Free The Secrets We Left Behind by Susan Elliot Wright Page A

fruit bowl on top of some wrinkled apples, turned the letter over
and scrawled on the back,
I did not attend the appointment on the 26th because as you should bloody well know, I’ve been in your stupid hospital for six weeks and anyway I died this
morning. Hope that’s a good enough excuse for not attending the next one. Yours, Marie Casey (deceased).
    She read what she’d written, then tore the letter into shreds and tossed it into the sink. How could it be that, just last night, she’d been sitting in the living room watching
Top of the Pops,
and now, twenty-four hours later, she no longer had a mum? She took another toke on the spliff and ignored the tears that were rolling down her cheeks. She’d been
almost relieved when her mum was admitted to hospital; at least the nurses would know what to do. Also, it meant that, for a while, she could pretend her mother wasn’t an alcoholic, that she
was in hospital for some normal reason, like gallstones or piles or a hysterectomy. Jo had gone in to see her most nights, but her mum was often so drugged up she was barely conscious. Last night,
she’d seemed a bit better, although her skin was a sickly yellow and there were brown shadows under both her eyes. She’d even talked about a holiday in Spain. ‘We’ll save
up,’ she’d said, her voice stronger than it had been for weeks. ‘I’ll get a little job when I’m back on my feet. I was a cashier before I met your dad, you know; I did
double-entry bookkeeping for two years, so I’ll be able to find something.’ Then her eyes had filled up and she reached for Jo’s hand. ‘You shouldn’t have to be the
one who goes to work, not at your age, not when you’re such a clever girl. You should have stayed on at school and done your A levels. Oh, Jo-Jo.’ She turned her head away on the
pillow. ‘What sort of mother have I been?’
    For a fleeting moment, she wanted to say,
A lousy one, if you want to know the truth. A really bloody shitty one.
But she knew that wasn’t entirely fair. When she was little,
she’d thought her mum was wonderful, the best mum in the world, and that had given her a dilemma, because although she knew she wanted to have her own babies as soon as she grew up, she
couldn’t imagine living in a different house to her mum. So when she was old enough, she’d decided, she would buy a big pink house and she and her children and her mum would all live
there together. She hadn’t given much thought to a husband; she didn’t think she’d need one.
    She realised her mum was crying.
    ‘It’s all right, Mum.’ Gently, she pulled her hand away and stood up. ‘Listen, I’ll come and see you again tomorrow, okay?’ She kissed her mum’s clammy
forehead and walked out of the ward, keen to be home in time for
Top of the Pops.
    Then in the middle of the night, the ward sister had telephoned and told her that her mum had taken a turn for the worse. The minicab cost almost two pounds, but it got her there quickly.
She’d sat next to the bed for nearly three hours, listening to her mother’s laboured breathing and leaning in closer every time her eyelids flickered. And then at just after five in the
morning, her mother had smiled for the first time in weeks, a warm, beatific smile that came more from the eyes than the mouth, and then she’d closed those once-pretty green eyes for the last
time, and died.
    Jo gathered up all the envelopes, opened the pedal bin with her foot and threw them in, thank-you card and all, then she put her hand in the cold, greasy washing-up water, fished out the torn-up
pieces of the hospital letter and threw them in on top. She finished the spliff then walked across the hall and into her mother’s room. The last time she’d been in here was the day the
ambulance came. She pushed the door open slowly. The room felt chilly and smelt stale, like unwashed clothes. The laundry basket in the corner was full, and she felt a pang of guilt. She could have