Chapter Twelve: The Invisible Men
‘Do you want her tablet?’ I call down to D. ‘She said I could have it when she was…alive.’
‘Nah,’ My little brother shouts back, ‘I think I got most of what I wanted already.’
‘I feel like I’m looting.’
‘I know, it’s weird,’ he chuckles as I come down the stairs. He’s taking yet another full tank from the carpet shampooer into the kitchen. ‘But it’s not like she’s using it, is she.’
Then the smell hits me.
The living room and lobby smells absolutely disgusting. Wet from the shampooer, the carpet stinks like dog mixed with cheese and dusty musk. I retch.
‘Oh my GOD,’ I splutter, pulling my shirt over my nose. ‘It’s like Satan’s butthole down here.’
‘Aye,’ D nodded, coming back with the clean tank. He clips it into the Shark shampooer. An expensive model, barely used.
‘How long do you think since it was cleaned?’ My voice is muffled by my shirt, and I’m amused to see D follow suit and pull his t-shirt collar up over his nose.
The pair of us did that a lot, as children – when Mum would chain-smoke in the same room as us, clicking on her yellowed computer as we watched cartoons.
‘T reckoned a good four years.’
‘But that’s a pricey carpet shampooer, isn’t it? Why have it and not use it.’
‘God knows.’
‘What happened that that Keeping Up Appearances box set?’ I grumble, rifling through shelves of DVDs. ‘I was gonna have that.’
The mother-in-law’s tongue plant still stood next to the TV in the living room, dry and dusty. I went to pick it up, thought a minute, then decided to just water the poor thing instead.
Well, mum did imply she didn’t want me to have the plant. I didn’t want her ghost following me down the motorway for her plant back.
I was so stressed and tired and greiving, I was seeing shadows in the corner of my eye…I shuddered at the thought it might be Mum making sure I wasn’t nicking her stuff.
‘Alexa,’ I said, for old time’s sake, ‘Play York Mix Radio.’
The end of April brought a tang in the air – one that promised a warm summer.
‘Well mum thinks I’m married to a man.’
J’s message popped up in the family group chat. I clicked in with interest.
Mum had reached that stage of confused where she knew that I was gender fluid – or gender queer, or whatever – and her brain translated that into her eldest son being gay.
He’s married to a woman who has always identified as such, was even born as such.
‘But you’re a man,’ mum said to J’s wife when the pair of them visited her a few days prior.
Again: how much of that was the cancer eating at her brain, and how much of that was her just being a bitch?
‘She said to me,’ T told me later, ‘she said “oo, you know that Louis? He’s a bit of alright, isn’t he? Phwoar.”’
I recoiled before T quickly added:
‘She’s confused. She thinks you live with Louis and with a dog.’
My brain hurt.
‘The other day after J and his wife left,’ T added, ‘she collared me and she goes: “Why didn’t you tell me J is married with a wife? I thought he was gay.”’
The council-supplied live-in carer fitted in well enough.
The wonderful St Leonard’s Hospice carer visits were taken away. In their place, a private company sent one carer three times a day to help the live-in carer; and apparently, they were no where near as considerate and empathetic as the hospice ladies had been.
As a result, mum was frequently triggered.
‘I called the other day,’ D told me, ‘And the live-in carer picks up. And mum’s shouting in the background and the carer goes “oh, I’m in trouble!” and she hands the phone to mum and mum goes “WHY DON’T YOU JUST FUCK OFF” and puts the phone down.
‘So I call back,’ he continued, ‘and mum picks up and in a completely different voice goes “hiya love!”’
T and my brothers joked about it in the group chat, but it was sad. All of us finally had this woman back in our lives, and her brain was a loom of tangled wires.
Six days after I’d last seen her, I fought my declining mental health and went back up north.
With my car parked up on the overgrown driveway, I sensed the aura of chaos as soon as I stepped on to the porch.
A preppy-dressed woman I didn’t recognise opened the door when she saw me through the glass.
‘Hi, I’m Lou- erm, Sarah. Kay’s daughter.’
It felt weird introducing myself by my deadname.
‘I’m the care coordinator,’ the lady, bright-faced and in her fifties, chirped. ‘I’ve come to assess your mum...’
Sounds of generic struggle bounded in from the living room.
‘I’ve heard she’s been a bit difficult,’ I said, wincing at a “FUCK OFF” from my mother.
‘This is my first time seeing her and I’m a bit surprised. From the district nurse notes, I thought she was fully cognitive and manageable.’
I spluttered.
‘She perks up when a nurse visits even though she’s in pain,’ I explained, ‘She likes to talk to the new person and sort of…show off, I guess? Like a child.’
I felt stupid saying it, but the care coordinator nodded and pulled a pen from her denim waistcoat. She’d clearly heard this kind of scenario before.
‘She’s been refusing medication, painkiller,’ she said, making notes, ‘but if a GP sees it’s in her best interests, we can override her and administer it.’
My heart hurt at the idea of my mum being in pain again, out of her own stubbornness.
‘That sore on her lower back…’ the lady continued, ‘it’s very bad.’
‘Really? It was manageable last I knew.’
‘No, it’s spread and it looks infected. I’ve seen a photo. It’s very bad, it looks like wings.’
‘It can’t be infected, the live-in carer has been with her since I was last here.’
‘Well, I think she’s been picking at her stoma patch with those long nails, and then her sore…’
Well, that made sense.
Promising to sort a GP visit, the care coordinator took the day visiting carer into the kitchen to ask her some questions.
The live-in carer Zoe, a stunningly beautiful woman my age with soft Zimbabwean accent, smiled at me exhaustedly as I walked in to the living room.
Mum was kicking the blankets off her slim mattress, picking at the sheets, moaning angrily.
She’d become noticeably worse in the six days since I’d last seen her – she was a skeleton in a t-shirt, face pale and dusty. Zoe leaned forward and gently placed her hand on mum’s arm to stop her hitting herself.
I rested my hands on the end of the bed.
‘Hi, Mum.’
Mum’s eyes darted upwards.
It took a moment. Then her mouth dropped open, eyes wide in delighted shock. She pointed a bony finger shakily at me, her grey face filling with love.
There she was. Mum. The Mum from my childhood. The Mum buried so deep I’d barely seen her since I was nine years old.
‘You!’ She shouted excitedly. I came up to the edge of the bed, and took her pointing hand in mine.
‘Hi Mum. It’s Sarah.’
‘I know who you are!’ She snapped loudly, her joyful expression not changing. I was surprised by how strongly her stick-thin arm jerked me closer, nearly pulling me from my feet.
She ran her fingers up and down my arm, smile so wide I could see the toothless gums at the back of her mouth. ‘Sarah! It’s my Sarah!’
She reached for my face, put her palm against my cheek.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ she shouted, tears pooling in her eyes. ‘You are so, so beautiful.’
Her fingers we so cold, her nails long and thick. I winced against them as she patted my cheek, just as she did when I was a little girl.
I sheepishly looked up at Zoe while my cooing mother stroked my face.
‘Hi. I’m Louis, but…she knows me as Sarah.’
‘Hello,’ Zoe said, smiling with her mouth and eyes. I was a little disarmed by her earnestness. She wore muted designer clothes, and gently stroked my mother’s bony shoulder with genuine care.
A calm fell over the room. Mum closed her eyes blissfully. Her bones relaxed into the mattress.
‘We were just finishing changing her,’ Zoe said. ‘She was being a bit…argumentative.’
‘Mum, Zoe needs to finish cleaning you up and getting you comfy. Are you going to let her do that without a fuss?’
She nodded happily. Her fingers wouldn’t leave my arm. I watched as her nails passed over my self-harm scars.
Where we you when I needed you?
Mum settled down into a nap shortly afterwards.
Dad rolled up in his big white van, rolling it onto the lawn outside. When I saw, I cringed, as if mum would psychically know her ex husband was tearing up the – overgrown and moss-covered - front garden.
He still didn’t want to see her. Twenty years after he’d last clapped eyes on her, he thought it would be…a bit much.
We walked to a café together. He was bright and chirpy, patched with plaster dust as usual. He was on his way into York to pick up some timber for a room conversion.
His world was so big. Mum’s world was a tiny single bed.
While he went to order our coffee, I flipped my phone out.
It’s not that I didn’t trust the care coordinator, or the live-in carer Zoe. But I googled the tailbone bedsore anyway.
For it to have got so bad in such a short time was a concern. I’ll admit, I automatically assumed the live-in carer hadn’t been changing her properly.
But that wasn’t the case.
A Kennedy terminal ulcer.
They appear incredibly quickly, often within hours, during multiple organ failure; when there are barely days left of life.
I stared at a disgusting photo on Google images. A huge, heart-shaped wound on the coccyx.
Maybe I’d cancel the slice of cake.
‘You alright?’ Dad asked, sitting himself back down.
The sunlight fell into his deep wrinkles. His beard, bristly and grey, sagged a little under the chin. A hard lump settled in my throat.
My god. My dad is…old. He’s old.
‘Don’t ever get like Mum,’ I spluttered. ‘Please don’t ever get like that.’
I warmed to Zoe very quickly. She was a gentle and cheerful soul, and so considerate of my mother.
And at this point, my mother was…absolutely helpless. I mean, helpless.
Nothing could have prepared me for seeing how she was at that point.
The woman I clearly remember striding through town in stiletto heels and hoop earrings, who sang Queen songs while lithely running the hoky sweeper across the dusty flat carpet, and sat at her bulky computer grumbling at Ceaser II: she was a wraith.
A slip. Ground down to the very essence.
She could not turn onto her side by herself. She couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t even move her legs any more.
Her watch strap, hooked on to the first hole, hung from her wrist. Her skin was a light purpley-yellow, and felt like a banana peel. She looked almost…dusty? Like a woman made of parchment.
‘I think her nails need cleaning,’ I muttered, while Mum delightedly scraped them across my cheek. The smell of feces was unmistakable.
‘I will do that now,’ Zoe said gently, popping off to the kitchen. Mum ran her fingers through my hair while I tried not to retch.
‘Heheheehe,’ she said. She grinned so widely, I could see the gaps in her gums at the back of her mouth. The few teeth she had were rotting, black at the tips and edges. It was shocking how quickly her body was shutting down.
‘We’re just going to give your nails a wash Mum,’ I said, taking her hands from my face and holding them at a safe distance. When Zoe returned with a bowl of warm water and towel, I retreated to the kitchen and scrubbed my face and hair violently. It was all I could do to stop myself going at it with a Brillo pad.
Dying comes to every one of our loved ones eventually. It’s not nice to think about.
But maybe we should think about it. Maybe we should talk about death a lot more, about the decent into it, and the state we will see our parents or siblings or – God forbid – our children in at the end.
There is not a single aspect of my mother’s decline for which I was prepared.
Nothing was taught at school, none of the many NHS pamphlets and posters I’d seen in my life made the slightest mention of how thirsty the dying get, or how they cry for their mothers, or how they just can’t get comfortable; no advice about the hallucinations, or the wild mood swings, or the shit under a dying woman’s fingernails.
It was deeply traumatic.
I’d learned everything very quickly in the previous few weeks by Googling symptoms and reading Reddit posts written by similarly-traumatised children of dying parents, each of them confused and scared and absolutely unprepared.
There was a laundry list of symptoms and red flags myself, my aunt and siblings had seen since the terminal diagnosis that we’d missed, putting them down to ‘just Kay being Kay’; the obstinate and ungrateful woman who had broken our hearts so badly.
The constant anger at being uncomfortable was not ‘Kay being Kay’, it was terminal agitation.
The screaming at me or my aunt to “fuck off out of my house” wasn’t Kay either, it was the cancer in her brain.
The picking at her stoma bag, shouting “VOLUME UP” at an already maxed out Alexa, and disinterest in doing her crosswords or games on her tablet were all symptoms of quick decline – and I had no idea.
There was a night I came to take over from my aunt.
‘Do you want to get a Chinese?’ Mum asked as soon as I walked in. It was ten at night in the somewhat sleepy village. I sensed my aunt had already been discouraging this line of thought for a while.
‘You won’t eat any though,’ she said.
‘I want spring rolls,’ Mum snapped, tears pooling in her eyes.
‘I’ll have to go pick it up,’ I said, ‘They don’t deliver after ten.’
‘No! I don’t want you to go pick it up!’
‘There’s spring rolls in the freezer,’ My aunt piped up.
‘I don’t want you to make those!’
It was horrible. She was crying. All she wanted was a Chinese takeaway, and she wanted to eat it with her daughter. But she was terrified of me leaving the house, to leave her again.
She messed around on her phone for a while, but she couldn’t navigate Uber Eats. Eventually, I convinced her to let me throw the freezer spring rolls into the air fryer for her. Predictably, she only had a mouthful.
I’m crying while writing this. I will always regret not letting her order takeaway. It didn’t matter that she was only going to have a few bites. She just wanted to buy food for her family.
But I was stressed, overstimulated, and I had no idea how little time she had left.
I’m sorry Mum. I didn’t know.
Forgive me.
Zoe was making herself some lunch in the kitchen. I took the opportunity to have a nice lie down on the sofa in the dining room.
‘LOUIS!’
I bumbled in to see my mother pointing at a space near the wall flush against her bed.
‘You need to press that,’ she said.
I stared at nothing.
‘Er, that?’ I pointed at the air.
‘Yes!’ She snapped, angry now. So I pressed at the blank wall.
‘That it?’
‘No, you need to press those ones.’
I pressed those ones. Invisible buttons in the ether. I envisaged some kind of control panel with lights and beeping sounds. She looked around with an air of professionalism, like a captain at the wheel.
‘Should I pull this lever,’ I asked, humouring her, poising my palm just above the carpet. She seemed to think about it.
‘No. But bring that over here.’ She pointed to the footstool.
I grabbed it, brought it to the edge of the bed.
‘Right,’ she said with serious authority, ‘Turn that to 50.’
‘To 50? I’m not sure I can…’
‘Well just keep turning it till I tell you to stop, then,’ she snapped. She was getting genuinely pissy with me.
So for the next five minutes I rotated a footstool around and around, sometimes clockwise sometimes anticlockwise, until my mother was certain it was where it needed to be.
‘Is that it?’ I asked, honestly a bit breathless after all that footstool spinning.
‘Get Sarah!’ She snapped.
‘I am Sarah,’ My deadname didn’t even hurt to say anymore, this was about making a dying woman comfortable.
‘Press that!’
I pressed what I assumed to be a big button hovering in the ether.
‘Like that?’
‘Harder!’
I used both hands to push at the air.
‘That’s it,’ She beamed. I couldn’t help but notice she was far more forgiving of me when I was Sarah than when I was Louis.
This wasn’t some kind of joke, or even a hallucination – as far as she was concerned, pressing those invisible buttons was a matter of life and death.
Zoe wandered into the room. She smiled at me.
‘Those people outside are so loud,’ Mum shouted at her. ‘Go tell them to be quiet.’
‘What people?’ I asked. ‘There’s no people. It’s quiet.’
‘Those people banging on the door!’
Zoe and I shared a glance, then I shrugged.
‘I’ll go tell them to piss off,’ I said.
Which I did, loudly, so mum could hear.
‘You’ve not told them!’ She insisted when I wandered back in.
Zoe was sent to tell them off instead.
The next hour was mostly me and Zoe being sent to tell the invisible men at the front door to stop knocking and carrying on. At one point, Zoe and I were passing each other in the foyer constantly, swapping sheepish but resigned looks.
‘Someone’s breaking in to the kitchen!’ Mum shouted, jabbing her bony finger at the doorway. ‘Go look!’
‘Mum,’ I said humbly, ‘Look at me. Do you think I’m best placed to protect this house from anyone breaking in. I can’t vacuum the stairs without getting out of breath.’
‘Just go check the kitchen!’
So I did.
‘Oi!’ I shouted at the empty downstairs loo. ‘Get out of it! I’ll call the police!’
Mum looked at me expectantly when I went back to her bedside.
‘All sorted,’ I said.
‘Who were they?’
‘I don’t know, just some bastards.’
‘Right,’ she nodded sagely. ‘Well can you go tell them at the front door to shut up?’
‘What, again?’
‘Just GO DO IT, PLEASE.’
I let the group chat know that I’d just stopped an invisible person from breaking in to the kitchen.
‘They probably wanted some expired meat,’ J replied.
The day carer visited again in the evening. Eve. I had to get her name from Zoe, because her accent was so thick I had no idea what the woman was saying to me.
A heavy-set girl, she was equally heavy-handed. Like, worryingly so for someone meant to be caring for the dying.
When she helped Zoe move mum across the bed to change her pad, Eve practically launched her into the wall. I was shocked how she grabbed the dying woman’s shoulders and dragged her up the bed, how mum cried out in pain and how Zoe gently but firmly pushed Eve’s hands away.
What kind of agency employs someone like that to look after the dying? And the entire time she was in the house, her boss sat in a Corsa outside scrolling on his phone.
It was just…weird.
To distract myself, I went upstairs for a bit of snooping.
In The Man Who Is Not My Father’s study, I found the awesome Transformer Dad got me for Christmas one year.
It was covered in dust, perched on the same ledge I’d placed it fifteen years prior.
I sat on the floor and played with it for a while. I could remember exactly zero of the six possible transformations.
I found Mum’s wedding certificates. The first, when she was barely eighteen years old.
The husband was listed as thirty-eight.
Thirty-eight? I stared at the paper. I’m getting to that age, and anyone under twenty five seems like a baby to me. How can anyone my age look at an eighteen-year-old and want to fuck them?
Not to mention, he’d been doing it for sure when she was barely seventeen. She was pregnant when she was married.
Occupations were listed. The husband was a joiner. Mum was…
‘A spinster?’ I spluttered.
Spinster? At eighteen years old?
The seventies were a wild time to be female.
I breathed a sigh of relief when Eve left. She took an aura of heaviness with her.
But mum was being combatative. As I came down the stairs, I heard her shouting:
‘I want my daughter!’
When I bumbled in, Zoe was holding a water bottle near mum’s face and mum was trying to swat it away.
‘She said she wanted water…’ Zoe said.
‘I DO want water! And I want my daughter!’
‘Mum,’ I said sternly, ‘Zoe is helping you. Will you have some water?’
She looked at me like a toddler, smiling, and let Zoe give her a drink.
‘I need turning on my side,’ Mum said, after downing half a bottle of water. I pulled her bony shoulder closer as Zoe propped a bunch of cushions behind her.
Now able to see us easily, her face softened as Zoe and I sat beside the bed, close enough for her to touch.
Mum stroked Zoe’s face gently. She had such a cheeky smile on her face. Those nails barely missed Zoe’s eyesockets, but the carer didn’t even flinch. I did all the flinching for her.
‘You are absolutely stunning,’ Mum said, eyes filling.
Zoe really was beautiful.
Something in her face sparked a part of Mum’s brain not pressed in a long time. That saw the mirror when she was just a little girl marrying to an old man, or the early twenties girl getting ready in her parents bathroom for a night out with her sister.
Then Mum looked over at me.
‘My God,’ she said as if seeing me for the first time, ‘You are so, so beautiful.’
Zoe and I shared a sheepish look as those nails transferred to my cheek. I’ll admit being put into the same category as Zoe was a boost for me. Somewhat dulled by a nail nearly piercing my eye.
‘They would normally tell us to clip the nails,’ Zoe said, probably meaning her bosses, ‘but hers seem important. I don’t think she would be happy.’
‘I need to talk to you,’ Mum said suddenly, looking at me very seriously.
Zoe smiled at us.
‘I’ll give you a minute,’ she said, breezing away. Her perfume followed her shortly after.
‘Look at me,’ Mum said.
I did. She was pallid. There was a yellowness to the purple folds under her eyes, and the wrinkles under her nose looked like creases of leather. Her hair was so thin now, I could see the shine of her scalp.
‘No nonsense. Confession time.’
‘Okay, Mum. What confession.’
‘And I’m not messing about.’
‘Right…’
‘I’m being serious.’
She danced around the topic like this for a good five minutes. Nearly saying what she needed to say, pulling back, meandering again, regrouping, rescheduling. She was like the release of Grand Theft Auto Six.
After ten minutes of the bizzare dance, I was starting to get annoyed. Then she blurted it:
‘Your dad’s not your dad.’
She looked absolutely devastated. The only time I ever saw her sadder was when I told her about what The Man Who Is Not My Father had done.
I laughed.
So she’d forgotten that she’d told me about Jack already.
‘I know, Mum, It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Dad is still my dad.’
A weight lifted from her. I swear I practically saw it float off to the ceiling.
‘It’s okay?’
‘Yes Mum, it’s okay.’
‘And you were going to have a sister.’
‘Er…okay?’
‘But we had an abortion. Well, I had two...your dad didn’t know about the second one…’
By her expression, I knew that second one wasn’t Dad’s. And it wasn’t from something entirely consensual.
This was getting a bit much.
‘It’s okay, Mum. You made the right decision. I’ve had to make that kind of decision too. A huge amount of women have. It would have been irresponsible to bring life into a world not right for it.’
She stared at me, dumbfounded, mouth hanging open a little. Tears fell from her eyes.
‘Mum,’ I continued, ‘I promise it’s okay. Accidents happen…and in many cases…my case also,’ I tried to look reassuring while I squeezed her hand, ‘rapes happen. It’s never easy. It’s traumatic, even if what you’re dealing with doesn’t have a nervous system yet. You never get over making that decision. But it was yours to make, and you did the right thing for them, too.’
She paused, her eyes darted across across my face, then she sighed deeply.
‘Well,’ she added in a level voice, ‘It all comes out in the wash in the end, doesn’t it?’
For a flash of a second, a sane woman stared at me. Then, she was gone, replaced by some wittering version going on about so much nonsense I couldn’t keep up.
I felt like I’d been hit in the chest, after all that. I was ready to cry, and my mother was telling an invisible person about Werther’s Originals.
Zoe came in and stood at the end of the bed, just as mum attacked me.
Two emaciated hands slapped hard on each side of my head and gripped. I saw stars.
Those nails dug into my skin, fingers yanked my hair and pulled so hard water filled my eyes.
I heard Zoe gasp.
‘It’s okay,’ I murmured, glancing over.
‘And you better not,’ Mum said, her face inches from mine, filled with absolute hatred. ‘You better not try anything. Because I will sue you.’
I glanced nervously at Zoe, who looked poised to intervene.
‘You’ll sue me?’ I managed. It was almost hilarious if it wasn’t so scary.
‘I will.’
Mum looked smug, angry, hateful. Her nails dug further into me. Her fingers grabbed my metal hair claw and pushed it hard into my skull, dragging my hair from the roots.
I could feel my heart in my throat. Her left thumb pressed against my right cheekbone, and the sharp nail wandered into my peripheral vision.
Was she going to gouge my eyes out?
I tried to pull away, but she was firm. The meagre muscles in her arms tensed under the parchment skin.
Finally, I managed:
‘You can’t sue me. I’m your daughter.’
Her fingers tightened. She span my head to the left, to the right, hard – as if she was trying to wring my neck.
‘Mum!’ I spluttered, honestly frightened. ‘It’s okay! It’s me!’
Behind her eyes there was nothing but rage. It was like she shut down.
‘Mum!’
The hard grapple she had on my ear and hair and skin softened just a smidge.
I tried to pull away gently, and her fingers caught in my hair claw.
The light behind her eyes returned. She laughed at me untangling her fingers from my hair and the metal clip as if it was the funniest thing she had ever seen. That laugh so deep, guttural, one I’d heard so many times as a child before everything went to shit.
‘Are you okay?’ Zoe mouthed when I finally untangled myself. Mum was hysterical with laughter.
I nodded, but I was shaken up. For a second that woman in that tiny bed wanted to hurt me bad.
When I checked myself in the bathroom mirror, red crescents sat at my chin and down my neck. I was shivering.
The overnight carer, sent by the same agency that sent the heavy-handed woman, was meant to arrive at 10pm so Zoe could go to bed.
She didn’t show up until gone eleven. A young, slight girl dropped off by that same Corsa which had lurked on the driveway in the afternoon.
This carer, at least, was gentle. She helped Zoe change mum, who was incredibly chatty, but complaining of being in pain.
‘We can’t get her to have her painkiller,’ Zoe said, holding the plastic syringe up. ‘She keeps hitting it away.’
I took the syringe, and tried to get mum to take it. But she was on her meandering bullshit again.
‘Will you have this painkiller?’ I asked.
‘I will, yeah,’ and she grabbed it. Then just before I was going to help it into her mouth: ‘And I won’t take any nonsense though. I can’t stand liars.’
‘I know Mum, but just take this…’
‘And I know when they’re about too.’
I tried to no avail for twenty minutes to get her to have the oxycodone. Short of shoving it down her throat, there was no way. Her mind was bouncing from place to place, like the spokes on a Bumble Ball.
‘I’ll see you in the morning, okay?’ I told her, giving the overnight carer a sympathetic look.
Mum suddenly shouted.
‘THAT,’ she said firmly, pointing directly at the wall, ‘LOOKS LIKE A FISH.’
On my way back to the hotel, I stopped by a petrol station. A somewhat famous one in York, adorned with Daleks and Star Wars paraphernalia.
I took photos, hoping to show Mum in the morning.
“That looks like a fish,” I thought. I hope that’s not the last words I ever hear her say.
As it goes, they were the second-to-last words.
Thank you for reading x