. This was a cold, dank world we’d landed in, desolate, and the house stood ashen faced among it all.
I watched Mother walk towards the house, away from the car, away from me. I pictured her all those years ago, walking away from the car on that other dead November afternoon.
I almost savour the smell of it now, that strange, addictive perfume of the crematorium. It had the cloying, fake floral note used to cover death and the funeral parlour’s preservative unguents. Mother’s face was as set as a death mask then, too. But that was just a new round of Botox.
The day of the funeral had been neutral — not cold, not hot — and had begun with no promise. There was a distinct flavour of nonchalance, of nothing special happening. The used air circulated round us in the overly large car. There was no indulgence in emotion.
Tears blistered in my eyes and I remember trying not to blink so that not one bead of sadness would be dislodged. Her motionless hand lay on the perfect line of her dress. People had stared at us as we rolled by, trying to see the mourners’ faces. Death is not just something to fear. It fascinates. Some people even crossed themselves. But God wasn’t with us that day.
When we arrived, everything had the jaded air of being pre-ordained, the next in a whole stream of funerals. It didn’t strike me as strange then that something so unexpected and sudden could be so easily and swiftly organized. I touched my mother’s sleeve, but she walked away from the car. Maybe she hadn’t felt my hand there.
Dad had been my childhood. When he died, I thought it must have been partly my fault — I’d stopped being a child, so it was time for him to leave. He’d collapsed in the flowerbeds, clutching his chest. When his heart slowed into its last beat, he took my last childish breath with him. I sat with his head in my lap and I bent over him. That’s when I felt him exhale for the last time. I remember the must of him, the yeasty breath sweetly spiced, like marzipan on Christmas cake. I drew my next breath alone. And it was then that I tasted a new world: cold, sharp, flavourless. It was a more insipid world, one with fewer shades, fewer possibilities, less to beguile or charm — a flat disinterested world that is the real world, the world my mother keeps telling me I need to wake up to. But I’ve found no use for it yet.
It was strange to me that they said it was his heart. His heart had always been the greatest part of him. Perhaps it had loved enough. In the end, it gave way as easily as a weak knee, nothing more than tired flesh. I used to think his heart just had too much love and stopped with the weight of it all but Mother disillusioned me of that. ‘Certainly not too much love! Anything else but that!’ Yet he died with an expression on his face that I will never forget, an inexplicable look of . . . defeat. His face was rigid. I couldn’t tell when his eyes stopped being able to see me. His cheeks were still so pink, ruddy as if life still played there, even though his body was already a lifeless rag.
I watched Mother now, walking away from me yet again. She had never known defeat in her life. Dad used to refer to her as a great work of modern art — highly intelligent, highly strung and utterly impenetrable. I smiled at the memory but, sadly, not enough to myself.
She turned, her feet crunching on the gravel.
‘What are you grinning about now?’
‘I was just thinking about Dad.’
‘And you’re smiling?’
I watched her fingers clench, the bright rings and baubles he gave her still adorning her hands in memoriam. Mother misses him so much that it can occasionally spill over into bitterness. That’s what death does to you — it warps you, then it hardens you into the new shape you have become.
Rule 2: On location. Pay close attention to all the details of your new environment.
THE HOUSE
I was statically warm in my travelling clothes. Not that I have ‘travelling clothes’. I find that jeans and all things black suffice for most occasions but when heated to a certain degree they do, admittedly, release a kind of mildewed fug.
‘And you stink.’ Mother sniffed as if to demonstrate the fact.
‘What are you, twelve, Mother?’
‘Air freshener is not a cologne,’ she sang viciously, as she reached the steps to the house.
This was one of Mother’s favourite little mottos, along with ‘The floor is not a storage area’, which I interpreted as meaning, if you’ve been doing something dirty or secretive, remember to tidy away the evidence. Cleanliness may not really be next to godliness, but it can certainly hide a multitude of sins. Living under the same roof as Mother requires the art of concealment, but we’re more comfortable with the term tidiness.
Today, Mother had her usual veneer of calm with a hint of carefully applied scent that definitely wasn’t Febreze. I, meanwhile, had found it slightly more challenging to maintain my sheen. My hair naturally sprang into tight bedsprings, while my clothes gathered in great creases round the tops of my thighs and gave off a sullen odour as if my flesh had been brewed in the fabric.
Mother only needed to do The Look to let me know it wasn’t quite the right impression for Ambergris Towers. It was clear that a little piece of history was weeping as I climbed the sweep of extravagant steps.
The mansion had a suitably stern face. Vast stone carvings frowned over the shadowed windows. The ancient misery and despair reserved for the unspeakably rich bled from every stone. I must stress there was no actual blood. Not yet anyway. Nonetheless, there was a profound melodrama to the house that only the most ornate language could accommodate. We should have arrived in the chaos of a great thunderstorm, our hair dripping with rain, our eyes blurred until an acid-white flare engulfed the sky to illuminate the stone-faced house.