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me seriously, but she can.
    She might bluff, as she generally does, but I know, deep down, that she feels abandoned. Since I moved to Canada, Mam and I have been largely telephone callers in each other’s lives, except for my yearly trip home, where we’d try to squeeze all the bonding into two weeks. It was never good enough, long enough, or eased my guilt enough. Every time I got on that plane to come back to Canada I’d drape that blanket over my head and silently bawl my eyes out underneath. Even when my dad died I couldn’t be there because of work. I’m sure my mother knows I’ve let the side down, although she’d never say anything. Because my mother is one of life’s martyrs, which is convenient for me: she never lets you feel truly shit about the decisions you’ve made, even though we both know that sometimes she has to restrain the urge.
    ‘By the way, weren’t you going to look up the side-effects of my Beautiful-Pretty medication?’ she chirps.
    Her other name for her BP pills. There’s a part of my mother that I sometimes think is a bit deranged.
    ‘Oh yeah.’ I find my piece of paper with the weird name scribbled on it. ‘I’m right on the computer now… Hang on.’
    I clack away at keys. ‘Okey-dokey… side effects… shortness of breath, hives, swelling of the face or tongue.’
    She groans after each word, each groan getting progressively deeper and more groany, which is sort of funny.
    ‘Headache.’
    Groan.
    ‘Depression.’
    Double groan.
    ‘Erectile dysfunction—’
    I hear a muffled gasp. ‘Well that last one’s got me very worried Angela. How am I going to please all my paramours now then?’
    ‘With great difficulty, probably.’
    She laughs a dirty laugh.
    ‘Does it say anything about dizziness though?’
    I scour the list. ‘Why? Are you feeling dizzy?’
    ‘No.’
    I tut and stop scanning. ‘Then why are you asking?’
    ‘I don’t know. Let’s lay this morbid topic to rest anyway.’
    I click off the Net. ‘I was wanting to tell you something. I have some good news for you.’ I’m pretty sure she must be thinking I’m seeing a man, so I quickly add, ‘I’m coming home.’ Then I add, ‘Just for a visit, obviously.’ Just in case she gets the wrong idea there too.
    There’s a brief silence. ‘You can’t come home! What about work?’ My mother loves having ‘a career girl’ for a daughter. She only ever worked as a make-up girl in a department store. She was a pretty, well-brought-up, working-class young lady, who might have gone somewhere, only she married my dad. My dad was going nowhere except to the pub. As she’ll say, ‘all our marriage he was having an affair. His mistress was the Ye Olde Fiddle.’ Even now, there’s a disappointment and a bewilderment in her that runs high. Because the life she got wasn’t the life she wanted. And now that my dad’s dead and she can’t blame him anymore, she’s got nobody to blame but herself, and that’s not sitting too well with her.
    ‘I’m going to tell him I need a leave of absence. It’s not like he’s really got any work for me as it is. Sometimes I think he’s just paying me to listen to him rant.’
    ‘You can’t do that! You had so much time off when Jonathan died.’
    If that’s what you call confining yourself to the house, moving in a silent world between the armchair and the bed, listening to people intellectualise loss by telling you that there was a reason why Jonathan died at thirty-six, or that God had plans for my husband that didn’t include a long life. Yet you’re just dealing with the soft, speechless things, like the towel he last showered with, the smell of his T-shirt he last went running in, trying to convince yourself that because you can still smell him must mean that he’s still there.
    ‘I didn’t have a job to take time off from! I’d been fired, remember? I was trying to work out what to do with my life.’ Is this her way of telling me she thinks I’m