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

where we scattered her ashes. On a clear day you can see across the Thames Valley from here, all the way to County Hall.
    One Sunday, my father and I drive over to Henley to take his parents out for lunch. It is the first time we’ve seen them since my mother’s death, and although they are kind, they don’t mention her, either her death or the fact of her ever having lived. I think how she would have loved this, confirmation of what she had been saying for the best part of thirty years, about the English generally and her in-laws in particular: “My family are weird, God knows, but this lot are weirder.”
    During the week, I walk to work instead of taking the bus. It is better to be moving; sitting still risks opening the door to reflection. I retreat to the most ordinary of memories: standing in line for the park-and-ride in Oxford, waiting for the bus, boarding and sitting in it. That’s the entire memory. My mother is in a blue three-quarter-length coat, a brown cashmere scarf my father’s brother gave her for Christmas, and Ecco shoes, in which she has put neon-green laces. I don’t know why I remembered it, beyond that I must have been happy, anticipating the day we would spend together, looking at colleges before I filled out my university application forms.
    There is another, more complicated image I keep looping. Six months earlier, my mother had come up to London to help me buy a sofa. It was one of those early-spring days of freak heat wave, and London was smoldering. There were roadworks everywhere. My mother had worn a coat too warm for the day, a padded green jacket with a brooch in the shape of a fox on the collar. I told myself she had merely failed to look at the forecast, although she wasn’t eating enough then to stay warm. All morning we walked up and down the Tottenham Court Road, getting nowhere. Heal’s was too expensive. Everything in Furniture Village was dark and heavy, with a cheap finish. There was nothing in Habitat.
    By mid-afternoon, we were exhausted and my mother was keen to get back. She was late for the train, and with half the Underground shut for track maintenance, we waited in the heat outside Edgware Road Station for the replacement bus service to Marylebone. We should have taken a taxi. I wish we had. I thought the satisfaction of doing it the hard way would outweigh the discomfort, but on the bus halfway there I saw I’d miscalculated. As we shuddered and lurched down the Marylebone Road, the air boiling around us, I saw something like panic cross my mother’s face, followed by regret for letting the side down. We got to the station so late that, after leaving me at the barrier, she had literally to sprint the length of the platform to catch the departing train. I watched her run with a sudden, leaden awareness that everything—the heat, the panic, the retreating back in a jacket too warm for the day—was something I would remember, when remembering became necessary. It was the last of the ordinary days.
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    ONE FRIDAY EVENING, I don’t take the train. I stay in London and go to the launch of my godfather’s art show, where an old friend of my mother’s hands me an envelope. It is photos of her he found and thought I might like to have, from an early holiday they took in Portugal or Spain. I’ve heard about these holidays. On one, my mother and godfather read
Portnoy’s Complaint
on the beach and both cried. On another, her long hair bleached blond by the sun, men followed her through the streets of Lisbon, clicking their fingers and propositioning her. This was “before Portugal opened up,” she would say grandly, and how much it annoyed my godfather had delighted her.
    â€œI’m not doing anything,” she had said innocently when he hissed at her to stop.
    I have never seen these photos before, although I’ve seen one of her from a few years earlier,