When I stepped off the double-decker bus, the sky hung strange and violet, and there, on the cold flagstones of the high street, I saw my mother sitting and begging for coins. My husband and I stood frozen, blinking in the pale English dusk. It felt as though the town had twisted itself sideways and no one, not a single soul, had seen this coming.
Im forty-three, and my mother, Margaret, is sixty-seven. We live in opposite corners of London, boroughs apart. Sometimes I think the city stretches itself just to keep us separate. Like many older people adrift in their twilight, my mother cannot quite be left alone, but she will not live with me. Oh no, and there is only one reason for it: she keeps a hoard of animals in her flatfour cats with royal airs and three dogs with eyes like stormy weather. Shes adopted every stray beast in her street, and she feeds them as if each animal were a secret spell. Every penny I give herpounds and pencevanishes into medicine or pet food. I deliver groceries myself, since I know she wont spend a shilling on meals or her own prescriptions.
The other evening, my husband James and I lingered too long at a friends terraced house. We left the car behind and took the last Number 38 bus home, that odd hush of suburbia engulfing us. When we arrived at our stop, there she wasmy mother, tucked by the Boots chemist, her knees pressed to her chest, a battered hat held out for spare change. I drifted toward her, feet leaden as if the pavement were syrup, unable to grasp how she had come to this. James stared, his eyes round as shillings. He knew, of course, that we supported her from our own modest savings.
He looked at me with that questioning silence: Where is all the money going? And now, the dream world peeled back another layer: all her efforts, all her collecting, were not for herself at all, but for her beloved straysfood for dogs and cats, their jabs at the vet.
None of it felt quite real. Is it sadness or something stranger, when you see your own mother in such a state? What would my family and old school friends whisper at the church fête, seeing Margaret hunched and half-invisible among the pigeons? No doubt, theyd believe I was a heartless daughter, careless and gone astray, abandoning my mother to freeze and fade.
Now, in this endless dream, I wander the high streets at twilight, searching for her shadow in every arch and alley. She wont stop, no matter my pleadingjust slicker now, ducking behind the bakery or the bus shelter, always just out of reach of my arms and my voice.
