shushing in the breeze outside my window. The sound of roadworks further up the hill. A door slamming in the neighbour’s flat. The deceleration of a train pulling into Chalkwell station.
But nothing else. No one in the flat.
It must have been me.
Well, I knew I had just articulated the word – said it out loud as I was coming into consciousness. But I had a notion that I was merely repeating someone else’s plaintive cries.
Sorry.
It had happened several times since the funeral. Each time I had woken up from a nightmare I couldn’t remember, with the absolute conviction I was not on my own.
But then, the mind has a funny way of dealing with grief.
And of course, I was sorry.
Terribly.
The guilt was almost unbearable.
I knew Mum had been trying to talk to me. That last time we were alone at the hospice. I’d walked in to find her sleeping, so had kissed her on her forehead. Her hair was spread like a black fan across her pillow. She had been a young mum, and if you looked past the lines the illness had carved on her face, with her perfect semi-circles of long dark lashes and her thick black hair, she was still as serene and beautiful as a Renaissance Madonna.
But she’d woken at my touch and when she realised it was me she’d made a big thing of trying to meet my eyes. At first I thought she said, ‘Sadie – fit.’ It was difficult to tell. Her speech was much impaired since the last stroke. She’d been left with paralysis on the left side of her face and was unable to move her left arm.
‘You okay, Mum?’
She was frustrated. ‘Ift.’
I said nothing, waiting for her to try another attempt.
She struggled up a bit. I reached behind her and helped her sit up onto the pillows, plumping them carefully as she rested her neck.
She took a breath and looked at me. Her mouth opened, tongue lolling to the front. ‘Gift.’
‘A gift?’
She nodded.
‘Okay. Who for?’
She moved her good hand in my direction. ‘You.’
‘You have a gift for me?’ I looked at the bedside table. Glass, hand cream, anglepoise lamp.
‘No. Come.’ She paused for breath. ‘To … you.’
‘I have a gift coming?’
She expelled a lungful of air and shuddered. I could see the frustration scratching across her face. ‘Speak Dan.’
Dan was my mum’s boyfriend of about twelve years. A nice chap with a heart of gold. But he’d gone AWOL a couple of days before and Mum was in a real state about it, naturally. The poor woman was totally incapacitated, unable to do anything to find out where he was.
Thing was, Mum and Dan had a lot of things in common. They were both educators; both furious campaigners for human rights; and they both loved me. But, and this was a big but, they had both experienced long periods of depression. Mum’s strokes had been a result of high blood pressure, which, in turn, it was suggested, had been brought about by her often high state of anxiety. See, Mum didn’t have bouts of sadness, she had episodes of deep clinical depression, some of which developed into psychosis and paranoia. Just like Dan. In fact, that’s where they had met – in a private clinic. Therefore we were all concerned about his absence. I shook my head and said, ‘We still can’t find him, Mum. He’s not at work. He must have had to go somewhere urgently.’
Mum did a shrugging sort of action with her good side and said, ‘Sadie.’ She made a move that looked like she was trying to shake her head, making an effort to form her lips and shape the words. Though her dark eyes were alert I couldn’t understand her, so I took her good hand and placed a pencil in it. Mum’s elegant fingers groped for the pad of paper that never left her side. It took her a while.
Her writing was getting worse. When she finished I tried to decipher what she’d written. I could make out a ‘B’ then an ‘O’ but the figure after it could have either been an ‘X’ or a ‘K’.
I looked at Mum. ‘Box?’
Mum’s lips suckered in. She looked more fragile than ever. Then she let out a wail and started to judder, her head shaking back and forth. It was so frustrating for her.
With the functioning side of her face she tried to speak. ‘Earme.’ Working hard to take in a good breath of air, she swallowed and said, ‘Portent.’ She was really het up. I hated to see her like that but I just couldn’t understand her meaning.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ I focused on the writing. Perhaps it wasn’t an X but an O and a K? ‘Book?’
She made a sound like the air going out of a balloon. I leant in and smiled at her. She was sweating and her hair was messed up. I pushed a couple of black strands away from her eyes. Despite everything, she still had only a dusting of grey.
Stiff creases divided her forehead. Her good hand was clenched into a fist. She was working out how to say what she needed to tell me.
I cut in, trying to relieve her of the effort. ‘Okay, the book. I know you don’t like the idea but Mum …’
She made a strangled sort of sound, then slumped back into her pillows, giving up communicating. But her hand crept into mine. I squeezed it. Gently.
See, I finally got my book commissioned ten days previously. It wasn’t life-changing but it was definitely a good deal. In between the various loops and curves of my volatile career as a freelance journalist, I had been writing a book on the Essex witches.
Mum always said she thought we were distantly related to one. And there was this song, an old Essex folk ballad, The Weeping Willow, which Mum thought was connected to an ancestor. And there was a game in the playground: the kids would form a circle around one blindfolded child, the ‘witch’, and then you’d all dance around. When the verse ended the blindfolded child would try to catch one of the circle dancers. Whoever they caught was out. I can’t remember all of it but there are a couple of verses that stick:
They kicked them off and laid them down
And put them in the cold hard ground
The summer wind blew long and chill
The Divil bade her do his will
Pale and wild pale and wild
The witch did down the child
She picked her up and put her down
The willow’s leaves wrapped round and round
Her evil cries filled the air
And so did end the bad affair
Pale and wild pale and wild
The witch did up end the child
I think it was the song that got me interested, even as a child. That, my mother’s proud connection to it, and the fact that Essex had so many witches. There was folklore and myths about them everywhere I turned. And, if I’m honest, I did seek them out. I was always a bit of a spooky girl, fascinated by rather macabre stories and shrunken heads. My dad tried to get me interested in Roald Dahl, but to his great disappointment I quickly cast off Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in favour of Tales of the Unexpected. As I got older, I started delving into the witch hunts. It turned out to be rather sobering. In fact I soon became both horrified and hooked. The statistics were phenomenal: between 1580 to 1690 the combined total of indictments for witchcraft in Hertford, Kent, Surrey and Sussex was 222. In Essex alone over the same amount of