The summer Mum died, I found a little flat to rent near her cottage so I wasn’t too far away to sort out the paintings and belongings before the landlord rented her property to someone else. He gave me three months to do this on account of Mum having lived there for twenty-two years.
Once everything had been sold or donated, I got myself a job as a waitress in an Irish pub for a few months before being taken on at Stokers. It was the perfect time for it to happen for two reasons; one being that I had been truly terrible at waitressing; messing up orders, dropping glasses, and regularly phasing out. Sometimes I’d come to after a rough shake of my shoulder, and I’d find myself staring into the kitchen’s sink or at a readied order, already going cold.
The insurance job, though just an admin role, had the appeal of being steady hours, a steady wage and a steady stream of three or four simple tasks on loop every day. It didn’t even occur to me that this might not suit everyone until two of the new intake left after the first week without telling anyone, and the remaining three stayed on for another month but did so with their heads bowed in misery.
Between the restaurant and starting at Stokers, I didn’t see Aubrey for a few months. She moved home to Inverness, just as I’d hoped to do with Mum. She still messaged me every day, but it was a relief that she wasn’t around. My days were full of doing, doing, doing, and the thought of stopping to talk it all through was unbearable. Just not possible. Besides, the tone of her messages had changed so that they didn’t always sound like the Aubrey I needed. She often sent me quotes from strange political websites and questions out of the blue about animals and souls and even artificial intelligence, but if I’m honest I just didn’t care. What did those things matter now? From a distance, a squirrel in a tree is just a squirrel, whether it’s stitched together or born. It’s still out of reach. Aubrey was blurring reality with science fiction and I was too frustrated to draw the line for her, so instead I tried to be polite, filling my replies with the quizzical emojis I thought she wanted. But as time went by, it was easier to mark her messages as unread and store my phone somewhere out of sight.
By Christmas that year, the hills and lochs had offered all they could to Aubrey, and she wanted to be part of the world again. She found a flat to rent a ten-minute drive from me, and bagged a full-time job in a music shop, one of those little places often found down some steps, where they sell old LPs and second-hand record players. She settled right into it, even bringing her guitar to work sometimes and tuning the strings behind the counter.
At first, she wanted to meet up a lot but I hadn’t the time, and it took many requests from her and firm answers from me before she started to respect my balance. Still, it was never the same. Aubrey was different. I don’t know if it was those few months in Inverness or what, but she seemed so much more pushy, always getting at me to try new things, meet new people, and “move out of my comfort zone”.
One time she even booked a last-minute weekend away for us in Edinburgh without telling me. The hotel, the train. Everything. While there, we’d be going zorbing, where you roll down a hill in one of those inflatable bags of air. When she told me, I just sat there, spaghetti sliding off my fork. After a pause in which she grinned and (I’m sure) self-congratulated, I told her there was no way. It was too last minute, and I had plans that I couldn’t cancel. She shook her head and went anyway, taking another friend in my place. I spent the weekend in the flat, hearing from no one. It was delicious time for me to be alone, scheduled in fair and square.
Aubrey’s reckless activities worried me a bit. She focussed so much on the peripheries that she never could see what was in front of her. But believe it or not, I sometimes got the feeling that I frustrated her. I never saw it coming until I’d already done something that she deemed to be wrong. It always happened when we trod old ground.
“Have you visited her?” Aubrey said, her voice slow. “Out there?”
Mum’s ashes were mixed into sand on the Northumberland coast. I’d gone alone, and after watching the tide creeping in in its subtle way over the wet slick, emptied the canister unceremoniously over the side of a dune. Within a few seconds I already couldn’t tell where the ash stopped being ash and became sand, dead shells, and broken glass. I’d pulled Mum’s last feather from my pocket and rolled the shaft between my fingers before releasing it. Rather than it lifting on the wind like I thought it might, the cold gust dragged it slowly across the beach, never quite out of sight. I turned away and headed back to the car anyway.
“No,” I replied. “She’s not there. All the good bits are gone. I only scattered the parts that killed her.”
The bereavement staff never told you where the tissue donations went, just that there was some good to come out of the horror of death. Not to think of the body, but to think of how smiles and love would carry on. But the folders of information that you went through weeks, months later, gave guarded hints that the vast majority of donations didn’t go to people in need. And by then the NHS was deep in service to some early iteration of Easton
