She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockes Page A

scream at her, “Stop it, it’s over, you can’t bluff your way through this one.” Then she had stopped going out and complained of being in pain, and I longed for the old bravado.
    She was adamant that no one should come to the funeral; just my dad and me and the woman from the Humanist Society who, when she visited a few days after the death, seemed taken aback by the stringency of my mother’s wishes. My dad and I wavered. There were my mother’s friends from London; there were the parents of my own friends, who’d become her friends; there were neighbors and friends from the village. All summer they’d dropped in with offers of help: portable fans to disperse the heat, ideas on how to tempt her appetite. We owed them a funeral. An elderly woman called Hazel whom I knew by sight but had never spoken to stopped me in the street and asked if I needed help going through my mother’s wardrobe. “It can be hard,” she said. We got all the way to Hazel, buoyed by the idea we were doing the right thing, before stopping and helplessly scrapping the list.
    The humanist looked at me. (I thought she’d be woollier, but she was actually quite stern. “Mum would have liked her,” we said afterward, hopefully.) It’s not that she didn’t have friends, I said. It’s that she didn’t want . . . she didn’t like the idea of people gathering in these circumstances. I knew exactly how my mother felt about this: that being the only dead person in the room would put her at a decided disadvantage.
    Mr. Quigley, the undertaker, had come for her that night in formal dress, accompanied by his daughter, who was very young and very grave, wearing what looked like a man’s black suit and standing behind her father, staring respectfully at her shoes. The undertaker had explained we might want to wait in the living room and shut the door; the removal of the body could be upsetting.
    My dad and I did as he instructed, milling awkwardly in the middle of the room. Her glasses were still on the windowsill, on top of a paperback she’d been reading, a shiny-backed crime novel from the library. Twenty-seven versions of my own face stared down at me from the Shrine. There was a sharp bump against the door. Something in my brain lifted up and resettled. The turn from the hallway to the porch was tight and I couldn’t imagine how they’d make it, or how two slight-looking people, an old man and a girl, could manage the load. (Mr. Quigley may not have been old, but that’s how he seemed, in his gentle formality.)
    We opened the door and went out into the hallway. The porch opened onto the warm summer night. Mr. Quigley and his daughter reemerged from the darkness, and when we shook their hands, I noticed the girl’s watch, which was huge, like something you’d wear to go diving. “My mother will be fascinated by all this,” I thought.
    On the day of the funeral it started to rain, the first rain of summer. “Hammy to the end,” I thought. We honored her wishes and kept the guest list to two.

My grandmother, Sarah Doubell.

CHAPTER 4
    London–Buckinghamshire–London
    THE SHIFT IS INSTANTANEOUS. It is as if, the day after her death, a van pulls up outside my house and men start unloading luggage onto the pavement.
    â€œOi,” I say. “Hang on a sec. None of that’s mine.”
    â€œSorry, love,” says the man. “Someone has to have it.”
    What can I say? “OK. Bring it in.”
    My dad and I had never talked about it. He could hardly get a word in with my mother around, although in the last year of her life a subtle change had started to occur. Whereas usually when I rang home she gave my dad five minutes on the line before swooping in and taking over, as she got sicker and less able to follow the conversation the balance had tilted. My dad’s portion of the phone call got longer and longer,