I found a small piece of map in the car the other day – ‘Cleobury Mortimer’, wherever that is – and laughed at a memory of her for the first time since she died. I know where the ripped piece came from; it was from when we went on holiday a year ago and we were in the car and lost and had been lost for a long time. I was sat in the back and I could feel the tension pouring off both of them. I tried to ignore it and kept my head down trying to duck under the argument-ready air. Dad kept glancing at the unfolded map sitting lazily on Mum’s knee and eventually snapped. He couldn’t hold it in any more. He shouted: she had the map and it was her job to direct, he had to concentrate on the driving. She could at least open the thing and make an effort. All she had to do was one bloody thing and she wasn’t bloody doing it. Typical. He finished. Silenced exploded in the car and he was already looking sorry for what he’d said. He stole a glance to see Mum’s reaction. She had been expecting the blame, I could tell, but not at this force or this volume. She looked straight ahead, hands resting on her knees. She was assessing the situation and planning her retaliation. After a few seconds she’d decided her move and acted. She lifted the map up in front of her, made a show of slowly unfolding it, and held it out wide between her hands like she was holding up a bed sheet. She tore it right down the middle and then ripped neatly and tidily until the map was a pile of tiny pieces. She gathered them together into one fist, taking her time, and then threw them into the back of the car. Dad’s gaze had been quickly alternating between the contours of the unknown road and Mum’s tearing hands. I could see that he wanted to protest, to tell her to stop, but somehow the words didn’t come. There was furious silence for about half a minute until Dad found his voice again and told her that now she was just being a bloody lunatic, we were in a strange part of the country without a map. Bloody brilliant. Bloody well done. I thought the shouting was really going to get going now and braced myself but before he got to the end of the sentence he started laughing. Mum sat with her arms crossed, staring straight ahead as he laughed and spluttered and apologised and tried to kiss her cheek and still drive the car along an unknown road. He had to cajole her for ages before she forgave him. She made him accept full responsibility for being lost and made him buy us an ice-cream each. Not for him, just me and her. She wasn’t really mad any more now either, it was just pretend mad, but she kept it up for a while anyway, so Dad knew that he was still on probation. He didn’t care, he was just happy to be forgiven. For months afterwards, even after Dad had cleaned out the car, we would still find tiny pieces of ripped map, stuck between seats or in corners of footwells. Mum said that we should have saved each piece as we found them and made a new road map of the United Kingdom and Dad said, after she’d left the room, that the way she read maps it probably wouldn’t make any difference.
I saved the piece of map in the back of my wallet. It was good to remember her and I thought about her all the time. I was scared I would forget what she looked like, how she moved and spoke and smelt. Sometimes it felt like her face was disappearing from my memory, like the images of her I held in my head were dissolving. To try and counter this I looked at photographs of her, but she was one of those people who look different in almost every picture ever taken and none of them were quite how I remembered her anyway.
The dreams of her though, they were the opposite; they were too real I suppose. They were worse than the nightmares and almost stopped me going to bed. When I was awake I missed her badly and it hurt, of course it did, but at least I knew the truth. The dreams muddled everything up. They gave me her back for a few minutes. My normal dreams have always been silly, colourful and weird, just like everyone’s dreams. I remember when I was a little kid and I dreamt that the school had been taken over by bright-red robots. We tried to fight them but we couldn’t win and someone said that it was pointless, a waste of time, so we made friends with them instead. Some of the robots became teachers and some of the smaller ones were pupils like the rest of us. I can still see it now; it’s stayed with me all these years. When I got older I would sometimes dream I was being chased down black streets by wild dogs and men with guns or that I was naked on the school playing field, desperately trying to hide from pointing fingers and laughing faces. I would toss and turn myself awake and after a second relief would flood through me and I would find a cool patch of pillow and fall back into sleep.
When I dreamt about Mum it was different. It would be simple everyday things. We would be walking through town on a Saturday morning, on our way to the butcher’s, or we would be in the supermarket and I would try and sneak more chocolate into the trolley and she would catch me and make me put it back on the shelf. Every last dull detail, every sound rang true, everything exactly as it was a few months before. That’s what made the mornings so horrible. If anyone ever invented a drug where you dreamt like that without ever having to wake up, it would sell faster than chocolate, heroin or booze.