Carrying her drink through to the sunroom, Laura sits and looks out into the black night. Having kept the lights off on purpose, so as to see the stars through the glass, she is thankful to see that the clouds are mercifully few and the stars are there, like little diamonds on a bed of black velvet.
‘Overthinking again?’ She hears her mother’s voice as clearly as if Kitty really were in the room with her.
‘Always,’ Laura says. ‘It’s hard to make sense of the world when you’re not in it.’
‘Ah now, you can do it. You’ve been doing it for a year. I raised you to be a strong, independent thinker.’
‘Who still needs her mammy,’ Laura says. ‘It’s really rather selfish of you to persist with this whole being dead thing.’
‘I know. I’m all about “me” these days.’
Laura can hear her mother’s laugh, her sharp sarcasm, the way they would banter back and forth even when things were awful. Even when Kitty was in the worst pain imaginable, and they knew that time was starting to run out, they still managed to find something to laugh and joke about. Laura would tease her mother that she would make sure she was laid out in her coffin with no make-up and whatever chin hairs that had managed to survive the chemo still on show.
Kitty had in return vowed to haunt her daughter from the afterlife forever. Laura would give anything for that to be true. She’s found herself quoting Heathcliff’s famous lament fromWuthering Heights: ‘Haunt me, then! Be with me always—takeany form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!’
She knows it isn’t really an abyss, and instead a really nice semi-detached house in the suburbs. But it still feels it has an abyss quality sometimes.
If anyone were to walk in on her having these chats with her dead mother they’d probably tell her it was time to up her medication. Laura will deal with that if and when the time comes, but for now, she likes these little chats. She’s not crazy – she knows they are not real. She knows she is talking to herself, but right now she doesn’t feel like she has anyone else to talk to. And she swears it’s her mother’s voice she hears talk back to her, grateful that her mind can still conjure it up so easily and so authentically even now.
‘I wish you were here,’ she whispers, looking up at the stars, wondering, not for the first time, if heaven even exists. It has to, she thinks, doesn’t it?
‘I am.’ She hears her mother’s voice as she pulls the woollen throw from the back of the sofa and curls up under it.
10
A SHAGGY DOG STORY
Becca
Daniel bounds enthusiastically into my mother’s house, caring not one single shiny poop that his paws are muddy and his fur soaked through to the skin. I do my best to get in behind him, trying to grab the towel that Mum has hung on the radiator in the hall ready to be used as a doggy containment unit while the worst of his muddy wetness is absorbed.
But Daniel is too fast, and too bouncy – much too bouncy for a dog of his advancing years should be, if the truth be told. Before I have time to trap him, he is in the centre of my mother’s ‘good room’ having left a muddy trail of disaster on her shaggy cream rug, and showering the rest of the room with the spray of a first-class doggy shake.
‘You wee fu?—’
‘Rebecca Louise Burnside, there is no need for swearing,’ my mother shouts from the kitchen. There is nothing wrong with her hearing, despite her age. When she spots Daniel doing thedamp zoomies around her cream sofa and chairs, she quickly revises her stance. ‘You wee fu?—’
‘Mother! There is no need for swearing,’ I reply as I manage to grapple Daniel, the very slippery spaniel, in a rugby hold and towel dry him into submission.
My mother just stands, mouth agape, looking at her be-muddied rug and sofa. She looks for a moment as if she might cry.
‘You made the fatal mistake of leaving the door to this room open,’ I tell her. ‘This one will always try to investigate the road less travelled. But don’t worry. I’ll put him in the kitchen and get cleaning in here. You won’t know anything untoward had happened by the time I’m done.’
A good session with the steam cleaner will work off some of the remaining adrenaline that is currently dilly-dallying through my bloodstream as if it doesn’t have anything better to do. This low-level anxiety is absolutely not my favourite.
‘Grand,’ my mother says. ‘You know where it all is. You know, maybe I should phone Emily and get her to come round. We could make another TikTok.’ She looks absolutely delighted with herself for coming up with that idea.
‘You know, cleaning videos do really well with the algorithm,’ she says. ‘You should see some of them. Awful business. Poor souls living in absolute squalor, and these ones come in and do free cleans and you wouldn’t know the place afterwards. Honestly, there’s something wrong with the world when vulnerable people can end up living in such filth.’
‘Are you sure they’re not just ordinary teenagers?’ I say, thinking of the squalor both my boys had lived in until about the age of seventeen when, suddenly and thankfully, they decided I had been right all along and it is more pleasant to live in a place that isn’t an actual biohazard.
‘Don’t be facetious, Rebecca,’ my mother says. ‘Those people are way beyond that.’ She sniffs the air, no doubt enjoying the aroma of wet dog that now permeates the place, and wrinkles her nose. ‘Maybe just get on with getting that dog dried off before the whole place starts to smell. I’ll worry about a TikTok another day – but Saul phoned me this morning to tell me all his friends were watching the one we made yesterday in Asda.’
Superb, I think, my inner voice dripping with sarcasm, as I try to gently encourage Daniel out of the good room and towards the kitchen. A repeated mention of ‘chicken’ does the trick.
‘He sent me the video last night,’ I tell my mother. ‘You both did a great job. I’d never have thought it was something you’d be interested in.’
I ignore the look of consternation on her face as I fish some chicken pieces out of her fridge and feed them to a now compliant Daniel.
