The littlest thing. Her own mother died of liver failure, her flesh the color of ancient vellum, her organs pickled. Served her right. When Louise went to look at her in the Co-op undertakers last week, she had to resist the urge to take a needle with her, the old sailor’s trick for death at sea, and push it through the yellow flesh (like rancid cheese) of her nose. Just to make sure she was really dead.
Her funeral was four days ago, at Mortonhall Crematorium, a service as torpid as her life. Though her name was Aileen, the minister drafted in continually referred to her as “Eileen,” but neither Louise nor the ramshackle bunch of people who regarded themselves as her mother’s friends had bothered to correct him. Louise liked the way “Eileen” made her mother seem like someone else altogether, a stranger and not her mother.
When she was doing her cool-down stretches on the front path, she noticed the thing on the doorstep where the milk would have been if they delivered milk in this area. A nondescript brown canister. She felt a sudden irrational fear. A bomb? Some weird practical joke? Would she open it and find feces or worms or something poisonous? It took her a couple of seconds of panic before she realized it was an urn, and that inside the urn was what was left of her mother. For some reason she had expected something tasteful and classical-an amphora made from alabaster, with a lid and a finial, not something made from a kind of plastic material that looked for all the world like a tea caddy. She remembered her mother’s cousin saying he would collect the ashes from the crematorium for her. If it had been left up to her, she wouldn’t have bothered.
Now she was left with the problem of what to do with the remains. Could she just put them in the bin? She had the feeling that that might be illegal.
She turned her key in the lock but had to give the front door a hefty shove to get it open. It had been a wet summer and all the wood in the house had swelled, although the door had fitted badly to begin with. The house was only three years old but had all kinds of small annoying things wrong with it-snagging that had never got done no matter how many times she had complained- cracked plaster, sockets that were attached to the wall rather than the baseboard, a kitchen sink that wasn’t earthed. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The house was the “Kinloch” and was the smallest detached you could buy, but it was a house, a proper house, the two-eyes-and-a-mouth kind that she used to draw when she was a child, houses that contained an ideal family. She had drawn that too-mother, father, two children, and a dog. All she’d had in reality was the mother, a pretty piss-poor one at that. Poor Louise. When she thought of her days as a child, she usually put herself in the third person. She was sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with this fact, but no psychiatrist was ever going to get anywhere near her head.
Modern houses were shit, but the estate (“Glencrest”) was safe, inasmuch as anything ever was, most of the neighbors in her little enclave knew one another, if only by sight. There were no pubs anywhere near, there was a Neighborhood Watch, there were young women with pushchairs who went to Mother and Baby Groups, there were guys who washed their cars on the weekend. It was as near as you got to normal.
She took the urn inside with her and placed it on the kitchen draining board. She unscrewed the lid and poured some of the contents into a saucer and examined them, poking them around with a knife like a forensic technician. It was gritty, more like clinker than ash, and Louise half-expected to see a bit of tooth, a recognizable bone. Toxic waste. Perhaps if she added water to the saucer, her mother would be resurrected, the clay reformed from the dust. Her mothwing lungs might reinflate and she would rise like a genie from the urn and sit opposite Louise at the too-small kitchen table in the too-small kitchen and tell Louise how sorry she was for all the bad things she’d done. And Louise would say, “Too fucking late, get back in your urn.”
The cat, old and arthritic, jumped awkwardly onto the draining board and sniffed hopefully at the contents of the saucer. Jellybean’s health was failing, he had a tumor growing inside him, the vet said “the time was coming very soon” when Louise was going to have to make a “decision.”
Jellybean was once a tiny, hurtling ball of fur as light as a shuttlecock, now he was a sack of bones. He was older than Archie, Louise had known the cat longer than she’d known anyone else, except for her mother, and she didn’t count. She had found him when he was a kitten, abandoned in an empty house. She’d never had a pet, didn’t like cats, still didn’t like cats, but she loved Jellybean. It was the same with kids, she didn’t like babies, didn’t like children, but she loved Archie. She couldn’t say it to anyone (especially not Archie) because they would think she was mad, but she thought she might love Jellybean as much as she loved Archie. Possibly more. They were her pair of Achilles’ heels. They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces. She kissed the top of Jellybean’s wobbly head and felt a sob catch in her chest. Jeez, Louise, pull yourself together, for fuck’s sake.
The front door crashed open and was slammed shut again. Archie’s passage through the house was marked by the noise of things thrown and dropped and walked into. He was like the ball in a pinball machine. He exploded into the kitchen, nearly falling over his own feet. After he was born, the midwife said, “Boys wreck your house, girls wreck your head.” Archie seemed intent on doing both.
He looked hot and bothered. She remembered that feeling, suddenly having to don a school uniform in what still felt like the middle of summer. English schools went back in September, but Scottish schools had always thought it a good idea to make kids go back in the dog days of heat. It would be a Presbyterian thing. No doubt John Knox looked out his window one fine August morning and saw a kid bowling along the street with a hoop, or whatever kids did in the sixteenth century, and he thought, That child should be suffering in a hot, airless classroom in a uniform that makes him ridiculous.
Yeah, that would be Knox, Louise thought. Hey, Knox, leave that kid alone.
What had happened to her little boy? Had he been eaten by this monster? Not long ago Archie had been a handsome child-silky blond hair, round, kissable arms. Looking at him now, in his badly fitting body that seemed to have been put together from the salvage of other people’s limbs, she found it hard to believe that women would ever find him attractive, that he would have sex with them, that he would fumble and wrestle and convulse, that he would do it with virgins and married women, with college students and girls who worked in shops. Her heart ached for him in his new ugliness, made even more poignant somehow by the fact that he seemed unaware of it.
“What’s that?” Archie asked, glancing at the saucer of ash. No “Hello, Mum,” no “How was your day?”
“My mother, what’s left of her.”
He grunted incomprehension.
“She was cremated last week,” Louise reminded him. A public burning. She hadn’t allowed Archie to go to the crematorium, she’d kept him away from his grandmother when she was alive, so she wasn’t going to waste his time on her when she was dead. Louise took the morning off work, said she had a hospital appointment. It was amazing the lies you could tell that were believed without question. If anyone had looked back through her employment records, they would have seen that they showed her mother was already dead, everyone she knew believed that her mother died long ago. “She’s dead to me,” she would have said, if challenged over her veracity.