Free The Children's Writer by Gary Crew

bed, face down, crying.
    ‘What?’ I said again.
    She turned on the pillow. ‘Sebastian came today,’ she said.
    ‘Didn’t you want him to?’
    She put out her hand and patted the bed, inviting me to sit. ‘It was horrible,’ she said. ‘Not what I hoped for.’
    I tried consoling her, telling her she was tired. ‘And it’s cold. Come and have some soup.’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was the boys. They were awful to him.’
    I lay down beside her, to comfort her.
    I will pause here, being reminded of my mother and how I sat with her, comforting her, towards the end. I will tell this now, because if I don’t, Chanteleer will take over, as he always did, and swamp me. As he swamped my Lootie. So I will take this opportunity to tell you about my mum, and how I learned to wait, and to listen.
    My mother was a big woman, as I have said. She saw me through school, and my teenage years, working all the time to have me educated. I grew big too, much like her, I guess, until finally I left the brothers at St Finbar’s, and their saints and martyrs. Although I was not what you call smart, I was not stupid, and I loved reading, but it was my mother’s work and her commitment that really saw me through.
    Some people live just long enough to bring their dreams to fruition. So it was with my mother. When she knew that I had made it into uni, she took to her bed, coughing.
    Within a month her cough had driven away her society women, her Flemington hat buyers, the source of her miserable income.
    The doctor came, a little old man in a dark suit, his face florid, his hair receding. He wore round, gold-framed glasses. He prescribed a pile of mixtures and drugs. I collected these from the pharmacy and Mum took them, grumbling, the teaspoon trembling at her lips. Still the coughing persisted. I filled out the forms for a pension.
    She neither improved nor declined. She clung. Lying in her bed, with me at her side, she would say, ‘Charlie, find me something bright.’
    ‘What?’ I’d ask, not understanding.
    ‘Something lively.’
    I thought of flowers, but there were none in our yard, only the maudlin arum lilies out the front, their curled edges yellowing like boiled milk left to stand.
    ‘You need a hospital,’ I said. ‘That’s what you need.’
    ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘I’ve got bronchitis.’
    ‘I’ll make you a cuppa,’ I said.
    ‘No,’ she said, turning to me. ‘Find something from my workroom. Something lively. Something bright.’
    ‘A catalogue?’ I asked. We didn’t have magazines.
    ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Something…’
    There were cherries on her work table. Big red cherries that some woman had wanted on her hat. Awful, artificial, but bright. I took them back.
    ‘You’re a good boy,’ she said. ‘You always know. When I was a kid, we had a cherry tree in the front yard at home. Real nice, it was. Here…’ and she held out her hand.
    My mother had big hands, rough, like a man’s. But the cherries didn’t look silly, not the way she cupped them in her palm. They looked smaller, nicer (as she had said) and I thought how she made her hats. How she crafted something lovely out of a raw-edged square of straw, steamed over the kettle on the stove. How those big hands moved, this way and that, and when the straw was steamy limp, they moulded it into the shape of the woman’s head, complimenting her brow, reducing hernose, accentuating her lips, ennobling her chin, making not only the hat fine and dainty, but the woman who wore it. And now Mum was holding a handful of fake cherries, red and bulbous, making them nice too.
    She was happy, just to have me there (knowing I was there, assured) while she rolled the cherries between her fingers, enjoying them.
    Then the coughing came, hacking and hard, doubling her over, and she clenched her fist, not wanting to drop what she held. Wanting to hold on, no matter how bad.
    ‘You go,’ she said. ‘Do your study. I’ll be all right.’
    But I