her room to try to coax her out of bed. “I might never see my own mother again,” she sobbed, buried under blankets. “I’ve got nothing to look forward to. Nothing.”
I felt I had no choice other than to stay at home and make sure she didn’t do anything foolish. While I watched over her, I sought refuge in the books I’d sneaked out of the mobile library. Since my initial foray, I’d perfected my skills at sneaking books from the adult section, making sure I put on a particularly baggy item of clothing before running down the driveway to the van. I didn’t feel too guilty about deceiving the librarian because she didn’t seem to notice the absence of any of the items I took, and I always sneaked them back onto the shelves within the regulation lending period of two weeks.
When the mobile library arrived that week, however, I was a little disturbed to find that I’d almost exhausted the potentially interesting titles in the adult section. After finding only one volume there that even vaguely interested me, I waited to check out the little stack of children’s titles I always took out to avoid arousing the librarian’s suspicion. As I stood there, I found myself eyeing the slush pile of titles she didn’t approve of that had been sent by the staff at the main library. I hadn’t heard of any of the authors, but two of the titles on the top of the pile looked particularly interesting: Sons and Lovers and Brave New World. So when the librarian dropped her date stamp and bent awkwardly behind the checkout counter to pick it up, I took the opportunity to grab the two books and stuff them down the front of my anorak. After I got them home, I was thrilled to find that I enjoyed these books, and to realize that if I could continue to poach from the librarian’s slush pile the horizons of my reading would broaden significantly.
Despite the distraction offered by my new reading, however, I was becoming increasingly concerned about my mother. The only time she got out of bed was to go to the toilet, and five days after we’d visited Mabel the only thing she had eaten was a packet of cream crackers and a bowl of Heinz cream of mushroom soup. Otherwise, she’d refused to eat, and I was beginning to wonder whether she might have decided to starve herself to death, wasting away so that I’d barely be able to distinguish the outline of her body from the ripples and ridges in the blankets, and she’d end up being carried out of the house again on a stretcher, this time a bundle of loose skin over jutting-out bones.
It was distressing, too, that my father seemed unconcerned. “Oh, she’ll pull herself out of it,” he said, slapping on another coat of paint in the hallway. “She’s just sulking after she got the news about her mother. But she’ll get over that soon enough.” Then he turned up the radio so he could listen to the cricket match.
Maybe he was right, maybe this was just a minor hiccup in my mother’s recovery; maybe she’d get back to landscaping the back garden once she’d got over her initial shock. But, really, I never knew with my mother. What I did know, though, was that if she didn’t have any food she wasn’t going to get better. And though I might not be able to control her mood, I might be able to persuade her to eat.
“Mum,” I said, entering her room soon after my father had left for work. “Are you awake, Mum?” The curtains were closed and I found myself immersed in a grainy semidarkness, able to make out my mother’s undulating form beneath the bedclothes only after I’d been standing there for several seconds. She lay on her side, facing me, silent, unmoving. “Come on, Mum,” I said. “It’s time you got up.” I could make out her features now; they looked pale and smooth as paper in the dim light. Her eyes were closed, the lashes unflickering, her mouth without tension. I knew she wasn’t asleep; her breathing was too shallow. “Come on, Mum,” I said again, running my hand over her hair. I’d expected it to be soft, but it was crisp and springy with matted-in lacquer, a hard sheen-repelling touch. I stood up and walked over to the window. “Wakey, wakey,” I said, pulling back the curtains,