Free My Buried Life by Doreen Finn

lands, grew tired and faded away. Being ignored is merely a substitute, a fatigued person’s bullying.
    The old cardboard files give way to newer ring-bound ones for her more recent missives. One folder is marked ‘Lexington Ave.’,the letters printed in her neat hand. Inside is a thick sheaf of pages dating back thirty years, more, all in order, each one dated by my mother. The first half of them are typed, the deliberate lettering of an old office typewriter, like the one Maude gifted me when I was still a kid. There is nothing on these pages beyond my mother’s name, our address, the date, an office reference code. A staple in the top left corner of each sheet is empty, but a tiny shred of paper caught on the metal in several of them hints at something about which I know nothing. My mother was never in New York. She knew no one in the States. Did an emigrant relative send her letters? Money? After leafing through the pages I am as in the dark as I was when I opened the cardboard folder. I put it to one side. My head is too stuffed today to take on anything new that needs working out. My mother’s mysteries are just as unsolvable now as they were when she was alive.
    It is surprising to uncover my own correspondence to her, neatly stowed. My hand stills, hovers over my writing, spiky anger bursting through the hurried scrawl. I don’t read what is there. I know the details. Weather, food, work. The parks I walked in, museums I visited. Nothing personal, no plea for an answer. But she must have known, must have felt my need for a reply.
    Her address book is pristine. Old addresses are neatly crossed out, new ones carefully added in. I flick to E, but there is nothing where my name should be. Same with P.
    She didn’t keep my address in her book.
    This is not a new address book. There are names in it of people who died a long time ago. I remember this book from before I went away. I had three addresses in New York, but my mother seems not to have recorded any of them.
    A bang against the windowpane shakes the hush of the bedroom. A bird lies on the grass below. I can’t tell if it’s still alive from up here. This is the best bedroom in the house, two windows overlooking the main road, and all the light a room could need. I lean my shoulder against the wall. The paintwork is cool against the thin cotton of my shirt. I look down. My bare feet are pale against the dark wood. My mother’s effects lie scattered across the polished floor. The room was immaculate until I began the sorting. Even in death, not a thing out of place. Rigid control of environment was my mother’s calling card.
    When Andrew was in hospital she wrote to him every day. I was never privy to the content of those epistles, but my mother spent time each morning composing letters to her son. She wrote on pads of Basildon Bond, always blue or white, watermarked. These she covered in her neat, slanted script. I knew that no error lay in those ordered lines, not a missing apostrophe or misspelled word. In my eleven years in New York I received one letter a year from her, all of them the same: a short appraisal of the weather, two or three sentences about the garden, a reference to bridge games and a line about Maude. The format never changed. My birthday slipped by each year, unacknowledged; one more day in a year of days for her.
    Isaac asked me about my mother at the beginning. A tiny village jazz club, a candle in a red jar between us, cigarette burns on the tabletop. I waved away the question, let it run off me like oil. Jazz tore up the air around us, gobbled up the spaces between our sentences, didn’t allow for proper conversation. It suited me, kept things at bay. Mineral water fizzed in a glass on the damaged tabletop. I’d stopped drinking again. My meetings kept me sane, even if they didn’t completely stop the craving. It was something I learned to live with, that persistent nagging behind everything I did, the unquenchable thirst. Work