Counting my bathroom trips through the night, I eventually raised the post-massage tally to eleven. As for input, after biryani and beer in the Indian restaurant, there was still a tea to go, a coffee and a can of Coke. I would also smoke a cigarette before the night was out, but that’s by the by. The can of Coke came from the hospice’s automatic dispenser in the visitors’ lounge to the left of reception, a Wi-Fi hotspot. Where exactly that left me on input and output at the end of the day, I had no idea. Whether my bladder was bursting, but unable to pass water, because hopelessly silted up, or whether, to the contrary, it was squeezed quite dry, but still urgently determined to pass water that wasn’t there, perhaps due to some sad overproduction of adrenalin, I have no idea. The sums are beyond me. You have a body and you can’t even say whether there’s more going out than coming in, or vice versa. Never mind the stuff that goes in and out of your brain, one way or another. In any event, of all the visits to the bathroom that day, the tenth definitely took the biscuit for the most frantically miserable.
Arriving at my mother’s door, which the nurse had quickly pulled closed behind her to speak to me, I was surprised to see there was a nameplate on it. The effect was strangely formal, as if this were a managerial office in some corporate corridor. MRS MARTHA SANDERS, the plate said. My mother had at last been recognised as an important person.
‘She is sleeping,’ the nurse announced. Her robust figure seemed to be guarding the way. She still hadn’t decided whether I was worthy to enter. ‘If you need to call us, there’s a buzzer by the bedside table.’
Still she stood.
I waited, trying to convey to the nurse my awareness of the solemnity of the situation, as if eager to pass muster.
‘If she should bring something up – you know, if she’s sick – there is a stack of disposable basins. On the trolley. And call us at once. There are always two of us on duty.’
Now that she was stepping aside at last, I stopped her and asked if I could spend the night beside my mother in the armchair, since I had nowhere to stay and it was already late and I would like to be close to my mother at this difficult moment, and she said of course I could. Perhaps she thought this was noble of me, because now she smiled. It was a wan, grown-up smile. It said, We all have to go through this, Thomas Sanders. You’re right to stay with your poor mother through the night.
‘I’ll bring you a blanket,’ she offered. ‘On my next round.’
‘I suppose you’d better tell me where the bathroom is, then,’ I said.
She pointed to the door at the end of the corridor on the right.
‘Thank you.’
Some ten hours, then, after receiving my sister’s urgent email – Mum’s sinking fast – I now stepped into the room where my mother had recently been asking after me.
The light was dim. Dark curtains were drawn over the patio. The armchair was there on the far side of the bed, as seen in my brother-in-law’s iPad photo. On the near side was an ordinary chair. I put my bag down by the wall and sat. What light there was came from a sort of big glass saucer high on the wall to my left. The warm air was heavy and sickly-sweet. Entering, I was immediately aware that I had passed into a completely separate world, as though stepping into a dark church from bright sunshine, or finding a deep cave along a sunny seashore. This was a different dimension. I sat and contemplated the figure on the bed.
To say my mother had aged, enormously, would not be enough. She was transformed. She had adapted, been adapted, to this other world. One with its darkness and heaviness. The bed had two guardrails. Painted pale yellow. She was flat on her back, head and shoulders propped up a little. The blanket, tucked tight as a straitjacket, was a thick felty mauve and came up almost to her neck, where it was folded over with a starched white sheet. The arms, in a pale nightdress, lay leaden on top. The right arm, further from me, was tubed up to a drip; the left, grossly swollen, clutched the buzzer at the end of its wire, as if ready, even in sleep, to call the nurse. Her face was not white, or drained of colour. It was a bruise of mottled blues and greys, but pleated with wrinkles so fine as hardly to seem skin at all; more like a shrivelled fruit fallen from a tree. Her mouth was open and slack and, with her false teeth out, the lips had fallen in; they were gone, as though darkness inside were dragging the flesh down into itself. Her thin grey hair had turned oddly yellow and gave the impression someone had tugged it back hard, stretching the forehead and forcing the skull up and out. But most of all, Mum looked larger than I remembered her. The head was bigger, the neck thicker, the body bulkier and heavier. She was swelling up. As I sat down, the open mouth sucked in air with a sharp snoring shudder that shook the shoulders and was followed by a distinct gurgling sound.
At once I felt I had to wake her. I had to speak to her. At the very least, exchange a glance of recognition. What was the point, really – and my impatience, rather than subsiding now that I was beside her, actually increased – what was the point of my coming so urgently to see my mother, if she were to die the moment I sat down beside her? To become mere material, before anything was said. Because on seeing her, I was convinced she must die at once. Already she seemed nothing but numbed and bruised flesh. Why else had they put the plaque on the door? Did they use the same plaque, I wondered, on the box that would carry her out of here? A sensible economy. You got the plaque when they knew you were going. You swelled up to be ready for death. To split open like a pod. And she had been asking for me. The nurse had said so. Still compos mentis, she had wanted me to come. If she woke, some simple greeting and farewell could be spoken, even if she then went straight back to sleep. Even if she died before waking again. Some contact would have been made. She would know I had come. I hadn’t abandoned her.
Sitting by her side in the dim emergency light opposite the dark curtains drawn across the patio and the pink birdbath that, thanks to my brother-in-law’s iPad, I knew were out there in the rain, I slipped my hands between the yellow bedrails and took my mother’s hand. The position of the upper rail forced me to lower my wrist rather unnaturally, so as to come to the bed and her hand from underneath it. Alternatively I could have dropped my hand over the rail. I tried. But this was unnatural too, forcing the hand vertically down on the bed. It was hard to find a comfortable position in which to hold my mother’s hand. So let there be discomfort, I thought.
‘I’m here, Mum,’ I said.
Then I remembered the text message that had just arrived on my phone. Text messages are no respecters of time or place, or different dimensions. Who was it from? One of the children, perhaps, needing the hospice address, or Elsa. Or Deborah again. Or even David. We always spoke when I was in the UK. I withdrew my hand and checked the phone. It was a message from Orange to tell me my credit was low. ‘Top Up now and win two tickets to the Premier League game of your choice.’ Then, exactly as I was returning the phone to my pocket, it began to ring. Its trill sounded obscenely loud, and somehow altered, in the dark room. Everything was altered here. Deborah Seymour. She still has that name on my mobile. I declined the call, but did not want to turn the phone off in case my children tried to get in touch. Or Elsa. I texted Deborah: ‘Mother taken urgently to hospital. Can’t meet tonight.’
The phone back in my pocket, I slipped my hand through the bars again, took Mother’s hand in both mine and squeezed gently. My mother always had rough, raw, rather large hands. If I think of them now, I see their redness plunged in cake mix or bread dough, or chopping carrots, or pulling weeds. Doing things, anyway. But that night they were cold and swollen and, when I squeezed, it was as though they had been filled with air or some liquid that couldn’t escape but moved around as I pressed. They felt wrong. This was the woman, I thought, to whom you once said, ‘You and your body are one, Mum, you are your body, your body is you.’ What would it mean to be this body now? She snored again, sharply, abruptly, and the cheeks seemed to be sucked even more deeply into the sunken mouth. A faint, sweet, cloying smell hung in the air. It was the smell she knew awaited her when we had spoken together four years ago.
‘Mum.’
I squeezed her hand and this time got a faint response, a faint returning squeeze.
‘Mum, it’s Thomas. I’ve come.’
Only my mother calls me by my full name, Thomas.
‘I’m glad to be here beside you, Mum.’
I pulled a hand out from under the bedrail and reached towards her face, smoothing hair that was already in fact too flat and smooth against the skin. Her forehead was damp and cold, but when I pressed ever so slightly there was a faint hum in the skin, a livingness still. I let my hand rest there and stared. I felt deeply sorry for my mother, sorry for her face, sorry for her eyes, her head, her skin, her body, sorry that all this had happened to her and now must go on happening until the final calamity; and at the same time I felt repelled, as if I really did not want to be touching the sick forehead and lank hair, I did not feel comfortable with my wrist so near the sunken toothless mouth, the strangely flabby neck. Doctors knew they had to put a finger up your butt, the Californian physio had told me, but at the same time they didn’t want to. They were repelled. I had no diagnostic duty to caress my mother’s face, but with all my heart I wanted to. I wanted to care for her, somehow, in some way. It seemed important. And I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. This wasn’t my mother of old. Hence perhaps it wasn’t ‘with all my heart’. There had never been many caresses in the Sanders family; that is the truth. Or not that I could recall. Can one trust one’s memory on these matters? ‘Mum,’ I whispered. ‘Mum?’ And I thought it hardly mattered whether I did or didn’t caress her face because she wasn’t awake anyway and wouldn’t sense either the affection or the repulsion. At least I wasn’t hurting her, I hoped. At least that. Unless these things can be sensed in your sleep. Unless the interpretation we normally put on the word ‘sensed’ is far too narrow and even in sleep one’s well-being, or unease, can be shifted by a touch or a soft word. We know so little about these things. I squeezed her hand again, this time with my left hand alone, and again had the impression, but perhaps it was only an impression, that the hand squeezed faintly back.
‘Mum,’ I said in a louder voice, but still soft. The silence in the room, or rather the soft electronic hum from some appliance or other, made my voice sound very harsh, even in its would-be softness. ‘The last thing you want to do is wake her,’ my sister had said.
‘Can you hear me, Mum? If you can, give two quick squeezes for yes.’ Immediately there was a little squeeze, much clearer this time. But only one.
I withdrew my hand from her face and sat watching her, trying to get used to this terrible transformation that had overcome her, the strangeness of my suddenly being in this dim, over-heated room beside this broken body. At the same time, the silly business of trying to communicate by asking her to squeeze my hand, when she was so evidently asleep, reminded me of a moment in Beckett’s novel Molloy, where Molloy says he communicates with his mother by knocking on her head, with different numbers of knocks for different requests. I had given Mother my copy of Molloy to read sometime in my teens. She would have been in her late forties then. Like the knitting and years later the Scrabble, it must have been an attempt on my part to find some common ground that Mother and I might meet on, some territory that was not the Wondrous cross or our Saviour’s blood. Or perhaps what I was asking for was some acknowledgement on her part of the legitimacy of my different interests, the different path I was choosing. Language. Books. I wanted my mother’s consent, I suppose, for not being the person she had always wanted me to be, as years later I had sought her consent for an eventual separation from my wife, without ever having the courage to mention the word ‘separation’, and indeed had sought my wife’s consent for a separation she did not want; yes, I had secretly, shamefully encouraged my wife to kick me out of the house, so as not to have to take this decision myself. As I had encouraged my mother to suggest that separation was the only solution, without ever saying, I want to separate. ‘Let this cup pass from me’ was one of the few prayers in the Bible I have ever really prayed in earnest. ‘How many people have to say it’s okay, before you will allow yourself to leave your wife?’ my shrink had enquired on perhaps our third or fourth encounter.
I had given my mother a copy of Molloy, I recalled now, sitting beside her bed, watching for signs of life, because I found the book hilarious and captivating. I wanted my mother to be captivated too, to be taken captive, by Beckett. This was my father’s habit of impulsively sharing his enthusiasms, impulsively wanting others to be captivated as he was, to fall thrall to the same spell. I didn’t even reflect that I was asking my mother to read a story about a man who sets out to find a mother who lives he knows not where, and with whom he can only communicate by knocking on her skull. In the darkened, overly warm room in Claygate Hospice I smiled and shook my head. How was it possible that I realised this only now? Only now, aged fifty-seven, sitting by my mother’s broken body in the year 2014, did I realise how inappropriate it had been, or no, how completely appropriate, to have given my mother a copy of Molloy in the year – what, 1971, 1972? Appropriate precisely because my mother had not remarked on the connection at all. And nor had I. At no point did mother and son mention to each other that they were sharing a book about a mother and son who couldn’t communicate. Or is that what literature’s for, to talk without talking? To substitute for talking. To escape talking. Rather she said she had been quite enjoying the novel – she offered me that sop – until she came to the part where Molloy talks about his excretory habits, and then she really did not want to read any further, because it was in bad taste and she really couldn’t understand why such a talented man as Samuel Beckett evidently was would want to talk about such things. It was vulgar.
I had been disappointed, but perplexed too, because I couldn’t recall much talk about excretory habits in Molloy, unless you count the passage where Molloy counts his farts, which is madly funny. It was one of the passages that had made me fall in love with the book. But Mother of course did not want these references to the body and its functions. Molloy’s farts had come between us, then. There was an unpleasant smell to the conversation. Mother never said a word when someone let off an unpleasant smell in the room. Even when we were young children. Farts couldn’t be uttered. It was odd, I thought, squeezing my mother’s hand again, and this time there was no response, it was odd that I had never given my father any of my books to read. Never given Dad Beckett. Never given him T. S. Eliot. Never given him Dostoevsky. I never tried to get my father along to White Hart Lane, or to the pub for a pint. Perhaps I sensed my father would not stand in my way. Or I didn’t care, one way or another. I did not need my father’s consent. I was fine with my father, however sharply we disagreed. It was my mother I had to seduce and never could. Mother was never impressed. Never impressed by a book. Never impressed by a girlfriend. Never impressed by a job, or even a prize. Yet she constantly seemed to invite me to try to impress her, to try to win prizes. I am eager to approve of you, Thomas, she seemed to say, if only you could convince me that you are worthy of approval. I am ready to pray with you, she said that summer, if only you would bend your knee.
‘Mum,’ I said again, and as I spoke a message buzzed on my phone.
I wouldn’t read it. I felt it was wrong for messages to penetrate this scene, as if we were both in church together. How different church would have been in my childhood if there had been mobile phones to take the boredom out of my father’s sermons, though it’s hard to imagine my parents would have stretched to giving their children mobile phones, even if they had existed in those church-mice days.
I wouldn’t read the message.
‘Are you awake, Mum?’ I repeated. I was worried about the coldness of the hand. Shouldn’t it be under the blanket? ‘Tom’s here.’ I tried to warm her, rubbed her fingers. ‘Thomas.’ Their squishiness was odd. It wasn’t normal blood and bone.
My eye strayed round the room. To the left, opposite the bed, there was some kind of bureaucratic regulation on the wall. But the lettering was too small to read in the dim light. Some kind of restriction, or warning. The low table by the armchair was strewn with magazines and chocolate bars. One half eaten. Mother loved chocolate bars, though it seemed unlikely she had done the eating here. My brother-in-law? Would he have left the bar unfinished?
On the other side of the bed was a service trolley, with water in a baby-bottle and various pieces of medical equipment. Those must be the disposable basins, I thought. Grey rectangular trays, like old egg boxes, but bigger, deeper. The drug pump was half hidden under the blanket by her shoulder and fed into her right arm. Presumably. It was good to think she was getting all the painkiller she needed. Then I saw that on the bedside table beside the phone, from which only hours ago she had spoken to my brother, there was a book, and I removed my hand from where it was still holding hers and reached across to see what my mother had been reading. The cover showed a crusader’s shield and an ancient sword laid across it, but rather than the historical romance you might have supposed, the antique lettering of the title read, What To Do When Faith Seems Weak & Victory Lost. By Kenneth E. Hagin.
Again the phone in my pocket vibrated with an incoming message. I put the book on my lap and pulled out the phone.
‘Really sorry about your mum. Things frightening here. Charlie psychotic. Please let me bring him to speak to you. Even ten minutes. When they have got her to sleep. Please, Tom. Need help. Don’t know who else to turn to.’
My daughter had texted. ‘Poor Gran. Arriving 11 tomorrow. Please send address.’
I sat in the chair and, with my left hand still holding Mother’s, turned a few pages of this unexpected book with my right. What To Do When Faith Seems Weak & Victory Lost. ‘In whom,’ read an opening quotation from Corinthians, ‘the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine upon them.’ So much for missing pronouns. And another verse, ‘Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.’
I shook my head. I have often wondered whether it wasn’t precisely my biblical childhood that gave me my vocation as a linguist; the only way out of madness was to concentrate on the language it was written in. Yet here was my mother on her deathbed in danger of becoming sane. So it seemed. Or at least looking around for props to shore up folly. When faith seems weak. Could Mum’s faith really be wavering, with her nametag already nailed on death’s door? One of the things that had alarmed me as I approached this visit was the fear that there would be a repeat of my father’s deathbed appeal for me to convert. ‘I would go to my grave happy,’ my father had said, perhaps a week before his death, ‘if you would return to the faith, Tommy.’ I did not want to go through that again, to have to disappoint the person I had come to comfort. Yet even worse somehow, I now realised, was the thought that my mother might lose her faith, in extremis. At the very last moment she might feel she really was nothing other than a decaying, flabby, stinking body. And my presence there, sitting quietly by her bedside, might remind her of all the arguments I had made out for this position, arguments that then seemed so sane to me, playing Scrabble together in her little house four years ago. Suddenly I felt an intense pang of nostalgia for Mother’s little house, for its tiny bathroom and treacherously steep staircase. I had felt safe in that house. It was a low-church house, plain and poor and sensible. Safe from my crumbling marriage, safe from the demands of my then girlfriend. Protected. At ease. And what had I given my mother in return? I had sought in every way to undermine her faith, to undermine her house. All at once it seemed crucial that my mother make it through to the end with her faith intact. Four years ago I had had a vague and pious concern that my mother should rediscover the body she had always disparaged and ignored, always subordinated to Christian propriety. Now it seemed essential that she go on ignoring and subordinating her body to the end. Let Christian propriety triumph. The last thing I wanted now was for Mother to tell me I had been right.
Holding her hand, my wrist twisted by the safety rail, I began to dread the mental anguish I might be witness to when she woke up. Certainly my father had been horribly anguished when he had told me he would go happy to his grave if only I would acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ. I was shaken. Until those very last days Father had always granted me complete liberty of belief. So why did my convictions, or lack of them, have to be at the centre of attention in his dying? Was it that a gesture on my part would have shored up his own faith? Perhaps everyone’s belief is challenged with the approach of death. And denial is definitely easier when done together. The more people are Christian, the easier it is for Christians to go to their graves. The more people clap for Tinker Bell, the more Tinker Bell exists. Certainly a marriage can last for eternity, if both partners deny it died a decade ago and hasn’t even been decorously embalmed. My mother, I thought, was about to wake in anguish over the last-minute crumbling of her faith and, sitting there by her bed, I would be partly guilty for that pain.
‘Mum,’ I said. My right hand had dropped the book to return to her forehead. When faith seems weak, the title said. Perhaps Mum had been persuaded by that ‘seems’. If she had had the foresight to bring the book with her to the hospice, it was because she intended to be so persuaded. Perhaps her wobble had already been drawn into a narrative of temptation and overcoming. Wasn’t wobbling part of the story of being faithful? Even Jesus was tempted. Even Our Saviour cried, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother has gone beyond, I thought.
‘Mum,’ I repeated. ‘I’m so glad I made it here.’ I spoke in my softest voice. In the end I just wanted everything to be okay.
My mother snored sharply. Her white nightie, I noticed, was damp with sweat around the neck. Again something gurgled in her throat, pulling the lips deeper into the mouth. The neck tightened to swallow, and the eyes screwed up. She was suffering. Abruptly I stood up, walked out of the room and down the corridor to the bathroom. ‘She’s in a hospice,’ I texted, waiting for the pee to seep through reluctant sphincters. Who cared whether Deborah realised I had been lying before? ‘In Grange Road, Claygate. Text when you arrive and I’ll come outside for a few minutes.’
Later that night I would be recalling this as the ninth pee since the massage. My fingers were shaking. The pee came in fits and dribbles. The bathroom, clunkily equipped for wheelchairs, was full of depressing requests to respect other users. There was urine on the seat, a puddle on the floor. Reams, I thought, could be written about how people behaved in public lavatories. Reams no one would ever want to read. And I was struck by the thought that after the word ‘public’ one would never say ‘bathroom’. Public bathrooms. Though once one used to say public baths, and even municipal baths.
‘Do you remember,’ I began, on returning to my mother’s room – and again I was impressed to see the plate, MRS MARTHA SANDERS, on the door, and disturbed to smell the cloying smell of cancer as I approached her bed – ‘when you used to take us to Derby Baths, Blackpool? And Squires Lane Baths, Finchley? My eyes would weep with the chlorine. Do you remember? They were good times, Mum,’ I said.
Mother never joined us in the pool. She did not want to appear in a swimming costume. She didn’t want us to see her body. Or maybe she just didn’t enjoy pools. I don’t know. But she took us to them anyway and dried our ears and gave us oxtail soup from a Thermos. She enjoyed seeing us in pools perhaps. The bodies of her young children. In baths. ‘I remember,’ I told her, ‘my head on your tum while you towelled my hair.’
I was holding my mother’s hand again. She was snoring more lightly now. I might as well be talking to myself, I thought. Why was I trying to feel these emotions? As if they were a duty. Sentiment an imperative. Why try to feel warm and sad? Just get up and go. Now the wrinkles at the corners of her lips trembled. Her stomach lifted and fell, the same stomach that fifty years ago had held me to itself, towelling roughly, hurting my ears. Mother was generous, but never gentle. Maybe she just wasn’t aware of roughness and gentleness. What is the point of remembering these things? The finger rubbing vigorously in the ear through the towel to make sure all was dry. I wasn’t helping her, being here. I wasn’t helping myself. Mother was happier when we went into the countryside, I thought. And all at once I recalled something that hadn’t seen the mental light for decades. ‘You remember, Mum,’ I began again, ‘that pond called the Figure of Eight? Beyond Leyton Primary School. When you bought me a net to fish minnows and we tried to keep them in an old kitchen sink in the garden?’ How tolerant she had been, I thought now, of my pet obsession. Me far more than my brother and sister. I had to have pets. Why was that? The fish, the frogs, the mice, the hamsters, the guinea pigs, the rats, the rabbits, the dogs. All dead now, of course.
Flowers too. At some point, walking in the countryside with Mother, I had started collecting wild flowers, pressing them and taping them in the pages of an exercise book. Bizarre to remember this now. Why had I done that? To please her? Did I hope Mother would be pleased to have a son interested in wild flowers? A son who could knit? Or was I really interested in them? I couldn’t recall. Certainly I’m not now. Who gives a thought about wild flowers? But I do remember how quickly they drooped and died. It was astonishing. So much more quickly than daffodils or roses. You picked them and they drooped and died. A matter of seconds. ‘You told me,’ I said, holding my mother’s hand, though I might as well have been talking to the bedpost, ‘that everything wild dies at once, when you take it out of its proper world.’ Certainly the attempt to create a tiny pond in our Blackpool garden with the help of an old kitchen sink was an abject failure. Barely a day passed before the minnows were upended on the surface, or trapped slimily pale in the weeds. Already the water smelled of death. A low-tide smell. Different from cancer. Different from farts. When the frogs died, their back legs opened wide. They lost their froggy shape. There was no talk of Paradise. They were just matter. Squidgy smelliness. Everything dies; that was the lesson of pets. Everything dies and loses its shape. I didn’t say this out loud, in case somehow she might hear. Especially pets stolen from the wild. Yet I was definitely saying it to her, in my head. Shape is life, Mum. The salamanders and that broken-winged blackbird. They died in a flash. Far sooner than a well-bred dog or cat. Lose your place in the world and you lose your shape, your life. Removed from pond or hedgerow, these creatures couldn’t give up the ghost fast enough. Why hast Thou forsaken me? Only the mice thrived. White mice in the old vicarage boiler room in Cricklewood. They gnawed through their wooden cages and escaped into a neo-Gothic maze of rotten pipe-lagging. Which clown had sold us thin plywood cages for white mice? They bred and stank of life as powerfully as the minnow-pond had stunk of death. Amazing all the droppings. Till Dad got them exterminated – remember, Mum, while I was off on the Youth Club house party? Dad had the mice exterminated. I never saw their bodies.
‘Thomas?’
It was her voice.
‘Thomas, is that you?’
Her eyelids were still closed, but trembling. Without her teeth, the voice was a slurred whisper.
‘Mum! I just arrived. I’m so glad to be with you.’
‘Thomas.’ She sighed. ‘Of course.’ She breathed deeply. ‘How silly of me. I am sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Pain,’ she muttered. The head shook from side to side.
‘Shall I call the nurse?’
She didn’t respond. The mauve blanket had her neatly tucked in almost to the shoulders. Above that, the white nightie was damp with sweat, the head was lumpy and grey. The hair was yellow.
‘Thomas!’
Suddenly Mother pulled herself up, wrestled herself upright, the way she had once wrestled herself out of her recliner.
‘Thomas!’
Like a child coming out of a nightmare, she forced herself up onto her elbows. Her eyes opened and found mine. She seemed alarmed.
‘Mum. I’m so glad I made it.’
Why did I keep saying that?
‘If only …’
She stopped, staring at me.
‘Oh, Thomas, if only …’
I stood and leaned across the bed to kiss her. Even as I did so, I felt a text message arrive in my pocket.
‘Mum.’
Her mouth opened, to greet, or speak. It was filled with blood. Black blood poured out.
Looking back, you would have to say I moved fast. In a flash I was round the bed and grabbing the grey egg-box basins. Before the second jet rushed out, I had one under her chin and a hand behind her head.
‘Mum. Mum. Keep calm. Hang on.’ Holding the basin in one hand, I found the buzzer with the other. I pulled it from her hand and pressed.
‘Mum.’
Maybe blood was not so bad as the words I had feared.
Her eyes were still fastened on mine. Veiny, bloodshot, but still very blue, very alive, very determined. ‘If only.’ In extremis, my mother was willing something, willing something against the tide. She vomited again. I put down one basin on the bedside table and shifted another under her mouth. The blood was black, and frothy. Now two nurses were in the room with rubber gloves.
‘You had better leave for a little while,’ they said.