For mum. I touched my mother’s hand gently. Stupidly I feared I might break the slender, cold, white fingers. I looked into her eyes. Strange, I thought as I viewed the fading light in her face, that I didn’t really know all that much about her, apart from the fact that she gave birth to me. She cooked and cleaned and rubbed my head whenever I was ever in any physical or mental pain. She did all this without any complaint. Feeling like the worst kind of slimeball, it occurred to me, as I stood there drowning in my own self-pity, that I had never asked her anything about herself that might have helped me understand who she was. I realised that I had no idea about what food she liked best, whether she had a favourite film, what her dreams were, whether or not she had done at least one of those things she told herself she would do when she was a little girl. I supposed, as I conjured up all those pictures of her flitting back and forth from one room to another, that all she was at the end of the day was a mirror for other people, being whatever the other person needed her to be. As far as I knew she’d had nothing nice in her life. She had only been to the seaside once and that had been with Tony. Dad had always been too busy. My last gift to her on this Earth was decided. ‘Mum,’ I said softly, ‘before you go to wherever it is you are going, please try and focus on me for a moment. There is somewhere I would like to take you.’ I had no idea what her dream was and she was too weak to tell me, so I gave her one of mine. With all of the strength she could muster she parted her eyelids. I knew at a glance how much it took out of her. I thought of the nicest, sweetest place I could think of, a place with a long sun-bleached beach and a sparkling sea, a place untouched by mankind and far away from man. I could see her move away from me; her arms outspread, wanting to touch everything at once. ‘What’s all this?’ she asked, spinning and looking, looking and spinning again. ‘I have absolutely no idea!’ I laughed through my teary eyes. ‘It’s a nice place and that’s all that I know about it. There is another one, only you’d think it was just a lumpy patch of land waiting for the council to build on it.’ ‘It’s beautiful!’ she said. She took her tatty brown shoes off and placed them neatly side-by-side on the beach and went off to investigate the sea. When she was convinced that it really was water she sat down and gazed at it. It was what I would have done at that point, too. ‘Is it warm enough for you?’ I asked her. ‘You know I can do something about that if it isn’t.’ ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. I added dark glasses to her face and she laughed. ‘Leon,’ she threw her hands into the air, ‘where are we, luv? Is this the Projector?’ ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter,’ was my only response. ‘It’s somewhere else. Perhaps we’d better leave it at that.’ ‘Are you doing this?’ she asked. ‘Is this all you?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘So where am I now?’ I didn’t really want to answer her, but I did anyway. ‘In my head,’ I said, ‘or rather we’re in each other’s heads. It’s not real.’ ‘It’s real enough for me,’ said Mum. ‘I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven.’ ‘You sort of have, mum,’ I said, wiping away a tear. ‘I don’t feel dead,’ said Mum. ‘I feel more alive.’ She asked me how long it was going to last. I wasn’t sure. We said nothing then for half an hour. She spoke next and I was surprised that, even though she had remembered she was slipping away from this earth, it didn’t bother her at all. She had quickly become accustomed to the idea. ‘Promise me one thing,’ her gaze never left the sea as she spoke. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Anything!’ ‘Promise me you will do everything in your power to follow your dream.’ ‘I’m not sure I can,’ I said honestly, ‘not anymore.’ Mum grabbed my hand. ‘You must try,’ she said. ‘Forget this, forget what Carl did. You are a better person than that. If you kill him you’ll be as bad as he is. You’d be letting us both down.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘So it is true,’ I said. ‘He did do this. He wasn’t just winding me up.’ ‘He made me a cup of tea,’ said Mum. ‘I thought it was weird him doing that. I should have realised really. I know he did wrong, but just let the police handle it, Leon. When they ask you what happened tell them what I told you.’ ‘I’m not sure they’d believe this, mum,’ I said. ‘Ah well, never mind.’ A thick globule of tear hit the sand and made a crater. ‘He will pay,’ I said. Mum dried my face with her hand and rubbed it on her skirt. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but you must let the law catch him. You go away and study to become a scientist.’ I didn’t answer her. It was the furthest thing from my mind at that time. Feeling the breath of the end at the backs of our necks we both stood up. I put my index finger and my thumb in my mouth and whistled, something I could never do in the real world. A shiny black stallion with a long flowing mane came thundering towards her, stopping in a flurry of sand. She turned towards it and smiled. On its back was my dad. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of you now.’ My dad nodded at me and I nodded back knowingly. Mum had never been on a horse in her entire life. Dad extended a hand and pulled her up onto the stallion’s back, placing her safely behind him with all the skills of a rodeo star. I assumed that even in the afterlife you could learn something new. They rode towards me. ‘You know what you must do son, don’t you?’ dad said soberly. ‘ ‘I do dad,’ I said. ‘Just let me cry for a while first. I need to get away for a bit.’ ‘Just be careful! As soon as people realise who you are they will come looking for you. You must look out for them and when they come you must run the other way.’ He nodded, then swinging the stallion away from me they cantered towards the sun to dissolve in its burning haze. I like to think that my mother didn’t die in hospital. I like to think that she died in paradise. It was the very least I could do for her. (A scene from Projector.)
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 06:55:05 +0000
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