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some strange reason I think she’s meaning that she has seen a ghost. I feel sick. ‘Jonathan?’
    ‘Before he died,’ she adds, as though she senses clarification’s necessary. The shock passes. Of course before he died. What was I thinking? ‘He was sitting in his car, right there,’ she points across the street. ‘Just sitting, and sitting…As though he didn’t want to go inside that house.’
    I gaze across the street. ‘Our house? Why would he not want to come inside our house?’
    She doesn’t answer.
    ‘Well maybe he was listening to something on the radio…’
    ‘No. Something very bad was on his mind,’ she says. ‘I could see the demon in his face.’
    The word demon gives me the chills. I push away that disturbing image of him, wishing she’d never introduced it to me. ‘It was probably just his work. His mind was always on his work.’
    She doesn’t answer, just watches me closely again. The room has turned cold. An atmosphere surrounds us that I don’t like. It creeps me out. I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. I get out of there pretty fast.
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    ‘Hello blossom.’
    It’s my mother’s bright little voice somewhere a world away in England.
    ‘Mam! I was just going to ring you after I put a load of laundry in.’
    Just yesterday I went into Safeway and there was an elderly lady lying on the floor. A checkout girl was holding her hand while the manager hovered, on the lookout for the ambulance. All I could think was, what if that were my mother, passed out on a supermarket floor in Sunderland, with a stranger, instead of her daughter, holding her hand? Sometimes I think morbidity’s been grafted onto my personality since Jonathan died.
    ‘Crabs,’ she says.
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘You can get them from communal laundry machines. And I don’t mean the ones that walk sideways on the beach. Oh hang on… I’m just watching…. Ooh, you know… Irish chappie? Oily, rather prattish … Does the singalong with all the old snowies?’
    Old snowies. Her name for anyone over the age of sixty.
    ‘Daniel O’Donnell?’
    She makes a strange vomiting noise, then chortles. ‘It’s not his voice, you know. It’s him. Watching him. Urrrrrhhhh. He’s awful.’
    ‘Mam! He’s a very pleasing-looking boy. He’d make some mother a lovely son.’
    ‘Hide your mothers, that’s all I have to say. And your grannies. And maybe even your pet poodle.’
    ‘I think you’re tipsy.’ She sounds half wasted.
    ‘Excuse me?’ she says in that dignity-affronted tone.
    ‘You’ve been on the happy fluid.’
    ‘Girl! No I have not! I’ve just had a small glass of wine and I thought I’d give my only daughter-child a call.’ Another groan. ‘Urgh, he’s back on again. Hang on ‘til I switch his … There. I can talk now. How are you baby daughter?’
    Baby daughter. This makes me smile. ‘Well I’m fine,’ I tell her. It’s not quite true. I’ve been unsettled since yesterday. ‘But how are you, more to the point?’
    Just a few weeks ago my mother turned sixty. My mother is one of those rare women who has somehow become sexier and more head-turning as she’s grown older—the Helen Mirren of mothers. So she’s taking the big six-oh hard. On top of that, she’s just found out she’s got high blood pressure and has to go on medication. Lately I’ve had a heightened sense of my mother’s time left on this earth. I’ll think, if she lives another fifteen years, and I go back to England once a year, that’s only fifteen more times I’m going to see her. I can go to the corner store more than that in a week. How do you make fifteen times count, when you know they’re the last you’re ever going to get?
    ‘God, you’re a cheerful Charlie!’ she said to me, when I told her this. ‘I’m only fifty. I could have forty years in me yet!’
    Here’s the other thing. Since she turned sixty she’s started knocking ten years off her age. I never know how she can say it to