She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockes Read Free Book Online

trouble. Reluctantly, she laid it in a box like a dead pet and drove it to the police station. By the time she got back she’d cheered up. The female desk sergeant had squealed when she opened the box and called out her fellow officers from the back room. It was the only contribution to the amnesty they’d had.
    â€œThey were completely intrigued,” said my mother, beaming. “I suppose I don’t look the type.”
    I still have the trunk and I still have the dinner service. The bespoke suit went down in a freak sewing accident in the mid-1990s. I am not, on the whole, sentimental about the gun.

Me and Mum in the late 1970s.

CHAPTER 3
    Chasing the Train
    ONE EVENING IN 2003 the phone rang and I answered it. Over a bad line, my cousin Victoria said she had a message for my mother from her own mother: Fay was poised to book a flight to England from South Africa and wanted my mother to green-light it. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and walked from the hallway into the living room, where my mother sat in a chair by the window, blanket over her legs, feet poking out of the end in thick woolly socks. Outside in the heat wave the trees towered and loomed. I passed on the message.
    â€œAbsolutely not,” said my mother.
    She had been off-color for a while. There was a persistent skin irritation that wouldn’t go away, even with antibiotics. She was uncharacteristically listless, then nauseated, and finally breathless. She lost interest in pretty much everything except going out every morning to feed the birds in the garden and reading the newspaper. It took her the best part of a day to get through it.
    Much later, my dad and I tried to trace back the symptoms—the tiredness and coughing, the misdiagnoses (asthma, bronchitis)—to work out how long she’d been ill. Well over a year, we thought. Since her mother had died from TB, she’d been confident, when we finally went in for the biopsy, that that’s what it was. I think she was even a little consoled by this, a connection to the woman she had never known and of whom no living person had a single memory. The diagnosis of lung cancer seemed unfair when my mother hadn’t smoked for thirty years.
    I took the phone around the corner and in a low voice said to my cousin that Fay’s offer was appreciated but that my mother was too tired for visitors. My cousin disappeared from the line and came back a moment later to say her mother understood. I went back into the living room, passed my mother the phone, and the sisters spoke to each other for a few minutes. Then my mother said good-bye and hung up. I went back into the kitchen to make cocktails.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    WE WERE WORKING our way through the
Savoy Hotel Cocktail Book
that summer, which is why, for years afterward, I had orange liqueur and Tia Maria and angostura bitters in my cupboard, up there with the baking soda and other things I never use. I’d had an idea we’d start at A and work through, but by mid-June this was looking ambitious. There were too many ingredients and the exercise, conceived of in the absence of any better ideas on how to ritualize the end, threatened to furnish me with a tragic coda at the funeral: “We only got to Sea Breezes!” (An epitaph she would have loved, by the way.)
    Because I was in charge, my mother drank from a glass. Left to her own devices, she would drink from a washed-out old yogurt pot, silver foil still stuck to the rim. It was the kind of ostentatious economy she loved, right up there with reusing unfranked stamps or folding a single sheet of loo paper in half. She poured her first yogurt pot at nine in the morning.
    â€œHere,” I said, handing her a White Russian.
    â€œCheers.”
    We sat and looked out through the living-room window. Every now and then the breeze would lift and a great hiss and surge of light seemed to fill every wavelength.
    â€œIt’s so