to hear what station she had listened to. It was the local radio station and the tinny, slightly earnest sound of the news. Her clothes – jeans and a dark blue sweater – lay folded on the chair as she had left them. The thread that had held all these various objects together, the life which had given meaning to their side-by-sidedness, had gone. The slippers on the floor no longer had any connection to the book on the table. The family photographs, with their insinuations of unity, were broken apart into their different lives. Each item in her wardrobe had its own special memory: a wedding, a party for this dress, a holiday for that. The telephone filled the house with an incessant ringing. Each caller was no longer held to the next by a living presence, but only by a memory which belonged separately to each. Something was finished. She was dead and all that she had held together was now apart.
There was a bloodstain on the carpet, evidence of the paramedics’ attempt to revive her. I bent down to touch it. It was still damp from someone’s vain effort to wipe it away. Her bed had been stripped, the sheet bundled and the blanket folded. I lifted one of the sheets. It was stained with blood and urine. This sheet seemed to be emblematic of our relationship, its function as a source of childhood comfort subverted by these abject signs of her body. The dearest and the most difficult contained in one place. This is the paradox of my love for my mother: the longing for her to love me in the way I wanted her to, and the desire to be free of my dependency on her.
I kept the sheet my mother had died on for several years, in a plastic carrier bag at the back of one of my drawers. I imagined it, infused with the smell of her, spread out on the floor. As a child I had revolved around my mother’s body like a moon, held to her by my need. But I sensed she was always just beyond me, an absence I could find no words to fill. I could never name this void between us; nor could I leave her for long enough to live for myself. Now, after her death, maybe I could put to one side the distance I had established in adulthood, and circle this empty and crestfallen place, and discover the connection between us.
I was unsure what to do with the sheet. I could destroy it. I could burn it or throw it in the dustbin or consign it to a skip (there were always skips around where I lived). In doing so I could release myself from the entrapment of my childhood. I wanted both to keep it and to be rid of it. And so it remained in its plastic bag in my drawer, until one day I stopped my circumambulations and stepped, so to speak, in the middle of the sheet and, remaining there, I finally decided to take it out and burn it. I cleared a space in the back yard and draped it across a large stick. I had no matches, so I lit a piece of screwed-up newspaper from the gas stove and placed it beneath the sheet. The synthetic material mixed with the cotton erupted. The yard is very small and for a moment the heat in the confined space was intense. I was reminded of a Guy Fawkes night when my son was small. I had lit a number of cheap Roman candles and fountains. I had imagined they would be innocuous, but their magnesium brightness and roaring smoke overwhelmed the narrow space between the wall and the side of the house, and I brought them to a premature end with a bucket of water. The flames of my mother’s sheet roared. I watched it burn, and felt on my face the fierce energy of the fire. Oily plastic residue dripped onto the concrete.
When I was a child, separation from my mother brought on pangs of inexplicable fear for her safety. I recall one autumn evening when I was ten, looking out of a window at my boarding school, watching the rain fall. I had heard a flood warning on the news and now, as I pressed my face against the glass and watched the headlights of the cars glisten through the rain on the main road beyond the school’s walls, I imagined my mother drowning, swept away in a flood tide, her hair spread out and floating like seaweed on the surface of the water. In earlier years, as I lay in bed in the evening, I would call for her to say ‘good night’ to me. She would arrive in my room, sit on my bedside and kiss me and I would ask her to open my cupboard to make sure there was no demons hiding inside. As soon as she had thrown open the doors to reveal nothing more sinister than my father’s old suits and dinner jacket and a few toys, and she had pronounced the words ‘goodnight’, I was comforted. I took an image of her with me to sleep.
When I grew past this childish phase, I lost the reassurance of her presence, and the image of her would sometimes fade as I hovered over sleep and felt myself slipping into another world. At this moment on the cusp of sleep, when sleepers let go of their waking self, I experienced a terror that I would never find myself again. As I sank into sleep I would encounter an emptiness, its nameless, globular form rising up in concentric waves to smother my breathing. I felt myself suffocating and would spring into wakefulness, gasping for air, my eyes snapping open in the dark and my heart thudding. I tried to put off this moment and would stay awake, filling my mind with pleasurable thoughts, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. I would try and slip past its sentinels, and sleep without warning, unknown to myself. I never said any of this to my mother. I don’t know why.
At the end of each holiday, before I was due to return to boarding school, she would take me on an outing. The two of us would go out for the day to watch a film, or to eat at a restaurant. One end of summer I had a project on wild flowers to complete. We walked through the woods at the back of our house to a field. We called it the wild flower field. It lay through a railway bridge where, as children, we would yell beneath the Victorian arch and wait for the sound to rebound. It smelt dank and was always muddy. And out on the other side was the wild flower field, a long strip of meadow, bordered by the railway below and woodland above. That summer afternoon my mother and I sat in the field making a perfunctory search for wild flowers. I think we both felt the imminence of my departure for school. My fingers scrabbled through the coarse grass, coming upon a cowslip, or the flower of a wild strawberry, which I picked and placed between sheets of blotting paper, and I would glance across at my mother, on her knees searching, and she would look at me and smile, and in that moment there would be nothing between us but my own sense of emptiness.
We repeated this tableau vivant: an evening performance of the film Tobruk. We sat together, hearing guns blasting, heroic figures shouting, and then the lull of the desert after the battle. And in this momentary quiet and dark of the cinema I felt numbed. And my mother? She would have loathed the film. A day out to see Steve McQueen in Grand Prix. We sat on a seat in a small square, somewhere in central London, my mother voicing her exasperation, the meal ruined by my feeling unwell, the anticipation of the film squandered. Such brief moments laid our relationship bare: the time and the energy which went into maintaining propriety, and the evasions of a nameless dread which neither of us could cope with. And as everything began to unravel, I would abandon myself in compliance with her need to shore up my unhappiness behind the frontispiece of normality. I became my own worst enemy. I remember that film. I lost myself in the speed and excitement. But nothing we did together ever changed the silent fatalism that bound us together.
My mother’s childhood in South London had been interrupted by the war. She had been sent to a boarding school and then had moved to the countryside with her parents. Her father was a small businessman whose tastes were continental. He dressed with a fastidious élan which belied his English conservatism. She shared his ambiguous loyalties. A part of her held to the Puritanism of a petit bourgeois culture and the order it gave her. But she disliked its meanness and the sanctimonious hypocrisy it cultivated in the better off. She chose convention. It stifled her, confirmed her desire to escape into something of her own making. But she held to it. The Puritan inside her anchored her against drifting ambivalence. I think she believed that pursuing what she wanted was wrong. She feared it would lead to madness, and to the loss of her sense of belonging. Her own mother had suffered years of mental instability. Addicted to barbiturates, she would phone her psychiatrist at moments of crisis. When she lay dying, she had asked my mother if she loved her and my mother told me she had lied and said that yes she did. Hers had been a solitary childhood which she had palliated with her sense of fun; always the gay, vivacious one in the photographed group of young women. Popular and beautiful, she enjoyed parties and making friends. She had grown adept at hiding her feelings of despair. She expected the same of me when I was sent away to boarding school. I sensed a desperation in her when this did not happen, which left me stunned and pensive. She chivvied me, distracting herself.
My childhood was similar to those of tens of thousands of middle-class English boys growing up in the suburbs in the 1960s. We were the children of men and women who had married in the 1950s. Our families were divided between the