“Bastard!” Mother said again and I couldn’t be sure if she meant me or the man in the black-and-white. “Both bastards!” she said as if to put me right.
I could not believe it. She was acting as if I had deliberately left her. In fact, the same stiff-faced expression that she’d used when I announced that I was leaving home to flat-share with friends, then when I told her I was getting married, now hardened her features. I’d witnessed similar solidifying countenances many times in the past, particularly when I enquired after my father, but they had never been quite as severe, nor as furious, as this one. This was bloody scary! This was Medusa on a bad-hair day.
I shuddered and wondered if it was my hideous death that had sent her over the edge. Then I reconsidered. She’d always been a little crazy, hadn’t she? I mean, not outright, frothing-mouthed kind of crazy, but… disturbed. A hoarder of hurt feelings, a miser as for as warm regard was concerned. Why did she hate me? What had I done? It wasn’t my fault that I got killed. I had problems dealing with it myself. Did she think I’d deliberately deserted her? Did she assume I was just following my father’s example? No, it didn’t make sense. No sane person would blame a son for being killed. Not unless they really were insane…
It came back to that again. I refused to admit it. She couldn’t have been mad. But tearing up my picture…? What was that all about? And I was beginning to guess who the grey-haired man in the black-and-white was.
In the mean time, as I was assessing the state of my mother’s mind, she was reaching down for the letters on the floor. Several of them slipped through her podgy fingers as she picked them up and I was in like a dog whose supper bowl is ready. I quickly scanned the names and checked the addresses.
Every one of the aged envelopes bore my name and our old address except for two which still had my name, although the “Master” had been dropped, and this current address. What the hell was Mother doing with them and why hadn’t she passed them on to me? It didn’t make sense. What reason could she have for keeping them to herself? They hadn’t even been opened.
Call me thick, but it did eventually dawn on me who had written and had kept on writing to me over the years. The old black-and-white photograph, torn but not thrown away—until now, that is, the letters addressed to our previous home, and then to Mother’s current one, the house I had shared with her through the early teenage years. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to work it out. The picture was of my father; the unopened letters were from him.
Oddly, I didn’t feel rage towards my mother. A huge sadness descended on me, though. How could she do it? All right, even if he had deserted us, run off with some other woman for all I knew—Mother would never speak of it, preferring to let my own imagination do its worst—he was still my dad. Even if he was the vilest man on earth, I still had the right to know him and judge for myself. Really, how could she do it?
I screamed “No!” as she began to tear up the letters, methodically, one by one, dropping the remnants into the bin by her side, and I tried to grab them, but of course, my scrabbling hand touched nothing. I beat on the carpeted floor with the heel of my fist in angry frustration, as if the noise alone would stop her. Naturally, there was no noise. I could have wept, I could have screamed my frustration over and over again. But all I could do in the end was watch.
I remembered the drawings and paintings of mine, the long essays in exercise books, short stories meant for my eyes only, all those personal treasures—treasures to me!—which she had blindly, thoughtlessly, thrown into the dustbin, never letting me know until it was too late and the refuse had been collected, never asking me. I hadn’t hated her then, but I did now.
What had I been to her all those years? A son, or her possession? Had she never felt any real true love? If so, she would have talked to me, she would have confided in me. She would never have sulked every time I made plans of my own. It was the natural thing for offspring to stretch their wings, to learn for themselves, and finally to leave the nest, so why had she never accepted that? Why had she never welcomed Andrea as my wife? Why was she so aloof towards her grandchild, Primrose? Was she so selfishly wrapped up in her own ways and woes that there wasn’t room for others in her chilly heart? But the prime question kept stalking me.
Was she nuts?
Terrible things to think about your own mother, I know, but remember what I’d been through. Murdered most foully, witness to my wife and daughter’s grief, lost and alone without a body to call home. Who could blame me for being in a bitter frame of mind?
Those letters were from my father and she had kept them to herself for reasons of her own. Skunk he might have been, but a kid needs to have some knowledge of its old man. And maybe he wasn’t quite as rotten as she’d said. I’d heard only her side of the story. Years of poison. But now a brittle glimmer of doubt had opened up in my mind. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t the swine she’d always led me to believe.
One by one she gathered up the letters that had fallen from her clutches, tearing each of them with growing vigour—and anger. By now the thunderous look on her face would have turned cream sour, the hateful beam of her eyes would have paralysed rabbits. Spittle glistened on her lips and there was a drool at one corner of her mouth.
“Bastard!” she repeated again and again, and I wasn’t quite sure if she meant the author of those letters or me. Better to think she meant the former, but it was still shocking. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected visiting Mother—deep mourning or stoic fortitude—but it certainly wasn’t this.
“Bastard!” Rip.
I stood and gazed down at her hunched shoulders, her spiteful hands and frighteningly hard face, shaking my head with a different kind of sadness than before. This was a pitying melancholy, the anger in me held tight, restrained by the pity itself. Her head seemed to vibrate with her displeasure, the tangled “snakes” quivering as if truly alive. I wanted to leave, but stayed rooted to the spot. Her behaviour was almost mesmerizing.
“Bastard!” Rip.
Then a word I would never in a hundred years have imagined my mother using.
“Cuntcuntcuntcunt…” Over and over.
At least it broke the spell. I’d backed off, over to the other side of the room, my startled eyes fixed on her as she dropped the strewn letters, picking up pieces and tearing them into even smaller pieces. What in God’s name had happened to Mother? Had my death driven her over the edge, finally broken through that old, cold reserve she had always worn like a self-protective mantle? Or was this the true Mother, the monster lurking behind the respectable and reserved woman she showed to the rest of the world? Abruptly, I realized I didn’t want to witness any more, and with this thought, I left my mother’s home…
… To find myself beside my own corpse.
It was a stark, miserable room, with off-white tiles from floor to ceiling and frosted-glass windows on two sides. There were work counters filled with bottles, jars, bowls and various kinds of metal instruments all around the walls, with cupboards and single drawers beneath them, glass-fronted cabinets above; these were crammed with more bottles and compounds, most of them brightly labelled and the only cheer in this gloomy place. When I say gloomy, I mean in aspect—two long fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, but their brightness merely seemed to accentuate the unflinching drabness of the place.
Nearby was a round glass container of pinkish liquid standing on top of a cream-coloured box with dials and switches, two clear plastic tubes running from it. It resembled a drinking-fountain, the type you get in American offices, but because of the colour of the liquid inside I surmised that it was an embalming machine, because I knew I was in some kind of mortuary. Close to it on the counter was a tray filled with body plugs and eye caps, the latter obviously used to keep eyelids closed, and next to that an open jar with make-up brushes. Further along was a sink and swivel-headed tap, more jars and metal containers filling the worktops alongside and the shelves that ran round two sides of the room. A cushioned stool on wheels stood in one corner, while a small-wheeled utility trolley with two metal shelves, and a drawer beneath the lower shelf, was positioned next to a rectangular white porcelain table with raised lips around its edges and a drainage hole at one end. There was another table a few feet away from the first and both were identical and anchored to the tiled floor by broad central pillars; the only difference between them was that the former also held my cadaver. It was covered up to the hips by a green surgical drape, and my head was supported by a block behind the neck. Behind that was a water tap with a short hose attachment.