Read A Little Death for Free Online

can remember with any clarity is the death of my mother. Everybody tiptoeing about—‘don’t tell the children anything’—I’m sure they wouldn’t even have told us our mother was
dead
if they could have managed without. Our nurse told us she’d gone to be with Jesus. Edmund was nine when she died and I was seven. Which I suppose means that our younger brother, Freddie, must have been about three. The worst thing was the mourning: one day I had rows and rows of pretty dresses in the most gorgeous colours; then they took them all away and they came back black. I wouldn’t exactly say I missed my mother; in fact, if it hadn’t been for the black dresses I think I would have forgotten about her almost immediately.
    Our nurse was one of these excessively religious women. I’ve always thought it must have been some sort of nonconformist establishment that she belonged to and Edmund says he remembers her reading a Baptist newspaper. I’ve got a feeling that the church was called something to do with sheep, like the Flock of the Shepherd or the Brethren of the Lamb. I imagine that it was rather like Little Bethel in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, thepart when Kit has to go and fetch his mother away from the church and all the people are rolling around and waving their legs in the air and being saved. Being saved evidently didn’t agree with Nurse because she always came back from her church in a frightful temper. She used to see everything as a sign: the pattern on the wallpaper, the way you walked downstairs, something was always a sign. But all the signs meant the same thing: ‘You’ll come to a bad end.’ Everything meant I’d come to a bad end. The nursery was a miserable place after my mother died, everything black: rocking horse, pictures, dolls, the whole lot wrapped in black material. And it was worse because Edmund went off to school. I remember being absolutely distraught about that, a hundred times more upset than over my mother’s death, because I had no one to talk to if Edmund wasn’t there. I didn’t really know my mother, you see. I thought she was beautiful and I used to love seeing her dressed up in her lovely clothes, but she was like a beautiful butterfly, or a fairy… you wouldn’t expect a fairy to bathe you, would you? I don’t remember her holding me or playing games or anything, just that she would brush her lips against our faces to say good-night. A kiss so soft you could hardly feel it.
    I forgot her face very quickly and that made me sad. Of course, there were photographs, but they never made her look very beautiful and I’m sure she was. I suppose I could have looked in the glass to refresh my memory—when she was alive, my father used to call me his pocket edition. But if I looked in the glass now, I’d see an old woman and my mother didn’t live to be an old woman, so what’s the point?
    Freddie I do remember very clearly, which is just as well because I’ve never been able to find a single photograph of him. I remember once, when I was very young,looking through a photograph album with my father. He was telling me stories about the people in the pictures and there was a picture of him and Uncle Jack with their parents, when they were boys. My grandmother was sitting in front of them on a chair with a baby in her lap and Father and Uncle Jack and my grandfather were standing behind her. They all looked very cross except for the baby, who was smiling. I said, ‘Look, the baby’s smiling.’
    My father said, ‘The baby’s not smiling, Georgina. It’s dead.’ I looked again, carefully, but you wouldn’t have known it was dead unless someone had told you. It just looked happy.
    When they’d cleaned all the blood off Freddie and put fresh clothes on him, I thought perhaps someone might want to take a photograph of the two of us with my father, but there was no camera and no one to use it. Edmund says he can barely remember what Freddie looked like, but that isn’t surprising