Read She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me for Free Online Page A

living rooms. When they came to see us in the village, my mother’s voice took on an arch tone, as if her life there were a bizarre experiment she would one day abandon. She always said of these friends that they expected her to spoil me—the only child born a month shy of her forty-third birthday. “They thought you’d be a brat,” she said. I don’t know what gave them that idea. Perhaps it was the decor in the living room, where photos of me taken every year from age two and a half upward ran across the length of one wall, which uncharitable friends called the Shrine.
    â€œRogue’s gallery,” she said.
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    FOR THE REST of the school holidays, we hung out at home. We went to the shops and to the bottle bank one town over. My mother worried I would be lonely without siblings and organized copious playdates and activities. For her sake I suffered Scrabble, although it bored me, and for mine she suffered Snakes and Ladders, although as a game that turned entirely on luck, it offended her principles. “You make your own luck,” she said. And, “Sufficient unto the day.” And, “Don’t scratch, you’ll make it worse.” One summer she taught me canasta and we created vast, sprawling games across the kitchen table. We had a whale of a time.
    â€œDid they feed you?” she said when I came back from a sleepover. “What did they feed you? Who else was there? What were the sleeping arrangements?”
    â€œWho’s your best?” she would say, and name two of my friends. “Which would you rather?”
    I once heard Nigel Nicholson tell a story on the radio of an encounter he’d had as a child with Virginia Woolf. She had asked him about his teacher, and he had given her a bland description, enough to fob off most adults, to which she had replied impatiently, “Yes, but what sort of
shoes
does she wear?” My mother was like that. “Did you see . . . ? What did you see? What do you think . . . ? Which would you rather . . . ?” Motivation established, then came judgment. Her judgments were arbitrary and final. Cremation over burial. Charlotte Brontë over Emily. France over Italy. Spain over France. “Slob,” she once said of the mother of a schoolfriend of mine whom I’d reported seeing dump clean laundry from the machine straight onto the floor. “What a slob that woman is.”
    One day I walked in from school to something sharp and filmy in the air, like gasoline. My mother was at her usual post, on a bar stool by the sink.
    â€œWhat?” I said. She turned to look at me so strangely.
    â€œMike died.”
    â€œOh.”
    Her brother Mike was seven years her junior, the next one down and a great athlete. In the event of she and my father dying, she’d said once, I’d go and live with Mike. I’d been quite looking forward to it. Now he had collapsed with a heart attack at the mine, in his mid forties, fit as a fiddle, with three young children and a wife.
    My mother glared and turned away so I wouldn’t see her cry. I carried on standing in the doorway, neat in my school uniform, worried about my math homework, dental checkup in the diary, tennis coaching, swimming coaching, rehearsals for the school play, dance class, piano practice, Latin verb revision on my mind, and before she turned away, I thought, the look on her face was unmistakable: this child has nothing to do with me. She didn’t go back for the funeral.
    Mike, mum's younger brother and “best friend” in the family.
    And then a cousin came to stay; an actual blood relative, the daughter of my mother’s sister Fay. Her name was Victoria and she was three and a half years older than me. She had long blond hair and was very pretty. We got on in a low-key kind of way. She wanted to be a vet and spent most of the trip in the tack shop on