Chapter 1

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One of the few things I’m sure about is my mother’s dead. At least I think she is.

 

    Bodily, she’s been gone for about a week. I saw her. Marble cold. False teeth jutting like a salmon’s jaw.

 

    Muriel would be mortified if she knew how she looked. Keeping up appearances was important to her. Make that vital.

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    But if she’s no longer here, how come my mother dictates my every move? My every thought. As in life as in death, I suppose.

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    Am I my own man or hers?

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    It’s fine by me if I’m hers. It’d excuse a litany of crimes. Against humanity, supermarkets, and charity shops.

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   I shouldn’t exaggerate. Against humanity suggests mass murder or ethnic cleansing. All I’ve done is upset a few people. Still, it seems a bit harsh to be hated so much.

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   It’s true about the supermarkets and charity shops, though. Along with dentists, chandleries, and neighbours, both domestic and foreign, I’ve stolen from them. I’ve put everything from an organic chicken to a windlass in my pocket. Not literally.

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Chapter 2

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Sitting in Muriel’s chair, I rest my fifty-year-old hands where hers have worn the orange geometric fabric, and I feel closer to her than when she was alive.

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   An enlarged version of her is bearing down on me from the sideboard, frowning from the mantelpiece, attempting a thin-lipped smile from the sewing box she’ll never open again.

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  The photographs have been positioned around our parents’ front room by my older sister Jane. She’s keen to preserve our mother’s presence. I’m not and can’t wait to bury her.

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   A wood pigeon waddles back and forth on the lawn outside the bay window. Single-minded in its pecking, shimmering neck mechanical, unlike me, it’s got purpose. The bird disappears into the grass that Jim, my father, has let grow. Without his wife telling him what to do, he’s doing nothing.

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   In the glazed corner cabinet I know my mother’s left me, mistaken in the belief I like it, yellowing glue weeps from the fractured back leg of a ceramic Shetland pony. My parents stopped collecting holiday souvenirs when we moved to the ‘New House’ in Fairfield Close thirty-five years ago.

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   Tomorrow I’ll be back in London, the funeral done and dusted. Ashes to ashes. “If I never see Stoke Blakely again, it’ll be too soon.”

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   “Are you talking to yourself again, Daniel? You’re supposed to be taking the dog for a walk,” Jane shouts through the door I’ve only just closed.

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   “They’ll be here in a minute.” I assume she’s referring to the expected handful of extended family mourners.

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   I reach for the photo album Jane unearthed from the attic and deposited on the coffee table. Flicking through the musty smell of Connah family history, a buckled image catches my eye.

 

   One of the lick-and-stick hinges is missing, and my infant self is clinging to the page dressed in my sister’s hand-me-down bathing suit. It’s a wonder I’m not gay though I wouldn’t rule it out.

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   I can still hear my father’s voice as the Polaroid whirs from the camera nearly half a century ago. “At least try and look happy. We’re on holiday, supposed to be enjoying ourselves,” are familiar words.

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   I’m crouching beside my mother on a deserted beach. The tide, along with the other vacationers, has long departed. Sand furrows continue across mine and Muriel’s faces; hers partially obscured by wind-blown hair. Lug worms coil at our feet.

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   I turn the photo over where Jim’s sloped handwriting tells me what I want to know: Mother and Crybaby Daniel, aged two. Southport 1964.

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   The clatter of breakfast plates in the kitchen makes me look up, and Christmas stares back at me from an image on top of the music centre. Four children, twelve years apart, are opening brightly wrapped presents.

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   I’m seven years old, staring at a gift tag I know I’ll have read over and over, wanting to believe its sentiments. Very much love, Mother wasn’t something I heard every day.

 

   An unspoken truce was called on 25 December though it rarely lasted beyond lunchtime. A broken toy, or Jim forgetting the trifle’s hundreds and thousands, might cause hostilities to be resumed, along with any number of other things. If I’d felt loved for that one day, I might have felt better about the other 364.

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   Will I be able to forgive Muriel when she’s lowered into the ground? I hope not. Fifty years of neglect is hard to bury. Maybe I really am the ‘nasty piece of work’ she said I was.

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   Reaching for a picture of her seated in the chair I now occupy, the smell of decay entrenched in the fabric, I peer into Muriel’s mud-brown eyes and ask, “Was I born bad, or did you make me this way?”

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   Maybe a last walk round the village will uncover some answers.