The Girl Below(42)

For most of the next day, which we spent in the ICU, Mum was delirious one minute and lucid the next. The last unequivocal conversation we had was about some dry cleaning she wanted me to pick up, then later on, breathing rapidly, her forehead slick with sweat, she stopped making total sense. My father got a mention—“he left you with nothing, the prick”—but so did her childhood cat, who had been run over by the milk truck. “It happened all the time. They smelled the milk.” She would form sentences then reject them, as though trying out a new foreign language—the language of the dying. When she did get her words out, she left gaps that I had to sew up. “You’ll see,” she began at one point, before a long pause, “me again.”

“See you where?”

“In the garden.”

I assumed she meant heaven, that we’d be reunited there, until I remembered she was an atheist. “But, Mum, you don’t believe in God.”

“I don’t.” She laughed—phlegmy, jarring—and batted the skin near her neck. “After the party,” she said. “You were wearing the locket.”

I wondered if she was out of it, free-associating, or if this was my last chance to confess—or try to. “The morning after the party,” I began, “I was fiddling with it when it accidentally broke. I was wearing it when we went down in the bunker but afterward it wasn’t around my neck. I think I left it down there—it must have come off.”

“No, no, no,” said my mother, adamant. “You kept it.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I really don’t know where it is.”

Mum hadn’t been sad up till then, but quite unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears, and she turned her head away from me to speak. “But I know you have it. I saw you wearing it.”

I was devastated. For more than a decade, Mum hadn’t said a word about the locket, but it turned out that all along she’d known I took it—and worse, thought I’d been hiding it from her. “I swear I don’t have it,” I said, hoping she’d believe me.

Mum didn’t say anything more or even look at me again, and a woman in a white coat fiddled with the tube that was taped to her arm. When she was done, Mum sighed, and her hand I’d been holding went limp. Her chest heaved and her eyes were still open, but her gaze was glassy, remote.

“We’re doing all we can,” said the woman in the white coat. “You should get some rest.” She signaled to an armchair in the corner of the room but offered no clues as to how I might sit in it without letting go of my mother’s hand. It didn’t occur to me to move the chair.

Parts of that night, I missed. Important parts, like the moment Mum died. I remembered things leading up to it: hushed voices, interludes of calamity followed by long periods of staring at the lino floor, so highly polished I could see up my own skirt. But however many times I sidled up to it from different angles, the part where she took her last breath remained stubbornly blank. To me it was a moment of failure, a lapse in concentration that cost me the game. I feel ashamed of the lapse, almost fraudulent, as though I have only been pretending I was there.

Other moments, other sights, couldn’t be gotten rid of, left behind pockmarks: Mum’s face set in a yellow, waxwork mask. The strange-smelling treacle that spread out on the sheet from beneath her until it was noticed and then covered by a nurse.

They let me sit with her for a long time. I was given a cup of tea and a biscuit, neither of which I touched.

Sepsis, the doctors said. After years of illness, her immune system was spent. They pumped her full of antibiotics, tried frantically to find something that would help her fight the infection, but even as they were pumping, I think the doctors knew that what they were doing was futile. It was all for show—a show for me, I supposed.

When it was over, a friend of my mother’s picked me up from the hospital. I didn’t know what day it was or how long we had been there, cut off from time in the bright, windowless rooms of the ICU. The friend drove me home but wouldn’t let me stay there on my own. By the door, we had a standoff. I didn’t want her to come in; she insisted. I gave in, but stubbornly ignored her, went straight to Mum’s room, shut the door, and climbed into her bed. The sheets felt clammy, earthbound, but the surrounding walls were sheened in silver, and I thought it was Mum, that she had manifested in the wallpaper as a kind of seraphim. I didn’t want to close my eyes on her, to abandon her, but I’d been up for days and was quickly mown down by an unstoppable freight train of sleep.