Closer 2

We are watching our speed on the road but in another dimension we are gathering velocity. We pass signs to places where we both used to live and the Mini fills with memories. Mum’s houses were always imposing and for decades I drove large cars with impressive German marques. We are reduced in circumstances but on this morning we are cheerful, close to each other and one day closer to our endings. Today will bring us closer still.

    quantum states
    Brighton is all down town: they tumble, one past the other, spilling into the sea. Even after four years I rarely enter the city without an exclamation, a little giddy at my plunge down Dyke Road. But today I am travelling west and the downs, finding fun elsewhere, retreat from the water. The A27 cuts through a flattened land, pylons straddle ploughed fields on their way to coastal suburbia. A numbing boredom shot through with loneliness and longing tells me we are travelling in more ways than one. I am being delivered into the Sussex of my upbringing. 
    Mum and me are in the Mini. We are on our way to a funeral. We are watching our speed on the road but in another dimension we are gathering velocity. Mum is eager to give directions. They are accurate but unhelpful. Her macula degeneration leaves her without relative coordinates and she has no idea of our junctions. We pass signs to places where we both used to live and the Mini fills with memories. Mum’s houses were always imposing and for decades I drove large cars with impressive German marques. We are reduced in circumstances but on this morning we are cheerful, close to each other and one day closer to our endings. Today will bring us closer still.
    Pat is dead and we will bury her where she lived, in Bosham. The name has started something. Down deep large magnets are humming and imparting acceleration. I have been here before. I am sixteen and I am tripping. I am by the water (here, where we park) and I wish I was someone else. I wish I was the youth with the droopy moustache and long hair. I wish I the night-tripper, the man with the acid, because I wish to be adored by Suzie, kohl-eyed in crushed velvet, puppy plump and utterly lovely. I want to be petted by this girl but the magician-king holds court. He has a name that makes me think of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. My awkwardness balloons and everything about me is shameful, awkward and out of place. My mind has been kicked like a football and is held only by the taut, shiny wire of my insecurity.
    Pat keeps us waiting. Mum sits in a trio of her friends, husbands long gone. Mary is dismayed at the lateness of the late but for, once, I am not impatient. On this early January day the old church is warm, clean, washed with light and busy with Pat’s sad children. Four a cappella singers, standing loosely, add a beautiful soundtrack. Doris’ daughter and I joke about our elderly charges. I know things about her: she is floored by depression, single and sometimes hospitalised. I know it but can do nothing about it.
    Mum however is intent on enjoying herself. Mum’s sight is shot so she insists I talk her through the service booklet. On the back there is Pat the old woman, just another saggy face propping up glasses, a smile just discernible, but on the front is a young woman, hair caught in a breeze, looking straight ahead, really attractive. Mum talks about a photograph of her with a horse and I assure her I know the one. Mum approves of Pat’s white coffin. My disapproval stirs (surely not white, Mum, so naff) but I shut up. Mum imagines her grandsons carrying her coffin. I foresee a loud argument, talk of heath and safety regulations and a grey haired man telling the funeral director to stuff all that because this is how it is going to be. I like the man in that scene. Mum and I giggle. I am gathering useful information. It is naughty but fun.
    Mum sings the words to the first verses of the hymns and I join her. Well, that stops here: none of my offspring have an inkling of the rhythm or rhymes of these verses from another age, from another galaxy. We implore our redeemer to open crystal fountains, we defy goblins and foul fiends, we long for a Canaan unrecognisable from the mess on Sky News. Charmed by these antiquated certainties I utterly fail to notice that matter and antimatter are being brought into close alignment. Inside the Large Hadron Collider Michael faces us and speaks of his mother’s life.It happens in flashes. He is my age and his Sussex story bears similarities. Pat is tested, and for some years her sons were less than helpful, unruly. Well I think, that’s one way to refer to five years in Parkhurst. How did I know that? Michael instances his sister – I just know she is unmarried, his other brother Mothball…..The man in front of me turns and time and place disintegrate. Mothball has lost his hair and his moustache. He shuffles, he limps, his eyes flicker in a thousand yard stare. The drugs took Michael’s liberty but they reached deeper into Mothball. I am in two places thirty-seven years apart. I am particulate, spread in a continuum. The universe teeters, I am in violation of quantum mechanical law.From the Church we are given a map to Pat’s Pub. My middle age provides me with a cloak of invisibility and only twice do I cast it off. Michael has a sense of loss that his bravura this afternoon make more moving. I see myself in him, his rehabilitation finding echoes in my own and I want more for him. I want to clutch at him and take him to a meeting. Suzie is no more. I remember the letters we exchanged when I was back at boarding school. I can see her handwriting. The publican and I once built camps in the woods. He presses his back against the wall and says yes divorce was difficult. I am surprised at how the feeling is communicated fully without a single detail. At funerals, and at weddings too, the joins between worlds grow thin and there’s a chance, for a short while, of unusual rates of transmission. I notice how often I am holding Mum’s hand. I have to guide her but she is holding me too, in the present.

    Mum is feted and finds younger medical folk (sprightly in their early seventies) and delights in correspondences. We visit the Mayo Clinic, Boston, and local postgraduate centres without leaving the Horse and Groom. There is a social side to dying and Mum is intent on a good time. She is upright, strikingly dressed, and quick witted. The fact is we are a handsome couple, a tad bohemian, Brightonians out among country cousins. I see my mother how others see her and my pride is recharged. Mum tells me she is proud of me too.

    We stop off for tea in Chichester with Doris, quite doddery now as Mum notes disapprovingly. Mum plays with Doris’ armchair and the footstep rises smoothly. Her feet stick out and she is small and talkative like a child. I want to scoop her up in my arms. Even back at dinner with the family Mum and I are still full of beans. We have been fortified by the funeral.

    Once upon a time separation brought me closer to my children and it has done what it does for Mum and me today.

    Pat is dead, we are alive, we are glad we have each other. Is there anything else?

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