Dismantling My Mother’s House is part memoir, part autofiction. It has been shortlisted for Jericho Wirter’s First500 and highly commended in the Bridport Memoir Prize (reaching the last 6%)
What follows in the first few pages of the as yet unpublished manuscript
Dismantling My Mother’s House
Breaching the queer dark of an unfamiliar bedroom, a child’s voice calls out, Mummy, goodbye. It sounds just the once. The final ripple of a wave reaching my shore, clear enough to snap me awake. The girl child’s voice hangs in the square, blank room.
Mummy goodbye disappearing into the flatness.
I’m neither warm nor cold. Dry air expands the dark. It wasn’t me who’d cried out, but it hadn’t been a dream either. Too external. Disembodied and real, how the first telephone conversations must have sounded to their listeners.
A knock at the door dislodges my thinking. A crack of light, followed by my brother, dispels it completely. He has news. The hospital’s phoned, Mum has died.
He sits on the edge of the bed and explains whose phone was off and whose on and who phoned him and who else knows. He breathes in the space, my silence. I thank him. We agree to talk more in the morning and he leaves. I’m sharp awake now, listening for the voice again. Perhaps there’s more to be heard. But there’s nothing in the room except me rustling the duvet and the sound of my teenage niece sobbing next door. In a minute, I’ll go to her.
Even though I’ve no recordings of myself as a young girl, I recognise the voice. I know with the conviction of a mother, it was my child-self calling out. How did she know the moment to choose? Perhaps she’d called out goodbye at the moment Mum died, or when the hospital phoned my other brother. Did their unseen lines cross in the night, to be intersected by some other line, deep within my unconscious?
Then relief dispels the questions. Mum will no longer be in pain.
**
Three small rocks rise from the glossy white sea of Mum’s kitchen window sill. Each is populated by miniature creatures, humans and trees made from shells, beads, pipe-cleaners, string and glue. I made these palm-sized islands before I was five, before either me or Mum knew I needed glasses. I may not have heard my young voice in years, but the work of my imagination has been visibly present, if usually overlooked, ever since I was giving it form.
I spent hours inhabiting these anchorages while indiscernible swathes of colour pulsed beyond my immediate concerns. Here I was queen, bestowing life and safety to whoever took shape from the fiddlings of my nail-bitten fingers. And the time spent in intense construction didn’t require my leaving Mum’s orbit as she baked, sewed or tidied.
Over fifty years, the softening of glue, slipping heads from torsos, and detaching of beady eyes has obscured the original anatomies, warping them into surreal creatures, grubbied by thickening dust. Still Mum had brought them with her from our family home to this, her new one, arranging them on the pristine sill, keeping them precious.
***
The miniature rock islands bind this home to the one where I grew up. Photos of us as a young family also add anchors of familiarity to a house that definitely isn’t my home. The furniture I loved as a child doesn’t. Here, her dark oak corner cupboards, card tables and foot-rests oppress the smaller, modern armchairs and a dining set bought to fit. The weight and soft clicks of the cupboard doors and heavy drawers I’ve opened and closed my entire life still reassure me, but the satin upholstery and ornate legs impose an era of stiff backs and waxed etiquette on the compact rooms. Adding to this mash up is that of the owner before Mum moved in, whose smoking habit, despite fresh paint and new carpets, was never totally eradicated during the six years Mum lived here. And without the heating and Mum’s cooking, the tobacco tang is creeping back throughout the ground floor.
Mum came here from the home I’d known as mine, where she’d lived for almost fifty years. Buying it from his parents, she and Dad had moved in just before I was born. She’d spent the last years of the swinging sixties, such as they were in northern England, rearranging rooms, replacing windows and painting walls to make the house her own, fit for her family. That house, like this new one, had a solidity typical of many houses in Harrogate. I’d loved living there, for eighteen years, steeped in my father’s family history. It was as much inside me as I’d lived within it. A large island, constructed by her, scuffed and taken for granted by the rest of us.
Even so, this home was less intimate than the very first one she’d provided. In utero there was no distinguishing who made whom. There, one cell grew from another, multiplying into folds of flesh, in a network of needs, functions and sensibilities that fastened our bodies together over nine months.
I’d always done the leaving. Mum was always there when I returned. All these sensations of home, holding me within their invisible scaffolds, now pitch more air than architecture, empty as this house that needs to be cleared. And my body, untethered, unfocused, doesn’t know where or how to put itself.
***
It’s four years since I felt similarly bewildered.
Mum was still planning to live until she was a hundred when I went to the Arctic. I was in Svalbard, with thirty other artists, on a residency aboard a repurposed brigantine. It was June and the sun did not set, merely rearranged the shadows of mountains, glaciers and moraines. What looked a few hundred metres away often turned out to be ten kilometres, or further. Million year old air hissed and popped from the bitty bergs we passed. I breathed in the exhalations of lives long gone. A glacier formed over four thousand years took five minutes to calve its front wall.
In the face of this I shrank. And not just me. Everyone on the boat was gawping and cooing, an assortment of infants scrabbling before the deliberations of rock, ice, mud and water reshaping before us. Every moment was an event, a first, that bore witness to the actions of the industrialised world. We were face to face with the consequences of two hundred plus years of not looking. And now we didn’t know where to settle our gaze.
No more so than the afternoon we headed for the rock at the most northern tip of the archipelago. Rossøya barely broke the waters. It was a bony mound, far less ornate than the ones I’d made and inhabited with shells, string and beads. There was no sign of the driftwood and washed-up plastics we’d found on other beaches. It swelled white where snow lay unmelted, black in crevices threading across it, and green at its slimy rim. Ancient continental crust three billion years old, once part of the earth’s mantle, had been pressed upwards by magma, to thicken and aerate on meeting the sky.
The sea was not white but grey. There was still the threat of unseen ice so we inched towards the rock. I toddled on deck, bundled in layers of fleece and thermals, legs outspread, keeping myself upright in the boat’s movement, dubious about getting too close. I couldn’t articulate what made me uneasy. In my pocket was a piece of fossilised coral from when Svalbard was 50° farther south. The grind of past and present, distance and proximity pounded inside me. I fell into the arms of the group excitement, let myself be carried on the anticipation of stepping onto the ground of the world’s most northerly rock. I was fifty one years old and had never felt such a child.
