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was conducted via email and by letters slipped under his office door as I exited the building. I denied him a meeting with me, a chance to explain. He was too happy to oblige me, too guilty to say no. Someone will replace me easily, probably a postdoctoral researcher eager for some experience.
    ‘Maude, I’ll pay. But I think you should consider it.’
    She sweeps past me, all 89 years of her.
    I know she’s just trying to fill the time till Mr Bergin confirms what my mother’s will contains. She’s worried. Maude has no home of her own. Her husband gambled everything they owned, leaving her homeless, destitute, when he died at 58 of a heart attack. She has nothing to worry about. My mother will surely leave her the house. Eventually I’ll go back to New York, to my job, my research. Easy though it is to breathe with my mother not around, this isn’t home. Not this shiny city, this receptacle of half-finished buildings, the place from which I ran.
    Maude has been up since dawn, pruning, weeding, picking herbs and now cleaning the house. It’s only ten o’clock, and I would still be in bed if it weren’t for this meeting. I am a spiderweb of pain, that vague all-body ache that results from drinking too much late into the night. I finished off the congealed contents of the drinks tray in the living room, smoked some of the weed I smuggled accidentally in the bottom of my suitcase, a tiny packet left over from God knows when. I don’t even know how it got into my case. I passed out on the floor as dawn silvered the sky and slipped in through the window. Maude’s key in the hall door roused me. I’d wanted to get up when I heard her, but I couldn’t lift my cheek from the carpet. She didn’t say a word about it, but I still felt grubby for being that way in front of her, as though I were a teenager and drinking against parental wishes. Maybe if she came out and confronted me, insisted that I have a problem, it might be easier. But I come from a house where nothing is confronted head-on, problems are discussed in hushed tones behind closed doors, and voices brighten when the subject of the conversation comes into the room. This house is well practised in discretion. It holds its secrets like port in a corked bottle.
    It makes it easier for me to drink and get high.

    Mr Bergin arrives in a flurry of tidiness. He is small, neat and compact. Utterly trustworthy, which I suppose is why my mother chose him. He busies himself with files and sheaves of paper, while Maude fusses with a heavy silver tray of tea and sliced cake. It won’t make any difference whether we feed the solicitor or not, but Maude isn’t like me. I remove the antique tray from her grip and place it onto the dining room table. My hands on her shoulders, I manoeuvre her into a chair before dropping onto one myself.
    A headache sighs somewhere in the back of my skull. I pull at a thread on the tablecloth. I wish I could lay my head down and sleep until this whole gathering is over.
    I’m exhausted. My hair is bundled into a knot at the back of my head, and I’m thinner than I’ve been in a long time. I’m running every day to keep myself from thinking too much, but I do know that what I long for is to escape into the cool, scented spaces in poetry. I don’t want to be here, in this hot room, waiting to hear how my mother is laughing at me from another dimension.
    Maude is bright, expectant, but it’s just a disguise. I’ve watched her today, seen how she smoothes her hair, brushes invisible wrinkles from her clothes. The tremor in her hand raises its level of activity, and I see her calming it with the other hand, hiding it. Mr Bergin won’t judge her on how she looks, but it’s the small actions that keep her busy, stop her mind from wandering into substandard care homes for the elderly who cannot afford anything else. I understand her fear and the shapes it takes inside her head, but I also know she’ll be provided for. My mother may not