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

peaceful,” she said. “It’s so peaceful here.”
    When my dad came in from work, she looked up and smiled. “Go and change.”
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    THERE WAS SOMETHING we were supposed to be doing, during those dozy afternoons and long, empty mornings, which we had emphatically been failing to do. My mother always said that, given the choice, she would rather go down the long, slow decline route than be run down by a bus. That way, when the time came, she’d have had a chance to have put her affairs in order. But now we were here and it wasn’t appealing. It seemed absurd at this stage to ruin what time we had left with painful and long-avoided subjects, although “what time we had left” was a cliché we were finding hard to make meaningful. I had taken semileave from work, and the sense of time running out had been replaced with the peculiar drag of being home on a weekday, with its echo of sick days off school. It felt like this period would go on in slow motion forever.
    â€œIs there anything you want to do today?” I asked in the morning, and my mother’s eyes flitted.
    â€œNo,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
    In the evening, another phone call, another sister three thousand miles away. This one didn’t offer to visit. “Sensible woman,” said my mother.
    We were trying to be disciplined about crackpot remedies. Some free reflexology at the hospital, a rosary I bought in Camden Passage for a joke. In a moment of weakness, I’d been to the health food store for pills that promised to restore a full head of hair in record time.
    â€œDo I have to?” she’d said when I handed her one. I was horrified. My mother loved nothing better than to contrive a minor discomfort for herself, for the pleasure she got from overcoming it. “Too many pills,” she said in a small voice.
    â€œOf course you don’t have to,” I said briskly, and packed them away.
    Every morning, either my dad or I—whichever of us had slept overnight in the downstairs bedroom in the single bed next to hers—helped her up and we hobbled through the kitchen to the living room. At lunchtime, I maneuvered her into the car and we drove the two blocks to the high street, where we sat in the window of the Chinese restaurant. We’d been going there for years; my mother always asked after the owner’s children. The place was empty, and he solicitously and diplomatically took our order.
    â€œI’m surprised it pays them to stay open,” I said.
    â€œYes.”
    For a change, one day I drove us to a pub halfway between our village and the next. We used to go there for a treat on the last day of school. Under-twelves weren’t allowed in, but my mother said if I was quiet, no one would object. We’d stopped going when they changed beer suppliers to a brand she didn’t like and the ham in the ham sandwiches went from dry-cured (right) to honey-glazed (wrong), so this was a sentimental gesture, of sorts. We sat in the garden.
    â€œBeats working, doesn’t it?” called my mother to the couple at the next table. It was the hottest day of the year so far and she looked startling in a heavy wool jacket, a black skullcap—which she preferred to a wig—and a red T-shirt I had given her with Che Guevara on the front. The couple turned in alarm. Tormenting the English was one of my mother’s favorite pastimes, but there was something off in her tone that day; it had none of the usual archness—was almost beseeching—and where normally I would have cringed, I thought, “Answer her, you fuckers.”
    â€œYes,” they said, eventually. My mother turned away and, relaxing for a moment, tilted her face skyward as a flower tracks the sun. “Lovely,” she said. After lunch, we crossed the garden in a feat of horizontal rock-climbing: table to chair to wall to