Mum

My mother has died. She died the morning I was going to see her, and I got the news from my sister as I was boarding the plane - phone in one hand, boarding pass in the other. My first reaction, as always, was anger. "Why are you telling now?" I shouted at my sister, Laura, "I've got to go and sit on a plane and a train for the next two hours, where I can do nothing. Couldn't you have waited till I got to Basingstoke?"

There's no good time to tell someone their mother has died. And it can't have been easy for Laura to make the call. 

A Good Egg

I apologised to my sister, and sat in the plane in a state of benumbed calm - the anger never stays long. The news was hard to process. Susan and I toasted her with Easyjet prosecco - it's genuinely what she would have wanted. The acid-reflux was like a punch to the guts. 

I'd seen her less than a month before and, while far from well, she was bright-eyed and sharp. We even managed to get her out in the garden for a BBQ, where she sat, smiling and oblivious, while the rest of the family tore around her. She was dressed in a baseball cap to keep the sun off. It was the most incongruous thing I'd ever seen: like a moustache on the Mona Lisa, or Botticelli's Venus in a fez. 

I'd spoken to the family the night before the flight. The doctors had given her days, weeks at most, so I was glad to be leaving in the morning. In fact, she was gone before I left Ireland.  

When I'd last seen her, just four weeks before, she'd been sat up, in her own house, her eyes bright and full of life. I spent the morning before I went home trying to persuade a wasp to leave through the window, so it didn't sting her. When it came time for me to go, I kissed her and pleaded with her. "Why do you do it? Why do you fight everyone, when they're only trying to help you?" I'd been with her a week and seen her hide her uneaten pills, send her carers away, and put the kibosh on medical assessments. "Why do you do it, you madwoman?" She grabbed me by the wrists and said, coolly but with fierce, bright eyes, "I want my independence."

She fought hard for that independence, and there was nothing to do but kiss her again. The last time I saw her alive was through the front room window, waving cheerfully, lipstick on, grinning at me. I burst into tears on the way down to the train station. As goodbyes go, it wasn't bad, but it was never meant to be goodbye. There was supposed to be another one, a proper goodbye I had prepared for. I probably got off lightly. The others saw her in hospital, saw the decline, saw her get weaker and weaker. When I left her she was still bright and funny and smiling. 

Mum always sat in what is variously described in the family as her "control module", or "mum's nest". All of her stuff was arranged about her, a warrior queen equipped for her journey into the next world: remote controls for video recorders that had been binned twenty years ago, prayer cards, bound together with a fat rubber-band, like a schoolboy collecting Star Wars cards from bubblegum packs. There were piles of clothes, blankets and cushions, unidentifiable woolen objects, a Tiffany lamp with several geometric panes missing, pairs of glasses, scissors, make up, emery boards, infinitely ancient boiled sweets that had heat-sealed themselves into one giant conglomeration in the oven-like temperatures of the house. There were her uneaten medicines, her untapped gin and, above all, her books. Books everywhere, teetering in dusty piles, wedged into corners, some with lacy frills, where they'd been nibbled by Guinea Pigs who died decades ago. Many, hundreds of books by M C Beaton, though that might be, in my mother's parlance, "just a lately thing". 

She had a lot of books. And now we have a lot of books. Catherine Cookson, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Mary Higgins Clarke books. The books she consumed. 

There are also books that might be intended heirlooms - handsome leather-bound copies of Dickens and Agatha Christie, literal yards of identical, lavishly tooled literature. I have no place to put them -  I don't have a library and, despite the high hopes you had for me, mum, I never grew up to be a baronet. 

And there were still hundreds of books when we got back to the house from the hospital. Speechless books, with no one to read them. Half a book, then, like a contract unsigned, a song that no one has heard.

The nest was still there, hollowed out, with us, newly orphaned, left staring at the space where our mother had been. Where she'd patched up the armrest with sticking plasters and wouldn't let anyone change it. Her dusty glasses. The un-sucked sweets you need a chisel for. All the useless medicine. 

With one of those inversions that death casually throws up, we were children experiencing empty nest syndrome. Except she wouldn't be back for the holidays with a bag of laundry and a request for rent money. She was just gone. Gone forever. 

I'm not sure it's hit me properly. I feel flattened, emptied out. I feel lessened. Its not pain, it's numbness. I'm on eulogy duty, so I hope the wave doesn't hit me in the pulpit. Nobody needs to see that.   

I'd written a story about her. I'd changed her to an aunt, called her Silvia, and reinvented her past. But the events of the story: a meal, insults, excessive drinking, and arguing in front of the telly, were substantially true. It's being published in the winter edition of Exacting Clam magazine, which I also drew the cover for, so I hoped she would see it: my mother,  the star of a story in an American magazine. In the early sixties she lived in New York and worked for Hearst Publications (in some capacity - she was pretty sketchy on details). She was incredibly proud of this, so I think she would have enjoyed having adventures in the pages of an American magazine. Though you never knew with her. I was terrified when she turned up for my play in London because it contained language, and an excruciatingly bad sex scene. She was totally cool with it. "I have lived in the world you know, John."

We never lost her totally. Even in the last days in hospital, when she was crotchety and more asleep than awake, she was still recognisibly mum. One morning in the hospital, she surprised Edward with the revelation that she had given birth to a baby boy - a fat, smiling redhead named Patrick. Edward was somewhat taken back by his new phantom brother.

 "Are you sure?" he said, "Surely, you're a bit past all that stuff now." She held him with a hard stare.

 "Cheeky." she said.