Free The Memory Book by Rowan Coleman

my back against the wall, it’s as though I am lost in a maze, and I’m not sure of the way out. ‘There’s a lot she isn’t saying, and I don’t know if I can, if I should, force the issue. Not now, not after all this time.’
    ‘Whatever else, she does deserve the truth, doesn’t she? That girl, she’s so angry a lot of the time. So unsure of herself, so … closed in. Haven’t you ever wondered whether half of it’s because she feels like she was abandoned by her father before she was ever born?’
    I say nothing. This doesn’t feel fair to me, the new crusade that Mum is on, determined to get me to set my house in order. I don’t want to set my house in order; I want to glue things into my book. I raise the tiny hedgehog up to eye level, and begin to make a loop for it out of a length of cotton.
    ‘Ignoring me won’t make it go away,’ Mum says, but a little less sternly this time. ‘You know how I feel about it.’
    ‘Yes, Mother,’ I say. ‘I know what you feel about it because you’ve been telling me more or less non-stop since the day Caitlin was born. But it wasn’t your choice to make, was it?’
    ‘Was it yours?’ she says, which is what she always says, and I realise there are some things I am quite looking forward to forgetting.
    ‘Nothing would be any different from the way it is now,’ I tell her, going back to my book.
    ‘You can’t possibly know that,’ she says. ‘You made assumptions, and Caitlin’s life is based on them. She’s a child that has always felt abandoned, and lost. Even if she never says it, you only have to look at her to know she doesn’t feel like she fits in.’
    ‘This from the woman who used to always wear a full-length kaftan and flowers in her hair?’ I say. ‘You’ve heard of personal expression, right? Why does it have to mean more when it’s Caitlin?’
    ‘Because it
does
mean more because it is Caitlin.’ Mum struggles to find the words, turning over a peeler in her hand as she thinks. ‘When she was little, she never stopped singing, always grinning like a loon. Shouting, making herself the centre of attention, just like you. I just … I just feel like she’s not … reaching out enough. I mean, where are the jazz hands and the high kicks? What happened to that little girl? And don’t say she grew out of them. You never did.’
    ‘Mum, what do I have to do for you to give me a break? I mean, if a degenerative brain disease won’t do it, what will? Would you let me off if I had breast cancer, maybe?’ The words come in quick angry bursts, low and strained – because I know Caitlin is upstairs, curled in upon herself, furled around all the words she feels she cannot say; and because I know that Mum is right, and Mum being right is the hardest thing to stand. Picking at this same old wound withmy mother won’t help Caitlin, so I force myself to back down, finding the imprint of the tiny hedgehog driven into the palm of my hand as I unclench my fist. ‘Caitlin might not have had a traditional upbringing, but she has always had me, and you, and now she has Greg and Esther. Why isn’t that enough?’
    Mum turns her back on me to boil orange vegetables, probably to mushy oblivion, and I watch her: her shoulders are tense, the tilt of her head set in repressed disapproval, perhaps grief. She is very angry with me – it feels like she always has been, although I know for a fact that is not true. Now more than ever, the times when she was not angry shine like polished silver in a sunny sitting room, and those memories positively dazzle. Sometimes I try to pinpoint the exact moment things changed between us, but it always shifts. Was it the day Dad died, or the day he became ill? The day I didn’t choose the same dreams that she had always had for me? Perhaps, though, perhaps it began with this one choice, made a long time ago – this choice that somehow became a lie, and the worst kind of lie. A lie I didn’t exactly tell Caitlin, but one