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

drainpipe, into the pub and across endless carpeted space to the toilet. “Phew!” said my mother, hanging on to the door handle. “I thought we’d never make it.”
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    I DROVE US BACK the long way. Down the road that ran parallel to the railway, which we had driven down to school every day for ten years. When we coincided with a train, she’d speed up to race it until I squealed and made her slow down again. Up the hill, along the lane by St. Mary’s, past the RAF base, and then I pulled in at a place where I used to go swimming. We sat in the car in front of a squat 1970s building.
    â€œDo you remember . . . ?” I said.
    â€œYes,” she said vaguely. I had the sense she was indulging me.
    In the evening, I sat beside her in the living room, holding her hand. “Look,” I said. There was a pattern on one of her fingernails, a corrugated effect like the ghost of an old infection. “Is that a new thing?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said my mother. “Funny.”
    â€œI’ll get us another drink.” She smiled at me.
    â€œIf anyone tries to stop you, call a policeman.”
    If the first cocktail didn’t work, I reverted to rum and Coke. After two rounds I started to scale back the measures. We got stuck on piña coladas for a week before tiring of them. The margaritas came out like lighter fuel. But the White Russians were perfect, the Kahlua thick and syrupy, the texture of cough medicine. When I poured in the milk, it came up, like sludge, from the bottom of the glass.
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    MY MOTHER WAS SITTING on a stool at the kitchen table. I was standing behind her, rubbing lavender oil into what remained of her hair. It had come back a little curly and appeared now in fine gray swirls on her scalp, like a weather map depicting a hurricane. As I applied the oil, I saw the strawberry birthmark at her hairline. “Stimulates regrowth” is what it said on the bottle, but it was just a nice sensation. I had to stop it from flooding the neck of her jersey.
    â€œLovely,” she said.
    There was no preamble. It appears in my memory out of nowhere, as it had the first time, although on this occasion my mother’s voice was less harsh. When all else failed, she said, she had her father arrested. The case had gone to the High Court. He had defended himself and cross-examined his own children in the witness box, destroying them one by one. He had been found not guilty. She didn’t say what the charge was, beyond that the action was triggered by a pattern repeating itself. What had happened to her had been happening to her sister Fay, the one she called her baby, and she wouldn’t stand for it any longer. My mother was twenty-four; her sister was twelve. She gave me the last of the heavy-weather looks, a worn-out version of her old favorite, Woman of Destiny Considers Her Life. I managed to squeak out a question this time: how was he found not guilty?
    My mother looked bitter and by way of an answer repeated something the prosecutor had said to her about her stepmother: “If that woman isn’t careful, I’ll have her up as an accessory.” She had lied in the witness box or retracted her statement; some kind of U-turn that contributed to the collapse of the case. The prosecutor was furious with her, said my mother.
    After the verdict, her father had come up to her in the courtroom and, grinning, said, “Aren’t you proud of me?” My mother said it was the most shocking moment of her life.
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    SHE HAD GONE BACK to her apartment and had tried to decide what to do. She had dragged her siblings through a horrifically public ordeal, which had failed. She had been personally defeated. The worst thing about it, she said, was worrying that people at work would find out. It had been in the