Free Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall Page B

don’t want to sleep. It’s too exhausting. I can’t think about the last twenty-four hours, so I think about my mother instead.
    She died when I was three, so if she miraculously appeared now, resurrected, I wouldn’t recognize her. When I dream of her, she’s real. I see her long dark hair and the necklaces of beads that I played with as a baby. I don’t know how much is memory and how much imagination. The dream is not a nightmare, it has only comfort in it, but I lose it too fast when I wake, and I lie alone with a terrible pain inside me, a hole that will never be filled. I can’t decide which is worse, to not have a mother, or to not have children. An empty space in both directions. No backwards, no forwards.
    She died in a car crash, but nobody will tell me anything about it. Whenever I ask, an enormous vagueness descends. I would like more detail. Whose fault was it? Was she driving? Was there anyone else in the car? I need an end before I can go back to the beginning.
    My brothers rarely talk about her, as if they’ve all agreed to forget. Unlike me, they have a memory of her being there for their childhood, but they can’t seem to translate that into a physical description. Sometimes I think they all knew a different person.

    When I was about twelve, I tried to find out more about her and pushed my brothers for some details.
    Paul’s mother is tall with short hair. “She liked gardening and her nails were always black with soil. She only talked to us for a bit at mealtimes, and even then she started looking through the window again, thinking about the garden.” He can only describe her outside, pruning, raking the leaves, designing an herb garden.
    “She sang in the garden,” he said once. “I could hear her sometimes, after I’d gone to bed, when there was still some light left outside. I think she went on gardening in the dark, with a torch.”
    “What did she sing?” I asked.
    He looked confused. “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear the words.”
    “‘A Hard Day’s Night’? Or ‘Penny Lane’?” I discovered the Beatles records in the lounge when I was eight, and played them over and over until I knew all the words. My mother always sings them in my dreams.
    But Paul shook his head. “No, of course not. She was too old for that. We were the Beatles fans. She sang—” He stopped and tried to think. “I don’t know—folk songs, I suppose. ‘Green-sleeves,’ ‘The Ash Grove,’ and things like that.”
    I was disappointed, and certain that he was wrong. He was only twelve when she died.
    Martin’s mother is small, like me, and her hair is straight and long. He thinks she was blonde, but he’s not quite sure. In several of the black-and-white photographs in the wedding album, the light falls on her hair from the side and it looks blonde. I think Martin only remembers her from the photographs.
    He finds it even harder to remember what she was like. I asked him about her soon after I talked to Paul. Martin had to deliver 500 boxes of crisps to Newcastle, and I was allowed to go with him because it was the Christmas holidays and he could be there and back in one day.
    “No,” he said, leaning on one of the tires he had been examining, “I don’t remember her singing.”
    The cold of the early morning surrounded us. I put my gloved hands into my pockets and snuggled into my scarf. Martin’s breath came out slowly in huge milky clouds. I wished he would hurry up and get into the cab where we could warm up, so I didn’t say any more.
    Twenty miles later, Martin decided to continue. “I remember she had a brown dress covered with tiny white daisies. She wore it a lot.”
    I waited for more, but nothing came. Martin, who had known her for fourteen years, had only a tenuous grasp on her image. I know nothing of her brown, daisy dress. It is nowhere in the wardrobe of my memory, so it must have worn out before she even thought of me.
    Jake’s mother is just a presence, with no