After Read online

  *

  I write to gain control. To steady the ballast. It is not working here. Going in circles, head hurting too much. Everywhere, in every corner of my world, a breaking, a splintering. Brain not working, cannot write, cannot think straight, yes, despairingly that.

  *

  Kintsugi: A Japanese philosophy of repair. Involving broken ceramic, porcelain or earthenware. A shogun, five hundred years ago, came to the conclusion that treasured vessels which had been chipped or smashed should not be discarded, actually. Excuse me, there is use in them yet. They should be given the gift of attention. Repaired with threads of gold paste cementing the shattered pieces like river lines on a map. So. Flaws must be declared. Cracks made a fearless feature. The result: a fresh beauty. On a human not God-like scale. Shunning the rigours of perfection and symmetry; the Apollonian virtues of obedience. It is the beauty of failure, and only some people see it. Yet the lanterns, irretrievable.

  *

  Chips and flecks and slivers of sharpness. Pieces of brokenness. That need a carrying in from the world. A monumental repairing. If it’s possible. No, not.

  *

  River lines of gold, binding broken porcelain. Yet sometimes the breakage is too extensive. Sometimes crucial, tiny, connecting chips are infuriatingly lost. Gaps, gaps. Leakage. Kintsugi involves the construction of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles that do not always work. Pieces most wilfully do not cleave. Edges do not bind. Not everything is snug and in its place; the result is not always watertight. Sometimes the Kintsugi practitioner has to give up because the fragments stubbornly will not come together. It shouldn’t be considered failure, that.

  But everything feels like failure now.

  4

  T gently guides me, as if I’m porcelain, to an official form waiting in readiness.

  Constable B, who’d been in the viewing room, is discreetly behind me still, following, watching. Yes, this was indeed my mother. Yes, I confirm all this. With the signature’s flourish there is an ending of something. Officialdom’s release. Into the next phase. T informs us she will call on Monday to discuss the coroner’s decision about an autopsy. Paul and I tell her we’d prefer nothing invasive. T indicates we may not have a choice. That if we want to refuse permission – she hesitates – then we have the right to take it higher. To the Supreme Court? A pause. Yes, the Supreme Court. Oh. Everything a question, everything unknown.

  T puts her arm around my brittleness as she walks us to the door. She says, softer, that she will also be ringing to see how I am. Wanting to weep at her kindness, cracked by it, not sure I can hold myself upright for much longer. I can call her any time. She hands me her business card.

  ‘Does Mum really have to be cut open?’

  Hesitation. Treading carefully now. A licking of the lips. T says the doctor and coroner will most likely order an autopsy. There’s too much uncertainty over the death. So, autopsies are only sought if there’s a medical mystery with the deceased and in this case, er, yes, there is. The police’s hovery presence is telling us this. Autopsies are expensive and will only be undertaken if something of benefit arises from them. Like certainty. And don’t we all need certainty with this one.

  So. A pathologist will most likely want to dissect our mother’s beautiful body. A microscopic inspection of her internal organs will be carried out and a biochemical testing of her stomach contents. It will be brutal. No, no dignity here. And an appeal from us will only hold things up. ‘Delay, you know, the body.’ For the funeral. Paul and I both throw up our hands and say, ‘Whatever’; whatever the world of officialdom thinks best. They need to investigate as do we. Paul and I also have our suspicions. The inquiries will not necessarily be intertwined. We don’t tell them that.

  *

  A last question as we leave, to Constable B. I feel I know something of her now, that in return for her watchfulness she might, possibly, give me a small gift: honesty.

  ‘Was it deliberate?’

  Constable B nods uncertainly. She can’t speak. Her eyes say she’s sorry, that she wishes she didn’t have to tell us this.

  *

  And the lanterns. Broken at my feet. From the furious wind. A tsunami of too much.

  *

  Walking outside into the blare of sunshine and the roar of a weekend diving into life. We blink like theatre goers who’ve been immersed in a drama of darkness for a gruelling afternoon yet it’s only been an hour. Exhaustion like a rake is dragging through our bodies. Our walking. Can’t, at a normal pace. Can’t see properly, think. I am not inhabiting myself correctly. A normal self is somewhere else.

  ‘Do you want me to drive?’ Paul asks.

  ‘No, I can do it.’ Rubbing my head as if it’ll rub clearness into it, like an alcoholic after a big night out who needs to find their way home from an unknown gutter.

  *

  Weaving through traffic. Not sure how. So much to process, organise, do. ‘A funeral?’ Paul asks. Elayn’s wishes? A blank. Slipped into the earth where she’s spent the past forty years of her life or returned to the place she grew up? That she never visits. Nestled close to her parents or closer to her grandchildren? Buried or burnt? Scattered to the wind or kept in a vase on a shelf? We never asked. Any of it. Too hard, awkward, soon. The weight of uncertainty, about getting everything right, on top of all the disquiet about everything else.

  Elayn was so particular about appearances and her funeral would be no different. Particular about getting things just so, right. Paul and I are heading into a storm of more questions the closer we get to home. More phone calls, interrogations, judgment, as news spreads within her circle and we try to explain what we can about what we barely know ourselves.

  Floundering here in the unhinged dark. Can’t drive properly, a danger to others and myself.

  *

  As is attributed to Gautama Buddha, ‘In the end, this matters most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?’

  How well did I love? Not well enough.

  5

  Was my mother ever sure of her daughter’s unconditional love for her? No, there was always too much complexity for the clearness of that. I’d remarked to girlfriends that when Elayn died there’d be a sense of relief mixed in with everything else. A catch of guilt as I said it, but it was the truth and the truth, spoken, always felt soldering and right. I told my girlfriends I’d be freed, finally, like a diver bulleting from the depths of pressured darkness into light. How wrong I was, how wrong. I did not expect my life to be hell without my mother in it. I know, even now on this day of morgue, that this will be the case. She’s got me well and good.

  *

  Margaret Thatcher said in an interview that she had nothing to say to her mother after the age of fifteen. So cruelly true, for so many females. The girls with wilfulness blazing under their skin, impatient for their own lives and paths; wanting, needing to break away and contemptuous of their mothers’ choices. Daughters too quickly dismissive and judgmental, with their mysterious, self-absorbed velocity. Daughters who think of their mothers as the happiness stalkers, reining them in with tut and affront. Daughters so caught up in their own fresh worlds. Their mothers can only cling to the edges and the girls can resent even that.

  The clutter of maternal attention. The fury at attempts to persuade, nudge, shape. And then, and then, sometimes between them, the descent into the piracy of silence. From either side, from both sides. Which was Elayn and me. Oh yes, we knew that old friend – The Great Withholding – that crashed between us at times. And toppled us both.

  *

  Yet there was so much love over the years, without us even realising it. Without acknowledging it, nurturing it, or asking for it. And in Elayn’s final year the dynamic between us of frustration and fury, hauteur and head butt softened, miraculously, into something else. Everything opened out like a stop-motion film of a shy flower finding light. We were both tired from decades of adult wariness and clash and let go, stepped back, let e
ach other in. Who knew we could evolve to this? Yet we did. And it astounded us both. Like two old warriors who’d had enough. Who’d softened into a knowing, finally, after years of exhausting attack. Softened into a realisation that none of it, actually, was worth it.

  *

  ‘If I had my life over I never would have had kids,’ Elayn threw at me once. It was a phrase I carried throughout my adult life, particularly when I had children myself. Yet when Elayn and I were close, at our best, those resonant lines from the Psalms dropped over me like a benediction: ‘The darkness is no darkness with thee.’ Close, it felt like I was suddenly bathed in a vernissage, a varnishing, and all the sullen textures of my daughterly being were combusting into light. I craved that. Never stopped being that little girl aching for a demonstrative love, to be dandled on a proverbial knee, trying to nudge my way in.

  *

  Elayn spoke of death with yearning yet vivacity coursed so strongly under her skin. All contradiction and inconsistency. As Dorothy Parker said of Isadora Duncan: ‘There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths.’ In the 1970s we had lift-off: she finally dared to be herself. Changed the spelling of her name – pedestrian Elaine to audacious Elayn – following a flirt with numerology. She embraced divorce when no one around her, in sleepy suburbanland, dared do it. Stepped into the world of topless bathing. Biorhythms. Male centrefolds in Cleo. Transcendental meditation and star signs. All were glorious liberations from the swamping of model-wifeliness she had been trapped in for decades. She did everything too well. T.S. Eliot said that most people are only a very little alive, and during that time Elayn felt like one of the few – the fortunate, spirit-brimmed few – who are the over-livers.

  In the seventies, in her late thirties, Elayn found the courage to be magnificently, courageously detached from the world around her. It was the time of her Great Acceleration.

  Yet she had come of age two decades earlier, an era when women were not expected to work. Married at nineteen, a mother at twenty-four, her husband’s property. Elayn belonged to the last generation of females to exist in that world. She chafed against it. Grew to loathe it. She straddled three eras. A pre-feminist one as she remained buried in suburbia for two decades of marriage and motherhood; a feminist one of liberation and exhilaration involving, principally, the younger women around her; and then the post-feminist era that was her daughter’s. It was Elayn’s tragedy and bitterness to have been born when she was. She was too modern for her surroundings for much of her life. Possibly, also, in her death. There will be many future Elayns.

  *

  The Great Acceleration. The breaking free. The brokenness. An ungluing that either does you in or doesn’t. Sometimes, with Kintsugi, the vessel refuses the calling of shape. Abandonment is sometimes appropriate, alongside an acceptance of loss. It’s the texture of life.

  *

  Elayn had a young girl in her who refused to die. It was in her curiosity, her ready smile, her red lips. She was an appreciator. She never under-lived. That’s who she was in public. But she was someone else in private. Gabriel García Márquez said that everyone has three lives – a public life, a private one and a secret one. Can we ever really chisel out someone’s secret life? The ugliness of the underbelly, in all its rawness. Exposed most viciously with those closest to us. Those, of course, that we love the most.

  *

  What will survive of us is love and we must hold on to it, only that. To enable those left behind to move on, to repair. Must hold on to love and not the wasted times of argy-bargy and grump, not the assault of shutting off and the cruelty of indifference. Why did Elayn and I hold ourselves hostage to that ridiculously negative energy of affront at various periods in our lives? It achieved nothing. What a waste.

  6

  So. We’ll never smell Elayn’s smell again, the brew of soap and Vitamin E cream and White Linen perfume and powder. A smell we’d known since childhood. As an adult I lived in London for almost fifteen years and at the end of a stay Mum asked if she could change the sheets for me. ‘No, leave them,’ I’d murmured, but didn’t say why. Never told her that that night I’d snuggled up in the bed she’d used, still stamped with her smell, and deeply slept. Because for that one night I’d craved the security of childhood, the time long ago when my husband, Andrew, and myself didn’t live like this, far removed from what shaped us, from our land, our sky, our heart.

  *

  On Elayn’s birthday, one English April, I bought a tree. A eucalyptus. Fifty pounds – Christ! – from Portobello Road. A sapling of silvery coltishness with rounded, juvenile leaves. It was startling with difference. Bought to celebrate the earth opening up to receive its springtime benediction, the air cracking open. Bought to plunge us home. Scent us back. The Australian native took to the sodden London soil and grew tall. Its rounded leaves sharpened into familiar slivers. Their colour, a faded blue-green; a striking contrast to the rich English greens all around them. Just as Elayn was always a striking contrast to the world around her.

  Occasionally, throughout the yearning years, a gum leaf would be plucked and crushed and held under my nose, just like I used to as a child. Breathed in deep. Brimming with memories of home. Of living under the great thumb of nature and your skin drinking in the light like the desert with rain. And brimming with the memory of Mum. The good times. The essential, repairing times that were craved, always craved. Because when we were good I felt better.

  *

  Elayn loved the row of porcelain lanterns. It was intended that the children would make some for her, too. We never got around to it; they were always too beautiful and we kept them for ourselves. Our tight little family of six, our tight little world, and Elayn on the edge of it. So much guilt. The elderly, pushed to the edge of our lives. In the great rush of our lives.

  *

  I had two grandmothers, Lexi and Win. Both lived to one hundred and the family fully expected Elayn to do this also; our women were strong. My mother had several decades of living left in her; her vivacity the outward sign of it. She never allowed herself to be rubbed out, erased. By men, by other women, by life. Until this. Whatever this is.

  *

  As I go through Elayn’s address book and break the news over and over – but not the nub of it – I become painfully conscious there are so many gaps in her back story. It was all to come, all; we had plenty of time for the telling until of course we didn’t. And as I mine Elayn’s address book for clues I marvel at the secrets of her existence. This slim volume, like a tiny vault, guarding a hidden life.

  An address book that is a map of being. If only it could be deciphered. To reconstruct Elayn with repairing threads of gold. An address book alive with secrets. It contains the numbers for six different lawyers, a famous television personality, a hotline for the Victims of Child Abuse. What? Elayn’s parents are dead as are her two brothers, which means much of a past life lost. A watching dog inside me, patiently waiting for answers. I cannot bear the corrosiveness of uncertainty, have never been able to deal with it.

  *

  Elayn had always existed vividly in the present. I was never curious enough about her past. What child is? Do we ever really know our parents – as women, as men – rather than as mothers and fathers? The richness of their other lives, beyond us. Perhaps we don’t want to know them too well for the truth would be too painful to bear; that they had unknown existences, desires, impulses; that we were not, perhaps, at the centre of their world. Actually.

  *

  Un-maternal mothers do exist. They should not be judged. And they, like all mothers, treat various children differently within the family dynamic. Which is why this is my story and not Paul’s, nor my oldest brother, Mark’s, who was not with us during the first fortnight of Elayn’s death. Elayn presented herself differently to all of us. I cannot speak for my siblings. They knew a different Elayn, as did all her friends. Their Elayn is not mine nor mine theirs.
I barbed her, by my mere existence. I have always struggled to understand why. Few of her friends would know this.

  Kafka said he wrote to close his eyes. But you can also write to open them.

  *

  Sometimes, within a pit of fury, Elayn spat out to my younger, vulnerable self what felt like the arrowed truth: ‘Everyone hates you.’ ‘You’re so ugly.’ ‘You have no friends.’ Yep, she knew the Achilles heel. My vulnerability as a child was no deterrent for her. She knew how to reduce like no other, as mothers do. But this betrays the complexity of the woman. Of course I recall the flung words yet Elayn was so much more than that; as we are all so much more than our worst selves. But that particular side of her was what was recorded in my journals in the heat of the hurting, from the age of fifteen onwards. It’s before me now in furious, tear-stained scribblings.

  The writer’s chip of ice. Even then, as a teenager. Elayn knew it and was afraid of it. For the family as much as herself.

  *

  Samuel Johnson wrote that his life was one long escape from himself. My life was one long escape from my mother, from the woman she wanted as a daughter. In adulthood I lived in a lot of places far away that were resolutely not ‘home’. Nowhere near the flinch of that. Until the end. The final five years of Elayn’s life when I returned after decades of gypsy wandering. To deal with my past. Or not.

  Unglued, yes. Perhaps that was her intention. Take that, and that. And my life feels as if it has been in rehearsal for now. This motherless, anchorless time.

  *

  Paul and I are freshly adulted and we do not want this. It hurts, for both of us, to be in this place. Everything is upended, it all feels too late. This narrowing family, this unquiet air, as our little family shrinks to its huddled few.

  And in the thick of it, the yearning, home-sore. Needing to get back to my little teapot of a house and its enveloping warmth. Wanting to stay bunkered for a while, for what feels like months, years, in some necessary ritual of mourning, sheltered from the tug and the pull of the world. Wanting to get back to before. Hiding from the future. From police questions. From the ramming curiosity of the neighbourhood. From my four children most of all. What happened, who is to blame? If anyone, if all of us. ‘How did Nonna die, Mum?’