There’s a blank space after that, where my memories should be. The last thing I remember is hearing Daphne’s key in the door, and the scrape of Simon’s chair as he stood up. Crazy how your brain just slams the shutters on things it can’t cope with.
I have a half-formed memory of Daphne standing over me in the bathroom later that evening, when Simon had gone, trying to pull my hands away from my face. And I couldn’t understand why until I looked in the mirror and saw the bloody red tracks my fingernails had been leaving.
But the rest of the night is a blank. Which is strange, because I know I didn’t sleep. The next thing I really remember is the sound of the rain on the window the following morning. By then, the shock and violence had given way to a kind of numb, broken emptiness, and I lay on the sofa, feeling like I was underwater, while Daff called the travel agency to tell them I wouldn’t be coming back in.
I went round to Mum’s house a couple of days later. The house I grew up in, the house I’m in right now. I don’t know why. I just had to. Daff didn’t want me to go alone, so I lied – told her I was meeting Simon there.
As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was a mistake. The place smelled of her. How could her smell still be here, when she wasn’t?
I didn’t get further than the hallway before I broke down. Above the hall table, there was a photo of the two of us. We’re on the beach at Whitley Bay, near Newcastle – one of Mum’s favourite places on earth. I’m fourteen or fifteen, mugging at the camera from beneath an unfortunate Britpoppy fringe. Mum has her arm wrapped tightly around me, and her blonde hair is whipping about wildly in the sea wind. But through it all, you can still see her bright smile and her blue-green eyes, sparkling with laughter and life.
I pulled the picture off the wall and crumpled onto the floor, my back pressed up against the front door. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at it, crying so hard that my entire body was shaking. Because it hit me then, quite suddenly, that this was real. That this nightmare was actually happening. That my mum was gone, and something inside me was broken and might never be fixed.
Her phone was still on the hall table – she was always forgetting to take it out with her – and I sat there calling it over and over again, crying harder and harder each time her voicemail kicked in. She sounded so real, so alive. How could she be gone? It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t.
The days after that were a blur. There were forms to fill in – endless fucking forms. There were trips to the funeral director’s office. I would sit there next to Simon in that bleak little room on Ealing High Road and think how absurd it seemed to be discussing things like flowers and food at a time like this. Mum was dead, the ground was cracking beneath me, and here I was talking about whether I preferred lilies or chrysanthemums. What the fuck did it matter? What did anything matter now?
The funeral itself I remember in random stop-motion snatches. The unreal horror of the coffin behind the podium. The way Uncle Simon’s face seemed to collapse as he stood up to give the eulogy. I was supposed to speak, too. I was meant to read a poem – a Walt Whitman thing, one of Mum’s favourites. But a couple of days before, I’d decided I couldn’t do it, for fear of breaking down in front of everyone.
I’ve always regretted that.
I remember staring around the church while Simon was speaking, to see if my dad had bothered to show up. I’d been so certain that he would. That he would step back into my life today, when I needed him most.
But no.
When the service finished, even through the blinding misery, I felt a violent stab of anger at him for that. Of all the shitty things he’d done to her – to us – that seemed to be the shittiest.
The weeks and months after that all bled into each other to form one long, airless vacuum. I pushed everything inwards: tried to nail a brave face on and keep moving. I guess I thought that by going through the motions, things would eventually get back to normal. But they didn’t.
Daff tried to help, to get closer to me, to console me. I lost count of the nights she came home early, or the days she took off work. She’d grip my hand and pull me close, and beg me to talk to her – or talk to someone else: a friend, a therapist, a bereavement counsellor. But every time, I just pushed her away. I didn’t see how talking could change anything. Talking wouldn’t bring Mum back.
I went back to temping. A different office, but equally dull and monotonous. And every night, after eight hours of typing and smiling and making small talk, I would go into the grotty public toilets by the Tube station near work and cry until my throat was raw.
Because I think it was only then, in those weeks that followed, that I really started to process it all. Mum had been the one constant in my life. She had always been there, and now, suddenly – inexplicably – she wasn’t. She was my only real family. And she was gone.
I never even got to say goodbye. Or, more importantly, to apologise. Because the last time I’d seen her … well, it didn’t even bear thinking about. That was the worst thing – the thing I never told anyone, not even Daphne. The last things I ever said to Mum
