‘In,’ she says, and my brain doesn’t connect with her words. I’m too caught up in panic. I look over at her and she takes her eyes off the road just long enough to this time shout ‘IN!’ at me. It’s terrifying enough to jolt my body into doing what it needs to do to stay alive.
My stomach twists – deeply regretting my nuggetsandMcFlurry binge. I cannot be sick. I don’t have time to be sick. There is no way we are stopping this car until I am outside my mother’s house, so if I do so happen to be sick I will have to sit here covered in it and that won’t be pleasant for anyone.
It’s impossible to stop my mind from racing, Will the ambulance be there when we arrive? Mrs Bishop maybe? Or will Mumbe there still, on her own, on the floor? In pain, or worse. No, Becca, donotthink of worse.
My breath comes back out of my body with a loud sob.
‘Becca, hold it together,’ Laura says, her voice steady and strong. It’s the only thing anchoring me to this moment, and to this place. Otherwise I know I’d be in full-on dissociation mode.
I gulp in another mouthful of air and feel Laura’s hand on my knee. ‘We’re almost there. You need to keep it together. Your mum needs you to keep it together. I know you want to fall apart but you can’t. This is not the right time. You need to settle yourself.’
‘Okay.’ I sniff.
‘Say it like you mean it,’ Laura orders. She’s actually pretty bloody scary when she’s in full on dom mode. God, I don’t need my brain to go there – to imagine Laura as a full-on dominatrix, cracking her whip and ordering grown men to ‘say it like you mean it’. It’s such a ridiculous image in this most horrendous of moments that I almost – almost – start to laugh. I’m existing between fear, my weird imagination and borderline hysteria.
I do as I’m told and just about hold it together, even when we turn onto my mother’s street and I see the outside of the houses illuminated by the flashing blue lights of an ambulance.
‘Breathe!’ Laura orders again. ‘Just breathe. In and out. Slow and steady. You know how. You’ve done it before.’
As she pulls into the side of the road, I see a paramedic jump out of the back of the ambulance and run back to the house, a red bag in hand, without so much as looking sideways.
‘I’m scared.’ The words are out of my mouth before I even realise I’m saying them, and I know I sound like a child but ultimately that’s exactly what I am. I am my mother’s child and she is my everything. Yes, she may drive me mad at times. She may do things I’ll neverunderstand, like climb into attics, or insist on over-feeding me every time I visit, or even make TikToks with her neighbour, but she is still my mother. She is still my anchor in a world that so often seems to move too fast. She has known me longer than anyone, loved me from before I took my first breath and she has always, always just been there. How am I supposed to cope if she just isn’t any more?
Roisin Burnside held me like I was still a child and soothed me when my marriage fell apart, and again when my daddy died. Even though she was floored with her own loss, she lay down beside me on the bed she had shared with him and held me until I stopped shaking.
All those cut knees, and summer colds, and winter tummy bugs she has nursed me through. All the heartache, and teenage drama, and new mother panic she has guided me through without judgement. Well, with a little judgement – but none of it unkind. All of it coming from a place of love and encouragement. The one person who has been in my life constantly. The first set of arms to hold me, the first person to tell me they loved me.
And now I’m sitting outside her house, with blue lights illuminating the night sky, and I have all these feelings bubbling up inside of me – a mixture of fear, and love and pre-emptive grief – and I’m not quite sure what to do with them.
‘Of course you’re bloody scared,’ Laura says. ‘It’s scary. But you have to try to push that aside for now. Okay? And see the bits you can’t push aside? I’m here to help you get through them.’
When I look at her, I see that she too has tears in her eyes. I’m immediately grateful for her love and support. I’m grateful for her being in my life and even when we are having a difficult time, questioning each other’s intentions, she is here for me nowand her support is unconditional. And all this must be like opening a vein for her, her own mother’s death still so raw.
‘Come on, love,’ she says, her voice soft as she reaches across and unbuckles my seatbelt as well as her own. ‘We need to go in.’
I nod and as she gets out of the car, I take a shaky but deep breath. We do indeed need to go in.
Offering up a silent prayer, which is admittedly quite cheeky of me given my status as an extremely lapsed Catholic, I open my own door, feet like lead, and try to get out, the cold, damp air pulling me from my spiral. I do need to be the grown-up, responsible one now. Mum will be relying on me not to fall to pieces.
Walking up the path to her house – a place I will always consider home – I see the front door is open and the hall lights are on inside – the big lights. This is not an ambient lighting situation, clearly. This is big, bright, harsh light required stuff, and my mum hates the big light. She will hate this, I think. She will hate all of this.
Laura’s hand slips into mine and she whispers to me to just take one step at a time. I can hear the buzz of urgent conversation. I hear beeps and the paramedics using that slightly too loud voice they use when talking to someone who isn’t quite fully conscious or fully aware of what is happening. Or someone who is already gone and who they are desperately trying to get back. They are calling her name, confirming that she is indeed the patient to the very tiny part of me that hoped – somehow – that this was all a mistake and Saul had read things wrong. That maybe she had just dropped her phone. It’s amazing what ridiculous bargaining a brain will do when it wants to be right, or wrong, about something.
‘Roisin, Roisin… now can you hear me?’ The paramedic’s voice rings out and my knees buckle, but I pull myself together, forcing myself to keep standing. Laura is right – this is not the time for me to fall apart.
Saul’s words come back to me. ‘Mum, we were on FaceTime chatting and she was telling me about her TikTok and then she went very pale, and her face looked funny. Like, droopy. I think she might’ve dropped her phone but then all I could see was the ceiling, and I heard a thud and she was moaning and trying to speak but it sounded strange. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t know what to do so I called an ambulance.’
My heart has sunk deeply into my boots, thudding its way down there at lightning speed. It was only because Laura heard Saul talking to me, and assured him we were on our way and it would be okay, that my poor son reluctantly ended the call, although not before making Laura promise to update him as soon as possible.
Popping my head through the living room door, not sure what exactly I will see, I offer yet another prayer apologising to God for the whole not believing in him thing. The part of me that thought I would run straight to my mother and grab her hand tightly – begging her to stay – was wrong it seems. It didn’t factor in my cowardice at what was unfolding.
Mrs Bishop is perched on the sofa in a cream-coloured quilted dressing gown, embroidered with delicate blue flowers. A pair of fluffy baby blue slippers are on her feet. The sturdy kind favoured by pensioners, which I’m starting to think I would like a pair of myself. The movement for comfortable footwear extends into slippers after all – or house shoes, as my granny called them.
Mrs Bishop’s normally perfectly set white curls are stickingout at all angles. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her looking anything less than perfectly presented. It’s unnerving. She looks extra small, and extra frail. When I get closer I notice she is holding a set of pale-blue rosary beads. In other circumstances I’d admire the matchy-matchy vibe, but this is not the time for that. This is a time when I just look at her small, veiny hands clasping the blue beads, and it just makes me incredibly emotional. I envy her faith. I envy the hope that it must give her. And if not hope, then I envy the comfort she must feel.
I’m acutely, painfully, aware that to my left my mother is on the floor and there are three paramedics working at her. They are calling instructions to each other. I hear Laura tell them that I am Roisin’s daughter, and I know they are speaking back to her, but I am not engaging with them. It’s as if my brain has put them on mute.
I have decided with a stubbornness that Daniel would be proud of that I simply am not listening. I am too scared. My mother is too quiet. I don’t want to turn my head to see. So I choose to focus on Mrs Bishop and her slippers, and the pale-blue rosary beads she is knitting through her fingers. If I don’t see what is going on, there is a chance it might not be happening. I know it’s a very flawed logic but it’s keeping me upright and stopping me from lying down on the floor beside my mother and getting in everyone’s way.
