My face was an inch from my mother’s. I tilted my head forward a fraction, my nose nearly touching her skin. Tears leaked from the outside corners of my eyes and I felt them meet under my chin. I wanted to wake her. A silent sob escaped me, and I wanted to shake her and say: Mum, I’m here. I whispered the words, needing to say them out loud. But I was older than her, by more than ten years, and I knew, despite my emotional unraveling as I knelt at her bedside, that I would scare her if she woke now.
I lifted the covers a fraction and felt the warmth of her sleeping body. The urge to crawl in beside her, as I had done many times as a young child, was overwhelming. But I was no child. And yet. And yet I was her child. And I had missed many years of falling asleep with her hand draped over my waist, with her falling asleep midsentence as she told me a story to chase away a bad dream with a good one.
She sighed, and I quietly stood, just watching her for a moment. Now was not the time for a reunion. I would have to think of some way to make that happen. I was still just wearing my jeans and a bra, so I slipped a sweater and some socks from her drawers and pulled them on, and walked backward out of her room, reluctant to lose sight of her.
I went to my bedroom, to look at me. And there I was, a beautiful child. I was more confident with my younger self than I had been with my mother, and sat on the edge of the bed, making it dip so that my sleeping self turned away from the wall and toward me. The action unwedged her little thumb from her mouth, and I could just make out tiny bite marks in the skin. I brushed her hair away from her face, my face; a curl disobediently bounced back. I stroked my thumb over her perfect cheek and whispered into her ear, “You are good, you are kind, you are clever, you are funny,” which is what I whisper into my children’s ears every night while they’re sleeping. I don’t know why I started doing that, although you may have already wondered if it’s because I did it to myself when I was six years old.
It was getting lighter outside and the child’s eyes flickered. She said, “Mummy,” in a voice stuffed with sleep, and I kissed her—kissed me. I paused briefly on the way out and touched the spines of the books in my old bookcase—The Magic Faraway Tree, I had loved that—then went noiselessly downstairs.
I leaned against the kitchen counter, my heart thumping. My mother was alive and upstairs. Alive. I was a child asleep upstairs. What now? I bounced on my toes a little, took a few paces forward, shook my head, took a few paces backward: I literally didn’t know what direction to take. I exhaled sharply, a long, thin, steadying breath. I stopped and held my palms in the air, as if quieting an excitable audience. I needed to get a grip. Despite everything, I had to be sensible, and I muttered aloud, “Get a grip.” I needed to engage my brain, before my heart catapulted me back up those stairs and into my mother’s arms.
Although it was cold outside, I couldn’t stay in the house. So I quietly opened a drawer that I knew would be bursting with wrinkled plastic carrier bags, and pulled one out. I cut a couple of slices of bread; a whole missing loaf would be noticed. Doing everything as slowly and silently as I could, I took a knife and a jar of jam. There was always lots of jam in the cupboard, and I remembered it was because Henry had an allotment and made loads of his own. There were no plastic bottles to fill with water, although my mouth was dusty dry, so I drank straight from the tap. I wanted to take some water with me, but didn’t know what to put it in. Then I remembered my mother cleaned and kept the empty jars to give back to Henry, so I filled a couple, screwed on the lids, shook them to make sure they weren’t going to leak, and put them in the bag with the bread and jam.
I needed shoes. There were two pairs of wellies by the back door, a small yellow pair (mine) and my mother’s, black. Clearly the absence of boots would be spotted, but right now my need was greater, and my mother would have other shoes. So I put them on, and went to the shed, to eat, wait, and decide what to do next.
I shivered in the shed and sought reassurance in the rough wood beneath my fingers, touched the cardboard of the damaged box and thought fleetingly how wood and cardboard never get really cold, like glass and metal do. Sheds are not the most comfortable of places, so I found a cushion to sit on; it had that oddly comforting smell, like the attic. Some of my aches were getting worse, but I only hurt from the waist up.
I messily broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in the jam. It tasted of the old days, except back then I didn’t like the bits in it, and now I did. I leaned against the wall of the shed. My head was a mess: one thought chased another like a dim-witted cartoon cat trying to pounce on a gang of clever and very quick mice. I tried to make sense of where I was; how and why. Desperate to organize my mind, I mentally gathered what I could of my situation and tried to order it by importance, like some version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But my train of thought kept crashing before it left the station, so I felt like I could grasp only the very basics of my predicament. I could breathe and I could chew. I was safe, I had shelter and wasn’t in any immediate danger, at least not that I knew of. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure: I was in the past, but what if I was stuck here? I wanted to see my mother, yearned to reveal myself to her and have her understand who I was. But what about Eddie and the girls? I should get back in the box straightaway and get home—but I was here now, and maybe this was the only chance I’d ever have to be with my mother, the only thing that could fill the mother-shaped hole in my heart. I held my hands in front of me, watching them shake, strangely keen to see physical proof of my inner turmoil. I pinched myself, and laughed, more of a cruel snort at my own predictability. Such a cliché. If I’d had a bottle of alcohol, I would have looked at it accusingly.
I slapped myself round the face so hard that tears sprang to my eyes, and slapped myself again, about as hard as I possibly could, stinging my skin. Nothing changed; I was still in the shed. My mother was within reach, but inaccessible. No friend, no Eddie. No one. I was completely alone, even though my darling mother was in that house. I imagined myself running inside, shouting, It’s me, it’s me.
Gradually a cold, white light seeped through the cracks in the shed walls, and with it came the tinny sounds of distant voices. I looked at the house through a gap in the shed door. I couldn’t see much, but after rummaging in a bucket of tools I found a scraper, which I used to widen the gap. The scraper was one of those flat metal things; I remembered my mother using it to scrape the old paint off the kitchen table. Now I could see her through the kitchen window in her blue dressing gown, her hair loose round her shoulders; the radio was on—that was what I could hear.
I pulled the sweater around me; it was long, black, and baggy, and helped against the freezing morning. But the real warmth came all the way from the kitchen window and the view of my mother. She was just so lovely. She had the power to make everything sweet, even this very moment. She leaned on her elbows and gazed out at the birds in the garden before turning away briefly; then she came to the back door and threw a handful of bread crumbs out.
Suddenly she turned fully and ducked out of sight, reappearing just as swiftly in the kitchen window with little me in her arms. I was laughing, throwing my head back in that slightly worrying way that looks as though it might have gone too far. My eyes were squeezed shut and then I opened them, using both my hands to hold my mother’s face and press her cheeks together, kissing her lips. Then we both laughed—my mother and myself as a child—and I watched from the shed, wishing I were my younger self, feeling left out.