Free What to Look for in Winter by Candia McWilliam

had a rotten go of flu, which she did, too.
    She did not want to wake up on the following day. That day was to include events that she could not countenance.
    I don’t even know if suicide was legal when she did it, or whereher ashes are. I think she died in October. I know that I wore school uniform to the funeral and that I was horrified by the tidy curtains as she went away through them in her coffin. My friend Janey Allison, Janey who had never joined the anti-Candy gang, who grew up to be champion downhill ski-racer of all Scotland, and who could like Paul Klee hold a line boldly, in crayon as she could in snow, Janey’s mother cried at the funeral. She was a terse Scots blonde, Mary, née Ingalls, who was given to ticking us off in Latin at table in the farm kitchen out at Turnhouse, but she showed an affection I cannot forget. Janey I never see nowadays but can, right now, in her button shoes, aged four, or in her ballet gear, with the petersham belt. Our mothers were such friends as I hope we are still.
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    Mummy put me to bed in her and Daddy’s bed, and she told me that she loved Daddy. I have no idea whether she got down the pills, which were transparent and turquoise, with alcohol. Their name was Oblivon.
    The next day took one of two forms.
    Either I was taken to the home of the Professor of the History of Art, Giles Robertson, and his wife Eleanor in Saxe-Coburg Place, or I was taken by my mother’s cleaning lady, Mrs Stewart, whom I loved and called Sooty, to her house on an estate in Pilton. I can remember moments selected from each very disparate residence. Perhaps there were two days inside that one day. Oddly, I don’t know the year, though I think it was the year after President Kennedy was shot. I know that I wrote a long encomium to the President after the assassination, and that my teacher didn’t like the way I mentioned Mrs Kennedy’s pink Chanel suit; to mention garments was not ‘suitable’, a very Edinburgh concept at the time. If she’d known he was going to be assassinated, though, maybe she would have chosen something a wee bitty more practical? (Is this an especially Edinburghconsideration? In Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat , the protagonist selects a specially non-stain-resistant dress to be murdered in.) I knew that it was peculiar, even distasteful, to think like this.
    I can remember when President Kennedy was shot, and not when my own mother died?
    I know. But it was so.
    I knew that something was wrong when I saw my mother on her tummy in my bed. I think that she had on not a nightgown but a green wool dress. She had sewn me a pink pillow with grey kittens and pussy willow branches on it to help combat my nightmares about the Cauliflowers, who came out of the walls and stole your breath. I do not recall whether her head rested on this pillow at her end. That is all I saw, except that her head was to one side. It will never cease to appal me that my children have seen me from this angle on account of drink. How can I? How could I? How did I?
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    There’s nothing so dreadful-tasting that, if it is your poison of choice, will not make you take it. That is what addiction is. The worse it is, the more ‘unsuitable’, the more it seems to be what is made for you, your final course of just desserts, not someone else’s cup of tea at all.
    That day, whichever day it was, that Mummy died, I waited for my father. At first it seemed to be with Sooty.
    When Sooty’s husband Sandy came in from the Ferranti factory, Sooty took him into their kitchenette where their son David would sometimes melt lead to make soldiers. Sandy had braces and the family had a television. Sooty called Mummy ‘Maggie’. She said to Sandy, ‘It’s very bad with Maggie. I think she’s gone.’
    Sandy had a blue shirt and the lino was like coloured pebbles. In the garden was an aviary for budgies. The kitchen furniture was