[Story Index] [Discussion Thread] [The Asylum]
1996, life, love and loss.
By slappy
2000-12-02
My mother had been trying to contact me for some time. I was a month away from being 18, and lets face it, I was never that great at returning phone calls. My parents had been divorced for a few years, and I had chosen to live with my father. I hardly ever got the chance...or rather, I was too lazy to make the effort to meet up with my mum, even though she lived within walking distance of my home. She was only a phone call away, and that was all I really needed at the time. We used to speak for hours, sometimes until 6 or 7 in the morning. She always listened to me, gave me the chance to explain without butting in, never judgemental, and always gave me the right advice at the right time. For that, I will always be grateful.
So I would get back from school, listen to the ansafone, hear her voice, "...will you call me please, I love you, Mum.". I would make a snack, and as I always did, I would go into my own little world, a trance-like state, like every other teenager who'd just got back from school. Of course I would forget about phoning my mum.
Over a period of a week or so, reminders were given to me by my dad, my sister, my mum on the ansafone. "Will you call your mother, she wants to speak to you soon, OK?", but I always procrastinated and promised I'd "do it tomorrow". Anyway, the time finally came when I managed to get my act together and call her. By this time it felt like some kind of overdue homework that had to be handed in, but when I heard her voice it was beautiful, as it always had been. Why had I left it so late? I loved talking to her. I could say anything; I would make her laugh, she would make me laugh, we made each other feel good. I longed to see her, but speaking to her at that moment was all that mattered. So the conversation ended, and I carried on about my business of being a moody teenager with my dad.
A few days later - it was a Friday afternoon at 1 p.m. - I was awoken by my elder sister who was living with me and my dad at the time. She knocked on my door. I slowly opened my eyes to see her standing at the end of my bed, white as a sheet, one hand over her mouth, the phone in the other outstretched to me. I looked at her. What was going on? I took the phone slowly from her. It was my dad on the other end.
"Hello?"
"Mariana... I have some very sad news."
"Dad? What's happened?"
"...ahem... your mother has passed away."
...silence.
What can you say to that? My jaw dropped. I looked at my sister again, standing there with tears in her eyes. I was shaking. I passed the phone back to her. I think she spoke to my dad again briefly, and as she hung up, I reached for her. She came to me and we hugged. We cried. I still wasn't sure if I had actually woken up. But it wasn't a dream.
People say their lives flash before them when they are about to die. How can you fit a lifetime of experiences into a split second? But in the first five minutes of me waking up that day, I had gone from thinking I had two parents to knowing I would never see one of them again. It was the longest five minutes I have ever lived.
I got dressed, for we were to go to my mothers house. I can't remember how we got there, but we arrived to see police outside talking to my dad. We ran up to him. I was wide eyed, in shock, disbelief. There was a female police officer. Very sympathetic, but obviously embarrassed. She didn't know what to say, but what can anyone say in circumstances like these? I wanted to know what had happened, where my mum was. Her body had already been taken away. The neighbours hadn't heard from her in a couple of days. They had got worried, and eventually found her lying on the kitchen floor.
I hadn't seen my mum for a while, and looking back, whenever we did manage to meet up, we always met in the tea room round the corner, or at her neighbours house. I asked her if I could come round to play the piano, but she always made up an excuse not to go into her house: "I need to go to my neighbour's while she's away to water the plants" or "I really like this tea place... let's leave it until next time, shall we?".
The kind police officer looked at us. "Do you want to go inside?" Me, my dad and my sister all looked at each other and silently agreed. "Ok. but let me warn you, it's quite a mess in there. It might come as a shock. You don't have to if you don't want to ok?". I had to go inside.
She lived in a basement flat in a posh area of North London. It never got much light inside, and she always kept a duvet up against the front window to block out the drafts. We held hands and slowly walked down the steps and into her small flat. I couldn't believe it. Tears were welling up in my eyes. I placed my hand inside my jumper and over my mouth and nose. The stench was unbelievable. There were plates, pots, pans, mugs, glasses, knives, forks, spoons everywhere that hadn't been washed. The sink was full, dirty and greasy. Food and milk had been left out to rot for god knows how long, days, weeks, maybe months even. Maggots had made their way into the fridge, had lived, bred and died. I looked at the space on the kitchen floor where my mum must have been found dead. I stepped over it, still holding on to my dad and my sister.
It felt like I was in some sort of scary dungeon. I was scared to turn around, to touch anything, to let go of my dad's arm in case something would take me away to a different world, like it had with my mum. We looked over into her "living" room. The floor was covered. You could not move. It was covered in empty, 1 litre vodka bottles. We had found the murderer. At the scene of the crime, lying there on the floor.
In the backs of our minds I guess we had expected her to die. Although it was a shock, we all knew. So did she. She needed to talk to me that week. And she did. She wanted to say goodbye. And she did. She wouldn't leave us until she had said her goodbyes.
As I sit here, feeling sick to the stomach, tears occasionally making their way to the fronts of my eyes, I think to myself that it will be four years at the end of this month that she has been gone. Nearly a fifth of my life I have not known her. If I die at the age of 80, I will not have seen her for over three quarters of my life. But I know she is in a better place now. Nothing could be worse than the hell she must have gone through.
I will always have the memories... they will never leave me.
She will always live... in my heart.