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

while my mother’s dwindled. I would tell him jokes and stories from my day that I hadn’t told her. He would laugh, and I would know, in the background, she was hearing it and registering the change. I knew how awful this was, but I kept on doing it. I was punishing her for leaving me.
    As a result, my dad and I have never really talked about anything serious, certainly not about her history. She was the gatekeeper and she kept the gates shut.
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    I DON’T HAVE THE HEFT for this. I can’t get lids off jars. I get drunk on half a shandy. My mother, who could get the lid off anything and metabolized alcohol like water, would be appalled by this admission, it being worse in her view to admit to a weakness than to have one in the first place. “Go and ask the man,” she would say when I was little, trying to get me to overcome my Englishness. I didn’t want to ask the man. I would rather do without than ask the man. How I became a journalist, when all you do all day is ask the man, I have no idea. And yet despite being a journalist, I have never so much as fed her name into a search engine. All I have, after her death, are the stories she told and the stories she threatened to tell but didn’t.
    It had delighted my mother when I went into journalism. “I’d have been proud, of course, if you’d been a maths genius,” she said airily, “but it wouldn’t have been my
preference
.” She bored the neighbors rigid with details of my life. She once got into a fight with someone in the village who suggested, mildly, that I was an odd choice to send to Israel to interview Ariel Sharon—twenty-five years old and bereft of any knowledge, let alone specialism in Middle Eastern politics. (In fact, so wholly unthreatening a proposition was I that Sharon, showing me around his farm, picked an orange from his orchard and, after peeling it, fed a piece of it into my mouth like a baby bird, while I tried to arrange a response around the giant size of my freak-out. Such are the dividends of knowing nothing.)
    â€œShe seemed an odd choice,” said the man in the village, and my mother snapped, “I’d like to see you do better.” In the newsagent’s, she furtively moved stock so that copies of the
Guardian
, where I worked, covered copies of the
Telegraph
, where I didn’t.
    Lurid threats were made as to what, precisely, would befall my employers if anything befell me.
    The year before she died I won an award, and my mother considered her legacy: “Some people write novels or paint beautiful paintings,” she sighed. “I created you.”
    Now I sit in my flat in London and turn on my computer. “I will be professional about this,” I think. I will do all the things you do in the early stages of a story: flip between websites, jump up for snacks, write words at crazy angles in your notebook, hoping they’ll never come before a judge, not least because you’ve drawn a little house with a chimney and smoke coming out of it in the middle of the page confident that if it looks like action it will generate results, or at least the momentum to achieve them down the line. It will be a matter of lists and itineraries. I am suddenly cheerful. Some cups of tea, some common sense, and who knows what harm might be undone?
    I had asked my dad, groping for a language—any language—in which to talk about these things we’d never talked about, if she had said much to him.
    â€œThere was something about a trial?” I said, as we sat in the kitchen not long after the funeral. We were drinking red wine from the box on the counter. Apart from cocktails, which were different, I wouldn’t drink much when I was at home. I drank plenty in town, but at home I instinctively avoided it. I might have a glass of champagne at Christmas, but I wouldn’t join my parents in wine at the table.