Free She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockes

IDEA if my mother knew about the murder. I have a dim recollection of her telling me her father had been to jail once, but for what I don’t know—although I have an even dimmer memory of her saying he was fired from various jobs and locations for “interfering” with children he had access to.
    In any case, any doubts I had about going to South Africa are resolved by this paperwork. It is one thing to have a researcher photocopy and send me pretrial notes from the murder; the murder is impersonal. But the idea of someone providing a similar service for the second trial—of potentially reading my mother’s testimony in the action she brought against her father before I do—is unthinkable. I will have to go to Pretoria and read whatever is in the archives for myself.
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    JOURNEYS LIKE THESE should take months of planning—trips to travel agents, consultations of maps and with shamans—but ten minutes on the Internet and it’s done: flights, hotel, even an e-mail to a man who used to work with my mother at the law firm in Johannesburg. He writes back instantly to say he remembers her well and would be delighted to have lunch when I come in the new year. I feel vaguely embarrassed; after all these years, is this all there is to it?
    I ring the South African consulate to ask about visas, and they suggest something that hasn’t occurred to me: that if my mother’s paperwork is in order, I can apply for dual citizenship. I have a visceral reaction, followed by a second, guiltier one. I put the phone down and ring my friend Pooly. “They offered me a passport,” I say.
    She bursts out laughing. “And?”
    â€œI know it’s a new era and all, but—”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œUgh. ‘South African passport holder.’ Makes me feel physically sick.”
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    AT THE WEEKENDS I go home to Buckinghamshire, out on the Friday-night train and back again on Sunday. It is a journey I’ve made hundreds of times. Now it turns into a cliché—woman looks through train window at familiar landscape made alien by sad thoughts about death. My memory of those months from July to September is reduced almost entirely to being on the train every weekend, watching the bleached walls of the council estate go from ash gray in the sun to pewter in the rain, and the derelict lots, with their mountains of scrap metal, burnish and blacken. The new Wembley Stadium is being built in the distance and gets higher each week. London bleeds into the suburbs and then the greenbelt: the spire at Harrow, the allotments, the back end of the private school, the pub garden. My favorite part of the journey comes forty minutes in, when the train emerges from tree-covered escarpments into a clearing with views across the valley. It looks like the opening scene from a Jane Austen adaptation. My spirits soar. I am two stops from home.
    Before my mother died I would round the corner and see her head in the window, and she, eagle-eyed, waiting, would wave. The window looks blank now. Friday night passes somehow and then, on Saturday, while the weather holds, my dad and I go on long walks. We go along the canal for the first time since I was a child. We go up the hill behind Chequers, and climb over the fence to the summit. There are sheep up there, and we wonder to whom they belong. You can see right down into the prime minister’s residence. We joke about snipers. We go across the fields by the air force base, yellow stubble underfoot, dry hay in the air, and across the cricket field behind the station. We don’t talk much, just walk and stop at the pub for lunch or a drink.
    We go all the way along the ridge to the beacon at Ivinghoe. The weather is on the turn by then and it is blustery enough to hold out your arms and lean into the wind. One weekend, we go the steep way up the hill behind the house