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spending too much time in a state of limbo? ‘Anyway, it almost sounds like you don’t want me to come, Mam…’ This hurts. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe it’s easier for her to believe I’m doing okay if she doesn’t have to sit there face to face with the evidence to the contrary.
    ‘Why would I not want you to come? Do you want to come?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘Well don’t go rabbit with delirium!’
    I picture ecstatic bunnies hopping all over the garden. ‘You mean rabid, Mam.’ My mother comes out with the oddest things. I remember when she’d play her John Lennon record. She seriously thought he was singing, Give Peas A Chance.
    ‘What?’ she says, haughtily. She’s taking my lack of enthusiasm about coming home as a personal slight. I know these things because I know my mother, because in many ways I am my mother. This is not just conversation, it’s subtext; it’s loaded with all kinds of weird business that we’re both aware of but won’t talk about because it all comes down to feelings, and we are both bad with expressing them. She loves me. I love her. We need one another. But neither one of us wants to admit it too much because she feels she lost me years ago, and I am too busy worrying about losing her now.
    ‘Whatever you do, don’t come on my account, Angela. When have I ever asked you to put yourself out for me? Sometimes you disappoint me. You of all people should know me better. I don’t think anybody in this world really understands me.’ Nobody has ever understood my mother. ‘You… your father… you’re both mad as marsh hares,’ she says.
    ‘Right, then if I’m a bloody March hare then it’s best I don’t come, isn’t it!’
    Sometimes she’s got this knack for pressing my buttons.
    ‘Don’t swear, Angela! And don’t shout. I’m not at the North Pole. I’ve not got Lego for ears. Maybe you’re the one that’s deaf! I’m just saying,’ she goes sotto voce to prove that people can make a point without shouting, ‘Do what’s going to make you happy, don’t worry about me.’
    I feel a ridiculous urge to cry because I’ve somehow affronted her dignity and she’s stuck a big knife in me in return, and she doesn’t realise she’s doing it—she never realises; she never seems to understand that hurting can be a two-way street. Because I don’t want to fight with her. I have a new litmus test for life. If I’m going to fight with anybody I love, I’m going to ask myself, Angela, if this were your last day on this earth, is this how you would spend it? Hurting each other’s feelings, breaking each other’s hearts? Sometimes the regrets mount up in me and they are truly backbreaking; I almost can’t take their weight.
    ‘Just because I’m old and my body’s breaking down….’ she adds, for dramatic effect.
    ‘You’re sixty, mam. And you’ve got high blood pressure, just like the rest of the world… And I do want to see you. I really do. I mean, don’t you know me better?’
    She sighs, but it’s a tipsy, partially entertained sigh because she loves me and would rather have a silly argument with me than have nothing. ‘Well how very nice of you. Hang on while I fall on the floor and prostate myself with gratitude.’
    Then she adds, ‘babsy’—another one of her pet names for me—which means she knows she has been over-sensitive, and she doesn’t want to fight either.
    Can I really go to England? What if we end up killing each other? I’m not exaggerating. Dismembered bits of my mother lying all over the carpet are a distinct possibility.
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    The flight is delayed three hours. I’m in the middle seat of the middle row, right by the toilets. The man to my left has horrid breath. To my right is a teenage boy who keeps sticking toothpicks up his nose to impress his brother. I watch him out of the corner of my eye, wondering what our son might have looked like, if we’d had one.
    I have six hours before my connecting flight up to